A New Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture

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How to go to your page This eBook contains two volumes. In the printed version of the book, each volume is paginated separately. To avoid duplicate page numbers in the electronic version, we have inserted a volume number before the page number, separated by a colon followed by a space. This matches how page numbers are cited in the Index. For example, to go to page 5 of Volume I, type I: 5 in the “page #” box at the top of the screen and click “Go.” To go to page 5 of Volume II, type II: 5… and so forth.

A New Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture Volume One

Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture This series offers comprehensive, newly written surveys of key periods and movements and certain major authors, in English literary culture and history. Extensive volumes provide new perspectives and positions on contexts and on canonical and post-canonical texts, orientating the beginning student in new fields of study and providing the experienced undergraduate and new graduate with current and new directions, as pioneered and developed by leading scholars in the field. Published Recently 49. A Companion to Emily Dickinson 50. A Companion to Digital Literary Studies 51. 52. 53. 54.

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the Arthurian Literature the Modern American Novel: 1900–1950 the Global Renaissance Thomas Hardy T. S. Eliot Samuel Beckett Twentieth-Century United States Fiction Tudor Literature Crime Fiction

67. A Companion to Medieval Poetry 68. A New Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture

Edited by Martha Nell Smith and Mary Loeffelholz Edited by Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman Edited by David Paroissien Edited by Richard Brown Edited by Sara Castro-Klaren Edited by Haruko Momma and Michael Matto Edited by Greg Zacharias Edited by Cheryl Alexander Malcolm and David Malcolm Edited by Claudia L. Johnson and Clara Tuite Edited by Helen Fulton Edited by John T. Matthews Edited by Jyotsna G. Singh Edited by Keith Wilson Edited by David E. Chinitz Edited by S. E. Gontarski Edited by David Seed Edited by Kent Cartwright Edited by Charles Rzepka and Lee Horsley Edited by Corinne Saunders Edited by Michael Hattaway

A

NEW

CO MPA NION

TO

E NGLISH

R ENAISSANCE

L ITERATURE AND C ULTURE Volume One

EDITED BY MICHAEL HATTAWAY

A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication

This edition first published 2010 © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd except for editorial material and organization © 2010 Michael Hattaway Edition history: Blackwell Publishers Ltd (1e, 2000) Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell. Registered Office John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, United Kingdom Editorial Offices 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley. com/wiley-blackwell. The right of Michael Hattaway to be identified as the author of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A new companion to English Renaissance literature and culture / edited by Michael Hattaway. p. cm. – (Blackwell companions to literature and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4051-8762-6 (alk. paper) 1. English literature–Early modern, 1500-1700–History and criticism–Handbooks, manuals, etc. 2. England–Civilization–16th century–Handbooks, manuals, etc. 3. England–Civilization– 17th century–Handbooks, manuals, etc. 4. Renaissance–England–Handbooks, manuals, etc. I. Hattaway, Michael. PR411.C663 2010 820.9′003–dc22 2009033117 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Set in 11 on 13 pt Garamond by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited Printed in Singapore 1

2010

Contents

VOLUME I List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Contributors

xi xiii xv

Asterisked items are essays that offer focused readings of particular texts 1

Introduction Michael Hattaway

Part One: Contexts, Readings, and Perspectives c.1500–c.1650

1

13

2

The English Language of the Early Modern Period Arja Nurmi

15

3

Literacy and Education Jean R. Brink

27

4

Rhetoric Gavin Alexander

38

5

History Patrick Collinson

55

6

Metaphor and Culture in Renaissance England Judith H. Anderson

74

7

Early Tudor Humanism Mary Thomas Crane

91

8

Platonism, Stoicism, Scepticism, and Classical Imitation Sarah Hutton

106

9

Translation Liz Oakley-Brown

120

vi

Contents

10

Mythology Jane Kingsley-Smith

134

11

Scientific Writing David Colclough

150

12 Publication: Print and Manuscript Michelle O’Callaghan

160

13

177

Early Modern Handwriting Grace Ioppolo

14 The Manuscript Transmission of Poetry Arthur F. Marotti

190

15 Poets, Friends, and Patrons: Donne and his Circle; Ben and his Tribe Robin Robbins

221

16 Law: Poetry and Jurisdiction Bradin Cormack

248

17

263

*Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Book 5: Poetry, Politics, and Justice Judith H. Anderson

18 *‘Law Makes the King’: Richard Hooker on Law and Princely Rule Torrance Kirby

274

19 Donne, Milton, and the Two Traditions of Religious Liberty Feisal G. Mohamed

289

20 Court and Coterie Culture Curtis Perry

304

21 *Courtship and Counsel: John Lyly’s Campaspe Greg Walker

320

22

329

*Bacon’s ‘Of Simulation and Dissimulation’ Martin Dzelzainis

23 The Literature of the Metropolis John A. Twyning

337

24

352

*Tales of the City: The Plays of Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton Peter J. Smith

25 ‘An Emblem of Themselves’: Early Renaissance Country House Poetry Nicole Pohl

367

26 Literary Gardens, from More to Marvell Hester Lees-Jeffries

379

Contents

vii

27

English Reformations Patrick Collinson

396

28

*Translations of the Bible Gerald Hammond

419

29

*Lancelot Andrewes’ Good Friday 1604 Sermon Richard Harries

430

30 Theological Writings and Religious Polemic Donna B. Hamilton

438

31

Catholic Writings Robert S. Miola

449

32

Sectarian Writing Hilary Hinds

464

33 The English Broadside Print, c.1550–c.1650 Malcolm Jones

478

34

The Writing of Travel Peter Womack

527

35

England’s Experiences of Islam Stephan Schmuck

543

36

Reading the Body Jennifer Waldron

557

37

Physiognomy Sibylle Baumbach

582

38

Dreams and Dreamers Carole Levin

598

VOLUME II List of Illustrations

xi

Part Two: Genres and Modes

1

39 Theories of Literary Kinds John Roe

3

40 The Position of Poetry: Making and Defending Renaissance Poetics Arthur F. Kinney

15

41

28

Epic Rachel Falconer

42 Playhouses, Performances, and the Role of Drama Michael Hattaway

42

viii

Contents

43 Continuities between ‘Medieval’ and ‘Early Modern’ Drama Michael O’Connell

60

44

*Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy A. J. Piesse

70

45

Boys’ Plays Edel Lamb

80

46 Drama of the Inns of Court Alan H. Nelson and Jessica Winston

94

47

‘Tied to rules of flattery’? Court Drama and the Masque James Knowles

105

48

Women and Drama Alison Findlay

123

49

Political Plays Stephen Longstaffe

141

50

Jacobean Tragedy Rowland Wymer

154

51

Caroline Theatre Roy Booth

166

52 *John Ford, Mary Wroth, and the Final Scene of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore Robyn Bolam

176

53 Local Drama and Custom Thomas Pettitt

184

54

*The Critical Elegy John Lyon

204

55

Allegory Clara Mucci

214

56

Pastoral Michelle O’Callaghan

225

57

Romance Helen Moore

238

58

Love Poetry Diana E. Henderson

249

59

Music and Poetry David Lindley

264

Contents 60

*Wyatt’s ‘Who so list to hunt’ Rachel Falconer

ix 278

61 *The Heart of the Labyrinth: Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus Robyn Bolam

288

62

Ovidian Erotic Poems Boika Sokolova

299

63

*John Donne’s Nineteenth Elegy Germaine Greer

317

64

Traditions of Complaint and Satire John N. King

326

65 Folk Legends and Wonder Tales Thomas Pettitt

341

66 ‘Such pretty things would soon be gone’: The Neglected Genres of Popular Verse, 1480–1650 Malcolm Jones

359

67

Religious Verse Elizabeth Clarke

382

68

*Herbert’s ‘The Elixir’ Judith Weil

398

69 *Conversion and Poetry in Early Modern England Molly Murray

407

70

423

Prose Fiction Andrew Hadfield

71 The English Renaissance Essay: Churchyard, Cornwallis, Florio’s Montaigne, and Bacon John Lee

437

72

Diaries and Journals Elizabeth Clarke

447

73

Letters Jonathan Gibson

453

Part Three: Issues and Debates

461

74

463

Identity A. J. Piesse

75 Sexuality: A Renaissance Category? James Knowles

474

x 76

Contents Was There a Renaissance Feminism? Jean E. Howard

492

77 Drama as Text and Performance Andrea Stevens

502

78 The Debate on Witchcraft James Sharpe

513

79 Reconstructing the Past: History, Historicism, Histories James R. Siemon

523

80

Race: A Renaissance Category? Margo Hendricks

535

81

Writing the Nations Nicola Royan

545

82

Early Modern Ecology Ken Hiltner

555

Index of Names, Topics, and Institutions

569

List of Illustrations

1 2 3

The Battle of the Money-Bags and Strong-Boxes, engraving after Pieter Bruegel the Elder (c.1570)

2

The Pope Suppressed by King Henry the Eighth, anonymous woodcut illustrating Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (London, 1570)

7

Girolamo da Treviso, Protestant allegory showing the Pope being stoned by the four evangelists

8

4

‘Rainbow Portrait’ of Queen Elizabeth I (c.1600)

139

5

Woodcut engraving of ‘The secretarie Alphabet’ from John De Beau Chesne and John Baildon, A Book Containing Divers Sortes of Hands (London, 1571)

180

William Marshall, portrait of John Donne in his shroud, engraved frontispiece to his Devotions (London, 1634)

231

Title-page portrait of the Spanish ambassador to the court of James I, Diego Sarmiento de Acuña, count of Gondomar (1624)

359

Satirical etching known as The Monopolist or The Picture of a Patentee, after Wenceslas Hollar (c.1641–50)

361

The emblem attached to a poem addressed to Richard Cotton, ‘Patria cuique chara’

369

10

Title page to John Foxe, Acts and Monuments (London, 1641 edn.)

405

11

The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, from Richard Verstegan, Theatrum Crudelitatum Haereticorum Nostri Temporis (Antwerp, 1592)

408

12

A New Year’s Gift for Shrews (London, c.1630)

479

13

A Good Housewife, anonymous woodcut sheet (?London, c.1600)

480

14

Satires on marriage; anonymous engraved sheets (London, 1628)

482

15

The Funeral Obsequies of Sir-All-in-New-Fashions, anonymous engraved sheet (London, 1630)

489

6 7 8 9

xii

List of Illustrations

16

The Contented Cuckold, anonymous etched sheet (?London, c.1660)

491

17

Hunting Money, sheet engraved by Thomas Cross (London, c.1650)

492

18

The Four Complexions, sheets engraved by William Marshall (London, 1630s)

493

All do Ride the Ass, engraved sheet attributed to Renold Elstrack (London, 1607)

496

‘Fool’s Head World Map’, anonymous engraved sheet (?Antwerp, c.1590)

498

A Continued Inquisition Against Paper-Persecutors, anonymous engraved title page to Abraham Holland, A Scourge for Paper-Persecutors (London, 1625)

499

22

Shrovetide and Lent: pair of anonymous engraved sheets (London, 1636)

500

23

Jack a Lent by John Taylor, anonymous title-page woodcut (London, 1620)

502

24

We Three Loggerheads, anonymous oil painting on panel (c.1650)

505

25

Behold Rome’s Monster on his Monstrous Beast (?London, 1643)

514

26

The Lamb Speaketh, bound into William Turner’s The Hunting of the Romish Wolf (Emden, 1555)

516

27

Which of These Four … (London, 1623)

517

28

A Pass for the Romish Rabble (Amsterdam, 1624)

520

29

Title page to Thomas Walkington’s The Optic Glass of Humours (London, 1607)

559

Title page to Robert Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi … Historia (Frankfurt, 1617)

562

31

Poena sequens, from Geoffrey Whitney’s Choice of Emblems (Leyden, 1586)

568

32

The True Description of a Child with Ruffs (London, 1566)

571

33

The Roaring Girl or Moll Cut-Purse, title page to the play of the same name (London, 1611)

576

Giuseppe Arcimboldo, The Librarian (1566)

594

19 20 21

30

34

Acknowledgements

It has been a treat to work with all the members of the editorial and production teams at Wiley-Blackwell. Many contributors generously offered suggestions that helped me revise my plans for the work; particular thanks to those who were willing to contribute copy at comparatively short notice. The size of these volumes meant that for months my wife Judi had to put up with her husband’s absence and obsessive preoccupations: I owe her much more than a presentation copy.

Contributors

Gavin Alexander is a University Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge, and a Fellow of Christ’s College. His recent publications include Writing After Sidney: The Literary Response to Sir Philip Sidney, 1586–1640 (2006), Renaissance Figures of Speech (2007), co-edited with Sylvia Adamson and Katrin Ettenhuber, and an edition of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writings on literature: Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism (2004). Judith H. Anderson is Chancellor’s Professor of English in Indiana University and author of The Growth of a Personal Voice: ‘Piers Plowman’ and ‘The Faerie Queene’ (1976), Biographical Truth: The Representation of Historical Persons in Tudor-Stuart Writing (1984), Words That Matter: Linguistic Perception in Renaissance English (1996), Translating Investments: Metaphor and the Dynamic of Cultural Change in Tudor-Stuart England (2005), and Reading the Allegorical Intertext: Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton (2008); she is also a co-editor of Will’s Vision of Piers Plowman (1990), Spenser’s Life and the Subject of Biography (1996), and Integrating Literature and Writing Instruction: First-Year English, Humanities Core Courses, Seminars (2007). She is currently co-editing a book entitled Go Figure: Energies, Forms, and Institutions in the Early Modern World. Sibylle Baumbach is Assistant Professor and Research Coordinator at the International Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture (GCSC), University of Giessen. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Munich and has taught at the University of California Santa Barbara and at Warwick University. She currently holds a FeodorLynen Fellowship at Stanford University and has published on Shakespeare, Romantic poetry, and the study of drama. Her current research foci include mythopoetics, metamorphosis, and literary dialogues. Robyn Bolam is Professor of Literature at St Mary’s University College, Twickenham. She formerly published as Marion Lomax, and her work includes: Stage Images and Traditions: Shakespeare to Ford (1987; repr. 2009); editions of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore

xvi

Contributors

and Other Plays (1995) and Aphra Behn’s The Rover (1995; repr. 2008); the anthology Eliza’s Babes: Four Centuries of Women’s Poetry in English 1500–1900 (2005); and essays in Contemporary Women’s Poetry: Reading, Writing, Practice, ed. Deryn Rees-Jones and Alison Marks. (2000), The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s History Plays, ed. Michael Hattaway (2002), and Plotting Early Modern London, ed. Dieter Mehl et al. (2004). Roy Booth is a Senior Lecturer in the English Department at Royal Holloway, University of London. His particular interests in early modern literature include John Donne’s poems and the drama of the period, especially plays related to witchcraft. Recent publications on seventeenth-century poetry and witchcraft can be found online on the EMLS (Early Modern Literary Studies) website. His academic blog, ‘Early Modern Whale’, can also be found at . He is currently working on seventeenth-century astrology, and the controversy about it in the 1650s. Jean R. Brink is a Research Scholar at the Henry E. Huntington Library. An emeritus professor from Arizona State University, Tempe, she is the author of Michael Drayton Revisited (1990) and of articles on Elizabethan bibliography and biography. Recent articles have appeared in the Sidney Journal and the John Donne Journal. She is currently working on a documentary biography of Edmund Spenser. Elizabeth Clarke is Reader in English at the University of Warwick, where she has led the Perdita Project for the indexing of women’s manuscript writing, and the Nichols project to produce a new edition of John Nichols’ Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth I. She has just finished a book on the reading of the Song of Songs in the seventeenth century: Politics, Religion and the Song of Songs in SeventeenthCentury England (to be published by Palgrave Macmillan). David Colclough is Senior Lecturer in English at Queen Mary, University of London. He is the author of Freedom of Speech in Early Stuart England (2005) and the editor of John Donne’s Professional Lives (2003). He has recently completed an edition of New Atlantis for the Oxford Francis Bacon, and is currently editing volume 3 of the Oxford Edition of the Sermons of John Donne (Sermons to the Court of Charles I). Patrick Collinson is Regius Professor of Modern History, Emeritus, at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of Trinity College. He previously held chairs at the universities of Sydney, Kent at Canterbury, and Sheffield. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, and the author of The Elizabethan Puritan Movement (1967, 1990), The Religion of Protestants (1982), and The Birthpangs of Puritan English (1987). He has also written on sixteenth-century historiography, with essays on William Camden. His article on Elizabeth I is the longest in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Bradin Cormack is Associate Professor in the English Department at the University of Chicago and Director of the Nicholson Center for British Studies there. His publications include A Power To Do Justice: Jurisdiction, English Literature, and the Rise of

Contributors

xvii

Common Law, 1509–1625 (2007) and The Forms of Renaissance Thought: New Essays on Literature and Culture, co-edited with Leonard Barkan and Sean Keilen (2008). Mary Thomas Crane is Professor of English at Boston College. She is the co-editor with Amy Boesky of Form and Reform in Renaissance England: Essays in Honor of Barbara Kiefer Lewalski (2000) and author of Framing Authority: Sayings, Self and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (1993) and Shakespeare’s Brain: Reading with Cognitive Theory (2001). Martin Dzelzainis is Professor of Early Modern Literature and Thought in the English Department at Royal Holloway, University of London. He edited The Prose Works of Andrew Marvell, volume 1: 1672–1673 (2003) with Annabel Patterson, and is general editor, with Paul Seaward, of the forthcoming Oxford University Press edition of The Works of Edward Hyde, Earl of Clarendon. He is currently completing The Flower in the Panther: Print and Censorship in England, 1662–1695 for Oxford University Press. Rachel Falconer is a Professor of English Literature at the University of Sheffield. Amongst her publications are Orpheus Disremembered: Milton and the Myth of the Poet Hero (1996), Hell in Contemporary Literature (2005), The Crossover Novel (2008), and as co-editor, Face to Face: Bakhtin Studies in Russia and the West (1997). Alison Findlay is Professor of Renaissance Drama at Lancaster University. She specialises in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century drama, gender issues, and performance practices. She is the author of Illegitimate Power: Bastards in Renaissance Drama (1994), A Feminist Perspective on Renaissance Drama (1998), and Playing Spaces in Early Women’s Drama (2006). She is co-author of Women and Dramatic Production 1550–1700 (2000), based on a research project using practical workshops and productions. She has published essays on Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and is currently a general editor of the Revels Plays. She is now working on Women in Shakespeare for the Shakespeare Dictionary series to be published by Continuum Press, followed by Much Ado About Nothing: A Text and its Theatrical Life, to be published by Macmillan. Jonathan Gibson works at the English Subject Centre, Royal Holloway, University of London. He has published research on a wide range of early modern topics, including letters, Elizabethan court poetry, the writings of Elizabeth I, manuscript construction, and Shakespeare, and is currently working on a book about the manuscripts of the courtier-poet Arthur Gorges. Germaine Greer is Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Studies, University of Warwick. Her books include The Female Eunuch (1969), The Obstacle Race: The Fortunes of Women Painters and their Work (1975), Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women’s Verse (1988), Slip-Shod Sibyls: Recognition, Rejection and the Woman Poet (1995), John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester (2000), The Boy (2003), Whitefella Jump Up: The Shortest Way to Nationhood (2004), and Shakespeare’s Wife (2007). She is

xviii

Contributors

also founder-director of Stump Cross Books, which publishes scholarly editions of work by early modern women. Andrew Hadfield is Professor of English at the University of Sussex. He is the author of a number of books, including Spenser’s Irish Experience (1997) and Shakespeare and Republicanism (2005), and the editor of others, including (with Matthew Dimmock) The Religions of the Book: Christian Perceptions, 1400–1660 (2008), and (with Raymond Gillespie) The Oxford History of the Irish Book, III: The Irish Book in English, 1550–1800 (2006). Donna B. Hamilton is Professor of English at the University of Maryland. Her publications include Virgil and The Tempest: The Politics of Imitation (1990); Shakespeare and the Politics of Protestant England (1992); Religion, Literature and Politics in PostReformation England, 1540–1688 (edited with Richard Strier, 1996); Anthony Munday and the Catholics, 1560–1633 (2005); A Concise Companion to English Renaissance Literature (edited, 2006); and an edition of The Puritan (2007), in Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works (general editors Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino). Gerald Hammond was the John Edward Taylor Professor of English Literature at the University of Manchester. He is the author of Fleeting Things: English Poets and Poems 1616–1660 (1990), The Making of the English Bible (1982), and The Reader and Shakespeare’s Young Man Sonnets (1981). Richard Harries was bishop of Oxford from 1987 to 2006. On his retirement he was made a life peer (Lord Harries of Pentregarth). He is currently Gresham Professor of Divinity, and an Honorary Professor of Theology, at King’s College, London. He is the author of books on a range of subjects, including Art and the Beauty of God (1993), The Passion in Art (2004), and The Re-enchantment of Morality (2008). He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Michael Hattaway is Professor of English Literature, Emeritus, in the University of Sheffield and Professor of English at New York University in London. His publications include (as author) Elizabethan Popular Theatre (1982); Hamlet: The Critics Debate (1987); Renaissance and Reformations: An Introduction to Early Modern English Literature (2005); William Shakespeare: King Richard II (2008); (as editor) As You Like It and 1–3 Henry VI for the New Cambridge Shakespeare; plays by Jonson and Beaumont; The Cambridge Companion to Shakespeare’s History Plays (2002); and (as co-editor) The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama (1990 and 2003) and Shakespeare in the New Europe (1994). Diana E. Henderson is a Professor in the Literature Faculty at MIT, and also teaches in the Comparative Media Studies and Women’s and Gender Studies programmes. She is the author of Collaborations with the Past: Reshaping Shakespeare across Time and Media (2006), and Passion Made Public: Elizabethan Lyric, Gender and Performance (1995), and is the editor of Alternative Shakespeares 3 (2007), and Blackwell’s Concise Companion to Shakespeare on Screen (2006).

Contributors

xix

Margo Hendricks is an Associate Professor in the Department of Literature at the University of California at Santa Cruz. She is the co-editor, with Patricia Parker, of Women, Race and Writing in the Early Modern Period (1994). Other publications include articles on Marlowe, Shakespeare, and Behn, and on race and post-colonial identity. Ken Hiltner is an Associate Professor of English at the University of California Santa Barbara, where he is the Director of the Early Modern Center, as well as the Director of the Literature and the Environment Initiative. In addition to his book Milton and Ecology (2003), he has recently edited a collection of essays, Renaissance Ecology (2008). He is currently working on two books on ecocriticism. Hilary Hinds teaches in the Department of English and Creative Writing at Lancaster University. Her publications include God’s Englishwomen: Seventeenth-Century Sectarian Writing and Feminist Criticism (1996), an edition of Anna Trapnel’s The Cry of a Stone (2000), and (co-edited with Elspeth Graham, Elaine Hobby, and Helen Wilcox) Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen (1989). Jean E. Howard is George Delacorte Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, where she teaches Renaissance literature, feminist studies, and literary theory. Her books include Shakespeare’s Art of Orchestration: Stage Technique and Audience Response (1984); The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (1994); Engendering a Nation: A Feminist Account of Shakespeare’s English Histories (1997), co-written with Phyllis Rackin; and Theater of a City: The Places of London Comedy 1598–1642 (2007), which won the Barnard Hewitt Prize for outstanding work in theatre history for 2008. In addition, Professor Howard is one of the co-editors of the Norton Shakespeare and has edited seven collections of essays. Sarah Hutton currently holds a chair at Aberystwyth University. Her publications include Anne Conway (2004), Benjamin Furly (1646–1714) (2007), Women, Science and Medicine (edited with Lynette Hunter, 1996), and Platonism and the English Imagination (edited with Anna Baldwin, 1994). She has also published articles on the Cambridge Platonists, Margaret Cavendish, Emilie du Châtelet, and Catharine Macaulay. She co-ordinates the AHRC research network on Anglo-French intellectual and cultural interchange. She is Director of the series International Archives of the History of Ideas. Grace Ioppolo is Professor of Shakespearean and Early Modern Drama in the Department of English and American Literature at the University of Reading. She is also the founder and director of the Henslowe–Alleyn Digitisation Project. Her publications include Dramatists and their Manuscripts in the Age of Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton and Heywood: Authorship, Authority and the Playhouse (2006) as well as Revising Shakespeare (1991) and Shakespeare Performed: Essays in Honor of R. A. Foakes (2000). She has produced critical editions of Shakespeare’s King Lear and Measure for Measure, and Middleton’s Hengist, King of Kent, and has published numerous articles on textual transmission and manuscript culture. She is the general editor of the ten-volume Complete Works of Thomas Heywood (forthcoming from Oxford University Press). With

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Contributors

Peter Beal she has co-edited Elizabeth I and the Culture of Writing (2007), a collection of essays on manuscripts written by, to, or for Queen Elizabeth, and English Manuscript Studies 11: Manuscripts and their Makers in the English Renaissance (2002). With S. P. Cerasano, she is preparing a critical edition for Oxford University Press of Edward Alleyn’s Diary. Malcolm Jones lectures in English language, literature, folklore and art history at the University of Sheffield. Before entering academia he worked in the British Museum and other museums and as a lexicographer. His book on the folkloric in late medieval European art, The Secret Middle Ages, won the Katherine Briggs Folklore Award (2003). More recently he has been working in the early modern period and his The Print in Early Modern England appears in 2010. Recent publications include ‘Washing the Ass’s Head – Exploring the Non-Religious Prints’, in M. McDonald (ed.), The Print Collection of Ferdinand Columbus (2004), 221–45, ‘Saints and other horse-mutilators, or why all Englishmen have tails’, in S. Hartmann (ed.), Flora in the Middle Ages (2007), 155–70, and ‘ “Lively representing the proverbs”: A Pack of Late SeventeenthCentury English playing cards engraved with proverb representations’, in K. Mckenna (ed.), The Proverbial ‘Pied Piper’: A Festschrift Volume of Essays in Honor of Wolfgang Mieder on the Occasion of his Sixty-Fifth Birthday (2009), 5–30. John N. King presently holds an appointment as Distinguished University Professor, and as Humanities Distinguished Professor of English and of Religious Studies, at the Ohio State University. His expertise extends to early modern British literature and culture, Reformation literary and cultural history, the history of the book, manuscript studies, and iconography. His books include English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition (1982), Tudor Royal Iconography: Literature and Art in an Age of Religious Crisis (1989), Spenser’s Poetry and the Reformation Tradition (1990), Milton and Religious Controversy: Satire and Polemic in Paradise Lost (2000), Voices of the English Reformation: A Sourcebook (2004), and Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and Early Modern English Print Culture (2006). He serves as editor of Reformation and coeditor of Literature and History. He is the recipient of a residency at the Rockefeller Foundation Study Center at Bellagio, Italy, and of fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Folger Shakespeare Library, the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the Henry E. Huntington Library, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Lilly Endowment in conjunction with the National Humanities Center. Jane Kingsley-Smith is a Senior Lecturer at Roehampton University, London. She has published a number of articles on Shakespeare, and a monograph entitled Shakespeare’s Drama of Exile (2003). Her second book, Cupid in Early Modern Literature and Culture, is forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. Arthur F. Kinney is Thomas W. Copeland Professor of Literary History and Director, Massachusetts Center for Renaissance Studies, at the University of MassachusettsAmherst. In 2006 he was given the Paul Oskar Kristeller Lifetime Achievement

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Award by the Renaissance Society of America. His most recent books are Shakespeare’s Webs: Networks of Meaning in Renaissance Drama (2004), and Shakespeare and Cognition (2006). Torrance Kirby is Professor of Ecclesiastical History and Director of the Centre for Research on Religion at McGill University. His most recent books are The Zurich Connection and Tudor Political Theology (2007) and Richard Hooker, Reformer and Platonist (2005). He recently edited two collections of essays, A Companion to Richard Hooker (2008) and A Companion to Peter Martyr Vermigli (2009). James Knowles is Professor of Medieval and Renaissance Literature and Head of School, School of English, University College Cork, Ireland. He teaches widely on early modern drama (especially Jonson, and the masque), Civil War writing, and on the cultural politics of the 1620s and 1630s. His publications include editions for the Oxford University Press Complete Works of Thomas Middleton, the Cambridge University Press Cambridge Works of Ben Jonson, and the Oxford Works of John Milton. In 2006 he was the co-curator for Royalist Refugees (Rubenshuis, Antwerp), and he has written extensively on the masque, and on Jonson’s Entertainment at Britain’s Burse. Edel Lamb in an Australian Research Council Post-Doctoral Fellow in the University of Sydney. She is the author of Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre: The Children’s Playing Companies (1599–1613) (2008) and is currently writing a booklength study of early modern books for children. John Lee is a senior lecturer at the University of Bristol. He is the editor of the Everyman edition of Spenser’s Shorter Poems: A Selection (1998) and the author of Shakespeare’s Hamlet and the Controversies of Self (2000). Recent articles include ‘Montaigne, Shakespeare and imagination’ in the International Shakespeare Yearbook (2006), and ‘Shakespeare and the Great War’ in The Oxford Handbook of Twentieth-Century British and Irish War Poetry (2007). Hester Lees-Jeffries is Fellow and College Lecturer at St Catharine’s College, Cambridge. She is the author of England’s Helicon: Fountains in Early Modern Literature and Culture (2007), and of other essays on early modern literature; she has also edited the translation of Bernard Palissy’s treatise on water-supply by the Elizabethan poet Thomas Watson. She is currently working on various Shakespeare projects and editing James Shirley’s The Example. Carole Levin is Willa Cather Professor of History at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, where she specialises in early modern English history. Her books include The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power (1994), The Reign of Elizabeth I (2002), and Dreaming the English Renaissance: Politics and Desire in Court and Country (2008). She was recently the co-curator of the exhibition ‘To Sleep, Perchance to Dream’ at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC.

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David Lindley is Professor of Renaissance Literature in the School of English at the University of Leeds. He has published on poetry and music, the court masque, the scandalous case of Frances Howard, and most recently on Shakespeare, including an edition of The Tempest for the New Cambridge Shakespeare and a book on Shakespeare and music for Arden. His edition of eleven of Jonson’s masques appears the Cambridge edition of the Works of Ben Jonson. Stephen Longstaffe is Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Cumbria. He has published an edition of Jack Straw, a 1594 play on the Peasants’ Revolt, and articles and book chapters on aspects of political drama. His most recent publications are as editor of The Continuum Handbook to Shakespeare Studies, with Andrew Hiscock, and a collection of essays on Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV. He is currently working on clowns in early modern drama. John Lyon teaches at the University of Bristol, where he is also Principal Investigator of the AHRC-funded Penguin Archive Project. He has published widely on literature from the sixteenth century to the present day. In addition to enduring interests in elegy and in influence, particularly Shakespearean, he is currently working on Ben Jonson, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Geoffrey Hill. Arthur F. Marotti is Distinguished Professor of English at Wayne State University. He is the author of John Donne, Coterie Poet (1986), Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (1995), and Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England (2005). He is currently working on a book on the personal anthologising of poetry in manuscript in early modern England. Robert S. Miola is the Gerard Manley Hopkins Professor of English and Lecturer in Classics at Loyola University of Maryland. He has written on classical backgrounds to early modern literature, Shakespeare, and Jonson, and recently published Early Modern Catholicism: An Anthology of Primary Sources (2007). Feisal G. Mohamed is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois and author of In the Anteroom of Divinity: The Reformation of the Angels from Colet to Milton (2008). His articles have appeared in Milton Quarterly, Milton Studies, the University of Toronto Quarterly, the Journal of the History of Ideas, and Dissent Magazine, and his PMLA article, ‘Confronting religious violence: Milton’s Samson Agonistes’, received an Honorable Mention for the Modern Language Association’s William Riley Parker Prize. Tentatively entitled Milton and the Post-Secular Present, his current book project develops presentist interpretation of Milton with particular emphasis on debates in political theory and ethics, and on the issues of religious liberty and religious violence. Helen Moore is a Fellow of Corpus Christi College, and Lecturer in the Faculty of English, University of Oxford. She works predominantly in the fields of Anglo-continental literary relations and drama, and has edited the romance Amadis de Gaule

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(2004), and the play Guy of Warwick for the Malone Society (2006). She has also published essays on Shakespeare, prose fiction, early modern drama, and the reception of continental and classical texts in English. Clara Mucci is Professor of English Literature at the University of Chieti, Italy. She is the author of Liminal Personae (1995), Tempeste (1998), Il teatro delle streghe (2001), A memoria di donna (2004), Il dolore estremo: il trauma da Freud alla Shoah (2008), and I corpi di Elisabetta: sessualità, potere e poetica della cultura al tempo di Shakespeare (2009). She is also a practising clinical psychologist. Molly Murray is Assistant Professor of English at Columbia University. She is the author of The Poetics of Conversion in Early Modern English Literature: Verse and Change from Donne to Dryden (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press), as well as articles on Chaucer and Jonson. Her current project is a study of early modern literature and imprisonment. Alan H. Nelson is Professor Emeritus in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley. His specialisations are palaeography, bibliography, and the reconstruction of the literary life and times of medieval and Renaissance England from documentary sources. He is editor or co-editor of three collections in the Records of Early English Drama series: Cambridge (1989), Oxford (2004), and Inns of Court (forthcoming). He is also the author of Early Cambridge Theatres: University, College, and Town Stages, 1464–1720 (1994), and Monstrous Adversary: The Life of Edward de Vere, Seventeenth Earl of Oxford (2003). Arja Nurmi is an Academy of Finland Research Fellow working at the Research Unit for Variation, Contacts, and Change in English (VARIENG) at the Department of English, University of Helsinki. Her research interests include early and late modern English, historical sociolinguistics, and corpus linguistics. Her main publications focus on the history of English auxiliaries and code-switching during the entire written history of English. Liz Oakley-Brown is a Lecturer in Renaissance Literature at Lancaster University. Her principal area of research is concerned with the construction of early modern identities. She has published two co-edited collections, Translation and Nation: Towards a Cultural Politics of Englishness (with Roger Ellis, 2001) and The Rituals and Rhetoric of Queenship: Medieval to Early Modern (with Louise Wilkinson, forthcoming), and the monograph Ovid and the Cultural Politics of Translation in Early Modern England (2006). She is currently working on a book-length study of Thomas Churchyard’s writing. Michelle O’Callaghan is a Reader in the Department of English and American Literature at the University of Reading. She is the author of The ‘Shepheards Nation’: Jacobean Spenserians and Early Stuart Political Culture (2000), The English Wits: Literature and Sociability in Early Modern England (2007), and Thomas Middleton, Renaissance Dramatist (2009).

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Michael O’Connell, Professor of English at the University of California Santa Barbara, is the author of The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in Early Modern England (2000), Robert Burton (1986), Mirror and Veil: the Historical Dimension of Spenser’s Faerie Queene (1977), and of articles on Elizabethan and medieval drama, Shakespeare, Milton, Spenser, Petrarch, and Catullus. He has just completed an edition and translation of three Florentine sacre rappresentazioni from the late fifteenth century. Curtis Perry is Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In addition to articles and book chapters, he is the author of Literature and Favoritism in Early Modern England (2006) and The Making of Jacobean Culture: James I and the Renegotiation of Elizabethan Literary Practice (1997). He has also edited two scholarly collections – Material Culture and Cultural Materialisms in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (2001), and, with John Watkins, Shakespeare and the Middle Ages (2009) – as well as the drama anthology Eros and Power in English Renaissance Drama: Five Plays by Marlowe, Davenant, Massinger, Ford and Shakespeare (2008). Thomas Pettitt is an Associate Professor in English and Comparative Literature in the Institute of Literature, Media and Cultural Studies, University of Southern Denmark. He has published numerous articles on English and continental folk drama, pageantry, medieval and Renaissance theatre, ballads, and legends, and is currently working on the relationship between folklore, literature, and theatre in the late medieval and early modern periods. A. J. Piesse is Fellow and Senior Lecturer at Trinity College Dublin, where she works on late medieval and early modern theatre, with a special interest in Tudor moral interludes. She also has research interests in children’s literature. Nicole Pohl is Senior Lecturer at Oxford Brookes University. She works on seventeenth- and eighteenth-century English literature with a particular interest in women’s writing and utopias/utopianism. She has published and edited books on women’s utopian writing in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, European salons, and epistolarity, and is currently editing the complete letters of Sarah Scott. Her publications include Women, Space and Utopia, 1600–1800 (2006), Gender and Utopia in the Eighteenth Century: Essays in English and French Utopian Writing (edited with Brenda Tooley, 2007), Reconsidering the Bluestockings (edited with Betty Schellenberg, 2002), and Female Communities 1600–1800: Literary Visions and Cultural Realities (edited with Rebecca D’Monté, 2000). Robin Robbins is an Emeritus Fellow of Wadham College, Oxford. He has produced a two-volume critical edition with commentary of Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica (1646–1672) (1981), and his two-volume annotated edition of The Poems of John Donne appeared in 2008. John Roe is Reader in English and Related Literature, University of York. He is the author of Shakespeare and Machiavelli (2002), and editor of Shakespeare: The Poems

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(updated 2006) and Inspiration and Technique: Ancient to Modern Views on Beauty and Art (with Michele Stanco, 2007). Nicola Royan is Lecturer in Medieval and Early Modern Literature in the School of English Studies at the University of Nottingham. She is a graduate of the University of Glasgow (the first candidate ever to read Joint Honours in Scottish Literature and Latin), and the University of Oxford. Her publications include four collections of essays, Literature, Letters and the Canonical in Early Modern Scotland (with Theo van Heijnsbergen, 2002), Forum for Modern Language Studies, 38/2 (with Ian Johnson, 2002), The Scots and Medieval Arthurian Legend (with Rhiannon Purdie, 2005), and Langage Cleir Illumynate: Scottish Poetry from Barbour to Drummond (2007). Other work includes “ ‘Mark your meroure be me’ ”: Richard Holland’s Buke of the Howlat’, in P. Bawcutt and J. Hadley Williams (eds.), A Companion to Medieval Scottish Poetry (2006), and ‘Scottish literature’, in D Johnson and E. Treharne (eds.), Readings in Medieval Texts (2005). She is editorial secretary of the Scottish Text Society, and one of the trustees of the Scottish Medievalists. She also sits on the board of Nottingham Medieval Studies. Stephan Schmuck was awarded a Ph.D. from Aberystwyth University in 2007. He is an Honorary Research Fellow of the Institute of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, Wales, and is currently preparing a monograph provisionally entitled ‘Politics of Anxiety: Histories of Islam in Early Modern English Writings’. James Sharpe took his BA and D.Phil. degrees at Oxford and, after holding temporary posts at Durham and Exeter, has been employed at the University of York since 1973. He has researched and published extensively on crime and punishment in early modern England and on witchcraft. His publications on witchcraft include Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in England 1550–1750 (1996), The Bewitching of Anne Gunter (1999), and Witchcraft in Early Modern England (2001). James R. Siemon is Professor of English at Boston University. He is the author of Shakespearean Iconoclasm (1985) and Word Against Word: Shakespearean Utterance (2002). He has edited Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (New Mermaids) and Shakespeare’s Richard III (Arden). Peter J. Smith is Reader in Renaissance Literature at Nottingham Trent University. His publications include Social Shakespeare: Aspects of Renaissance Dramaturgy and Contemporary Society (1995) and Hamlet: Theory in Practice (1996). His articles and reviews have appeared in Cahiers Elisabéthains, Critical Survey, Kaleidoscope, New Poetry Quarterly, Renaissance Quarterly, The Review of English Studies, Shakespeare, Shakespeare Bulletin, Shakespeare Survey, Speech and Drama, Sydney Studies in English, The Times Higher Educational Supplement, The Times Literary Supplement, and Year’s Work in English Studies. He has edited Marlowe’s Jew of Malta (1994), Edward II (1998), and Dekker’s The Shoemakers’ Holiday (2004). Since 1992 he has been associate editor of the international journal of Renaissance studies, Cahiers Elisabéthains.

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Boika Sokolova teaches Shakespeare and drama on the London Programmes of the University of California and the University of Notre Dame, as well as at the British American Drama Academy (BADA). She is co-author of Painting Shakespeare Red (2001), and has edited volumes of essays on Shakespeare’s reception and appropriation in Europe. Her latest publication is a study book on The Merchant of Venice (2009) (Humanities Ebooks: ). Andrea Stevens is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, where she teaches courses on Shakespeare and early modern drama. Her articles, essays, and reviews appear or are forthcoming in Theatre Notebook, English Literary Renaissance, Shakespeare Bulletin, and Thunder at a Playhouse: Essays on Shakespeare and the Early Modern Stage. Professor Stevens is currently at work on a book about the early modern special effects and materials most closely related to the body in performance, in particular theatrical paint. John A. Twyning is Associate Professor of English and Director of the Literature Program at the University of Pittsburgh. He is author of London Dispossessed: Literature and Social Space in the Early Modern City (1998), and is currently completing a book for Palgrave Macmillan entitled England’s Green and Pleasant Land: Reforming the Nation in Literature, Landscape and Architecture (2009). Jennifer Waldron is Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Program in Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. She has published essays on Shakespeare and Montaigne, and she is currently working on a book that addresses connections between theology and theatre in early modern England. The project, ‘Lively Images: Idolatry, Sacrifice, and Secular Theater in Post-Reformation England’, examines Elizabethan and Jacobean drama in the light of religious debates over the sacramental and symbolic powers of the human body. Greg Walker is the Masson Professor of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. He has published widely in the fields of medieval and Renaissance literature, including, most recently, Medieval Drama: An Anthology (2000), Writing Under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation (2005), and The Oxford Handbook of Medieval Literature (co-edited with Elaine Treharne, 2010). Judith Weil is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of Manitoba. She is the author of Christopher Marlowe: Merlin’s Prophet (1977) and Service and Dependency in Shakespeare’s Plays (2005) and co-editor, with Herbert Weil, of the New Cambridge King Henry IV, Part One (1997). Jessica Winston is an Associate Professor of English at Idaho State University. Her research interests focus on the literary culture of the Inns of Court, especially in the early Elizabethan period. Her articles appear in Studies in Philology, Early Theatre, Renaissance Quarterly, and The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature. Peter Womack is a Professor of Literature and Drama at the University of East Anglia. His books include Ben Jonson (1986), English Drama: A Cultural History (with

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Simon Shepherd, 1996) and English Renaissance Drama (2006). He is working on a book about dialogue for the New Critical Idiom series. Rowland Wymer is Chair and Head of English, Communication, Film and Media at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge. His publications include Suicide and Despair in the Jacobean Drama (1986), Webster and Ford (1995), and Derek Jarman (2005), as well as a number of co-edited collections of essays, including Neo-Historicism (2000) and The Accession of James I: Historical and Cultural Consequences (2006). He is currently working on a book on science fiction and religion and editing The Witch of Edmonton for the Oxford edition of The Complete Works of John Ford.

1

Introduction Michael Hattaway

What does it mean to speak of ‘the English Renaissance’? Within the three parts of these volumes, we approach the question in a variety of ways. Essays in Volume 1 define historical contexts and critical perspectives. Volume 2 is given over to describing literary genres and kinds of writing, and then to engaging with a number of critical issues and debates. These essays have been written during a time when our awareness of the textualisation of the world has been much enhanced: a good proportion of essays, those about ‘history’ as well as those about ‘literature’, make their way towards a sense of the realities of the period though a close analysis of language (see Chapter 6, Metaphor and Culture; Chapter 36, Reading the Body; Chapter 79, Reconstructing the Past: History, Historicism, Histories). However, no essay derives from a stand-alone theoretical position: all are put to the test by the readings that they generate, and certain essays, marked with an asterisk in the table of contents, offer readings of representative discourses or particular texts. The word ‘Renaissance’ designates ‘rebirth’, a metaphor applied, from its beginnings, to a cultural vision that originated in Italy. For the nineteenth and twentieth centuries this was projected in a seductively splendid synthesis by Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1860). Burckhardt retrospectively laid out a master proposal to revive the art and learning of the classical world, to emulate the grandeur of ancient cities, to stimulate science and geographical discovery, and to produce art and literature that imitated antique models, an undertaking that was dedicated as much to the profane as to the spiritual. Rival city-states of Italy required monuments to enhance their fame, and thus ensured patronage for the writers and artists who duly bequeathed to posterity the texts and great architectural and visual exemplars with which we are all familiar. Gradual developments in the understanding of money as well of banking and bookkeeping enabled the accumulation of wealth to pay for the fame and glory these memorials of magnificence may have brought (Ferguson 2008). The engraving after Bruegel from c.1570 (Figure 1) shows how, pace Burckhardt, at least certain contem-

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Image not available in the electronic edition

Figure 1 The Battle of the Money-Bags and Strong-Boxes, engraving after Pieter Bruegel the Elder c.1570. A number of pottery banks approach to battle with the treasure chests, barrels, and strong-boxes on the right; coins, broken boxes, and bags litter the foreground. British Museum, London

poraries explained their own period in material terms. Here the heroics of virtue and glory are debased: it’s all for money – pottery banks, coming in from the left, battle with the treasure chests, barrels, and strong-boxes on the right. This Companion reminds its readers of some of the material constructions of culture, and also of the way so many ideas and institutions have been functional: instruments of power or parts of the apparatus of government. Yet Burckhardt’s idealising categories, which rest upon abstract notions like ‘genius’, ‘individuality’, and secularisation, have percolated into and informed all too many derivative handbooks for the period: it is certainly difficult to make them fit the English experience. England did enjoy a phenomenal energizing of literature: this is an age that, traditionally, has at its centre, Spenser and Sidney, Marlowe and Nashe, Shakespeare and Jonson. Ben Jonson, exceptionally, did publish his ‘works’ in a manner befit-

Introduction

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ting a Renaissance writer, creating large volumes to set alongside those containing texts by his classical exemplars (compare Erne 2003), although some of the dramatic genres he used and the commonplaces he deployed have medieval origins (Curtius 1953). The other writers too are as ‘medieval’ as they are ‘Renaissance’ – although any endeavour to categorise them in these terms would be not only equivocal but also misguided. However, no authors would have written the way they did without a typical ‘Renaissance’ education, in particular a vigorous training in classical rhetoric; none would have written what they did without being concerned with the dissemination and imitation of classical forms, many of which are reviewed in Part 2 (see also Bolgar 1954 and Chapter 4, Rhetoric). Ancient Rome occupied commanding heights in the imagination of the period, and the investigation of republicanism in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (1599) would not have been possible without Plutarch, the political radicalism of Marlowe and Jonson without Tacitus and Livy refracted through Machiavelli, the satires of Nashe without Juvenal and Horace (see Chapter 49, Political Plays; Chapter 64, Traditions of Complaint and Satire). Ovid’s influence is pervasive (see Chapter 62, Ovidian Erotic Poems) – as it was in ‘the Middle Ages’ – and Platonic ideas of love became familiar through Italian courtesy books. The Allegory of Love: Love, Beauty, and Pleasure, by Benvenuto Tisi (1481–1559) – called ‘Garofolo’ – in London’s National Gallery is on the cover of the first volume of this Companion. It shows Cupid presiding simultaneously (in the manner of older narrative pictures) over representations of a pair of lovers, now contemplating each other, later (perhaps) embracing (Wind 1967: 149). Its topic matches Donne’s ‘The Ecstasy’ – which, similarly, we might read either as a paean to Platonic love or as the recording of the voice of a cavalier seducer. The fact that many writers prefaced their work with a definition of the role of an ‘author’ (Masten 1997) shows how problematic this notion was. Much ‘publication’ was generated collectively, by writers and players in the theatres, by poets and musicians at court and at home. Wonderful songs might be created out of traditional or anonymous texts (see Chapter 59, Music and Poetry). Moreover, agendas for Renaissance authors were comprehensive – they were not confined to what is now called ‘literature’ (Hattaway 2005: 3–6): this was an age of polemic and satire as well as of madrigal verse, of political engagement as well as of lyric grace. Our own age is also inclined to read the personal as the political; we now recognise praise for the ‘golden’ qualities of certain love poets at the expense of the ‘drab’ verse produced by their socially engaged contemporaries as a sign of a past generation’s restrained and restrictive ‘literary canon’ (see Lewis 1954). This Companion ranges from roughly the period of Sir Thomas More (1478–1535) to that of John Milton (1608–74), although there is no attempt to be comprehensive. It moves from the period of humanism, the time of the revival of litterae humaniores, to the time when England had suffered the trauma of its Civil War (to some historians the first significant European revolution) and when Milton had, in Paradise Lost, written an epic that magnificently fused classical and Christian traditions in a text

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that remembers the scars of recent political and cultural upheaval. (Chapter 7, Early Tudor Humanism; Chapter 41, Epic; and Hill 1975). It was not until the seventeenth century, the ‘age of the baroque’ in continental Europe, that there was in England a sense of programmed and collective endeavour in the cognate arts of music, painting, and architecture. The Jacobean court masques (see Orgel and Strong 1973; Chapter 47, ‘Tied to Rules of Flattery?’: Court Drama and the Masque) that epitomise this high combinate art are contemporary with artefacts that are as ‘indecorous’ as Shakespeare’s Pericles (1607) or as backwardlooking as the translations of Iberian chivalric romance that continued to be enjoyed in a manner that suggests that Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1605) was quite disregarded (see Chapter 57, Romance). Printing may have generated a ‘communication revolution’, but the circulation of texts in manuscript was the preferred practice in some elite groups (see Chapter 12, Publication: Print and Manuscript and Chapter 14, The Manuscript Transmission of Poetry). There was no attempt to design great civic churches or to plan cities before the times of Inigo Jones (1573–1652) and Sir Christopher Wren (1632–1723), and country houses and gardens manifest an intriguing union of neoclassical and older romantic styles. While depictions of landscape are almost non-existent in English painting, there are intriguing discourses on literary topography (see Chapter 34, The Writing of Travel; Chapter 26, Literary Gardens, from More to Marvell). Great examples of English portrait painting abound, but their images are not life-like but iconic, their subjects explained by allegorical imprese or insets rather than fixed by gleams of ‘personality’ (see Strong 1969). The fact that diaries were only beginning to be written suggests that ‘a new concept of “individuality” ’ is problematic: it certainly did not emerge into the new seventeenth century from Act 1, scene 2, of Hamlet (see Chapter 72, Diaries and Journals, and Chapter 74, Identity). So any expedition to explore English culture that used as a map, say, Vasari’s Lives of the Artists, an Italian text of 1550 that in its own time set a cultural agenda, would rapidly lose its way – which is why this Companion could not be organised around a series of biographies of authors and their ‘works’. Furthermore, an ‘English Renaissance’ is technically an anachronism. The word ‘Renaissance’ is not recorded in the Oxford English Dictionary until the 1840s, the age of John Ruskin. Any idea of a cultural ‘revolution’ is certainly misleading: literary and visual artefacts of the period record patterns of evolution from medieval antecedents that are as least as important as their debts to new models of representation and orientation emerging from Italy and later from France (see Chapter 58, Love Poetry; Chapter 43, Continuities between ‘Medieval’ and ‘Early Modern’ Drama). ‘Renaissance’ also signals points of origin, for capitalist organisation of commerce and manufacture, for the reconstitution of political and family institutions, for patterns of identity, status, gender, race, and class, for philosophical and political thought. Yet it would be misleading in the extreme to point to specific beginnings for these phenomena, although essays in Part 3, ‘Issues and Debates’, do approach some of them. A cliché in cultural history is the emergence of ‘men of genius’ as a

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subspecies of that epistemological monstrosity ‘Renaissance man’. However, in this sense, ‘genius’ is another anachronism: the notion derives from the middle of the eighteenth century. Moreover, not only has it occluded the power of material forms and pressures in the production of talent but it is also a masculine construction that has excluded the writings of women. Essays in this volume concern themselves with writing by, about, and for women (see Ferguson 1996; Chapter 25, ‘An Emblem of Themselves’: Early Renaissance Country House Poetry; Chapter 61, The Heart Of The Labyrinth: Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus; Chapter 48, Women and Drama; and Chapter 76, Was There a Renaissance Feminism?). ‘Renaissance’ is also, conventionally, an aristocratic phenomenon (although it took bourgeois capital to generate the necessary expenditure) and, in the fine arts, traditionally associated with connoisseurship: we redress this with essays on popular arts of the period (see Chapter 33, The English Broadside Print c.1550– c.1650; Chapter 66, ‘Such pretty things would soon be gone’: The Neglected Genres of Popular Verse, 1480–1650; Chapter 53, Local Drama and Custom; Chapter 65, Folk Legends and Wonder Tales.) Both strands in these volumes imply varieties of ‘counter-canon’. It has become fashionable to avoid problems of origin by relabeling the period the ‘early modern’, a term taken from social historians. It reminds us that the period saw the posing of some of the great political and cultural questions that have shaped the forging of modernity, and encourages us to look in texts for scepticism and doubt rather than reconciliation, harmony, and ‘closure’. It reminds us of the extension of travel and diplomacy, of knowledge of other cultures, and of the concomitant growth in commerce (see Singh 2009; Chapter 35, England’s Encounters with Islam; Chapter 80, Race: A Renaissance Category?). But this label also raises difficulties: like ‘Renaissance’, it suggests a break with a ‘medieval’ past, implies continuities with what comes later, and, dangerously, invites the importation back into our period of cultural paradigms that we associate with eighteenth-century Enlightenment and even the revolutionary epoch of the early nineteenth century. Many essays in this Companion reveal how distant this foreign country, sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury England, lies from the continents of classical decorum in the arts and of rationality and tolerance in politics and philosophy. Our period may well be better described as ‘Reformation England’, a hypothesis I endorse by choosing as a cover illustration for the second volume another painting by Garofolo in the National Gallery, Saint Augustine with the Holy Family and Saint Catherine of Alexandria (c.1520). It portrays an apocryphal story of how Augustine, while wrestling with the mysteries of the Trinity, met a child trying in vain with a seashell to scoop the ocean into a hole he had dug on the beach. When Augustine gently told him the task was impossible, the child (in fact Christ) told the saint that his intellectual task was no less futile. The saint’s vision, which relates to Augustine’s Platonism, is an emblem of the unbridgeable gap between faith and reason that is a starting point for so much Reformation theology.1 We have also included among the illustrations a selection of polemical prints, sometimes brutal and not sufficiently

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known, on which are inscribed religious divisions in the kingdom, divisions that, inevitably for the times, were also political. We reproduce an engraving of The Pope Suppressed by King Henry the Eighth from Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (Figure 2) as well as a painting by Girolamo da Treviso, owned by Henry VIII, the style of which, like that of Garofolo’s Saint Augustine, is immediately apparent as deriving from the Italian high Renaissance but the subject of which, the Pope being stoned by the four evangelists, recalls the religious division and the violence which beset England for a century and a half (see Figure 3; Chapter 27, English Reformations). The fissiparous energies of religious dissent and reform generated political factionalism and the scrutiny of institutions and culture that could, on the other hand, lead to literary analyses of the highest order (see Chapter 30, Theological Writings and Religious Polemic; Chapter 31, Catholic Writings; Chapter 32, Sectarian Writing). Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure (1603) is not only a massively intelligent probing of the ordeals of the Reformation but also a paradigm example of the way in which the secular and the religious were inseparable (compare Chapter 18, ‘Law Makes the King’: Hooker on Law and Princely Rule). In such a world Jacob Burckhardt’s idea of the Renaissance being categorised by the melting into air of ‘the veil of illusion’ scarcely fits the realities of early modern England (see Chapter 11, Scientific Writing). Nor did England see the emergence of states that were ‘works of art’ (see Burckhardt 1960: 81). Sir Thomas More may have produced a blueprint for an ordered society in his Utopia, but the kind of absolutism needed to sustain his ideals never existed in this period. The reach of the Tudor and Stuart regimes always exceeded their grasp, and essays record as many voices of dissent as consensual choruses. The notion of ‘Merry England’ can be traced back to the fourteenth century, but the Cade episodes in Shakespeare’s 2 Henry VI remind us that the happiness the phrase conjures is predicated on a myth of social equality. The rest of the play exposes not only aristocratic factionalism but also the terror of a regime dominated by warlords. Having noted that, however, we must not equate early modern dissent with modern radicalism. Most oppositional writing was fired by religious ideology rather than by political principles derived from any concept of rights. A single collection can offer neither one definitive overview of the period nor any monolithic account of how it was seen by contemporaries. Describing the course of history by means of narratives with beginnings, middles, and ends or enclosing parts of extensive cultural fields is problematic. Inspection of the map of these two volumes will reveal lacunae, and their organisation will complicate parts of what they seek to clarify. Their very title will have confronted readers with three difficulties. One is acknowledged: only limited attention could be paid to texts associated with three of the four nations that inhabit ‘the British Isles’ (see, however, Chapter 17, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Book 5: Poetry, Politics, and Justice, and Chapter 81, Writing the Nations). That designation emerged in the seventeenth century as an instrument of English political and cultural hegemony – the endeavour is registered specifically in Shakespeare’s allegory of empire, Cymbeline (1610), where

Image not available in the electronic edition

Figure 2 The Pope Suppressed by King Henry the Eighth, anonymous woodcut, illustration to John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (London, 1570), an iconic allegory of the English Reformation. Henry VIII enthroned treads on the body of the fallen Pope Clement VII, below whom are shown the Catholic clergy in disarray, Bishop Fisher leaning over the prostrate pope; the side-note reads: ‘The lamentable weeping and howling of all the religious rout for the fall of their god the Pope’. King Henry hands a bible to Archbishop Cranmer (Cromwell, the lord chancellor, stands behind him). This woodcut clearly recalls earlier images depicting demonstrations of papal supremacy that were a commonplace of Protestant polemic: Alexander III’s humiliation of Frederick Barbarossa (shown with his foot on the emperor’s neck) and Pope Celestine III’s similar treatment of Emperor Henry VI (shown kicking the crown of the emperor who kneels before him) – compare ‘The Popes have as well made foot-balls of the crowns of emperors as footstools of their necks’ (Henry More, Divine Dialogues, 1668). Contemporary English bibles use the phrase ‘making one’s enemies one’s foot-stool’, and the use of the motif in Marlowe’s 1 Tamburlaine reflects its popularity in Elizabethan England: compare ‘Sapores, when he had conquered Valerianus the Roman emperor, used him afterward most villainously, as his foot-stock [stool]’, from Bishop John Jewel’s Defence of the Apology (1567). British Library, London

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Image not available in the electronic edition

Figure 3 A Protestant allegory showing the Pope being stoned by the four evangelists, by Girolamo da Treviso (1497–1544). In the grisaille painting, owned by Henry VIII, the Pope has fallen across the bodies of Hypocrisy and Avarice, and in the foreground lie a cardinal’s hat and a document with seals, probably a papal bull. On a huge hill in the background a candle stands, symbolising the truth claimed by the ‘pure’ reformed church, an uncompromising binary contrast with the candle extinguished by a cooking pan in the immediate foreground, symbolising the false teachings of Rome (see p. 521). There are very similar woodcuts in the Coverdale Bible of 1535. Royal Collection, Windsor Castle

‘Britain’, the designation for a long wished for but never achieved nation-state, occurs no fewer than thirty-four times. (The mere thirteen instances of the word in the remainder of the Shakespearean canon often designate ‘Brittany’). Both narrative history and cultural multiplicity enhance the underlying problems that derive from using ‘Renaissance’ to designate both a period and a category of artistic styles within the art and culture of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Britain. The third problematic is the way the title links ‘literature’ with ‘culture’. Few readers will be surprised to find essays in the ‘Contexts, Readings, and Perspectives’ section on history, religion, language, and education cheek by jowl with accounts of ‘literature’. These essays and those on literary forms stand not as accounts of ‘background’ – a misleading metaphor, like ‘reflection’, ‘image’, or ‘portrait’ – that originates from the visual arts, but to kindle awareness of cultural pressures. Many essays investigate material and ideological environments as well as particular ‘literary’ texts.

Introduction

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This Companion acknowledges lines of cultural force, surveys some of the fault-lines generated by seismic movements in fiscal policy, religion, and politics, but does not treat of ‘culture’ as something analogous to a physical substance with consistent and enduring properties. No historicising programme is followed, nor are crisis and contestation privileged over consensualism. Cultural generalisations in the period are likely to be invalidated by the way in which at this time, far more than now, that imagined community of ‘Britain’ was possessed of a plurality of discrete cultures, created by regional and political difference, rank, religion, gender, or any combination of these (see Spufford 1974; Trill 1996; and Underdown 1985). Some contributors would read from texts to cultural conditions; fewer would insist that particular material conditions determine rather than enable the texts that are the subject of their essays. Theatrical representations of the market, for example, sketched in texts as different as Dekker’s The Shoemaker’s Holiday (1599), Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (1613), and Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (1614), are as implicated in a traditional ‘moral economy’ as they are patterned by contemporary economies, and are structured around patterns of festivity that reach back to both the Christian calendrical year (Hutton 1994) and classical comedy (Salingar 1974) . Some essays seek to embed texts within early modern history and culture; others, particularly those devoted to readings, indicate how Renaissance texts might be read not only contextually but also from the perspectives of the theories and preconceptions of our own day. This needs no apology: we have long realised that, to tweak a familiar aspiration of Matthew Arnold, the endeavour to see a text as itself, ‘as it really was’, is impossible. All readings are mediated: by the irrecoverability of the past, by our membership of interpretative communities (is a work canonical or not, ‘major’ or ‘minor’?), as well as by preconceptions moulded by our own race, class, and gender. ‘Meanings’ are created as much by readers as by writers. In this second edition not only have former contributors updated and added to essays – the last two decades have revolutionised writings about this period – but new essays have been commissioned on many further topics and themes pertinent to its history and cultural achievements. Senior colleagues who wrote for the first edition recommended, at my request, younger scholars, whose contributions I have been proud to receive. Spelling in this volume, of quotations and, usually, titles, has been silently modernised. (Exceptions have been made when, for example, Spenser is cited or when modernisation would obscure a semantic point, particularly in quotations from manuscript sources.) I should like to express my thanks to David Daniell, Richard Dutton, Martin Dzelzainis, Andrew Hatfield, Diana Henderson, Jean Howard, Lorna Hutson, and James Siemon, all of whom commented on my original proposal for the volume. The selection of illustrations could not have been made without the encyclopaedic knowledge, generosity, and enthusiasm of my friend and colleague Malcolm Jones. From all contributors I have learned as much as I hoped – and more than I care to acknowledge. The editorial and production team at Wiley-Blackwell have been helpful,

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patient, and always good-humoured. Special thanks to Janet Moth, who expeditiously copy-edited these volumes with generous care and estimable understanding. My wife Judi has been a centre for a roaming life that took me once to Kraków where, as a guest of the Jagellionian University, I first drafted this introduction. She has had to listen to all too much about this book ever since.

Note 1

‘Saint Augustine is accompanied by Saint Catherine of Alexandria, with her traditional attribute of a wheel. Saint Stephen, who was one of the first deacons of the church and was stoned to death in about AD 35, is probably the saint visible (perhaps holding stones) in the left background. In the top left corner the Virgin and Child appear upon the clouds with

Saint Joseph and music-making angels’ (National Gallery caption). For the medieval legend from which the picture derives, see Ahl 1986:46; for an account of how the story is not only untrue but perverts Augustine’s doctrine of the Trinity, see O’Donnell 2005: 287–8 (I owe this latter reference to Torrance Kirby).

References and Further Reading Ahl, Diane Cole (1986). ‘Benozzo Gozzoli’s frescoes of the life of Saint Augustine in San Gimignano: their meaning in context’. Artibus et Historiae, 7, 35–53. Bolgar, R. R. (1954). The Classical Heritage and its Beneficiaries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bray, Roger (ed.) (1995). The Blackwell History of Music in Britain, 2: The Sixteenth Century. Oxford: Blackwell. Burckhardt, Jacob. (1960 edn.). The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore. London: Phaidon. Collinson, Patrick (1982). The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society 1559–1625. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Collinson, Patrick (2003). The Reformation. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Curtius, Ernst Robert (1953). European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. W. R. Trask. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Erne, Lukas (2003). Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ferguson, Margaret W. (1996). ‘Renaissance concepts of the “woman writer” ’. In H. Wilcox (ed.), Women and Literature in Britain, 1500–

1700 (pp. 143–89). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ferguson, Niall (2008). The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World. London: Penguin. Ferguson, Wallace K. (1948). The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Interpretation. Cambridge, MA: Riverside. Fernie, Ewan, Ramona Wray, Mark Thornton Burnett, and Clare McManus (eds.) (2005). Reconceiving the Renaissance: A Critical Reader. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Girouard, Mark (1983). Robert Smythson and the Elizabethan Country House. New Haven: Yale University Press. Grazia, M. de., M. Quilligan, and P. Stallybrass (eds.) (1996). Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Greenblatt, Stephen (1980). Renaissance SelfFashioning. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hattaway, Michael (2005). Renaissance and Reformations: An Introduction to Early Modern English Literature. Oxford: Blackwell. Helgerson, Richard (1992). Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Introduction Hill, Christopher (1975). The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Hutton, Ronald (1994). The Rise and Fall of Merry England: The Ritual Year 1400–1700. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lewis, C. S. (1954). English Literature in the Sixteenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Manley, L. (1995). Literature and Culture in Early Modern London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Masten, Jeffrey (1997). Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Miller, David L., Sharon O’Dair, and Harold Weber (eds.) (1994). The Production of English Renaissance Culture. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Norbrook, D. (1984). Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Norbrook, D. (1999). Writing the English Renaissance: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Donnell, James (2005). Augustine: A New Biography. New York: Ecco. Orgel, Stephen and Roy Strong (eds.) (1973). Inigo Jones: The Theatre of the Stuart Court. London: Sotheby Parke Bernet. Parry, G. (1981). The Golden Age Restor’d: The Culture of the Stuart Court 1603–1642. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Pincombe, Mike (2001). Elizabethan Humanism: Literature and Learning in the Later Sixteenth Century. London: Longman. Pocock, J. G. A. (1987). ‘Texts as events: reflections on the history of political thought’. In S. Zwicker and K. Sharpe (eds.), The Politics of Discourse (pp. 21–34). Berkeley: University of California Press. Salingar, Leo (1974). Shakespeare and the Traditions of Comedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shuger, Deborah. K. (1990). Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Shuger, Deborah. K. (2001). Political Theologies in Shakespeare’s England. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Singh, Jyotsna G. (ed.) (2009). A Companion to the Global Renaissance: English Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Skinner, Quentin (1978). The Foundations of Modern Political Thought: The Age of Reformation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spink, Ian (1992). The Blackwell History of Music in Britain, 3: The Seventeenth Century. Oxford: Blackwell. Spufford, Margaret (1974). Contrasting Communities: English Villagers in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spufford, Margaret (1981). Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strong, Roy (1969). The English Icon: Elizabethan and Jacobean Portraiture. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Strong, Roy (1979). The Renaissance Garden in England. London: Thames & Hudson. Thomas, Keith (1978 edn.). Religion and the Decline of Magic. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Thomas, Keith (2009). The Ends of Life: Roads to Fulfilment in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Trill, Suzanne (1996). ‘Religion and the construction of femininity’. In H. Wilcox (ed.), Women and Literature in Britain 1500–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Underdown, David (1985). Revel, Riot, and Rebellion: Popular Politics and Culture in England 1603–1660. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wind, Edgar (1967). Pagan Mysteries in the Renaissance. London: Penguin. Woodbridge, Linda (1984). Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540–1620. Brighton: Harvester. Wyatt, Michael (2005). The Italian Encounter with Tudor England: A Cultural Politics of Translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Part One

Contexts, Readings, and Perspectives c.1500–c.1650

2

The English Language of the Early Modern Period Arja Nurmi

During the early modern English period (1500–1700), English began to resemble the language we know today. In order better to understand the language and the many subtle and not so subtle differences, we need to study not only linguistic backgrounds but also social contexts, because we cannot understand the distinctiveness of literature without knowing what was common and usual (Hulme 1962: 7). Because all languages change all the time, English around 1500 was very different from English around 1700. There were three ongoing social, political, and cultural processes that greatly influenced the shaping of the language: first, the spread of the printing presses and the increase in the number of printed texts; second, the vernacularisation of many genres previously written in Latin and/or French, such as science, law, and religion (and also, increasingly, fiction); and third, the intensified contact with not only continental Europe but the rest of the world through trade and exploration. These processes impacted different levels of the language in various ways, and the end result was increasing standardisation of writing and the rapid increase of the vocabulary, including large-scale borrowing from foreign languages. In addition to change, variation is another constant of all languages. Variation is conditioned by a great many social and language-related internal factors that jointly influence the linguistic choices of any individual speaker or writer. Social variables, such as a speaker’s (or writer’s) age, gender, social status, education, or geographical origin, and situational factors, such as the number of listeners or intended readers, the relationship and degree of familiarity between author and audience, and relative power differences, all determine how we choose our words now, and they had just as much impact in the early modern period. Many linguistic structures have complex conditions of their own, but there are also common processes that withstand patterns of variation, such as more common words being resistant to change. We are used to reading early modern English with modernised orthography, which makes it deceptively similar to present-day English. Therefore, it is sometimes useful to take a look at the language in its native form. The playwright Robert Daborne

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wrote the following letter to the theatre financier Philip Henslowe, and it shows English as it was actually written in private contexts at the time: ROBERT DABORNE TO PHILIP HENSLOWE, 5 JUNE 1613. Mr Hinchlow, the company told me yu wear expected thear yesterday to conclude about thear com ¯ ing over or goinge to Oxford, J have not only labord my own play which shall be ready before they come over but given Cyrill Tourneur an act of ye Arreignment of london to write yt we may have yt likewise ready for them, J wish yu had spoken wth them to know thear resolution for they depend vpon yr purpose, J hav sent yu 2 sheets more fayr written vpon my ffayth sr they shall not stay one howr for me, whearfor J beseech yu as heatherto so yu would now spare me 40s which stands me vpon to send over to my counsell in a matter concerns my whole estate & wher J deale otherways then to yr content may J & myne want ffryndship in distress so relijng one yr favor which shall never reap loss by me J rest ¯ aund t yr com ob: Daborne 5o June 1613 (Greg 1907: 71–2)

The most obvious difference from present-day English is the non-standard orthography. There are abbreviations using superscript characters, such as yr for your and sr for sir, and the double m in command is expressed with a macron above the single m (com¯aund). These are all fairly common in personal correspondence and other types of private handwritten texts. Capitalisation does not follow any clear rules, and so Daborne writes Oxford but london, Arreignment but resolution. Both there and their are given the spelling thear, and where is spelled wher, but wherefore is whearfor. Some of these choices are idiosyncratic, but many of the forms appear in the writings of others as well. There are also some conventions of the time followed by many educated writers, such as the Latinate convention of writing word-initial u as v in vpon. Punctuation does not follow our modern rules either: to our eyes the whole letter appears to be one long sentence with occasional commas thrown in. Since Daborne wrote for his living and was educated at Cambridge, these choices cannot be assigned to his ignorance, poor literacy, or even to a particularly low social status. The letter represents private writing, and the style may seem somewhat informal to us, but since the topic is important to Daborne (an advance for the play he is writing), it would seem likely he paid at least some attention to his linguistic choices in order to present a plausible case. Because we have been trained to follow rules for writing, it is quite hard for modern readers to understand that during the early modern English period there really was no standardised spelling or punctuation. The place of a comma or other punctuation mark in a text of the period may signify a breathing pause or emphasis, not a syntactic division, as is more frequent in current language. On the whole punctuation was often impressionistic, although the more educated writers often used the Latin model, at least in published texts. The use of apostrophes to mark elisions, for example, was

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mostly seen in scholarly writings; otherwise letters were elided without note (Partridge 1964: 2–3). In one text, a writer could also vary the spelling of a single word with no obvious purpose in mind. Indeed, people could write their own name in multiple ways (see e.g. Liberman 2009). Some of the spelling variation reflected different accents of spoken English, as particularly unpractised writers favoured pronunciation spellings, but much of it was seemingly random. There was an increasingly clear difference between published and private writing, as printed volumes began to show more uniform spellings thanks to the developing editorial practices of publishers. The printing standard slowly became the accepted spelling standard but, even in the eighteenth century, the differences between published and unpublished writing were notable. As standard orthography spread in public writing, regional variation in spoken language was increasingly hidden behind this uniform front. This does not mean that regional variants ceased to exist. Local dialects continued to be spoken, and also written in unpublished texts. On the other hand, the first stages of a standard or prestige pronunciation were also seen, a general dialect spoken by the upper strata of the metropolitan area. Evidence for this is found, for example, in the often told anecdote of Sir Walter Ralegh continuing to use his native Devon dialect at court. While this is evidence of the persistence of regional variation, it is at the same time evidence that Ralegh was distinctive enough in his linguistic practices to merit attention, and that there was a variety of English spoken at court consistent enough to compare regional accents to. Early modern English is frequently read out loud as if it were pronounced as English is today, but there were clear differences, which can be observed in rhyming words, for example. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2.2.67–70), Shakespeare rhymes approve and love and here and wear, which for most modern speakers do not rhyme. In fact, it was the vowel system of English that underwent the most notable changes during the period. There were some consonantal changes as well, but those are few in number. For example, even in the London area there were many variants of r, and it was still typically pronounced after vowels in words like far. The r-less pronunciation seems to have started its spread only in the eighteenth century (Nevalainen 2006: 126). Dropping final -g (writin’) and initial h- (’ouse) was also quite common, but this is frequent in present-day spoken language, too (Crystal 2005: 79–82). Long vowels and diphthongs are the most obvious cases where differences are found: meet was pronounced /me:t/ rather than the modern /mi:t/ and life sounded more like /ləif/ than /laif/ (Crystal 2005: 79–89). This shift in long vowels and diphthongs has long been identified under the title of the Great Vowel Shift. The changes have traditionally been described as more systematic than they appear to have been in actual fact, but it is still a useful concept in observing the large-scale changes in pronunciation starting in the fifteenth century and completed by the eighteenth (Nevalainen 2006: 120–4). Some changes took place in most dialects, others were localised to the south. For example, the long /u:/ in words like house and out shifted into the diphthong /ou/, except in the north, where the old pronunciation is still heard. The diphthong

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would have had several variants depending on the stage of the change and the speaker, ranging from /əu/ to /ɑυ/ (the last one closest to modern RP). Since our experience with early modern texts is as readers, the variation and change on other levels of the language is of more interest than pronunciation. As mentioned above, some of the variation was regional, and many features survive in traditional dialects even today. Some variation was social, the higher ranks of society speaking and writing in different ways from the lower strata. Because a large part of the population was still illiterate (by 1700 it has been estimated that only 20–30 percent could read and write), we do not have linguistic evidence from all groups evenly. While we can look at the literary representations of low-ranking people in contemporary drama and fiction as indicators of their speech, it is useful to bear in mind that writers then as now frequently resort to stereotypes and simplifications rather than faithful reproduction of authentic spoken language. On the level of grammar, many changes occurred, shaping English towards modern usage. The verbal system was reorganised in two ways: verb inflections were changing and disappearing, and auxiliary verbs settled into new functions (Rissanen 1999). In addition to the larger changes, many smaller differences from present-day English continued. For example, there was variation in the use of be and have as the perfect auxiliaries with verbs expressing movement or change of status (he has come vs he is come). Old strong past tense forms and participles were still in use for some verbs, as in climbed vs clombe, has wrote vs has written (Blake 1983: 82). Because in language most things are interconnected, the changes in the personal pronouns (the loss of thou) were tied to the inflectional changes of verbs. Modal auxiliaries are one verbal group that gained most of its current features during the early modern period. It is often claimed that one of the reasons behind the development of the modals is the decline of the subjunctive. Certainly there are some cases, particularly where should and would are used, when earlier a plain subjunctive would have appeared, but this is only a small sub-trend in the bigger picture. The frequency of modals seems to change fairly slowly, and the major shifts are in the patterns of meaning associated with verbs. On the one hand, there are still traces of the old lexical meanings: will and would can at times mean ‘want’. Also, could, might, should, and would are still occasionally used as straightforward past-tense forms of can, may, shall, and will, although their meanings were beginning to be increasingly independent of their old present-tense forms (see e.g. Gotti et al. 2002). Shall and will do not yet show the pattern of ‘shall in first person, will in second and third person’ that later became a rule that was enforced quite rigorously. This usage seems to have been southern in origin, and people speaking southern dialects may well have followed it, but, overall, there was free variation. Will was most often used to express fairly neutral futurity, and started to appear in its contracted form ’ll. Shall was already beginning to decline in frequency during the sixteenth century, most probably because, unlike other modal auxiliaries, it did not seem to develop new meanings.

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The most interesting development in the field of modality was the increase of epistemic (acceptable) meanings almost throughout the entire group of verbs (shall excepted). This seems to have begun in earnest during the sixteenth century among university-educated, high-ranking men, but spread to the language of women, and to the lower ranks, in time. Since epistemic modality expresses the process of logical thinking as well as the speaker’s or writer’s degree of certainty in their conclusion (compare He must be home by now and He may be home by now), it is not surprising that formal education is behind the origin of this pattern. It could even be argued that the increase of the meaning is tied to a general change in culture, connected to the rise of empirical thinking in science. The use of the auxiliary do was different from the current pattern in two major ways. First, do was not always used in questions, negated statements, and imperatives as it is today (Comes he not here?; Why comes he not himself?; I know thee not; Go not home). There is a gradual increase in the frequency of do in these contexts all through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, with a setback around the first decade of the seventeenth century (Nurmi 1999: 167). By 1700 it was clearly more common to see these structures with do than without, although there were individual verbs (most persistently know and doubt) that resisted longer. The second main difference in the use of do was that it appeared frequently where it would not be seen these days, both in affirmative statements and imperatives (He may mean more than we poor men do know). Despite the temptation to read them as such, most instances of do are not in fact emphatic in these cases. Periphrastic do, when used in affirmative statements, seems to have been at least partially a stylistic device. There is evidence to connect it to a courtly style, giving indications of solemn, occasionally pompous speakers and writers. Because of the solemnity, do was also favoured in religious language, both the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer. On the other hand, do was also used in verse simply as a metrical filler and for freeing the main verb to the end of the line for better rhyming. An extreme example of this is the deliberately clunky Queen of the May speech in Beaumont’s Knight of the Burning Pestle: For now the fragrant flowers do spring and sprout in seemly sort, The little birds do sit and sing, the lambs do make fine sport.

The decline of periphrastic do in affirmative statements and imperatives mainly took place during the seventeenth century. Many reasons have been suggested, but the simultaneous pressure from prestigious Scottish courtiers, who used a do-less variant, and the influx of migrants from northern England, also speaking a do-less dialect, can be seen as two driving forces in the early stages of the decline (Nurmi 1999: 179–81). Once do was no longer associated with a high style it probably lost its usefulness and was increasingly only used for emphasis and in verse. The progressive (I am writing) also starts to be used noticeably during the seventeenth century, but it is still clearly lagging behind compared to modern English,

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both in frequency and also in the different syntactic patterns it appears in (Rissanen 1999). Without exaggerating greatly, it can be claimed that the structure appeared in the present and past tenses only during the early modern era, and not always then – it is lacking in many contexts where modern speakers would expect to see it. Because of the rarity of the form, it is difficult to establish any sociolinguistic patterns surrounding it, but it seems to be yet another form arising from the informal range of language use, spreading gradually to the more formal registers. The prefixed on-writing or a-writing seems to be somewhat archaic (and possibly dialectal) at this time, appearing most commonly in verse, where it, too, provides an occasionally useful extra syllable. As mentioned above, the other main type of change affecting the verbal system was the simplification of the inflectional system. This led, for example, to the subjunctive being indistinguishable from the indicative in all but the third person singular (he goes vs he go) and the verb be (Rissanen 1999: 228). Tied to the decline of thou, the corresponding verb ending (goest) also disappeared. The major element of variation in the inflectional system was provided by the third person singular indicative endings. The variance between -s and -th endings (he goeth vs he goes) continued for three centuries, but the most rapid changes took place around 1600, when -s started to gain ground. There were some frequently occurring verbs that resisted the change (most notably do and have, which continued to have the variants doth and hath beside does and has for much longer). The replacement of -th with -s was a very typical change in that it appeared first in the language of women and the lower social ranks, and was accepted by men and the higher social strata later. It was also typical in another way: the new form was in use in the northern dialects, and, with the constant migration going on in the period, spread first to London and from there to the rest of the country (Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 2003). Another change concerning verbal inflections was also going on, linked to the changes in personal pronouns. As the second person singular pronoun thou was used less and less, the corresponding verbal ending also fell out of use. So, instead of thou goest we would see you go. While thou was still in use, it was in fact already quite rare, at least in written language, in the sixteenth century (Nevala 2004: 159–84). There may have been a small surge of popularity for the old form in the seventeenth century, but it was still clearly in the minority. The dialectal use of thou has continued in Yorkshire to this day. Thou seems to have been used for two main purposes: as an indicator of relative power, with social superiors addressing their inferiors with thou, and in expressions of intimacy, particularly between spouses, but also addressed to God. The most obvious cases of power imbalance can be seen between masters and servants, but also Sir Edward Coke’s often quoted ‘I thou thee, thou traitor‘, from the trial of Sir Walter Ralegh, refers to this usage, since it would have been extremely rude to use thou when addressing a knight, and the usage thus reflected Coke’s contempt for the accused Ralegh.

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The use of thou to denote intimacy between spouses seems to occur particularly when the relationship is a close one, or in passages of text where other endearments appear as well. It can also be presumed that the habit of addressing God with thou related to the intimacy of prayer. These two uses of thou are often difficult to separate from each other, since, for example, parents using thou to their children are usually resorting to it at times when they were expressing tenderness. In early modern society parents were regarded as socially clearly superior to children, but they were no different from modern parents in their love. It has been argued that a man’s position as the head of the family would make also the use of thou by husbands to their wives a matter of relative power rather than intimacy, but the existing texts seem to belie this explanation. Another change in the personal pronoun system was the replacement of ye with you. This took place in the course of the sixteenth century, and ye was already quite old-fashioned in Shakespeare’s day (Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 2003: 60). This is another change where women were the early adopters and men lagged behind. The difference between the north and the south is also evident, as the new form you is more quickly adopted in the south and the old ye lingers in the north a while longer. Other changes in pronouns include the final disappearance of him as the third person singular non-personal pronoun and the spread of it to take its place. The relative pronoun system also sees the introduction of who to refer to human antecedents, replacing the earlier which as in ‘Margaret Roper, which desireth …’ (Rissanen 1999: 294). Linguistic patterns heavily stigmatised today, such as multiple negation (I do not know nothing) were still being used, although losing ground. A feature considered non-standard today, multiple negation was perfectly acceptable until the sixteenth century. By the end of it, only some linguistic environments supported its use, while in most cases simple negation was preferred. This seems to have been a trend led by men and those from the higher social strata (Nevalainen and Raumolin-Brunberg 2003). While multiple negation has disappeared from standard English, it of course continues to be used in regional and informal varieties. There were many other small differences from current English, ongoing changes and patterns of variation. The -ly ending of adverbs was not compulsory, so it was possible to say come quick (Abbot 1870: 17). The comparative and superlative forms of adjectives were more commonly periphrastic in scholarly writings (more perfect), while informal texts show even long adjectives with inflectional endings (confidentest) (Nevalainen 2006: 98). In imperatives, the subject is often expressed: ‘hear you, Gossip’ (Rissanen 1999: 278). Word order was freer than in modern language, although some of the seeming freedom is merely due to poetic licence (Blake 1983: 118). There was inversion of subject and verb quite often after a sentence-initial adverb such as then or now: Then was I going prisoner to the Tower (Rissanen 1999: 264). In passives the by-agent (were received by my lord) alternated with the of-agent (were received of all the nobles) (Nevalainen 2006: 110).

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Some changes were shifts in frequency, such as the increase in the use of the ofgenitive (the forces of the King of Denmark), which wins space from the s-genitive (the King of Denmark’s forces) (Rissanen 1999: 101–202; Nevalainen 2006: 76). On the other hand, many seeming differences are features of spoken language even today; the differentiation of spoken and written language was just not similar to modern practices. One such example is sentence-initial and, which was not frowned upon in early modern English (Abbot 1870: 70–5). One of the most striking developments during the early modern period was the constant expansion of the lexis of English. There were several reasons for this. First, there was a process of vernacularisation going on, with English being used for new purposes, such as scientific writing. There was also a new reading public as the literacy of the population improved. This meant new kinds of texts, written for a non-specialist audience, one that was interested in learning new things but also in being entertained (Blake 1983: 16). Finally, increased international contacts brought with them the need to discuss new, hitherto unknown, things. New audiences for written texts meant that different registers of language are seen in writing: there is more informal language in fiction, for example, than ever before. Drama in particular provides us with approximations of the spoken language of the time, complete with stereotypical speakers of dialect, stylised versions of beggars’ cant, and the like. How much of the language is authentic and how much merely a production of stage conventions is hard to estimate (Blake 1981: 81). We also have more evidence of private writing, such as personal correspondence and journals, because a larger percentage of the population was literate. While these texts provide us with some insight into regional variation and informal language, the fact that the lowest strata were still illiterate remains. However, the mere existence of a wider range of language in use gives us a more complete picture of English than in the previous centuries. We cannot estimate how many of the words first seen in writing during the early modern period had already been in use in spoken language, or for how long. New words came to the language in the same ways as they always do. Existing words were given new meanings, new words were coined from old, and borrowing from foreign languages was frequent. There was a wealth of overlapping terms, many of which have later specialised into narrower meanings, but which at the time had a much broader meaning. There were also plenty of words that had a very brief life and limited usage in the language, surfacing briefly to be forgotten again. There was a wide variety of suffixes and prefixes used for forming new words (Nevalainen 2006: 61–4). Some, like -ness, were native, while others had been borrowed recently with their headword and then adopted for further coining with older loanwords and eventually the native word stock as well. There was also a process called conversion, where the word class of a word is changed. For example, the verb remove produced two nouns, one formed with a suffix (removal), the other without one (remove). With multiple strategies of word formation and many affixes with fairly similar meanings (un-, in-, dis-, de- all giving a negative meaning, for example) it is no wonder that the coining of new words was so frequent.

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There was a wide range of synonymous or near-synonymous words in early modern English. Some words have since disappeared, others have become specialised in meaning, and some have remained. To take one example, the word wit covered a great deal of ground. Originally, it expressed perception, but in this sense it had mostly been replaced by sense in early modern English. The second meaning of wit was cognition, where near-synonyms such as mind, understanding, knowledge, memory, cunning, science, conceit, conscience, intelligence, intellect, engine and ingeny gradually appeared. Finally, there was the expression sense of wit, with synonyms such as conceit, ingenuity, fancy, imagination, fantasy, and genius (Koivisto-Alanko 2000: 214). It may also have had sexual connotations (but see Williams 1997: 340–1). Each word had its own senses, and there were many overlaps among them. Cunning, for example, went from ‘knowledgeable, skilful’ to ‘clever’, and finally to the negatively valued ‘crafty’ that is most common these days (OED s.v. cunning). Beyond forming new words from old, borrowing them from other languages was a common trend. Most new loanwords were borrowed from Latin and French. Latin particularly contributed scholarly terms for the new genre of scientific writing (formula, fungus), but also other learned writings. French loans were more likely to be in the fields of law, the military and politics (colonel, cartridge). Particularly in the seventeenth century they also appear in terms referring to polite society (bourgeois, genteel ). While Latin and French had the most notable influence on English vocabulary during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, expanding trade and other contacts around the world meant that many other languages were also sources of loans. Of European languages, Spanish, Dutch, and Italian were particularly influential, but many languages around the world gave names to goods traded and new plants, animals, and natural phenomena encountered. The new layers of vocabulary introduced to the language are related to cultural changes associated with the Renaissance. The rise of humanism and the renewed interest in original classical sources, and the call Ad fontes (to the sources), led to an increase in the number of people studying Latin and Greek. Since also the range of people for whom education was available constantly increased, this meant that there was a larger number of people with ‘small Latin and less Greek’ than before. There would also have been more and more people who had a familiarity with central Latin and Greek terminology in scholarly fields, even if they did not possess active knowledge of either language. Another important source for scientific terminology was Arabic, which provided scholarly terms such as algebra. The spread of Renaissance cultural ideals from Italy through France and also Spain meant that many terms and concepts related to relevant pursuits would be borrowed from those languages. So, for example, fencing terms such as stockado would come from Italian, as would words describing music and painting (piano, fresco). Spanish provided loans referring to things found in the New World, such as cigar, but also other cultural references (anchovy, armada). In fact, culinary words seem to have been borrowed from all over Europe, since German Sauerkraut has its

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first mention in 1617. In addition to Italy, the Netherlands were one of the great centres of art, and it is not surprising words like landscape and easel were borrowed from Dutch. The Renaissance also marked the beginning of globalisation, with first the great explorers and then world-wide trade. The East India Company had traders all over Asia, and the merchants borrowed words for local items. Some were common only in the language of the trading community – witness the various synonyms for interpreter: dragoman, trenchman, jurebasso (Kaislaniemi 2009) – but others have remained in the language, such as tatami, which was borrowed from Japanese in the early seventeenth century. Foodstuffs (like saffron from Arabic) were commonly introduced with their borrowed names to the English diet, and so too were other cultural elements of trade partners. The word ramadan, for example, has been used in English since the sixteenth century. Trade and exploration led to a great deal of contact with other European traders, so it is not surprising that much naval terminology was gained from the Dutch, and many new foodstuffs were introduced to English via Spanish. Once the colonialisation of America started, new words describing the flora and fauna of the New World were introduced, borrowed from Native American languages. So, for example raccoon came from Algonquian, and woodchuck from Cree. Many of these borrowings remained more common in the language of settlers, and would be known only to those interested in explorers’ tales or the natural sciences. Early modern English saw the beginnings of American English, although during the seventeenth century there was still very little actual difference between the English of England and the English of America. Any differences are usually attributed to two factors. On the one hand, the mix of dialects the settlers brought with them shaped American English. The Puritans settling in Massachusetts Bay were largely from East Anglia, and the Quakers from the north Midlands migrated to the Delaware Valley, while gentry with their servants from southern England moved to Virginia. The other main reason for the early separation of American English was colonial lag: it has been suggested that the pace of language change in the reasonably isolated colonies was slower than in the mother country, leading to a later adoption of changes in America than in England (Nevalainen 2006: 146). During the early modern English period attitudes towards the English language changed, because much good writing became available, with new words for the new subjects being ubiquitously invented and imported (Barber 1997: 76–8). The main devices of classical rhetoric had also been domesticated, which also lead to a new-found appreciation of English (see Chapter 4, Rhetoric). This in turn was one of the reasons for attempts at the formal description and prescription of English. The earliest monolingual dictionaries of English began to appear in the seventeenth century (before that there were bi- and multi-lingual dictionaries for the learning of foreign languages), and they were one possible standardising influence (Barber 1997: 106). Some dictionaries attempted to provide help with hard words, particularly those of foreign origin, while others also introduced new words, seemingly coined by the

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dictionary-maker. There were also some grammars of English being compiled, some as early as the late sixteenth century, with a steadier flow of new publications during the seventeenth century (Barber 1997: 112). Many early grammarians tried to adapt English to the rules of Latin, copied from each other, and were less than systematic in their approach. The process of standardisation should not be considered as a end unto itself. While there were some attempts to provide rules and examples, there were many more levels of language that were gradually standardised into the form found in modern English. Most of these processes were gradual, and proceeded from the lower strata of society. Once the changes were accepted at the most prestigious levels of society, however, they eventually became part of the accepted and prescribed standard usage. Many such changes have been described in this essay (for example the replacement of -th by -s or the adoption of periphrastic do in questions and negated statements). Some changes seem to have spread from the higher levels of society downward, the loss of multiple negation being a clear example. The rules of grammar began to be formally codified only during the eighteenth century, but the existence of a standard language does not need codifiers, simply a consensus of speakers and writers as to what the standard is. There were and are many dialects which do not follow the rules of standard English in many of these respects. In fact, many of the features associated with standard language came into being in densely populated areas, particularly London (Nevalainen and Tieken-Boon van Ostade 2006: 292–3). There was a variable input of migrants from all over the country, and a great deal of dialect levelling and mixing. This also explains why so many of the features of standard English originate in the north even though their spread began in the south: immigrants brought their own dialect features with them and other Londoners adopted them. The writings extant in early modern English give us a great deal of information on the richness and variability of the language, blossoming in new uses with new means of expression. Never before had English stretched from the most informal daily language to the most solemn formal occasions, from the entertaining to the informative, in quite this way. New words, new rhetorical devices, new genres came into existence. More people could write and express themselves in a form that was preserved for posterity. Despite this multitude of sources available to us, we are still seeing only the tip of the iceberg. The real scope and richness of early modern English are beyond our reach, because the spoken language has not been preserved, except in poor imitations. References and Further Reading Abbot, E. A. (1870). A Shakespearian Grammar, 3rd edn. London: Macmillan. Barber, C. (1997). Early Modern English, 2nd edn. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Blake, N. F. (1981). Non-Standard Language in English Literature. London: Deutsch. Blake, N. F. (1983). Shakespeare’s Language. Misterton: Language Press.

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Blake, N. F. (2002). A Grammar of Shakespeare’s Language. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Blank, P. (1996). Broken English: Dialects and the Politics of Language in Renaissance Writings. London: Routledge. Brook, G. L. (1976). The Language of Shakespeare. London: Deutsch. Crystal, D. (2005). Pronouncing Shakespeare: The Globe Experiment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. For sound samples, . Cusack, B. (1998). Everyday English 1500–1700: A Reader. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Dobson, E. J. (1968). English Pronunciation 1500– 1700, 2nd edn. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gotti, M., M. Dossena, R. Dury, R. Facchinetti, and M. Lima (2002). Variation in Central Modals: A Repertoire of Forms and Types of Usage in Middle English and Early Modern English. Bern: Peter Lang. Graham-White, A. (1995). Punctuation and its Dramatic Value in Shakespearian Drama. London: Associated University Presses. Greg, W. R. (ed.) (1907). Henslowe Papers, Being Documents Supplementary to Henslowe’s Diary. London: A. H. Bullen. Hope, J. (1994). The Authorship of Shakespeare’s Plays: A Socio-Linguistic Study. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hulme, Hilda M. (1962). Explorations in Shakespeare’s Language; Some Problems of Lexical Meaning in the Dramatic Text. London: Longman. Kaislaniemi, S. (2009). ‘Jurebassos and Linguists: the East India Company and Early Modern English words for interpreter’. In R. W. McConchie, A. Honkapohja, and J. Tyrkkö (eds.), Selected Proceedings of the 2008 Symposium on New Approaches in English Historical Lexis (HEL-LEX 2) (pp. 60–73). Somerville, MA: Cascadilla. Koivisto-Alanko, P. (2000). Abstract Words in Abstract Worlds: Directionality and Prototypical Structure in the Semantic Change in English Nouns of Cognition. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique. Lass, R. (ed.) (1999). The Cambridge History of the English Language, vol. 3: 1476–1776. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Liberman, M. (2009). ‘In Defense of spellchecking’, Language Log, 11 April. . Nevala, M. (2004). Address in Early English Correspondence: Its Forms and Socio-Pragmatic Functions. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique. Nevalainen, T. (2006). An Introduction to Early Modern English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Nevalainen, T. and H. Raumolin-Brunberg (2003). Historical Sociolinguistics: Language Change in Tudor and Stuart England. London: Longman. Nevalainen, T. and I. Tieken-Boon van Ostade (2006). ‘Standardisation’. In R. Hogg and D. Denison (eds.), A History of the English Language (pp. 271–311). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Nurmi, A. (1999). A Social History of Periphrastic do. Helsinki: Société Néophilologique. Nurmi, A., M. Nevala, and M. PalanderCollin (eds.) (2009). The Language of Daily Life in England (1400–1800). Amsterdam: Benjamins. OED (The Oxford English Dictionary). OED Online. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Partridge, A. C. (1964). Orthography in Shakespeare and Elizabethan Drama. London: Edward Arnold. Rissanen, M. (1999). ‘Syntax’. In R. Lass (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language, vol. 3: 1476–1776 (pp. 187–331). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ronberg, G. (1992). A Way with Words: The Language of English Renaissance Literature. London: Edward Arnold. Salmon, V. and E. Burness (1987). Reader in the Language of Shakespearean Drama. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Walker, T. (2007). Thou and You in Early Modern English Dialogues: Trials, Depositions and Drama Comedy. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Williams, Gordon (1997). A Glossary of Shakespeare’s Sexual Language. London: Athlone. Wyld, H. C. (1936). A History of Modern Colloquial English, 3rd edn. Oxford: Blackwell.

3

Literacy and Education Jean R. Brink

We do not know how many people could read in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. There is virtually no reliable evidence enabling us to draw statistical conclusions about mass literacy in the English Renaissance. We do know that William Shakespeare and Edmund Spenser – and those fortunate enough to receive an Elizabethan or Jacobean grammar school education – were very well educated. Shakespeare attended a grammar school in Stratford where students were literate in English when they entered, and at school they learned Latin and were introduced to Greek. Spenser attended Merchant Taylors’ School in London, where Hebrew was part of the curriculum. A number of its graduates contributed to the celebrated King James version of the Bible. Grammar school students studied Greek and Roman literature and history in texts written in those languages, and they were trained to write and speak Latin. The printed word fascinated early modern society in part because of the phenomenal impact of the printing press; books previously produced laboriously in scriptoria and monasteries could be mass-produced for the first time. Religion also offered incentives for literacy. The Protestant Reformation coincided with and fuelled the development of printing. Sectarian reformers, or even Puritan critics of the established clergy, could enlist the printing press in their service, produce 1,500 copies of a pamphlet, and so rapidly disseminate their views to a mass audience. In the aftermath of the translation of the Bible into English, the Protestant clergy urged their congregations to learn to read so that they would have access to the Holy Scripture; if literacy could not ensure their parishioners’ salvation, reading texts might make them less susceptible to error. Knowledge of the Bible was a blessing to the ungodly as well as the godly. A thief or murderer could plead ‘benefit of clergy’ and have his sentence commuted. For a criminal, the capacity to read and translate a sentence from the Latin Bible could figure literally as a matter of life or death. The illiterate were sent to the gallows, while the literate were merely branded. Lawrence Stone has estimated that 47 per cent of the criminal classes were literate, but David Cressy, in his thorough and

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influential statistical study of literacy in the English Renaissance, has revised this estimate, arguing that Middlesex records show that 32 per cent of the capital felons under Elizabeth and 39 per cent under James successfully claimed benefit of clergy (Stone 1964: 28; Cressy 1980: 17). Even these less optimistic statistics on literacy suggest that criminals were as literate as, or more literate than, the population at large. Benefit of clergy may even have had a lasting impact on literary history. Early in his career, two days after the opening of his Every Man in His Humour, Ben Jonson killed Gabriel Spencer, who was a member of the Lord Admiral’s Men, the company of Philip Henslowe. Henslowe, whose Diary is the source of much that we know about Renaissance drama, reported news of the duel to Edward Alleyn, his son-in-law. He describes Jonson not as a playwright, but as a bricklayer, an uncelebrated occupation even among the trades: ‘I have lost one of my company, which hurteth me greatly – that is, Gabriel, for he is slain in Hoxton Fields by the hands of Benjamin Jonson, bricklayer.’1 Jonson was convicted and left the prison a branded felon but, because he could read Latin, escaped the gallows. David Cressy’s statistics on literacy conclude that 70 per cent of the male population was illiterate on the eve of the Civil War and that nearly all women and labourers were illiterate (Cressy 1980: 55–9). An influential study of play-going in Shakespeare’s London uses these statistics to claim that women were a significant presence in the theatres and that their presence indicates that audiences were illiterate: The high proportion of women at the playhouses testifies to the popularity of playgoing for the illiterate, since few women of any class, even in London, could write their names. Illiteracy among women in the country as a whole approached 90%, and did not drop significantly until the last quarter of the seventeenth century. (Gurr 1987: 55)

Cressy’s figures derive from statistical analysis of the relative percentages of people signing their names with a mark or signature in public documents. A signature is interpreted as evidence of functional literacy – the ability to read. Conversely, it is assumed that the illiterate signed with their mark. John Shakespeare, William’s father, for example, is frequently described as illiterate because he signed documents with a mark. Conclusions drawn from these statistical studies, once widely accepted, have received critical evaluation in the past ten years. It is now less generally agreed that the majority of people were illiterate and that nearly all women were.2 The early statistical data on literacy have been severely criticised on the grounds that reading and writing were taught separately and that many more people may have been able to read than to write. In addition, when the statistics are based on wills, it is important to consider that people drawing up their will were likely to be elderly or infirm and so more likely to sign with a mark than a signature. When statistics are derived from marks on political testimonials, such as loyalty oaths, marks may have been preferred over signatures because they conferred more anonymity.

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While it seems reasonable to assume that lower-class women, like lower-class men, were illiterate, the conclusion that women were illiterate irrespective of class is less persuasive. Occupations, such as printer, baker, bricklayer, can be used to differentiate men, but are of less value in differentiating women, who were more likely to have been employed in the home. The assumption that over 90 per cent of women were illiterate would be more convincing if it were based on selected and specific samples. It would be significant, for example, if it could be shown that 90 per cent of the women named as executors of their husband’s estate were illiterate, or if a high percentage of maids of honour serving at court were unable to write their own name. It is also important to keep in mind that women are likely to be under-represented in most data collected from public documents. Women made up only one-fifth of the legal depositions in rural areas, but the figures for London are much higher. Women made nearly 50 per cent of the depositions in London courts, the majority being described as wives or widows (Cressy 1980: 145–7). In studies of both male and female literacy, we lack data that would enable us to differentiate one decade from another. Nevertheless, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are all too frequently treated as one vast and unchanging backdrop to cultural events. According to David Cressy, no public documents that can be used for generalised statistical studies of literacy survive from the sixteenth century. The oath for the Establishment of the King’s Succession of 1534 was not universally administered. It was not until over a century later that suitable evidence for statistical studies of literacy was forthcoming. The Protestation Oath of 1641 is the starting point for most discussions of seventeenth-century literacy. By March 1642 almost everyone, who was male and over 18, had been given an opportunity to sign his name or mark to the Protestation Oath. This oath merely supported Protestantism, but the more radical Vow and Covenant, which followed the Protestation Oath, held that there had been a traitorous and popish plot to subvert reformed religion and liberty. Summarising these data, Cressy concludes that the evidence for male literacy in the 1640s is based on the signatures and marks of more than 40,000 men from over 400 parishes in twenty five counties; however, he adds the important qualification that this sample was not scientifically constructed and that the resulting statistics probably underestimate the literacy in urban as opposed to rural England. According to Cressy, statistical studies indicate an overpowering stratification by social class and gender: ‘The gentry and clergy were overwhelmingly literate; tradesmen and yeomen fell in the middle; husbandmen, labourers, and women were massively illiterate’ (Cressy 1980: 106). Substantive answers to social questions, such as who could read and write, who should be educated, and to what ends, are not always easy to answer, and the answers, even when they appear to be factual, are more difficult to interpret than most studies have acknowledged. For example, in the 1543 Act for the Advancement of True Religion, the government of Henry VIII spelled out the dangers of extending literacy to women and the lower classes: ‘No women nor artificers, ’prentices, journeymen, serving men of the degrees of yeomen or under, husbandmen, nor labourers were to

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be permitted to read the Bible in English’.3 Unless a sudden increase of literacy among women and the labouring class threatened religious and social stability, a decree of this kind must have been largely symbolic. It is likely that literacy was a class and gender marker. Prohibitions against female and lower-class literacy were reminders of status and endorsements of the hierarchical principle that women were to be subordinate to men just as servants were subject to their masters and the lower classes were expected to defer to the gentry. Statistical studies of literacy are based on incomplete data, but the same holds true for other quantitative approaches to estimating the numbers of those receiving an education in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. We need to be careful about judging either ease of access or the levels of education attained on the basis of modern statistical studies of book production or even book ownership. More than one observer lauded the availability of grammar schools in England, but expressed reservations about the accessibility of universities. In chapter 3 of The Description of England (1577), ‘Of Universities’, William Harrison states that, in addition to the universities, ‘there are a great number of grammar schools throughout the realm, and those very liberally endowed for the better relief of poor scholars, so that there are not many corporate towns now under the queen’s dominion, that have not one grammar school at the least, with a sufficient living for a master and usher appointed to the same’ (Holinshed 1807: II, 254, 252). The sixteenth century was progressive in its attitude towards educating the lower classes. Renaissance educators valued the humanist tradition in the classics that had produced them, and they advocated educating the poor as well as the rich, women as well as men. In his Utopia Sir Thomas More envisions an educated society in which all classes study classical texts (More 1964: IV, 158–9). Harrison, however, is less optimistic about the number of university fellowships likely to trickle down to the lower classes: ‘it is in my time a hard matter for a poor man’s child to come by a fellowship (though he be never so good a scholar, and worthy of that room) … In some grammar schools likewise, which send scholars to these universities, it is lamentable to see what bribery is used … such bribery is made, that poor men’s children are commonly shut out, and the richer sort received’ (Holinshed 1807: II, 252). Although in 1577 Harrison is sceptical about how fairly educational opportunities are in practice distributed, neither he nor his contemporaries question the principle that the poor should be educated. The seventeenth century was less egalitarian. Less than a century later, Sir Francis Bacon counselled James I against increasing educational opportunities. By 1611 Bacon subscribed to the opinion that there were too many grammar schools and that an excessive number could be dangerous: ‘Many persons will be bred unfit for other vocations, and unprofitable for that in which they are brought up, which fills the realm of indigent, idle and wanton people which are but materia rerum novarum’ (Bacon 1868: IV, 252–3). In the decades after the Civil War most people were even more fearful about educating the poor. They reasoned that to overproduce intellectuals by educating the humbly born beyond their station in life would breed social unrest.

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In 1678, a century after Harrison lamented social injustice, Christopher Wase is forced to acknowledge a broadly based opposition to educating the lower classes. He concedes that ‘there is an opinion commonly received that the scholars of England are overproportioned to the preferments for lettered persons’ (Wase 1678: 1): Hereupon the constitution of free schools cometh to be questioned, as diverting those whom Nature or Fortune had determined to the plough, the oar, or other handicrafts from their proper design, to the study of the liberal arts … Multiplying … foundations [he continues] is … represented as dangerous to the government. (Wase 1678: 1)

The quality and quantity of educational opportunities available to the lower classes and to women decreased as the seventeenth century came to an end. Lawrence Stone has concluded in quantitative terms, ‘English higher education did not get back to the level of the 1630s until after the first World War; did not surpass it until after the second’ (Stone 1964: 69). It was not until after the Second World War that AngloAmerican society was as committed to educating the lower classes as it had been in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Our picture of what actually occurred in the Renaissance educational system and of its impact on all classes of people remains uncertain, but we are remarkably well informed about theory as opposed to practice. Renaissance handbooks on education range from philosophical theories of government and social control, such as More’s Utopia (1516) and Machiavelli’s The Prince (1513, printed in 1532) to moral programmes such as those set out in Erasmus’ Education of a Christian Prince (1517) and Sir Thomas Elyot’s Book Named the Governor (1531). Sir Thomas Hoby’s translation of Castiglione’s The Courtier (1528, translated and printed 1561) was a courtesy book offering a portrait of the ideal courtier that also influenced books intended for those who aspired to be gentlemen. In the Schoolmaster (1570) Roger Ascham, who had been the pupil of Sir John Cheke, whom he describes as the best teacher, and the schoolmaster of Queen Elizabeth, whom he celebrates as the best student, outlined the principles of a humanist education. Ascham’s programme was aimed at the landed gentry and assumed a tutorial setting. In contrast, Richard Mulcaster, headmaster of Merchant Taylors’ School and later master of St Paul’s, wrote two handbooks, Positions (1581) and the Elementary (1582), concerned more directly with teaching the children of merchants and tradesmen, as well as the gentry, to read and write. In The First Part of the Elementary, Which Entreateth Chiefly of the Right Writing of our English Tongue (1582), he develops a system for spelling. He also explains what skills are to be taught – reading, writing, drawing, singing, and playing – and how and when these skills are to be introduced. As Mulcaster’s emphasis on fine arts might suggest, students from the Merchant Taylors’ School frequently performed at court in the decade between 1574 and 1584. These and other educational manuals indicate that there was considerable agreement on curriculum and methodology.4 Children first attended a petty school where they learned reading, writing, and counting, but girls might be taught needlework

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instead of writing and arithmetic. The child was to begin by learning his ABC, probably from a hornbook, and then, in ‘good reformation style’, read the catechism, psalter, and primer. The petty school was under the jurisdiction of the church, but that mattered little in terms of curriculum since church and state were in practice inseparable. In injunctions of 1536 and 1538 Henry VIII decreed that everyone should be taught the basic articles of faith, the Pater Noster, Ave Maria, Credo, and Decalogue, in English. The drive towards religious uniformity deeply influenced early education. In 1545 King Henry’s authorised Primer was published in English to supply ‘one uniform manner or course of praying throughout all our dominions’ (Baldwin 1943: 44). A translation was made available for those who knew Latin. All agreed that the ABC and catechism should be the first text, and that religious uniformity was essential; there was less consensus concerning which religious doctrines and practices should be uniform. Summarising the curriculum of the petty school, T. W. Baldwin concludes: ‘The emphasis here is on Reformation, not on Renaissance’ (Baldwin 1943: 32). Nowell’s Catechism, existing in three Latin versions of increasing difficulty, was approved by the bishops in 1562, but was not published until eight years later. Between 1570 and 1647 it went through forty-four editions in Latin, English, and Greek and so had a major impact on the way texts were interpreted. The master asks a question to which the student supplies a memorised answer. In addition, to inculcating specific doctrines, such as justification by faith, the catechism led the student to pay attention to correspondences between the Old and New Testaments. In Romans 5:14 ‘type’ is used in a strict theological sense when Paul calls Adam the typos of Christ, literally, ‘the figure of him that was to come’. A type in the Old Testament foreshadows its antitype in the New. If, for example, the master asks why the Decalogue refers to the Christians of the New Testament as well as the Israelites of the Old Testament, then the student is supposed to reply that the pharaoh of Egypt is a type of the devil and that Moses’ delivery of the Israelites from bondage in Egypt is a type of Christ’s delivery of the faithful Christian from the bondage of sin. This system of reading influenced Spenser and, later, metaphysical poets such as George Herbert. Typology also affected the design of Milton’s Paradise Lost. The catechism helped to establish typology as a system for reading the Bible but, as was true of the four kinds of sense or meaning categorised by Dante (see Chapter 55, Allegory, n. 1), its approach to allusions also influenced the reading and writing of secular texts. Nowell’s Largest Catechism was written in Ciceronian Latin, but no doubt was left as to the primacy of religion in the educational scheme of things: I see it belongeth to the order of my duty, my dear child, not so much to instruct thee civilly in learning and good manners, as to furnish thy mind, and that in thy tender years, with good opinions and true religion. (Nowell 1853: 113 [English] and 1 [Latin])

The schoolmaster was to prefer Christian to humanist objectives: ‘For this age of childhood ought to less, yea, also much more, to be trained with good lessons to

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godliness, than with good arts to humanity’ (Nowell 1853: 216). It is understandable that, theoretically, religion would be ranked over civility and learning, but these comments in the catechism go beyond establishing a hierarchy and set godliness in opposition to civility and humanism. Humanist educators viewed the education of women positively, but very little is known about schools for women. Nevertheless, from the comments of Renaissance schoolmasters who discuss contemporary practice, it is clear that women were involved in disseminating the basic literacy fostered by the petty school system. In Ludus Literarius or the Grammar School (1612), John Brinsley says that basic skills should be learned before admission to a grammar school, and comments that this might be a good job for a poor man or woman: ‘it would help some poor man or woman, who knew not how to live otherwise’ (Brinsley 1917: 17). He repeats his description of a woman as a possible instructor in a petty school: ‘Thus may any poor man or woman enter the little ones in a town together’ (1917: 20). In his New Discovery of the Old Art of Teaching School (1659), Charles Hoole says: The petty school … deserveth that more encouragement should be given to the teachers of it than that it should be left as a work for poor women or others whose necessities compel them to undertake it as a mere shelter from beggary. (Hoole 1913: 157)

We know very little about the gender of the students attending schools, but women were employed to teach children to spell, read, write, and cast accounts. Following the petty school, a student who had aptitude and parental support would enter a grammar school. Ben Jonson’s disparaging comment about Shakespeare’s grammar-school education, that he had ‘small Latin’ and ‘less Greek’, stimulated twentieth-century interest in the curriculum and pedagogy of the Elizabethan and Jacobean grammar schools (see Baldwin 1944). The Latin word-play in Love’s Labour’s Lost and the French puns in Henry V suggest that Shakespeare was well educated and allow us to infer that his audience was also linguistically sophisticated. In assessing Jonson’s deprecatory comment on Shakespeare’s learning, we need to keep in mind that Jonson was himself a formidable classical scholar who was awarded an honorary master of arts degrees by both Oxford and Cambridge. The uniformity prized in religious instruction in the petty school extended into the grammar-school curriculum. A student at Eton or Winchester was taught the same texts in the same manner as students at Merchant Taylors’ School or the Stratford grammar school. In addition to authorising a prayer book, Henry VIII decreed that William Lyly’s Grammar was to be the authorised introduction to Latin, and this remained the standard grammar-school text throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Renaissance educators regarded innovation with suspicion and used the term ‘new-fangled’ to express their distaste for change. In the Convocation of Canterbury in 1664 and again in 1675 attempts were made in the House of Lords to end the privileged status of Lyly’s Grammar, but it retained its official authority

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After concentrating on Lyly’s Grammar in the lower grammar school (approximately the first three years), the study of rhetoric began in the fourth form. Students composed elegant letters in Latin and began to study Greek. The dramatist Terence was particularly important as a text. Charles Hoole says that students must make him ‘wholly their own’: Terence, of all the school-authors that we read, doth deservedly challenge the first place, not only because Tully [Cicero] himself hath seemed to derive his eloquence from him. … The matter of it is full of morality, and the several actors therein most lively seem to personate the behaviour and properties … of people, even in this age of ours. (Hoole 1913: 137–8; see Chapter 8, Platonism, Stoicism, Scepticism and Classical Imitation)

In The Staple of News Jonson satirises schoolmasters for not spending enough time on the catechism and for letting the children speak plays and act fables, but Terence is exempted from this censure: ‘We send them to learn their grammar and their Terence, and they learn their play-books’ (Intermean 3 after 3.4). In terms of methodology, throughout all the forms most schoolmasters used the ‘double translation’ method advocated by Roger Ascham in the Schoolmaster. Students would be given verses from a text, such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and asked to parse them grammatically, identify tropes and figures, and suggest synonyms in Latin. Then, they would turn the passage into English prose and translate it back into Latin, taking care to ensure that each word was correctly placed grammatically and rhetorically; finally, the passage was turned into English verse. In some schools, grammatical translations were used. Students were asked to translate words and phrases into normal English word order before they returned the passage to Latin. The double translation method involved very close reading and caused students to pay more attention to specific word choice than to overall design or structure. Also, because Latin is a case grammar with a more flexible word order than English, Renaissance students learned to experiment with the syntax of the English sentence. The fifth form introduced the comparative grammar of Latin and Greek and focused on oratory, especially Demosthenes, Isocrates, and the all-important Cicero. Poetry was not neglected: students read Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics with their schoolmasters. Hoole comments that after they had memorised sections of the Eclogues and worked with their schoolmaster on the Georgics, they might be left to read the Aeneid by themselves (1913: 180). In the fifth form students also prepared a commonplace book, a kind of mini-Bartlett’s Quotations, in which witty or apt phrases were arranged under headings such as ‘friendship’, ‘liberty’, and ‘law’. These sayings and stylistic set pieces could later be used in compositions and speeches. It is important to remember that, for the educated, Latin was a spoken language in the Renaissance. Montaigne, for example was not allowed to speak vernacular French until he was 6; his family, servants, and tutors spoke only Latin to him.

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If Hebrew were to be included in the curriculum, it was introduced in the sixth form along with Homer and a long list of Greek writers including Pindar, Euripides, Sophocles, and Aristophanes. Latin authors, such as Horace, Lucan, Martial, Persius, Seneca, and Plautus, were also studied. The sheer concentration of the method limited the number of texts that could be read, and those texts appearing in the curriculum were read selectively as they are in modern anthologies. Hoole concludes his section on ‘The Master’s Method’ in A New Discovery of the Old Art of Teaching School by announcing that he has described what is ‘commonly practised’ in England and foreign countries, and that the curriculum and pedagogy are ‘proportioned to the ordinary capacities of children under fifteen years of age’ (1913: 204–5, emphasis added). Medieval universities were intended to train the clergy, and Renaissance universities retained this focus. The religious and political battles between Anglicanism and Puritanism spilled over into the universities. Many fellowships were specifically limited to those who intended to enter the church. Universities offered undergraduate degrees, but they concentrated upon the professions – theology, medicine, law, and music. In addition to clerical training, the university also promoted social mobility. All university graduates were considered gentlemen; nearly one-half of those enrolled at Oxford and Cambridge at the turn of the century were members of the gentry or the nobility. Women were not allowed to take degrees until the twentieth century, nor was a female presence encouraged. Married men were not allowed to hold fellowships, and Elizabeth was reluctant to promote the careers of university dons who married. After studying at either Oxford or Cambridge, young men might enter one of the four law schools located in London, known as the Inns of Court. A university degree was not a prerequisite to entrance; it was possible to go immediately from a grammar school to the Inner Temple, Middle Temple, Gray’s Inn, or Lincoln’s Inn. Students attending the Inns of Court might study the common law and actually pursue a career as a lawyer. The Inns also served as a lodging place for those who may have had as much interest in the London theatres as the common law and who planned to spend some time in London before settling down to the management of a country estate. We are inclined to conceive of the history of education in terms of the development of institutions, the petty school, grammar school, and university. We can assess the importance of societies, such as the Society of Antiquaries, whose papers have survived. We know that great collections of manuscripts, books, and art were put together by private collectors and preserved as part of family traditions. The climate of a culture is more difficult to assess, but the Renaissance seems to have fostered intellectual curiosity and aspiration. In his Novum Organon Sir Francis Bacon set out to write the new ‘organon’, the replacement for the corpus of Aristotle surviving from the ancient and medieval worlds. We have examples of extraordinary intellectual energy – particularly in respect to translations of texts from classical and modern languages. These translations, some of which have become classics in their own right, were produced not by professional scholars, but by those with an interest in culture: Sir Thomas North’s Plutarch, George Chapman’s Homer, Lucy Hutchinson’s Lucretius, John Florio’s

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Montaigne, Sir Thomas Hoby’s translation of the Courtier, Arthur Golding and George Sandys’ Ovid, Sir John Harington’s Ariosto. Those committed to the active life also respected contemplation. The explorer Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who drew up an elaborate plan for an idealised Elizabethan academy, sat on the deck reading More’s Utopia as his ship sank. We know that Sir Walter Ralegh, Gilbert’s half-brother, whiled away his years of imprisonment in the Tower writing a history of the world. Commitment to education helped to shape Renaissance literature. In a letter to Ralegh about the Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser acknowledges that his aim is ‘to fashion a gentleman or noble person in vertuous and gentle discipline’ (‘Letter of the Authors’).

Notes 1

Henslowe’s Diary cited in Jonson 1925–52: I, 18. 2 A number of seminal studies of readers and reading have drawn upon the practices of a broad sampling of readers to challenge these assumptions: see Anderson and Sauer 2002; Ferguson 2003; Gillespie 2005; Hackel 2005; and Sherman 2008.

3 34 and 35 Henry VIII.c.1. Cited in Cressy 1980: 44. The following scholars have cited this Act as evidence of widespread literacy: J. W. Adamson (1946: 44); Richard Altick (1957: 16, 25); H. S. Bennett (1969: 27). 4 For useful background and analysis, see Hattaway 2005 and Mulder 1969.

References and Further Reading Adamson, J. W. (1946). The Illiterate Anglo Saxon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Altick, Richard (1957). The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800– 1900. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Andersen, Jennifer and Elizabeth Sauer (eds.) (2002). Books and Readers in Early Modern England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Ascham, Roger (1570; repr. 1967). The Schoolmaster, ed. Lawrence V. Ryan. Folger Shakespeare Library. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Atkins, S. H. (1970). Aids to Research in Education: A Select Check-list of Printed Material on Education Published in English to 1800. Willerby, Hull: University of Hull Institute of Education. Bacon, Francis (1868). The Letters and Life of Francis Bacon, ed. J. Spedding, 14 vols. London. Baldwin, T. W. (1943). William Shakspere’s Petty School. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Baldwin, T. W. (1944). William Shakspere’s Small Latine & Lesse Greeke, 2 vols. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Bennett, H. S. (1969). English Books and Readers, 1445–1557. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brinsley, John (1612, 1627; repr. 1917). Ludus Literarius, or the Grammar Schoole, ed. E. T. Capagnac. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Brinsley, John (1622; repr. 1943). A Consolation for our Grammar Schooles. New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints. Bushnell, Rebecca W. (1996). A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Cressy, David (1980). Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Elsky, Martin (1989). Authorizing Words: Speech, Writing, and Print in the English Renaissance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, Ferguson, Margaret W. (2003). Dido’s Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Literacy and Education Gillespie, Raymond (2005). Reading Ireland: Print, Reading and Social Change in Early Modern Ireland. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Grafton, Anthony and Lisa Jardine (1986). From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gurr, Andrew. (1987). Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hackel, Heidi Brayman (2005) Reading Material in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hattaway, Michael (2005). Renaissance and Reformations. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing. Holinshed, Raphael (1577, 1587; repr. 1807). Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland. Collected and published by Raphael Holinshed, William Harrison, et al., 6 vols. London: J. Johnson. Hoole, Charles (1659; repr. 1913). A New Discovery of the Old Art of Teaching Schoole, in Four Small Treatises, ed. E. T. Campagnac. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Jonson, Ben (1925–52). The Works, ed. C. H. Herford, P. Simpson, and E. Simpson. 11 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kelly-Gardol, J. (1977). ‘Did Women Have a Renaissance?’ In R. Bridenthal and C. Koonz (eds.), Becoming Visible: Women in European History (pp. 137–64). Boston: Houghton Mifflin. More, Thomas (1964). Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St. Thomas More: Utopia, 21 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press. Morgan, Victor, with Christopher Brooke (2004). A History of the University of Cambridge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Mulcaster, Richard (1581; repr. 1887). Positions: … Which Are Necessarie for the Training vp of Children, ed. Robert Hebert Quick. London: Longman, Green & Co. Mulcaster, Richard (1582; repr. 1925). The First Part of the Elementarie, which entreateth chefelie of the right writing of our English tung, ed. E. T. Campagnac. Tudor and Stuart Library. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Mulder, John R. (1969) The Temple of the Mind: Education and Literacy in Seventeenth-Century England. New York: Pegasus. Nowell, Alexander (1853). A Catechism. Written in Latin by Alexander Nowell, Dean of St. Paul’s: Together with the Same Catechism Translated into English by Thomas Norton, ed. G. E. Gorrie. Parker Society 32. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sanders, Eve Rachel (1998). Gender and Literacy on Stage in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sherman, William H. (2008). Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Spufford, Margaret (1982). Small Books and Pleasant Histories: Popular Fiction and its Readership in Seventeenth-Century England. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Stone, Lawrence (1964). ‘The educational revolution in England, 1560–1640’. Past and Present, 28, 41–80. Stone, Lawrence (1969). ‘Literacy and education in England, 1640–1900’. Past and Present, 42, 69–139. Wase, Christopher (1678). Considerations concerning Free Schools as Settled in England. London: Mr Simon Millers. Watson, Foster (1908). The English Grammar Schools to 1660. New York: August M. Kelley.

4

Rhetoric Gavin Alexander

Amongst all the ornaments of arts, rhetoric is to be had in highest reputation, without the which all the rest are naked. Thomas Nashe (1589)

Rhetoric is the systematic and practically oriented study of the techniques and resources of verbal persuasion. Rhetoric or oratory is all about persuading a particular audience by appeals to reason and emotion, with care taken to consider well who they are, and also what they think of the speaker. It is a contingent art, ready to adapt its resources to changing discourses and occasions. The theory and practice of rhetoric is, as Nashe’s metaphors suggest, much concerned with surface appearances: the question of whether rhetoric defines substance as well as style, matter as well as words, thought as well as expression, is therefore never far away. Rhetoric became the master-discipline of Renaissance learning and the central focus of education: its impact can be felt in all areas of Renaissance culture. I propose here to concentrate on its role in the formation of literary works, because it is here that rhetoric itself is most subtly scrutinised and explored, and because the implications of rhetorical paradigms for our understanding of literature of this period are often imperfectly worked out. The connections of rhetoric to literature, and to the theory of literature, are many, and the question of precedence is always contested: not only do literary works contain a great deal of rhetoric, but also rhetorical theory claims to comprehend all of literature.

Backgrounds Rhetoric’s roots lie in the ancient Greek colonies of Sicily, whence the art got a foothold in mainland Greece and, especially, Athens. By the time of the major Greek dramatists of the fifth century BC and, in the next generations, the philosophers, it had a high status, and was accruing a substantial body of written theory. It was ideally

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suited to a democracy, where every citizen must be able to speak for himself in political debate or in a legal case. But rhetoric also purported to be a sort of master-discipline, since all human arts and sciences have recourse to verbal expression and argument. Already in these early days some philosophers, most notably Plato, were trying to dent rhetoric’s prestige, either out of professional rivalry (because it encroached on what philosophy viewed as its turf – dialectical argument) or out of a more sincere worry about the apparent ‘indifference of rhetoric to the truth, whether known or unknown, and its substitution of emotional pressure for argument’ (Fantham 1989: 229). Those criticisms have never been resolved, and our customary derogatory use of the word ‘rhetoric’ has its roots in an ancient controversy. From Greece rhetoric spread to Rome, and in that empire’s less truly democratic culture its major developments were in forensic oratory. Cicero was the finest exponent of legal rhetoric, and his legacy can still be powerfully felt in the courtroom performances of today’s lawyers, real and imaginary. I will return to the question of what all this has to do with literature, but for now we may just observe that classical rhetorical theory always used illustrations from the poets, that some of the earliest of rhetorical devices were in fact drawn from literature, and that every literary writer before the modern era had a systematic rhetorical education. Moreover, rhetorical theory was always looking to proliferate, to expand outwards from the practices at its core to touch all areas of human communication. Similarly, there were seen to be no limits to the range of other expertises needed by the effective speaker, as Cicero insisted: The art of speaking well, that is to say, of speaking with knowledge, skill, and elegance, has no delimited territory, within whose borders it is enclosed and confined. All things whatsoever, that can fall under the discussion of human beings, must be aptly dealt with by him who professes to have this power, or he must abandon the name of eloquent. (Cicero, De oratore, 2.2.5)

The art never fell altogether out of view or out of use, but the European Renaissance saw a major resurgence, spurred on by the discovery in the corners of monastic libraries of many lost orations of Cicero, and a full text of the greatest of classical treatises on rhetoric, Quintilian’s Institutio oratoria (‘The Education of an Orator’). Since much of the impetus of social, cultural, and political development in the Renaissance came from the imitation of Greece and Rome, it is no surprise that rhetoric became central to the humanist curriculum, and that a proper context for its exploitation seemed to have emerged. The educated man might only use his rhetoric in fighting a case in court or in writing love letters, but he had been taught it in the hope that it might enable him to make a contribution to political life or win the favour of a monarch: it was the skill that best expressed the civic values of humanism. Before we go any further, we need to look briefly at the basic outlines of rhetorical theory. First of all, the orator, in whatever situation he must act, has three fundamental and interlinked aims: to teach (docere), to delight (delectare), and to move (movere).

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Now, although rhetoric would claim to have something to offer whenever a person opens his or her mouth, in practice it identified three kinds of situation in which society would recognise its persuasive presence. These three kinds of rhetoric are: (1) epideictic or demonstrative rhetoric, which is concerned with praise and dispraise, often ceremonial, and was seen as containing some of the earliest literary forms, like the odes of Pindar; (2) deliberative rhetoric, which is concerned with persuasion and dissuasion in political debate – whether to adopt this policy or not; and (3) forensic rhetoric, which is concerned with legal argument, for the prosecution or for the defence. As Thomas Wilson, one of the first English theorists, explains in The Art of Rhetoric (1553): Nothing can be handled by this art but the same is contained within one of these three causes. Either the matter consisteth in praise or dispraise of a thing [epideictic]; or else in consulting whether the cause be profitable or unprofitable [deliberative]; or lastly whether the matter be right or wrong [forensic]. (Vickers 1999: 82)

Because of this insistence that any verbal performance could be slotted into one of the three rhetorical kinds, there was very early on a problem: not all literature can be happily classified as epideictic oratory. Where, for instance, does one put drama or epic poetry in this classification? Aristotle, in the earliest surviving rhetoric book, identified three means of persuasion. These are logos, or argument; ethos, the projected moral character of the speaker; and pathos, the strong emotions performed or aroused by the speaker. What this tripartite division makes clear is that rhetoric persuades not only (perhaps in some cases not even primarily) by the force of its logic, but also by making the audience want to believe in the speaker, and by manipulating their passions. The theory next identifies five basic skills, sometimes called the five parts, which became the headings under which most textbooks treated rhetoric, and which also corresponded to the order in which an oration would evolve. The first skill, and therefore the first stage of rhetorical composition, is inventio (discovery), which consists in seeking out arguments and examples, from the so-called commonplaces or topics, which can be applied to the case in hand. The next skill, dispositio (arrangement), concerns the casting of these materials into the conventional form of an oration, with its various traditional stages between opening and conclusion. Elocutio, the third skill, involves choosing a style of expression, and within the decorum of that style selecting figures of speech to colour what is said. Memoria, the next skill, involves simply committing the oration to memory, although even here a substantial theory of the art of memory evolved. And finally, actio or pronuntiatio was the name given to the delivery of the oration; its science included the codification of types of emphatic gesture and the training of the voice. Elocutio was always the area of rhetoric where literature was most in play, and consequently it is the area that will most concern us. It distinguished kinds of style (e.g. high/grand, middle/mixed, low/plain), and it is these same kinds that are invoked

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when we talk of Milton’s grand style or Herbert’s plain style. And, in discussion of the scores and sometimes hundreds of rhetorical figures, it distinguished between schemes (devices which are about the patterning and arrangement of words) and tropes (devices which involve changes of meaning, like metaphor). Another popular division was between figures of speech (schemes) and figures of thought, which might be figures that impose a pattern on a larger scale (e.g. prolepsis, by which an objection to an argument is anticipated and seen off), or might be something more complex. Tropes in some cases stand outside this binary division, and in other cases are classed as a sub-category of figures of thought. But these bewildering distinctions need not detain us further. Again, Wilson is a good guide to the hierarchy of the three styles: There are three manner of styles or inditings: the great or mighty kind, when we use great words or vehement figures. The small kind, when we moderate our heat by meaner words, and use not the most stirring sentences. The low kind, when we use no metaphors nor translated words, nor yet use any amplifications, but go plainly to work and speak altogether in common words. (cited in Vickers 1999: 123–4)

The styles were sometimes multiplied to five or more, and throughout the Renaissance particular variants of them were identified and practised. But as Debora Shuger tells us: The significance of these categories does not lie in their descriptive precision; they are crucial because Renaissance theorists use these terms to relate the formal characteristics of discourse to larger cultural issues. Renaissance rhetorics, that is, employ stylistic categories to articulate the political, philosophical, and theological implications of lexical or syntactic patternings. (Shuger 1999: 177)

To talk of Milton’s grand style and Herbert’s plain style is to imply something not just about each poet’s rhetorical preferences but about their position in society and about their position in relation both to their subject matter and to their various audiences, in earth and in heaven. Much of the taxonomic energy of classical and Renaissance rhetoricians was expended on the rhetorical figures, with each creating subtly different categorisations, organising the figures into different groupings, adjusting the emphases of their definitions, or even inventing new terms. Richard Lanham observes that ‘the central point about the nomenclature of rhetorical figuration’ is ‘that the confusion has been a creative one … The vast pool of terms for verbal ornamentation has acted like a gene pool for the rhetorical imagination, stimulating us to look at language in another way’ (Lanham 1991: 79). Henry Peacham summarises the point of figurative speech in the preface to his handbook, The Garden of Eloquence (1577): For by figures, as it were by sundry streams, that great and forcible flood of eloquence is most plentifully and pleasantly poured forth – by the great might of figures, which

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Gavin Alexander is no other thing than wisdom speaking eloquently, the orator may lead his hearers which way he list, and draw them to what affection he will: he may make them to be angry, to be pleased, to laugh, to weep, and lament; to love, to abhor, and loathe; to hope, to fear, to covet, to be satisfied, to envy, to have pity and compassion; to marvel, to believe, to repent; and, briefly, to be moved with any affection that shall serve best for his purpose. By figures he may make his speech as clear as the noon day, or, contrariwise, as it were with clouds and foggy mists, he may cover it with darkness; he may stir up storms and troublesome tempests, or, contrariwise, cause and procure a quiet and silent calmness; he may set forth any matter with a goodly perspicuity, and paint out any person, deed, or thing so cunningly with these colours that it shall seem rather a lively image painted in tables than a report expressed with the tongue. (Alexander 2004: 251)

There is nothing that language might hope to achieve that one or other of the figures cannot accomplish. And there is no effect to be found in language use that a figurative analysis will not help us to understand. Because rhetorical theory was so comfortable to claim imaginative literature as falling under its aegis, the theory of literature in the Renaissance was heavily dependent on rhetorical ideas. Poetry was described as being the originator of human society and civilised values – a thought adapted from classical defences of rhetoric. The aims of imaginative literature were found to be the same as those of rhetoric – the ‘affective triad’ of teaching, delighting, and moving. And literary works were of course composed – and therefore could be analysed – according to the model of the five parts of rhetoric and using such devices as the rhetorical figures. Attempts to make literary theory rhetorical – from such a broad treatment as Puttenham’s Art of English Poesy (1589) through to such a specialised treatise as Abraham Fraunce’s Arcadian Rhetoric (1588) – tended, indeed, to focus on the elocutionary stage, so that literary students of rhetoric would associate ‘rhetoric’ not with orations or types of argument but with ‘figures of speech’. The problem always, for the likes of Puttenham as for us, is that the rhetorical tradition, while envisaging the orator as the complete man, and rhetoric as subsuming all kinds of speech, concentrates on an oratory which is clearly of a different kind from imaginative literature, and not just because much literature tends to be read silently rather than performed. We find, therefore, that it is easier to theorise rhetorically about images of oratory in literary works than it is to treat the works themselves rhetorically; that is to say, we can admire the rhetoric of a character like Mark Antony in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, but find the theory inappropriate to describe the craft of the author in any but the most general terms. On what level do we recognise, and judge, rhetorical skill? What of dialogue and narrative, which rhetoric can describe, but which are less clearly formal oratory? This problem is especially vexatious in those echoes of the textbooks in Shakespeare’s plays. The question always is, ‘Whose rhetoric?’ Do we locate the consciousness of use of rhetorical figures, for instance, in the author, or in the character: do we discover a rhetorical scenario within the plot or the writing?

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Rhetoric teaches speakers to use their words carefully and calculatedly. It imagines an audience ready to be won over – one might even say gullible. But of course audiences will include those with a rhetorical training, and rhetoric during the period with which we are concerned came to recognise explicitly that it was a science of reading and interpretation as well as one of composition and performance. We need, then, to imagine readers fascinated by the rhetorical performances in the poems and works of prose fiction that they read, and audiences alive to the rhetorical skill on display on many levels in the plays they saw. In this way, works of Renaissance literature become texts that we can scrutinise with a minutely attentive rhetorical sensibility, always asking not only what the theory of a particular device might tell us about its use, but also to whom we should attribute the rhetorical intention that motivates that use. Of course, it is also possible to think of literary rhetoric as to an extent unconscious, the result of a half-forgotten rhetorical training rather than of consciously rhetorical composition. Does it matter that writers like Shakespeare and Milton learnt how to write speeches in character as part of their school training (Baldwin 1944; Clark 1948)? The so-called ‘school exercises’ or progymnasmata on which Renaissance schoolboys cut their rhetorical teeth included such tasks as delivering a narrative of a course of events, offering an encomium (praise) or vituperation (dispraise) of a person or thing, presenting a description of a person or place, and creating a speech in the voice of a fictitious, mythical, or historical character. As students developed their skills they would begin to practise whole speeches or declamations, which would be either suasoriae – deliberative exercises in advising a historical or mythical character faced with a difficult choice as to the correct course of action – or controversiae – exercises in legal oratory. They would then go on to engage in disputations, being set the task of arguing on one or other side of an issue. It was by way of set disputations that university undergraduates were examined, and the skill was frequently shown off before monarchs and noble visitors. The ability to see the arguments on both sides of the question (in utramque partem) was thus fundamental to the development of rhetorical skill and is quite clearly a common component in the intellectual formation of anyone who had undergone a basic early modern education (Altman 1978; Skinner 1996: 27–30, 97–9; Skinner 2007). The particular emphasis of that training was more on the rhetorical potential than on the ethical implications of the two sides of any question: not ‘Is this right or wrong?’ but ‘How can this be made the more persuasive case?’ To return to the school exercises, with their jigsaw-puzzle approach to the development of key rhetorical skills, one thing we can see quite readily is why scenes of high rhetorical artifice in literature – set-piece descriptions, passionate speeches – can often appear somewhat isolated from their surroundings, fragments of rhetorical excess that might seem to belong in the schoolroom. But it is not only composition that can seem a matter more of parts than of a whole. Because the tiniest building blocks can be rhetorically labelled – the use of this rhetorical figure to embellish that rhetorical commonplace – a rhetorically conscious reading can encourage a fragmentary rather

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than a holistic approach to literary analysis. We see something of this in the margins of early modern books, where the marginal notes of contemporary readers show a commitment to the labelling of parts rather than a habit of response to wholes (see e.g. Adamson et al. 2007: frontispiece). But rhetorical thinking can be subtler than that, and so can its uses to literary composition and analysis.

Rhetorical Theory and Literary Practice Puttenham introduces the third book of his The Art of English Poesy with these remarks: so is there yet requisite to the perfection of this art another manner of exornation, which resteth in the fashioning of our maker’s language and style, to such purpose as it may delight and allure as well the mind as the ear of the hearers with a certain novelty and strange manner of conveyance, disguising it no little from the ordinary and accustomed, nevertheless making it nothing the more unseemly or misbecoming, but rather decenter [more decorous] and more agreeable to any civil ear and understanding. (Alexander 2004: 133)

Puttenham then devotes more than a hundred pages to an effort to graft rhetoric on to poetry. His primary emphasis, as signalled in the quotation, is on elocutio and figures of speech. His explanation, rather confused in a number of ways, misses out what I think is one of the central reasons why imaginative literature could make such heavy use of rhetorical figures without its language seeming to come too close to the rhetoric of the law court or forum. The key point, which Quintilian expresses succinctly, is that rhetoric is in the first place an attempt to codify natural language use: ‘It was, then, nature that created speech, and observation that originated the art of speaking’ (Institutio oratoria, 3.2.3). The patterns of speech, which are described and classified in the rhetoric textbooks, are found in everyday speech – in those cases the figures are not tools of composition, but merely analytical labels for natural modes of expression. Here is the rhetorically minded literary theorist known as ‘Longinus’, writing in the first century AD, on the figure hyperbaton, in which syntax is deliberately disordered: This figure consists in arranging words and thoughts out of the natural sequence, and is, as it were, the truest mark of vehement emotion. Just as people who are really angry or frightened or indignant, or are carried away by jealousy or some other feeling – there are countless emotions, no one can say how many – often put forward one point and then spring off to another with various illogical interpolations, and then wheel round again to their original position, while, under the stress of their excitement, like a ship before a veering wind, they lay their words and thoughts first on one tack then another, and keep altering the natural order of sequence into innumerable variations – so, too, in the best prose writers the use of hyperbaton allows imitation to approach the effects of nature. For art is only perfect when it looks like nature and Nature succeeds only when she conceals latent art. (On the Sublime, ch. 22)

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When a fictional character uses a figure of speech, it may of course be taken to signify that a rhetorical consciousness is at work in that character. But in many cases we should look at the character’s rhetoric rather differently, as created by the author to tell us something about that character. The particular figure of speech, if we look at the theory, will present the orator with the opportunity to simulate an emotion or state of mind. In fictional contexts, the figure may simply signify that emotion or state of mind in a character who speaks instinctively and without artifice. The simulation is the author’s, and not the character’s. This point is made very clearly, even ironically, in Shakespeare’s The Rape of Lucrece (1594), a poem based on a central Roman myth about the foundations of the republic, although Shakespeare’s interest is for the most part elsewhere. The degenerate Prince Tarquin takes advantage of Collatinus’ absence to try to seduce his wife Lucrece, and, when this fails, rapes her; Lucrece, after sending for her husband and making him swear to avenge her, commits suicide. The Rape of Lucrece is a long poem, considering how simple the plot is, for the reason that it contains a good deal of oratory: Tarquin’s failed persuasions, Lucrece’s failed dissuasions, and then, after the rape, Lucrece’s lament and her staged suicide in front of her husband. Shakespeare’s method is a simple one of bringing together two concerns: sexual violence and rhetoric. He makes these two concerns collide, overlap, swap places; he uses the metaphors of one to describe the other. The relation of rhetorical persuasion to violence, of word to action, of good rhetoric to bad, of language to virtue, are all as a result made themes of the poem. When Shakespeare begins Lucrece’s attempt to dissuade Tarquin (with memories perhaps of the suasoria type of declamation practised at school) he uses his favourite trick of attributing natural, innocent eloquence to the chaste woman. Lucrece uses an instinctive rhetoric, full of hyperbaton: Her modest eloquence with sighs is mixed, Which to her oratory adds more grace. She puts the period often from his place, And midst the sentence so her accent breaks, That twice she doth begin ere once she speaks. (563–7)

Other figures are implied here, like aposiopesis, where a sentence is broken off incomplete, and anacoluthon, where a sentence ends on a different tack, and with a different grammatical structure, from what its beginning had anticipated. Both are explained in the handbooks as indicating a high degree of emotional upset and confusion, through sorrow, shame, fear, or anger. It is not that Lucrece is consciously or cynically simulating the emotions these figures are supposed to communicate: Shakespeare is the one doing that. But to refer to her speech as ‘eloquence’ and ‘oratory’ does make us ask the question, and serves by irony to emphasise Lucrece’s physical and rhetorical powerlessness: she cannot use rhetoric deliberately because she is not in control of the

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situation; Tarquin is in control, and so it is silence which he ultimately inflicts on her. Shakespeare uses aposiopesis to represent this, as Tarquin interrupts Lucrece in mid-sentence, stops her mouth with her nightdress, and rapes her: ‘ “No more,” quoth he, “by heaven, I will not hear thee” ’ (667). Lucrece cries, but she is silent as Tarquin ‘pens her piteous clamours in her head’ (681). Tarquin then slinks away, and Lucrece’s plaint begins, unheard of course. The archetype of female complaint is the nightingale, who sings beautifully but incomprehensibly: a sort of eloquent silence. This is because the nightingale is the mythical Philomela, who had her tongue cut out after being raped by Tereus, a tale, Titus Andronicus makes clear, that Shakespeare will have studied at school in Ovid’s retelling. Lucrece addresses this bird, and proposes a duet with it, before moving on to consider a painting of the fall of Troy. Seeing ‘despairing Hecuba’ (1447) Lucrece is moved, because this woman lacks a tongue to express her grief, and so Lucrece lends her hers. In this long section of the poem, Lucrece responds to literary archetypes of silent grief by giving voice sympathetically; and yet there is nobody to hear her. The challenge for Lucrece is to overcome silence and be heard: she must tell her husband of her shame so that he will avenge it. But this is somehow not enough – and here again is a way in which rhetoric cannot entirely serve her – for she must also kill herself so that he believes her. This is the ultimate rhetorical challenge: to speak performatively, to produce an argument from which deeds will result. But the deed in this case must murder language: Lucrece has to speak her way to a suicide, and Shakespeare represents her wonderfully overcoming the lure of aposiopesis, which is the overwhelming instinct of real sorrow, anger, fear, and shame. She finishes the sentence, and breaks rhetoric: Here with a sigh as if her heart would break, She throws forth Tarquin’s name: ‘He, he,’ she says, But more than ‘he’ her poor tongue could not speak, Till after many accents and delays, Untimely breathings, sick and short assays, She utters this, ‘He, he, fair lords, ’tis he, That guides this hand to give this wound to me.’ (1716–22)

By speaking and being heard Lucrece regains the autonomy Tarquin had taken from her, and breaks the silence he had forced on her. The figure aposiopesis – with which Shakespeare had earlier represented Tarquin’s silencing of Lucrece – hovers over this moment like a ghost of the rapist. The moment Lucrece gains control of her words, she is able to determine her deeds; the sentence she manages to finish thus ends with her suicide, and she finally achieves rhetorical power and autonomy, at the cost of her own life. We can return for a moment to Aristotle’s trio of means of persuasion: logos, ethos, pathos. If Shakespeare’s poem moves us, it is certainly by the force of its ideas, by its

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depiction of character, and by its representation of suffering and strong emotion. But rhetoric can – we must never forget – describe the motives and verbal performances of the author’s characters as well as the author himself. The idea of ethos – the convincing moral character that ought to come naturally but might just be simulated, a veneer – problematises any and every character in Renaissance literature. It demands that we think of character not only as something created by an author, but also as something projected by each and every person. An author might make a character sincere, and his or her rhetoric natural. But rhetoric encourages us to view that character as – if only partially and fleetingly – rhetorically self-conscious, and in control of the image he or she projects. The rhetorical concern with surfaces means not only that language will be seen as separate from the ideas that it adorns, but also that character will be seen to be a covering for a mind, which might or might not accord with the mask that is worn (Alexander 2007). Here is Quintilian on ethos, characteristically ambiguous on this most important of questions for rhetoric – must we mean what we say? The heart of the matter as regards arousing emotions, so far as I can see, lies in being moved by them oneself. The mere imitation of grief or anger or indignation may in fact sometimes be ridiculous, if we fail to adapt our feelings to the emotion as well as our words and our face. … Consequently, where we wish to give an impression of reality, let us assimilate ourselves to the emotions of those who really suffer; let our speech spring from the very attitude that we want to produce in the judge. Will the hearer feel sorrow, when I, whose object in speaking is to make him feel it, feel none? Will he be angry, if the person who is trying to excite his anger suffers nothing resembling the emotions he is calling for? Will he weep when the speaker’s eyes are dry? (Institutio oratoria, 6.2.26–7)

What, exactly, is ‘an impression of reality’ (the Latin word is verisimilis, a term which developed its own currency in later, Aristotelian, literary theory of the Renaissance)? And can tears be feigned? As soon as we think of moral character as not essential but performed, even Lucrece is opened to criticism. The double rhetoric of character and author is not only a (thoroughly desirable) complicating factor when we think about rhetorical intentions. It also produces a double rhetoric of audience response. The audience within a work may be aligned with that outside it, or completely at odds. The discrepancy is most clearly visible in works of literature that give us the impression that we are overhearing something private, and that we are meant to be overhearing. Here is an Elizabethan love sonnet that, though in many respects typical, very actively exploits this rhetorical condition: O be not grieved that these my papers should Bewray unto the world how fair thou art: Or that my wits have showed, the best they could, The chastest flame that ever warmèd heart.

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Delia does not love the poet, and does not wish to be loved by him; she is unpersuaded by his poetry, and tends rather to assume that it is as irksome as his love. The poet insists, however, that it will affect other readers more powerfully, that they will value it and keep it alive, and that they will see an image of Delia so impressive that her transient beauty will continue to be esteemed after her death. The poem has a quieter faith that its poet will also persuade these other readers that his love for Delia was genuine – that, at least, is the note on which it ends: ‘Yet count it no disgrace that I have loved thee.’ If we are persuaded by this poem that its poet is in love and has not either invented his Delia or feigned his passions, then this is through the same rhetoric by which it appears to be seeking to persuade her to take him and his verses seriously – the humility and servility of this last line especially. Most love poems are like this to some extent, addressed simultaneously to a beloved and to an audience, persuading one of one thing and the other of another: a double rhetoric. Philip Sidney gives us a glimpse of this double rhetoric in the Defence of Poesy (c.1580; published 1595); he is discussing love poetry and implies that writing of love requires being in love, or at least seeming so: But truly, many of such writings as come under the banner of unresistible love, if I were a mistress, would never persuade me they were in love, so coldly they apply fiery speeches, as men that had rather read lovers’ writings … than that in truth they feel those passions. (Alexander 2004: 49)

Of course, to persuade a mistress that one is in love does not require that one be in love. In this respect the sincerity of the lover is very like that of the orator, a rhetorical performance necessary to achieve a goal. The success of the lover, like that of the orator, depends not so much on the rights and wrongs of the case as on the power of the arguments, and the projection of a convincing ethos or character. If this is not bad enough, much love poetry is bound into a rhetorical condition where the desired end result is not love but sex, where love is feigned to this end. In the Roman poet Ovid’s Art of Love, its title an ironic echo of more serious works of technical instruction (we might think of Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric and Horace’s Art of Poetry), the lover is urged to learn rhetoric:

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Learn eloquence, ye noble youth of Rome; It will not only at the bar o’ercome: Sweet words the people and the senate move, But the chief end of eloquence is love … In a familiar style your thoughts convey, And write such things as present you would say; Such words as from the heart may seem to move; ’Tis wit enough, to make her think you love … (1.459–68, in Dryden’s translation – published in 1709)

Love, like rhetoric and poetry, is an art that can be learned. And it is an art which can employ these other arts: Ovid indeed sets women up as a fourth kind of audience for rhetoric alongside judge, senate, or people, as if there ought to be a fourth category of amorous oratory to accompany the traditional threesome of forensic, deliberative, and epideictic. Students of the art of amorous rhetoric are not hard to find in Renaissance poetry. We might think of Donne’s calculated persuasions in ‘The Flea’, or the famous rhetoric of Andrew Marvell’s ‘To his Coy Mistress’: Had we but world enough, and time, This coyness, Lady, were no crime … But at my back I always hear Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near; And yonder all before us lie Deserts of vast eternity. Thy beauty shall no more be found; Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound My echoing song: then worms shall try That long-preserved virginity: And your quaint honour turn to dust; And into ashes all my lust. The grave’s a fine and private place, But none, I think, do there embrace. (1–2; 21–32)

What is this poem’s context, and what are we to think as we listen to it? Marvell employs the same commonplaces as Daniel, but his dispositio and elocutio put them to a very different use. This poem is an exercise in argument, a suasoria, and it is important to remember that whatever we make of the poem and of its author is down to its rhetoric and to the character its orator constructs. To discuss Marvell as if he says this sort of thing is to confuse real life with oratory, essential moral character with projected ethos. Within the poem the amorous orator is acting as his own counsel, fighting his own case, wanting to win the argument so that he can sleep with his mistress. But outside the poem, the lover is the client and the author is his lawyer or

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speech-writer, his eloquence for hire, and he is anxious to win the argument out of professional pride. The amorous orator is rather affectionately satirised by Christopher Marlowe in Hero and Leander (published in 1598, after Marlowe’s death). Marlowe had translated Ovid’s elegies, and was as adept as any at the classically inspired rhetoric of courtship. What he does in Hero and Leander is to introduce a tinge of realism into a classically derived tale of star-crossed lovers. Hero is the priestess of Venus, and lives in Sestos, the westernmost point of Asia Minor. Leander is from Abydos, the easternmost point in Europe and a short swim from Sestos across the Hellespont. They are not meant to be together, but love finds a way. Much of the poem is given over to highly conventional amorous rhetoric, and describes Hero’s responses, quite prepared to love the young man, but equally happy to put off the embarrassing business of love while she listens to him and occasionally raises a feigned objection: And now begins Leander to display Love’s holy fire, with words, with sighs and tears, Which like sweet music entered Hero’s ears; And yet at every word she turned aside, And always cut him off as he replied. At last, like to a bold, sharp sophister, With cheerful hope thus he accosted her. (192–8)

The comical rhyme, extending back to the eighth syllable of each line to almost match ‘sophister’ and ‘accosted her’, highlights a pleasant double meaning. He is a sophist: his arguments will be mere sophistry, specious, clever, but empty. But a sophister was also in Marlowe’s day a second- or third-year Cambridge undergraduate, a teenager of perhaps 15 or 16. Marlowe studied at Corpus Christi College in Cambridge, and whilst there, would have honed both his honourable and his disreputable rhetorical skills. Leander as sophister has not yet graduated to the real world; the skills he has acquired have all been exercised in the laboratory of the schoolroom and tutorial. He has not had to make a real argument before. Consequently, his speeches are made to sound deliberately rehearsed: Wild savages, that drink of running springs, Think water far excels all earthly things; But they that daily taste neat wine despise it. Virginity, albeit some highly prize it, Compared with marriage, had you tried them both, Differs as much as wine and water doth. (259–64)

(One suspects, as he says it, that Leander’s mother still waters his wine; and we can be certain that virginity is all that Leander has yet tried.)

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This idol which you term ‘virginity’ Is neither essence subject to the eye, No, nor to any one exterior sense, Nor hath it any place of residence, Nor is’t of earth or mould celestial, Or capable of any form at all. Of that which hath no being do not boast: Things that are not at all, are never lost. (269–76)

And so on, with all Andrew Marvell’s panache but without his worldliness. All credit to Leander, then, that he manages in the end to persuade Hero, if she needs persuading: O who can tell the greeting These greedy lovers had at their first meeting. He asked, she gave, and nothing was denied; Both to each other quickly were affied. Look how their hands, so were their hearts united, And what he did, she willingly requited. (Sweet are the kisses, the embracements sweet, When like desires and affections meet.) (507–14)

The narrator’s rhetoric is getting ahead of things here; despite the gushing language the two lovers are still just sitting on the bed, holding hands, and pecking each other now and again on the cheek. Until Hero takes charge: Therefore unto him hastily she goes, And like light Salmacis her body throws Upon his bosom, where with yielding eyes She offers up herself a sacrifice … Like Aesop’s cock this jewel he enjoyed, And as a brother with his sister toyed, Supposing nothing else was to be done, Now he her favour and good will had won. … Albeit Leander, rude in love and raw, Long dallying with Hero nothing saw That might delight him more, yet he suspected Some amorous rites or other were neglected. (529–32; 535–8; 545–8)

Eventually animal instinct takes over and supplies the defects in Leander’s education. Marlowe’s trick in Hero and Leander is to open up the seam between rhetoric as a taught skill and one’s motives in employing it. At the same time he looks at the old

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question of the orator’s sincerity, but with a fresh twist. Leander is sincere, but manages, by using all the rhetorical tricks he has been taught, not to look it. His oratory is so well learnt that he has never had to ask what he is speaking about. Works of Renaissance literature question rhetoric at the same time as they gratefully employ its resources. They do this with a light touch and for comic effect: so much of the verbal wit of Shakespeare’s plays is about those gaps between words and things that it was rhetoric’s job to explore and exploit. And they do this with persistence and moral seriousness. We might think of the funeral scene in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar (3.2), with Brutus’ ingenuous but rather clumsy scheme-filled speech trumped by Antony’s powerful tropes, and a brilliant combination of logos, ethos, and high pathos. Shakespeare makes Antony both a powerful, grief-stricken friend whose rhetoric comes from the heart and a cynical phoney who plays politics with words just for the love of the game. Or we might think of the love–hate relationship with rhetoric of John Milton, with virtuous eloquence disarming specious rhetoric in Comus, and the Satan of Paradise Lost – whom Milton explicitly compares at the moment of Eve’s temptation to ‘some orator renowned / In Athens or free Rome, where eloquence / Flourished’ (9.670–2) – achieving the fall of man by the rhetorical skill of his serpent tongue. It is in religious poetry that the need to question and even to bypass rhetoric is felt most strongly. Love poets and dramatists only play with the idea of not needing persuasive speech, at the same time as they employ it. But the stakes are higher for the Christian poet, and sincerity is not to be simulated when one auditor is not a gullible mistress but an omniscient deity. We can end by looking at a poem from the posthumously printed collection known as The Temple (1633) by George Herbert, sometime public orator in the University of Cambridge, but in later life a pious clergyman and devotional poet: Jordan (II) When first my lines of heavenly joys made mention, Such was their lustre, they did so excel, That I sought out quaint words, and trim invention; My thoughts began to burnish, sprout, and swell, Curling with metaphors a plain intention, Decking the sense, as if it were to sell. Thousands of notions in my brain did run, Offering their service, if I were not sped: I often blotted what I had begun; This was not quick enough, and that was dead. Nothing could seem too rich to clothe the sun, Much less those joys which trample on his head. As flames do work and wind when they ascend, So did I weave myself into the sense. But while I bustled, I might hear a friend

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Whisper, ‘How wide is all this long pretence! There is in love a sweetness ready penned: Copy out only that, and save expense.’

Christ addresses Herbert at this poem’s end in what is an echo (or sacred parody) of a number of sonnets by Sidney, such as the first of Astrophil and Stella, which ends: ‘ “Fool,” said my muse to me, “look in thy heart and write.” ’ He should simply write about love and not try to be too clever. Looking back, the poet’s attempts to marry rhetoric and devotion seem doomed. Invention, the first stage of rhetoric, is already at odds with the poet’s pious ‘plain intention’ even before that is curled (a metaphor) by the metaphors which elocutio contributes (3–5). We have, though, a gap similar to that found in such Elizabethan love sonnets as Sidney’s or Daniel’s between the rhetorical practice described and that presented. This poem is not unrhetorical, and yet it must describe the options of ornate rhetoric and extreme unrhetorical plainness. It does this in a sort of triumphantly self-defeating way. Metaphor is employed ironically, to criticise past metaphors, as we saw in ‘Curling with metaphors’ and as we see again when the past poet fails to approach heaven precisely because he is too sophisticated simply to name it, coming up instead with the metaphor and periphrasis of ‘those joys which trample’ on the ‘head’ of ‘the sun’ (11–12). But can one really speak or write without inventio, dispositio, and elocutio? Is it possible to be unrhetorical, or is this just another rhetorical pose? Rhetorical theory codifies a number of pitfalls that wait on any attempt to do without rhetoric, gestures which rhetoric will claim as its own, including the figures of aphelia – plainness of writing or speech – and parrhesia – candid speech – and the plain style itself. Herbert knows this, though many of his poems are a contest between a determination to say only ‘Thou art still my God’ (‘The Forerunners’) or just ‘My God, my king’ (‘Jordan (I)’) and a wish to redeem rhetoric, to save it from sin and bring it back to the paths of virtue. And that is what in the end Herbert manages in his collection of devotional poems, The Temple. Rhetoric is employed to good ends, safely within the walls of the imaginary church that encloses Herbert’s art. Though the Devil may encourage its abuse, Herbert can still believe that God intended man to know the art of rhetoric.

References and Further Reading Adamson, S. (1999). ‘Literary language’. In R. Lass (ed.), The Cambridge History of the English Language, vol. 3: 1476–1776 (pp. 539– 653). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Adamson, S., G. Alexander, and K. Ettenhuber (eds.) (2007). Renaissance Figures of Speech. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Alexander, G. (ed.) (2004). Sidney’s ‘The Defence of Poesy’ and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism. London: Penguin. Alexander, G. (2007). ‘Prosopopoeia: the speaking figure’. In S. Adamsom, G. Alexander, and K. Ettenhuber (eds.), Renaissance Figures of Speech (pp. 97–112). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Altman, Joel B. (1978). The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama. Berkeley: University of California Press. Baldwin, T. W. (1944). William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Less Greeke. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Clark, D. L. (1948). John Milton at St. Paul’s School: A Study of Ancient Rhetoric in English Renaissance Education. New York: Columbia University Press. Fantham, E. (1989). ‘The growth of literature and criticism at Rome’. In G. A. Kennedy (ed.). The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Classical Criticism (pp. 220–44). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Halliwell, S. et al. (eds.) (1995). Aristotle: ‘Poetics’; Longinus: ‘On the Sublime; Demetrius: ‘On Style’. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Howell, W. S. (1956). Logic and Rhetoric in England, 1500–1700. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Jost, W. and W. Olmsted (eds.) (2003). A Companion to Rhetoric and Rhetorical Criticism. Oxford: Blackwell. Kennedy, G. A. (1994). A New History of Classical Rhetoric. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kennedy, G. A. (1999). Classical Rhetoric and its Christian and Secular Tradition from Ancient to Modern Times. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Lanham, R. A. (1976) The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance. New Haven: Yale University Press. Lanham, R. A. (1991). A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, 2nd edn. Berkeley: University of California Press.

McDonald, R. (2001). Shakespeare and the Arts of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mack, P. (2002). Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Murphy, J. J. (ed.) (1983). Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Renaissance Rhetoric. Berkeley: University of California Press. Quintilian (2001). The Orator’s Education, trans. D. A. Russell. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rebhorn, W. A. (1995). The Emperor of Men’s Minds: Literature and the Renaissance Discourse of Rhetoric. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Rhodes, N. (1992). The Power of Eloquence and English Renaissance Literature. London: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Shuger, D. (1999). ‘Conceptions of style’. In G. P. Norton (ed.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: The Renaissance (pp. 176–86). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Skinner, Q. (1996). Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press. Skinner, Q. (2007). ‘Paradiastole: redescribing the vices as virtues’. In S. Adamson, G. Alexander, and K. Ettenhuber (eds.), Renaissance Figures of Speech (pp. 149–63). Cambridge: Cambridge University press Vickers, B. (1989). In Defence of Rhetoric. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Vickers, B. (ed.) (1999). English Renaissance Literary Criticism. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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History Patrick Collinson

I In his Apology for Poetry, Sir Philip Sidney had some fun at the expense of the historian, ‘loaden with old mouse-eaten records, authorising himself (for the most part) upon other histories, whose greatest authorities are built upon the notable foundations of hearsay’. And yet the historian boasted that it was he who held the key to ‘virtue and virtuous actions’. Sidney, who was making the case for poetry – which is to say fiction – as more useful than history, the kind of fiction contained in his own great romance Arcadia, dismissed such claims. The historian was tied ‘not to what should be but to what is’, ‘to the particular truth of things and not to the general reason of things’. Only poetry had the capacity to instruct as well as to delight, the instruction sugared with the pill of delight (Sidney 1973: 105–14). These sentiments have a deceptively postmodernist resonance, as historical positivism came under relentless attack in the late twentieth century. But Sidney belongs not to our own times but to the context of a sustained Renaissance debate about the ars historica, a debate that had taken off from where Aristotle (on Sidney’s side), in contention with Plato, had left it, and which was perpetuated in some of the writings of Cicero, without adding much to those classical exchanges (Grafton 2007). Anthony Grafton, the leading expositor of the subject, taking a Europe-wide view, writes that ‘the genre of the Artes historicae grew from deep roots in ancient and fifteenth-century thought, took a clear shape in the middle of the sixteenth century, and assumed canonical form in the years from 1576 to 1579’ (Grafton 2007: 21). At its heart was a principle clearly enunciated by Cicero. The art of history was something practised by the rhetorician. History was a branch of rhetoric, a matter of production rather than consumption (research). Invented speeches, what this or that historical character should have said, rather than anything which he could be shown to have said, were legitimate, a standard part of the rhetorical repertoire (Grafton 2007: 11).

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Sidney’s Aristotelian jeu d’esprit at the expense of the ars historica flew in the face of what every preface to every work of history was saying in defence of its subject, and such apologies were merely repetitive of the old classical tropes. Sidney had only to quote Cicero when he wrote, ironically, of history as ‘the witness of times, the light of virtue, the life of memory, the mistress of life’ (Sidney 1973: 105). This was the ultimate cracked gramophone record. George Nadel has written of these authors as gripped by a strange repetition compulsion, repetition of the same commonplaces about historia magistra vitae century after century, generation after generation trying on the same grand Ciceronian garments (Grafton 2007: 30–1). William Camden, a friend of Sidney, wrote in the preface to his Annals of Elizabeth (1615) that to take away from history truth, ‘the beautifullest creature in the world’, was to poison the mind of the reader (MacCaffrey 1970: 4). As for the didactic exploitation of historical truth, the Protestant historian John Foxe told readers of his ‘Book of Martyrs’ that he took pity on ‘the simple flock of Christ’, who knew so little of the ‘true descent of the church’, ‘and all for ignorance of history’ (Foxe 1583: sig. *iijv). Commending a history of their own county to the gentlemen of Kent, William Lambarde wrote in 1576: There is nothing either for our instruction more profitable, or to our minds more delectable … than the study of histories, nor for the gentlemen of England, no history so meet as the history of England. (Lambarde 1970: vii–x)

(Nor, naturally, for the gentlemen of Kent, the history of Kent.) Such high-flown sentiments often failed to make contact with what writers whom we might want to identify as historians of one kind or another actually did. ‘Historians? The categories were very fluid, and malleable. The words ‘story’ and ‘history’, which for us mean rather different things, were for this period interchangeable. The total fiction of a Shakespeare play could be sold to the world as A Pleasant Conceited History Called the Taming of a Shrew (Worden 2006: 81). ‘Truth’ itself was a very slippery commodity. From a broadsheet of 1565, The True Description of Two Monstrous Children Born at Herne in Kent to The True History of the Tragic Loves of Hipolito and Isabella, Neapolitans (1628), the word ‘true’ was almost a health warning. Ben Jonson, in The Staple of News, said of such ‘true’ reports: ‘no syllable of truth in them’. Sidney admitted that often the historian was obliged to make up his stories, or to make sense of them only by ‘borrowing weight’ from poets (as we might say, by contriving a beginning, a middle and an end), so that there was no absolute difference between history and fiction (Collinson 1997b: 42–3). And more than merely ‘authorising’ himself on other histories, many a sixteenthcentury historian indulged in what we should regard as plagiarism on a massive scale. If Livy or Tacitus had already said it, why trouble to tell it differently? Sir John Hayward, in his book on Henry IV’s usurpation, took the Ciceronian trope about rhetoric as a licence to lift almost everything from other and mostly classical historians, word for word. A huge amount of the whole was quarried from Tacitus, both speeches

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and characterisations, many of which would reappear after a costume change in Hayward’s later works on the Norman Conquest and the reign of Edward VI. In the context of the late Elizabethan debate over the succession, the Henry IV book, with its risky dedication to the earl of Essex, was political dynamite and got its author into serious trouble. But when Queen Elizabeth asked whether Hayward could be done for treason, Francis Bacon thought not, but said that he had committed ‘very apparent theft’, ‘for he had taken most of the sentences of Cornelius Tacitus and translated them into English, and put them in his text’. (This is interesting evidence that the concept of plagiarism was not foreign to the minds of that time.) Actually Bacon flattered Hayward, since his principal source was Sir Henry Savile’s translation of Tacitus (1591). The problematics of all this are very interesting. Was this plagiarism or a kind of creative writing, a legitimate reworking of those ancient materials? Should we deny Hayward the accolade of historian? And did the staging of fourteenth-century English politics in Tacitean language and character mean that in human affairs, certainly in politics, nothing really ever changes? If so, this leaves little room for history as we understand it, that past where they did things differently, and which depends, critically, on a relativist sense of anachronism (Manning 1991; Richardson 1999). The history of history in the English Renaissance has been written back to front, as a slow upward progression from such dubious practices to something like our modern idea of what history ought to be (Levy 1967). Camden’s Annals of Elizabeth was a history of the reign based on, as it were, the National Archives, its author making much of his Herculean labours in ‘great piles and heaps of papers and writings of all sorts’. His pages contained no invented speeches. He also claimed to be an impartial witness to the times. ‘Prejudices I have shunned’ (MacCaffrey 1970: 3–8). So Camden gets a pat on the head for placing history, in Hugh Trevor-Roper’s words, ‘on a new base of scientific documentation’. F J. Levy called this ‘the new history’. Much historiographical industry has been devoted to discovering ‘how and why English historiography found its modern method’ (Woolf 2003: 6). But keeping our ears cocked for sounds of the first cuckoo of spring is a risky business. We may miss Camden’s motive in his exercise in archival positivism: not an aspiration to be a seventeenth-century von Ranke so much as the need to protect himself against the very real dangers which surrounded the historian of recent politics, politics which in this case included the judicial murder of his sovereign’s mother. He told his great contemporary, the French historian Jacques-Auguste de Thou, author of Historia sui temporis, that ‘history is in the beginning envy, in the continuation labour and in the end hatred’. Camden put himself in a position to say: ‘Well, however inconvenient it may seem, that is what the record tells us.’ But this should not detract from Camden’s capacity, inspired by his model, de Thou, to venture some distance beyond the conventions of the ars historica, as currently practised (Collinson 1998, 2003), nor from the importance of Camden’s example for future historiography, beyond the age of the ars historica. So what did the sixteenth century understand by ‘history’? For Francis Bacon, history, if not the same thing as the whole of knowledge, was the empirical basis of

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all knowledge. A linguistic fossil of this taxonomy survives in our phrase ‘natural history’. Yet the title of ‘historian’ was more restricted. The investigation of the past, antiquity, was not the same thing as history, and Camden, the somewhat reluctant historian of Elizabeth, did not consider his great work of antiquarianism, Britannia (1584), which explored such evidences of the past as place names, ancient ruins, and buried coins, to constitute history, nor himself, in that antiquarian capacity, to be an historian (Collinson 1998). The essence of history lay in literary composition, which had no place in ‘mere’ antiquarianism. At one point in Britannia Camden asks the reader to ‘give me leave to act the part of an Historian, which I shall presently lay aside again, as not being sufficiently qualified for such an undertaking’ (cit. Levy 2006: 412). (But this was in itself a rhetorical trope, the device by which an author does something that he has said he will not do.) There was another reason why a ‘mere’ antiquarian might be reluctant to claim the status of a historian, which is to say the annalist of high politics. This was the principle that such a historian should have had direct and personal experience of that exalted world, which had, for example, been the case with Machiavelli. The Elizabethan MP Francis Alford, angling for the post of official Elizabethan historian, told Sir Francis Walsingham: ‘To write a story there appertaineth more than a scholar’s knowledge.’ Lord Burghley himself, if he were not too busy, was the obvious man to ‘write the story of Her Majesty’s reign’. But, failing that, Alford, with a record of not very distinguished public service, would be glad to take it on, if suitably rewarded. Some hopes! Camden was not a servant of the Crown, but thanks to what has been called the Westminster Connection he was close to those who were. Having represented himself in the preface to his Annals as virtually Burghley’s amanuensis, his claims about immersion in the state papers to which Burghley had given him access were clearly meant to provide credentials, which were the next best thing to direct involvement in those high affairs. Sir Henry Savile’s dedication of his Tacitus to the queen refers, flatteringly, to her own ‘admirable compositions’ and ‘excellent translations of histories (if I can call them translations, which have so infinitely exceeded the originals)’. He wishes that she might be her own Tacitus. Camden later assumed the same courtly pose. He would be content if James I were to publish the fourth part of his Annals over his own name (Collinson 1998: 157–8). So it was that Francis Bacon left to mere ‘factors’ (research assistants) the gathering of the necessary facts and documents. The historian was above such a menial task. Bacon’s own History of the Reign of King Henry the Seventh (1622) did not dispense entirely with ‘research’, but in its most essential respects it was a work of literary invention. It was also a prescriptive political treatise, written for the instruction of James I and the future Charles I. History was present as well as past politics: which makes it strange that, not quite understanding what Bacon was really about, his account of the reign became the foundation for much that would be written about it until well into the twentieth century. Historians, authorising themselves upon other histories, seem to have been unduly captivated by Bacon’s account of the avarice of Henry Tudor.1

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The humble antiquary continued to be fair game for the caricaturist. John Earle drew his portrait in the collection of characters called Microcosmography (1628). ‘A great admirer he is of the rust of old monuments … Printed books he contemns as a novelty of this latter age, but a manuscript he pores on everlastingly.’ ‘Old women should like him well, for he is enamoured of wrinkles, and loves all things, as Dutchmen do cheese, the better for being mouldy and worm-eaten’ (Earle 1966: 26–30). Yet antiquarians had serious business in hand, even after the government of James I stepped in to stop them reading scholarly papers to each other in the Society of Antiquaries. This is where we may hope to find the critical testing of evidence that we associate with our own historical protocols. The labour of the antiquarians, studying things rather than texts, what we call archaeology, required a sense of what for ‘politic’ historians was almost irrelevant, the unattainable ‘otherness’ of the past. In this respect the historians were lagging behind (Pocock 1967: 6). Arthur Ferguson even suggests that if we hope to find examples of historical consciousness and a sense of historical perspective, the critical sense of anachronism, the political narratives formally designated as ‘histories’ are almost the last place where we should be looking (Ferguson 1979). An understanding of historical process was more likely to figure not as an end in itself but as a necessary approach to the illumination of particular issues, in the fields of law, theology, and, above all, language. It was with a sense of language as a social and historical phenomenon that Edmund Spenser’s schoolmaster, Richard Mulcaster, could write in his Elementary (1582), a book on the principles of English grammar, that whereas the English of his own day was at the peak of its development, like Greek in the time of Demosthenes or Latin in Cicero’s day, ‘when the age of our people, which now use the tongue so well, is dead and departed, there will another succeed, and with the people the tongue will alter and change’. In The Art of English Poesie, George Puttenham wrote of language ‘by little and little, as it were insensibly, bringing in of many corruptions that creep along with the time’ (Campagnac 1925: 83, 179; Vickers 1999: 225). More recently, Daniel Woolf has vastly extended the canvas of historical sense, in his The Social Circulation of the Past, which explores the texture of historical consciousness in the broadest cultural context, taking us far beyond the covers of the books classified as history. ‘Every individual in Tudor and Stuart England, of whatever social degree, had memories of the past as lived experience’ (Woolf 2003: 274). As the Oklahoma folks in The Grapes of Wrath said, as they packed up their things and headed for California: ‘How will we know it’s us without our past?’ To come back to those books. It is not that Renaissance historians did not know that good history ought to transcend both mere antiquarianism and rhetoric for rhetoric’s sake. Thomas Blundeville, in his The True Order and Method of Writing and Reading Histories (1574), little more than a digest of books by two Italians, Francesco Patrizzi and Giacomo Aconcio, disparaged those who, ‘having consumed all their life time in histories’, knew nothing except useless dates, genealogies ‘and such like stuff ’ (cit. Woolf 1990: 5). Camden could quote with approval the ancient historian Polybius (but as a Renaissance man, preferring to quote Polybius than to say it himself):

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In other words, Shakespeare’s words, a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing. But it remains a question how far these historians practised what they preached. They had more interest in teaching from the past, or what purported to be the past, than in learning from it, or rather, learning about it.

II All that being said, ‘history’, for the educated and half-educated classes of the later sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, would have meant not English history but Greek and especially Roman historians, their past the past to which that present was taught to relate. The history chair that Camden endowed in Oxford we should call a Professorship of Ancient History. When Savile translated some of the Histories of Tacitus as The End of Nero and Beginning of Galba, a story of imperial monarchy degenerating into tyranny, the impact on political consciousness, and perhaps practice, was profound (Salmon 1991; Worden 1994). Yet educated Elizabethans were not totally dependent on such translations. Sallust, author of The Conspiracy of Catiline and a model for Tacitus who, unlike Tacitus, wrote easy and accessible Latin, was published several times in London, but not in English until 1608. More commonly the standard editions of these classics were products not so much of the underdeveloped English book trade as of the great continental publishing houses. Tutors in Oxford and Cambridge, who were giving up more and more of their time to educating the sons of the gentry and aristocracy, introduced them to ‘history’ as a soft but for their purposes useful option, and that normally meant Roman history. It was for their benefit, no doubt, that translations were made: North’s Plutarch (1579), Chapman’s Homer (an enterprise begun in 1598). These translations were also a feature of cultural nationalism, somewhat like the enterprise of Bible translation. For all his posturing against the historians, Philip Sidney was saturated in this kind of history, and in the moderns, from Machiavelli to Bodin and Contarini. He had prepared for a diplomatic mission by reading some of the Decades of Livy. Gabriel Harvey recorded in the margin of the copy they both used (an edition printed in Basle in 1555, now preserved at Princeton) that he and Sidney had ‘privately discussed these three books of Livy, scrutinising them so far as we could from all points of view, applying a political analysis’. Such shared experiences were typical of the pedagogical and reading practices of the age, commonly on record in the universal practice of ‘commonplacing’ in little notebooks. Harvey had conducted readings of Livy with others, much as a modern musician might conduct master classes (Jardine and Grafton 1990; Worden 2006: 79). Another kind of history that was familiar to all dedicated Bible readers, and even to the much greater numbers who heard the Bible read, Sunday by Sunday, in church,

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was sacred, Old Testament history, which must have been more accessible than many events closer in time, its geography more familiar than America. It became a constantly reiterated theme of sermons to connect, even identify, England with ancient Israel, ‘right parallels’, London with Jerusalem, and to apply to England the threatening strictures of the Old Testament prophets, Jeremiah and Hosea. If God had all but given over his chosen people, Israel, why should be overlook the great sins of the new Israel, England? A seventeenth-century preacher told his auditory, which consisted of both houses of Parliament, that if they would not learn from history, God would make them the next history.2 Ever since Eusebius of Caesarea invented the subject in the fourth century, ecclesiastical history, a continuation of the biblical story, had been considered a distinct subject, separate from civil history. When Camden endowed a chair of history at Oxford, the first professor, Degory Wheare, was alarmed to be told that he would have to lecture on ecclesiastical history, a subject of which he claimed to be ignorant. Camden reassured him, however, that it was his intention that his professor should profess only civil history (Jones 1943–4: 175). In his own Annals of Queen Elizabeth, Camden explained that he could not entirely omit ‘ecclesiastical matters’, since ‘Religion and the Commonwealth cannot be parted asunder.’ (That was what Eusebius found, in writing his history in the age of Constantine’s conversion, when church and state had become effectively one thing: Christendom.) But he would deal with them ‘with a light and chary hand’; and, it has to be said, with an evident distaste for what on one occasion he called the religious ‘effervescence’ of certain ‘vehement’ ecclesiastics, which was to say, Puritans (Collinson 2003: 87; MacCaffrey 1970: 6). Archbishop Matthew Parker, Elizabeth’s first archbishop, made a notable contribution to the genre in his history of the seventy archbishops of Canterbury, De antiquitate Britannicae ecclesiae (1572–4). But the ecclesiastical history with which Protestant Elizabethans and their children were most familiar was John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, popularly known as ‘The Book of Martyrs’, an account of ‘matters ecclesiastical passed in the Church of Christ, from the primitive beginnings to these our days.’ Defending the distinctive importance of his subject, Foxe observed that men delighted in the chronicles of war, ‘the hurly-burlies of realms and people’. But how much better for Christians to recall the lives, acts, and doings, not of bloody warriors, but of mild and constant martyrs. ‘For doubtless such as these are more worthy of honour than an hundred Alexanders, Hectors, Scipios and warlike Julies … Such as these are the true conquerors of the world’ (Foxe, 1583: Sig. *vir). Foxe’s book began life as a modest text in Latin, written to instruct a European readership about the history of persecutions in England from the time of John Wyclif. The first, greatly expanded, English edition appeared in 1563, with further enlarged versions in Foxe’s lifetime in 1570 (1570 was a landmark in the history of this text), 1576, and 1583. This was not only the largest book ever published in England. It was a protean text which changed its shape, content, and even purpose, from edition to edition, growing in density and detail as Foxe approached his own times, the years of the Marian persecution, and altering in tone and intention in the various abridge-

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ments of the vast work which followed. (Foxe 1583; Highley and King 2002; King 2006; Loades 1997, 1999). This was virtually contemporary history with an appeal that invites comparison with Louis de Jong’s multi-volume history of the Nazi occupation of the Netherlands, which attracted tens of thousands of Dutch readers. Foxe was the ultimate historical revisionist, turning the received history of the church on its head, identifying truth with what had been heresy, as well as with the suppressed and almost invisible martyr minority, while falsity abided with the pomp and pride of the Roman church. That he was able to do this was entirely owing to the fact that the repressed martyr church, the Protestants, were now, in Elizabethan England, on top; a Constantinian fact with which he was never entirely comfortable. Although Foxe was capable of suppressing inconvenient facts (not all of his heretics could have passed a test of their Protestant credentials), he made almost nothing up, following his sources (the ‘monuments’ of the title) very closely. Again, as with Camden, no invented speeches. The protocols of ecclesiastical history, as laid down by Eusebius, were closer to what we now expect from history than political history in the classical mould. Many of Foxe’s informants were the victims themselves, or the eyewitnesses to their sufferings, so that it could be said that the book was written by the people to whom it belonged, the product of the godly community, which it served to construct. And, as with Eusebian ecclesiastical history, Foxe’s pages were peopled by characters who would not be seen dead in any work of history in the classical mould: a poor illiterate Cardiff fisherman, the daughter of a Suffolk farmer, raised not at the university but at the tail of a plough, a blind teenage girl from the Weald of Kent. In many respects the kind of history now labelled as ‘new’, as in ‘the new social history’, derives from ecclesiastical, martyrological history, not from classical historiography. According to a once influential reading of Foxe, his book instilled into the whole English nation a sense of its exceptionality as the only elect nation of God, the modern Israel (Haller 1964). That was far from Foxe’s purpose, although no author can hope to control the sense which generations of readers will make of any book, least of all of a book of several million words. It may be symbolic that Foxe’s friend Sir Francis Drake took the 1576 edition on board the Golden Hind when he circumnavigated the globe, and made use of it (Parry 1999). However, exaggerated claims have been made about the capacity of this huge and scarcely affordable tome to penetrate extensively even the literate population, let alone ‘the unlearned sort’ for whom Foxe ostensibly wrote. Its bulk was self-defeating, and it is unlikely that as many as 10,000 copies were printed of all editions up to the Civil War, one copy for every 16,000 people living through those generations. There were, to be sure, many ‘little foxes’, which catered for a variety of interests (Oliver 1943). It did not take long for Foxe to be challenged from the other side of the tracks. This was not only in searing critiques of his book as a pack of lies: Nicholas Harpsfield (who as himself a persecutor had featured in the ‘Book of Martyrs’) led the way in his Dialogi sex contra … oppugnatores et pseudomartyres (Antwerp, 1566). Catholic exiles from the Elizabethan Protestant regime, whether overseas or in a kind of ghetto in their

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own country, were soon provided with counter-martyrologies, accounts of the deaths of Catholic dissidents and missionary priests, especially by the brilliant publicist Richard Verstegan, author of Theatrum crudelitatum haereticorum nostri temporis (Antwerp, 1587) (Dillon 2002). Verstegan attempted to organise the publication of a ‘general ecclesiastical history of the Church of England’, a counterblast to Foxe. The roots of this enterprise lay in the proto-history of England, the Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum by the eighth-century monk of Jarrow, the Venerable Bede, which Thomas Stapleton had translated and published in Antwerp in 1565. Although this grand design came to nothing, many of the constituent parts of the projected general history were promulgated, notably an electrifying book by Nicholas Sander, De Origine ac Progressu Schismatis Anglicani (1585) (Heal 2006; Highley 2006). Yet another dimension of history, ‘popular’ rather than learned, was to be found in the memories of common people, connecting time, locality, and present needs. ‘We old men are old chronicles’, says a character in a dialogue of 1608; and John Aubrey called such village patriarchs ‘living histories’. It has been said that the English landscape was ‘a vast repository of memory’, a repository radically revised but not abolished as the Reformation attempted to extinguish such ancient landmarks and objects of devotion as sacred wells, stones, and trees, not to speak of more recent relics, the ruins of the religious houses dissolved by Henry VIII (Aston 1984; Walsham forthcoming). This memory bank endlessly interacted with written records and stories, such as the tales of Robin Hood, so that there may have been no purely oral historical traditions. Aubrey himself remembered that his nurse ‘was excellent at these old stories’, and ‘had the history from the conquest down to Carl. I [Charles I] in ballad’. (Where had she had them from?) George Puttenham noted the tradition of communal singing of ‘historical reports’, and ‘stories of old time’ (Fox 1999; Worden 2006: 80). It is a good question whether Shakespeare, and other historical dramatists, could assume in their audiences an at least basic knowledge of English history, the stories of kings and queens, and this at a time (the long 1590s) when history plays were enormously popular, often refracting current concerns about the future, as the endless Elizabethan succession crisis came to its inevitable conclusion. Thomas Heywood doesn’t quite close the question down, but he certainly sheds light on it, when he tells us that plays have made the ignorant more apprehensive, taught the unlearned the knowledge of many famous histories, instructed such as cannot read in the discovery of all our English chronicles. (Worden 2006: 80–1; see also Archer 2006: 210)

At the other extreme from localised memory, Elizabethan readers were introduced to more exotic landscapes. William Thomas produced the first English History of Italy (1549), and 1591 saw the publication of Giles Fletcher’s Of the Russe common wealth, the first English book to engage with Russia. In this literature ‘the other’ was often deployed patriotically and even xenophobically. In The Glory of England (1615), Thomas Gaisford drew comparisons with China, India, and Turkey. ‘My joy exceedeth

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for not being a native amongst them.’ In the large book which Richard Hakluyt called The Principal Navigations of the English Nation (1589) a book, like Foxe, which expanded in successive editions, Hakluyt and his continuator Samuel Purchas explored an empire that had yet to exist.

III By now it will be apparent that the scope of ‘history’ in the literature and culture of the English Renaissance was very wide indeed. But in what remains of this essay I shall restrict the term to the history of Britain and its constituent parts. And I shall not attempt to venture beyond the generation of the so-called ‘politic’ historians of the late Elizabethan and early Stuart years, the likes of Camden and Bacon. Clarendon and his late seventeenth-century successors would call for another chapter, and another kind of expertise. John Pocock has written that there have been as many English pasts as there were social and professional groups with an interest in recalling it. The lawyer’s past was not the same thing as the cleric’s past, or the herald’s, who all owned different pasts, nor, we might add, the past of the Derbyshire lead miner, whose knowledge of his past and its laws, which he had by heart, was essential for his livelihood (Pocock 1975; Wood 1999). This leads Pocock to ask whether we can speak of a national past in the early modem period. The answer has to be given by the writers who presumed to purvey various versions of English history, national and local. We may begin with the chronicles. Archbishop Parker feared that Queen Elizabeth would be ‘strangely chronicled’,3 implying that there would be, or ought to be, only one, more or less authoritative, account of her reign (the spirit in which Camden put pen to paper); rather like the practice in imperial China, where the original archives were routinely shredded to leave only a single, official history.4 It was said that chronicles ‘do carry credit’ (Holinshed 1587: 766). Chronicles were also, in principle, universal histories, covering the whole of time. Sir Walter Ralegh’s History of the World (1614) was such a work, in the tradition of the chronicles, but also the introduction and groundwork for an intended history of England that never got written – although its preface ran through the history of the Tudors into the reign of James I. In practice, sixteenth-century English chronicles multiplied and jostled for space in a competitive market. Daniel Woolf has counted 220 editions of seventy-nine different chronicles between 1475 and 1699 (Woolf 1988: 346). This tells us something important about the devolved diversity of early modern English society and culture. Nothing could be more remote from imperial China. None of these chronicles was authorised by the government, although the most ambitious, Holinshed’s Chronicles, invited official interest – and interference. The sixteenth-century chronicles derived, in part, from town chronicles that were organised on the principle of the local civic year, consisting, as Thomas Nashe complained, of nothing but lists of ‘mayors and sheriffs, and the dear year [year of dearth] and the great frost’ (Grosart 1884: II, 62). As with monastic chronicles, which were focused on the affairs of a particular community and yet aspired to a kind of universality, these chronicles were a curious

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combination of the minuscule with the greater whole to which it belonged. And increasingly the chronicles were shaped by the centralising tendencies of Tudor England. Even before 1485 they were becoming national in vision and scope, as in Ranulph Higden’s Polychronicon, first printed by Caxton in 1482. Although provincial towns such as Worcester and Shrewsbury continued to be served by their own selfappointed chroniclers, their books were not printed and were peripheral to a culture centred in London.5 It is also significant that, with the chronicle of Edward Halle, entitled The Union of the Two Noble and Illustrate Families of Lancaster and York (1548), the great theme (hitherto chronicles had had no discernible theme) was political and royal: the coming of unity and peace through the union of the red and white roses in the Tudor dynasty. It might be thought that this was a piece of ‘official’ propaganda. But there is no evidence that it was. But if the chronicles were in competition, they also ingested material from each other and from more literary sources, so that the story is one of complex agglomeration. There were three books coming from outside the tradition that fed into the mid-Tudor chronicles. Polydore Vergil was an erudite Italian who was engaged by Henry VII to compose an ambitious Anglia historia. His work was completed in manuscript up to 1513 in that year, but not printed until successive editions appeared in Basle in 1534 (covering events up to 1509) and 1546 (now reaching as far as 1538). Polydore introduced a critical and dispassionate standard to English history writing (which perhaps only a foreigner could have achieved), as well as the formal organizing principle of devoting a chapter to each reign; and the fact that he was incorporated into the chronicles was to their advantage (Hay 1952). There was an interactive relationship between Polydore’s enterprise and Sir Thomas More’s The History of King Richard III, completed in about 1518. More’s searching and ironical interrogation of his subject has aroused almost as much discussion as his Utopia, written concurrently. It has even been suggested that part of his intention was to parody the historical search for ‘truth’, much play with what Sidney would call ‘the notable foundation of hearsay’, a sceptical interrogation of history itself (Fox 1982: 75–107; Fox 1989: 108–27; Hanham 1975: 188–219). Nevertheless, the transcendent merits of the neo-Tacitean Richard III were widely acknowledged, one Elizabethan considering it ‘the only story worthy of reading’,6 while it was left to Shakespeare to pay it the most enduring of compliments. Another book that deserves more respect than it has ever received was The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey by his gentleman usher, George Cavendish (written 1554–8), which, because of its Marian associations, remained unprinted until 1641 (when the imminent downfall of Archbishop William Laud gave it some exemplary topicality). Cavendish was used extensively in several of the chronicles, while Shakespeare and Fletcher could not have contrived the brilliant masques that light up the stage in Henry VIII (and which actually succeeded in burning it down) without Cavendish (Sylvester 1959). The 1560s witnessed a climax in the war of the chronicles. Edward Halle had died, leaving his friend Richard Grafton to complete his work. Grafton published in his own right An Abridgement of the Chronicles of England (1562), which ran into several editions. But his far more ambitious Chronicles at Large … of the Affairs of England

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from the Creation of the World unto the First year of Queen Elizabeth (1568) was a flop, seen off the turf by John Stow, who published a more successful Summary of English Chronicles (nineteen editions in two different versions between 1565 and 1618); and his bumper Chronicles (1580) which, unlike Grafton, achieved several editions and was continued into the next century by Edmund Howes. Stow, a self-made and autodidactic London tradesman, derided Grafton as one who ‘hath but picked feathers from other birds next in his reach’ (Kingsford 1908: 1, x–xii; Gadd and Gillespie 2004). But then, in 1577, the trump card was played with the publication of the Chronicles of England, Scotland, and Ireland, which would always be known after the leading figure in the syndicate that planned it as ‘Holinshed’, Raphael Holinshed; but perhaps unfairly, since the original idea belonged to the immigrant printer Reginald Wolfe, and Holinshed was dead before the second enlarged edition appeared in 1587. ‘Holinshed’, the main source for Shakespeare’s history plays, was a vast and unwieldy agglomeration, much castrated by official censorship in 1587. But it included a number of virtually self-contained works of considerable merit, among them the ‘Description of England’, written against ever-pressing deadlines by a rather odd cleric called William Harrison, whose real interest lay in a vast and unpublishable chronology of the whole of human history (Edelen 1968, 1994; Parry, 1984, 1987). Chronicles have been disparaged for their somewhat mindless inconsequentiality. But Annabel Patterson has drawn attention to the ‘protocols’ that determined the shape and arrangement of Holinshed, which she calls ‘an important and inventive cultural history’, including a very deliberate ‘multivocality’ which allowed all interests, social and religious, to be heard. This was not ‘state history’ but history for the citizen, and Patterson has even risked a considerable anachronism by calling its values ‘liberal’ (Patterson 1994). The Oxford University Press and a new syndicate of appropriately expert scholars, headed by Ian Archer, Felicity Heal, and Paulina Kewes, are currently engaged in a critical edition of Holinshed, which, with attendant colloquia and publications, promises to rival the John Foxe industry now reaching its consummation. Were chronicles on their way out? It has been argued that they were becoming mere ‘artifacts’ (coffee-table books?), while their practical functions were taken over by several other genres, including history plays, better organised, more clearly directioned and more manageable histories, the new ‘politic’ histories, and cheap and expendable pamphlets, the early precursors of newsbooks (Woolf 1988: 346). Their massive size was perhaps self-defeating, and it made little sense continually to update their contents, always beginning with the creation of the world. But that is not to say that Holinshed and Stow were not still read, not to speak of John Speed’s History of Great Britain (1611), in various ways and for various purposes, throughout the seventeenth century and even beyond. That is something that the burgeoning Holinshed project will explore. There was a cyclical process whereby large books ingested smaller books, and in their turn spawned derivative and even ephemeral publications (Walsham 1999). So the chronicles fed into cheap ballads, but also into the more respectable historical and political poems known as A Mirror for Magistrates, first published by William

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Baldwin and other poets, including Thomas Sackville, in 1559, and kept in print in various versions until the 1620s. We are only beginning to appreciate the political impact in late Tudor and early Stuart England of these stories of corruption and evil counsel in the not-so-distant English past, conceived in the manner of the De Casibus tradition invented by Boccaccio and brought to England by John Lydgate in the fifteenth century as The Fall of Princes (Campbell 1938; Lucas 2006, 2009). And, not to be excessively Whiggish in our judgements, historians were becoming increasingly concerned with the critical evaluation of historical evidence, with their accounts of the past becoming more tightly structured and more focused. Foxe’s and Camden’s use of original documents became increasingly de rigueur. It is significant that the prolific poet Samuel Daniel moved from composing semi-fictional, semihistorical verses to a more prosaic and well-documented history, commencing with the Norman Conquest, when reliable sources became available (Levy 2006: 409, 411). How far a wide public maintained its interest in the kind of history the chronicles purveyed, and which the history plays conveyed to a wide audience, is a different and ultimately unanswerable question. The 1590s witnessed nothing short of a craze for history plays. Of the 266 known titles of plays performed in the London theatres in that decade, a good proportion were history plays, not all of which were written by Shakespeare. But it proved to be a somewhat transient fashion. Shakespeare’s contribution to the genre was once seen as patriotic and straightforwardly affirmative of the shared values of an Elizabethan age with its back to the wall. These were, after all, wartime plays. ‘Come the three corners of the world in arms / And we shall shake them.’ (King John 5.7.124–7). To what could that refer but to the war with the Spanish empire, on which, it was said, the sun never set? Recently, rather more has been made of Shakespeare’s critical interrogation of regal and martial pretensions, even in Henry V, maugre, we might say, Sir Laurence Olivier and the concerns of 1944. According to one reading, this play, and others, must be set in the uncertainties of the late Elizabethan succession crisis, the politics of a Europe, and of a British Isles, in unpredictable flux (Dutton 2006). Since those who impersonated kings on the stage were commoners of low social status, historical drama could even be said to have had a subversive potential; although, conversely, it has been argued that it was also a vehicle for the social aspirations of the theatrical profession, notably Shakespeare himself, lifting him and his art out of the world of base mechanicals into the gentry (Helgerson 1992: ch. 5, ‘Staging exclusion’).

IV But there is no mistaking the fervently expressed patriotism, which resounds in so much of the historical and topographical literature of Renaissance England. Shakespeare’s ‘This blessed plot, this realm, this England’ (Richard II 2.1.50) is a typical rather than exceptional sentiment. Holinshed had climaxed with a paean of praise for ‘the commonwealth of England, a corner of the world, O Lord, which thou hast singled

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out for the magnifying of thy majesty’, while Camden declared that ‘the glory of my country’ had been his motivation (Holinshed 1587: 1592; Camden 1610: ‘Preface: The Author to the Reader’). The glory of England, as of other emergent nations reaching for their identity in the Renaissance, was partly a matter of origins. The dominant origins myth (British rather than English) told of the foundation of civilised society in the islands by Brutus, the grandson of Aeneas, from whom the very name Britain was derived; and the legends of the British hero and all-conquering emperor Arthur (Ferguson 1993; Kendrick 1950). These stories had passed into the chronicles from a twelfth-century work of imaginative invention, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia regium Britanniae, the value of which, as history, was doubted even in its own time. Polydore Vergil, as a detached foreigner, was in a good position to pour cold water: ‘Truly there is nothing more obscure, more uncertain or unknown than the affairs of the Britons from the beginning.’ Since it was possible to see the cliffs of Dover from France, it was likely that the island had always been inhabited. As for Arthur, it was conclusive for Polydore that the Roman historians knew nothing of his exploits. His tomb had been ‘discovered’ at Glastonbury Abbey, but Glastonbury had not been founded in Arthur’s day (Ellis 1846: 31–3, 121–2). A friend of Sir Thomas More, John Rastell, joined in the fun in a book with a delicious pun as its title, The Pastime of People (1529). Visitors to Westminster Abbey were shown Arthur’s seal. But Westminster, too, had not existed in those days, the wax of the seal would long since have decayed, and, in any case, charters before the Conquest were not sealed. These were the kinds of argument that Lorenzo Valla had deployed in the fifteenth century to expose the fraudulence of the Donation of Constantine, and they had an affinity with the development of perspective in painting (Woolf 2003: 3). According to conventional ideas of what the Renaissance was about, the ‘British history’ should now have evaporated like morning dew. Not so. Anthony Grafton has taught us that the not inconsiderable critical powers of the humanists could function in strange and counterintuitive ways. The best critics made the best forgers. Even great scholars were capable of believing what they wanted to believe, and their ‘truths’ were not quite the same thing as ours. Valla had had his reasons, which were not those of disinterested scholarship, to expose the fraudulence of papal claims. Annius of Viterbo made up a wholly fictitious pseudo-history, which he attributed to the ancient Babylonian writer Berosus (who really did exist), in order to ‘prove’ that his native Viterbo was the true cradle of Roman civilisation. Another writer who exposed the pseudo-Berosus proceeded to make equally implausible claims on behalf of his native Frisia, while in Scotland Hector Boece, the product of a Parisian higher education, composed a largely imaginary history of his own nation (Chapter 81, Writing the Nation) (Grafton 1990a, 1990b). So it was that John Leland, who was far more learned than John Rastell, firmly believed in the historicity of Arthur and his deeds, invoking the same evidence that Rastell had rubbished (Leland 1582). It became a matter of national, and soon of Protestant, honour to defend these old stories, which were now actually supplemented from the highly dubious pseudo-Berosus by Foxe’s learned friend, John Bale, author

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of the first English bibliography, lllustrium maioris Britanniae scriptorum (1548). The Welsh, or ‘Cambro-Britons’, were particularly defensive of traditions that still flourished in their bardic culture. Humfrey Lluyd affirmed in his Breviary of Britain (published, posthumously, in translation, 1575): ‘I do believe that Brutus came into Britain with his train of Trojans.’ When Camden came to write Britannia he reduced the wonderful world of Geoffrey of Monmouth to a pile of rubble, but still declined to pronounce absolutely on the issue. Let Brutus be taken for the father and founder of the nation: ‘I will not be of a contrary mind’ (Camden 1610: 8, 10, 22). The old legends now had a future as ‘poetical histories’, as in Michael Drayton’s epic poem Poly-Olbion (1612, 1622), which devoted 236 lines to the British history. John Selden wagged a pedantically reproving finger in his marginal notes to the text, but this was little more than a friendly flyting between scholar and poet. Meanwhile, Camden had discovered the true ancestors of the English and their language, ‘a warlike, stiff, stout and vigorous nation’, the Germanic Saxons (Camden 1974: 24–5). Local and regional patriotisms were at least as powerful as national sentiment in an England, which functioned as a kind of federation of partly self-governing communities, counties, towns, and parishes. The relation between the whole and its parts is demonstrated in one of the major cultural achievements of the age, the great Atlas associated with the name of Christopher Saxton (1579) which, it has been said, gave Englishmen ‘visual and conceptual possession of the physical kingdom in which they lived’ (Helgerson 1992: 107; Harley 1983; Morgan 1979). For Saxton’s Atlas depicted England, for the first time, as a collection of coloured counties, and included separate maps of individual counties and groups of counties. This was the climax to a cartographical enterprise that accompanied the application to the English landscape and its history of ‘chorography’. This was a now forgotten art located somewhere between geography and history, invented in Renaissance Italy by Flavio Biondo in his Italia Illustrata, and taken up by German humanists, Conrad Celtis and others, whose ambition was to produce a Germania Illustrata. The pioneer of English chorography was John Leland, a philologist and Latin poet, whose boundless ambition was to travel the length and breadth of England, on foot, first to survey and rescue its threatened monastic libraries, and then to take stock of the country itself, in all its rich physical and historical detail. He told Henry VIII in what became known as his ‘New Year’s Gift’ that he would present him with a survey of ‘your whole world and empire of England’ (Toulmin Smith 1907: 1, xxxvii–xliii). But Leland bit off more than he could chew, became insane, and left to John Stow and other successors the vast accumulation of paper which we know as Leland’s ‘Itineraries’, the foundation for a flourishing chorographical industry. Leland’s legacy was delivered piecemeal, in a number of regional studies, which together amounted to what A. L. Rowse called ‘the Elizabethan discovery of England’. William Lambarde led the way in his Perambulation of Kent (1576), to be followed by John Stow’s Survey of London, Richard Carew’s Survey of Cornwall (1602), and the ambitious plan of John Norden to complete an entire Speculum Britanniae, which got little further than some of the counties closest to London. Whereas Stow’s book was

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suffused with backward-looking nostalgia for the lost world of merry and Catholic England, Lambarde wrote as a fierce Protestant, while Carew lived entirely and optimistically in the present tense (Collinson 2001), The consummation came with Camden’s Britannia, which began (1586) as a stubby little book in Latin, intended to introduce a learned and cosmopolitan audience to a neglected province of the Roman empire, but became, in Philemon Holland’s translation (1610) a sumptuous, illustrated folio for English gentlemen, the foundation for generations to come of topographical and antiquarian history in the same tradition, culminating in modern times in the Victoria County Histories. Just as Shakespeare put Holinshed into verse, so Michael Drayton versified Camden in the 12,000 lines of Poly-Olbion, a deification, almost, of ‘Albion’s glorious isle’. When he reached the last frontier of Cumberland, Drayton wrote: ‘My England doth conclude, for which I undertook this strange Herculean toil.’ And here we too must conclude, only noting the sad, and perhaps significant, fact that Poly-Olbion proved to be a flop. Notes 1

2

Vickers 1998; Chrimes 1972; G. R. Elton, ‘Henry VII: rapacity and remorse’, ‘Henry VII: a restatement’, both in Elton 1974; response by Cooper 1959. Collinson 1988: ch. 1 (‘The Protestant Nation’); Collinson 1997a; Walsham 1999: ch. 6 (‘ “England’s warning by Israel”: Paul’s Cross prophecy’).

3 4

British Library, MS Lansdowne 15, fo. 66. Information imparted by Professor John M. Wong of the University of Sydney. 5 See the essays on Worcester and Shrewsbury in Collinson and Craig 1998. 6 Francis Alford to F[rancis] W[alsingham], Inner Temple Library, Petyt MS 538.10, fo. llv.

References and Further Reading Archer, Ian (2006). ‘Discourses of history in Elizabethan and early Stuart London’. In Paulina Kewes (ed.), The Uses of History in Early Modem England (pp. 201–22). San Marino, CA: Huntington Library. Aston, Margaret (1984). ‘English ruins and English history: the Dissolution and the sense of the past’. In Aston, Lollards and Reformers: Images and Literacy in Late Medieval Religion (pp. 313–37). London: Hambledon Press. Camden, William (1610). Britannia. tr. P. Holland. London. Camden, William (1974). Remains concerning Britain, ed. Leslie Dunkling. Wakefield: EP Publishing. Campagnac, E. T. (ed.) (1925). Mulcaster’s Elementarie. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Campbell, Lily B. (ed.) (1938). The Mirror for Magistrates. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chrimes, S. B. (1972). Henry VII. Berkeley: University of California Press Chynoweth, John, Nicholas Orme, and Alexandra Walsham (eds.) (2004). The Survey of Cornwall by Richard Carew. Devon and Cornwall Record Society, ns 47. Exeter. Collinson, Patrick (1988). The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Collinson, Patrick (1997a). ‘Biblical rhetoric: the English nation and national sentiment in the prophetic mode’. In Claire McEachern and Deborah Shuger (eds.), Religion and Culture in the

History English Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Collinson, Patrick (1997b). ‘Truth, lies, and fiction in sixteenth-century Protestant historiography’. In Donald R. Kelley and David Harris Sacks (eds.), The Historical Imagination in Early Modem Britain: History, Rhetoric and Fiction, 1500–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Collinson, Patrick (1998). ‘One of us? William Camden and the making of history: The Camden Society Centenary Lecture’. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 8, 139–63. Collinson, Patrick (2001). ‘John Stow and nostalgic antiquarianism’. In J. F. Merritt (ed.), Imagining Early Modem London: Perceptions and Portrayals of the City from Stow to Strype 1598– 1720 (pp. 27–51). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Collinson, Patrick (2003). ‘William Camden and the anti-myth of Elizabeth: setting the mould?’ In Susan Doran and Thomas S. Freeman (eds.), The Myth of Elizabeth. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Collinson, Patrick (2009). ‘John Foxe as historian’. . Collinson, Patrick and J. Craig (eds.) (1998). The Reformation in English Towns 1500–1640. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Cooper, J. P. (1959). ‘Henry VII’s last years reconsidered’. Historical Journal, 2, 103–29. Dillon, Anne (2002). The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community 1535–1603. Aldershot: Ashgate. Dutton, Richard (2006). ‘ “Methinks the truth should live from age to age”: the dating and contexts of Henry V’. In Paulina Kewes (ed.), The Uses of History in Early Modem England (pp. 169– 99). San Marino, CA: Huntington Library. Earle, John (1966). The Autograph Manuscript of Microcosmographie. Leeds: Scolar Press. Edelen, George (ed.) (1968, 1994). The Description of England: The Classic Contemporary Account by William Harrison. Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library. Ellis, Sir Henry (ed.) (1846). Polydore Vergil’s English History. London: Camden Society. Elton, G. R. (ed.) (1974). Studies in Tudor and Stuart Politics and Government: Papers and Reviews 1946–72. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press

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Ferguson, Arthur B. (1979). Clio Unbound: Perceptions of the Social and Cultural Past in Renaissance England. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ferguson, Arthur B. (1993). Utter Antiquity: Perceptions of Prehistory in Renaissance England. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fox, Adam (1999). ‘Remembering the past in early modern England’. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 9, 233–56. Fox, Alastair (1982). Thomas More. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fox, Alastair (1989). Politics and Literature in the Reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Foxe, John. (1583) Actes and Monuments of matters most speciall and memorable, happenyng in the Church, with an vniversall history of the same. Wherein is set forth at large the whole race and course of the Church, from the primitive age to these latter tymes of ours … especialy in this realme of England and Scotland. This, the title of the 1583 edition (cited hereafter), is included in the variorum online edition of 1563, 1570, 1576 and 1583. British Academy and Oxford University Press 2009. . Freeman, Thomas F. (1999). ‘Texts, lies and microfilm: reading and misreading Foxe’s “Book of Martyrs” ’. Sixteenth Century Journal, 30, 42–5. Fussner, F. Smith (1962). The Historical Revolution: English Historical Writing and Thought; 1580– 1640. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Gadd, Ian and Alexander Gillespie (eds.) (2004). John Stow (1525–1605) and the Making of the English Past: Studies in Early Modem Culture and the History of the Book. London: British Library. Grafton, Anthony (1990a). Forgers and Critics: Creativity and Duplicity in Western Scholarship. Princeton: Princeton University Press Grafton, Anthony (1990b). ‘Invention of traditions and traditions of invention in Renaissance Europe: the strange case of Annius of Viterbo’. In Anthony Grafton and Ann Blair (eds.), The Transmission of Culture in Early Modern Europe (pp. 8–38). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Grafton, Anthony (2007). What Was History? The Art of History in Early Modem Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Grosart, A. B. (ed.) (1884). The Complete Works of Thomas Nashe, 6 vols. London. Haller, William (1964). Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation. London: Jonathan Cape. Hanham, Alison (1975). Richard III and his Early Historians, 1483–1535. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Harley, J. B. (1983). ‘Meaning and ambiguity in Tudor cartography’. In Sarah Tyacke (ed.), English Map-Making, 1500–1650 (pp. 22–45). London: British Library. Hay, Denys (1952). Polydore Vergil: Renaissance Historian and Man of Letters. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Heal, Felicity (2006). ‘Appropriating history: Catholic and Protestant polemics and the national past’. In Paulina Kewes (ed.), The Uses of History in Early Modem England (pp. 105–28). San Marino, CA: Huntington Library. Helgerson, Richard (1992). Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Herendeen, Wyman H. (2007). William Camden: A Life in Context. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer. Highley, Christopher (2006). “ ‘A pestilent and seditious book”: Nicholas Sander’s Schismatis Anglicani and Catholic histories of the Reformation’. In Paulina Kewes (ed.), The Uses of History in Early Modem England (pp. 147–67). San Marino, CA: Huntington Library. Highley, Christopher and King, John N. (eds.) (2002). John Foxe and his World. Aldershot: Ashgate. Holinshed, Raphael (1587). The First and Second Volumes of Chronicles. London. Jardine, Lisa and Anthony Grafton (1990). ‘ “Studied for action”: how Gabriel Harvey read his Livy’. Past and Present, 129, 30–78. Jones, H. Stuart (1943–4). ‘The foundation and history of the Camden Chair’. Oxoniensa, viii, ix, 175. Kelley, Donald R. and David Harris Sacks (eds.) (1997). The Historical Imagination in Early Modem Britain: History, Rhetoric and Fiction, 1500–1800. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kendrick, T. D. (1950). British Antiquity. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kewes, Paulina (ed.) (2006). The Uses of History in Early Modem England. San Marino, CA: Huntington Library.

King, John N. (2006). ‘Guides to reading Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’. In Paulina Kewes (ed.), The Uses of History in Early Modem England (pp. 129–45). San Marino, CA: Huntington Library. Kingsford, C. L. (ed.) (1908). A Survey of London by John Stow Reprinted From the Text of 1603, 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Lambarde, William (1970). A Perambulation of Kent: Containing the Description, History and Customs of that Shire. London: edn. of 1826, repr. Bath. Leland, John (1582). A Learned and true Assertion of the Original Life, Acts and Death of … Arthur, King of Great Britain, trans. R. Robinson; repr., ed. W. E. Mead, 1925. Early English Text Society, no. 165. Levy, F. J. (1967). Tudor Historical Thought. San Marino, CA: Huntington Library. Levy, F. J. (2006). ‘Afterword’. In Paulina Kewes (ed.), The Uses of History in Early Modem England (pp. 407–20). San Marino, CA: Huntington Library. Loades, David (ed.) (1997). John Foxe and the English Reformation. Aldershot: Ashgate. Loades, David (ed.) (1999). John Foxe: An Historical Perspective. Aldershot: Ashgate. Lucas, Scott (2006). ‘Let none such office take, save he that can for right his prince forsake: A Mirror for Magistrates, resistance theory and the Elizabethan monarchical republic’. In John F. McDiarmid (ed.), The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England: Essays in Response to Patrick Collinson. Aldershot: Ashgate Lucas, Scott (2009). ‘A Mirror for Magistrates’ and the Politics of the English Reformation. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. MacCaffrey, Wallace T. (ed.) (1970). William Camden, The History of the Most Renowned and Victorious Princess Elizabeth Late Queen of England: Selected Chapters. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Manning, John J. (ed.) (1991). The First and Second Parts of John Hayward’s The Life and Reigne of King Henrie IIII. Camden 4th ser., 42. London: Royal Historical Society. Merritt, J. F. (ed.) (2001). Imagining Early Modem London: Perceptions and Portrayals of the City from Stow to Strype 1598–1720. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Morgan, V. (1979). ‘The cartographic image of “The Country” in early modern England’.

History Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 29, 129–54. Oliver, Leslie M. (1943). ‘The seventh edition of John Foxe’s “Acts and Monuments” ’. Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 37, 243–60. Parry, Glyn (1999). ‘Elect church or elect nation? The reception of The Acts and Monuments’. In David Loades (ed.), John Foxe: An Historical Perspective (pp. 167–81). Aldershot: Ashgate. Parry, Graham (1995). The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Parry, G. J. R. (1984). ‘William Harrison and Holinshed’s Chronicles’. Historical Journal, 27, 789–810. Parry, G. J. R. (1987). A Protestant Vision: William Harrison and the Reformation of Elizabethan England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Patterson, Annabel (1994). Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pocock, John (1967). The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pocock, John (1975). ‘England’. In Orest A. Ranum (ed.), National Consciousness, History and Political Culture in Early-modem Europe (pp. 95– 116). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Richardson, Lisa (1999). ‘Sir John Hayward and early Stuart historiography’. Unpublished Cambridge Ph.D. thesis. Salmon, J. H. M. (1991). ‘Seneca and Tacitus in Jacobean England’. In Linda Levy Peck (ed.), The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (pp. 169– 88). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sidney, Sir Philip (1973). An Apology for Poetry, ed. G. Shepherd. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Stow, John (1908). A Survey of London, ed. C. L. Kingsford, 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Sylvester, Richard S. (ed.) (1959). The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey by George Cavendish. Early English Text Society, no. 243. Thomas, Keith (1983). The Perception of the Past in Early Modem England. The Creighton Trust Lecture 1983. London: University of London. Toulmin Smith, Lucy (ed.) (1907). The Itinerary of John Leland, 5 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Vickers, Brian (ed.) (1998). Francis Bacon: The History of the Reign of King Henry VII. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vickers, Brian (ed.) (1999). English Literary Renaissance Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Walsham, Alexandra (1999). Providence in Early Modem England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Walsham, Alexandra (forthcoming). The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wood, Andy (1999). The Politics of Social Conflict: The Peak Country 1520–1770. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Woolf, D. R. (1988). ‘Genre into artifact: the decline of the English chronicle in the sixteenth century’. Sixteenth Century Journal, 19, 321–54. Woolf, D. R. (1990). The Idea of History in Early Stuart England: Evolution, Ideology, and “The Light of Truth’ from the Accession of James I to the Civil War. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Woolf, D. R. (2000). Reading History in Early Modem England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Woolf, D. R. (2003). The Social Circulation of the Past. English Historical Culture 1500–1710. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Worden, Blair (1994). ‘Ben Jonson among the historians’. In K. Sharpe and P. Lake (eds.), Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (pp. 67–89). Basingstoke: Macmillan. Worden, Blair (2006). ‘Historians and poets’. In Paulina Kewes (ed.), The Uses of History in Early Modem England (pp. 69–90). San Marino, CA: Huntington Library.

6

Metaphor and Culture in Renaissance England Judith H. Anderson

The words ‘metaphor’ and ‘translation’, the one Greek in origin (metaphora), the other Latin (translatio), both enter English as synonymous rhetorical terms in the sixteenth century, together with the publication of numerous handbooks of rhetoric in the vernacular. ‘Translation’ and its cognate forms, notably the verb ‘translate’, afford the more telling history of these two words, insofar as ‘translation’ indicates both the basic figurality of language and the embedding of metaphor, as well as of rhetorical tropes more generally, in cultural traditions and social institutions (Ricoeur 1984: I, 196). The specific figure of speech called ‘translation’, or metaphor, shares its name in classical Latin rhetoric with the term for all tropes, namely translatio, and is therefore commonly regarded as the arch-trope. This is to say that figures other than metaphor, such as metonymy, synecdoche, simile, hyperbole, catachresis, and even irony, historically have been found to share ground with metaphor, as is strikingly evident in the devotional writing of John Donne. Addressing a metaphor-making God, Donne realises that ‘Thou art a figurative, a metaphorical God too; a God in whose words there is such a height of figures, such voyages, such peregrinations to fetch remote and precious metaphors, such extensions, such spreadings, such curtains of allegories, such third heavens of hyperboles … as all profane authors seem of the seed of the serpent that creeps; thou art the dove that flies’ (Donne 1987: 99). Metaphor underwrites all the figures Donne names, including extensions and spreadings, or metonymies, in the hands of the divine maker. If the boundaries between figures are often appropriately fuzzy in application, such shared tropicality, or translation, cuts two ways, at once enabling juncture and inviting dispute or suspicion. In early modern England, the expression and application of figures were focal in such crucial debates as those about vestments, the Eucharist, and the workings of economic exchange, for example.1 However inclusive translation may be as arch-trope, definitions remain useful as starting points, necessarily accompanied with the recognition that whole libraries have been written about the nature and working of metaphor. Nowadays definitions

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of translation/metaphor generally exclude explicit comparison, which earlier was usually assumed to be a defining characteristic. For representative modern examples, the philosopher Paul Ricoeur’s definition of metaphor and the psychological linguist Jean Aitchison’s definition are both based on unconventionality: Ricoeur’s might be encapsulated as ‘a deviant predication’, and Aitchison’s is expressed as ‘the use of a word with one or more of the “typicality conditions” attached to it broken’ (Ricoeur 1977: 143, Aitchison: 1994: 148). Notably, Ricoeur’s definition is sentence-based, and Aitchison’s word-based. The cognitive scientists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, linguist and philosopher respectively, and the literary critic M. H. Abrams base their definitions on transference: on the one hand, metaphor is ‘a way of conceiving of one thing in terms of another … [whose] primary function is understanding’; on the other, a metaphor is ‘a word or expression which in literal usage denotes one kind of thing or action [that] is applied to a distinctly different kind of thing or action, without asserting a comparison’ (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 36; Abrams 1988: 65). Notably the latter, Abrams’s definition, which is aimed at an undergraduate audience, excludes comparison explicitly but appears to accept a fallacy of transference unimpeded by the deviation or difference it posits. The definition in the enlarged first edition of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics focuses wholly on the positive value of enhancement: here metaphor is ‘A condensed verbal relation in which an idea, image, or symbol may, by the presence of one or more other ideas, images, or symbols, be enhanced in vividness, complexity, or breadth of implication’ (Whalley 1974: 490). Variant definitions seem, like metaphorical potency, unending. The English word ‘translation’ derives from Latin trans, ‘across’, and ferre (supine: latum), ‘to carry’, and signifies the carrying of something (anything) from one place (location or situation) to another. As the trope translatio, it indicates a partial transfer of signification and a likely transformation of meaning: metaphorical transfer simultaneously is and is not – my love is and is not a rose. Early modern English applications and extensions of translation include, in addition to the trope, both the familiar turning of the words of one language into those of another and a broad range of uses that are not definitively linguistic and are now less familiar – indeed, archaic – such as the transfer of an official from one ecclesiastical jurisdiction to another, the transmigration of a soul to heaven, the transformation or refashioning of apparel, the transfer (or alienation) of money or property from one person to another, and the movement of a tradesman from one company to another (e.g. baker to draper).2 Again, an example from Donne’s Devotions serves to illustrate the extension of translation from metaphorical writing to religious reality: ‘when one man dies’, Donne observes in his celebrated meditation on those for whom the passingbell tolls, ‘one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators … [but His] hand is in every translation’ (Donne 1987: 86). The remarkable use of the ecclesiastical vestments of the old Catholic religion on the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage is yet another instance of translation, complete with the specific complexities

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of metaphorical implication (Jones and Stallybrass 2000: 192–3; Greenblatt 1988, 1990). Any expression of one thing in terms of another, whether relatively neutral explication or more intrusive interpretation, might also be termed ‘translation’. What is constant in all these significations is some degree of modification or change: a transfer, a transposition, a transformation occurs. Historically, linguistic and tropic translations are – to borrow a term from Lakoff – ‘radial’ instances of such changes, that is, motivated and conceptual, rather than haphazard, and potentially metaphorical in extension.3 This constant, namely change, suggests more than the mere substitution of meaning that even so knowledgeable and influential a theorist of metaphor as Ricoeur has found characteristic of rhetorical definitions of metaphor like those of the early modern period. Ricoeur considers such definitions erroneous because they identify metaphor with mere naming rather than with the construction of new knowledge that is otherwise unavailable (Ricoeur 1978: ch. 2). Herein lies another difference between the early modern period and our own, and it fundamentally involves language, the verbal material of metaphorical thinking and conceptualisation. It relates not only to the theory of metaphor then and now, but also to the radial implications of the word ‘translation’. In Tudor and Stuart times the linguistic ‘situation’, a word by which I would encompass both cultural context and medium of expression, was in important ways different from our own. In Renaissance England, grammar, the fundamental ordering (ratio) of words and the very basis of rational argument, was word-based rather than sentence-based in the way modern grammar is.4 Renaissance rhetorics, which deal with tropes and schemes, or figures of thought and speech, also prioritise words and figures rather than sentences (‘sentences’ in the structural sense, not the sententious one – i.e., séntence, not senténce). In addition, Renaissance culture was both more in touch with the Latin origins and etymological or ‘literal’ (litteralis, ‘of letters’, or component parts) meanings of English words than is ours and likely for any number of reasons to have had the heightened awareness of them that is evident in the multiple applications and extensions of the word ‘translation’ already noted. Monolingual vernacular dictionaries that comprehensively collect and define the entire word-stock of English simply did not exist in the Renaissance.5 Their absence disqualifies appeals to lexical norms and synchronic stability in modern theories of language and rhetoric, although it need not eliminate a powerful theory of metaphor based on the sentence, such as Ricoeur’s, rather than modify it. In the absence of such dictionaries, even a degree of etymological awareness that is virtually immediate and reflexive in the presence of neology and word-play would be plausible among those with a grammar-school education, which was basically concerned with Latin. The common practice of double translation in Renaissance grammar schools – from Latin to English and then back to Latin – would further have encouraged bilingual habits of mind, and these would have extended to other languages, such as French, which was deeply embedded in English law, and Greek, at once the earliest extant language of the

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New Testament and of traditional medicine. The same point holds for the pedagogical emphasis on Latin morphology in the teaching of Renaissance grammar – for example, the compounding of words such as prepositions and verbs and the derivation of cognate terms – both as a mnemonic device and as an indication of linguistic rationality or ‘cause’. If Latin, the language of grammar, is conceived to be rational, it would make sense to conceive of English in a related way, especially when English words flaunted their relation to Latin ones, as they do for anyone with even small Latin. In the Renaissance those with an awareness of Latin roots would have included not only the highly educated and otherwise elite, but also merchants and others connected with trade and finance and even apprentices in a number of trades (Anderson 2005: 10, 220 n.11). Certainly up to and including the time of John Milton, Secretary for the Foreign Tongues under the Commonwealth (and into the Protectorate), Latin also remained the common language of correspondence and diplomacy. A particularly telling example at once of the awareness of Latin roots and of the pertinence of this awareness to cultural metaphor can be found in Robert Estienne’s Thesaurus linguae Latinae, a Latin dictionary influential in England throughout the Renaissance.6 Tracing the English noun ‘gravity’ to its adjectival antecedent ‘grave’ and thence to its immediate Latin origin, we find the following entry under Latin gravis/-e, ‘heavy’ or ‘weighty’: In its own nature [suapte natura] … [gravis] signifies heavy: as a heavy stone, a heavy bundle, weighty arms, a weighty shield, clearly because it burdens us [gravat nos] in bearing it and because it is carried with difficulty and vexation [cum molestia]. Thence we transfer it through catachresis [per abusionem transfferimus] to age, illness, labour, grief: because these who feel the vexation of age, illness, and other things are oppressed, as it were, by an intolerable burden, which, even as a heavy weight, they ardently wish to put from them. And this transference [translatio] is applied not only to bodily vexations but also to those of the mind … which oppress the spirit with a certain kind of weight … And for the same reason molestia, ‘vexation’, has been named from moles, that is, from a huge mass, heavy in weight. Another sense is that, just as heavy rocks and huge tree trunks are not easily moved from a place but stand fixed in all changing times, so constant persons endowed with wisdom are justly and figuratively called grave [graves], because neither by entreaties, nor bribes, nor vainglory, nor promises are they budged from fairness and justice – as are these whom we call light [leves], who, in likeness of dust and straws, are stirred by every breeze.

As this entry indicates, lexical meaning in Estienne’s Thesaurus is simultaneously rooted in objective phenomena and fundamentally tropic: a reproach is heavy because it is like a stone; judgements have weight because they are fixed and constant like rocks or tree trunks. Language is thus translational and transformative; its constant is change.7 Another telling example in this period of the transformative presence and metaphorical effect of etymological roots can be seen in the word ‘invest/-ment’. Like

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translation, this word-concept is a multiple pun that enters into the areas of theatre, economics, law, politics, and religion, all of which I have treated in Translating Investments (Anderson 2005: 22–35). ‘Invest’ derives, via Latin investire, from Latin in and vestis, ‘in clothes’. Its various forms occur with a broad range of meanings in early modern English: for example, ‘to clothe … envelop’, or ‘surround’; ‘to clothe or endue with attributes, qualities, or a character’; ‘to clothe with or in the insignia of an office’ and hence ‘with the dignity itself ’; ‘to endow with the dignity itself ’; ‘to endow or furnish with power’; ‘To settle, secure, or vest (a right or power)’; ‘to enclose or hem in … to lay siege to’; ‘to occupy or engage’; and ‘to lay out or employ one’s money upon any bargain for advantage’.8 The last of these meanings is found in John Florio’s Italian–English dictionary of 1598. It evidently expresses the idea that invested capital is given another cover or form – clothed otherwise or vested elsewhere – and appears to have ‘passed from the Levant or Turkey Company to the East India Company’, in whose transactions the OED records its first English use in 1613.9 Although this meaning in English likely originated earlier in Italian methods of bookkeeping, which were also imported into England, the idea of a capital investment (or reinvestment) in cloth and wool would seem ready-made for England, where these were the major exports.10 The origin and various meanings of ‘invest/-ment’, all of which derive from the idea of clothing (or enclosing – punningly, en-clothing?), thus indicate metaphorical associations at once within the cultural lexicon and between it and the larger culture. The idea of investment as the bestowal, possession, or acquisition of rights and powers easily becomes the idea of investment as dressing for status (whether elite, bourgeois, or artisanal) and thence the idea of financial investment. Dress as symbolic capital also invites an obvious connection with the increased interest in sumptuary laws under the Tudors.11 The association of clothing with rights and powers, with defining a space or enclosure, and specifically with financial transactions afforded a figurative (officially metonymic) code that affected still other cultural applications – the comparison of rhetoric to clothing, for instance.12 In A View of the Present State of Ireland, Edmund Spenser observes that ‘there is not a little in the garment to the fashioning of the mind and conditions’: thus clothing shapes – ‘in-forms’ – mental and social status rather than merely reflecting it (Spenser 1966: X, 121). The renewed interest in the legislation of dress under Henry VIII became even more pronounced under Elizabeth, who was herself the conspicuously symbolic sartorial politician of the portraits (and the 2,000 dresses). The legislation of dress merely highlighted a fundamental category of social perception that was (and still is) translative to its verbal core.13 In Shakespeare’s Hamlet, a remarkably complex context in which the word ‘investment’ occurs comes when Polonius warns Ophelia about Hamlet’s intentions, and it goes far to illustrate the interweaving of investment in the sense of clothing with social relations, which specifically include commerce and religion. Polonius’ warning is laced with the diction of finance, sex, and piety:

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Be something scanter of your maiden presence, Set your entreatments at a higher rate … In few, Ophelia, Do not believe his vows, for they are brokers, Not of that dye which their investments show, But mere implorators of unholy suits, Breathing like sanctified and pious bonds, The better to beguile. (1.3.121–31)

This controversial passage has been much emended by editors; for some, their copytext’s financial ‘bonds’ becomes Theobald’s sexual ‘bawds’.14 ‘Vows’ in the passage are pledges, whether of lovers (secular or religious) or borrowers, and ‘brokers’ are (dishonest) middle-men or mediators, with ‘broke’, the past tense of ‘break’, offering a homonymic echo to ‘brokers’ – broken vows. ‘Dye’, a hue or shade, suggests also the stamp for a coin, and ‘investments’ are either garments or commercial transactions, the whole line suggesting related controversies about clerical morality, the coinage, the cloth trade, and financial exchange that are endemic in the period. Conceivably, if distractingly, ‘investments’ could also glance at the meaning ‘sieges’, this time in the proper translative sense of ‘hemming in’ for which the clothing metaphor calls.15 ‘Unholy suits’ are duplicitous pleas or else misleading clothes, hence deceptive appearances; ‘breathing’ could modify ‘vows’, ‘brokers’, or even ‘suits’, the first and last of these semi-personified; and ‘bonds’ (or bands) are conceivably clerical bands (collars) or marriage banns/bands/bonds, but are more clearly financial commitments or legal agreements, again semi-personified – unless, of course, we emend them to ‘bawds’, or brokers of passion, as earlier mentioned.16 As elsewhere in Hamlet, words, the clothes or vestments of thought, clothe and hide, express and obscure, whatever ‘passes show’ or claims to (Shakespeare 1997: Hamlet 1.2.85). The unsettled state of the English language itself in the Renaissance also bears on the theory and practice of metaphor. ‘An analysis of 40 pages of the Shorter Oxford Dictionary’, for example, shows ‘that of every 100 [English] words in use in 1600, 39 were introduced between 1500 and 1600’ (Bateson 1961: 31 n.2). Shakespeare alone is thought to have introduced 1,700 Latinate neologisms, including compounds, of which two-thirds have survived (Lass 1992: III, 341). In this enriching linguistic ferment, a recourse to etymology for coinage and comprehension must have been a habit of mind – spontaneous, immediate, often tentative in conversation, but available for scrutiny, sustained argument, and further reflection in written or printed forms. In the Latin rhetorics of Cicero and Quintilian, whose influence on Renaissance rhetorics can hardly be overstated, metaphor is typically based in a single word, with anything more extensive classified either as allegory or as some other figure. This word-based conception of metaphor further focuses attention on the roots and other components of words. Language itself thus exhibits a translational/transferential character, which is seen at once to enrich, complicate, and potentially destabilise the

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meanings it conveys, a perception realised at once in the pleasures of puns and in distrust of linguistic reliability. The very word ‘translation’ – the phonically close English translation of a phonically less obvious Latin translation of Greek metaphora – is not merely a linguistic ‘carry-over’ from Greek to Latin to English, but also a spatial metaphor itself, one of movement and, more exactly, of displacement, deriving, as previously noted, from trans and ferre (latum), ‘across’, ‘beyond’ and ‘carry’, ‘bear’ (Ricoeur 1977: 142–3; Derrida 1975: 55). Understandably, religious or political doctrine built on such displacement could begin to look at once like the biblical foundation of sand and, conversely, like an exciting medium of invention and everextending experiment in poetry and plays. Little wonder that puritanical plain speech and the poetic imagination found themselves at loggerheads. The distrust of rhetoric and, inseparably, of language is evident in a representative English handbook of rhetoric such as Henry Peacham’s Garden of Eloquence (1577, 1593). Peacham’s Garden follows Cicero in basing the origin and rationale of tropes on a lack – a want of ‘words to express the nature and property of diverse things’ – and on the consequent borrowing of ‘the name of one thing, to signify another’ that resembles it in some way. Peacham explains that language-users, seeing matters well expressed by this means, began to refuse ‘such words as were proper’ and to substitute their own inventions for the nature of things. Embellishment now exceeded need, but where we might expect Peacham next to decry human errancy, he adds instead that ‘proper’ words either ‘had little sweetness, or could not declare the nature of the thing so well’. His conclusion reinforces the superiority of such artfully ‘translated speech’, observing that men borrowed words ‘from like things, both for the grace sake of the similitude, and also for the cause of perspicuity of the thing [subject matter or existent thing] expressed’. Metaphorical art, at once more pleasing and more accurate, now compensates in Peacham’s view for – a deconstructionist might say now supplements – the shortcomings of natural language (Peacham 1593: 1–2). Although no handbook of rhetoric can account for the complex practices and splendid achievements of Tudor and Stuart writers, two other rhetorics of the period, by George Puttenham and John Hoskins, serve to illustrate the cultural implications and effects of metaphor more sensitively than does the more pedestrian Peacham. Although Puttenham has little substantively new to say about metaphor, the language he uses to describe it is significant. Metaphor for him is decidedly forceful: ‘a kind of wresting [emphasis added] of a single word from his own right signification, to another not so natural, but yet of some affinity or conveniency with it, as to say, ‘I cannot digest your unkind [i.e. ‘unnatural’] words’ (Puttenham 1988: 189). Puttenham enumerates three motivating ‘causes’ of metaphor: first, ‘necessity or want of a better word’ that is ‘apter and more natural’; second, ‘pleasure and ornament’, and third, ‘to enforce a sense and make the word more significative’ – Quintilian’s vim significandi, ‘significative power’ (Puttenham 1988: 189–90, Quintilian 1920: 8.2.6). Puttenham has his eye on a courtly audience for whom ‘wresting’ and enforcing are likely to be more appealing than the verecundia, ‘modesty’, that Cicero’s spokesman recommends to the metaphorist (Cicero 1988: 3.41.165). Reading Puttenham’s translation of

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metaphora, namely, ‘the figure of transport’, with the flippancy it invites, we might retranslate it ‘the figure of ambition’, or more literally, ‘of carriage from one “place” to another’ – ‘place’ heard not simply in a linguistic or rhetorical sense but also in that Donne intends in his poem ‘The Canonization’, namely, ‘get you a place’, or, in Puttenham’s treatise, a higher place, in the court (Donne 1970: 73). Clothing in the rhetorical sense, not simply in the sartorial one, reflected and affected a successful career in Renaissance society. Whereas Puttenham emphasises force, Hoskins seems to favour community. He explains that A metaphor, or translation, is the friendly and neighbourly borrowing of one word to express a thing with more light and better note, though not so directly and properly as the natural name of the thing would signify … The rule of a metaphor is that it be not too bold nor too far-fetched. And though all metaphors go beyond the signification of things, yet are they requisite to match the compassing sweetness of men’s minds, that are not content to fix themselves upon one thing but they must wander into the confines; like the eye, that cannot choose but view the whole knot when it beholds but one flower in a garden of purpose; or like an archer that, knowing his bow will overcast or carry too short, takes an aim on this side or beyond his mark. (Hoskins 1935: 8, emphases added)

Puttenham’s ‘wresting’ is now ‘a friendly and neighbourly borrowing’ as if of a cup of flour (not to say a flower of rhetoric). The greater light and better memorability (‘note’, cf. Latin nota) recall the special light – proprium lumen – that Quintilian attributes to metaphor, and the restraint of extravagance and over-boldness recalls Cicero, as momentarily does Hoskins’s recognition of the mind’s need to wander, which Cicero’s spokesman described as ‘maxima … delectatio (a very great pleasure)’ (Cicero 1988: 3.40.160). Yet even with all these derivatives, there is value added in Hoskins’s characterisation of the creativity of metaphor – of its ‘go[ing] beyond’, or exceeding, the proper and natural ‘signification of things’. This is an excess required to match the comprehension of the human mind. It suggests Sidney’s (or Shakespeare’s) well-known characterisation of the poetic imagination and goes beyond Hoskins’s Roman sources (Sidney 1973: 100–1; Shakespeare 1997: MND 5.1.12–17). The similes Hoskins uses to convey the work of metaphor are themselves suggestive: the hungry, associative eye or the archer who shoots fictively in order to get at a truth. As Hoskins explains, ‘a metaphor … enricheth our knowledge with two things at once, with the truth and with similitude’ (Hoskins 1935: 8). This is a doubling whose parts have seemingly equal thingness, and it is also cognitive, for it ‘enricheth’, or adds to, ‘our knowledge’. * Renaissance ideas about tropology – translation – crucially inform debates about the Eucharist that define Reformation beliefs in England. As Diarmaid MacCulloch has

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observed, the basic problem of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, chief architect of religious reform under Henry VIII and Edward VI and fundamental shaper of the Tudor church, ‘was best how to convey a metaphorical notion of presence’ in the Eucharist, i.e. the Communion or Supper (MacCulloch 1996: 379). Language and rhetoric were at the heart of this problem, as more specifically was the charged biblical statement ‘This is my body’ (e.g. Matt. 26:26). Does ‘is’ indicate a real and present existence or a figurative and spiritual one? Underlying English debates about the Eucharist, notably between Cranmer and Bishop Stephen Gardiner, his chief antagonist, is the still vexed question of what the word ‘is’, known as the copula, itself historically is, and how it signifies. Gardiner, having accepted King Henry as head of the English church, nonetheless clung, much as Henry himself did, to Roman Catholic doctrines – in Gardiner’s case, especially as these pertained to the doctrine of the Eucharist. Within the crucial early years of the Protestant Reformation, the Swiss reformer Huldrych Zwingli was seminally responsible for a denial of real presence in the Eucharist, which is the belief of Catholicism, because he understands the copula ‘is’ tropically, taking it to mean ‘represents’ or ‘figures’ (Zwingli 1984: II, 356–7). Zwingli’s associate Johannes Oecolampadius subsequently transfers Zwingli’s tropic copula to the predicate nominative, ‘my body’, and considers this phrase a ‘representation – or figure – of my body’.17 Whichever reformed translation of the New Testament Greek, and behind it, of Christ’s Aramaic, obtains, real presence is thus displaced by figuration, as Gardiner will assert in England about three decades later. Although Martin Luther, another formative influence on the English Reformation, had grave differences with the old Catholic religion, he believed fundamentally in the substantive (not merely figurative) presence of Christ in the Eucharist. Cranmer’s own belief, broadly representative of his associates in the reformed English church, changed in the course of his life from a Roman Catholic to a Lutheran position and then to one sufficiently Zwinglian for him to have declared, ‘we make no sacrifice of him [Christ], but only a commemoration and remembrance of that sacrifice’.18 Whereas Catholics like Gardiner asserted that the reformers were blind to the real, substantive force of the verb ‘is’, the reformers counter-charged that the Catholics do much abuse the Latin verb substantive, est [is], and much contrary to the proper signification that [est] should have caused it ‘to signify transubstantiatur[,] is changed in substance, or to stand for convertitur … or for transmutatur …. [If] they should take est, in his true and proper signification: they should speak that thing, which is false and not true.19

In this view, it is the Catholics’ est, or ‘is,’ that is fundamentally metaphorical, a translatio or carrying of one thing across to another. The crucial difference is that, for the Catholics, the translation is objective and real, whereas for the reformers, transubstantiation occurs merely in language – in a figure or trope. Their charge is the inverse of Gardiner’s charge that the allegories of the reformers will subvert truth, ‘and all our religion [will be] reduced to significations’, to mere language, or tropology.20

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If Gardiner charges that Cranmer’s Eucharist has no basis in objective reality, Cranmer’s response bases eucharistic change in subject and psyche – in faith. Cranmer’s clearest answer comes in a memorable phrase describing Christ’s words at the Last Supper as having ‘effectual signification’. The reason he gives unambiguously indicates what he means by the phrase: ‘For he is effectually present … in the godly receivers’ of the bread and wine (Cranmer 1844: 34–5, emphasis added).21 Soon after, he adds, ‘to the godly eater’, the words of the supper ‘be effectuous and operatory’, and ‘so to the wicked eater, the effect is damnation and everlasting woe’ (Cranmer 1844: 36). The object is subject to the condition of its recipient. Christ is not absent but ‘present in his sacraments, as … in his word, when he worketh mightily by the same in the hearts of the hearers’ (Cranmer 1844: 11). This presence looks more dynamic than instrumental and appears also to be radically interiorised. In substance, the bread remains bread, however. Cranmer was a major player in another crucial controversy that erupted in the mid-sixteenth century and involved the perception of symbolism and the control of meaning. This controversy concerned religious vestments, most abidingly the surplice, and, like the eucharistic controversy, its rippling effects lasted well into the seventeenth century. Such vestments had a long, accretive history in the church that had made them symbolic foci of the role and virtues – spiritual and institutional – of the priesthood. In medieval Catholicism, the chasuble became the priestly garment bestowed at ordination that was distinctively associated with a sacrificial conception of the Mass and, more precisely, of its central event, the Eucharist. The development of liturgical dress and that of eucharistic doctrine in the Middle Ages were remarkably coincident, although explanation of this coincidence remains controversial. In Desiderius Erasmus’ Praise of Folly, first published in 1511, a scant six years before Martin Luther pinned his reformation theses to the church door, Erasmus’ character Folly, observing the symbolism of the vestments worn by prelates, wonders aloud what would happen if any of them ‘were to reflect on the meaning of his linen vestment, snow-white in colour to indicate a pure and spotless life, or of his twohorned mitre, both peaks held together by a single knot, signifying perfect knowledge of both Old and New Testaments; of his hands, protected by gloves, symbolic of purity, untainted by any contact with human affairs, for administering the sacrament; of his crosier, a reminder of his watchful care of the flock entrusted to his keeping, or the cross carried before him as a symbol of his victory over all human passions?’ (Erasmus 1986: XXXVII, 137). Folly’s openly ironic question registers the gap between spiritual symbolism and worldly practice that later led radical Protestant reformers to accuse the vestment-clad priesthood of corruption, hypocrisy, and empty pageantry. The radical Protestants’ accusations align with their iconoclasm – their hostility to imagery of any sort, whether painted, sculpted, or rhetorical. Reformation doctrines of the priesthood, radically encapsulated in the motto ‘the priesthood of every believer’, necessarily entailed some degree of opposition to the

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tradition-laden vestments of Catholicism, along with rejection of a sacerdotal priesthood set above and apart from the laity. Archbishop Cranmer’s official directions between 1549 and 1552 regarding the use of vestments at once reflect his revisions of doctrine and his effort to control the words, actions, and visual symbols that express it.22 When Cranmer offers an explanation as to why certain ceremonies and practices, including a number that involve liturgical vesting, have been ‘abolished and some retained’, his reasons emphasise neither their inherent sanctity nor that of the priesthood, but the need to maintain ‘decent order’ and ‘quiet discipline’ and lawful calling and authorisation, although they also include ‘edification’ and ‘reverence unto’ the practices maintained ‘for their antiquity’ (PB 1999: 286–9; cf. 324–6). Cranmer typically retains a traditional symbol or practice while radically altering – reforming – what it means. Little wonder that issues of seeming and being, of appearance and reality, issues not only of symbolism and representation but also of religious authority and power, were intensely debated throughout the Tudor and Stuart period. In the seventeenth century, Donne’s sartorial imagery to characterise competing religious faiths in ‘Satire III’ and in his Holy Sonnet ‘Show me, dear Christ, thy spouse’ testify to the life of the vestiary symbol, as does Herbert’s poem ‘Aaron’ to its transformative, translative interiorisation (Herbert 2007: 601). Gerrard de Malynes affords a final example of the metaphorical shaping of perception and institution in the longue durée of the English Renaissance. Malynes, who is on record both in the final decades of the Elizabethan period and throughout the reign of King James, claimed numerous careers and occupations but identified himself first and foremost as a merchant. His magnum opus is Consuetudo, vel Lex Mercatoria, or The Ancient Law-Merchant (1622); in addition, he also wrote relatively short economic tracts.23 Lex Mercatoria focuses primarily on mercantile custom, especially including the financial mechanisms of international trade, but, almanac-like, it engages Malynes’ entire culture and society: government, religion, science, mining, minting, apiculture, usury, the coinage, poverty, alchemy, law, double-entry bookkeeping, banking and insurance, and a good deal more. According to a modern economic historian, Malynes’ extant petitions and memoranda to the English Privy Council suggest that he is ‘the most likely candidate’ among mercantile/bullionist writers to have ‘influenced policy during the Jacobean years’ (Muchmore 1969: 337). The central metaphor by means of which Malynes conceives the economy of England is not only corporeal but more exactly physiological, and it is much influenced by his considerable medical reading. Malynes expounds three ‘Essential parts of traffic [trade]: namely commodities, money, and exchange for money by bills of exchanges’; respectively, these are ‘the body, soul, and spirit of commerce’ and function accordingly (Malynes 1629: 58–9). Malynes develops his analogy (traditionally a form of metaphor) elaborately. For a single example, his understanding of ‘spirit’ resembles that of the contemporary physician Helkiah Crooke, for whom spirit is an ‘exhalation’ of the blood that ties the divine soul to the earthly body, ‘as it were by a strong though not indissoluble bond’.24 It is corporeal: ‘A subtle and thin body always movable … and the vehicle or carriage of the faculties of the soul’, both ideas

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Malynes echoes. Subtlest of all substances, ‘as the wind’ the spirit described by Crooke ‘passeth and repasseth at his pleasure, unseen, but not unfelt; for the force and incursion thereof is not without a kind of violence’ – a biblically resonant description suggestive in relation to Malynes’ sense of the insidious yet forceful effect of the contemporary currency exchanges.25 The description that follows is further suggestive in light of Malynes’ economic knowledge – his grasp of the impact of supply and demand, the quantity of money, and the balance of payments – yet his insistence on the ultimately controlling impact of exchange: spirit is ‘always in motion, for the spirits [like the exchanges] are continually moved, not by another only … but also by themselves, that is, by an inbred principle of their own’, either ‘upward’ or ‘down-ward’.26 Malynes’ tropes are at times merely illustrative but, examined more closely, his central metaphor of body, soul, and spirit, in particular this independent principle of movement up or down, appears to have had a shaping influence on his thought about currency exchange, which lies at the very core of his economic theory. In short, what we have here is an actual example of metaphor’s working to inform Renaissance conceptions and to fashion Renaissance institutions. Thomas Milles, a customs officer and a contemporary of Malynes, makes a connection among rhetorical figuration, eucharistic sacrament, and economic exchange through trade that concludes the present essay by coming full circle. Milles’s figuration is as ironically charged as the accusations traded by Renaissance churchmen and almost as layered as the lines I earlier cited from Hamlet. In The Customers’ Alphabet, Milles equates merchants’ valuation in exchange with counterfeiting the king’s coin and excoriates certain ‘undertakers’, who are variously characterised as farmers of customs (crown patentees) and ‘merchants, that (tradeless themselves) live by buying and selling[,] … raising all their profits from others trades and pains’ (sigs. F2v, K2r): If exchange of goods by gold and silver, the body and blood of kings and kingdoms (represented to us in current coin) be the spirit of traffic and mystical cement that glues so fast together the mutual conjunction between sovereigns and subjects by law and grace, as religious justice hath taught us to believe, then draw these undertakers their methods all from ROME, where first was taught the doctrine that enchants and transubstantiates our Eucharistic sacraments (representing to us the body and blood of CHRIST, by bread and wine) to idolatrous masses, and our Christian exchange into Jewish usury. (Milles 1608: sig. K2v)27

In Milles’s accusations, translation and the surplus that accrues to it belong to Rome, defender of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, rather than to the Reformers, the actual metaphorisers and interiorisers of such presence, whose ‘mystical cement’ Milles considers truly real. His own extravagant use of eucharistic metaphor to characterise the reality binding trade, currency, law, grace, and fealty emphatically reasserts the perceptual, constitutive force of translation in this period.

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1 See Anderson 2005. Throughout this essay I draw directly and indirectly on discussions in this book and in Anderson 1996. 2 OED, s.v. translate, translation; Hans Kurath and Sherman Kuhn, eds., completed by Robert E. Lewis, ed., Middle English Dictionary (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1954–2007), s.v. translation, notes meanings that are in most cases still available at least to the sixteenth century: e.g. the glorious transformation of a person into a constellation, the transfer of power or prerogatives from one person to another, the alienation of a kingdom from its ruler, the capture or exile of a people. On translation among companies, see Rappaport 1989:110 3 Lakoff 1987: 12–14, 334, 378, 534–40; cf. Lakoff and Johnson 1980: chs. 1–3, 12; Johnson 1987: chs. 2–3. Lakoff ’s radial category is essentially synchronic, a restriction I reject. 4 Padley 1985: I, 298–300, and chs. 4–5, sees a shift from a word-basis to a sentence-basis in the mid-seventeenth-century grammar of Port Royal. He insists that the word-basis of grammar is endemic to the Renaissance. See also Anderson 1996: prologue and 235–6 nn. 1–3. 5 So-called hard-word dictionaries, which become available in the vernacular around the turn of the sixteenth century, do not count in this sense. 6 Citation of Estienne 1543, cited here, is referred to as his Thesaurus; its translation is mine; I have also modernised medial ‘v’ to ‘u’. According to Starnes 1963: 99–100 (cf. 10– 11, 104), Estienne’s Thesaurus was ‘part of the standard equipment of school libraries and individual libraries’ in the Renaissance; Watson 1908: 387 describes Estienne’s (i.e. Stephanus’) Thesaurus as ‘the great general dictionary’ of the period. 7 Discussion derived from Anderson 2005: 11–12 and 1996: 75–7. Cf. Johnson 1987: 80–4 on the metaphorical projection from a physical realm to a figurative and perceptual one that best illustrates his theory regarding the embodied basis of human understanding.

8 9

10

11

12 13

14

OED, s.v. invest v., I.1.a–b, 2.a; 3.a, 4–8; II and II.9.a; investment, 1, 5. Quotation from Onions 1966, s.v. invest. See also OED, s.v. invest, II and II.9; see Florio 1598 for his citation. On the exporting of cloth and wool, Scott 1912 remains basic, esp. vol. 1. De Roover 1974: 362 reports that double-entry bookkeeping ‘was spreading fast among the English merchants [c.1600], although it had been practised assiduously by the Italian banking houses in Lombard Street [central London] ever since the fifteenth century, if not earlier’. Finkelstein 2000: 20 adds that Luca Pacioli’s instructions for double-entry bookkeeping (1494) had been translated into English, Dutch, and French manuals by 1543. See Baldwin 1926: 131, 140–9, 152, 220, 248; Hooper 1915: 433–49, esp. 437–46 (Elizabeth’s reign). Finkelstein 2000: 23 cites contemporary instances in which the tailor’s measure becomes a metaphor for ‘the need to keep each rank in its place’. On the distinction between metonymy and metaphor, see Anderson 2005: 4–5 and ch. 4. On such categories, see Lakoff 1987 and Lakoff and Johnson 1980. Also Baldwin 1926: 194 (Elizabeth’s dresses), 36, 162 (clothing and the symbolism of national identity), 81 (clothing and the symbolism of power), 33–4 (nobility and wealth), 167 (extravagance); and the classic treatments of Elizabeth’s use of symbolic dress by Yates 1975: 29–87, 215–19; Strong 1977: 46–54. See Clayton 1966, to which what follows is indebted; also Mahood 1957: 119–20; Thompson and Thompson 1987: 115–16; Fischer 1985, s.v. investment, 88. My subsequent comments necessarily overlap with these descriptions and particularly with Clayton’s. Unlike Clayton, I regard the images of beggary as simply a subset to that of clothing, and take the three major images in the passage to be clothes, commerce, and religion: cf. Clayton 1966: 77. Also cf. Tobin 1982: 94–5 to support ‘bawds’ not ‘bonds’ on the basis of echoes of Apuleius’ Golden Ass in

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15

16

17

18

19

20 21

22

Hamlet. Commenting on this passage, I draw on Anderson 2005: 31–4. The sense ‘sieges’ has been assumed for investments in this passage, for example, by Mahood 1957: 119–20, and Shakespeare 1982. The first record of the verb invest in this sense that the OED cites is in 1600. See my earlier speculation about en-clothing/enclosing. On bonds/bands as clerical collars, again see Clayton 1966: 80–1; Mahood 1957: 119–20. Rupp 1969: 25–7; Oecolampadius 1927: I, 337 (no. 235); see also Luther 1961: III, 176; and ‘Marburg Colloquy, 1529’ 1969: 71–107. Cranmer 1965: 227, emphasis added. Cranmer, by his own testimony, had read ‘almost everything that has been written and published either by Oecolampadius or Zwingli’ (MacCulloch 1996: 180); on Cranmer’s various views, see MacCulloch 1996: 181–3 and ch. 9; also Brooks 1992: 37, 43–4 and passim. My use of the term Zwinglian is meant to signal a kind of influence through other, more mixed and moderate, channels such as Martin Bucer, Peter Martyr, and at a greater distance, Johann Heinrich Bullinger and Philipp Melanchthon. Vermigli, generally known as Peter Martyr (1550?): fo. 15r. On Martyr’s influence on Cranmer, see Anderson 1988: 451–69; also Hall 1993: 227–34. Gardiner 1551: sig. G6v; Gardiner cites Melanchthon’s warning to Oecolampadius. Although Cranmer’s Answer was first published in 1551, he revised and thereby reauthorised the text while in prison. The First and Second Prayer Books of Edward VI 1999: 291 n.: the ‘Ordinal was not printed as part of the first issues of the Prayer-Book of 1549, but as the colophons of some copies

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show, it was intended to be bound up with copies of the Prayer-Book’. The 1552 Prayer Book contained a re-revised Ordinal from the start. References to both prayer books are to this edition, abbreviated PB. 23 Malynes 1629; pagination in the 1622 edition appears to be the same as in 1629, with differences limited to accidentals and the rare addition or omission of a single word. Malynes dropped ‘de’ from his name in his later publications; in the interest of consistency, I have retained ‘de’ for bibliographical reference, although I otherwise refer to him simply as ‘Malynes’. Like Malynes’ surname, his first name is variously spelled in the secondary literature: ‘Gerard’ or ‘Gerrard’. 24 Crook[e] 1616: 173. For a much-expanded discussion of Malynes’ conception of his central metaphor, see Anderson 2005: ch. 8, on which I draw here. 25 Anderson 2005: 174. The coincidence of this description of the spirit’s movement with that of a more familiar, non-corporeal spirit in John 3:8 of the King James version of the Bible is remarkable: ‘The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth: so is everyone that is born of the Spirit.’ 26 Anderson 2005: 174. I have used the phrase ‘balance of payments’ rather than ‘balance of trade’ because, as Gould 1955: 127 observes, Malynes saw trade in terms of prices and money rather than volume. Malynes’ emphasis is always on the prices of imports versus exports. 27 Ordinarily I have not attempted to approximate graphic features, but those of Milles’s text are significant enough to require approximation. They shout.

References and Further Reading Abrams, M. H. (1988). A Glossary of Literary Terms, 5th edn. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Aitchison, Jean (1994). Words in the Mind: An Introduction to the Mental Lexicon, 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell.

Anderson, Judith H. (1996). Words That Matter: Linguistic Perception in Renaissance English. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Anderson, Judith H. (2005). Translating Investments: Metaphor and the Dynamic of Cultural

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Change in Tudor–Stuart England. New York: Fordham University Press. Anderson, Marvin (1988). ‘Rhetoric and reality: Peter Martyr and the English Reformation’. Sixteenth Century Journal, 19, 451–69. Baldwin, Frances Elizabeth (1926). Sumptuary Legislation and Personal Regulation in England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Bateson, F. W. (1934; repr. 1961). English Poetry and the English Language. New York: Russell & Russell. Brooks, Peter Newman (1992). Thomas Cranmer’s Doctrine of the Eucharist: An Essay in Historical Development, 2nd edn. London: Macmillan. Cicero (1942; repr. 1988). De Oratore, ed. G. P. Goold, trans. E. W. Sutton, completed by H. Rackham, 2 vols. London: Heinemann. Clayton, Thomas (1966). ‘Quibbling Polonii and the pious bonds: the rhetoric of Hamlet I.iii’. Shakespeare Studies, 2, 59–94. Cranmer, Thomas (1844). An Answer unto a Crafty and Sophistical Cavillation Devised by Stephen Gardiner. In Writings and Disputations, ed. John Edmund Cox. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cranmer, Thomas (1965). A Defence of the True and Catholic Doctrine of the Sacrament of the Body and Blood of Our Saviour Christ, ed. G. E. Duffield. Philadelphia: Fortress. Crook[e], Helkiah (1616). Mικρoκoσμoγραϕια [Mikrokosmographia]: A Description of the Body of Man, together with the Controversies and Figures thereto belonging, Collected and Translated out of the Best Authors of Anatomy, especially out of Gasper Bauhinus and Andreas Laurentius. [London]. De Roover, Raymond (1974). ‘Gerard de Malynes as an economic writer: from scholasticism to mercantilism’. In Julius Kirshner (ed.), Business, Banking, and Economic Thought in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Selected Studies of Raymond de Roover (pp. 346–66). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Derrida, Jacques (1975). ‘White mythology: metaphor in the text of philosophy’, trans. F. C. T. Moore. New Literary History, 6, 5–74. Donne, John (1975; repr. 1987). Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, ed. Anthony Raspa. New York: Oxford University Press. Donne, John (1965; repr. 1970). The Elegies and the Songs and Sonnets of John Donne, ed. Helen Gardner. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Erasmus, Desiderius (1986). The Praise of Folly, trans. Betty Radice. In A. H. T. Levi (ed.), Collected Works of Erasmus: Literary and Educational Writings (vol. 27, pp. 77–153). Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Estienne, Robert (1543). Dictionarium, seu Latinae linguae thesaurus. Paris: Robert Estienne. Finkelstein, Andrea (2000). Harmony and the Balance: An Intellectual History of SeventeenthCentury English Economic Thought. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. The First and Second Prayer Books of Edward VI (1549, 1552; repr. 1999) [PB]. London: Prayer Book Society. Fischer, Sandra K. (1985). Econolingua: A Glossary of Coins and Economic Language in Renaissance Drama. Newark, NJ: University of Delaware Press. Florio, John (1598). A World of Words, or Most Copious Dictionary in Italian and English. London. Gardiner, Stephen (1551). An Explication and assertion of the true Catholic faith, touching the most blessed Sacrament of the altar. Rouen. Greenblatt, Stephen (1988). Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Berkeley: University of California Press. Greenblatt, Stephen (1990). Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture. New York: Routledge. Gould, J. D. (1955). ‘The trade crisis of the early 1620s and English economic thought’. Journal of Economic History, 15, 121–33. Hall, Basil (1993). ‘Cranmer, the Eucharist and the foreign divines in the reign of Edward VI’. In Paul Ayris and David Selwyn (eds.), Thomas Cranmer: Churchman and Scholar (pp. 217–58). Woodbridge: Boydell. Herbert, George (2007). The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. Helen Wilcox. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hooper, Wilfred (1915). ‘The Tudor sumptuary laws’. English Historical Review, 30, 433–49. Hoskins, John (1935). Directions for Speech and Style, ed. Hoyt H. Hudson. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Johnson, Mark (1987). The Body in the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Jones, Ann Rosalind and Peter Stallybrass (2000). Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Metaphor and Culture Lakoff, George (1987). Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, George and Mark Johnson (1980). Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lass, Roger (ed.) (1992). The Cambridge History of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Luther, Martin (1961). Confession Concerning Christ’s Supper 1528. In Robert H. Fischer (ed. and trans.), Word and Sacrament, III (pp. 151– 372), vol. 37 of Luther’s Works, ed. Jaroslav Pelikan and Helmut T. Lehmann, 55 vols. Philadelphia: Concordia Publishing and Muhlenberg Press. MacCulloch, Diarmaid (1996). Thomas Cranmer: A Life. New Haven: Yale University Press. Mahood, M. M. (1957). Shakespeare’s Wordplay. London: Methuen. Malynes, Gerard (1629). Consuetudo, vel Lex Mercatoria, or The Ancient Law-Merchant. London. ‘Marburg Colloquy, 1529’ (1969). In Donald J. Ziegler (ed.), Great Debates of the Reformation (pp. 71–107). New York: Random House. Milles, Thomas (1608). The Customers’ Alphabet and Primer. London. Muchmore, Lynn (1969). ‘Gerrard de Malynes and mercantile economics’. History of Political Economy, 1, 336–58. Oecolampadius, Johannes (1927). Briefe und Akten zum Leben Oekolampads, 1, ed. Ernst Staehelin. Leipzig: M. Heinsius Nachfolger, Eger & Sievers. Onions, C. T. (Ed) (1966). The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Padley, G. A. (1985). Grammatical Theory in Western Europe 1500–1700: Trends in Vernacular Grammar, 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. PB, see The First and Second Prayer Books of Edward VI. Peacham, Henry (1577, 1593; repr. 1954). The Garden of Eloquence. New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints. Puttenham, George (1589; repr. 1906, 1988). The Arte of English Poesie. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press.

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Quintilian (1920; repr. 1980). The Institutio Oratoria of Quintilian, ed. and trans. H. E. Butler, 4 vols. London: William Heinemann. Rappaport, Steve (1989). Worlds within Worlds: Structures of Life in Sixteenth-Century London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ricoeur, Paul (1977; repr. 1979). The Rule of Metaphor: Multi-Disciplinary Studies of the Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. Robert Czerny. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Ricoeur, Paul (1978; repr. 1979). ‘The metaphorical process as cognition, imagination, and feeling’. In Sheldon Sacks (ed.), On Metaphor (pp. 141–57). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ricoeur, Paul (1984). Time and Narrative, trans. Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, 3 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rupp, Gordon (1969). Patterns of Reformation. Philadelphia: Fortress. Scott, William Robert (1912). The Constitution and Finance of English, Scottish and Irish Joint-Stock Companies to 1720, 3 vols. Repr. New York: Peter Smith, 1951. Shakespeare, William (1982). Hamlet, ed. Harold Jenkins. London: Methuen. Shakespeare, William (1997). The Riverside Shakespeare, ed. G. Blakemore Evans et al., 2nd edn. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Sidney, Sir Philip (1973). An Apology for Poetry or The Defence of Poesy, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Spenser, Edmund (1932–57; repr. 1966). A View of the Present State of Ireland, ed. Rudolf Gottfried. In Edwin Greenlaw et al. (eds.), The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition (vol 10, pp. 43–231). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Starnes, DeWitt T. (1963). Robert Estienne’s Influence on Lexicography. Austin: University of Texas Press. Strong, Roy (1977). The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry. London: Thames & Hudson. Tobin, J. J. M.. (1982). ‘ “Bawds” not “bonds” ’. Hamlet Studies, 4/1–2, 94–5. Thompson, Ann and John O. Thompson (1987). Shakespeare: Meaning and Metaphor. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Vermigli, Peter Martyr (1550?) A Discourse or treatise of Peter Martyr Vermilla Florentine, the public

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reader of Divinity in the University of Oxford wherein he openly declared his whole and determinate judgement concerning the Sacrament of the Lord’s supper, trans. Nicholas Udall. London, Watson, Foster (1908). The English Grammar Schools to 1660: Their Curriculum and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whalley, George (1974). ‘Metaphor’. In Alex Preminger et al. (eds.), The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, enlarged edn. (pp. 490–5). Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Yates, Frances (1975). Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Zwingli, Huldrich [Huldrych] (1984). Friendly Exegesis, that is, Exposition of the Matter of the Eucharist to Martin Luther, trans. Henry Preble. In H. Wayne Pipkin (ed.), Writings of Huldrich Zwingli (vol. 2, pp. 239–385). Allison Park, PA: Pickwick Publications.

7

Early Tudor Humanism Mary Thomas Crane

There are so many problems with ‘humanism’ both as a term and a concept that one hesitates to use it. For one thing, the noun ‘humanism’ actually dates from the nineteenth century (although ‘humanist’ – umanista in Latin – occurs in the fifteenth century). In the Renaissance various Latin phrases – bonae litterae, litterae humaniores, etc. – were used to describe the scholarly and educational field that we now call humanism. There has been much scholarly debate over many years about how ‘humanism’ in general is to be defined, and about its nature and scope in Tudor England and elsewhere. Central questions in these debates include: what was the relationship between Italian humanism and its northern European versions? Is the Protestant Reformation in northern Europe an outgrowth and close associate of humanism, as James McConica (1965) and Douglas Bush (1939) suggested, or did it destroy humanism proper, as argued by Frederic Seebohm (1867)? Was English humanism essentially politically conservative (as suggested in different ways by Fritz Caspari (1954) and Anthony Grafton and Lisa Jardine (1986)), or did it lead to political reform and eventually to republicanism (as Arthur B. Ferguson (1965) and McConica (1965) have argued), or was it essentially irrelevant outside the classroom (as Daniel Javitch (1978) holds)? Was humanism mainly a philosophical, literary, or pedagogical movement? Was it truly innovative, an outgrowth of medieval tendencies and practices, or merely a product of its own public relations efforts? Was it enabling for women, or, with a few extraordinary exceptions, implicated in the structures and institutions that excluded them from public life? Did it contribute to the development of the ‘new science’ in the seventeenth century (as Henry Turner (2006) has argued)? Debate continues on all of these topics. More recent writers like Grafton and Jardine point out our own implication in ideologies of humanism, as students, scholars, and teachers who work within institutions derived, even indirectly, from humanist ideals and practices and would therefore question the self-interestedness of any of our investigations of it.

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In general, earlier scholars tended to take humanism seriously as a successful reform movement, to take it on its own terms and to believe the claims of its early champions (although these earlier scholars were not, perhaps, quite as naive as some revisionist scholars suggest). More recently, there has been a tendency to emphasise early humanists’ lack of sophistication, their political conservatism or even political irrelevance, and to point out the gap between, on the one hand, their claims that a humanist education could create virtuous and effective leaders and reform human society and, on the other, the often brutal and dangerous actuality of political life during the period. In this essay I want to accord with Rebecca Bushnell (1996) in making a modest claim for the usefulness, sophistication, and significance, both intellectually and socially, of early Tudor humanism in England. I believe that humanism in sixteenth-century England effectively shaped practices of reading, writing, and thought as well as the ways in which subjects imagined themselves and their social and political roles. Some scholars have also argued that, although humanism bore few immediate political fruits in England, we can nevertheless trace tenuous links between earlier humanism and the emerging republicanism of the seventeenth century. As is well known, the humanist reform movement began in Italy, appearing there in the late thirteenth century, much earlier than its first beginnings in England. Scholars have charted a number of basic differences between Italian humanism and its later northern European versions. Italian humanism emerged out of opposition to the technical philosophical and logical programmes of late medieval scholasticism, which humanists accused of narrowness and sterility. Humanism sought to replace a scholastic curriculum focused on complex and highly specialised systems of philosophy, theology, and logic with a broader, more ‘humane’ training in literature and rhetoric. According to Grafton and Jardine, Italian humanism was largely propagated by charismatic and influential writers and teachers rather than through widespread curricular change. It introduced two intertwined programmes: an interest in the recovery, restoration, and translation of classical texts from Greek and Latin antiquity, and a focus on training in writing and speaking elegant Ciceronian Latin (rather than the ‘debased’ medieval Latin of the schoolmen). Scholars have suggested that Italian humanism differed from its northern European manifestations in several important ways. The Italian movement is often characterised as ‘pagan’ in contrast to the Christian humanism of the northern Renaissance, because it grew out of opposition to the logical, exegetical, and stylistic practices of the late medieval church and because it advocated a return to classical texts without sharing to the same extent northern concerns to make them compatible with Christianity. Italian humanism also seemed ‘pagan’ in its emphasis on the virtuous secular life in the context of the political controversies of Italian cities rather than (as in the north) on reform of the church. Italian civic humanism was meant to be of use not only to specialists but also to all citizens. Humanism has thus been linked by some scholars to the civic ideals of city states such as the Venetian and Florentine republics, although humanism continued as an influential pursuit under other regimes (such as the Medici in Florence).

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In Italy, the humanist movement was fuelled in part by a patriotic and quasi-nationalist desire to reclaim and re-establish a link between contemporary Italy and ancient Rome. Although training in Latin was predominant, the study of Greek also had a role in Italian humanism, and some have argued that the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453, which caused many Greek scholars to flee to Italy, was a formative event. The role of Greek learning was especially significant in the revival of interest in Plato (countering the medieval tradition of Aristotelianism). However, it remained true in Italy as well as in England that claims about the importance of Greek learning often exceeded actual knowledge of the Greek language and its literature. One of the earliest important Italian humanists was Francesco Petrarca (Petrarch), a classical scholar who revived interest in Cicero as a model for prose style, and who was also the author of important works in both Latin and Italian. Petrarch’s Florentine follower, Giovanni Boccacio, and later such scholars as Collucio Salutati, Leonardo Bruni, Poggio Bracciolini (who visited England), and Lorenzo Valla, continued to produce translations of important classical works and to recover lost manuscripts from classical antiquity, searching monastery libraries for these neglected treasures. Angelo Poliziano and Pietro Bembo continued the work of the previous generation of humanist scholars. Other Italian humanists turned to the works of Plato to provide an alternative to medieval Aristotelianism. Nicholas of Cusa, Marsilio Ficino, and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola were especially known for their development of Neoplatonic thought. Most important for the development of humanism in England were the famous Italian teachers who spread humanist learning to rest of Europe. Guarino Guarini in Verona and Ferarra (1374–1460) was an especially important figure in this regard. Finally, the writings of Niccolò Machiavelli exerted a profound influence on historical and political thought, and it is through his writings that humanism can be tied most explicitly to republicanism. Humanism spread north from Italy in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries but did not have widespread influence in England until the sixteenth. As humanism reached northern Europe, influencing scholars and teachers in France, Germany, the Low Countries, England, and elsewhere, its outlines were altered by new and inextricable connections with religious reform movements and, as scholars such as Elizabeth Eisenstein (1979), Walter Ong (1958), and Lisa Jardine (1993) have recently stressed, by the invention of the printing press with moveable type in Germany (around 1450). The printing press made possible a wider and more accurate dissemination of texts and thus was an important tool for furthering humanism, across geographical space and also across class lines (as printed books made texts available not only to wealthy patrons, who could afford hand-copied manuscripts, but also, increasingly, to ordinary people). But the printing press also shaped the forms through which humanism was expressed, advocated, and dispersed. Erasmus gained international stature as a humanist not, like Guarini and other Italians, as a charismatic teacher who attracted students from all over Europe, but through the strategic publication of widely read texts. In her biography of Erasmus, Jardine points out how much time he spent carefully seeing his manuscripts through humanist presses (such as Froben in Basel or the Aldine in

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Venice). A volume like Thomas More’s Utopia (seen through yet another humanist press in Louvain by Erasmus himself) represents a case in point, since its elaborate front matter – including letters from More to Peter Giles, from Giles to Jerome Busleiden, from Erasmus to John Froben, and commendatory verses in Latin by other European humanists – works to establish the prominence of the whole More–Erasmus circle of humanists. In general this group used publication quite effectively to create themselves as a pan-European intellectual movement. Although England was not home to any learned humanist press to rival Froben or the Aldine, the publication of vernacular humanist works (such as Sir Thomas Elyot’s The Book Named the Governor and Roger Ascham’s Schoolmaster) gained a wider audience for the movement. However, the humanist reliance on print publication in England contrasted sharply with an aristocratic disdain for the stigma of print, which lingered in England into the seventeenth century. Thus, courtly writers in England eschewed publication in favour of circulation of their works in manuscript among a small elite audience, a practice quite at odds with humanists’ enthusiastic embrace of publication. Some scholars have argued that the very form of a printed book, and the possibilities that it offered for organising and indexing its contents, led to an increasing emphasis on rational ‘method’ in humanist theories of composition and education. The French rhetorician Petrus Ramus, who popularised an organisational ‘method’ of dichotomy, can be said to have emerged from humanism and to have been strongly influenced by the book as a material object, as Walter Ong has shown (Ong 1958). Different countries in northern Europe developed different versions of humanism. France became a centre for serious textual scholarship. Its most influential figures, Jacques Lefèvre d’Étaples and Guillaume Budé, were important scholars of classical and religious texts. Lefèvre was, like Erasmus, interested in religious reform, and produced a French version of the New Testament. The reformer Jean Calvin began his career, like many Protestants in the period, with strong interests in classical scholarship, but, like others, eventually turned away from humanism to focus more exclusively on religious matters. Budé was one of the best Greek scholars of the period and also contributed important work on Justinian’s Digest, the central legal work of Roman antiquity. In the next generation, essayist Michel de Montaigne was greatly influenced by humanist ideas but, as became increasingly common among later generations of humanist-trained writers, wrote in the vernacular rather than in Latin. In Germany and the Netherlands, Desiderius Erasmus emerged as the central figure of the northern Renaissance and exerted a profound influence over the forms that humanism was to take, through publication and the foundation of schools, in those countries and in England. Scholarly arguments have been waged over whether there is a definable Erasmian humanism, and, if so, how it might be defined. Erasmian humanism was basically centred on the reform of school curricula and methods of teaching, and also on ideals for the reform of church and state. Unlike Italian and French humanism, which was based in the writing and teaching of a few influential scholars, Erasmian humanism had a broad impact on the education of many (eventually most) young men who were educated in the countries, and England was one,

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where it became a dominant force. Erasmian humanism has been especially associated with values such as pacifism (most famously expressed in Erasmus’ critique of the warrior Pope Julius II in his Julius Exclusus and in Thomas More’s Utopia), and with the idea of a return to the original and unadorned text of the Scriptures, eschewing the complex apparatus of specialised scholastic commentary. Erasmian humanism can thus be linked to the reformist idea of making Christianity more directly available to ordinary people in a vernacular translation based on a biblical text understood in more literary (rather than specialised theological) ways. Like most humanists at the time, Erasmus did not hold a position in a university, but instead gained his reputation through his correspondence and publications. Although he was a member of a Roman Catholic religious order, Erasmus never lived in one place for very long. His ideas about reformed religion were at least initially similar in some ways to those espoused by the Protestant Reformation, and it is often said that ‘Erasmus laid the egg that Luther hatched’. Certainly Erasmus’ controversial 1516 translation of the New Testament shared such reformist ideas as the need to return to ‘original’ Greek texts and interpret them literally, without recourse to the tradition of scholastic commentary. But when Martin Luther (also deeply influenced by humanist ideas) broke with the Catholic Church, Erasmus, like Thomas More in England, refused to join him, ultimately disagreeing with Luther on his more pessimistic Protestant ideas about lack of free will and the innate sinfulness and imperfectibility of human nature. As an itinerant scholar without any permanent teaching position, Erasmus, as Lisa Jardine has shown (Jardine 1993), made a career out of networking, strategic publication, and friendships with other prominent humanists all over Europe (including John Colet and Thomas More in England). The effectiveness of Erasmus’ self-promotion – as Jardine argues, he even constructed a retrospective career for his own mentor Rodolphus Agricola – does not negate his real and lasting influence on education and on the concept of the publishing public intellectual. Erasmus’ published works range from the translation of the New Testament, the life and letters of St Jerome, the Enchiridion militis christiani (Handbook of a Christian Soldier), Institutio principis christiani (Education of a Christian Prince), as well as educational works such as the Adagia (Adages), Colloquia (Colloquies), De Copia (On Copious Expression), De ratione studii (On the Method of Study, written for John Colet’s new humanist school), and his famous Encomium moriae (The Praise of Folly). Erasmus championed the work of Rodolphus Agricola, who provided a ‘logic’ to form the basis for the Erasmian ideal of copious expression (see Chapter 4, Rhetoric). Agricola’s dialectic offers ways to generate and organise ideas for composition rather than a rigorous method of logical proof. We can sense behind Agricola’s work an underlying anxiety about, first, the difficulty of thinking of things to say, especially in Latin, but also anxiety about an uncontrolled proliferation and profusion of language, especially if it was based on promiscuous reading of pagan authors. Agricola’s logic offers rules and aids for generating commonplace ideas, and also offers a systematic way to classify both the rules and the ideas that they produce. Thus, Agricolan

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dialectic provided the ideal basis for a school curriculum designed to provide matter for invention, as well as ways to keep it under control. English humanism first began to emerge, in tentative and piecemeal ways, in the fifteenth century. It did not really take root until the Tudor monarchy discovered the usefulness of humanist-educated men in meeting two crucial needs: for propaganda to legitimise a rather tenuous claim to the throne, and for educated personnel to staff the centralised bureaucracy forged to strengthen its position in relation to the feudal aristocracy. English humanism was, at least at the beginning, closely linked to Italy, with travel occurring in both directions: English men went to study in Italy, and Italian scholars came to teach and write in England. Roberto Weiss, in his important study of Humanism in England During the Fifteenth Century (Weiss 1957), traces the earliest beginnings of humanist influence in England before the accession of Henry VII in 1485, although he notes that, at first, humanist learning was simply assimilated to existing scholastic methods and only very gradually brought about a transformation of attitudes and approaches to education. When the noted Italian humanist Poggio Bracciolini joined the household of Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester, in 1418, he was disheartened to find that England was, from a humanist’s point of view, a cultural backwater. There was virtually no interest in humanist education, no adequate libraries to be found, nor did English monasteries contain interesting manuscripts. Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, son of King Henry IV, first brought serious enthusiasm for humanism to England. He came to know a number of prominent Italian scholars and began, with their help, to build a library of classical and humanist works, much of which he donated to Oxford University. Although he did not read Greek himself, he commissioned translations of important works from that language into Latin, thus planting the first seeds of interest in Greek learning at Oxford. During the fifteenth century some graduates of Oxford and Cambridge began to undertake postgraduate studies in Italy (rather than, as was formerly common, in France), and as a result came under the influence of humanist teachers like Vittorino da Feltre, and, especially, Guarino da Verona. Returning to England, they were then able to transmit humanist learning to a new generation of English students, who were soon able to gain adequate training in bonae litterae without leaving the country. Henry VII took a greater interest in humanism and humanist scholars than had any previous English monarch. He discovered, as noted above, the value of humanist writers as propagandists for his regime. It was important to shore up the somewhat shaky Tudor claim to the throne by careful retelling of the history of the Wars of the Roses, emphasising the providential accession of Henry in bringing an end to a long period of violence and unrest. The Italian scholar Polydore Vergil, for example, came to England as part of a papal delegation and stayed on to write a history of England, the Anglia historia, which Henry commissioned. Henry also provided a humanist education for his children, hiring John Skelton and Bernard André, among others, to tutor them. Thus, when Henry VIII became king in 1509, humanists, with some justification looked forward to increased patronage and support from someone who

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had himself been educated in humane letters. Thomas More, for instance, greeted the accession of Henry VIII with several Latin epigrams, praising his humanist education: Quid enim non principe fiat ab illo, / Cui cultum ingenuis artibus ingenium est, / Castalio quem fonte novem lavere sorores, / Imbuit et monitis Philosophiae suis? (‘What could lie beyond the powers of a prince whose natural gifts have been enhanced by a liberal education, a prince bathed by the nine sisters in the Castalian fount and steeped in philosophy’s own precepts?’) More offers proleptic praise of Henry for providing jobs for humanists: Ille magistratus et munera publica, vendi / Quae sueuere malis, donat habenda bonis. / Et versis rerum vicibus feliciter, ante / Quae tulit indoctus praemia, doctus habet (‘He now gives to good men the honours and public offices that used to be sold to evil men. By a happy reversal of circumstances, learned men now have the prerogatives which ignoramuses carried off in the past’) (More 1963: III, 106–7). Doctus was the word used by English humanists to describe those who had received a humanist education, while indoctus could designate either those who had been educated according to late medieval scholastic principals or the relatively uneducated feudal aristocracy. More, of course, would be one of the docti or learned men preferred by Henry, and would come to learn that such appointments did not always end feliciter (happily). While the patronage of important figures at court helped encourage interest in humanism, it could not gain a real foothold until curricula at both universities and the schools in England were altered to incorporate humanist approaches. The earliest institutional changes came at Oxford, and especially New College, where, by the second half of the fifteenth century, the teaching of grammar began to follow the newer methods of Lorenzo Valla, and Greek was beginning to be taught as well. William Grocyn (c.1446–1519), one of the so-called ‘Oxford reformers’ studied by Seebohm (1867) and perhaps the first true English humanist, had, according to Weiss, begun to learn Greek before he went to study in Italy around 1488. Grocyn, along with Thomas Linacre (1460–1524; a fellow of All Souls, court physician, and tutor to Prince Arthur) and John Colet (1466–1519) brought the fruits of study in Italy back to England, where they influenced a new generation of humanists, including Thomas More. Humanist learning was further encouraged by the foundation of new colleges expressly dedicated to its principles: St John’s College, founded in Cambridge (where interest in humanism also began to appear) in 1511 and Corpus Christi College, Oxford, founded in 1516. Regius professorships in Greek and Hebrew came into being at both universities in 1542. John Colet was the most important of the early humanists, advocating an influential blend of religious and educational reform. He exercised his influence primarily through his sermons, his friendship with Erasmus, and most especially in founding St Paul’s School, which became the model for humanist grammar schools in England. His lectures on the New Testament, delivered at Oxford in 1496, advocated the application to the Bible of scholarly methods which humanists had applied to establishing and re-editing classical texts, eschewing the medieval practice of elaborate glosses and commentaries for more direct attention to the immediate contexts for, and language and style of, the text itself. Erasmus, who visited England at least six

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times, living there at one point for almost five years (1509–14), heard some of Colet’s lectures on the Pauline letters and was strongly influenced by his ability to combine classical learning with a reformed Christian faith. Colet’s greatest influence probably came through the founding of St Paul’s School in 1510 in London. Colet, Erasmus, and the school’s first headmaster William Lily collaborated in establishing the curriculum of the school and in writing a new Latin grammar (Lily’s Grammar). The Magdalen College School also adopted a humanist curriculum, as, soon, did many other schools throughout England. Northern European (Erasmian) humanism, as exemplified in English grammar schools, took further a technique already present in Italian educational practice. This technique involved teaching students to excerpt aphorisms, commonplaces, and striking sententiae from all classical works read, to collect them in a notebook, and to use them as the raw material for ‘invention’ (in the literal Latin sense of ‘finding’) of their own compositions. In its reaction against medieval scholasticism, Italian humanism had shifted its focus from logic (with its goal of epistemological certainty) to rhetoric (with more modest goals of plausibility and persuasion). Rodolphus Agricola’s humanist ‘dialectic’ offered a method for classifying gathered fragments so that they could be ‘framed’ into original compositions. Erasmus, in his De copia and other works, furthered this method, and Colet’s school codified it as the basis of the humanist grammar-school curriculum in England. This pedagogical method was especially appealing to Christian humanists like Erasmus and Colet because it provided a way to make classical literature more compatible with Christianity. Students were instructed to fly over the fields of classical literature like bees, selecting only the most wholesome and moral flowers from which to collect their nectar of learning. This ‘notebook method’ of collecting and recycling moral fragments also provided a way, at least in theory, to bridge the gap between humanist claims that education made people morally better and the realities of grammatical education. Latin was taught in the late Middle Ages in England through a method that emphasised the memorisation of rules (found in the grammar) and of examples of the rules (found in a Vulgaria). These examples were coined by the writer of the text and consisted of useful phrases for daily life (since students were usually required to speak Latin at certain parts of the day). Lily, on the other hand, deemphasised, to some extent, the memorisation of rules (though this was still a large part of learning Latin), stressing instead the assimilation of exemplary sentences taken from classical authors (found in a new Vulgaria written by William Horman). Horman’s examples tend to be moralising sententiae, and they reflect humanist ideals of hard work, diligence, and sober moral probity. The ‘Grammarians’ War’ of 1520, over the attempt to replace Richard Whittington’s traditional Vulgaria with Horman’s new one as an accompaniment to Lily’s Grammar, marked an important victory for the humanist curriculum at the grammar-school level. Lily’s Grammar was officially recognised as the standard textbook in 1542. As a humanist education gained ascendancy over older scholastic methods and was established as a valid credential for preferment at court, many writers began to

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contrast humanist education in bonae litterae, with its emphasis on such modest virtues as prudence and using time wisely, with an aristocratic training in fencing, dancing, hunting, and other pastimes designed to reveal the aristocrat’s graceful indulgence in the leisure that was his right. Before long, virtually all grammar schools in England used some version of St Paul’s curriculum, and private tutors (to Edward VI and Elizabeth) used it too. Humanist education manifested itself through a copious style (in Latin, or, increasingly, English) larded with moralising quotations from classical authors. Writing in this manner became a way to reveal possession of the ‘cultural capital’ (to use Pierre Bourdieu’s phrase) afforded by a humanist education, as aristocrats revealed their own ‘capital’ by dancing, fencing, hunting, hawking, and other such pursuits. It succeeded in part because it also created an alternative stance for upwardly mobile seekers of position at court. As Tudor monarchs, beginning with Henry VII, and especially Henry VIII, sought to protect their position by reducing the power (and numbers) of the powerful aristocratic families, ‘new men’ were needed to fill positions at court that nobles had previously filled. Although some scholars have argued that the Protestant Reformation, with its more pessimistic view of human nature and distrust of secular art, effectively ended humanism in England, others have suggested that there were significant continuities between the religious humanism of Colet, Erasmus, and More and later English Protestants. Certainly Henry’s break with the Roman church in the 1530s intensified the ascendancy of humanist-educated men at court, since it necessarily removed some previously influential clergy from power (and also provided lands formerly owned by the church to establish new men as landed gentry). Humanist education appeared at just the right time to provide an alternative set of credentials for preferment: rigorous rhetorical training and discipline in hard work, organisation, and diligence. Men trained in this way provided ideal bureaucrats, and many were preferred by Henry VIII and by his advisers More, Thomas Wolsey, and Thomas Cromwell. However, the idealistic rhetoric of educational theory, which argued that humanist education produced virtuous citizens who could improve society by advising the prince, yielded to reality: the need to ingratiate, to compromise, and to sway with the prevailing winds. Sir Thomas More was, perhaps, the most prominent humanist at the court of Henry VIII, although some have questioned whether he is to be considered a humanist in the purest sense of the term, since his strongly Catholic religious faith eventually led away from his position as adviser to Henry VIII towards martyrdom and sainthood, and from writing elegant humanist works to vehement religious polemic. His education was mixed, involving a strong humanist influence, but he also followed the aristocratic custom of spending time serving at table in the home of an important and wealthy figure, Cardinal John Morton. In addition, More was strongly attracted to Catholic ideals of a cloistered and celibate life, spending time at Charterhouse in London, and he seriously considered entering the order of Franciscan friars. Deciding instead on marriage and public life, he practised law and entered into friendships with Erasmus and his circle of continental humanists.

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More’s most important published works were his The History of King Richard III (with versions in both Latin and English) and Utopia. His study of Richard III follows the trend of Tudor historiography in depicting Richard (whose defeat by Henry VII marked the beginning of the Tudor regime) as a figure of monstrous evil. More follows English humanist principles not only in the strongly moralistic tenor of the work – which represents and criticises the evils of tyranny and pride – but also in its strong narrative sense. However, More’s brand of humanist historical writing differs greatly from that of an Italian humanist historian such as Machiavelli, who emphasised the realities of political life rather than its relation to moral ideals. More’s Utopia, written in Latin and published in 1516, continues to be a very controversial work. Critics have been unable to agree on such basic questions as whether Utopia, as More describes it, is intended to be a truly ideal society or an example of the opposite of an ideal (a dystopia). If it is meant to be a true utopia, critics have wondered why the Utopians are not Christian, and why the narrator, Hytholodaeus (whose name means ‘speaker of nonsense’) is such a questionable figure. On the other hand, if it is dystopic, why does it advocate so many reforms dear to both Erasmus and More? Critics have also questioned the relationship between the so-called dialogue of counsel in Book 1 and the description of Utopia in Book 2. Hytholodaeus’ praise of Utopian communism has also been much questioned and discussed. It seems clear that the answers to these questions lie both in More’s deeply humanist nature and also in those aspects of his character and background that led him to depart from humanism in important ways. Utopia’s dialogue form and playful use of rhetoric are important, and deeply humanist, features. In accordance with the humanist practice of argument in utramque partem, the work does not advocate a single view but explores multiple possibilities. It is thus not intended to be read as a straightforward political treatise, but, like Erasmus’s Praise of Folly, is inflected with multiple ironies. On the other hand, those ironies both reflect and question, humanist beliefs. Stephen Greenblatt’s influential reading of the work has emphasised the way in which it reveals More’s belief in humanist programmes of public service and reform, but also his equally strong distrust of human nature and the imperfections that make successful reform virtually impossible in the real world. The first book joins with the elaborate prefatory matter to place the work clearly in relation to Erasmus’ humanist circle. The ‘dialogue,’ in which a character named More urges a reluctant Raphael Hythlodaeus to serve as an adviser to some prince so that his humanist learning will lead to reform, offers both a humanist critique of contemporary social ills and a critique of humanist optimism that educated men can find a way to solve them. The description of Utopia in Book 2 presents a society that is superior in many ways to contemporary European states (offering freedom from poverty and avoidance of war), but ultimately buying those benefits at the cost of a system of constant surveillance and public shame. Written when More was considering whether to accept a position at the court of Henry VIII, Utopia directly confronts the gap between humanist hopes and ideals and the realities of human nature, especially when it is in close proximity to absolute

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power. Although the character ‘Morus’ argues that some good can be done by a humanist adviser who is able to compromise and bend with prevailing winds, More, who rose to the position of Lord Chancellor, found himself unable to accept Henry’s divorce, marriage to Anne Boleyn, and break with Rome. He was executed for treason on 6 July 1535. Thomas More is not the only sixteenth-century Englishman whose credentials as a humanist can be questioned, for along with arguments over how to define humanism are arguments over who in early Tudor England is to be considered a humanist. Scholars generally agree that Sir Thomas Elyot, Roger Ascham, and Sir John Cheke can be placed in the humanist camp. Elyot was about ten years younger than More and wrote in English rather than Latin, as later generations of English humanists were increasingly to do. He was the author of The Book Named the Governor, published in 1531, which offered an account in the vernacular of a humanist educational programme for prospective ‘governors’ or public officials, similar to Erasmus’ Institutio principis christiani. Elyot’s writing also transfers from Latin to English the humanist ‘copious’ style of writing interspersed with frequent citation of fragments from classical authors. Although Elyot did not have a successful political career, he was important as a populariser of the humanist educational programme. Sir John Cheke and Roger Ascham were both products of St John’s, Cambridge, and both were tutors to the children of Henry VIII. Cheke (along with Richard Cox) was tutor to Edward VI, and supervised Edward in a curriculum involving such rigorous (and tedious) instruction in Latin and Greek, both reading and composition, that scholars have wondered whether it contributed to his early death. Some of the boy king’s compositions survive, preserving his dutiful application of humanist methods to such topics as Amor maior causa obedientiae timor (‘love is a greater source of obedience than fear’). Accounts of Edward’s rigorous education can be found (Baldwin 1944; Grafton and Jardine 1986). Roger Ascham, in turn, supervised the education of the future Elizabeth I, and his programme of ‘double translation’ from Latin into English, and English back into Latin, is set forth in an influential educational treatise, The Schoolmaster (1570). Other figures from the courts of Henry VII and VIII are more tenuously connected with mainstream humanism. John Skelton served as tutor to Henry VIII and produced some typically humanist works, writing poems in Latin and translating classical works into English. However, his English poems, for which he is mostly known today, imitate native medieval rather than classical models. More tellingly, in the so-called ‘Grammarians’ War’, Skelton sided with the anti-humanist faction and expressed these sentiments in his poem ‘Speke Parrott’. The poet Thomas Wyatt presents a similarly mixed allegiance, translating both classical and Italian humanist authors, yet his translations of Petrarch and other lyric poems are steeped in the aristocratic milieu of Henry’s court. Many of Wyatt’s poems express the speaker’s anxious engagement with aristocratic and humanist systems that seem equally attractive but finally incompatible.

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Humanists also wrote in genres other than lyric poetry during the Henrician period. William West (2002) has traced a humanist tradition linking encyclopaedic writing and theatre, leading to humanist interludes such as John Rastell’s Nature of the Four Elements or John Heywood’s The Play of the Weather. Once humanist education became widespread, and once it offered a widely accepted source of cultural capital for preferment at court and in other areas, most prominent figures were influenced by it in some way, even when they were opposing some aspect of it. Whether or not humanist ideas about political reform had much practical effect, by the end of the sixteenth century almost every educated man in England was shaped to some extent by humanist practices, if not principles. Thus, rather than attempting to decide whether Skelton, Wyatt, Christopher St German, Reginald Pole, or Thomas Lupset are true humanists in the Erasmian mould, it might be more fruitful to trace the place of humanism in the complex mix of religious, educational, and political ideologies that shaped them. Readers may have noticed that all of the humanists discussed in this essay so far have been men. The question whether humanism was beneficial to women in the early modern period has been much debated. Joan Kelly famously argued (Kelly 1976) that women did not really experience a ‘renaissance’ in the early modern period because they had more social and economic freedom under the social structures that predominated in the late Middle Ages. Whether or not humanist educational reforms were a positive force for women is a slightly different question. Certainly, only a very few women were able to benefit from this new kind of education; the newly founded schools and universities were not open to women, so only those whose families could provide private tutors were exposed to the new learning. With a very few exceptions, women were educated with the expectation that they would used their learning in an exclusively private sphere – to train and influence their children, to serve as companions and aides to their husbands, to read the Scriptures and engage in devotional writing. Careers of public service or teaching were completely unavailable to women who were not queen of England. Nevertheless, there were women in this period who received a humanist training and became famous for their learning. Thomas More made his household into a school of sorts, where his daughters were educated in Latin along with his son. More’s eldest daughter Margaret was especially known for her learning, and Jaime Goodrich has traced the central role of Margaret’s translations in publicly promulgating her father’s ideas (Goodrich 2008). However, More’s serious attention to his daughters’ education coexisted with his belief in the intellectual inferiority of women and an assumption that they could have no role in public life. The daughters of Sir Anthony Cooke, Margaret, Elizabeth, Katharine, Anne, and Mildred, were also afforded a humanist education and, although they were also barred from public life, two of them in particular came to exercise considerable influence through their marriages to influential men and in the course of their efforts on behalf of their son’s careers. Mildred Cooke married William Cecil, later Lord Burghley, and was the mother of Robert Cecil; Anne married Nicholas Bacon, who reportedly owed

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some of his success at court to her position and connections. She later worked tirelessly to advance the careers of her sons Anthony and Francis. Only women who were in the possible line of succession to the throne were educated with the goal of developing the eloquence and prudence necessary for successful public leadership. Lady Jane Grey, who was executed in 1554 because of Protestant support for her claim to the throne, was praised by Ascham as a model student. Elizabeth I was also taught by Ascham and received a full humanist education with the idea that it might lead to public service. Although she is mostly known for her assumption of roles such as that of the Petrarchan mistress, Gloriana, or Astraea, she also did sometimes lay claim to the authority of her humanist education, as when she delivered addresses in Latin, continued to translate classical works throughout her life, or assumed a stance of moral authority in her speeches (Sharpe 2000). Although Elizabeth is also perhaps most commonly associated with aristocratic courtly favourites such as Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, and Robert Devereux, earl of Essex, she relied on men with a humanist training such as William Cecil and Sir Nicholas Bacon for advice throughout her reign. Although self-conscious devotion to the humanist programme of educational, religious, and social reform did not survive the generation of More and Erasmus in its purest form (if, indeed, it ever existed in a pure form), its influence extended through the reign of Elizabeth and beyond. An education based on the study of classical literature remained an important credential for a public service career in England well into the twentieth century. More importantly, the rhetorical training and the habits of recycling bits of commonplace wisdom from classical authors instilled by humanist education mark the writing of British authors from Shakespeare through Milton and into the eighteenth century. Sir Philip Sidney, educated at the Shrewsbury School and Christ Church, Oxford; Edmund Spenser, of the Merchant Taylors’ School, and ‘Sizar’ or poor scholar at Pembroke Hall, Cambridge; Christopher Marlowe, a ‘poor boy’ at King’s School at Canterbury and holder of a scholarship at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, all represent examples of the widespread influence of humanism throughout England and across class lines. All three, in different ways, produced literary works shaped by humanism. Shakespeare, indeed, may have learned ‘smalle Latine & lesse Greeke’ in the grammar school at Stratford, but his writings are strongly marked by the rhetorical methods that would have been taught there. There is no question that humanist education, however limited its direct effect on political reform, had a crucial formative influence on English literature, in the early Tudor period and for many years to come.

References and Further Reading Baldwin, Thomas Whitfield (1944). William Shakespeare’s Small Latine & Lesse Greeke, 2 vols. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Bourdieu, Pierre (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Bush, Douglas (1939). The Renaissance and English Humanism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bushnell, Rebecca (1996). A Culture of Teaching: Early Modern Humanism in Theory and Practice. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Carlson, David (1993). English Humanist Books: Writers and Patrons, Manuscript and Print, 1475– 1525. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Caspari, Fritz (1954). Humanism and the Social Order in Tudor England. New York: Columbia University Press. Crane, Mary Thomas (1993). Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Eisenstein, Elizabeth (1979). The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ferguson, Arthur B. (1965). The Articulate Citizen and the English Renaissance. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ferguson, Wallace K. (1948). The Renaissance in Historical Thought: Five Centuries of Interpretation. Cambridge, MA: Riverside. Fox, Alistair and John Guy (1986). Reassessing the Henrician Age: Humanism, Politics, and Reform, 1500–1550. Oxford: Blackwell. Goodman, Anthony and Angus MacKay (eds.) (1990). The Impact of Humanism on Western Europe. London: Longman. Goodrich, Jaime (2008). ‘Thomas More and Margaret More Roper: a case for rethinking women’s participation in the early modern public sphere’. Sixteenth Century Journal, 39/4 (Winter), 1021–40. Grafton, Anthony and Lisa Jardine (1986). From Humanism to the Humanities: Education and the Liberal Arts in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Halpern, Richard (1991). The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation: English Renaissance Capital and the Genealogy of Culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Jardine, Lisa (1993). Erasmus, Man of Letters: The Construction of Charisma in Print. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Javitch, Daniel (1978). Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Jordan, Constance (1986). ‘Feminism and the humanists: the case for Sir Thomas Elyot’s

Defense of Good Women’. In Margaret W. Ferguson, Maureen Quilligan, and Nancy J. Vickers (eds.), Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourse of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe (pp. 242–58). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Kahn, Victoria (1985). Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kelly, Joan (1976). ‘Did women have a Renaissance?’ In Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz (eds.), Becoming Visible: Women in European History (pp. 139–64). Boston: Houghton Mifflin. McConica, James (1965). English Humanists and Reformation Politics under Henry VIII and Edward VI. Oxford: Oxford University Press. More, Thomas (1963). The Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St Thomas More, 21 vols. Yale University Press: New Haven. Ong, Walter (1958). Ramus, Rhetoric, and the Decay of Dialogue. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pocock, J. G. A. (1975). The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought at the Atlantic Republican Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rabil, Albert (ed.) (1988). Renaissance Humanism: Foundations, Forms and Legacy, vol. 2: Humanism Beyond Italy. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Seebohm, Frederic (1867). The Oxford Reformers of 1498: Being a History of the Fellow-Work of John Colet, Erasmus, and Thomas More. London: Longman, Green. Sharpe, Kevin (2000). ‘The king’s writ: royal authors and royal authority in early modern England’. In Kevin Sharpe, Remapping Modern England (pp. 127–50). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stewart, Alan (1997). Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Turner, Henry (2006) The English Renaissance Stage: Drama, Poetics, and the Practical, Spatial Arts 1580–1630. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wakelin, Daniel (2007). Humanism, Reading, and English Literature, 1430–1530. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Walker, Greg (2007). Writing under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Early Tudor Humanism Weiss, Roberto (1957). Humanism in England During the Fifteenth Century. Oxford: Blackwell. Wells, Robin Headlam (2005). Shakespeare’s Humanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. West, William (2002). Theatres and Encyclopedias in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Wolfe, Jessica (2004). Humanism, Machinery, and Renaissance Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wynne-Davies, Marion (2007). Women Writers and Familial Discourse in the English Renaissance : Relative Values. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Platonism, Stoicism, Scepticism, and Classical Imitation Sarah Hutton

The Renaissance owes its name to the so-called ‘revival of letters’, the new valuation of classical culture, which originated with humanist scholars of the fifteenth century and developed into the programme of recovery and rediscovery of the textual sources of Latin and Greek culture that has come to be known as the humanist movement. Although ‘humanism’ originally entailed proficiency in those languages, the secular emphasis of the discipline, its central concern with literary, linguistic, and historical issues, ensured that humanism had enormous impact on vernacular cultures across Europe. Scholarly focus on humanist rhetoric has obscured its important impact on philosophy, where the refreshed discovery of classical texts resulted in a wider knowledge of ancient philosophy than ever before in post-classical times: in particular, the expanded knowledge of the corpus of Platonic and Stoic writings and the new access to the sources of scepticism significantly widened philosophical horizons still dominated by Aristotelianism (Copenhaver and Schmitt 1992; Kraye 1996). In the longer term, the philosophical pluralism which to which these writings contributed resulted in the displacement of Aristotelianism as the backbone of European philosophy. The impact of the recovered corpus of ancient philosophy was not confined to professional philosophy but extended well beyond into all aspects of vernacular literary culture. Humanism played a key part in this process. First of all, humanism made these new aspects of philosophy available to a wider audience than the professional philosophy of the ‘schools’ (i.e. the medieval scholastic philosophers and theologians), with the result that part of the lasting contribution of humanism to philosophy was the development of secular philosophy. This shift from technical to lay philosophy exposed humanists to the jibe that they were ignorant of philosophy. An inevitable, longer-term, consequence of the process of laicisation, which they initiated, was the assimilation of classical thought as the stock-in-trade of Renaissance secular culture. These developments are as true of the English Renaissance as of the rest of Europe – the main difference being that England was, if anything, a latecomer to the cultural developments that define the Renaissance as a period.

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When singling out individual philosophies for discussion, we should bear in mind that they were received and studied in a pluralistic setting. For this, the Renaissance had both classical precedent and humanist example. Among the most important sources for ancient philosophy were the writings of Cicero, the Roman author most admired by Petrarch and other humanists. In the Renaissance, Cicero was admired not just as a master of eloquence, but also as a philosopher in his own right. Just as Cicero had mediated Greek philosophy to the Romans, so also his writings were of incalculable importance as a conduit of ancient philosophy to the Renaissance. Cicero was not a mere doxographer, or mere retailer of the ideas of others, but his writings record the interaction of philosophical positions with one another, including his own. In philosophy he may be described as an eclectic, since he drew on the Stoics, Plato, and Aristotle. Furthermore, he was an example of a philosophical amateur, not a professional. An eminent lawyer and man of public affairs, his was a philosophy for the active life, not a life of meditation. The appeal of his philosophy to the thinking layman was increased by its generic accessibility in the dialogue or private letter. In his introductory letter to his edition of Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations, Erasmus recommends Cicero for his moral philosophy, and for making philosophy relevant to everyday life, by adopting a style ‘that even an uneducated audience could applaud’ (letter to John Vlatten, in Martindale 1985: 127). Although Platonism, Stoicism, and scepticism were recognised by the humanists as distinct branches of philosophy, they were not treated as self-contained, mutually exclusive philosophical alternatives, as they are today. Accommodation is the hallmark of their assimilation into Renaissance culture. As with other areas of the Renaissance classical revival, the newcomers to the philosophical corpus were adopted and adapted to the needs and expectations of a different culture. To make an obvious point, part of the appeal of Stoicism and Platonism to the Renaissance was the moral emphasis of these philosophies, which struck a chord with humanism’s own preference for moral philosophy. Plato’s concern with the nature of true eloquence likewise echoed humanist interest in rhetoric. One of the most significant ways in which the receiving culture of the Renaissance transformed the classical past was its accommodation of pagan philosophy to the requirements of Christianity: the most striking example of reinvention of this kind is the transformation of Plato into a proto-Christian sage, the divine Plato, the seer of the soul most famously celebrated in Milton’s ‘Il Penseroso’. By seeking an accommodation between philosophy and faith, humanist thinkers were continuing an established tradition: Seneca, for example, had been revered as the acceptable face of Stoicism in the Middle Ages, on account of his piety, sobriety, and moral fortitude. The Renaissance interpretation of Seneca continued in this vein, following the lead given by Petrarch’s immensely popular De remediis utriusque fortunae. Even Francis Bacon acknowledged that Seneca ‘seemeth … to have some approach to the state of a Christian’ (Essays: ‘Of Adversity’). What was new was the expanded vista on Stoic thought, which made it less easy to ignore those aspects of Stoicism that did not fit this proto-Christian model. Scepticism had long been known through the writings of Cicero, but the recovery of Pyrrhonism through the writings of the

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rediscovered Sextus Empiricus opened the way for new applications for scepticism as a weapon against dogmatism in the religious crises of the Reformation. The recovery and dissemination of classical philosophy would not, of course, have been possible without the humanist linguistic skills that gave access to original sources. Most obviously, humanist knowledge of Greek made possible the rediscovery of Plato, early Stoicism, and Greek scepticism. Furthermore, humanist educational programmes ensured that readers had the linguistic skills to read both Latin and Greek philosophy. Moreover, humanist translations brought classical texts a wide public. In the case of classical philosophy, vernacular translation was less significant than translation into Latin, but this did not mean that philosophy was accessible only to the university elite. As the lingua franca of Europe in this period, Latin was the language of educated lay readers, as well as clerics, even if, at its most basic, a grammar-school education equipped Elizabethans with only ‘smale Latine and lesse Greeke’ (Baldwin 1944). The evidence of Elizabethan library collections is that bilingualism in Latin and the vernacular was fairly standard. Latin texts were therefore relatively accessible: Cicero and Seneca, for example, were normally read in Latin. There were a number of Latin editions of their works printed in England in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Since Greek was less widely known, Latin translations of Greek texts were the key to their dissemination across Europe. Ficino’s Latin translation of Plato is perhaps the best example of this. Far from being an indicator of narrow readership, the fact of a text’s being printed in Latin gave it a wide audience Among the key texts of Renaissance intellectual culture, the popularity of More’s Utopia (1516) owes much to the language in which it was written, namely Latin. And Baldassare Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano was more widely read in England in Bartholomew Clerke’s Latin translation De curiali (1571) than in Sir Thomas Hoby’s English The Courtier (1561). The use of Latin as medium of intellectual discussion means that translation into the vernacular (e.g. English) is not the best indicator of diffusion. But to recognise this is not to belittle the importance of vernacular translation. Rather, it is to put it in perspective. The overall trend of the period was towards the full development of the vernacular as the chief medium of written expression. Latin permitted an international readership, though, in a national context, vernacular writing reached a wider social spectrum than Latin. Promotion of the vernacular was a dimension of the humanist enterprise. One of the best known English translations of classical texts – North’s translation of Plutarch – was actually made from another vernacular translation – Jean Amyot’s French translation of Plutarch, La vie des homes illustres Grecs et Romans. The first printed English translation of Epictetus’ Enchiridion, John Stanford’s The Manual of Epictetus (1567), was translated from French, not Greek. Part of the appeal to the humanists of classical philosophy outside the Aristotelian tradition was its philosophical style and the diversity of genres used for philosophising. Erasmus admired Plato as the ‘most eloquent of philosophers’ and Plutarch for combining learning with eloquence. For Petrarch, Cicero was unrivalled for his eloquence. In contrast to Cicero, the brevity of Seneca’s written style was part of his appeal, though it did not become fashionable until the late sixteenth century. The

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philosophers commended by Sidney in his Apology for Poetry are those who employed ‘poetical helps’ to express their thoughts, namely Plato and Cicero. As Francis Bacon notes, the ability to communicate is an asset in a philosopher, and he commends the Stoics and Plato in this regard: ‘it is a thing not hastily to be condemned, to clothe and adorn the obscurity even of philosophy itself with sensible and plausible elocution. For hereof we have great examples in Xenophon, Cicero, Seneca, Plutarch, and of Plato also in some degree’ (Advancement of Learning, 1.4.4). Indeed, according to Thomas Elyot, the philosophers who most aptly exemplified Horace’s judgement that the best writing combines instruction with pleasure were Plato and Cicero: ‘what incomparable sweetness of words and matter shall he [the student] find in the said works of Plato and Cicero; wherein is joined gravity with delectation, excellent wisdom with divine eloquence, absolute virtue with pleasure incredible’ (Elyot, The Governor 1.12, in Smith 1967). The genres preferred by the Stoics, Platonists, sceptics, and their spokesmen contrasted with the formal treatises in which medieval philosophers had expounded their theories. Cicero, Plato, Seneca, and Plutarch made use of the dialogue, the personal letter, and the essay as the preferred media of intellectual discussion, and they were widely imitated by humanists themselves. The choice of such genres was undoubtedly a recommendation to lay readers. For example, Plutarch’s collection of ethical reflections known as the Moralia, printed in Greek in 1509, and translated into English by Philemon Holland in 1603, was not just a conduit of Stoic and Platonic moral philosophy, but helped to popularise the loose philosophical essay as a form for private philosophical reflection which was imitated by, among others, Montaigne and, after him, Bacon. Humanist aesthetics and literary theory actively encouraged the practice of using classical models. This was enshrined in the doctrine of ‘imitation’, which consisted not of slavish copying, but the emulation of classical models (see Chapter 4, Rhetoric). As a teaching technique for inculcating classical standards in the writing of Latin and Greek, imitation entailed following the style of recommended authors. Ben Jonson was echoing classical precedent and humanist opinion when, in his Discoveries, he defined imitation as a kind of creative adaptation, and cautions against mere servile reproduction. To imitate, he writes, is to be able to convert the substance or riches of another poet to his own use. To make choice of one excellent man above the rest and so to follow him as the copy may be mistaken for the principal. Not, as a creature that swallows, what it takes in, crude, raw or undigested, but, that feeds with an appetite and hath a stomach to concoct, divide and turn all unto nourishment. (Discoveries: ‘Of Imitation’)

Erasmus’ satire Ciceronianus (1528) was famously directed against imitation of the first type – the self-conscious reproduction of Ciceronian Latin. As exemplified by Erasmus’ De copia, imitation was a method for acquiring a richer, more expressive written style, by a process of selection and recombination of examples drawn from a variety of clas-

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sical sources. It was a method which encouraged eclecticism, in philosophy no less than in other fields: in The Schoolmaster (1570) Roger Ascham cites as a commendable example of imitation his friend Sturm’s recommendation that ‘examples out of Plato and other good authors’ should be used to illustrate the precepts of Aristotle (Schoolmaster, 1.21, cit. Smith 1967). Perhaps the most striking English example of such eclecticism in practice is Robert Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), where ancient philosophy is treated as a repository of sententiae and the discussion of melancholy takes the form of a patchwork of quotations. The object of classical imitation, according to Renaissance theory, was not mere faithful reproduction of the original, but the transformation of the models imitated to present use. A prime example of such imitation resulting in creative adaptation is More’s Utopia: the book owes much to his reading of Plato’s Republic and the satires of Lucian. The result is neither Platonist nor Lucianic, but an entirely new genre, one that raises serious political issues in a light-hearted way. The book was, furthermore, directed at a non-academic audience, and its success in reaching that audience may be explained in terms of the way it is written. And indeed, the extra-mural diffusion of classical philosophy in vernacular culture that was initiated by the humanists owed much to mediation in non-philosophical formats. Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano, for example, functioned as a compendium of Platonic wisdom. Another source of philosophical doctrine were discursive works like Du Plessis Mornay’s De la vérité de la religion chrestienne (translated by Sir Philip Sidney and Arthur Golding as A Work Concerning the Trueness of the Christian Religion, 1587) or compendia like La Primaudaye’s L’Academie Françoise (translated into English by Thomas Barnes in 1586). Drama contributed to popular familiarity with Stoicism through the plays of Seneca, which enjoyed wide popularity in the Elizabethan period.

Platonism In the Middle Ages, Plato’s philosophy had been known in imperfect translation, via only a handful of dialogues. Knowledge of the works of other Platonists was partial. The works of Plotinus were unknown. In the fifteenth century one man changed all that: the Florentine, Marsilio Ficino (1433–99). Ficino’s Latin translation of the thirty-six extant dialogues of Plato (commissioned by Cosimo de’ Medici and published in 1484) ensured that the philosophy of Plato was more widely known in the Renaissance than at any time since classical antiquity. Ficino also translated other important thinkers in the Platonic tradition, the most important of whom was Plotinus, whose Enneads Ficino translated and published in 1492. As part of the same programme of translation, Ficino also translated the writings of Hermes Trismegistus, the supposed Greek sage whose writings were believed to be a key interface between pagan philosophy and biblical religion. Ficino’s legacy was not just access to hitherto ‘lost’ philosophical works, but an interpretative approach to reading them. He regarded the Platonic tradition as a continuous one, and interpreted Plato through his later

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followers, notably Plotinus. He also presented Plato’s dialogues as a unified system of philosophy. In recommending Platonism to his Renaissance readers, he stressed compatibilities between Platonism and Christianity, as well as parallels between Platonism and other philosophy in the European tradition. For Ficino, Plato stood as first among philosophical equals, with special insight into religious truth. One of Ficino’s most enduring contributions to Renaissance literature was his virtual invention of the concept of ‘Platonic love’ in his commentary on Plato’s Symposium. By reinterpreting the implicit pederasty of Plato’s dialogue as amatory idealism, Ficino obliterated the unacceptable face of Greek social practices, opening the way to the creative adaptations of Platonic love popularised by dialoghi de’ amore, and central to the vocabulary of subjectivity in Renaissance love poetry. Ficino’s translation of Plato retained its currency well into the eighteenth century. Aldus Manutius published the first Greek edition of Plato’s dialogues in 1513. In 1578 the Huguenots Henri Estienne and Jean de Serres dedicated their edition of Plato to Queen Elizabeth I. However, none of Plato’s dialogues was translated into English, though there was an English translation of the pseudo-Platonic dialogue Axiochus (London, 1592). Moreover, the only dialogue to be printed in Greek in England was the Menexenus (Cambridge, 1587). This was in striking contrast to contemporary France, where there were numerous editions and translations. Indirect knowledge of Platonism in Tudor England was, of course, available through Latin sources, such as Cicero, and popular manuals of contemporary culture, such as Castiglione’s The Courtier. An interest in Platonism was nevertheless fostered in England in a number of ways. Early on, in the mid-fifteenth century, Leonardo Bruni and Pier Candido Decembrio dedicated their translations of Plato to Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, benefactor of the present Bodleian Library. By the early sixteenth century, interest in Platonism is evident at Tudor universities. The new colleges founded along humanistic lines, notably Corpus Christi College Oxford and St John’s College Cambridge, acquired Plato’s works. Indeed, Cardinal Wolsey’s unachieved plans to found Cardinal College at Oxford included the making of transcriptions of all of Cardinal Bessarion’s Greek manuscripts. Visiting humanists such as Erasmus and Juan Luis Vives helped to promote the study of Plato. Indeed, Erasmus’ own Christian humanist Platonism owed much to his English friend, the humanist John Colet, who had in his turn corresponded with Ficino. Tudor humanists such as John Cheke, Nicholas Carr, Roger Ascham, and John Aylmer were among the first to encourage the study of Plato. Aylmer’s pupils included Jane Grey, who studied Plato’s Phaedo. Ascham’s reading of the Phaedrus is evident in his Toxophilos. Elyot’s The Boke Named the Governour (1531) is in many ways a reflection on Plato’s Republic, and More’s translation of the life of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola (1510) is testimony of his interest in the Platonist humanists of Italy. The influence of Platonism on English literature was pervasive, but diffuse. There are many writers, among them Shakespeare, where Platonism is a presence, even though it is difficult to pinpoint specific sources and doctrines. In most cases literary

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Platonism is mediated by other literary sources in Italian and French literature: notably Petrarch, Tasso, Du Bellay, and the poets of the Pléiade. A central theme of the literary Platonism of the Renaissance was the idealisation of secular love through the doctrine of spiritual beauty and what has come to be called Platonic love. Subsumed within Petrarchism, Platonic love was celebrated in lyric poetry, especially in sonnet sequences like Spenser’s Amoretti and Drayton’s Idea, and given more critical treatment in Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella. It was also incorporated into pastoral romance made popular by Honoré d’Urfé’s Astrée. Underlying these literary manifestations of Platonism was courtly Platonism of the kind expounded in Castiglione’s The Courtier. When Sidney opens Sonnet 71 of Astrophil and Stella with the question ‘Who will in fairest book of nature know / How virtue may best lodged in beauty be’, and answers it by declaring Stella to be the outward manifestation of inward beauty, he is enunciating Platonic doctrine as expounded by Bembo in the fourth book of Castiglione’s Courtier. There Bembo declares ‘outward beauty’ to be ‘a true sign of the inward goodness, and in bodies this comeliness is imprinted more and less, as it were, for a mark of the soul, whereby she is outwardly known’ (The Courtier, trans. Hoby, book 4). The writer whose Platonism is best documented and most complex is Edmund Spenser, who drew on wide variety of sources including Macrobius, Boethius, Alain de Lille, and Dionysius the Areopagite as well as Ficino’s De Amore (especially important for his Fowre Hymnes). One writer who turned directly to Plato’s text was Ben Jonson, who owned Jean de Serres’ translation and probably drew directly on Ficino in his treatment of Platonic love in his masques The Masque of Beauty (1608) and Love’s Triumph through Callipolis (1630), and in his play The New Inn (1629). By the end of the sixteenth century we have the first examples of indigenous English Platonic thought in the work of Everard Digby (c.1550–92) and Thomas Jackson (1579–1640). Both exhibit the syncretic tendencies of Ficinian Platonism. Digby’s Theoria analytica ad monarchiam scientiarum demonstrans (1579) was the first serious philosophical work to be published in post-Reformation England. Digby attempts an accommodation between Platonism and Aristotelianism by combining Aristotelian syllogistics with Platonic dialectic. This is subsumed within a Platonist system of metaphysics according to which all things, including the human mind, derive from the divine ideas in the mind of God. Jackson’s Platonism, too, was syncretic, but more overtly theological in its application. A younger contemporary of Richard Hooker, at Corpus Christi College, Jackson wrote twelve books of commentaries on the Apostles’ Creed, published singly from 1613. Like Ficino, he treats Platonism as an ancient theological Platonism. In this respect he anticipates the socalled Cambridge Platonists who flourished at University of Cambridge in the midseventeenth century (Patrides 1980). Although not a close-knit school of thinkers, Cambridge Platonism is the most important example of Platonist philosophy produced in the English language. Philosophically, the most prominent members of this group were Henry More (1614–87) and Ralph Cudworth (1617–88). Other members of the group were Benjamin Whichcote (1609–83), Nathaniel Culverwell (1619–33), John Smith (1618–52), and Peter

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Sterry (1613–33). They all studied at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, except for Henry More, who studied at Christ’s College, where he was a younger contemporary of Milton. They were exponents of a syncretic, Christianised Platonism, reminiscent of, but distinct from, the Florentine Platonism. But they were also receptive to other currents of thought, both ancient (e.g. Stoicism) and contemporary (e.g. Cartesianism). With the exception of More and Cudworth, most of their writings were published posthumously: Smith’s Select Discourses in 1659, and Sterry’s Discourse of the Freedom of the Will in 1675, Culverwell’s An Elegant and Learned Discourse of the Light of Nature in 1652, and Whichcote’s Moral and Religious Aphorisms in 1703. They were masters of poetic prose, who, while valuing reason, acknowledged the communicative power of metaphor. In this they followed the example of Plato, who used allegory to convey metaphysical truth. Like Ficino, they believed Plato to have had special insight into matters divine. Their Christian Platonism has literary analogues in the poetry of Thomas Traherne, Thomas Vaughan, and Andrew Marvell. The only poet of their number, Henry More, was an admirer of Spenser, whose stanzaic pattern he adopted for Psychodia platonica (1642) and other allegorical poems on the soul.

Scepticism The form of scepticism best known in the early Renaissance was the academic scepticism of Cicero, which denies that it is possible to know anything with absolute certainty. All knowledge-claims, therefore, being at best provisional, this form of scepticism is also known as mitigated scepticism. The name, ‘academic’ derives from its origins in the Platonic Academy of the third century BC, where scepticism was taught by Arcesilas and Carneades. Since Greek sources were unknown in the Middle Ages, Cicero was the main source for academic scepticism in medieval times, and, following Petrarch’s commendation, remained an important source throughout the Renaissance. Knowledge of Ciceronian scepticism was enlarged first by Petrarch’s commendation of Cicero’s Academica, the first printed edition of which appeared in 1548, edited by Omer Talon and his friend Pierre de la Ramée (Ramus). This manifested a fuller knowledge of Cicero’s Greek sources, acquired from doxographies such as Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Philosophers and the writings of Sextus Empiricus. Of even greater impact than these additions to the corpus of academic scepticism was the recovery of the second school of Greek scepticism, Pyrrhonism, obtained from Diogenes Laertius’ Life of Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus’ Outlines of Pyrrhonism. Pyrrhonian scepticism, which originates with Pyrrho of Elis (c.360–352 BC), is a more radical form of scepticism since it doubts even sceptical judgement. Pyrrhonists hold that there is insufficient and inadequate evidence to determine or even deny whether any knowledge is possible. The only way to obtain tranquillity of mind, or ataraxia, is to suspend judgement on all questions of knowledge. Although Greek manuscripts of Sextus Empiricus circulated in the fifteenth century, the first printing of a work by Sextus was Henri Estienne’s Latin translation of the Outlines of Pyrrhonism in 1562.

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This was followed in 1569 by the edition of Gentian Hervet, which included both the Outlines and Against the Mathematicians. There was no Greek printing of Sextus’ works until 1621. Although academic scepticism was available to the Renaissance largely through the writings of Cicero, it does not appear to have made much impact beyond supplying exempla for humanist discussion. For example, in The Praise of Folly (translated by Sir Thomas Chaloner in 1569), Erasmus light-heartedly commends the academicians as the least assuming of the philosophers who have correctly recognised that nothing is certain. An early instance of the use of Pyrrhonism is Henry Cornelius Agrippa’s De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum (1526), a popular work which was translated into English in 1569 as Of the Vanity and Uncertainty of Arts and Sciences. Agrippa’s position is more fideistic and anti-intellectual than sceptical, but he draws on Pyrrhonism, for which he was ridiculed by Rabelais in Le Tiers Livre (1542), the third book of Gargantua et Pantagruel. In fact it was not until the mid-sixteenth century, when Pyrrhonian scepticism was applied as a weapon against philosophical and religious dogmatism, that scepticism became a current of thought to be reckoned with. Scepticism was first invoked as a polemical weapon during the controversies generated by the attack of Pierre de la Ramée (Petrus Ramus) on Aristotelian dogmatism. Ramus himself had little more than stylistic comments to make about academic scepticism. But his ally, Omer Talon, noted the anti-dogmatic application of the arguments of Cicero’s Academica in his own work of that name (1547). In the ensuing controversy the Ramists were branded academic sceptics by Pierre Galland and Guy de Brués. Shortly afterwards, scepticism was employed in the more dangerous arena of confessional controversy. This time it was the more devastating scepticism of Pyrrho that was deployed, recently made available in the Latin translations of Sextus Empiricus by Henri Estienne (Outlines of Pyrrhonism, 1562) and Gentian Hervet (Against the Mathematicians). Hervet undertook his translation of Sextus specifically in the service of the Counter-Reformation. Quite how extensively these Reformation applications of scepticism made an impact in England is difficult to tell. But Elizabethans were undoubtedly aware of them on account of the Ramist controversies at Cambridge (Gilbert 1960: ch. 9). The writings of Sextus Empiricus do not appear to have been well known in Tudor England, though there are known cases of people who owned them – for example John Dee and Viscount Conway. There was a manuscript of the English translation of Sextus attributed to Sir Walter Ralegh. Pyrrhonism was probably known through secondary sources, such as Henry Cornelius Agrippa’s aforementioned De incertitudine et vanitate scientiarum. The most important source for Pyrrhonian scepticism was Michel de Montaigne (1533–92), for whom sceptical doubt was encapsulated by the question he took for his motto: ‘Que sçays-je?’ (‘What do I know?’). In his Apology of Raymond Sebond, contained in the second book of his Essays, Montaigne undertakes an exercise in Pyrrhonism in order to demolish the truth-claims of human reason and philosophy. The dogmatisms that he attacks include that of the ‘prince of dogmatists’, Aristotle, but also Stoicism and Platonism. His purpose is not, as with Hervet or

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Talon, polemical, but is closer to the original aim of Pyrrhonism: to use doubt (epoche) as a means to achieve tranquillity of mind. As Montaigne explains in his Apology, ‘the profession of the Pyrrhonians is ever to waver, to doubt, and to enquire; never to be assured of anything, nor to take any warrant of himself ’, with the result that they are led ‘unto their ataraxie, which is the condition of a quiet and settled life, exempted from the agitations which we receive by the impression of the opinion and knowledge we imagine to have of things’ (Essays, trans. Florio, book 2, no. 12). Originally published between 1580 and 1588, Montaigne’s three books of essays were translated into English by John Florio in 1603. Although Florio’s translation does not do justice to Montaigne’s style, the relaxed combination of urbanity and sardonicism of the essays ensures that they wear their extensive erudition lightly. The same combination of learning, scepticism, and religious faith as that exhibited by Montaigne is found in the writings of John Donne, for whom, as for Montaigne, the bewildering variety of philosophy – exacerbated by the appearance of novel theories – ‘calls all in doubt’ (Anatomy of the World. The First Anniversary, 205). Unlike Montaigne, however, Donne found the weakness of human reason unsettling: we are ‘oppressed with ignorance’ (The Progress of the Soul. The Second Anniversary, 254). Montaigne’s sceptical question is posed as an interrogation of the soul – ‘what dost thou know?’: Poor soul, in this thy flesh, what dost thou know? Thou know’st thyself so little, as thou know’st not How thou didst die, nor how thou wast begot. (The Progress of the Soul. The Second Anniversary, 254–6)

Stoicism The availability of the writings of Cicero and Seneca in the Middle Ages meant that Stoicism was not unknown before the Renaissance. Through Seneca’s dialogues (e.g. De constantia) and letters (Epistulae morales) and writings such as Cicero’s De officiis, De finibus, and Tusculan Disputations, the Stoics were known largely chiefly as moral philosophers, admired for the parallels with Christian ideals that they appeared to exhibit – their moral seriousness and apparent piety, their recommendation of forbearance in the face of adversity, their contempt of worldly goods, their asceticism, and their subscription to the doctrine of four cardinal virtues, Prudence, Temperance, Justice, and Fortitude. Other, less comfortable, aspects of Stoicism – for example their advocacy of suicide, their ideal of the suppression of the emotions (apathy), or their belief in determinism – were conveniently ignored or glossed over. The early humanists enriched the corpus of Stoic writings, and established the Stoic canon. The partial knowledge of earlier Greek Stoicism available via Cicero and Plutarch was increased by the publication of doxographies such as Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Philosophers. Epictetus’ manual of Stoic moral philosophy, his Enchiridion, was translated into Latin and printed in 1547. The medieval view that Stoicism was

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congruent with Christian piety did not substantially change until the late sixteenth century. Ironically, perhaps, it was the humanist Petrarch who perpetuated the medieval view of Seneca in imitation of a work misattributed to the classical author: Petrarch’s De remediis utriusque fortunae of 1366 was a Renaissance best-seller, the most frequently reprinted of all his writings. (An English translation by Thomas Twyne, Physic Against Fortune, as Well Prosperous as Adverse, was printed in 1579). The work is a set of consolatory dialogues in which stoical reason debates with the emotions in order to find remedies for the ill effects of fortune, whether good or bad. Petrarch’s work did much to recommend Stoicism as a repository of moral sententiae and Seneca as a lay moralist fit for Christian consumption. Stoicism had other powerful advocates among leading humanists, notably Erasmus, who admired and edited Seneca. Although his Praise of Folly mocks the Stoics, it nonetheless retains the ‘Stoic definition’ of wisdom as the rule of reason. By virtue of having a place in the humanist school curriculum, Stoicism remained familiar throughout the Renaissance: Cicero’s richly Stoic De officiis and De senectute were widely used as introductory texts in moral philosophy. Epictetus’ Enchiridion was used as a school textbook of Greek. Seneca’s writings were widely available in numerous editions. Another source of Greek Stoicism was Plutarch’s Moralia (translated into English and published in 1603 by Philemon Holland) which drew on Stoic moral philosophy, illustrations of which might be found in some of the biographies, such as that of Cato the Younger, contained in Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (English translation, 1579). In the latter half of the sixteenth century this positive image of Stoicism was redrawn thanks to the scholarly study of the Flemish humanist historian, Justus Lipsius (Joest Lips; 1547–1606), which resulted in a revised view of Stoic philosophy. Lipsius’ main contribution to Renaissance Stoicism is his influential treatise, De constantia in publicis malis (On Constancy, 1584). Presented as a dialogue in time of civil war, this enunciates a practical moral philosophy for the man of public affairs. Seneca is held up as a model of conduct in the face of despotism and corruption. The only remedy in such a situation is to accept fate unswervingly, through steadfastness or fortitude (constantia), that is, by applying the Stoic principle of indifference to adversity through subordination of the passions to reason. Lipsius’ concept of fortitude is more positive than the ancient Stoic prescription of ‘apathy’ (emotionlessness). Lipsius sought to redraw the boundary with Christianity in order to render Stoicism acceptable within a Christian context. The new reading of Stoicism which he initiated entailed fuller acknowledgement of some of the aspects of Stoicism that were difficult to reconcile with Christian piety. For example, he subordinated Stoic fate to God and interpreted the Stoic concept of destiny as the decree of divine providence. The resulting accommodation of Stoicism and Christianity has come to be known as Neo-Stoicism. In his Politicorum sive civilis doctrinae libri sex (1590), translated into English by William James as Six Books of Politics or Civil Doctrine (1594), Lipsius’ political philosophy combines Stoicism with his interest in the Roman historian Tacitus. Lipsius also edited Seneca (1605) and was one of the first to emphasise the importance of Stoic

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natural philosophy as the basis of Stoic ethics, in his Physiologia stoicorum (Physics of the Stoics, 1604). His French admirers, Guillaume du Vair and Pierre Charron, took up Lipsius’ view of Stoicism. The translation of their writings into English is one measure of English interest in Stoicism. Sir John Stradling’s translation of Lipsius’ De constantia as Two Books of Constancy in 1594 was followed in 1598 by Thomas James’s translation of Du Vair’s 1594 Philosophie morale des Stoiques as The Moral Philosophy of the Stoics. Charron’s De la Sagesse was printed in Samson Lennard’s English translation, The Moral Philosophy of the Stoics, in 1606, which saw five editions by 1640. It was in the wake of Lipsius that Thomas Lodge made his English translation of Seneca, which was published as The Works of Lucius Annaeus Seneca, both Moral and Natural (1614). Among Stoic writers, Seneca had of course always been popular as a dramatist, and was imitated by English dramatists writing in both Latin and English. Thomas Newton’s Seneca his Ten Tragedies (1581) is testimony to the vernacular interest in Seneca’s plays. The formative impact of Senecan drama on English Renaissance tragedy is well attested (Salmon 1991). But the prominence of Stoic models in the subject matter of the plays may be attributed in large measure to the reinvigorated Stoicism of Lipsius. In the drama of the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean period Stoicism furnishes the model of the virtuous ‘antique Roman’, be he Brutus in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar or Horatio, ‘that man who is not passion’s slave’ in Hamlet. Likewise, Pandulpho in Antonio’s Revenge (performed in 1599) is a mouthpiece of Stoicism, and Rusticus in Massinger’s Roman Actor (performed in 1626) is a model of Senecan fortitude. It is in the plays of George Chapman that the paradigm of Stoicism is most fully drawn: Bussy d’Ambois (performed in 1604), Clermont d’Ambois in Revenge of Bussy d’Ambois (performed c.1610), or Cato in The Wars of Caesar and Pompey (performed c.1613), the righteous statesman who commits suicide to preserve his liberty. Among English playwrights, Ben Jonson owned and annotated Lipsius’ Politicorum … libri, drawing on it in his tragedies, Catiline (performed in 1603) and Sejanus (performed in 1611). Another important mediation of Stoicism in England was provided by the publication of Montaigne’s Essays. Montaigne was an admirer of Lipsius, and he cites Seneca frequently. Many of his essays are devoted to Stoic themes, for example, ‘That to philosophise is to learn how to die’ (Essays, 1.20, which opens with a quotation from Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations). Montaigne was nevertheless, as we have already noted, a stringent critic of Stoicism: in his Apology for Raymond Sebond, it is one of the dogmatisms that he attacks in his Pyrrhonist refutation of philosophy. In this attack, Montaigne rejected the Stoic equation of passion with vice, and argued that the ideal of impassivity is unattainable and the exaltation of virtue presumptuous. His critique of Stoicism was, however, neither doctrinaire nor total. Nor does it undermine the evident Stoicism of his other essays. For example, his essay ‘Of Experience’, written after the Apology, returns to Stoic themes, enunciating the Stoic principle of fortitude in the face of adversity, ‘A man must endure that patiently which he cannot avoid conveniently’ (Essays, 3.13). Montaigne’s Pyrrhonist refutation of Stoicism certainly did not discourage other essayists from turning to it. Among Francis Bacon’s Essays,

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‘On Death’ and ‘Of Adversity’ draw extensively on Seneca. The value of Stoicism as a moral propaedeutic to Christianity continued to be recognised. Pre-eminent among Stoicising devotional writers, Joseph Hall (1547–1656), was dubbed ‘our English Seneca’ for his Heaven upon Earth or of True Peace and Tranquillity of Mind (1606). The sobriquet is echoed by the Latin translator of Heaven upon Earth, who calls him ‘Seneca Christianus’ and, in the title of the French translation of the same work, Le Seneque Chrestien (1610). As we have already seen in the example of Montaigne, Stoic moral philosophy was not without its critics. In fact two of the main sources of Stoicism, Cicero and Plutarch, were also sources for anti-Stoic arguments. In his Praise of Folly Erasmus derides the Stoics for denigrating the emotions, thereby reducing the human subject to a mere marble statue. The Stoics are, moreover, guilty of pride for making themselves equal to the gods. An influential critic of Stoicism was John Calvin, whose edition of Seneca’s De clementia (1532), while acknowledging some parallels between Stoicism and Christianity, attacks the Stoic doctrine of virtuous apathy and fatalism. These criticisms are echoed in Milton’s Paradise Regained, where Christ scorns as mere human pride the Stoic concept of virtue as equal to God, and the Stoic ideal of self-sufficiency, asceticism, and trust in suicide as liberation. The Stoic last in philosophic pride, By him called virtue; and his virtuous man, Wise, perfect in himself, and all possessing, Equal to God, oft shames not to prefer, As fearing God nor man, contemning all Wealth, pleasure, pain or torment, death and life, Which when he lists, he leaves, or boasts he can, For all his tedious talk is but vain boast, Or subtle shifts conviction to evade. (Paradise Regained 4.297–321)

As the culmination of the humanist synthesis of antiquity with contemporary culture, Milton stands at the point of intersection between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. The critique of Stoicism which Milton here puts into the mouth of Christ echoes traditional Christian antipathy towards Stoicism. At the same time, in so far as they acknowledge the inassimilable alterity of Stoicism, these words presage change. By the time Paradise Regained was published in 1671, humanism was in the process of radical transformation, with profound implications for the status of the philosophies it had fostered. On the one hand, Bacon had challenged the authority of the ancients in matters of wisdom. On the other hand, Pyrrhonism had dissolved the old certainties of philosophy. The new philosophies of the seventeenth century declared their modernity by rejecting the past. With the success of Cartesianism, the laicisation of philosophy was complete, Descartes, in his answer to scepticism, having explicitly appealed to ‘common sense’ rather than tradition. The old currents of thought brought into view by humanism had become the province of history and imagination. It is

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perhaps no coincidence that the first English history of philosophy was written at this time, albeit one greatly indebted to classical sources – Thomas Stanley’s History of Philosophy (1655–62). The scene was now being set for the so-called ‘battle of the books’, in the course of which humanism was revised as neoclassicism according to standards laid down by the likes of Bentley and Boileau (Grafton 1991; Highet 1949).

References and Further Reading Allen, D. C. (1964). Doubt’s Boundless Sea: Skepticism and Faith in the Renaissance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Baldwin, A. and S. Hutton (eds.) (1994). Platonism and the English Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baldwin, Thomas Whitfield (1944). William Shakespeare’s Small Latine & Lesse Greeke, 2 vols. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Binns, J. W. (1990). Intellectual Culture in Elizabethan England. Leeds: Francis Cairns. Bolgar, R. R. (1954). The Classical Heritage and its Beneficiaries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Copenhaver, B. P. and C. B. Schmitt (1992). Renaissance Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ellrodt, R. (1960). Neoplatonism in the Poetry of Spenser. Geneva: Droz. Evans, R. C. (1992). Jonson, Lipsius and the Politics of Renaissance Stoicism. Durango, CO: Longwood Academic. Gilbert, N. W. (1960). Renaissance Concepts of Method. New York: Columbia University Press. Grafton, A. (1991). Defenders of the Text. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hankins, J. (1990). Plato and the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. Leiden: Brill. Hedley, Douglas and Sarah Hutton (eds.) (2007). Platonism at the Origins of Modernity. Dordrecht: Springer.

Highet, Gilbert (1949). The Classical Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jayne, S. (1995). Plato in Renaissance England. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic. Kraye, J. (1996). The Cambridge Companion to Renaissance Humanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Martindale, J. (1985). English Humanism, Wyatt to Cowley. London: Croom Helm. Monsarat, G. D. (1984). Light from the Porch. Stoicism and English Renaissance Literature. Paris: Didier. Nelson, J. C. (1958). Renaissance Theory of Love. New York: Columbia University Press. Patrides, C. A. (ed.) (1980). The Cambridge Platonists. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Popkin, R. H. (2003). The History of Scepticism from Svonarola to Bayle. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Salmon, J. H. M. (1991). ‘Seneca and Tacitus in Jacobean England’. In L. L. Peck (ed.), The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (pp. 169–88). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schmitt, C. B. (1972). Cicero Scepticus: A Study of the Influence of the Academica in the Renaissance. The Hague: Nijhoff. Smith, G. G. (ed.) (1967). Elizabethan Critical Essays. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

9

Translation Liz Oakley-Brown

The Patriarchal Landscape of Renaissance Translation In his dedication to the ‘best-best benefactors, and most-most honoured ladies, Lucy, Countess of Bedford, and her best-most-loved-loving mother, Lady Anne Harrington’, the Italo-Englishman John Florio refers to his 1603 translation of the first book of Michel de Montaigne’s Essays as a ‘defective edition (since all translations are reputed females, delivered at second hand …’ (A2r). Some four hundred years later, and largely as a result of theses such as ‘Des Tours de Babel’ (1985) by the Algerian-born French philosopher Jacques Derrida, the kind of gendered, hierarchical binary opposition between original and translation that is inscribed in Florio’s dedication, and perpetuated in the Romantic and post-Romantic eras, has been challenged (Simon 1996: 1, 10; Venuti 1995). Consequently, twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholarly and critical perspectives on the significance of this specific form of Renaissance textual practice have shifted from principally aesthetic evaluations of the ways in which translators turn one language into another towards the consideration of translation as a dynamic, ideological process inextricably linked with the construction, and contestation, of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century identities. As Inga-Stina Ewbank succinctly notes, ‘In questions of translation, poetics readily slides into politics’ (cit. Chew and Stead 1999: 8). In very general terms, the impetus in the early modern period to produce secular literary translations – the main focus of the ensuing essay – comes out of growing concerns to inaugurate a distinctively English sensibility. Of course, the idea that translations are a part of material culture is not a recent one. As Marta Straznicky points out, Renaissance England itself perceived translation to be ‘work in service of the state, providing broad access to the foundations of humanist learning, fostering public morality and civic virtue, and augmenting the capacity of the English tongue’ (2002: 423). This patriotic mode is evident in Alexander Barclay’s satirical verse the Ship of Fools (1509), which is possibly ‘the first of the significantly humanist-influenced Tudor translations to be published’ (Boutcher 2000: 51).

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As a rendition of Sebastian Brant’s Narrenschiff (1494) by way of Jacob Locher’s Latin version (1497) and Paul Rivière’s French edition (1497) (Lewis 1954: 130), Barclay’s Prologue states that his translation is designed ‘to redress the errors and vices of this our realm of England, as the foresaid composer and translators have done in their countries’ (1570: ¶¶iv). According to Nicholas Orme, Barclay’s Ship of Fools aligns itself ‘with humanist Latin, and criticises those attached to the medieval grammar of Alexander of Ville-Dieu rather than to the works of Priscian and the Renaissance grammarian Giovanni Sulpizio’ (2008). Even so, and as with sixteenth- and seventeenth-century translations as a whole, Barclay’s textual ambitions are not governed by strictly methodological means. Renaissance translators are unfettered by the systemic approach that would typify the practice in later periods. Though the familiar debates about whether to translate word-for-word (literally) or sense-for-sense (paraphastically) are ongoing (Burke 2005: 25), there is no Tudor or early Stuart equivalent of John Dryden’s tripartite division of metaphrase, paraphrase, and imitation as delineated in the Preface to Ovid’s Epistles (1680). A word commonly employed in the Renaissance, however, is translatio. Fundamentally, this is a figure of displacement. A useful sixteenth-century explanation of the rhetorical process may be found in Richard Sherry’s A Treatise of Schemes [and] Tropes (1550). Sherry claimed that this was an innovative English publication on the topic. Notably, the author thought that the title of his work might seem so ‘strange unto our English ears’ that prospective readers might ignore it, or if they happen to ‘vouchsafe to read it … yet perceiving nothing to be therein that pleaseth their fancy, will count it but a trifle, [and] a tale of Robin Hood’ (Aiv–Aiir). The Treatise characterised translatio thus: translation, that is a word translated from the thing that it properly signifieth, unto another which may agree with it by a similitude. And among all virtues of speech, this is the chief. None persuadeth more effect[ively], none showeth the thing before our eyes more evidently, none moveth more mightily the affections, none maketh the oratio[n] more goodly, pleasant, nor copious. (C.iiiiv)

Yet translatio can also be used to define an ‘activity of appropriation’ referring to ‘the transfer of … a tradition or a right from one society or culture to another’ (Russell 2001: 29). These translative endeavours compel developments in sixteenth-century pedagogical practices, which place translation at the heart of grammar-school education (Boutcher 2000: 47). Allied with the acquisition of rhetorical skills, the second book of Roger Ascham’s The Schoolmaster (1570), ‘The ready way to the Latin tongue’, established influential guidelines, which the pedagogue called ‘double translation’ (see Chapter 3, Literacy and Education). Ascham’s students are advised to render classical script into the vernacular. The English translation should then be transposed back into the source language. Drawing attention to his former role as tutor to the Princess Elizabeth, Ascham declares that ‘a better, and nearer example herein, may be, our most noble Queen … who never took yet, Greek nor Latin grammar in her

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hand, after the first declining of a noun and a verb, but only by this double translating of Demosthenes and Isocrates daily …’ (Wright 1904: 245–6). While Ascham sets out ‘six ways appointed by the best learned men, for the learning of tongues, and increase of eloquence ‘as 1. Translatio linguarum. 2. Paraphrasis. 3. Metaphrasis. 4. Epitome. 5. Imitatio. 6. Declamatio’ (1904: 242), these rules are not routinely followed in the numerous translations that were subsequently published in Renaissance England. In the words of Massimiliano Morini, ‘In point of fact, there is hardly any theory at all: one has got to extrapolate a theory, or the evidence for the existence of a theory, from a few prefaces and from the reverberations of theory into practice’ (2006: 18–19). Beyond the dictates of the classroom, which elicit translations of the aforementioned oratorical works and classical poems such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Renaissance writings are coerced into English by societal demands. In the first half of the sixteenth century, as the prefatory material to Ascham’s Toxophilus (1545) illustrates, there is an anxiety about the status of the vernacular language. ‘If any man would blame me’, Ascham implores, either for taking such a matter in hand or else for writing it in the English tongue, this answer I may make him, that when the best of the realm think it honest for them to use, I one of the meanest sort, ought not to suppose it vile for me to write: (Wright 1904: xiii–xiv)

In deference to the perceived inferiority of the target language, and often, it should be noted, in reverence to their patron, translators’ prefaces are regularly characterised by a particular type of humility topos. Arthur Golding’s dedicatory epistle to Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, at the head of his four-book translation of the Metamorphoses (1565) is representative of this prefatory style: If this work were fully performed with like eloquence and cunning of inditing [composing] by me in English as it was written by th’author thereof in his mother tongue, it might perchance delight your Honour to bestow some vacant time in the reading of it … to countervail my default, I request most humbly the benefit of your L[ordship’s] favour, whereby you are wont not only to bear with the want of skill and rudeness of such as commit their doings to your protection, but also are wont to encourage them to proceed in their painful exercises attempted of a zeal and desire to enrich their native language with things not heretofore published in the same. (Forey 2002: 3)

Though he adheres to the central tenets of humanist translation, Golding rightly promotes the novelty of his project. William Caxton’s prose version of the Metamorphoses (1480) was the first complete vernacular Ovid. The fifteenth-century translation came into being via the French Ovide moralisé rather than a Latin source and, given its English provenance, it is somewhat intriguing that it was never printed. Throughout the 1560s, the translation and publication of individual Ovidian myths, such as The fable of … Narcissus (1560) by T.H., and Thomas Peend’s The pleasant fable of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis (1565), provided textual areas in which burgeoning

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Elizabethan Protestant subjectivities could be rehearsed (Oakley-Brown 2001). Golding’s The xv. Books of P. Ovidius Naso, entitled Metamorphosis, translated out of Latin into English metre (1567) also domesticates its classical material in distinctive ways. The translator ‘uses a language of heightened Englishness in his translation’, Raphael Lyne argues, ‘and his versions of Ovidian myths are often filled with highly English scenery, characters, and ideas’ (2001: 53–4). Furthermore, Golding’s Ovid famously paved the way for what Dympna Callaghan has labelled a ‘secular-aesthetic in the 1590s’. This period, she claims, witnessed the advent of a new articulation of the aesthetic that came about through an absorption and iteration of the Roman poet Ovid that was to be found neither in the decades that preceded it nor in those that were to follow … Marked primarily by its distinctive tone – ebullient, racy, urbane and yet by turns sombre and even tragic – the new secularaesthetic is far closer to Ovid’s subtle modulations of voice in the Latin original than its precursors. (Callaghan 2003: 27)

Golding’s Metamorphosis is just one example of the manner in which Renaissance translation provides a foundation for ‘original’ forms of literature, such as the epyllia of Marlowe and Shakespeare, the erotic genre embedded in Callaghan’s discussion of the ‘secular-aesthetic’. Similarly, the translations of Virgil’s Aeneid by Gavin Douglas (1513), the earl of Surrey (c.1554), and Thomas Phaer (c.1562), as well as George Chapman’s complete versions of Homer (c.1616, c.1634), underpin Spenserian and Miltonic epics (Ellis and Oakley-Brown 1998: 339). The decades which followed the publication of Golding’s Ovid, namely those between 1570 and 1630, have been branded a ‘great age of translation’ (Burke 2007: 36). In a slightly more nuanced observation, Willis Barnstone comments that ‘The number of translations in the first decade of Elizabeth’s rule, after 1558, was four times that of the Henry and Mary years (1993: 203, cit. Ellis and Oakley-Brown 1998: 337). This upward trajectory of literary production corresponds with the period in which ‘the English vocabulary expanded most rapidly’ (Burke 2007: 36). Yet unease about the English vernacular remained. As part of a letter written to Gabriel Harvey in 1580, for instance, Edmond Spenser demands, ‘Why a God’s name may not we, as else the Greeks, have the kingdom of our own language?’ (cit. Helgerson 1992: 1). As Barnstone’s enumeration suggests, aided by advances in printing and the dissemination of texts, the era’s seeming response to these pervasive anxieties was to produce more translations. A catalogue of noteworthy classical translations of the English Renaissance might incorporate those by Philemon Holland, the so-called ‘translator general’. His published translations include Livy’s The Roman History (1600), Pliny’s History of the World (1601), Plutarch’s Morals (1603), Suetonius’ The History of the Twelve Caesars (1606), Ammianus Marcellinus’ The Roman History (1609), and Xenophon’s Cyrupaedia, or the Institution and Life of Cyrus, King of Persians (1632) (Matthiesson, 1931/1965: 174). George Chapman’s legacy features The Divine Poem

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of Musaeus (1616). Thomas May brought forth Lucan’s Pharsalia into English in 1627. Two years later, Thomas Hobbes published his English version of Thucydides’ Eight Books of the Peloponnesian War (1629). Not all writings were rendered into the vernacular directly from the source language. Defined as ‘the earliest great masterpiece in English prose’ (Matthiesson 1931/1965: 58), for instance, Thomas North’s influential Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Grecians and Romans (1579) was based on Jacques Amyot’s French version. In the case of his translation of The Moral Philosophy of Doni (1570), a more complex set of sources may possibly emerge as, according to North, it was ‘A work first compiled in the Indian tongue, and afterwards transferred into divers and sundry other languages: as the Persian, Arabian, Hebrew, Latin, Spanish, and Italian: and now reduced into our vulgar speech’ (Bir). European vernacular texts were also transposed into English. C. S. Lewis remarked that ‘The thudding verbiage of [Thomas Wyatt’s] “These new kinds of pleasures wherein most men rejoice …” raises a wonder why the man who thought Petrarch could be translated so, also though Petrarch worth translating’ (1954: 224–5). This scathing critique, however, did not prevent the Henrician ambassador/poet (together with the soldier/poet Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, and Henry Parker, Lord Morley) from being credited with ‘remak[ing] the English lyric tradition’ (Taylor 2008: 397). Thomas Hoby’s prominent version of Castiglione’s The Courtier (1561) and Thomas Shelton’s rendition of Cervantes’ Don Quixote (1612–20) should also be added to this brief survey. The publication dates for Shelton’s translation show that it was progressively distributed. Likewise, the Spanish epic Amadis de Gaule arrived in England in piecemeal form. In European circulation since the fifteenth century, the first English translation of Book 1 of this popular romance was published in 1590, followed by Book 2 in 1593 and Book 5 in 1598 (Pettegree 2007: 119). Monolingual, and thus most likely ‘bourgeois and plebeian’, Renaissance readers had to wait two decades for the complete narrative to appear: ‘A full sequence of the first four books was finally published only in 1618 and 1619’ (Pettegree 2007: 119; see also Chapter 57, Romance). Amidst this foregoing genealogy, however, it is possible to neglect the ways in which the Renaissance body is marked by the translation enterprise. Walter J. Ong’s well-known essay ‘Latin language study as a Renaissance puberty rite’ discusses the punishments that young boys suffered at the hands of their schoolmasters: In the long dialogue on the pro’s and con’s of corporal punishment with which Roger Ascham opens his famous educational treatise, The Schoolmaster, he provides glimpses of issues … which he never really fully exposes. Some pupils have recently run away from Eton, we are told in the course of this dialogue, ‘for fear of beating’ … (Ong 1959: 119)

In the context of religious reform, William Tyndale, the Lutheran translator of the Bible, was strangled and then burnt at the stake in Antwerp in 1536 for heresy and, as John Foxe recounts in the 1570 edition of Acts and Monuments, Jane Grey’s martyrdom is underscored by the oration of ‘the Psalm of Miserere mei Deus in English, in

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most devout manner throughout to the end’ (1584). At other executionary events the ability to recite Psalm 51 in Latin might permit convicted criminals to plead ‘benefit of clergy’, thereby releasing them from the death penalty (see Chapter 3, Literacy and Education). Corporeal violence accompanies Renaissance translation in other guises. Patricia Palmer observes that The fact that so many leading translators of the age – [Lodowick] Bryskett, [Geoffrey] Fenton, [Barnabe] Googe, [John] Harrington – were also players in the conquest of Ireland confirms the uncanny incongruity between pushing back the frontiers of English and expanding the geopolitical boundaries in which it operated. (cit. Cronin 2006: 97)

An examination of the circumstances surrounding George Sandys’ rendition of the Metamorphoses exposes further aspects of the relationship between English Renaissance translation and colonial expansion. Having already published the first five books of Ovid’s poem in 1621, Sandys completed the translation of another two books as he sailed to Virginia to take up his appointment as treasurer to the Jamestown colony. He disembarked at Jamestown in October 1621, just five months before the Indian uprising on 22 March 1622 (Ellison 2004). Sandys’ Ovidian translation was finished in Virginia, and the dedication to Prince Charles in the 1626 edition acknowledges the text’s liminal, and troubled, inception: It needed more than a single denization [act of being made a denizen or native], being a double stranger: sprung from the stock of the ancient Romans; but bred in the new world, of the rudeness whereof it cannot but participate; especially having wars and tumults to bring it to light instead of the Muses. (cit. Lyne 2001: 221)

While it may true to say that ‘there are intriguingly few points of contact between’ the translation and its colonial context (Lyne 2001: 248), the extract above bears traces of both the Stuart desire for territorial acquisition and the place that translation occupies in that specific expansionist project. Indeed, translators’ prefaces often proffer glimpses into the wider socio-political climate of the English Renaissance. Sandys’ dichotomous depiction of Rome and the New World obliquely chimes with the patronal address with which this essay began. Florio’s anxiety about his ‘defective edition’ is oddly echoed in Sandys’ concerns for the ‘rudeness’ of his displaced translation. Though their translations are products of distinctive cultural environments, both translators are engaged in the pursuit of a flawless text, unsullied by traces of an imperfect other. Translation’s role in identity politics may be located in different areas of sixteenthand seventeenth-century English culture. In common with other vernacular genres, as many source-studies demonstrate, Renaissance drama benefited from translated materials. Rather differently, research by Michael Neill (1994, 1996), Margaret Tudeau-Clayton (1998, 2002), Dirk Delabastita (2004), and Michael Cronin (2006)

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has variously shown how translation functions as a discursive set of practices in Shakespeare and Jonson. As part of a wide-ranging critical and theoretical analysis of Translation and Identity, for instance, Cronin has track[ed] an intra-textual translation presence to show how Shakespearean drama through the conduit of translation articulates English and more broadly European concerns with language, power, identity, metamorphosis, proximity and control in the context of intercultural contact. (Cronin 2006: 94)

In what follows, I take up and develop these interests in language, power, and identity to consider the ‘intra-textual presence’ of translation in this celebrated episode from John Webster’s Jacobean tragedy The White Devil (first performed in 1611; first published 1612): [lawyer]:

Domine judex converte oculos in hanc pestem mulierum corruptissimam.

vittoria: francisco: vittoria:

What’s he?

franciso: vittoria:

monticelso: vittoria:

franciso: monticelso: lawyer: vittoria: lawyer:

vittoria: lawyer:

A lawyer that pleads against you. Pray my lord, let him speak his usual tongue – I’ll make no answer else. Why, you understand Latin. I do sir, but amongst this auditory Which come to hear my cause, the half or more May be ignorant in’t. Go on sir. By your favour, I will not have my accusation clouded In a strange tongue: all this assembly Shall hear what you can charge me with. Signior, You need not stand on’t much; pray change your language. O for God sake: gentlewoman, your credit Shall be more famous by it. Well then have at you. I am at the mark, sir, I’ll give aim to you, And tell you how near you shoot. Most literated judges, please your lordships, So to connive your judgements to the view Of this debauched and diversivolent [desiring strife] woman Who such a black concatenation Of mischief hath effected, that to extirp The memory of ’t must be the consummation Of her and her projections – What’s all this – Hold your peace. Exorbitant sins must have exulceration.

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Surely my lords this lawyer here hath swallowed Some pothecary’s bills, or proclamations. And now the hard and undigestible words Come up like stones we use give hawks for physic. Why this is Welsh to Latin. (The White Devil, 3.2.10–39)1

Contemporaneous with the 1613 edition of Robert Cawdrey’s A Table Alphabetical Containing and Teaching the True Writing and Understanding of Hard Usual English Words, Borrowed from the Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Or French … with the Interpretation thereof by Plain English Words, Gathered for the Benefit [and] Help of All Unskilful Persons – a book that clearly makes much of the linguistic deficiencies of its monolingual readers – Webster’s portrayal of the ways ‘in which [Vittoria] defends herself against charges of immorality’ (Gunby 2004) dramatises key aspects of the cultural politics of translation in Renaissance England.

Women and Translation From classroom to court, the predominantly homosocial histories of Tudor and Stuart secular translation practices depict a social milieu in which men engage with the writings of other men – living and dead – in order to foster a sense of orthodox English selfhood. Markedly, the engraving showing the textual transmission between the classical poet and the translator that appears on the title page of Chapman’s The Crown of All Homer’s Works (1624) – see Figure 35 – represents the common patriarchal line of descent. As it is routinely stated, humanist educators such as Juan Luis Vives censure women’s encounters with secular writing. These pronouncements influence the kinds of translation undertaken by women. Originally produced in Latin at the request of Catherine of Aragon and translated into English by Richard Hyrde, a member of Thomas More’s household (Wayne 1985: 15), Vives’ The Instruction of a Christian Woman (Latin 1524; English 1529) sets out ‘What books ought to be read, and what not’: Plato casteth out of the commonwealth of wise men, which he made, Homer and Hesiodus, the poets: and yet have they none ill thing in comparison unto Ovid’s books of love which we read, and carry them in our hands, and learn them by heart, yea and some school masters teach them to their scholars and some make expositions and expound the vices. Augustus banished Ovid himself and think you then that he would have kept these expositors in the country? … Therefore a woman should beware of all these books, likewise as of serpents or snakes. (1540; cit. Aughterson 1995: 170)

For women to read, let alone translate the works of a classical author such as Ovid – chiefly the Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love), but a more wide-ranging list is implicitly denounced – is a contravention of the sexual codes of conduct which deem that they should be chaste, silent, and obedient. Later conduct books, such as Thomas Salter’s

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The Mirror of Modesty (1578), extend Vives’ strictures by condemning the ‘lascivious books’ of poets such as Ovid, Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, Virgil, and Homer (cit. Aughterson 1995: 178). Thus, authors such as Mary Sidney can complete her brother’s translation of the Psalter, render Petrarch’s Trionfo della Morte (The Triumph of Death) into English, and even produce a vernacular version of Robert Garnier’s Marc Antoine (1592). However, she may be aligned with Ovid’s Metamorphoses only as the patron and dedicatee of a selection of myths that appear in Abraham Fraunce’s The Third Part of the Countess of Pembroke’s Ivychurch (1592) (Lamb 1990: 40–5). There are other extant secular translations. Lady Jane Lumley’s translation of Euripides’ Iphigenia in Aulis (c.1553–4?) is ‘the first play in English by a woman, and the first play translated from Greek into English’ (Medcalf 2008: 385), and yet it exists only in manuscript form. In the light of humanist edicts upon education, it is not altogether surprising that women’s most visible intervention in the history of Renaissance translation is by way of devotional literature. Margaret More Roper and the Cooke sisters, Mildred, Anne, Elizabeth, and Katherine, for instance, ‘participate … on the pious fringes of translation activity’ (Ellis and Oakley-Brown 1998: 339; Lamb 1985). For obvious reasons, Elizabeth I’s translations attract attention, but, as Georgia E. Brown points out, they ‘are usually dismissed as bad and / or excessively literal’ (2004: 95). By comparison, Brown’s own reading of Princess Elizabeth’s ‘The Mirror or Glass of the Sinful Soul’ (1544) – a rendition of Queen Marguerite of Navarre’s verse – suggests that the resultant translation engenders a sovereign identity that is ‘not purely English, or purely Protestant, as the text moves across national and linguistic borders as well as epistemologies of gender’ (2004: 103). In this way, Brown’s detailed examination of the princess’s engagement with her French source sheds new light on translation and the formation of Elizabethan queenship and, perhaps, Renaissance self-fashioning at large. All of the aforesaid women are connected by their gentle status and domestic tutelage. In terms of social order, the outstanding name in the limited catalogue of Renaissance women translators is that of the former waiting woman Margaret Tyler (Schleiner 1992), known for her translation of D. Ortuñez de Calahorra’s Spanish romance, The Mirror of Princely Deeds and Knighthood (1578). Challenging generic and gendered boundaries (Krontiris 1988), Tyler’s much-studied preface directly confronts the patriarchal nature of Renaissance translation: ‘Such delivery as I have made I hope thou wilt friendly accept, the rather for that it is a woman’s work, though in a story profane, and a matter more manlike than becometh my sex’ (cit. Krontiris 1992: 46). With this particular socio-historical terrain of women’s translation practices in mind, Webster’s Vittoria might be viewed as embodying Renaissance tensions that circumscribe this form of textual production. Given that Vittoria ‘pointedly uses [Latin] at l. 200’ (Luckyj 2008: 57n.), it seems reasonable to think that the drama’s female protagonist understands the Lawyer’s Latinate declamation at the outset of the scene: ‘Lord Judge, turn your eyes upon this plague, the most corrupted of women’ (Luckyj 2008: 57n.). The audience, though, may not have been able to translate the Lawyer’s words. The White Devil had its inau-

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gural, and famously unpopular, performance at the Red Bull in Clerkenwell, a venue with a theatre-going public who may have been used to less sophisticated material (Gunby 2004). Accordingly, Vittoria’s lines that ‘amongst this auditory / Which come to hear my cause, the half or more / May be ignorant in it’ seem a blatant metatheatrical gesture which acknowledges the intellectual demographic of the audience (Luckyj 1999: 220). We do not hear Vittoria translating the Lawyer’s Latin. The extract’s intricate dramaturgy, however, may encourage the audience to believe that her transposition would be far superior to the verbose rendition that she procures from the trained, if comic, legal professional. Peter Burke has discussed the ways in which the ‘Renaissance translator’ functions ‘as go-between’ (2005). While she may not actually translate the Latin language into the vernacular, Vittoria acts as a go-between between the play-text and the audience. Like the Renaissance literary translators who keep in mind their learned courtly patron and their vernacular reader, Webster has his female character address a similarly bifurcated audience: the one on the stage and the one in front of the performance. Critics often comment on the paradoxical nature of this scene (Luckyj 1999: 218). As an adulterer, Vittoria is culpable. However, her rhetorical tour de force elicits audience support. Still, it is her audacious propensity to move between two languages that marks Vittoria out as ‘other’. And though the correlation between women’s garrulity and rampant sexuality is a common one, Webster refines this motif by dramatising Renaissance women’s problematic relationship to language through translation.

Translation and the Body Politic There are yet further ways in which The White Devil engages with the cultural politics of translation in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Vittoria’s condemnation of the Lawyer’s speech culminates in the exclamation, ‘Why this is Welsh to Latin’. In a dramatic episode that is thoroughly entrenched in gender politics, Vittoria’s seemingly marginal quip actually establishes another hierarchical paradigm in which the English vernacular is superior to that of the Celtic nation. As the play’s editor clarifies, ‘Renaissance dramatists often used Welsh as the prototype of an unintelligible language’ (Luckyj 2008: 59n.). In a discussion of Cymbeline (also performed in 1611), Terence Hawkes states that ‘two-thirds of [Shakespeare’s] play are set in Wales’, yet the audience ‘meet no native-born Welsh people there – unless we count the ‘two beggars’ of whom Innogen asks directions (3.6.8–9). Their status may be significant’ (Hawkes 2002: 58). To be sure, Cymbeline interrogates ‘what the series of Acts of Union between England and Wales finally involved’ (Hawkes 2002: 59). It would be unreasonable to claim that Vittoria’s brief and almost clichéd defamation of the Welsh language deals with the issue in a similar manner. All the same, her remark resonates with the English Acts that prevented ‘Welsh speakers from pursuing justice in their native tongue, or from holding municipal office of any kind’ (Blank 1996: 131). A

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telling tract on the subject is John Brinsley’s A Consolation for Our Grammar Schools (1622), which ‘declared Wales to have remained an “ignorant country” [C3v] … because of the people’s inability to read English’ (Blank 1996: 134). Translation is thus a way of merging England’s Celtic other into itself. While scholars are often reminded that ‘A study of Elizabethan translations is a study of the means by which the Renaissance came to England’ (Matthiesson 1931/1965: 3; cit. Boutcher 2000: 45), a different sense of England’s intellectual adroitness – or rather lack of it – might be discerned by studying the ‘balance of trade’ between vernaculars (Burke 2007: 22). Burke explains: As for Renaissance England, imports from Italian, Spanish, and French were quite high (from the period 1550–1660 about 450 published translations from Italian have been identified). On the other hand, exports were extremely low before the 1660s. The few cases include the travels of Francis Drake, Martin Frobisher and Walter Ralegh, as well as texts by Francis Bacon, Philip Sidney, James I, William Perkins and Joseph Hall. These translations were often made by Englishmen, since most continental Europeans did not know English. (2007: 23)

The observations above support Boutcher’s point that ‘virtually nobody outside the British Isles ever dreamt of needing to learn English’ (2000: 50). Nonetheless, as we have seen throughout this essay, the interplay between English translators and their patrons, translations and their readers, and ‘intra-textual’ episodes of translation foreground complex representations of selfhood and otherness. In this respect, studies of English Renaissance literature and culture are just beginning to unravel the ways in which translation has shaped the contours of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England and its subjects. Notes 1

Quotations are from John Webster: The White Devil, ed. Christina Luckyj, New Mermaids, 3rd edn. (London: Methuen Drama, 2008).

References and Further Reading Amos, Flora Ross (1920; repr. 1983). Early Theories of Translation. New York: Octagon Books. Aughterson, Kate (ed.) (1995). Renaissance Woman: A Sourcebook. London: Routledge. Barclay, Alexander (trans.) (1570). The Ship of Fools. London. Barnstone, Willis (1993). The Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Bassnett, Susan (1991). Translation Studies, rev. edn. London: Routledge. Bate, Jonathan (1993). Shakespeare and Ovid. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bate, Jonathan (1999). ‘Elizabethan translation: the art of the hermaphrodite’. In Shirley Chew and Alistair Stead (eds.), Translating Life: Studies in Transpositional Aesthetics (pp. 33–51). Liverpool English Texts and Studies. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

Translation Benktert, Lysbeth (2001). ‘Translation as imagemaking: Elizabeth I’s translation of Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy’. Early Modern Literary Studies, 6/3, 2.1–20. , accessed 30 Oct. 2008. Blank, Paula (1996). Broken English: Dialects and the Politics of Language in Renaissance Writings. London: Routledge. Boutcher, Warren (2000). ‘The Renaissance’. In Peter France (ed.), The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation (pp. 45–55). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Braden, Gordon (1978). The Classics and English Renaissance Poetry. New Haven: Yale University Press. Brown, Georgia E. (2004). ‘Translation and the definition of sovereignty: the case of Elizabeth Tudor’. In Mike Pincombe (ed.), Travels and Translations in the Sixteenth Century (pp. 88–103). Aldershot: Ashgate. Burke, Peter (2005).‘The Renaissance translator as go-between’. In Andreas Höfele and Werner von Koppenfels (eds.), Renaissance Go-Betweens: Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe (pp. 17–31). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter. Burke, Peter (2007). ‘Cultures of translation in early modern Europe’. In Peter Burke and R. Po-chia Hsia (eds.), Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe (pp. 7–38). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Callaghan, Dympna (2003). ‘The Book of Changes in a time of change: Ovid’s Metamorphoses in post-Reformation England and Venus and Adonis’. In Richard Dutton and Jean E. Howard (eds.), A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works: The Poems, Problem Comedies, Late Plays (pp. 27–45). Oxford: Blackwell. Chamberlain, Lori (1992). ‘Gender and the metaphorics of translation’. In Lawrence Venuti (ed.), Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology (pp. 57–74). London: Routledge. Chew, Shirley and Alistair Stead (1999). Introduction. In Chew and Stead (eds.), Translating Life: Studies in Transpositional Aesthetics (pp. 1–14). Liverpool English Texts and Studies. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Clarke, Danielle (2001). The Politics of Early Modern Women’s Writing. London: Longman. Cronin, Michael (2006). Translation and Identity. London: Routledge.

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Delabastita, Dirk (2004). ‘ “If I know the letters and the language”: translation as a dramatic device in Shakespeare’s plays’. In Ton Hoenselaars (ed.), Shakespeare and the Language of Translation (pp. 31–52). Arden Shakespeare. London: Thomson Learning. Derrida, Jacques (1985). ‘Des Tours de Babel’, trans. Joseph F. Graham. In Joseph F. Graham (ed.), Difference in Translation (pp. 165–207). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ellis, Roger and Liz Oakley-Brown (1998). ‘The British tradition’. In Mona Baker (ed.), The Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (pp. 333–47). London: Routledge. Ellison, James (2004). ‘Sandys, George (1578– 1644)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Sept. Online edn., , accessed 13 Dec. 2008. Fleming, Juliet (1994). ‘Dictionary English and the female tongue’. In Richard Burt and John Michael Archer (eds.), Enclosure Acts: Sexuality, Property, and Culture in Early Modern England (pp. 290–325). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Florio, John (trans.) (1603). The Essays or Moral, Politic and Military Discourses of Lord Michael de Montaigne. London. Forey, Madeleine (ed.) (2002). Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Translated by Arthur Golding. London: Penguin. Foxe, John (1570). Acts and Monuments. … The Variorum Edition, online (hriOnline, Sheffield 2004). , accessed 10 Dec. 2008. Gunby, David (2004). ‘Webster, John (1578x80 – 1638?)’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Sept. 2004. Online edn., , accessed 3 Sept. 2008. Hawkes, Terence (2002). Shakespeare in the Present. London: Routledge. Helgerson, Richard (1992). Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Howard, Jean. E. (2008). ‘Cymbeline’. In Stephen Greenblatt et al. (eds.), The Norton Shakespeare, 2nd edn. (pp. 2963–73). New York: W. W. Norton. Krontiris, Tina (1988). ‘Breaking barriers of genre and gender: Margaret Tyler’s translation of The

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Mirrour of Knighthood’. In Arthur F. Kinney et al. (eds.), Women in the Renaissance (pp. 19–39). Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Krontiris, Tina (1992). Oppositional Voices: Women as Writers and Translators of Literature in the English Renaissance. London: Routledge. Lamb, Mary Ellen (1985). ‘The Cooke sisters: attitudes toward learned women in the Renaissance’. In Margaret P. Hannay (ed.), Silent but for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators and Writers of Religious Works (pp. 107–25). Ohio: Kent State University Press. Lamb, Mary Ellen (1990). Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press. Lewis, C. S. (1954). English Literature in the Sixteenth Century Excluding Drama. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Luckyj, Christina (ed.) (1999). ‘Gender, rhetoric, and performance in John Webster’s The White Devil’. In Viviana Comensoli and Anne Russell (eds.), Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage (pp. 218–32). Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Luckyj, Christina (2008). John Webster: The White Devil, 3rd edn. New Mermaids. London: Methuen Drama. Lyne, Raphael (2001). Ovid’s Changing Worlds: English Metamorphoses 1567–1632. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lyne, Raphael (2002). ‘Ovid in English translation’. In Philip Hardie (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ovid (pp. 249–63). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Martindale, Charles and A. B. Taylor (eds.) (2004). Shakespeare and the Classics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Matthiesson, F. O. (1931; repr. 1965). Translation: An Elizabethan Art. New York: Octagon Books. Medcalf, Stephen (2008). ‘Classical authors’. In Roger Ellis (ed.), The Oxford History of Literary Translation into English, vol. 1: To 1550 (pp. 364–89). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Morini, Massimiliano (2006). Tudor Translation in Theory and Practice. Aldershot: Ashgate. Mueller, Janel and Joshua Scodel (eds.) (2009). Elizabeth I: Translations, 1544–1589. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mueller, Janel and Joshua Scodel (eds.) (forthcoming). Elizabeth I: Translations, 1592–1598. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Neill, Michael (1994). ‘Broken English and broken Irish: nation, language, and the optic of power in Shakespeare’s histories’. Shakespeare Quarterly, 45, 1–32. Neill, Michael (1996). ‘The world beyond: Shakespeare and the tropes of translation’. In R. B. Parker and S. P. Zitner (eds.), Elizabethan Theater: Essays in Honor of S. Schoenbaum (pp. 290–308). Newark: University of Delaware Press. North, Thomas (1570). The Moral Philosophy of Doni. London. Oakley-Brown, Liz (2001). ‘Translating the subject: Ovid’s Metamorphoses in England, 1560– 67’. In Roger Ellis and Liz Oakley-Brown (eds.), Translation and Nation: Towards a Cultural Politics of Englishness (pp. 48–84). Topics in Translation. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. Ong, Walter J. (1959). ‘Latin language study as a Renaissance puberty rite’. Studies in Philology, 56, 103–24. Orme, Nicholas (2008).‘Barclay, Alexander (c.1484–1552)’. In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, Sept. 2004. Online edn., , accessed 27 Oct. 2008. Pettegree, Andrew (2007). ‘Translation and the migration of texts’. In Thomas Betteridge (ed.), Borders and Travellers in Early Modern Europe (pp. 113–25). Aldershot: Ashgate. Pincombe, Mike (2001). Elizabethan Humanism: Literature and Learning in the Later Sixteenth Century. London: Longman. Russell, Daniel (2001). ‘Introduction: the Renaissance’. In Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski et al. (eds.), The Politics of Translation in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (pp. 29–35). Perspectives on Translation. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press. Schleiner, Louise (1992). ‘Margaret Tyler: translator and waiting woman’. English Language Notes, 29, 1–8. Schleiner, Louise (1994). Tudor and Stuart Women Writers. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Sherry, Richard (1550). Treatise of Schemes and Tropes Gathered out of the Best Grammarians and Orators. London. Simon, Sherry (1996). Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission. London: Routledge.

Translation Steiner, George (1992). After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Straznicky, Marta (2002). ‘Closet drama’. In Arthur F. Kinney (ed.), A Companion to Renaissance Drama (pp. 416–30). Oxford: Blackwell. Taylor, Karla (2008). ‘Writers of the Italian Renaissance’. In Roger Ellis (ed.), The Oxford History of Literary Translation into English, vol. 1: To 1550 (pp. 390–406). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tudeau-Clayton, Margaret (1998). Jonson, Shakespeare and Early Modern Virgil. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tudeau-Clayton, Margaret (2002). ‘Scenes of translation in Jonson and Shakespeare: Poetaster, Hamlet, and A Midsummer Night’s Dream’. Translation and Literature, 11, 1–23. Uman, Deborah and Belén Bistué (2007). ‘Translation as collaborative authorship: Margaret

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Tyler’s The Mirrour of Princely Deedes and Knighthood’. Comparative Literature, 44, 298–323. Venuti, Lawrence (1995). The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London: Routledge. Wayne, Valerie (1985). ‘Some sad sentence: Vives’ Instruction of a Christian Woman’. In Margaret P. Hannay (ed.), Silent but for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons. Translators as Writers of Religious Works (pp. 15–29). Ohio: Kent State University Press. Winny, James (1960). Elizabethan Prose Translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Woodbridge, Linda (1984). Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1550–1620. Sussex: The Harvester Press. Wright, William Aldis (ed.) (1904). Roger Ascham: English Works. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wyatt, Michael (2005). The Italian Encounter with Tudor England: A Cultural Politics of Translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

10

Mythology Jane Kingsley-Smith

The encounter between a literary protagonist and a figure from classical myth recurs frequently in early modern poetry and drama, and the moment is always highly charged with a desire for assimilation and a sharp sense of difference and of loss. In Shakespeare, this polarity is most evident in the reactions prompted by Hecuba, the widowed queen of Troy. Lucrece loses herself in gazing on the Troy painting and its depiction of Hecuba’s grief (The Rape of Lucrece, 1366–1568). Where the narrator implies a kind of paragone between the arts of painting and of dramatic monologue, she sees her identification with Hecuba as mutually enabling: ‘So Lucrece, set-a-work, sad tales doth tell / To pencil’d pensiveness and colour’d sorrow; / She lends them words, and she their looks doth borrow’ (1496–8). In Hamlet, however, a speech describing the ‘moblèd queen’ (3.1.505–21) fails to move the prince to anything but self-disgust, signalling not only that widowed queens no longer know how to mourn but that the sons of murdered fathers have lost the capacity for revenge. Alienated from epic mythology and revenge tragedy, Hamlet is ‘[less] an antique Roman than a Dane’ (5.2.293). This need to make comparisons between present and ancient culture was an obvious legacy of Renaissance humanism. As it related to classical mythology, it was a practice hard-wired into the early modern English subject from his or her earliest education. In the grammar schools, sections of Ovid’s Metamorphoses were learned by heart as a stylistic model, but the boys were also encouraged to write letters based on Ovid’s Heroides and ‘to find a rhetoric appropriate to a [mythological] character’s circumstances and passions’ (Bate 1993: 19–22). In the public theatre, audiences were expected to be able to draw inferences from the briefest mythological allusion and to mock those (invariably lower-class) characters who could not (see Titus Andronicus 4.3.80). The mythological self-images produced by England’s ruling class in portraits, costumes, interior design, civic entertainments, and masques further demonstrate the prestige that such allusions might confer. And yet, there were also manifest dangers – not only Hamlet’s despair at the way in which the qualities of

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the ‘antique Roman’ have been lost but the possibility that they might be revivified. The popularity of Italian novelle and mythological fables, in printed form and on the stage in England from the early 1560s, coincided with political and religious uncertainty about the direction of the Protestant Reformation.1 Classical culture was overtly antithetical to the reform agenda. Not only were its sexual mores profoundly different, it represented a polytheistic religion based on anthropomorphised gods. Moreover, the ‘fictional’ nature of its forms of worship and their emphasis on visual seduction were viewed as idolatrous from a Protestant perspective. On the one hand, this meant that paganism could be usefully deployed to castigate (and to create a greater cultural distance from) Catholicism. In the Homily Against Peril of Idolatry (appointed to be read in churches throughout England and Wales), the speaker observes that Catholic rites such as kneeling before images, lighting candles, burning incense, and venerating relics can all be traced back to pagan practices (Rickey and Stroup 1968: 48–54). Like the heathen, Catholic trades and professions have their own particular saint: ‘Scholars have Saint Nicholas and Saint Gregory; Painters, Saint Luke; neither lack soldiers their Mars, nor lovers their Venus, amongst Christians’ (Homily, 47). But whilst this pagan ancestry was used to demystify the Catholic faith, it also implied that too great an identification with or pleasure from mythology might equate to a kind of Catholic seduction. In the early 1580s, ministers in Kent complained that parish churches might easily be reconverted to Catholicism, becoming ‘like a Diana’s shrine for a future hope and daily comfort of old popish beldams and young perking papists’ (Duffy 1992: 583). In the Homily, an Elizabethan audience may have found the speaker’s use of the present tense disturbing when he laments: ‘Alas, wee seem in thus thinking and doing to have learned our religion, not out of GODS word, but out of the Pagan Poets’ (Homily, 47). The following discussion explores further the attraction and repulsion inspired by mythology in early modern England, focusing on the classical but with reference also to the nation-building myths and faerie mythology that often operated alongside it. Having considered the literary and visual resources to which poets and dramatists might turn, we will examine in more detail the function of classical mythology in early modern English literature and the liberties that were taken in its name.

Sources: Literary and Visual As Jean Seznec has shown in his magisterial study The Survival of the Pagan Gods, not only many of the arguments justifying the continued use of pagan mythology but the texts by which those myths were disseminated remained consistent between the medieval and early modern periods. Boccaccio’s Genealogia deorum gentilium (Genealogy of the Gentile Gods) began to circulate in manuscript form in the 1370s, but its publication in 1472 and subsequent reprinting ensured that it remained the standard reference work on mythology for two centuries. Since many of its sources were medi-

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eval commentaries rather than classical texts, Renaissance mythography remained embedded in a medieval perception of the pagan gods, largely defined by a tradition of moral and Christian allegory. For example, Fulgentius’ sixth-century commentary on Virgil’s Aeneid reads that text as a journey towards spiritual enlightenment: ‘it is by the urgings of the intellect that youth quits the straits of passion’ (cit. Brumble 2007: 417). The anonymous fourteenth-century Ovide moralisé perpetrated numerous moral and Christian readings of pagan myths, including that the Judgment of Paris was an allegory of God’s gift of free will to man. It was not until the mid-sixteenth century that the spectacular triumvirate of Lilio Gregorio Giraldi (De deis gentium varia et multiplex historia (The History of the Gods), Basel, 1548); Natale Conti (Mythologiae sive explicationis fabularum libri decem (Mythology), Venice, 1551); and Vincenzo Cartari (Sposizione degli dei degli antichi (The Images of the Gods), Venice, 1556) stole Boccaccio’s limelight.2 These texts represented a more ‘Renaissance’ attempt to engage with the classical sources in their original languages (Conti cites Greek tragedy from the original). They also recognised the use being made of mythology by poets and artists, with Cartari, and later Cesare Ripa, foregrounding iconographical descriptions of the gods (the Iconologia (1593) would be published in an illustrated edition ten years later). That these continental resources remained important to English writers is testified to by John Marston, who satirises his own reliance upon them in order to decipher contemporary verse: Reach me some Poets’ Index … Imagines Deorum. Book of Epithets, Natalis Comes, thou I know recites, And mak’st Anatomy of Poesie, Help to unmaske the Satyr’s secrecy. (Certain Satires, no. 2 (1598), 26–30)

However, classical mythology was also being made accessible to a wider public through English translations of seminal texts, most notably Arthur Golding’s The xv. Books of P. Ovidius Naso, entitled Metamorphosis (1567). English mythographies had also started to appear, if somewhat shamefacedly. For example, Stephen Batman’s ambivalence is registered in his title, The Golden Book of the Leaden Gods (London, 1577), and in a prologue which insists on the superiority of his readers, ‘now living in the clear light of the Gospel’ to the myths’ original audience, plunged into ‘apostasy, atheism, blasphemy, idolatry, and heresy’ by these same fictions. The Metamorphoses found a rather more sympathetic reception in Abraham Fraunce’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Ivychurch (1591) where the fictional, pastoral setting allows the eroticism of the myths greater liberty. Yet none of these texts explains why knowledge of classical mythology had become necessary for a mass English readership by the end of the sixteenth century. To explain the desire to interpret Jupiter, Venus, and Hercules aright, we need to look back to the Italian Renaissance and to engage with a specifically visual tradition.

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In the mid-fourteenth century, Pierre Bersuire had had to apologise for relying on written sources for his Reductorium morale ‘since … I could nowhere find … paintings of the gods themselves’ (cit. Seznec 1953: 175 n.5). But more than a century and a half later, archaeologists in Rome had uncovered ancient statues, reliefs, and coins, whilst the rediscovery and translation of classical texts including Philostratus’ Imagines, the Greek Anthology, and Anacreontea had uncovered an array of new ekphrastic descriptions (Bull 2005: 14). These visual representations of mythological themes, real and imagined, inspired an immediate response in some of Italy’s most gifted artists. For example, Michelangelo would sculpt a Sleeping Cupid (1496, now lost), in imitation of an antique statue that he had seen in the Medici garden. Botticelli’s Calumny of Apelles (1494–5, Uffizi, Florence) was based on a description by Lucian, newly translated and disseminated. The Cupids that frolic across the canvas of Titian’s Worship of Venus (1518–19, Prado, Madrid) were conceived in response to a painting described in Philostratus. The subsequent vogue for mythological themes across a range of Italian arts was promoted by two distinct movements (Bull 2005: 83–5). However, before considering the influence of Italian Renaissance art on the dissemination of Cupid any further we need to acknowledge important trends. The first movement of ‘Cupid art’ was primarily domestic: in fifteenth-century Tuscany and the Veneto, bridal couples were traditionally given wedding chests (cassoni) painted with scenes from the Old Testament but increasingly from erotic mythology, such as the Judgment of Paris, Dido and Aeneas, or Petrarch’s Trionfo dell’Amore. The mythological images in particular were extended to other domestic objects such as deschi da parto (birth trays), pastiglia boxes (receptacles for trinkets), and maiolica (tin-glazed earthenware). Nevertheless, this fashion remained local and had largely declined by the mid-sixteenth century (Bull 2005: 37–41). The more famous wave of Renaissance mythological art, represented by frescos, tapestries, paintings, statuettes, fountains, coins, gems, intermezzi, and processions originated in Rome but became concentrated in the courts of Genoa, Mantua, and Florence. Here, wealthy patrons were found, eager to create an impression of wealth and magnificence through the elaborate decoration of their pleasure palaces and gardens, and the exorbitant festivities celebrating their marriages, civic entries, and so on (Bull 2005: 41–79). The dissemination of mythological themes beyond Italy relied partly upon the rivalry between European nobles who lured renowned artists from one court to another. For example, François I brought Leonardo da Vinci to France, and commissioned Francesco Primaticcio to transform Fontainebleau until it became ‘a kind of new Rome’.3 In the north, the court of Rudolf II in Prague became a second Fontainebleau in its commitment to mythological art, whilst important workshops were established in Augsburg, Nuremberg, and Antwerp (Bull 2005: 84). Nevertheless, the northern Renaissance remained largely indebted to the willingness of its artists to travel: Albrecht Dürer, Lucas Cranach, and Peter Paul Rubens all studied in Italy, before returning to the north to reproduce what they had seen (Harbison 1995: 161–7). At the same time, designs increasingly came to them through the invention

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of the printing press, which revolutionised the transmission of images in the sixteenth century. Many influential mythological artists also worked in this medium. For example, Raphael collaborated with Marcantonio Raimondi to replicate images from his fresco cycle as well as original designs; Primaticcio and his collaborators produced a number of prints based on Fontainebleau; German and Italian artists, including Marcantonio, repeatedly copied Dürer’s prints. In England, it was through northern Renaissance prints that England would be mainly indebted for its encounter with mythological art (see Landau and Parshall 1994: 308–15), though the European emblem tradition would provide another valuable resource. Andrea Alciati’s Emblemata (1531), in which pagan gods and heroes embody a variety of moral lessons, inspired imitations across Europe, including Geffrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblems (Leiden, 1586). These visual expressions of classical mythology were crucial to its success in the Renaissance, not least because, as Seznec suggests, ‘A myth is primarily made of images rather than ideas; and the image itself possesses an autonomous power of evocation and proliferation’ (Seznec 1973: 286). The extent to which the visual image captured the imagination of English writers, despite their more limited access to mythological art, is suggested by the ‘love-in-idleness’ flower of Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2.1.155–74). In a strongly ekphrastic passage that suspends the play’s action, Oberon describes how the diverted arrow of Cupid fell upon ‘a little western flower – / Before milkwhite; now, purple with love’s wound’ (MND 2.1.166–7). The powerful visual appeal of this image (later materialised on stage) encourages the audience to make the connection with other Ovidian flowers, including the pansy that sprang from Adonis’ blood and the hyacinth that commemorates Hyacinthus. Its transfiguration from white to purple also recalls the mulberry of Pyramus and Thisbe (curiously absent from the mechanicals’ play). But if ‘love-in-idleness’ thus invokes the tragic consequences of frustrated eros it does so only to avoid them (endorsing Oberon’s imposition of desire upon Titania and Demetrius, and Theseus’ sexual possession of Hippolyta). For it is displaced to the beginning of the play and redefined as an agent of passion rather than a symbol of love’s loss. At the same time, the flower’s meaning is informed by a more contemporary visual tradition which identified the pansy with Elizabeth I (it appeared not only in her embroidery, but on the dress she wears in the ‘Rainbow Portrait’ (c.1600, Hatfield House, Herts. – see Figure 4), and was used as a verbal cipher for the queen in the April Eclogue of Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender (1579); see Klein, 1997: 477–8; McLane 1961: 13–26). Thus, the flower’s penetration by Cupid’s arrow may have suggested a witty pun on the ‘defloration’ that is itself displaced from Shakespeare’s ‘imperial votaress’, another figure for Elizabeth herself (Montrose 1983: 82). This metamorphosed / metamorphic flower thus suggests not only the syncretic nature of Shakespeare’s approach to mythology, and the liberties he took in redistributing and reinterpreting its tropes, but also the power of a single visual image to summon a range of mythological narratives, to conflicting and often ironic effect. Nevertheless, it is also important to recognise the more systematic approaches to

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Image not available in the electronic edition

Figure 4 ‘Rainbow Portrait’ of Queen Elizabeth I, c.1600. Hatfield House, Hertfordshire

mythology characteristic of early modern literature. In the rest of this chapter, I want to focus on the value of mythology as a basis for historical and moral allegory, before considering how early modern England used it to expand its own thinking on questions of sex and of religion.

Historical Allegory According to Euhemerus (a Sicilian from the fourth century BC, whose work became known in part through the Latin translation of Ennius), the pagan gods had originally been great men: either rulers or those with some particular skill. These men came to be regarded as gods, and were worshipped as such, ‘for it was thought that whatever confers utility on the human race must be due to the operation of divine benevolence towards men’ (Cicero, De natura deorum, cit. Seznec 1973: 287). Whilst early Christians used this revelation to explode the pagan faith as a man-made fiction, in the Renaissance it actually enhanced its status, providing a pattern for contemporary eulogy. For example, the Emperor Charles V was encouraged to see himself as Jupiter

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crushing the giants in his attempt to re-establish imperial power in Italy (Seznec 1973: 291). Louis XIV of France favoured images of himself as Apollo, the Sun God, as is evident from the Salon d’Apollon at Versailles (Bull 2005: 341). One of the many classical alter egos of Elizabeth I was Diana, the armed goddess of chastity (see Frye 1996). In each case, the deity chosen exemplified a particular aspect of the monarch’s public image whilst also defending their divine right to rule (in a reversal of the Christian argument). Yet this was only one aspect of the historical application of mythology. Through the use of ‘ethnogenic fables’ a ruler might celebrate not only his or her own legitimacy but also the prestigious origins and destiny of the kingdom (Ruthven 1976: 9). The most popular source was Virgil’s Aeneid. Not only was its protagonist a prince of Troy who went on to found Rome, his descendants were said to have founded the great nations of sixteenth-century Europe. For example, Aeneas’ great-grandson, Brutus, had founded Britain (an argument popularised by Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae, c.1136), the Trojan Francus, France, and so on. Such derivations not only endorsed the reign of the current monarch, they also provided the materials for nation-building at a time when England was in particular need of a mythical justification for its political and religious isolation in Catholic Europe. In Spenser’s remarkable piece of myth-making, The Faerie Queene, Rome’s claim to embody Troy must cede place to Elizabethan England. As Britomart foretells: a third kingdom yet is to arise, Out of the Troians scattered ofspring, That in all glory and great enterprise, Both first and second Troy shall dare to equalise. (3.9.44.6–9)

Thus a foundation myth becomes a prophecy of further empire-building that is also a kind of political intervention, engaging with contemporary Elizabethan policy by rendering its decisions a foregone conclusion. Moreover, The Faerie Queene demonstrates how other kinds of mythology could be used to similar effect. Not only was King Arthur (erroneously) assumed to be part of Trojan history through his descent from Brutus, he was also renowned as one of the great Briton kings who had defended the realm from the Saxons. Arthurian legend had already proved a crucial subtext for the Tudor monarchy: Henry VII traced his Welsh ancestry to the last British king, Cadwallader, and named his heir Arthur. Within The Faerie Queene, Arthur is not only the ideal partner for Gloriana (Elizabeth herself), he is also the mythical king from whom she claims her legitimacy: Thy name, O soveraine Queene, thy realme and race From this renowned Prince derived are, Who mightily upheld that royall mace, Which now thou bear’st (2.10.4.1–4)

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The poem’s use of faerie mythology further supports its historical ambitions. In Book 2, Arthur gains his first glimpse of the Faerie Queene when she appears to him in a dream, thereby reinforcing his claim to greatness since the attentions of a beautiful faery are a mark of exemplary merit. At the same time, Elizabeth’s figuration as a faery idealises her own rule. In the popular romance Huon of Bordeaux, translated by John Bourchier, Lord Berners (c.1540), the kingdom of Oberon is described in terms of unparalleled wealth, and the faery king himself possesses fantastical powers to bend it to his will. Thus, the land of faerie potentially provided ‘a wish-fulfilment of supreme sovereign power operative outside the boundaries of economic and political structures’ (Woodcock 2004: 38). Moreover, the fact that Gloriana remains largely absent from the poem strengthens her mythical status; even Arthur is directed by an unseen power beyond his perception or control. Part of the fascination of mythological allusion, however, was its inherent ambiguity, the sense that it was always shadowed by alternative (often disruptive) meanings, accrued from other mythographical studies, contemporary fictions, and polemical texts. As Matthew Woodcock has shown, there are bad fairies in all of Spenser’s major Italian sources, including Boiardo, Ariosto, and Tasso, and in The Faerie Queene other female characters associated with the faerie or fay include Acrasia, Phaedria, Agape, and even Duessa (Woodcock 2004: 102). Though the former has often been taken as a dark double for Gloriana, onto which are projected the negative aspects of faerie, the Elizabethan reader might still have read Arthur’s night-time encounter with the seductive queen in terms of the succubus, the Devil disguised as a beautiful woman, familiar from tracts on witchcraft and demonology (Woodcock 2004: 106). The danger of emasculation is also a real one, consistent with the effect of Elizabeth’s other incarnations on male heroes in the poem, not least Belphoebe over Timias, Radigund over Artegall. Moreover, faerie mythology also allows the poem to expose the constructedness of Elizabeth’s identity. We mainly encounter Gloriana through other characters’ narratives about her and through visual representations, such as the image on the shields of Guyon and Satyrane, and the carved gem worn by Arthur. The effect is to make Gloriana (and therefore Elizabeth) appear ‘only as a story or a text, only as something put together or “made” ’ (Woodcock 2004: 112). The questions of truth and fictionality that are intrinsic to faerie mythology potentially undermine its ability to celebrate the true virtues of its sovereign, and expose the dubious authority of Spenser’s epic itself.

Moral Allegory An apparently more secure justification for the use of mythology is the belief that it enshrines fundamental moral truths. The fact that they are shrouded in elaborate allegories is partly a reflection of the heathen’s unfortunate ignorance of the one true God, but also a deliberate feint in order to protect the truth. As Clement of Alexandria observes in his Stromata (5.9):

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all things that shine through a veil show the truth grander and more imposing … those who instituted the mysteries, being philosophers, buried their doctrines in myths, so as not to be obvious to all. Did they then, by veiling human opinions, prevent the ignorant from handling them; and was it not more beneficial for the holy and blessed contemplation of realities to be concealed?

It was the responsibility of the mythographer to unveil these truths for the careful (which often means elite) reader who is capable of recognising their meaning. His endeavour was all the more precarious when he undertook to make the whole text accessible through vernacular translation. Thus, Golding defends Ovid’s Metamorphoses by arguing that the same truths might be found in Scripture (which could even have been Ovid’s source, he suggests). Nevertheless, there is no harm in finding them in this pagan guise, provided we read them aright: If poets then with leesings and with fables shadowed so The certeine truth, what letteth [prevents] us to pluck those visors fro Their doings, and to bring again the darkened truth to light, That all men may behold thereof the clearness shining bright? (Epistle, 537–40)

The morals that Golding finds in the Metamorphoses do battle with its eroticism. Rather than incite the reader to lust, Ovid reveals the tragic consequences of that passion. Thus, the narrative of Hermaphrodite and Salmacis in Book 4 ‘declares that idleness / Is chiefest nurse and cherisher of all voluptuousness, / And that voluptuous life breeds sin: which linking all together / Make men to bee effeminate, unwieldy, weak and lither’ (Epistle, 113–16; ed. Nims, p. 408). The entirety of Book 10 (one of the most popular with Elizabethan poets) ‘chiefly doth contain one kind of argument / Reproving most prodigious lusts of such as have been bent / To incest most unnatural …’ (213–15). Yet part of the appeal of Golding’s moralisation is its refusal to be confined by any one interpretation, enabling him to adapt the fables to a range of different readers. Thus, the tragedy of Phaeton in Book 2 is read in multiple ways: In Phaetons fable unto sight the Poet doth express The natures of ambition blind, and youthful wilfulness. The end whereof is misery and bringeth at the last Repentance when it is too late that all redress is past. And how the weakness and the want of wit in magistrate Confoundeth both his common weal and eke his own estate. This fable also doth advise all parents and all such As bring up youth to take good heed of cockering them too much … (71–8; ed. Nims, p. 407)

Early modern poets who engaged with the moral aspect of mythography inherited a tradition that was simultaneously stable and in a state of considerable flux. That

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they were able to assume some familiarity with a particular moral reading is suggested by how often mythological allusions are used as a kind of moral shorthand. For example, Marlowe often begins his tragedies with a reference that both defines the trajectory of the plot and implies its hamartia or cause. In Edward II, Gaveston chooses to have Actaeon appear in a masque, a blatantly erotic performance by the beautiful, naked boy who will ‘seem to die’ (1.67–70) before the king. However, Actaeon’s fate in being ripped apart by his own hounds was often understood as a symbol of the way in which erotic desire proves self-destructive (in Twelfth Night, Orsino describes himself ‘turned into a hart / And my desires, like fell and cruel hounds / E’er since pursue me’, 1.1.20–2), and it was also a symbol for the dangers of transgressing on royal prerogative. In Dr Faustus, the Chorus establishes a parallel with Icarus (Pro. 20–2) that not only locates Faustus’ crime in his pride, his intellectual ambition, and his use of prohibited arts including astrology, but hints at divine malevolence: ‘And melting heavens conspired his overthrow’. As the example from Dr Faustus suggests, there was considerable room for ambiguity within the moralisation of any mythological figure or action. Indeed, such a tension is often evident between Golding’s Epistle and the narratives he translates. In the former, we are told that ‘The death of Orphey showeth God’s just vengeance on the vile / And wicked sort which horribly with incest them defile’ (224–5; ed. Nims, p. 411), but Orpheus was not incestuous; what the commentary blanks out is his preference for sex with boys and his explicit defence of it within the fable. Furthermore, if one of Golding’s overarching Ovidian morals is that submission to lust brings about its own punishment, this is clearly contradicted by the tragedies of Adonis and Hippolytus, both of whom refuse desire but cannot thereby escape destruction. Whilst mythography often suggests a certain disquiet at, or struggle with, its own moral contradictions, however, it also anticipates the way in which these would prove inspiring to the ambitious, secular-minded author, for example, those neo-Ovidian poets of the 1590s in England who produced the erotic, largely amoral poems now known as epyllia (see Keach 1977). Golding does not give one moral when he can provide five or six, and by this means the text releases a kind of hermeneutic pleasure that potentially militates against the act of moralisation itself since it opens the text up to a range of perspectives, valuing inventiveness over respect for authority. The epyllion’s interpretative enthusiasm is often channelled into aetiologies: fictional explanations for why things are the way they are. For example, love will always prove tragic because Venus was disappointed in her passion for Adonis (Venus and Adonis, 1135–6); at any time half the world is in darkness (or its population is dark-skinned) as a sign of Nature’s grief at Hero’s beauty (Hero and Leander, 1.49–50) and so on. We might see the aetiology as evidence of the drift towards secularism and a more unabashed pleasure in sensuality that is a feature of early modern mythology (Bate 1993: 25), but it also reflects a tradition established by the very moralisation it displaces.

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Finally, the experience of both reading and writing mythography may be intrinsically erotic. As we have seen, one of its major tropes is the unveiling of pagan allegory to reveal the Christian truth, but as Charlotte Coffin (2008: 6) has shown, this translates into a kind of exegetical striptease, ‘whose slow and difficult process makes for increased satisfaction’: The travail ta’en in that behalf, although it have some pain, Yet makes it double recompense with pleasure and with pain. (Epistle, 543–4; ed. Nims, p. 420)

In a comparison of the different techniques of Batman, Golding, and Fraunce (the first banishes much of the erotic material, the second controls it through the paratext, the last locates it within an elite, aristocratic setting), Coffin concludes that although ‘mythographers have different ways of dressing and undressing the gods … what transpires in all texts, even the most aggressively moralizing ones, is the intense pleasure of the writer who narrates and interprets the fables, handling them over and over again in never-ending intercourse’ (Coffin 2008: 17).

Erotic Licence For all the emphasis on its moral and historical functions, perhaps the abiding fascination of classical mythology for early modern England lay in its representation of untrammelled libidinal energy. It was the texts’ capacity to invoke erotic desire through a combination of lascivious narrative and seductively witty narration that was repeatedly attested to, not least by mythology’s detractors. For example, in February 1585, a bill was put forward ‘for repressing of printing of certain books’. In a speech given in Parliament to defend this legislation, the speaker located Ovid’s De arte amandi among the texts he condemned as unprofitable and idle pamphlets, lewd and wanton discourses of love, profane ballads, lying histories, which all tend to the corruption of manners and expense of time which otherwise men would bestow in reading of the scripture and other good treatises of morality or wit. (Hartley 1995: II, 40)

The reference to ‘idleness’ alludes to the fear of the profane and erotic replacing the divine (just as theatre-going was a potential rival to church attendance), with a pun on idolatry. Reading erotic texts is also implicitly onanistic when one might be reading something more improving (and metaphorically procreative). The danger of mythology in its visual form, as a painting or in the theatre, is also repeatedly witnessed. In 1583 Philip Stubbes condemns not just the eroticism of the play-going experience, but the plays’ subject matter: the ‘Heathenical pamphlets of toys and babbleries … [which] corrupt men’s minds, pervert good wits, allure to

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Bawdry, induce to whoredom, suppress virtue and erect vice’ (The Anatomy of Abuses, 139–40). Of these dangers, the incitement to rape and to adultery seems to have been most acute. In Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus, the guilt of Ovid’s Metamorphoses as the source text for Lavinia’s rape is made explicit when that book is brought on stage (Titus 4.1). Though the story of Philomel and Tereus allows Lavinia to express her mind, it is repeatedly made clear that the rape would not have happened without that text. Not only did Chiron and Demetrius know to cut off Lavinia’s hands because they had seen what ensued when Philomel retained this means of self-expression, but the location of the rape was ‘Patterned by that the poet here describes / By nature made for murders and for rapes’ (4.1.56–7). In Middleton’s Women Beware Women (c.1621), the Duke possesses an extensive collection of mythological art that is used not only as a pretext for obtaining a private audience with Bianca, but as an incitement to desire: Guardiano explains how, ‘to prepare her stomach by degrees / To Cupid’s feast, because I saw ’twas queasy, / I showed her naked pictures’ (2.2.404–6). The critical debate over whether or not Bianca is raped or submits willingly would have been partly informed for an early modern audience by the strong association between mythological art and female adultery. In A Mirror Meet for all Mothers, Matrons and Maidens, Intituled the Mirror of Modesty (London, 1579), Thomas Salter condemns the fact that if you teach a woman to read she will inevitably consume ‘the Lascivious books of Ovid, Catullus, Propertius, Tibullus, and in Virgil of Aeneas, and Dido’, thereby becoming familiar with ‘the filthy love (if I may term it love) of the Gods themselves, and of their wicked adulteries and abominable Fornications’ (B8v). The obvious conclusion for Harebrain in Middleton’s A Mad World My Masters (1604) is that if you want your wife to remain chaste she must be prohibited from reading mythological material (1.2.44). However, rape and adultery were only the most visible kinds of sexual transgression identified with mythology. More subtle is the way in which it allowed for a reader’s imaginative engagement with a range of ‘perverse’ sexual desires and practices, including incest and bestialism. The Ovidian account of Venus’ passion for Adonis is prefaced by her being kissed by her son, Cupid, who accidentally pierces her with his arrow. This potentially incestuous frame is reinforced by the fact that Adonis is the child of incest (specifically the coupling of Myrrha with her own father) and by the fact that the whole is placed within Book 10, which, as we have seen, is explicitly concerned with incestuous love. In Shakespeare’s retelling, this subtext is reinforced by Venus’ confusion of heteroerotic and maternal desire: she is ‘Like a milch doe whose swelling dugs do ache / Hasting to feed her fawn hid in some brake’ (875–6). When Adonis is transformed into a flower, she places it in her bosom, as the ‘Sweet issue of a more sweet-smelling sire’ (1178). Thus, Adonis becomes the child of his own union with Venus. Bestialism is another form of lust that classical allusions overlay onto heteroerotic romance. The image of the boar ‘sheath[ing]’ its tusk in Adonis’ ‘soft groin’ (1116) defines the former as the dominant partner in a bestial coupling, even as the overlap

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between the discourses of sodomy and bestiality make this a ‘homosexual’ act.4 A similar layering effect has been found in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which not only the allusions to Apuleius’ Golden Ass but those to the myth of Pasiphae and the bull (Metamorphoses, Book 8; Ars amatoria, 1.295–326) appear to reinforce the physical consummation of the relationship between Titania and Bottom. As a consequence, ‘the unproblematical distinction between human and bestial nature … ultimately emerges from the play as neither unproblematical nor particularly distinct’ (Boehrer 1994: 126). In this respect, the play might echo Golding’s insistence that the Ovidian metamorphosis of men into beasts is profoundly moral: those who do not follow virtue’s law ‘do differ nought from beasts, but rather be / Much worse’ (61–2; ed. Nims, p. 406). A Midsummer Night’s Dream also insists that the same kind of desire may be produced by a husband, a changeling boy, or an ass, a theory it might also have derived from Ovid. The effect of these ‘perverse’ loves mingling with the more orthodox is to suggest a more fluid and diverse perception of sexual desire in early modern England, that ‘sexual love is always at some level transgressive’ (Bate 1993: 60). But one of the most important functions of classical mythology seems to have been the possibility it offered to imagine same-sex passions, intimacies, even relationships. In his study of male homosexual desire, Bruce R. Smith identifies ‘six separate myths of homosexual behaviour’ in early modern England, each of them aligned with a particular classical narrative (Smith 1991: 20). Jupiter and Ganymede is not only the most famous, ‘display[ing] homoeroticism’s public face’ (Smith 1991: 190), it also gives expression to (and provides a model for) the vertical power relations that often pertained to homosexual desire: ‘Ganymede’ became a term commonly used to identify the passive partner (Smith 1991: 191–6). To explain the ‘renaissance of representations of female homoerotic desire’ in early modern England (Smith 1991: 7, italics mine), Valerie Traub also has recourse to particular classical myths, such as Diana and Callisto, Iphis and Ianthe. The retelling of the Iphis and Ianthe legend in particular, from Golding through to Sandys via contemporary romance, increasingly challenges the contemporary assumption that female–female desire is impossible and / or unnatural (Traub 2002: 276–88).

Religious Licence Finally, this notion of mythology as allowing for imaginative freedoms brings us back to the religious aspect of classical allusion. At the beginning of the chapter, I acknowledged the opprobrious use of paganism as an origin for the Catholic faith, its invented deities mimicking the worship of the saints, its invented rituals reflected in the Catholic love of spectacle. Yet this is not the only way in which pagan mythology might be used to comment on contemporary religion. One argument is that the increased fascination with paganism was reflective of an increasingly secular world-view. In particular, the epyllion’s shocking eschewal of moral

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and Christian exegesis reveals how ‘the pagan past permits a new and specifically literary orientation towards religious discourse, ideology, and practice’ (Callaghan 2003a: 28). Yet paganism can also be seen as re-producing feelings of religious affect, particularly in the theatre. Since God had been banished as a figure from the early modern stage, pagan deities had sometimes been required to substitute for him, as they did in the case of religious oaths. Where this substitution becomes potentially transgressive is in a context of worship specifically imagined in Catholic terms (see Taylor 2001). In Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) and Shakespeare’s The Two Noble Kinsmen (1613), for example, scenes of pagan worship become an opportunity for the representation of Catholic rituals, such as kneeling before an altar, burning incense, and the use of instrumental music (the last two having been banned in parish churches as part of the Reformation). Moreover, both dramatists insist on the value of the divine response incurred by these acts (and therefore the power of intercession): Fortune turns her face away from Sejanus; Diana endorses Emilia’s matrimonial future through the fall of a rose. When we consider further that Shakespeare’s scenes of pagan worship in Cymbeline and The Two Noble Kinsmen were all performed in the Blackfriars theatre, the site of a former monastery, in a district of London still associated with Catholicism (Wilson 2004: 5), the resonance of this pagan worship becomes even stronger. To conclude, the signifying power of mythological allusion in early modern literature is often deadened to us (its conceits turned to stone), not only through our relative ignorance of mythology, but through the contemporary success that transformed it into cliché, and the pretentiousness we perceive behind its use. This was a common reaction in the early modern period. For example, in The Return to Parnassus, Part Two, Will Kemp complains that ‘Few of the university men pen plays well, they smell too much of that writer Ovid and that writer Metamorphosis, and talk too much of Proserpina and Jupiter’ (1766ff., cit. Bate 1993: 43). Nevertheless, whilst references to it were sometimes desultory, mythology provided an undeniably rich source of creative inspiration for early modern writers, and a means of challenging the increasingly restrictive sexual and religious orthodoxies of the Reformation. If there was one thing that Ovidian mythology seemed to assert it was that men were naturally made of flesh and not marble.

Notes 1

See Alistair Fox’s account of the appropriation of Italian Renaissance genres, themes, and imagery ‘as a response to a need felt by English men and women to come to terms with the awesome cultural separation from a Continental Latinate system of values – religious, moral, aesthetic and political – that was being enforced upon them by the successive political

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and evangelical reformations of the sixteenth century’ (Fox 1997: 3). For further discussion of their printing history and influence, see Seznec 1953: 229–56, 279–323. Vasari, Lives of the Artists, vol. 7, 408, in Knecht 1982: 268. For further discussion, see Callaghan 2003b.

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Jane Kingsley-Smith References and Further Reading

Barkan, Leonard (1986). The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism. New Haven: Yale University Press. Bate, Jonathan (1993). Shakespeare and Ovid. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Berry, Philippa (2003). ‘Renewing the concept of Renaissance: the cultural influence of paganism reconsidered’. In Philippa Berry and Margaret Tudeau-Clayton (eds.), Textures of Renaissance Knowledge (pp. 17–34). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Boehrer, Bruce (1994). ‘Bestial buggery in A Midsummer Night’s Dream’. In David Lee Miller, Sharon O’Dair, and Harold Weber (eds.), The Production of English Renaissance Culture (pp. 123–50). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Brumble, H. David (2007). ‘Let us make Gods in our own image: Greek myth in medieval and Renaissance literature’. In Roger D. Woodard (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Greek Mythology (pp. 407–24). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bull, Malcolm (2005). The Mirror of the Gods: Classical Mythology in Renaissance Art. London: Allen Lane. Bush, Douglas (1932). Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Callaghan, Dympna (2003a). ‘Comedy and epyllion in post-Reformation England’. Shakespeare Survey, 56, 27–38. Callaghan, Dympna (2003b). ‘(Un)natural loving: swine, pets and lowers in Venus and Adonis’. In P. Berry and M. Tudeau-Clayton (eds.), Textures of Renaissance Knowledge (pp. 58–80). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Coffin, Charlotte (2008). ‘The Gods’ lasciviousness, or how to deal with it? The plight of early modern mythographers’. Paper given at ‘Interactions with Eros’ conference at Université PaulValéry, Montpellier. Duffy, Eamon (1992). The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400–1580. New Haven: Yale University Press. Fox, Alistair (1997). The English Renaissance: Identity and Representation in Elizabethan England. Oxford: Blackwell.

Frye, Susan (1996). Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Golding, Arthur (1567; repr. 1965). Ovid’s Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation (1567), ed. John Frederick Nims. New York: Macmillan. Harbison, Craig (1995). The Art of the Northern Renaissance. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Hartley, T. E. (1995). Proceedings in the Parliaments of Elizabeth I, 2 vols. Leicester: Leicester University Press. Keach, William (1977). Elizabethan Erotic Narratives: Irony and Pathos in the Ovidian Poetry of Shakespeare, Marlowe and their Contemporaries. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Klein, Lisa M. (1997). ‘Your humble handmaid: Elizabethan gifts of needlework’. Renaissance Quarterly, 50 (Summer), 459–93. Knecht, R. J. (1982). Francis I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Landau, David and Peter Parshall (eds.) (1994). The Renaissance Print, 1470–1550. New Haven: Yale University Press. McLane, Paul E. (1961). Spenser’s Shepheardes Calendar: A Study in Elizabethan Allegory. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Montrose, Louis Adrian (1983). ‘Shaping fantasies: figurations of gender and power in Elizabethan culture’. Representations, 1 / 2, 61–94. Rickey, Mary Ellen and Thomas B. Stroup (eds.) (1968). Certaine Sermons or Homilies Appointed to be Read in Churches In the Time of Queen Elizabeth I (1547–1571). Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints. Ruthven, K. K. (1976). Myth. London: Methuen. Seznec, Jean (1953). The Survival of the Pagan Gods, trans. Barbara F. Sessions. New York: Pantheon. Seznec, Jean (1973), ‘Myth in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance’. In Philip P. Weiner (ed.). Dictionary of the History of Ideas (vol. 3, pp. 287–94). New York: Charles Scribner & Sons. Smith, Bruce R. (1991). Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Taylor, Gary (2001). ‘Divine []Sences’. Shakespeare Survey, 54, 13–30.

Mythology Thomas, Keith (1995), ‘English Protestantism and classical art’. In Lucy Gent (ed.). Albion’s Classicism: The Visual Arts in Britain, 1550–1660 (pp. 221–38). New Haven: Yale University Press. Traub, Valerie (2002). The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Wilson, Richard (2004). Secret Shakespeare: Studies in Theatre, Religion and Resistance. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Woodcock, Matthew (2004). Fairy in The Faerie Queene: Renaissance Elf-Fashioning and Elizabethan Myth-Making. Aldershot: Ashgate.

11

Scientific Writing David Colclough

It is perhaps best to begin with a warning. No one in the Renaissance would have recognised the term ‘scientific writing’, and no one would have known what kind of strange creature a ‘scientist’ might be. The field of enquiry we now know as ‘science’ (with all the implications concerning the separation of cultures that implies) was a branch of knowledge (Latin scientia) that investigated the phenomena of the natural world (Johns 1998: 42–4; Rossi 1996). Hence the term a Renaissance writer would have used to describe his or her pursuit in this field was ‘natural philosophy’, and the distinction between its scope and aims and those of, say, moral philosophy, political philosophy, or theology was not as clear as it might seem to us.1 Natural philosophy was, after all, the study of the created world, in which God (the great artificer) and the Christian message were held to be revealed. The Book of Nature was one of the texts (the other usually being identified as the Book of Scripture) through which the individual Christian could know God; in the Renaissance the metaphor shifted from one of clarity and intelligibility (everyone, even if they are illiterate, can read this book) to one of obscurity (this book is written in an especially difficult language or character) (Curtius 1953: 319–26). At the same time, the privileging of the literal sense of Scripture corresponded with an increasing focus on the literal – observational and experimental – interpretation of nature (Harrison 1998). The ways in which the natural philosopher’s claims were made, disseminated, verified, or disputed, as well as his or her place in society, were also in many ways unrecognisably different. While many still locate the birth of modern science in Renaissance England, it is important to appreciate the gulf that separates us from the practice and the writing of natural philosophy in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Only comparatively recently have historians of science begun to take seriously the varieties of natural-philosophical enquiry pursued by those we have been taught to regard as the fathers of science. Newton’s lifelong interest in alchemy need no longer be dismissed as an embarrassing hobby, but may rather be recognised as a part of his understanding of the ends of knowledge. Similarly, the wider life of the natural

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philosopher has begun to be acknowledged as a crucial factor in understanding his or her work. Serious attention must be paid to Galileo’s struggles for favour from the Medici or the Pope when we know how far the desire for advancement may have influenced the presentation or the trajectory of his work (Johns 1998: 20–8). Francis Bacon’s relentless pursuit of high office is of as much relevance to our understanding of his natural philosophy as to our reading of his Essays – even if it simply serves to remind us that Bacon could only be a philosopher in his spare time (Jardine and Stewart 1998; Peltonen 1996: 10). This is to emphasise that the study of context has come to be a key component in our understanding of the natural philosophy (and much else) of the Renaissance. The Renaissance scientist is best seen not as an isolated thinker (or inventor) at work in the privacy of his or her study or laboratory, but as a social and political animal whose attempts to make sense are inescapably conditioned by social and historical conditions. We need in turn, when trying to make sense of scientific writing of the time, to take into account what kind of function the writer imagined for his or her text. No less than other kinds of writing, scientific texts need to be read as interventions in specific debates: far from only being building blocks in the history of ideas, they were written for particular audiences with both local and wider concerns. Even when they appear to be concerned with abstract concepts, these abstractions are themselves often used as a way of conceptualising localised differences and as weapons for assuming argumentative authority (Sherman 1995). However much these caveats might undermine the notion of the ‘scientific revolution’ as a monolithic and sudden shift in thought, it is important that we do not lose sight of the real innovations that occurred in natural philosophy during the Renaissance. New cosmologies were proposed – although it is important to remember that Copernicus’ theory was presented in the form of an hypothesis (Koestler 1959) – ‘new’ lands, and the human body, were mapped, in the earlier part of the period. The work of Robert Boyle, Robert Hooke, and Isaac Newton, published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and elsewhere from the early 1660s, was profoundly significant in terms of experimental and mathematical practice and theory. Copernicus’ De revolutionibus (1543), Gilbert’s De magnete (1600), Harvey’s De motu cordis (1628) and Galileo’s Dialogo … sopra i due massimi sistemi del mondo (1632) were all immensely important works, sometimes (as in the case of Galileo) achieving an effect well beyond that envisaged by their authors. In several of these cases innovation is strangely yoked to conservatism, something that could be seen as a hallmark of most scientific writing in the English Renaissance. Gilbert’s work on the magnet is, for its time, an impeccable example of experimental writing, but based on a traditionally Aristotelian search for a necessary (or efficient) cause, while Harvey’s treatise on the circulation of the blood is, similarly, thoroughly Aristotelian and yet ground-breaking (Wallace 1988: 224–5).2 This apparent contradiction might suggest that the transition from medieval to Renaissance should best be envisaged as a continuum, rather than a fissure: pace Foucault, it is hard to support the claim that an entirely new way of knowing appears in this period (Foucault 1970).

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Continuity is especially evident in the canon of scientific writing.3 In the Middle Ages the basic framework of natural philosophy in the Renaissance was provided by Aristotle’s scientific works, especially the Physics, De caelo, De generatione et corruptione, Meteorologica, De anima, and Parva naturalia. The questions being asked by natural philosophers were also of the same kind: the object of enquiry was sensible matter and, ultimately, necessary causes. But the classification and valorisation of different forms of knowledge was in transition. Here again, Aristotle – or a Christianised version of Aristotle – had been dominant in medieval thought from the thirteenth century, the main texts being the Posterior Analytics and the Metaphysics (Kusukawa 1996: 48–51). With the rise of the humanities in the fourteenth century and the new emphasis on the importance of grammar, rhetoric, history, poetics, and moral philosophy, the scope of natural philosophy was re-examined. The concomitant return to classical sources, which resulted in increased knowledge of the Greek text of Aristotle and of commentaries on his works, meant that the central texts of scientific enquiry could be subjected to sceptical critical analysis; but it could also lead to a certain conservatism. The authority of Aristotle could be shored up by the attentions of the philologists, with critical attention concentrating on textual matters rather than scrutinising basic claims and assumptions.4 Nonetheless, the boundaries of natural philosophy were expanding, with other schools of thought and areas of enquiry being incorporated. Mechanics, optics, astronomy, and medicine (which are, to us, obviously parts of ‘science’) were newly accepted as part of natural philosophy. Similarly, Platonic, Hermetic, Neopythagorean, Stoic, and Atomist ideas were making their presence felt. The alchemical theories of Cornelius Agrippa and the natural chemistry of Paracelsus spread to England, where the varieties of writing and activity were very extensive. This is evident in the productions of writers such as the natural magician Robert Fludd, John Dee, who cast horoscopes for major political figures as well as writing on navigation and conversing with angels, the mathematicians Leonard and Thomas Digges, the chemist Kenelm Digby, the astrologer and medic Simon Forman, and, of course, Francis Bacon.5 Many of these discourses in turn influenced other forms of thought and writing: Margaret Cavendish’s poetry, prose fiction, and political thought are informed by her vitalist natural philosophy, while Hobbes’s model of the state in Leviathan (and his philosophy as a whole) owes a great deal to his knowledge of the work of Galileo, Descartes, Mersenne, and Gassendi. Along with changes in the methods of doing natural philosophy, the growing place given to mathematics (especially important to Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo), observation, and mechanics (instrument-makers are central to scientific work in this period), and the impact of travel and new imports (Cook 2007; Ogilvie 2006), there were important changes in the way this work was presented. Turning from the medieval form of the disputation, where a proposition would be formally argued out in sequential sections pro and contra (a written form of an oral university exercise), natural-philosophical writing adopted more discursive, literary strategies. Much scientific writing in the Renaissance is itself concerned with the struggle to find a proper, truthful, and persuasive means of communicating scientific argument. Can there be

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such a thing as a transparent discourse of natural philosophy, where presentation does not affect argument; and if so, would one want it? How far can rhetoric be used in the course of natural philosophy; and how far is it possible to avoid it? How does one’s imagined readership affect the way in which one frames one’s arguments? Is Latin (the lingua franca of the republic of letters) or the vernacular the proper vehicle for natural philosophy? All of these questions are at the heart of the attempt by early modern natural philosophers to gain credit and legitimacy for their work, and, often, polemically to describe what the task of natural philosophy might be. I want to turn for the remainder of this chapter to a figure who was perhaps above all preoccupied with these questions about the nature of scientific writing, and who also remains for many the incarnation of English science in the Renaissance: Francis Bacon. The latter picture is certainly one to which Bacon himself contributed the original outline; others have subsequently filled in the gaps, often somewhat colourfully. Writing around 1592 to William Cecil, Lord Burghley – Bacon’s uncle and Elizabeth I’s Lord Treasurer – he described the scale of his ambitions: ‘I confess that I have as vast contemplative ends, as I have moderate civil ends: for I have taken all knowledge to be my province’ (Bacon 1996: 20). The famous frontispiece to the 1620 Novum Organum shows a ship returning through the pillars of Hercules, symbolising the limits of the known world: Bacon is rejecting the limits set by the ancients, while associating his natural philosophy with the achievements of geographical discovery – and the ambitions of empire. This is emphasised by his use of the motto plus ultra: the Emperor Charles V’s ne plus ultra given a positive gloss. Bacon had copies of this beautifully produced folio volume bound in purple velvet and embossed with his arms in order to donate them to the Bodleian Library in Oxford and Cambridge University Library, placing himself alongside (and perhaps hoping to supplant) the authorities already shelved there.6 Always concerned to establish his textual legacy, he also asked in his will that ‘books fair bound’ of all his printed works should be placed in the King’s library, and in the library of the University of Cambridge, and in the library of Trinity College [where he was an undergraduate] … and in the library of Benet College [now Corpus Christi, Cambridge] … and in the library of the University of Oxenford, and in the library of my Lord of Canterbury, and in the library of Eton. (Bacon 1857–74: XIV, 539)

Many have taken Bacon at his word, and after his death he was invoked as a kind of scientific prophet by a startling variety of groups and individuals, ranging from the providentialist George Hakewill in the 1620s, through Samuel Hartlib and the Comenian reformers during the republic, to the founders of the Royal Society: witness Bacon’s presence on the engraved title page of Sprat’s History of the Royal Society (1667) and in Abraham Cowley’s prefatory poem to the volume.7 In the nineteenth century he was regarded by Whewell, among others, as the leader of a revolution in scientific thought that led to the modern perception of the world, while his status has been, if anything, reinforced by more recent debates over his legacy. Benjamin Farrington

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praised Bacon as a forward-looking ‘philosopher of industrial science’ (Farrington 1951), while Karl Popper condemned him as the prophet of a misguided objectivity, and Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer pictured him as the arch-representative of instrumental science’s attempt to dominate nature and mankind (Horkheimer and Adorno 1973: 3–7). In his vigorous engagement with, and polemical rejection of, the ‘ancients’, most of all Aristotle; in his attempts to redesign the scope and ends of learning; in his experiments with different forms of text; in his use of experiment; in his advocacy of collaborative research and his requests for state funding, Bacon appears a thoroughly modern scientist. Yet it is as easy to locate significant flaws in this depiction. Bacon relied heavily upon the ancients at the same time as he rejected them (Pliny is a major contributor to the supposedly observational Sylva Sylvarum (1627)); his experimental life remains very obscure; his advocacy of collaboration seems only infrequently to have been translated into practice, and his requests for state funding were uniformly unsuccessful. Most of all, his grand six-part plan for the transformation of natural philosophy, the Instauratio magna, was never completed: at his death he had treated the first part and contributed to the second. Yet it is possible to argue that Bacon’s projects were precisely dependent upon this anticipative or proleptic quality, and that it is his texts’ attempts to provoke their readers into imagining and creating a future with a new form of knowledge that is their greatest quality. I shall try to demonstrate what I mean by looking at two of Bacon’s most important works: The Advancement of Learning (1605) and New Atlantis (published posthumously with the Sylva in 1627). Bacon presents The Advancement of Learning as a preparatory work, suggesting in the hyperbolic dedication to James I that it will ‘excite your princely cogitations to visit the excellent treasury of your own mind’ (Bacon 1996: 122). He is at pains to emphasise that the book is primarily intended to provoke thought (and action) in others, rather than to impose his own thoughts on his readers. Such a rhetorical sidestepping of personal, authorial authority is characteristic of this text, in which Bacon says he is clearing the way for others, and it becomes increasingly important to Bacon’s natural philosophical writing more generally. Near the end of the Advancement, he reflects that looking back into that I have passed through, this writing seemeth to me … not much better than that noise or sound which musicians make while they are tuning their instruments; which is nothing pleasant to hear, but yet is a cause why the music is sweeter afterwards. So have I been content to tune the instruments of the muses, that they may play that have better hands. (Bacon 1996: 288)

The preparatory tasks Bacon sets himself in the Advancement are to defend learning from its detractors, describe its current state, define its aims, and urge their pursuit. He divides the text into two books, corresponding to two rhetorical strategies; the first epideictic – designed to praise or blame – and the second deliberative – designed to persuade.8 In both books Bacon is concerned with the establishment of a proper

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attitude to the past and to the authoritative canon of natural philosophical writings. The defence that he offers in the first book has a place in a long tradition, as does his description of the field of learning in Book 2; and one of his main aims is to establish a proper relationship to such traditions (see Bacon 1996: 577–8). In the letter to Burghley quoted above, Bacon had spoken of ‘purging’ the province of knowledge of two sorts of rovers, whereof the one with frivolous disputations, confutations, and verbosities, the other with blind experiments and auricular traditions and impostures, hath committed so many spoils, I hope I should bring in industrious observations, grounded conclusions, and profitable inventions and discoveries; the best state of that province. (Bacon 1996: 20)

The Advancement is, to a great extent, this programme writ large. His ‘purging’ in Book 1 corresponds to the ‘destructive part’ of the Instauratio, necessary before the ‘constructive part’ could begin (Bacon 1857–74: X, 364–5, IV, 27). In order to praise learning as he defines it, Bacon requires an initial refutation of ‘tacit objections’, or ‘discredits and disgraces’. All of these ‘distempers’ of learning arise from a particular, unsatisfactory way of reading; a misguided attitude towards textual authority. As he writes in Book 1, as for the overmuch credit that hath been given unto authors in sciences, in making them dictators, that their words should stand, and not consuls to give advice; the damage is infinite that sciences have received thereby. (Bacon 1996: 143–4)

It is the voluntary relinquishing of their own ability to go beyond the texts of the past, laments Bacon, that has led readers and philosophers to the state of degenerate learning where they now languish, producing ever more depraved versions of ancient notions rather than attempting to build upon them. In the sphere of philosophy, ‘disciples do owe unto masters only a temporary belief and a suspension of their own judgement till they be fully instructed, and not an absolute resignation or perpetual captivity’ (Bacon 1996: 144). The only way that knowledge can accumulate and progress, Bacon declares, is if writers engage with their predecessors, since the belief that only the best has survived of past thought is entirely fallacious. He explains that even the wisest will choose superficiality over profundity for the sake of the multitude: ‘for the truth is, that time seemeth to be of the nature of a river or stream, which carrieth down to us that which is light and blown up, and sinketh and drowneth that which is weighty and solid’ (Bacon 1996: 145). However, the path of progress via such an engagement will be a difficult one ‘while antiquity envieth there should be any new additions, and novelty cannot be content to add but it must deface’ (Bacon 1996: 144). Reversing the traditional view of history and employing a topos common to Vives, Bruno, Gilbert, and Galileo, Bacon declares that ‘Antiquitas sæculi juventus mundi’ (‘What we call antiquity is the youth of the world’: Bacon 1996: 145), transferring the authority of antiquity to the present, the world’s true ‘old age’. In order to move forward from the present state of learning, it is necessary to clamber above

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the confusion of disputation on the piled volumes of the textual archive; to find his way in the ‘perambulation’ of Book 2, Bacon needs to stand atop the accumulated trophies of learning and survey the landscape. In order to revive learning, Bacon argues, both the manner of presenting knowledge and the intellectual and institutional means by which it is arrived at must be reformed. In Book 1 he criticises current ways of presenting knowledge as ‘magistral and peremptory, and not ingenuous and faithful; in a sort as may be soonest believed, and not easiliest examined’ (Bacon 1996: 147); in Book 2 he praises aphorisms (used in the Novum Organum), which, ‘representing a knowledge broken, do invite men to inquire further; whereas methods, carrying the show of a total, do secure men, as if they were at furthest’ (Bacon 1996: 235). Also in Book 2, he suggests institutional reforms that would be necessary to the reform of learning; he describes the necessary rectification as ‘opera basilica’, works for a king (Bacon 1996: 174). They are concerned with ‘the places of learning, the books of learning, and the persons of the learned’, and include the foundation and endowment of seats of learning; the proper remuneration of scholars and lecturers; the dedication of colleges exclusively to the study of ‘arts and sciences at large’; the ‘allowance for expenses about experiments’; ‘more intelligence mutual between the universities of Europe’; and the ‘public designation of writers and enquirers, concerning such parts of knowledge as may appear not to have been already sufficiently laboured or undertaken’ (Bacon 1996: 169–75). At the end of the Advancement, Bacon declares, ‘I have made as it were a small globe of the intellectual world … with a note and description of those parts which seem to me not constantly occupate, or not well converted by the labour of man’ (Bacon 1996: 299). Although his request for monarchical involvement in the reform of knowledge bore no fruit, in his writing Bacon continued to promote collaborative research and to experiment with ways of presenting knowledge for different groups of readers, especially after his prosecution for corruption, and his fall from public office in 1621. De Sapientia veterum (1609) discovered messages of contemporary relevance in ancient fables; the Latin Novum Organum (1620) presented an inductive logic in the form of aphorisms; the Advancement was expanded and translated into Latin in 1623; the History of the Reign of King Henry VII was published in 1621, and all the while Bacon was writing works of speculative philosophy and scientific polemic to be distributed in manuscript among a select group of readers. He also continued to work with geographical metaphors for the pursuit of natural philosophy; these are combined with his institutional ambitions for the new science in the quasi-utopian New Atlantis. The book is written in the form of a travel narrative; the narrator is one of nineteen sailors, whose nationality we never learn, and who arrive providentially at an unknown island called Bensalem after having been put off their course by bad weather (the island’s name means ‘son of peace’). Allowed by the generous and kindly inhabitants to remain and recover, they discover that the island is immensely technologically and philosophically advanced, and that it harbours an important research institution called Salomon’s House. The description of this institution was later to prove influential for both the republican Hartlib circle and the

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monarchist founders of the Royal Society. The utopian framework soon proves something of a red herring, however. The note attached to the work by Bacon’s chaplain and posthumous editor, William Rawley, emphasises its failure to fulfil its apparent promise, asserting that his Lordship thought also in this present fable to have composed a frame of laws, or the best state or mould of a commonwealth; but foreseeing that it would be a long work, his desire of collecting the natural history diverted him. (Bacon 1996: 785)

Similarly, while More’s Utopia offers a detailed description of the island and its constitution, readers of the New Atlantis remain ignorant of most of these aspects of Bensalem. Rather than being a political work about the ‘best state of a commonwealth’, the New Atlantis is instead a text that describes the ideal conditions for the reform of knowledge and offers a fable about the proper relationship of the present to the past. Its peacefulness is unrivalled; the island itself is Christian, but free of the confessional division that rent contemporary Europe, while freedom of worship is extended to the Jews, who were expelled from England in 1290. It is Salomon’s House that above all demonstrates that the island of Bensalem is the ideal scientific state. This is exactly the sort of research institution whose establishment Bacon had pressed for in the Advancement. Founded by a king and a central part of the state, it provides the results of the new philosophy and proceeds according to impeccably Baconian methods. The New Atlantis is markedly free of personal identity and the knowing subject (Le Doeuff 1995: 62). It is partly this feature that invites a reading of the text as a work about the nature of the Baconian mind in its relation to the past. Bensalem sends out spies (called ‘Merchants of Light’), who visit other countries and study ‘the sciences, arts, manufactures, and inventions of all the world’, bringing back ‘books, instruments, and patterns’ (Bacon 1996: 471; cf. 486). These figures have often been interpreted as disturbing colonialists, but could better be seen as representing the kind of commerce (an exploitative one, to be sure) that the natural philosopher should have with the past. Similarly the texts, instruments, or materials bought by Bensalem’s merchants are valuable, despite being under-used or not even recognised for what they are by its vendors. Although the methods and even the conclusions of the ancients may be inadequate or inaccurate, much can still be gleaned from their works through an eclectic approach such as that displayed by Bacon throughout his writings. The inhabitants of Bensalem thus show the reader how to negotiate between useful and useless knowledge, between the needs of the present and the materials of the past. The reader, on the other hand, is in the position of the sailors: able for the moment only to wonder at the proximity of this unknown land, and at their own position ‘between death and life … beyond both the old world and the new’ (Bacon 1996: 461), yet handed the ability to put what they have seen into practice in their own land. At the end of the work as we have it, the Father of Salomon’s House tells the narrator: ‘I give thee leave to publish [this relation] for the good of other nations’

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(Bacon 1996: 488). Bacon felt that the time was ripe for his reform of knowledge, even if he was unable to complete it himself. He sought out a wide range of audiences for his message, and when imagining the likely success of his natural philosophy he combined almost millenarian hope with despairing cynicism – his will bequeathed his ‘name and memory’ to ‘men’s charitable speeches, and to foreign nations, and the next ages’ (Bacon 1857–74: XIV, 539). But his extraordinary range of interests; his continual search for the right textual form; his skilful deployment of persuasive prose; his vexed relationship with the ancients and his contemporaries; and the totemic status he achieved for such a motley group of followers all demonstrate his central place in any consideration of the scientific writing of the English Renaissance. I will end with a passage from the Advancement of Learning that could as well stand as a gloss on the New Atlantis, or a general comment on Bacon’s idea of the nature of reason and the very purpose of scientific rhetoric: ‘the affection beholdeth merely the present; reason beholdeth the future and sum of time’; and therefore the present filling the imagination more, reason is commonly vanquished; but after that force of eloquence and persuasion hath made things future and remote appear as present, then upon the revolt of the imagination reason prevaileth. (Bacon 1996: 239)

Notes 1

I refer throughout to the Renaissance scientist as ‘he or she’, since although very few naturalphilosophical works were authored by women in the period, it is becoming clear that many more women were closely involved in the production of natural-philosophical knowledge than has hitherto been assumed. See Hunter and Hutton 1997; Jardine 1999: 334–7; Johns 1998: 613–14. 2 The search for necessary causes is described in Aristotle 1975. 3 This paragraph is indebted to Wallace 1988. 4 The legacy of Aristotle in the Renaissance is a highly complex one, and Aristotelianism was

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a continuing and strong influence on the ‘new science’; it is important to avoid facile narratives of its outright rejection. See especially Mercer 1993: 54; Schmitt 1983. On the traditions of natural magic, alchemy and astrology, see Thomas 1971. The title is also a competitive gesture, suggesting that the book will be a replacement for Aristotle’s Organon. On the contexts of Hartlib’s works, see further the invaluable CD-ROM of the Hartlib papers, Greengrass and Leslie 1995. On the complex printing history of the two books of the Advancement, see Bacon 1996: 576.

References and Further Reading Aristotle (1975). Posterior Analytics, ed. Jonathan Barnes. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bacon, Francis (1857–74). Works, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath, 14 vols. London: Longman.

Bacon, Francis (1996). A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clucas, Stephen (2006). John Dee. Dordrecht: Springer.

Scientific Writing Cook, Harold J. (2007). Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age. New Haven: Yale University Press. Curtius, Ernst Robert (1953). European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul (original work published 1948). Farrington, Benjamin (1951). Francis Bacon: Philosopher of Industrial Science. London: Lawrence & Wishart. Foucault, Michel (1970). The Order of Things, trans. Anon. London: Routledge (original work published 1966). Greengrass, M. and P. Leslie (eds.) (1995). Samuel Hartlib: The Complete Edition. Ann Arbor: UMI. Harrison, Peter (1998). The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Horkheimer, Max and Theodor W. Adorno (1973). Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. John Cumming. London: Allen Lane (original work published 1947). Hunter, Lynette and Sarah Hutton (1997). Women, Science and Medicine, 1500–1700: Mothers and Sisters of the Royal Society. Stroud: Sutton. Jardine, Lisa (1999). Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution. London: Little, Brown. Jardine, Lisa and Alan Stewart (1998). Hostage to Fortune: The Troubled Life of Francis Bacon 1561– 1626. London: Victor Gollancz. Johns, Adrian (1998). The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Johns, Adrian (2002). ‘Science and the book’. In J. Barnard, and D. F. McKenzie (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain (vol. 4, pp. 274–303). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Koestler, Arthur (1959). The Sleep Walkers. London: Hutchinson. Kusukawa, Sachiko (1996). ‘Bacon’s classification of knowledge’. In Markku Peltonen (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to Bacon (pp. 47–74). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Le Doeuff, Michèle (1995). ‘Introduction’. In Francis Bacon. La Nouvelle Atlantide, trans. Michèle le Doeuff and Margaret Llasera (pp. 7–71). Paris: GF Flammarion. Mercer, Christia (1993). ‘The vitality and importance of early modern Aristotelianism’. In Tom Sorell (ed.), The Rise of Modern Philosophy: The Tension Between the New and Traditional Philosophies from Machiavelli to Leibniz (pp. 33–67). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ogilvie, Brian W. (2006). The Science of Describing: Natural History in Renaissance Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Park, Katharine and Lorraine Daston (eds.) (2006). The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3: Early Modern Science. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peltonen, Markku (1996). ‘Introduction’. In Markku Peltonen (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Bacon (pp. 1–24). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rees, Graham et al. (1996– ). The Oxford Francis Bacon. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Rossi, Paolo (1996). ‘Bacon’s idea of science’. In Markku Peltonen (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Bacon (pp. 25–46). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schmitt, Charles B. (1983). Aristotle and the Renaissance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sherman, W. H. (1995). John Dee: The Politics of Reading and Writing in the English Renaissance. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Thomas, Keith (1971). Religion and the Decline of Magic. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Wallace, William A. (1988). ‘Traditional natural philosophy’. In Charles B. Schmitt, Quentin Skinner, et al. (eds.), The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy (pp. 201–35). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Webster, Charles (1975). The Great Instauration: Science, Medicine and Reform 1626–1660. London: Duckworth.

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The story often told about print is that the invention of moveable type and the printing press by Gutenberg in mid-fifteenth-century Mainz is one of the defining moments in the history of the West, a ‘communications revolution’ in the words of Elizabeth Eisenstein’s magisterial study, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, ‘that radically altered the shape of early modern societies’ (1979: I, 44). The assumptions behind this story of print have been challenged. Adrian Johns, in particular, rejects the ‘concept of a revolutionary shift to a unitary print culture’ (2002: 109). For Johns, the revolutionary attributes that Eisenstein found in print technology – the characteristics of standardisation, dissemination, and fixity – are not inherent in the medium, but are a function of how printed texts were used, negotiated, and understood by their makers and users. The meanings of print, therefore, are made not given, and these meanings are plural not singular. There is not a unified early modern print culture, but diverse print cultures (Johns 1998). While Johns’s insistence on the cultural construction of print is valuable, his particular approach is potentially limiting in that it dismisses the role played by the technology of the printing press in making print culture. The physical properties of print and the printing press did influence how its products could be used and understood. The model of a unitary print culture is oversimplifying, but the alternative argument for heterogeneity is not without its difficulties, and prompts further historical and conceptual questions: how can we account for and comprehend shared uses and discourses of print across diverse communities and cultures? The story of print is thus complex and contested. That said, few would disagree that print played an important part in transforming social relations and systems of ideas and facilitated the religious, social, and economic changes that characterise the early modern period. As Johns says, ‘the making and communication of knowledge of all kinds depended increasingly on print’ (1998: 60). Print was a ‘precipitant’ of the Reformation. Protestant reformers were quick to realise the potential of print in the propaganda war with the established church and, in doing so, shaped the meaning

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of print. The press was claimed as their own instrument, a sign of God’s grace. John Foxe spoke in Protestant and humanist terms of ‘the excellent art of printing most happily of late found out … to the singular benefit of Christ’s Church’ which would restore ‘the lost light of knowledge to these blind times’ and renew those ‘wholesome and ancient writers whose doings and teachings otherwise had lain in oblivion’ (Eisenstein 1979: I, 304; Lander 2006: 6–7). Print transformed the way that people thought about knowledge and engaged in social and cultural practices. It gave rise to new models of authority and authorship and practices of reading, which, in turn, were shaped by the uses that books were put to. Print culture is thus a product of this dialectic between the book’s physical and technical properties and its social and cultural uses. Print was introduced to England over a decade after it reached the major European cities. On 30 September 1476 the merchant William Caxton, who had already been trading in manuscript books and possibly early printed books in Bruges, opened a shop in the precincts of Westminster Abbey. His press in England was at work by 13 December 1476 and the next year he published Dicts or Sayings, the first known English printed book (Feather 1988: 8–11). Print is a different medium to manuscript: ‘Different kinds and quantities of labour were invested in manufacturing these different kinds of books’, and hence different meanings were produced (Hackel 2005: 32). That said, print did not signal the demise of a manuscript culture – in this sense, there was no printing revolution, given that manuscript cultures continued to flourish until at least the end of the seventeenth century. Throughout the early modern period, there was a great deal of continuity between manuscript and print publication. Printed books were prepared according the same hierarchy of formats that had governed manuscript production: the folio, the quarto, and the octavo (Chartier 1989: 2). Early printed books used the technology of manuscript production and imitated the forms of the manuscript so that the printed book in many cases looked physically similar to a manuscript book (Blake 1989). It even seems to have been a common practice in the fifteenth century to produce manuscript copies of printed books; it is appropriate that there is a manuscript presentation copy of the first English book in print, Dicts or Sayings, that seems to have been made from the printed copy (Blake 1989: 413). Manuscript and print hybrids continued to be produced throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Ornamental letters were sometimes supplied by hand, particularly in the early printed texts. The printed presentation copy of Coryats Crudities (1611) that Thomas Coryate had made for Prince Henry was beautifully finished, and the elaborate frontispiece and other engravings coloured by hand. Books were ‘printed with blank spaces specifically to be completed by hand’, often so the author or publisher could include dedicatory verses or epistles – this meant that the one work could be addressed to a number of different patrons or friends (Woudhuysen 1996: 23–4). Print and manuscript books were sold alongside each other in bookshops, as well as books of blank pages waiting to be written in (Hackel 2005: 28). Readers made a wide variety of manuscript additions to their printed books: they penned marginal notes, corrected errors, added texts, or replaced missing leaves by hand

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(Sherman 2008; Woudhuysen 1996: 20–5). These acts suggest that for early modern readers the book was not fixed and complete in itself, but open to amendment and addition. Critical attention has turned increasingly to the uses to which books were put by early modern readers (Andersen and Sauer 2002; Hackel 2005; Sharpe 2000; Sherman 2008). Different readers and reading communities took part in the making of books by adapting them to their own uses. The marks readers made in books neatly encapsulate the fluid relationship between manuscript and print. The development of a print industry in England did not result in the demise of a manuscript culture. Nor should manuscript publication be regarded as the residue of an older marginal scribal culture that doggedly persisted alongside a new dominant print culture. In fact, the majority of literature written during the English Renaissance was produced for manuscript circulation rather than for printed publication. Rather than print superseding manuscript, these two modes of publication ‘not only competed but also influenced each other, and to a great extent, coexisted by performing different cultural functions’ (Marotti 1995: xii, 1). The dialogue between the two media is aptly illustrated by the range of meanings the words ‘print’ and ‘publish’ carried in this period: whereas these words are restricted to the printed text in contemporary usage, in the early modern period they were used to describe texts produced by the printing press or pen, and even, in the case of ‘publish’, texts circulated orally, by word of mouth (Hackel 2005: 25–7). And yet this is perhaps not surprising, since this ‘was a society’, as Adam Fox has shown, ‘in which the three media of speech, script, and print infused and interacted with each other in myriad ways’ (2000: 5).

Manuscript Publication The production and circulation of literary manuscripts in the Renaissance was part of the social life of the elite (see Chapter 14, The Manuscript Transmission of Poetry; Chapter 20, Court and Coterie Culture). A folio manuscript book might be presented to a social superior to attract patronage, or a single sheet or small booklet of poems could be exchanged with a peer to reinforce a friendship. Harold Love has identified three distinct modes of publication within the manuscript economy: author publication, referring to texts written in the author’s hand; entrepreneurial publication, designating works copied by a professional scribe; and user publication, those texts copied for the owner’s use (Love 1993: 46, 51–83). A representative case of author publication is that of John Donne. Aside from a brief period from 1610 to 1611, when he printed his prose works Pseudo-Martyr, dedicated to James I, and Conclave Ignati, and his two poems written on the death of his patron’s daughter, Elizabeth Drury, The First Anniversary and The Second Anniversary, both published anonymously, Donne kept his verse out of print and even expressed anxieties in his letters over his ‘descent into printing’ in these instances (MacColl 1972: 32–3). By choosing scribal publication, he tried to keep his verse close and limit its

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circulation to a relatively restricted social circle. The coterie exchange of verses bonded individuals according to shared interests, be they literary or political, or within the patron-client relationship (see Chapter 15, Poets, Friends, and Patrons: Donne and his Circle; Ben and his Tribe). Entrepreneurial publication had a different social value and function. Professional scribes worked either for patrons or for the book trade, and they tended to produce specialist texts. Authors could commission copies of their poems for presentation to a patron, and the high quality of the transcription would give the work the status of a work of art. Professional scribes also produced manuscript texts on a commercial basis: parliamentary speeches and proclamations, for example, were copied and sold at stationers’ shops alongside printed legal texts. Manuscript offered authors a variety of modes of publication. User publication would seem to indicate that the text was intended primarily for personal use and not for circulation outside the writer’s intimate social circle. At the other end of the spectrum are the elaborate manuscript books, which shared the form of the printed book, often including title pages, dedications, page numbers, tag words, and so on, and produced either by professional scribes or authors. These books were typically presented as gifts to patrons and were often intended for circulation in the wider public domain. ‘They were “private” ’, as Margaret Ezell has argued, ‘only in the sense that the author, not the bookseller, had control of the manuscript’ (Ezell 1987: 66–8). The characteristic ‘privacy’ that is attributed to scribal publication has particular implications for our understanding of the woman writer’s participation in a manuscript culture. Women ‘were much more active in the system of manuscript transmission than in print’ publication (Marotti 1995: 49; see Chapter 72, Diaries and Journals). Why is this the case? One argument put forward is that women’s gender acted as a constraint on their entry into the public domain of print, hence their choice of the ‘private’ mode of scribal publication. Women, by making their writings public, transgressed the dictum of ‘chaste, silent, and obedient’, which rests on an analogy between women’s speech and female sexuality, and so were left open to accusations of promiscuity. This negative view of women who printed their writings was discernible in the Renaissance; however, we perhaps should see it as the ‘extreme end of an ideological spectrum’ rather than accepting it as the norm (Ferguson 1996: 145; Krontiris 1992: 17–19). The relationship between gender and publication is more complex than this type of repressive hypothesis suggests. The preference of women writers for manuscript arose out of attitudes towards print that were as much class-based as determined by gender. The majority of women who published their verses scribally belonged to the elite and therefore shared the prejudices of male members of their social class towards print. Women’s choice of manuscript, Margaret Ezell has argued, was not due to a gender bar on print, but because of ‘conservatism, the preference for an older form of literary transmission which left control of the text in the author’s hand rather than signing it over to the bookseller’ (Ezell 1987: 65, 100). Manuscript publication did not aim at a commercial reader-

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ship, except perhaps in the case of the class of professionally produced scribal texts. Instead it projects a reading public that is controlled either in terms of physical access to the texts, and the shared meanings that inform them, or in terms of censorship, as was the case with political verses. ‘Private’, as a characteristic of scribal publication, is not necessarily a synonym for personal or secret. Rather, as Ezell explains, it ‘is a “private” mode that, by its very nature, is permeated by “public” moments of readership, when the text is circulated and copied’. When women published their verses scribally and ‘privately’ these texts were ‘not universally available to any purchasing reader’, but they were also not necessarily hidden from public view (Ezell 1999: 38–9). Manuscript could be used to gain and pass on information that was particularly sensitive or privileged and so, for safety, restricted to a selected readership or its origin kept anonymous (Love 1993: 177). Scribal publication and its networks of transmission was an effective means of getting material into the public domain that would have been censored if printed, such as verse libels which viciously attacked public figures. One distinction between satire and verse libels is that while writers printed and put their name to the satires they wrote, libels were only published scribally and were anonymous and unowned, largely because their scurrility imperilled their authors. Verse libels are therefore an example of a manuscript genre (McRae 2004: 32–4). Libels were often more suited to circulation in manuscript in a practical sense in that they tended to be short and pithy, like this epitaph on Henry Howard, earl of Northampton – ‘Here lies my Lord of Northampton, his Majesty’s earwig, / With a Papistical bald crown, and a Protestant periwig’ – and therefore easier and quicker to copy by hand than to commit to the printing press. Libels had a wide circulation, crossing social boundaries and levels of literacy with a facility that argues against any oversimplifying distinction between popular and elite culture (Fox 2000: 302–10). They frequently employed a generalised language of sexual or political corruption that did not require a sophisticated grasp of politics to comprehend the general tenor of the libel, although others did require an insider’s knowledge of court politics (Bellany 1994: 289–92). For Pauline Croft, the ‘multitude of spontaneous political libels’, circulating amongst a socially diverse audience, demonstrates the existence of a public that was becoming increasingly interested in current affairs to the extent that one can begin to talk about an active public opinion that could be mobilised at particular historical moments (Croft 1991: 63, 68; see also Cogswell 1995). It is not possible to talk of a unified, socially homogeneous manuscript culture in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. As the circulation of verse libels attests, individuals and communities drawn from different social classes were able to participate in this type of manuscript culture. Literacy was not necessarily a barrier to access to either a manuscript or a print culture since texts could be read aloud to a non-literate audience or repeated from memory and transmitted by word of mouth. There were more socially exclusive scribal communities, such as those that flourished at the court and in aristocratic households. But, just as importantly, there were forms

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of manuscript publication that were orientated outwards, towards a wider public, and participated alongside printed texts in early modern arenas of public debate.

Print Publication The centre of the early modern English book trade by the early sixteenth century was St Paul’s churchyard in the City of London. There were other areas in London where bookshops could be found, but St Paul’s churchyard was the hub (Blayney 2000: 326). Booksellers had their shops in the churchyard and these were known by their device: Wynkyn de Worde’s shop, for example, was to be found at the sign of the Sun in Fleet Street. A distinctive feature of early modern title pages is the often extensive description of what can be found in the text. One reason for this is that title pages were used in the printing trade for marketing and fixed to the wall or the post outside the bookseller’s shop to advertise what was on sale inside. The woodcut illustrations often incorporated into title pages were similarly an effective form of visual marketing (Bennett 1965: 260–1; Voss 1998: 737–9). Books were sold unbound, in loose sheets, and taken to the bookbinders and clasp-makers who had their shops nearby in the churchyard. The book trade was not confined to London: books were sold at provincial markets and fairs, at shops established in the major provincial towns, and cheap pamphlets were sold by travelling pedlars along with other wares. The availability of books encouraged literacy, which in turn increased the demand for books. There was a rapid increase in the number of books published from the mid to the end of the sixteenth century: in the period from 1558 to 1579, 3,850 titles were published, which rose to 7,430 titles in the next two decades. This figure steadily increased to 9,740 titles in the years from 1605 to 1624, and declined slightly in the period from 1625 to 1640 to 9,680 (Wheale 1999: 6). Early modern books came in a range of shapes and sizes that involved different types of labour and investment to produce and were put to different uses. The great folio volume, or ‘shelf-book’, tended to be used for serious study within a library or read from the church pulpit; the humanist book was a mid-size quarto, manageable, and comparatively portable, and the format in which new humanist works often appeared; and the small and highly portable duodecimo and octavo volumes were the form often taken by texts to be carried in pockets and consulted regularly, such as devotional works (Chartier 1989: 2; Febvre and Martin 1997: 88–90). Folio books – the great bibles and commentaries and scholarly editions of classical works – required substantial investments in time, labour, paper, and type, including expensive ornamental letters (Febvre and Martin 1997: 110–15). Short pamphlets and single- or double-sheet texts, such as ballads, were much cheaper to produce, and this influenced the uses these texts were put to and shaped the emergence of a cultural category of ‘cheap print’ (Halasz 1997: 15). The early modern period, as the work of Tessa Watts demonstrates, ‘first saw the development of a specialist trade in books which were purposefully small, in order to reach a market of potential readers who had been

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hitherto unlikely to purchase the printed word, except in the form of a broadside ballad’ (1991: 258; see Chapter 66, ‘Such pretty things would soon be gone’: The Neglected Genres of Popular Verse, 1480–1650). The print marketplace and a literary patronage culture coexisted in this period, sometimes in competition, and sometimes in co-operation. Both these cultures can be seen in dialogue in the paratext to the printed book (Tribble 1993: 7–8). ‘Paratext’, a term that derives from the work of Gérard Genette, denotes anything in a book outside the main body of the text, including preliminary material and marginal notes. The preliminaries consist of a range of prefatory verse and prose epistles: the dedicatory verses or epistles to patrons, either current or prospective, epistles to the general reader, as well as commendatory verses in praise of the author, penned by acquaintances. Commendatory verses derive from a manuscript culture, and import into print the protective and validating force of this community of friends, who mediate between writer and reader, and construct an idealised readership (Tribble 1993: 8). Prefatory material frequently foregrounds acts of reading, prescriptively setting out how the reader should comprehend and use the book. This physical and textual space, typically at the front of the book, was used for authorial promotion, to establish and protect scholarly reputations, or the ‘credit’ of the author, which ensures the profitability of the reader’s investment in the book (Saenger 2006; Voss 1998). The book is offered both as a private gift, mimicking the exchanges within the patron–client relationship, and as a commodity for sale. ‘[T]he authority of the subject to speak’, Evelyn Tribble argues, ‘has yet to be invented; the writer is not self-authorized but authorized by others, by plural, external, potentially competing guarantors of the text’ (Tribble 1993: 57; see also Dunn 1994). Ben Jonson used the margins of the printed books of his royal masques to provide extensive intertextual commentary on his text. In doing so, he was imitating the glosses to be found in the humanist book, and so importing the authority usually reserved for classical authors to his own text. Jonson’s act of self-authorisation was thus made through the authority of others (Tribble 1993: 140–6). The humility topos frequently employed by writers in prefatory epistles could be used as a stylised form of deference to the dedicatee or to negotiate the entrance into the print marketplace (Saengar 2006: 55–8). This act of self-abasement paradoxically functioned as a mode of self-authorisation. The humility topos is closely related to the so-called ‘stigma of print’. Since manuscript rather than print was deemed to be the proper channel of publication for gentlemen, writers frequently supplied a publishing history in the epistle that related how they were forced to commit their writings to print against their better judgment (Saunders 1951). Like the humility topos, the ‘stigma of print’ provided a recognised trope that identified the writer as a civil, modest, and honest gentleman or woman and enabled them to negotiate their entry into the literary marketplace by displaying their cultural capital. The paratext to the printed book was a space in which early modern author functions were fashioned and writers’ relationship to the published sphere constructed (Dunn 1994). Yet it was also available for parody. Thomas Nashe prefaced his Strange

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News, of the Interception of Certain Letters (1592) with a mock-dedication ‘To the most copious Carminist of our time, and famous persecutor of Priscian, his very friend Master Apis Lapis’. Nashe’s Lenten Stuff (1599) similarly has a mock-dedication, and a parodic address ‘To his readers, he cares not what they be’. Nashe destabilises the humanist paratext, the way it was used to provide ‘social and literary guarantors’ and to make claims to cultural authority (Tribble 1993: 129). John Taylor, a devotee of Nashe, adopted the mock-dedication and parodic address to the reader as one of his authorial signatures. The pamphlet with which Taylor launched his career, The Sculler, Rowing from Tiber to Thames (1612), was dedicated ‘To neither monarch, nor miser, kaiser, or caitiff, Palatine or plebeian, but to the great Monsieur Multitude, alias, All, or everyone’. Coryats Crudities was famed for its paratext. The extensive preliminary matter took up around 160 pages, and consists of an engraved frontispiece and verses explicating its emblems, dedicatory epistles to Prince Henry and to the reader, Jonson’s verses on the author, and over fifty ‘Panegyric Verses’. The paratext has become a book in itself, and was, in fact, republished in the same year in an unauthorised edition, The Odcombian Banquet, without Coryate’s travel narratives. The front matter to the Crudities is an elaborate parody of the humanist conventions of the book, in which the commemorative function of the preliminary texts is flipped over into mockencomiastic laughter at Coryate’s expense (O’Callaghan 2007: 102–27). Print generated new models of authorship. The Renaissance, Michel Foucault has argued, was ‘the privileged moment of individualization’ when the modern ‘author’ came into being (Foucault 1979: 141). Notions of authorship in the early modern period, however, are complicated and qualified by the status of early modern copyright. Modern authors are understood to be the originators of their texts, and this translates into a concept of their ownership or ‘proprietorship’ of their intellectual property. Yet this definition of the author in terms of ownership of intellectual labour was given an institutional and legal status only in modern copyright laws, which date from the 1710 Statute of Anne (Rose 1993). Early modern copyright took a different form that had more to do with the business interests of the book trade than the author. The Worshipful Company of Stationers was granted a monopoly over the print trade by royal charter in 1557, a monopoly that it vigorously policed over the next 200 years (Feather 1988: 15–16, 29). Printing was an expensive business, and stationers needed to protect themselves against competition. From the mid-sixteenth century, the copyright to individual texts was established through entry of the text or copy in the Stationers’ Register. The author owned the physical manuscript of his or her work, but once it was sold to a printer-bookseller he or she had no further rights in the text. The printer-bookseller would then have the text or copy entered in the Stationers’ Register, which conferred exclusive rights of publication. It was usual in England in the sixteenth century to pay authors in kind rather than money, in other words, to give authors a number of copies of the printed work, which they could then sell on or use as presentation copies to attract patronage (Plant 1994: 217–18). The historical emergence of a concept of authorship, which posits a unifying and possessive relationship between an author and a body of works, is bound up with the

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economic conditions of the early modern printing trade. This is the thesis of two key studies of the ‘author’ and the print trade, Douglas Brooks’s From Playhouse to Printing House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modern England (2000) and Joseph Lowenstein’s companion volumes, The Author’s Due: Printing and The Prehistory of Copyright (2002a) and Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship (2002b). While Brooks insists that it was the printing house, rather than the evolution of copyright, that created authors, Loewenstein focuses on the industrial development of copyright, which is itself a legal and economic aspect of the printing trade. In either case, the emergence of the proprietary author is understood to be the product of negotiations between writers, stationers, theatre companies, and others involved in the printing trade. The proprietary author, according to Loewenstein, started to emerge through the acts of ‘authors who found ways to perform functions normally performed by stationers exclusively’. Ben Jonson, the archetypal possessive author, was able to invest the printed book and its author with such cultural prestige precisely because he intervened in the publication of his texts, frequently wresting possession of his plays from acting companies and overseeing their passage through the press (Loewenstein 2002b: 6). George Wither was another such author, who began to formulate a concept of authorial intellectual property very early in his literary career (Loewenstein 2002a: 142). In the decade before his publication of his attack on the Stationers’ Company, The Scholler’s Purgatory (1625), Wither gave an account of a professional, working relationship between the author and the print trade that was crucially dependent on the recognition of the author’s own intellectual labour. Wither makes innovative use of the preliminary epistles before the 1615 and 1617 editions of his Fidelia and his Fair Virtue (1621). ‘The Occasion of the private impression of this elegy’, prefacing the first edition of Fidelia, describes a form of subscription publishing that is financed by friends (Lindenbaum 1991: 135). If a bookseller was unwilling to cover the cost of having a book printed then the writer could look to friends and acquaintances to finance the publication. The venture seemingly was not successful, and the second edition of 1617 was put out by the bookseller George Norton, who placed a new preface before the work explaining how Wither had sold him Fidelia on the strict condition that in the printing of the text he ‘carefully respect his credit’. ‘Credit’ is a word that recurs throughout Wither’s ‘stationers’ epistles and other prefatory epistles of the period. Johns, in The Nature of the Book, understands ‘credit’ in terms of trust in the authority and authenticity of the book itself, hence ‘credibility’ is a synonym for veracity (Johns 1998: 30–3). Yet in this period credit was as much an attribute of the author as it was of the text. Credit as trust or honesty was the basis of personal reputation. An insistence on one’s credit was a means of communicating trust, and assured its audience of the profit to be made from investing in those who possess it (Muldrew 1998: 1–8). Credit is thus part of a discourse of authorial propriety. John Marriot’s epistle, ‘The Stationer to the Reader’, prefacing Wither’s Fair Virtue, can be read as an informal contract between author and stationer – it was, in fact, ghost-written by Wither. Marriot explains how he entered the copy in the Stationers’ Register and intended ‘to publish it, without further inquiry’; however the

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book bore ‘so much resemblance of the maker’, and when he discovered ‘to whom it most properly belonged’ he felt obliged to get the author’s permission to publish his book. These ‘stationer’ epistles are not accurate reflections of the publishing process; instead they construct an idealised professional relationship between the author and the stationer as a model for future practice. In 1623 Wither was offered the opportunity to make a substantial income from the print trade when he was granted a royal patent by James I that gave him the rights to his Hymns and Songs of the Church for fifty years and required that it be bound with every copy of the English psalter (Creigh 1980). The granting of the patent was an act of royal patronage, yet Wither’s vigorous defence of it was an expression of his own professional interest in the printing trade. Stationers refused to comply with the patent since it added considerably to the psalter’s cost. Wither’s subsequent battle with the Stationers’ Company was a battle over competing monopolies – Wither’s and the Stationers’. The Scholar’s Purgatory (1625) formulated an account of the author’s right to his intellectual labour based on a biblical model of property inheritance – the rights to the book should first go to the elder brother, the author, then to the younger brothers, the printer, bookbinder, and bookseller (Scholar’s Purgatory, p. 31). ‘Wither asserts a natural authorial property’, as Loewenstein has also noted, that has a legal basis in early modern property rights, and thus ‘dances on the brink of authorial property’ (Loewenstein 2002a: 149). The early modern period sees the emergence of the cultural figure of the professional writer who laboured with his or her pen. This author function has a particular affinity with the genres of ‘cheap print’, especially pamphlet literature. Literary texts typically metaphorise the material conditions of their own production and reception, and this process is, in turn, mediated by genre. Thomas Nashe’s pamphlets, for example, often situate writers, books, and readers within realms of St Paul’s churchyard, the centre of the printing trade. His pamphlets participate in the commodification of literary languages, a process to which his texts draw attention through their production of vibrant imaginary constructs of writers, readers, and the ‘public’, and their transactions within marketplace of print. Nashe’s self-appointed literary heir, John Taylor, turned manual labour (he worked as a boatman on the Thames) into a figure for his own literary labour, thus fashioning an artisanal and entrepreneurial discourse of authorship (Halasz 1997). Such an array of ‘authors’ illustrates the diversity of authorial types in this period. The first professional woman literary writer, Isabella Whitney, published two poetry collections, The Copy of a Letter Lately Written in Meter, by a Young Gentlewoman: to her Unconstant Lover (1567) and A Sweet Nosegay: or Pleasant Posy: Containing a Hundred and Ten Philosophical Flowers (1573). Although biographical details are patchy, Whitney appears to have been particularly well placed socially and geographically to take advantage of the burgeoning print marketplace. She seems to have come from a lower gentry family, and moved from Cheshire to London to work as a lady’s maid, a position that she later lost. Like other early modern writers, she uses the epistles and verses prefacing the book to fashion an author function and negotiate her entrance

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into the print marketplace. This is particularly the case in A Sweet Nosegay, which opens with a dedicatory epistle addressed to her friend and neighbour George Mainwaring, which asks not just for protection from the spiteful, but also for the dedicatee (and reader) ‘to respect my labour and regard my good will’. Throughout the verses and epistles included in the volume, like the later male professional authors, she makes her ‘labour’ and her ‘credit’ constitutive elements of ‘literary ownership’ (Clarke 2001: 200–1). Whitney’s use of the paratext is extremely sophisticated. The print community that she gathers maps on to household and kinship networks. Once again, we can see the proximity between print and manuscript, as Whitney transposes the faceto-face exchanges of manuscript culture into the forms of print. Yet, unlike the print communities assembled before male-authored texts, this print community is thoroughly domesticated. There are epistles addressed to friends, yet the dominance of close kinship relationships – sisters and brothers – brings the friend within the domain of kin and family. Friends are fellow-poets. A Sweet Nosegay incorporates verse replies from ‘T.B.’, possibly Thomas Berry, ‘C.B.’, and her ‘cousin G.W.’, and so establishes this woman poet’s place within a literary circle. Her brother, Geoffrey Whitney, followed in her footsteps, publishing his A Choice of Emblems over a decade later in 1586. Isabella Whitney appears to have had a very good working relationship with her printer, Richard Jones, who published both her collections. Unusually for an author of this period, she declared her respect for those in the print trade, saluting ‘all the Bookbinders by Pauls / because I like their Art’, in her London poem, ‘Will and Testament’, which ends A Sweet Nosegay, although her greatest debt is to ‘my printer’ to whom ‘I will my friends their books to buy / of him, with other ware’ (see Chapter 23, The Literature of the Metropolis). Jones specialised in popular manuals and poetry miscellanies, genres that had a wide readership ranging from the gentry and merchant classes to the urban artisans. Whitney’s volumes were similarly designed to appeal to this broad audience; they were printed in cheap pamphlet form, and she tends to popularise formal literary genres by adopting a didactic, moralising tone, simple verse forms, and a plain, often colloquial style. It is possible that Jones may have commissioned Whitney to write her second collection A Sweet Nosegay, a versification of Hugh Plat’s collection of proverbs, The Flowers of Philosophy, published in the previous year. Plat’s volume may have attracted both Jones and Whitney since collections of moral commonplaces were popular with readers and so highly profitable. It should be said that Whitney is a relatively unusual figure for this period in that it was rare for women to publish original volumes of poetry. Male writers from a comparable social class, the lower or aspiring gentry, whose books of poetry filled the early modern bookshops, tend to advertise their membership of a wider community of learning in their preliminary epistles. They were entitled to do so because they had attended the grammar schools and universities, and often the Inns of Court. Whitney, in her verse epistle from ‘The Author to the Reader’, presents herself as largely selftaught, ‘though learning lacked’; nonetheless she applies herself to a programme of ‘study’, to ‘read such books, whereby I though my self to edify’. Arguably, one reason

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why there are so few professional women writers in the early modern period is the fact that women were excluded from these higher educational institutions. These institutions provided male poets with the educational capital and context necessary for launching a literary career. Aemilia Lanyer, whose volume of poetry, Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum (1611), was published twenty-five years after A Sweet Nosegay, offers an instructive parallel to Whitney. Lanyer, the daughter of a court musician, had been educated within aristocratic households. A patronage economy underpins her volume and mediates its entry into print (see Chapter 25, ‘An Emblem of Themselves’: Early Renaissance Country House Poetry). Religious and devotional works make up the largest category of women’s printed texts, in keeping with their role as spiritual guides within the household. One of the growth areas in women’s publications in the seventeenth century was the advice and skills book, which included books on cookery, medicine, household management, and midwifery. Although before the mid-seventeenth century the vast majority of these books were written by men for a female readership, after 1640 they began to be written by women in increasing numbers. The seventeenth century saw a dramatic increase in the number of women in print. This was due to the rapid expansion of the public sphere during the English Revolution and, more generally, to improvements in literacy rates amongst women, which gave more women access to print both as producers and consumers as the century progressed (Ferguson 1996: 146–8; Tebeaux 1997; see Chapter 3, Literacy and Education).

Censorship As the number of presses increased and books became available to a wider audience, both the state and those involved in the print trade pushed for regulation of the new industry. The royal charter granted to the Stationers’ Company in 1557 formalised the company’s role in the censorship of ‘scandalous, malicious, schismatical and heretical’ books by involving the company in pre-publication licensing and by restricting the ownership of presses to members of the company, which effectively centralised the print trade in London, making it easier to control. The injunctions issued by Elizabeth I in 1559 required all new books to be approved by either six privy councillors or the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of London, or the vice chancellors of Oxford or Cambridge, if this was the place of publication (Feather 1988: 31–2). In theory, this meant that the stationer was required to take the manuscript to the official licenser to get it authorised before entering it in the Stationers’ Register to secure the copyright. The charter also granted the company the right of search and seizure of illegal books. This right, however, tended to be used not in the pursuit of seditious works, but in cases where copyrights or patents were being contravened or non-members were operating illegal presses. This has led Sheila Lambert to argue that regulation of press in this period had less to do with censorship than with the economics of the book trade, and she criticises the studies of Annabel Patterson and

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Christopher Hill for adopting a repressive model of censorship that assumes that there was ‘a government policy of all-pervasive censorship to prevent all expression of unorthodox opinion’ (Lambert 1987: 1). Cyndia Clegg similarly argues that press censorship should not be seen as the expression of a coherent Crown policy but as a fragmentary and ‘pragmatic situational response to an extraordinary variety of events’. There were mechanisms for the control of the press, but they were not used systematically. Stationers, for example, frequently violated licensing ordinances by not getting texts authorised or entering them in the Stationers’ Register, yet fines were rarely imposed (Clegg 1997: xii, 4–5, 7, 19). For Clegg, Elizabethan press censorship is characterised by its heterogeneity rather than its uniformity; she describes it as a ‘crazy quilt of proclamations, patents, trade regulations, judicial decrees, and privy council and parliamentary actions patched together by sometimes common and sometimes competing threads of religious, economic, political, and private interests’ (Clegg 1997: 5). This line of argument can be elaborated to suggest that censorship itself was multiform: there was not one censorship that served the whole state but rather multiple censorships that operated in the service of a range of interest groups including the Crown, the peerage, and the City of London, and extending to other individuals and communities operating at a local level (Dutton 2000). Censorship did not only operate through the regulation of the press, particularly since books tended to come to the attention of the authorities after they had been published rather than before. Rather, there were other mechanisms, including laws of defamation, which were intended to prevent or punish publication of illicit or scandalous material. The authorities were particularly concerned with open criticism of those in the public eye, such as privy councillors and other peers. Sir Edward Denny, for example, was able to get Lady Mary Wroth’s Urania withdrawn on the grounds of libel. Henry Howard, the earl of Northampton, was notoriously sensitive to criticism and brought a number of cases before the Star Chamber under the statute of scandalum magnatum, which enabled actions to be brought by peers who had been defamed. In these cases, censorship often operated at a local level, in the interests of an individual peer, rather than in the service of the crown, since Northampton was more concerned with his reputation than in protecting the state against subversion. Even so, Northampton saw his interests as a peer of the realm as closely allied with those of his sovereign, and scandalum magnatum was itself an extension of the royal prerogative. From a different angle, Debora Shuger has argued that although censorship was not monolithic, it did have a coherent ethical rationale, which derived from the concept of defamation as a form of verbal injury. Censorship was understood to be necessary in the early modern period because of the social damage caused by these forms of verbal injury (Shuger 2006). Censorship of the theatre, on the whole, operated through different mechanisms to that of the printed text. The main responsibility for the censorship of plays lay with the Master of the Revels. The office had been extended by Elizabeth I in 1581 to include the regulation of the new commercial theatres, and the Master of the Revels was given powers to license and suppress plays and to imprison offending players and

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playwrights. Censorship, in this case, was pre-production in that it was the playbook and not the play in performance that was examined by the Master of the Revels. This meant that there were opportunities for evasion. Plays could be performed in a quite different form than the play that went before the censor, or the text could be given topical inflections in performance through gesture, mimicry, and so forth (Clare 1990: 213). The Privy Council attempted to control the theatres by issuing proclamations prohibiting playing, and ordering playhouses to be closed or even demolished. Topics that would draw the attention of the Master of the Revels and the Privy Council were those that touched on the authority of the Crown, in ascending order: the reputation of the court and foreign dignitaries, foreign policy, and sedition and rebellion. Despite these areas of political sensitivity, theatrical censorship did not operate according to a coherent and consistently maintained ideological agenda: there were ‘no consistent political, moral, or cultural criteria to be discerned; instead, the historical moment determined the censor’s response in each case’ (Clare 1990: 211–12; see also Dutton 2000). There are dangers in completely rejecting a model of state censorship. As a result, censorship can become so anatomised and depoliticised, reduced to the micro-level of individual interests, that the wider picture is lost; or censorship is deemed to be so inefficient that one is left with the impression of a state that is, by default, capable of tolerating all dissenting viewpoints. The early modern state did act against treason and religious dissent, and Puritans and English Catholics were subject to constant policing. As we have seen, verse libels circulated anonymously in manuscript rather than print as a means of avoiding detection and prosecution. Radical political and religious texts during times of unrest, such as the 1620s, were printed in the Low Countries and then smuggled back into England. It is necessary to retain a sense of censorship as a repressive force, but we also need to recognise that it is a socially constructed concept that could be used strategically. The case of the Martin Marprelate pamphlets of 1588 to 1589 offers a vivid example of how writers and communities were not passive subjects of censorship but actively interpreted laws, in this case laws on libel, and formulated models of censorship in order to provoke public debate. A repressive model of censorship first began to appear in the texts of religious reformers and writers such as Spenser and Milton, who counterposed censorship to ideals of free expression and liberty of conscience (Clegg 1997: 170–97, 218). In doing so, these authors began to construct a model of a public sphere. It is in this sense, just as much as in terms of regulation, that censorship is central to the formation of a print culture. References and Further Reading Allen, Peter (1963). ‘Utopia and European humanism: the function of the prefatory letters and verses’. Studies in the Renaissance, 10, 91–107. Andersen, Jennifer and Elizabeth Sauer (eds.) (2002). Books and Readers in Early Modern

England: Material Studies. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Beal, Peter (1998), In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and their Makers in Seventeenth-Century England. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Bellany, Alastair (1994). ‘ “Raylinge rymes and vaunting verse”: libellous politics in early Stuart England, 1603–1628’. In Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (eds.), Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (pp. 285–310). Basingstoke: Macmillan. Bennett, H.S. (1965). English Books and Readers, 1558 to 1603. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blake, N. F. (1989). ‘Manuscript to print’. In Jeremy Griffiths and Derek Pearsall (eds.), Book Production and Publishing in Britain, 1375–1475 (pp. 403–32). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Blayney, Peter (1990). The Bookshops in Paul’s Cross Churchyard. London: Bibliographical Society. Blayney, Peter (2000). ‘John Day and the bookshop that never was’. In Lena Cowen Orlin (ed.), Material London ca. 1600 (pp. 323–43). Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Brooks, Douglas (2000). From Playhouse to Printing House: Drama and Authorship in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bruster, Douglas (2000). ‘The structural transformation of print in late Elizabethan England’. In Arthur Marotti and Michael Bristol (eds.), Print, Manuscript and Performance (pp. 50–75). Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Burt, Richard (1993). Licensed by Authority: Ben Jonson and the Discourses of Censorship. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Carlson, David (1993). English Humanist Books: Writers and Patrons, Manuscript and Print, 1475– 1525. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Chartier, Roger (ed.) (1989). The Culture of Print: Power and the Uses of Print in Early Modern Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Chartier, Roger (1994). The Order of Books: Readers, Authors and Libraries in Europe Between the Fourteenth and Eighteenth Centuries, trans. Lydia Cochrane. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Chartier, Roger (2005). Inscription and Erasure: Literature and Written Culture From the Eleventh to the Eighteenth Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Clare, Janet (1990). ‘Art Made Tongue-Tied by Authority’: Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic Censorship. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Clare, Janet (1997). ‘Historicism and the question of censorship in the Renaissance’. English Literary Renaissance, 27, 155–76. Clarke, Danielle (2001). The Politics of Early Modern Women’s Writing. New York: Longman. Clegg, Cyndia Susan (1997). Press Censorship in Elizabethan England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clegg, Cyndia Susan (2001). Press Censorship in Jacobean England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cogswell, Thomas (1995). ‘Underground verse and the transformation of early Stuart political culture’. In Susan Amussen and Mark Kishlansky (eds.), Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England. (pp. 277–300). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Corbett, Margery and Ronald Lightbrown (1979). The Comely Frontispiece: the Emblematic Title-Page in England, 1550–1660. London: Routledge. Creigh, Jocelyn (1980). ‘George Wither and the Stationers: fact and fiction’. Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 74, 49–57. Crick, Julia and Alexandra Walsham (eds.) (2004). The Uses of Script and Print, 1300–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Croft, Pauline (1991). ‘The reputation of Robert Cecil: libels, political opinion and popular awareness in the early seventeenth century’. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 1, 43–69. Dunn, Walter (1994). Pretexts of Authority: The Rhetoric of Authorship in the Renaissance Preface. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Dutton, Richard (2000). Licensing, Censorship and Authorship in Early Modern England: Buggeswords. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Eisenstein, Elizabeth (1979). The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformation in Early Modern Europe, 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eisenstein, Elizabeth (2002). ‘An unacknowledged revolution revisited’. American Historical Review, 107, 87–105. Ellinghausen, Laurie (2005). ‘Literary property and the single woman in Isabella Whitney’s A Sweet Nosgay’. Studies in English Literature, 45, 1–22. Ezell, Margaret (1987). The Patriarch’s Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Publication: Print and Manuscript Ezell, Margaret (1999). Social Authorship and the Advent of Print. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Feather, John (1988). A History of Book Publishing. London: Croom Helm. Febvre, Lucien and Henri-Jean Martin (1997). The Coming of the Book: The Impact of Printing, 1450– 1800, new edn., trans. David Gerard. London: Verso. Ferguson, Margaret (1996). ‘Renaissance concepts of the “woman writer” ’. In Helen Wilcox (ed.), Women and Literature in Britain, 1500–1700 (pp. 143–68). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foucault, Michel (1979). ‘What is an author?’ In Josué V. Harari (ed.), Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism (pp. 141–60). London: Methuen. Fox, Adam (2000). Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hackel, Heidi Brayman (2005). Reading Material in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hadfield, Andrew (ed.) (2001). Literature and Censorship in Renaissance England. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Halasz, Alexandra (1997). The Marketplace of Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Johns, Adrian (1998). The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Johns, Adrian (2002). ‘How to acknowledge a revolution’. American Historical Review, 107, 106–25. Kastan, David Scott (2001). Shakespeare and the Book. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kiefer, Frederick (1996). Writing on the Renaissance Stage: Written Words, Printed Pages, Metaphoric Books. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Krontiris, Tina (1992). Oppositional Voices: Women as Writers and Translators of Literature in the English Renaissance. London: Routledge. Lambert, Sheila (1987). ‘The printers and the government, 1604–1637’. In Robin Myers and Michael Harris (eds.), Aspects of Printing from 1600 (pp. 1–29). Oxford: Oxford Polytechnic Press.

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Lander, Jesse (2006). Inventing Polemic: Religion, Print, and Literary Culture in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lindenbaum, Peter (1991). ‘John Milton and the republican mode of literary production’. Yearbook of English Studies, 2, 121–36. Loewenstein, Joseph (2002a). The Author’s Due: Printing and the Prehistory of Copyright. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Loewenstein, Joseph (2002b) Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Love, Harold (1993). Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England. Oxford: Clarendon Press. MacColl, Alan (1972). ‘The circulation of Donne’s poems in manuscript’. In MacColl, John Donne: Essays in Celebration (pp. 28–46). London: Methuen. McRae, Andrew (2004). Literature, Satire and the Early Stuart State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marotti, Arthur (1995). Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Muldrew, Craig (1998). The Economy of Obligation: the Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Myers, Robin and Michael Harris (eds.) (1990). Spreading the Word: the Distribution Networks of Print, 1550–1850. Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies. Myers, Robin and Michael Harris (eds.) (1992) Censorship and the Control of Print in England and France 1600–1910. Winchester: St Paul’s Bibliographies. O’Callaghan, Michelle (2007). The English Wits: Literature and Sociability in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ong, Walter (2002). Orality and Literacy: the Technologizing of the Word, 2nd edn. London: Routledge. Pask, Kevin (1996). The Emergence of the English Author: Scripting the Life of the Poet in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peters, Kate (2005). Print Culture and the Early Quakers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Plant, Marjorie (1994). The English Book Trade, 3rd edn. London: Allen & Unwin.

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Rose, Mark (1993). Authors and Owners: the Invention of Copyright. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Saenger, Michael (2006). The Commodification of Textual Engagements in the English Renaissance. Aldershot: Ashgate. Saunders, J. W. (1951). ‘The stigma of print: a note on the social bases of Tudor poetry’. Essays in Criticism, 1, 139–64. Shapiro, I. A. (1950). ‘ “The Mermaid Club” ’. Modern Language Review, 45, 7–10. Sharpe, Kevin (2000). Reading Revolutions: the Politics of Reading in Early Modern England. New Haven: Yale University Press. Sherman, William B. (2008). Used Books: Marking Readers in Renaissance England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Shuger, Debora K. (2006). Censorship and Cultural Sensibility: The Regulation of Language in TudorStuart England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Tebeaux, Elizabeth (1997). ‘Women and technical writing, 1475–1700: technology, literacy, and development of a genre’. In Lynette Hunter and Sarah Hutton (eds.), Women, Science and Medicine 1500–1700 (pp. 29–59). Stroud: Sutton Publishing.

Tribble, Evelyn (1993). Margins and Marginality. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Tyson, Gerald and Sylvia Wagonheim (eds.) (1986). Print and Culture in the Renaissance: Essays on the Advent of Printing in Europe. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Voss, Paul (1998). ‘Books for sale: advertising and patronage in late Elizabethan England’. Sixteenth Century Journal, 29, 733–56. Voss, Paul (2003). ‘Printing conventions and the early modern play’. Medieval and Renaissance Drama, 15, 98–115. Wall, Wendy (1993). The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Watts, Tessa (1991). Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wheale, Nigel (1999). Writing and Society: Literacy, Print and Politics in Britain, 1590–1660. London: Routledge. Woudhuysen, H. R. (1996). Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts, 1558–1640. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Early Modern Handwriting Grace Ioppolo

Early Modern Hands Early modern writers used a wide variety of handwriting styles, dependent on the type of text they were writing or copying out. The basic ‘hand’ (or handwriting) was ‘secretary’, so named because it had been used in the early Tudor period by royal secretaries transcribing official documents and decrees. According to the writing master Martin Billingsley in The Pen’s Excellency (1618), there were three types of secretary hand: ‘set’, ‘facile’, and ‘fast’, as well as several other hands, including ‘bastard-secretary or text’, Roman, Italian (or italic), court (used in the courts of the Kings Bench and Common Pleas), and Chancery (used in the Chancery Court). Other hands used for specialised documents included those for the King’s Remembrancer and the Pipe Office. In addition, continental hands were also taught to the English, as noted by John de Beau Chesne and John Baildon in their handwriting manuals (1571 and later), including French secretary and simpler French, Spanish, high and low Dutch hands, and the more specialised ‘reversed hand’ (with letters written backwards), ‘letter entrelace’ (with intertwined letters), ‘letter coupée’ (with letters struck through in the middle) and the ‘small glossing hand’ (used for decoration). But as Billingsley explained, the ‘rounded’ facile secretary was the only ‘usual hand of England’, with the more ‘square’ set secretary reserved for formal documents, and bastard-secretary used for engrossments (text written out in large letters, as in the first lines of legal documents), epitaphs, tombs, and book titles. Given the ways in which each hand was supposed to be reserved for a particular kind of text, it is not unusual to find that, within one document, a single writer may have copied out text in two or more styles of hand. For example, in a play manuscript, the writer, by convention, would write act-scene notations, entrance and exit directions, and speech-prefixes in italic hand (often used in the period for some form of emphasis), with the dialogue in secretary hand. A muniment, deed, or other legal document setting out ownership or other rights could have bastard-secretary in the

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opening text, with set secretary, and italic as appropriate, in the rest of the document. By the beginning of the seventeenth century, however, many authors began to mix italic letter-forms, which were much easier to write, into their secretary hands, with the result that ‘mixed’ hands began to dominate. By the mid-seventeenth century, italic hands using only a few secretary letters predominate, so that a kind of rounded italic hand, from which modern handwriting developed, became the standard. This was not the case for professional scribes, who were paid to be exceptionally formal and neat, as they usually adhered to the types of rules and conventions noted by Billingsley and other writing instructors or ‘penmen’ as they were termed. In fact, in his manual The Pen’s Triumph (1658), Edward Cocker, a long-experienced ‘teacher of the art of writing’, decries the sloppiness that had entered into the teaching and use of handwriting and insists that ‘running’ or ‘coursary’ secretary, which is equivalent to Billingsley’s facile hand, could still be used properly. Cocker discusses the physical difficulty of writing any of the secretary styles, advising the writer not to affect ‘a conjunction of Letters in the writing of this hand, but rather that every Letter thereof be made distinctly by it self, unless they run naturally one to another’ (sigs. B1v–B4r). In this period, middle-class or aristocratic men, those most usually taught to read and write, were thought capable of mastering all the various hands, but in actual practice, unless they were scribes, men were at least taught to write at least a standard secretary and an italic hand. Yet women were most commonly taught, as Billingsley notes, Roman or Italian hand, suitable for the type of occasional writing that women were supposed to do, rather than the daily writing represented by secretary hand. However, given the number of women responding in italic or Roman hand to letters or documents written by men in secretary hand, middle-class and aristocratic women were certainly taught to read secretary hand if not to write it. Billingsley suggests that, due to its elaborate flourishes and embellished letterforms, secretary hand can shrewdly obscure the most artful and mysterious content. He claims that ‘whosoever doth practise it (according to the true nature of it) shall perceive therein many secret and subtill passages of the hand, which few, but those that have bin well grounded therein by a true Artist, are able to comprehend’, as it ‘imports some things in it that are not easily to be found out’ (sig. C3v). Indeed, in The Pen’s Triumph (1659), Edward Cocker notes of running secretary hand that ‘nothing is a greater Ornament to such hands, then a spacious field, as it were, wherein the wanton Meandrings and spreading plumes of each Letter may be fairly blazon’d’ (sig. C3r). That emblazoned, ornamental, and potentially subversive secretary hand is the province of men only becomes clear in Billingsley’s discussion in The Pen’s Excellency of Roman hand which is conceived to be the easiest hand that is written with Pen, and to be taught in the shortest time: Therefore it is usually taught to Women, forasmuch as they (having not the patience to take any great paines, besides Phantasticall and Humorsome) must be taught that which they may instantly learne; otherwise they are uncertaine of their

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proceedings, because their minds are (upon light occasion) easily drawne from the first revolution. (sig. C4r)

Without delving into issues of gender in The Pen’s Triumph, Cocker more fully discusses the characteristics of Roman hand, which is written ‘on the form of a Circle’: ‘All letters must carry with them a visible rotundity. It is not proper for the Letters to joyn, it being derived from a hand originally disjunctive’. More specifically, ‘The items should be thrice the length of their Bodies, and some shall matter more; the distance of lines for this hand must be so much as a stem in length, and about half the depth of the round letters’ (sig. D1v). Italic hand, according to both Billingsley and Cocker, only slightly differs from Roman in that, rather than using ‘rounded’ letters as in Roman hand, italic uses ‘squared’ letters; in practice the two hands are often indistinguishable in the early modern period. Noticeable in both penmen’s discussions of Roman and italic hands is the lack of subtlety, intrigue, and subversion that is inherent in secretary hand. The teaching of secretary hand was intended to create a uniform handwriting style that would be legible to all readers and writers. Inevitably, some authors wrote a careless or sloppy form of it, especially in the act of composing, or they failed strictly to conform to all the standard letter forms. This was not true for professional scribes, who were paid to transcribe a new or an existing document, as well as a spare copy of it. In fact scriptoria, that is, businesses employing scribes for short- or long-term hire, were available throughout London, and some scribes specialised in particular types of documents, such as muniments or legal depositions. At least two scribes, Edward Knight and Ralph Crane, were known to have worked with acting companies to produce theatrical ‘books’ (or prompt-books) or some other fair copy of a play-text, including presentation copies given to patrons. The company ‘book-holder’ would also probably be responsible for preparing not just the book but the ‘parts’ (actor’s scripts of their own lines) and ‘plots’ (summaries of entrance and exit directions for each play performed). Other scribes worked with poets or prose writers, and some scribes, such as Peter Bales and William Panke, were celebrated for their skill. Scribes were indeed considered professionals and they commanded fairly standard fees. In the diary he kept from 1617 to 1622, the great actor Edward Alleyn records all of his expenses for paying scribes to copy legal documents. For example, in 1618, he paid 2 shillings for two ‘fayer’ (or fair, as opposed to ‘foul’ or draft) copies of a ‘bill’ or official deed, with an extra fee for ‘engrossing’ it, that is, having the scribe prepare the final, official version. Alleyn also notes that he paid scribes between 8 and 12 pence a page for longer documents, and he apparently built up a number of relationships with particular scribes, even agreeing to bail one from debtor’s prison.

The Secretary Alphabet The top half of Figure 5 shows the ‘secretarie Alphabete’, with its elaborate majuscule letters, particularly A, E, H, R, S, and Y. The letters J and j do not appear as if they

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Image not available in the electronic edition

Figure 5 Woodcut engraving of ‘The secretarie Alphabet’ from A Book Containing Divers Sortes of Hands by John De Beau Chesne and John Baildon (1571). British Library, London

are usually interchangeable with I and i at this time, although i can be written as j, particularly at the end of Roman numerals, as in the number xiij (13). Some of the minuscule letters are so elaborate that they are illegible to modern readers. This is especially true for the first small a (called a ‘spurred’ a due to the diagonally slanted and extended line on its left side) and for d, f, g, h, k, m, n, r, s (including ‘long’ s), t, v, w, and z. While modern writers are taught to write their capital letters so that flourishes remain well above the line (as in modern italic R), many capital secretary letters descend below the line (as in secretary R). Even more noticeable is the number of secretary small letters with flourishes above or below the line (as in secretary h). These flourishes could partially or wholly obscure letters on lines above or below them or even letters on either side of them. Some of the small secretary letters are stylised and distinct, such as the h or d (especially if used at the beginning or end of a word), but other letters could easily be confused or misread. A small f is often indistinguishable from a long s, especially if the writer did not ensure that the horizontal bar on the long s protruded on the right side through the vertical one. As with modern hand-writers, many early modern writers were not particularly careful in forming letters. Both f and long s could be nearly identical to a t or l, especially if the writer gave his t or l a too short ‘ascender’ (or upward stroke). As Cocker notes, ‘sometimes in the making of a secretary f, t, or

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k, you must hold [the pen] as for a downright stroke [or ‘descender’], when you make the blot or right line through those letters. Let not your Breast lie on the Desk you write on, nor your Nose on the Paper, but sit in as majestical a posture as you can’ (The Pen’s Triumph, B3v). As the writing master who signs himself ‘E.B.’ recommends, Leaue between each word a small letters space, That faire and seemly your hand may be read, Keepe euen your letters at foote and at head, With distance alike between letter and letter, One out of others shewes much the better. (A2v)

Some writers appear not to have heeded this kind of advice, as their hands produce letter forms that were indistinct or illegible, probably even to a trained scribe. Some forms in this alphabet, by convention, are to be used in the initial or medial position in a word rather than in the final position, as in the case for s, with the long s (the uncrossed f ) used in initial or medial position and another s, which looks like an upside-down italic e, used at the end of the word. In addition, u was often not used in initial position but in the medial one, with v used mostly for the primary letter (although these particular distinctions began to drop out of seventeenth-century handwriting). Thus cup would be written as cup but up as vp, and very as very but every as euery. In addition, some secretary letter-forms signalled standard abbreviations, including a capital or small p with a bar or cross-stroke at its descender which served as an abbreviation for per or pro or par. Thus the word parish could be spelled pish. A tilde (∼) or macron (-), or some mark approximating either, placed over a letter signified that another letter, particularly m, had been omitted in the word. So, for example, common could be written as comon with a macron or tilde over the m, as with the, with one of the same marks over the e to signify them. In practice nearly any missing letter could be represented by a macron or tilde. However, this distinction also began to die out in the seventeenth century, probably because it took as much effort to lift the pen to write a macron or tilde as to keep the pen in place and write out the missing letter. There are a number of other common variants from the forms listed in Figure 5, including an elongated italic-looking e to represent es or is and ye and yt for the and that, with y carried from the Anglo-Saxon ‘thorn’ (þ) which represented th. Other abbreviations using superscript letters include Mr (for Master) and Mris (for Mistress), Sr (for Sir), wth and wt (for with), wch and wh (for which), and yr and yu (for your and you). Among numerous other abbreviations, etc. could be abbreviated as &c, with the ampersand also used alone in place of and, even in the most formal and important documents. The words Letter and letters were often abbreviated as lre and lres. Those keeping financial accounts used their own system of abbreviations, such as rd for received and pd for paid. Even memorandum could be abbreviated as

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md. Proper names could also be abbreviated, including Robert as Ro, William as Wm, and Thomas as Tho. These abbreviations are sometimes punctuated with a colon (:) after the last or below the superscript letter, as in yu:. In effect, any type of word could be abbreviated; for example yr LL: (or yr ll:) was a common abbreviation for your Lordships, also abbreviated as LLshps, and Ladyship, for example, as Lapp. An abbreviated word did not signal that it had carried less honour, status, or formality than non-abbreviated words, for even the monarch was addressed in standard abbreviated letter forms. For example, in his private letters, Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex, frequently addressed Queen Elizabeth as ‘yr matie’ (‘your Majestie’), as did other petitioners, even those with whom she did not have a personal relationship. Scribally written petitions to court figures such as privy councillors also contained abbreviations, and it goes without saying that personal letters between friends, relatives, and especially lovers contained non-standard abbreviations. Ciphers used to disguise names or identities also appear in personal letters and other manuscripts of the period, even from a subject such as Lady Penelope Rich when writing in the 1590s to King James VI of Scotland about his supporters in her social circle. But ciphers are more commonly found in official documents, particularly those concerning national security. All these variants in unusual letter forms, abbreviations, and superscript letters could perplex or confuse a contemporary reader of secretary hand. Also problematic are ‘minim’ letters – short vertical lines that were not connected with horizontal strokes. While some authors would formally write a letter like n or m using the secretary form in Figure 5, others would use a series of minims with no linkage between the vertical lines. Two minims in a row could signify an n or a u (or ii if the author did not dot them; in many cases the dot appears over the preceding or following letter and not over the i). Three minims in a row could signify an m, w, ni, in, iu, ui, or iii, among other combinations of letters. As Cocker points out, writing out as well as reading lines of text in secretary hand, with its elaborate flourishes and embellishments, particularly in capital letters, required a great deal more time and energy than italic hand. For this reason, writers began to adopt a mixed secretary hand, particularly using italic form for the letters that were the most elaborate or troublesome in secretary hand for majuscules such as C, S, T and minuscules such as c, h, f, r, s, and medial and final e. In fact, these latter minuscule letters are most frequently capitalised when they appear at the beginning of a word, simply because their majuscules are much easier to read. For this reason, capitalisation often seems arbitrary or haphazard in secretary hand, but in fact it usually has some relation to how much more difficult it would be to distinguish a c, for example, in the primary position in a word instead of C. As italic hand was used to imitate ancient Roman texts, the letters are unlinked and clear, and thus look neater and more regular on the page. These letter forms are also less inclined to carry over on to, and to obscure, a letter on the previous line with an ascender or the next line with a descender. Knowing that certain letters, such as f and long s or l and t, could be confused may explain particular cruxes in printed texts. For example, so spelled with a long s could be

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confused with to, and perhaps only the context of the sentence or passage could determine the correct word. But blaming the illegibility of secretary hand for a crux is not always possible, especially if the letters were too distinct to be mistaken for other letters.

Punctuation and Spelling In combination, unclear or imprecise letter forms, abbreviations, as well as punctuation and spelling could have a major impact on the ways in which an early modern text was transmitted from manuscript to print or even recopied and circulated in manuscript form. The use of punctuation was much different from the modern age, in which writers usually adhere to the same rules, such as a period at the end of a complete sentence, a comma to separate certain clauses or modifiers, and a colon to introduce a proposition. Early modern writers used much lighter punctuation, and when they did punctuate, they were often inconsistent. Judging from extant literary texts, authors often failed to use any punctuation to mark the end of a complete sentence, especially if it concluded at the end of a line of text. If writers do use punctuation at the end of a sentence or line it was often not a period (.) but a colon (:), semi-colon (;) or virgule (/). Question marks (?) are often used interchangeably with exclamation marks (!). A hyphen was sometimes represented by an equals sign (=), especially at the end of a line, rather than a short dash (-). However, when correcting, rather than composing, authors could insist on heavy punctuation. Thomas Middleton apparently used pencil to correct a partly scribal transcript of A Game at Chess by adding commas and other punctuation marks on nearly every line as well as to correct a few words in the portions of the text not in his own hand. However, he may not have been typical, as he was clearly correcting a scribal copy of his own work. Scribes often slavishly transcribed punctuation as they saw it (perhaps in anticipation of the author making corrections while proofreading), although more experienced scribes, particularly those like Ralph Crane, who appeared to specialise in literary transcripts, took great pains to regularise punctuation, as in Crane’s transcript of Measure for Measure, which seems to have served as printer’s copy for the 1623 Folio text of the play. However, in regularising such features, scribes do not appear to be working independently but are following the directions of those with whom they worked. For example, Crane appears to have collaborated with Middleton in making copies of A Game at Chess in the summer and autumn of 1624. Scribes generally do not tend to emend the text they are copying but to regularise its format and technical features. In addition, as spelling was not yet standardised, early modern authors had no single, indisputable reference guide by which to check spelling and from which they could not deviate. Writers may have been taught to use the spellings already available in texts they had studied but they frequently adopted idiosyncratic spellings, sometimes based on phonetic pronunciation. In the case of homonyms such as ‘there’, ‘their’, and ‘they’re’, all three words could be spelled in the same way, as ‘theere’,

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‘thier’, ‘theire’, or ‘theyre’, for example, or in any variety of ways at any given time. The meanings of such words could be distinguishable only by their context and not by spelling alone, and in some cases they would be entirely indistinguishable. R. B. McKerrow argued that a writer of this period chooses one particular spelling of a word and ‘sticks to it’, so that ‘the more a man writes the more would his spelling tend to become fixed’. However, there are numerous examples of precisely the opposite. In fact, inconsistent spelling is so common in literary and historical manuscripts that any spelling of any word is possible. For example, in his diary, Edward Alleyn, records his activities on ‘Easter daye’ 1620 in this way: ‘we Receued ye Comion wt mr Robinsone & his wife & all ye pore excepting aylec man whoe for incharitye wase put by by mr Harrisone this daye ye chapple wase furnished wt basone and candell sticks ye children wt surplices & ye fellowes allsoe’. In other words, Alleyn and his wife Joan received Communion with Mr Robinson and his wife and all the poor, excepting Alec’s(?) man, or servant, who for his lack of charity was put out by Mr Harrison. On the same day, the chapel at Dulwich College was furnished with a basin and candlesticks, and the children and fellows (i.e. college students and instructors) were given surplices for the ceremony. However, Alleyn does not ‘stick’ with these spellings, capitalisations, or the lack of clear punctuation, but varies them throughout his diary, memorandum-book and miscellaneous receipts, deeds and correspondence. Thus, not just spelling but syntax, punctuation and capitalisation could be highly idiosyncratic and inconsistent, so Alleyn’s writing is not symptomatic of an illiterate or uneducated man. Authors such as Heywood, Dekker, Munday, and Middleton show the same sorts of inconsistencies in their autograph manuscripts, and even in the spellings of their own names, with Dekker’s variously spelled ‘Dickers’, ‘Deckers’, ‘Deckkers’, and ‘Dyckers’, and Heywood’s as ‘Hawode’, ‘Hewod’, ‘Hewode’, and ‘Hewwod’ in entries in Henslowe’s papers that Dekker and Heywood witnessed. As the pronunciation of vowels was shifting during the early modern period, applying modern pronunciation to any vowel of this period may result in mispronunciation, so that any of these spellings may have effectively captured the sound of the names. That early modern women were less competent at spelling than men is a generalisation that does not always prove true. Frances Devereux, the daughter of Sir Francis Walsingham, and married to Sir Philip Sidney and later to Robert Devereux, second earl of Essex, does seem to have had no standard against which to check her spelling, telling Essex in a 1599 autograph letter, ‘I haue had the good fortune to reseue [receive] to lettars from you. the forst came when I wase so seke [sick] that I could not spake wth mr darei wch braft [brought] it’. Possibly her recent sickness has affected her ability to answer confidently the two letters she has received from her husband, although as she knew that this letter would be passed to her husband through Robert Cecil, she may have had her own reasons for appearing so unclear. However, Essex, a voracious reader of literature who patronised numerous poets and was a poet himself, was sometimes no more adept in his spelling, as in this remark to Queen Elizabeth in a 1592 autograph letter from the French battlefield: “Att my departure I had a restlesse desir honestly to disingage myself from this french action. in my absence I

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conceaue an absurd hope to do somthing thatt shall make me worthy of the name of yr seruant.’ In short, phonetic or inconsistent spelling in early modern handwriting is no indisputable marker of class, education, or gender. Many male authors used both a separate secretary and an italic hand, with secretary hand used for composing, that is, cursive or fluent writing, and italic for more formal copying. While it is usual to see this formal use of italic in scribal manuscripts, especially in copies of reading texts to be presented to patrons or clients, authors in the act of composing frequently use one standard hand throughout the text, as switching between two hands could easily disrupt the train of thought. Thus, composing authors might have been somewhat careless about their handwriting, punctuation, spelling, and the usual conventions of particular hands, especially if they made their own fair copy of foul papers, or if they knew that they would employ a scribe to do so. An author would be assumed to be making decisions and changes in the act of writing foul papers or fair copies, thereby introducing further errors or problems into the text during composition; a scribe would be paid to do the opposite. In practice, some writers like Essex and Ben Jonson used a single and predominantly italic hand, even in writing formal letters to monarchs or court officials or presentation or commissioned transcripts, as well as inscriptions in printed books. In a letter to Robert Cecil asking for release from jail for writing Eastward Ho, Jonson’s cursive hand is largely italic but with some secretary letters, and no example of a literary text written by Jonson entirely in secretary hand appears to survive. Most likely, Jonson, who seemed to be fastidious about the visual representation of his work, even proofreading his texts as they were printed, abandoned whatever secretary hand he had learned and concentrated on a more calligraphic italic hand. Each writer’s hand, whether secretary or italic, could change over time, as any complete archive, such as that of Henslowe and Alleyn at Dulwich College, demonstrates. Jonson’s hand altered somewhat after 1626, when he began to suffer from palsy. Some writers used a hand that was entirely or predominantly italic for all their writing, although such a hand did not guarantee legibility, as in the case of Middleton, whose failure to form completely many italic letters often renders his handwriting illegible. The legibility of a writer’s cursive hand may have had some bearing on whether he routinely copied his own drafts or foul papers. However, writers other than Jonson routinely used a neater version of their usual cursive hand, rather than a calligraphic italic, to copy their texts. Given the lack of standardised spelling and punctuation and the frequent deviation in handwriting from standard letter forms and conventional usage, early modern readers, including print compositors, could have been left bewildered in reading particular manuscript texts. Heywood’s revision of other dramatists’ plays, including The Book of Sir Thomas More, suggests that he must have been adept in reading others’ writing even while, ironically, writing a nearly illegible hand himself. If Chettle wrote Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit rather than merely copying it out, he may have been ironic in noting, ‘it was il written, as sometimes Greenes hand was none of the best: licensd it must be, ere it could be printed which could neuer be if it might not be read. To be brief, I writ it

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over, and as near as I could, followed the copy’ (A4r). As an apprentice and later as a master printer, Chettle would have learned how to read printer’s copy written in illegible hands. As McKerrow also notes, ‘it is unsafe to take the spelling of any ordinary printed book as representing that of its author’, because compositors could impose their own spelling on the texts they typeset, often depending on the pieces of type available to them at any given time, as well as their need to justify lines. It is important to recognise all the factors involved in reading and writing secretary and italic letter forms before attempting to trace the source of errors, confusions, variants, and/or revisions in manuscript texts, especially as they went into print or were recopied and then dispersed in variant manuscripts. For example, over 4,000 extant manuscript copies of individual works of Donne were made during the early modern period, so it should not be surprising that there were a wide number of variants, some of them deriving from a failure to read particular letters or words in preceding copies.

Early Modern Paper, Pen, and Ink In addition to teaching handwriting styles, writing instructors offered advice on how to make common ink, including ‘special black ink’ and ‘ink in haste’, and how to ‘keepe ink long’, as well as how to choose a quill, make a pen and a good penknife, and basically ‘how to sit writing’ and’ to write fair’. But writers began with a choice of paper. Although parchment (made from animal skin) and vellum (usually made from calfskin) were still used for some official and legal documents such as muniments, government records, or enrolments, by the fifteenth century paper was the common material used for writing. Rather than modern mass-produced and machine-made ‘wove’ paper, early modern ‘laid’ paper, usually imported from the continent, was handmade from linen rags which were reduced to pulp and laid in wooden frames, trays, or other moulds, strung with wires. When the paper dried, the wires across these moulds would leave a series of parallel indentations called ‘chain lines’. The mesh of wires in the mould could leave a watermark: a design such as a jug, a shield, a bunch of grapes, a fleur-de-lys, or a set of initials, used both as decoration and as a logo to identify the paper-maker. According to McKerrow and to Gaskell, an average sheet of paper, amounting to the size of a paper-making mould, less the trimming of edges, would be approximately 61 × 40.5 cm (24 × 16 inches). When folded vertically down the middle this would form a single bifolium, i.e. two conjugate leaves forming four pages. Each half-sheet would create two pages, for a total of four pages, with two recto (‘upright’ or ‘straight’ in Latin) or right-hand pages, and two verso (‘turned’ in Latin) or left-hand pages. Those writing letters found the bifolium format especially useful, as the first one or two pages could be used for writing, and the address of the recipient could be written on the last page. The letter was then folded into a small packet with the address on the outside, and sealed with wax (envelopes were not yet used in the early modern

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age). Although most bibliographers would argue that paper produced for print and for handwriting were the same, some recent research suggests that they were indeed different; at any rate paper had to take writing ink or printing ink in such a way that the ink did not run or soak in too much. According to contemporary accounts, the cost for ten sheets of paper was roughly 1 penny, thus paper was not inordinately expensive. Henslowe and Alleyn’s archive suggests that paper was not too precious to waste, as hundreds of short or incomplete pages were not reused, although some paper was recycled. Because scribes could calculate how much paper they would need in order to make another copy of the finished manuscript in front of them, they could begin by making up manuscript books containing several numbered pages. Binding the book would involve sewing thread through the gatherings of paper to make a spine. However, a composing author usually worked with one sheet of paper at a time. The sheet could be left unfolded and used to create two pages, one on each side. But it was perhaps more economical and convenient for the writer to use a bifolium; in fact, some paper may have been sold pre-folded in this way. Even more economically, the writer could fold the sheet once more (thus folded twice altogether) and turn it sideways to make eight pages, and so on. After being folded two or more times, the sheets would have to be slit across the top and/or sides so that they could be opened. If not folded, the paper could be trimmed to any size, although it was more economical to fold rather than trim paper so as to use as much of it as possible. How the paper was folded can still be determined by checking the placement of watermarks: for example, in the middle of a leaf of a bifolium, or in the top or bottom corners of a manuscript in quarto format. However, given that the paper may have been trimmed, or other single sheets inserted later into manuscripts, watermarks may appear in a variety of places. A full sheet appears to have been the appropriate size for playhouse plots, which were posted backstage on a peg to aid actors. Actors’ parts, rolled up as scrolls, could be made up of folio or smaller-sized sheets pasted, pinned, or stitched together head to foot. On the other hand, a writer who wanted to make up a manuscript book that would be small enough to carry around in his pocket would fold his sheets into octavo size if he had not already purchased a madeup blank book. Those who were writing for their own purposes could treat paper in a much more casual way. At some point, Henslowe turned his diary upside down and started writing again from the reverse end, that is, from the back page forward to the front. He also wrote in empty margins of already used pages, but his economy is probably not due to the cost of paper but the necessity of having all of his accounts in one single book, which was already bound by the time he began using it. Thus Henslowe could not readily add extra pages but had to make do with those already in the book. Many of his correspondents wrote on a portion of a larger, previously used sheet when writing to him, and in some cases their deletion of existing material is still legible. Even Alleyn wrote a 1597 contract for Henslowe and his covenant servant William Kendal on the verso of a portion of a larger piece of paper that listed some accounts

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which Alleyn had crossed out, but again, this may just happen to have been the only paper he had to hand. These writers probably recycled paper out of convenience and not because they were too poor to purchase more. As for the pen, Cocker recommends that writers ‘procure the first, second, or third Quill in the wing of a Goose or Raven’, then sharpen the point with a penknife. If ‘you intend to write Italian hand therewith, the nib must be small, and almost round, with a long slit: For secretary it must be broader; for large Italique, or that which we call Italian Text, it must be of a greater breadth’. The penknife could be used both to erase mistakes by carefully scraping off dried ink and to sharpen the pen point when necessary. Cocker also notes, ‘You may rule your paper with black-lead, and with white bread, or the paring-dust of white Leather, clearly fetch those lines out again.’ As the penman ‘E.B.’ advises, the scholar must Rule him two lines just of measure: Those two lines between to write verie just, Not aboue or below write that he must: The same to be done is best with blacke lead, Which written between, is cleansed with bread. (A2v)

In practice, such rulings were often made discreetly and faintly so they would not be easily visible after the text had been written out. If the paper was too rough, it could be polished with the penknife or a bookbinder’s folding stick. As de Beau Chesne and Baildon recommend, ‘white, smooth-grain’d, well-gumm’d Paper, is the best to write on; if it be not well-gumm’d and clear, you may draw it sheet after sheet through Allum-water’ or polish it with a penknife (A2r). Some literary manuscripts in this period show the use of red ink or red pencil used to rule off the upper, lower, and side margins, as well as regular plumbago (similar to graphite) pencil, but the bulk of the manuscript would be written in ink that would dry as brown or black. Ink was made from a variety of natural ingredients, as in Cocker’s recipe: Take three Ounces of [oak] Galls which are small and heavy and crisp, put them in a vessell of three pints of Wine, or of Rain-water, which is much better, letting it stand so infusing in the Sun for one or two dayes. After this has been done, the writer must take two Ounces of Coppris, or of Roman Vitrial, well colour’d and beaten small, stirring it well with a stick, which being put in, set it again in the Sun for one or two dayes more. Stir all together, adding two Ounces of Gum Arabique of the clearest and most shining, being well beaten.

To make it more lustrous, Cocker advises adding pomegranate or sugar and boiling it gently. Once armed with ink, a sharpened pen, a penknife, polished paper and a ‘pounce-pot’ or ‘sander’ to help blot or dry the ink on the written pages, the writer was ready to begin, probably following E.B.’s advice:

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he that will learn with speed for to write, To mark his example must have his delight, Letter and title to make as the same, And so shall the scholar be void of all blame. (A2v)

References and Further Reading Billingsley, Martin (1618). The Pen’s Excellency or the Secretary’s Delight. London. Billingsley, Martin (1637). A Copy Book containing a variety of examples of all the most curious hands. London. Cerasano, S. P. (2005). ‘Henslowe’s “Curious” Diary’. Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 17, 72–85. Chettle, Henry (1592). ‘To the gentlemen readers’. In Chettle, Kind-Harts Dreame. London. Cocker, Edward (1657). The Pen’s Transcendency. London. Cocker, Edward (1658). The Pen’s Triumph. London. Dawson, Giles E. and Laetitia Kennedy-Skipton (1966). Elizabethan Handwriting 1500–1650: A Guide to the Reading of Documents and Manuscripts. London: Faber & Faber. De Beau Chesne, John and John Baildon (1571). A Book Containing Diveres Sorts of hands. London. ‘E.B.’ (1590). A New Book Containing all sorts of hands usually written at this day in Christendom. London.

Gaskell, Philip (1972). A New Introduction to Bibliography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jenkinson, Sir Hilary (1927). The Later Court Hands in England from the Fifteenth to the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McKerrow, R. B. (1927). An Introduction to Bibliography for Literary Students. Oxford: Clarendon Press. McKerrow, R. B. (2000). ‘The relationship of English printed books to authors’ manuscripts during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: The 1928 Sandars Lectures’, ed. Carlo M. Bajetta. Studies in Bibliography, 53, 1–65. Petti, Anthony G. (1977). English Literary Hands from Chaucer to Dryden. London: Edward Arnold. Preston, Jean F. and Laetitia Yeandle (formerly Kennedy-Skipton) (1992). English Handwriting 1400–1650: An Introductory Manual. Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies.

14

The Manuscript Transmission of Poetry Arthur F. Marotti

In early modern England most verse was written not for print publication but for manuscript transmission. Lyric poetry, for example, was a literary form that was regarded as basically occasional and ephemeral, designed to be passed in manuscript transmission first to known readers socially connected in some way to the authors, and then to a wider social world. A poet’s family, friends, and social contacts were the proper recipients of what he or she wrote, and many of the pieces that found their way into print in poetical miscellanies or individual editions were, actually or by pretence, diverted into that medium, having the character of intercepted texts. Sometimes publishers congratulated themselves on wresting such work out of a socially restricted environment to make it available to broader readership able to profit from it: Richard Tottel, for example, whose influential and much-reprinted miscellany (Songes and Sonnettes, Written by the Ryght Honorable Lorde Henry Haward Late Earle of Surrey, and Other (1557)) was precedent-setting, boasted to his readers that, in printing the manuscript-circulated verse of such authors as Sir Thomas Wyatt and the earl of Surrey, he was making available ‘those works which the ungentle hoarders up of such treasure have heretofore envied thee’ (Rollins 1965: 2). Despite the continental examples of printed poetical collections, such as the sonnet sequences of Italian and French poets from Petrarch through Ronsard, cultural expectations, at least in England, were that lyric poems were private and restricted, rather than public and accessible. Many years ago J. W. Saunders (1951b) coined the expression ‘the stigma of print’ to refer to the social disapproval incurred by well-born or educated writers if they allowed their verse to be published. But there was more than an issue of social degradation involved in the printing lyric poetry; it was that the form itself was unsuitable to broad exposure, a fact that someone such as Emily Dickinson later acknowledged by keeping her own lyrics in her possession. Although print culture, over the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, finally incorporated lyric poetry as it did other literary genres, making it gradually seem more and more acceptable for writers to collect and publish their verse and for

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editors and publishers to produce single-author editions and anthologies of poems, the system of manuscript transmission of lyric poetry remained as vigorous as it had been in a pre-Gutenberg era. In fact, judging from the documentary remains, there was a resurgence in England of manuscript transcription and collection of verse in the seventeenth century, especially in the period from the early 1620s through the 1640s.1 Authors and compilers in particular environments such as the universities, the Inns of Court, the royal court, and the houses of the gentry and nobility, as well as in social networks such as those found in London and in the English Catholic subculture, produced a great many poetical collections that encompassed a range of texts broader than that of the body of canonical literature from the period. Since the processes of canonizing particular authors and works, as well as the writing of literary histories, were so reliant on the products of print culture, many of the pieces we find in surviving manuscript compilations – by either minor or anonymous writers – have been neglected. Composing, transmitting, collecting, and arranging poetic and prose texts were activities shared by most early modern literate individuals. Texts were transcribed and circulated on single sheets in or as letters, on bifolia, and in ‘quaternions’ (a ‘quire of four sheets of paper or parchment folded in two’, OED) and small quires,2 as well as in larger units ready to receive texts their owners deemed important (Saunders 1951a and Love 1993). Some manuscripts collected or bound later, such as those in the Conway papers (British Library MS Additional 23229), Edward Bannister’s thirteen folios at the start of British Library MS Additional 28253, Bodleian MS English Poetry c.53, and some of the sheets in Peter Le Neve’s manuscript (British Library MS Additional 27407) were folded loose sheets such as those used in correspondence. As examples of the circulation of verse in what Harold Love (1993: 13) called ‘separates’ or short manuscripts written and circulated as a unit, there are single sheets such as ‘A Poem put into my Lady Laitons Pocket by Sir W: Rawleigh’ (Rudick 1999: 16–17), Sir John Harington’s poem left behind the cushion of his godmother, Queen Elizabeth (Beal 1980–93: 1.2.122), Sir Walter Ralegh’s poem to Elizabeth and the queen’s recently discovered reply (May 1991: 318–19), and John Donne’s single surviving holograph poem, a verse letter sent to Lady Carey as a letter folded several times to make a small item for transport (Bodleian MS English Poetry d.197). Separates, including single sheets, were bound together in their own time or later to form manuscript collections. Poems were also sometimes copied into blank, bound codices, ‘paper books’ (Woudhuysen 1996: 47): Laurence Cummings (1960: 40) claims, for example, that Bodleian MS Rawlinson Poetry 85, an Elizabethan courtly and university collection, was ‘a bound and foliated book before [John] Finet began making entries’. Occasional poems originally sent to particular readers to celebrate births, mourn deaths, convey New Year’s greetings, maintain relationships with patrons and patronesses, express love or friendship, and for other purposes, were later gathered in collections along with other serious or recreational pieces. Sometimes the manuscripts themselves signal aspects of the process of literary transmission: poems were passed on by particular individuals, for example, or whole collections were lent

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for perusal or copying – some, as Henry Woudhuysen (1996: 50) claims, by booksellers and stationers. Donne’s 1614 request of his friend Sir Henry Goodyer to return to him a manuscript ‘book’ of his verse indicates that a collection of his poetry, at some stage in his life, was assembled by him in a single manuscript volume (Beal 1980–93: 1.1.245; Marotti 1986: ix–x). Stephen Powle wrote a note in his commonplace book anthology (Bodleian MS Tanner 169) regarding a Nicholas Breton poem entitled ‘A passionate Sonnet made by the Kinge of Scots uppon difficulties ariseing to crosse his proceeding in love & marriage with his most worthie to be esteemed Queene’ (‘In Sunny beames the skye doth shewe her sweete’): ‘Geaven me by Mr Britton who had been (as he sayed) in Scotland with the Kinges Majesty: but I rather thinke they weare made by him in the person of the kinge’ (fo. 43r).3 The Arundel Harington manuscript has a section beginning ‘Certayne verses made by uncertayne autors, wrytten out of Charleton his booke’ (fo. 43) (Hughey 1960: 1.179). Bodleian MS Rawlinson Poetry 26, which, before binding, was a collection of separates copied over a long period of time in many hands, has a late seventeenth-century note listing nine different people to whom the manuscript was lent (p. vi). In addition to transcribing poems from written exemplars, some manuscripts have texts that were recorded from memory. J. B. Leishman (1945) convincingly argues that memorial transcription accounts for some of the dramatic changes one finds in texts of some poems found in manuscript collections. This reminds us of the widespread practices of oral recitation or performance in a period in which there was a high degree of residual orality and, as scholars of the drama have recognised, people developed powerful memory skills that modern readers find hard to comprehend. Reading or singing literary texts aloud, often to small groups of friends or family members, was a very common practice, and we know that even some very long works, such as Sidney’s Arcadia, were given oral performance (Nelson 1976–7; Chartier 1989). The connection of script with orality and the individualistic characteristics of a particular person’s handwriting reinforce the aura of ‘presence’ in the manuscript text, which the printed text lacks (Love 1993: 141–8). Recording poetic texts was an activity related to traditional practices of commonplacing, the transcribing of passages from one’s reading, often in an alphabetical arrangement under familiar headings that facilitated retrieval and reuse in one’s own writing – ‘invention’ in the older rhetorical sense of the term (Beal 1993; Crane 1993; see Chapter 4, Rhetoric). In academic and post-academic environments, educated individuals kept commonplace books as a kind of prosthetic memory. In a less formal way, many people kept a looser sort of compilation, including a variety of items ranging from household accounts, to medical receipts, to historical and genealogical notes, to copies of letters, poems, and other important texts in circulation within restricted groups as well as within widening circles of transmission. Thus, some manuscript compilations in which we find poetry also contain a variety of miscellaneous materials: John Ramsey’s commonplace book (Bodleian MS Douce 280), for example, in addition to poetry, includes ‘A Rule to find the goulden or prime noumber’; discussion of Cambridge University organisation and admissions; a trans-

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lation of a book of Caesar’s Commentaries; medical receipts; lists of the offices of England and the post-Norman Conquest kings, lords, knights, bishoprics, and counties; theological, political, and historical comments; a partial autobiography and family genealogy; a personal will; a reading list; paternal instructions to his son; and a family coat of arms (Doughtie 1993; Marotti 1995: 21). Many ‘catch-all’ manuscript miscellanies, like this one, immerse poems in a varied textual environment. Other manuscripts, however, contain only or almost exclusively poems. If we look at numerous, but relatively few, surviving manuscript poetry anthologies or collections from the early modern period, we discover two kinds of documents: those kept by a single individual and those produced by two or more scribes – either within a family and social circle or within an institutional environment in which many individuals might have access to a manuscript volume being passed around in a group. The Devonshire manuscript of early Tudor verse (British Library MS Additional 17492), which circulated among several courtly women and their lovers, and the mid-seventeenth-century academic collection, Bodleian MS English Poetry c.50, in which four hands are represented, are examples of the latter. We might distinguish those documents in which the hands represented are those of amateurs and those that were done by professional scribes. In the latter case, we have personal collections done by commission for the individual wishing to have his or her own poetry anthology as well as those collections composed as presentation copies to friends or social superiors (Woudhuysen 1996: 88–103). British Library MS Additional 33998, which places each poem’s title in a box and draws lines between items, was professionally transcribed for Sir Walter Chute; Bodleian MS Rawlinson Poetry 31, which has verse by Donne, Jonson, Sir John Harington, Sir Henry Wotton, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, the earl of Pembroke, Sir Benjamin Rudyerd, Francis Beaumont, and others, was beautifully produced by the professional Peter Beal describes as the ‘Feathery Scribe’ (Beal 1998: 58–108). Bodleian MS Malone 23, a heavily political collection, presents the titles of its poems in a kind of boldface italic; Folger MS V.a.249 is a presentation manuscript of Sir John Harington’s epigrams the author sent in 1605 to the young Prince Henry. A number of the manuscripts containing large collections of Donne’s verse seem to have been designed for aristocrats: the Leconfield MS (Cambridge MS Additional 8467) for the earl of Northumberland; the Bridgewater MS (Huntington MS EL 6893) for John Egerton, later earl of Bridgewater; the Haslewood-Kingsborough MS (Huntington MS HM 198.1) for Edward Denny, earl of Norwich (Armitage 1966); British Library MS Harley 4955, which was probably compiled for the Cavendish family, if not particularly for Sir William Cavendish, first earl of Newcastle; and the two Dalhousie MSS (now owned by Texas Technological University) for the family of the third earl of Essex (Sullivan 1988; see Chapter 15, Poets, Friends, and Patrons). Some professionally transcribed manuscripts might have been prepared as fair copy from which printers could set the text of editions they were preparing. Rosenbach Library MS 1083/16 has a title page suitable for setting in print: ‘MISCELLANIES/ OR/ A Collection of Divers Witty and/ pleasant Epigrams, Adages, poems/ Epitaphes &c: for the recre/ation of the overtravel-/

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ed sences: / [ornament]/ 1630: / Robert Bishop’, followed by a dedicatory epistle on the verso of this page (see Redding 1960). In terms of their content, one might distinguish those manuscripts that are primarily comprised of the work of a single author from those (more typical) collections that contain the work of many writers. As examples of the first we have the Egerton manuscript (British Library MS Egerton 2711), comprising mainly the poetry of Sir Thomas Wyatt (including corrections entered in his own hand) (see Powell 2004 and Woudhuysen 1996: 104); Folger MS V.a.104, an autograph collection of Lady Mary Wroth’s poems; British Library MS Additional 58435, a holograph collection of Sir Robert Sidney’s verse; British Library MS Egerton 3165, the authorially controlled collection of Sir Arthur Gorges’s poetry; Leeds University Library Brotherton Collection MS Lt q 32, which contains the recently rediscovered work of Hester Pulter; British Library MS Additional 37157, Sir Edward Herbert’s collection of his verse included in his family papers (Beal 1980–93: 1.2.167); British Library MSS Additional 54566–71, which Peter Beal calls ‘the most substantial existing authorised manuscript text of any distinguished Elizabethan or Jacobean poet’ (Beal 1980–93: 1.2.103); Bodleian MS North Additional e.2, a professionally transcribed version of Dudley North’s sonnets (Crum 1979); Oxford MS Corpus Christi College 325, an autograph manuscript of William Strode’s verse; British Library MS Lansdowne 777, the collected verse of William Browne of Tavistock; the collection of John Donne’s elegies, satires, and divine poems (along with one of his lyrics and his prose paradoxes and problems) in the ‘Westmoreland manuscript’ (New York Public Library Berg Collection); and the Williams and Bodleian manuscripts of George Herbert’s poetry (Dr Williams Library MS Jones B 62 and Bodleian MS Tanner 307), the former containing the poet’s corrections and some pieces entered in his own hand (Woudhuysen 1996: 105). Some multi-author manuscript anthologies are very large collections. From the Elizabethan period there are such examples as the Arundel Harington manuscript of Tudor poetry (Hughey 1960), kept by Sir John Harington of Stepney and his son Sir John Harington of Exton (the author of a book of epigrams, of a translation of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, and of a satirical treatise on his invention, the flush toilet, The Metamorphosis of Ajax) – a manuscript from which many pages were removed in the late eighteenth century, but which still contains some 324 poems; Humphrey Coningsby’s collection (British Library MS Harley 7392), which has 158 poems (Marotti 2008; Woudhuysen 1996: 278–86); and Henry Stanford’s anthology, Cambridge MS Dd.5.75, which has around 300 items, a few of which are in prose (May 1988). From the early through mid-seventeenth century many large compilations have survived: for example, Nicholas Burghe’s collection (Bodleian Library MS Ashmole 38) has some 243 leaves of poems by at least sixty-eight writers; the Skipwith family collection (British Library MS Additional 25707) gathers some 280 poems by a wide range of Elizabethan and early Stuart poets (Hobbs 1992: 62–7); the two-part midseventeenth-century anthology compiled by Peter Calfe and his son of the same name (British Library MS Harley 6917–18) has 330 poems, most from the Caroline and

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Interregnum periods (Hobbs 1992: 67–71); an anonymous collection originating in Christ Church College, Oxford, Folger MS V.a.345, has over 500 poems in addition to a few prose pieces. All of these rival in size the largest of the Elizabethan printed poetical anthologies, A Poetical Rhapsody, which, in its 1602 edition, has 176 poems.

Manuscript Poetry in Different Environments Although the manuscript transcription and circulation of poetry took place largely in the middle and upper classes, across a broad geographical range, we can distinguish several particular social environments with which surviving collections were associated: in particular, though not exclusively, the universities, the Inns of Court, the houses of the aristocracy and gentry, and the royal court. Within each of these settings texts were composed, transmitted, and collected by individuals and by groups connected either by blood, friendship, or institutional affiliation. University collections include many Christ Church, Oxford manuscripts such as George Morley’s anthology, Westminster Abbey MS 41; Daniel Leare’s related collection, British Library MS Additional 30982; a collection by ‘J.A.’, British Library Sloane 1792; and Folger MS V.a.170. Cambridge University manuscripts include British Library MS Additional 44963, begun by Anthony Scattergood of Trinity College, and Bodleian MSS English Poetry f.25 and Tanner 465 and 466. Inns of Court manuscripts include the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century collection, Rosenbach Library MSS 1083/15; two closely related manuscripts, British Library MSS Additional 21433 and 25303; the Farmer–Chetham MS (Manchester MS Mun. A.4.150); and the Welshman Richard Roberts’s collection, Bodleian MS Donation c.54.4 British Library MS Additional 25707, which is textually important for the study of Donne’s poetry, is a composite manuscript compiled in the family of William Skipwith and his son Henry; British Library MS Additional 27404 was assembled by two brothers, Oliver and Peter Le Neve; the gentleman Henry Champernoune of Dartington in Devon, who inscribed his name on the first page of the document in 1623, owned a large collection of poems by Donne, Jonson, Wotton, Ralegh, and others, Bodleian MS English Poetry f.9. Further down the social ladder, there were people who owned manuscript collections of verse: for example, the merchant tailor William Warner (Bodleian MS Rawlinson C.86), the family of the mercer Sir Thomas Frowyk (British Library MS Harley 541), the physician Nathaniel Highmore (British Library MS Sloane 542), the London pharmacist Richard Glover (British Library MS Egerton 2230), the antiquarians John Hopkinson (Bodleian MS Donation d.58) and Marmaduke Rawden (British Library MS Additional 18044), and the Warwickshire yeoman Thomas Fairfax (Bodleian MS English Poetry b.5).5 Sometimes compilers of verse moved from one environment to another and the collections they were compiling registered this fact in their contents. Thus, for example, Margaret Douglas, who was part of a late Henrician courtly circle of men and women represented in the Devonshire manuscript (British Library MS Additional

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17942), took that collection with her to Scotland, where a son from her second marriage, Lord Darnley (the father of the future king of England, James I), transcribed a poem in it in his own hand (Harrier 1975: 24). John Finet moved between St John’s College, Cambridge, and the Elizabethan court, his anthology of verse (Bodleian Library MS Rawlinson Poetry 85), showing a combination of verse from both environments (Cummings 1960). Several manuscript collections register the movement from Oxford or Cambridge to London and the Inns of Court: for example, Rosenbach MS 1083/16 and Bodleian MSS English Poetry e.14 and Additional B. 97. The seventeenth-century collection of Sir Walter Chute (British Library MS Additional 33998), who was active in Parliament and at the Inns of Court as well as socially rooted in his Berkshire estate, shows signs of both urban and country connections.

Sex, Death, and Politics in Manuscript Verse Compared to what we find in contemporary printed publications, the contents of manuscript collections contain a much larger percentage of poems dealing with death, sex, and politics. Perhaps because the manuscript system of transmission was usually tied to particular social networks, we find many more epitaphs and elegies in their contents. In fact, some collections contain a huge number of poems about the deaths of known individuals, including members of the upper aristocracy and royalty: for example, Nicholas Burghe’s collection (Bodleian MS Ashmole 38) has over 200 epitaphs and elegies in a separate section of the manuscript (pp. 167–207). Likewise, British Library MS Additional 21433, which shares almost all of its poems with another Inns of Court collection, British Library MS Additional 25303, also relegates funerary poetry to a separate section (fos. 167r–86v). Some collections have elegiac poetry obviously related to the environment shared by the compiler and the persons celebrated in them: Folger MS V.a.345, for example, has several poems expressing grief on the occasion of the loss of respected university figures at Oxford: for example, ‘Epitaph on Dr Johnson’ (‘Why should we feare to entertayne’. p. 18), ‘An Epitaph on Doctor Johnson Physitian’ (‘Wert thou but a single death! Or but on corse’, p. 78), and ‘On Mr Vaux, who dyed last lent 1626’ (‘Vaux dead ’tis strange’, pp. 2291– 2). A unique elegy for Francis Beaumont by ‘G: Lucy’, ‘I doe not Wonder Beaumont thou art dead’, (British Library MS Additional 33998, fo. 43v), appears in the manuscript collection of the Skipwiths, who were neighbours and friends of the Beaumonts. One of the most popular poems in manuscript collections was the beautiful elegy Henry King wrote on the occasion of his wife’s death, ‘An Exequy to his Matchless never to be forgotten Freind’ (‘Accept, thou Shrine of my Dead Saint’). Other muchcopied elegies and epitaphs include the epitaphs on the 1606 death of James I’s infant daughter Mary (‘Within this marble casket lies’ and ‘As carefull mothers to their beds doe lay’), James’s own poem on the 1619 death of Queen Anne (‘Thee to invite the great God sent a star’), and Richard Corbett’s own piece (‘No, not a quatch [word or

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sound] sad Poets, doubt you’), George Morley’s elegy for King James (‘All that have eyes now wake and weep’), William Juxon’s elegy for Prince Henry (‘Nature waxing old’), Sir Henry Wotton’s elegy for James I’s daughter, Princess Elizabeth, Queen of Bohemia (‘You meaner beauties of the night’), and poems commemorating the deaths the countess of Pembroke (‘Underneath this sable hearse’ (William Browne of Tavistock)), the countess of Rutland (‘I may forget to eat, to drink, to sleep’ (Francis Beaumont)), and Lady Markham (‘As unthrifts groan in straw for their pawn’d beds’ (F. Beaumont)). Not all epitaphs and elegies, however, are respectfully commemorative (either of peers or social superiors). The epitaph form in particular was used for comic and satiric purposes – especially when the subject was a social inferior or a disliked social superior or dangerously powerful person. Thus the deaths of two different men named Pricke, one at Oxford, the other at Cambridge, occasioned comic verse exploiting the obvious opportunity for puns (Crum 1969: A 1362, O 1094, S 984, T 607, T 1445, and T 1481). Richard Corbett wrote a comic epitaph for an Oxford butler named Dawson (‘Dawson the Butler’s dead’). There is a nasty epitaph on the death of Lady Lake (‘Here lies the brief [epitome or summary] of badness, vice’s nurse’). The death of Penelope Devereux, first Lady Rich, then the countess of Devonshire, whose long affair with, then marriage to Charles Blount, the duke of Devonshire, produced five children, occasioned a nasty epitaph about her supposedly inordinate sexual appetite. In one manuscript it reads: On the Lady Rich Heer lyes the Lady Penelope Rich, Or the Countes of Devonshire, chuse ye which One stone contents her, loe what death can doe. That in her life was not content with two. (Folger MS V.a.345, p. 28)

The death of the most powerful late Elizabethan and early Jacobean minister, Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, produced some vicious verse mocking his morals and physical deformity (Croft 1991). It is not surprising, given the large number of manuscripts associated with such all-male environments as the universities and the Inns of Court, that so many of the ephemeral pieces recorded in such anthologies deal with sex, usually in joking and misogynistic ways (see also Chapter 66, ‘Such Pretty Things Would Soon Be Gone’: The Neglected Genres of Popular Verse, 1480–1650). In fact, obscenity was not the main target of censorship in the period – though Marlowe’s translation of Ovid’s Amores fell under the 1599 bishops’ ban of satiric and dangerously political literature, and some of Donne’s more obscene elegies were excluded from the 1633 printed edition of his poetry (‘To his Mistress Going to Bed’, ‘Love’s War’, and ‘Love’s Progress’). It is clear, however, that the manuscript medium was more receptive than was print to verse with bold sexual content (Marotti 1995: 76–82; Moulton 2000:

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35–69). And so we find a comic dialogue poem about a sexual encounter between a man and a woman who are conscious of guests engaged in more polite activities elsewhere in her the house (‘Nay pish, nay phew, nay faith and will you, fie’), a piece that appears in over twenty-eight manuscripts, and then was printed after mid-century in two printed anthologies, The Harmony of the Muses (1654) and Sportive Wit (1656). Folger MS V.a.399, a manuscript with a large number of obscene pieces, has a copy of the poem that probably inspired ‘Nay pish’, Thomas Nashe’s ‘Choice of Valentines’, here titled ‘Nashe’s Dilldo’ (fos. 53v–57r). It also has another piece about a farting contest between a lady and her maid (fo. 10v). Folger MS V.b.110 has a bawdy poem that poses a riddle to a mistress who then answers it: A Riddle Come on sweete love & let mee know What thing it is that takes delight And strives to stand yet cannot goe And feeds the mouth that cannot bite Answer It is a kind of loveing sting A pricking & a peircing thing Tis Venus wanton holy wand That hath no feete, & yet can stand It is a pen faire Helen tooke To write in her 2 leafed booke, Tis a true familier spright That mayds do conjure in the night It is a Truchion mayds do use A bedstaffe wanton women chuse. Yt is a graft borne on the head A staffe to make a Cuckolds bed, It is a thing both deafe & blinde. Yet narrow wayes in th’darke wil finde It seemes a dwarfe in breath & length But is a Gyant in his strength It is a shaft of Cupids Cut, To rove & shoot at pricks or but, Which every woman by her wil Would keepe within her quiver still, The bravest lasse that ere tooke life For love of this became a wife. (pp. 60–1)

This poem’s phallocentrism is not surprising, given the predominantly male readership of most manuscript collections.

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Folger MS V.a.96, a London collection, has a rare and unusual poem that offers serious advice about how to make love to a woman: I’st not in love the way to perfect blisse Tenderly to take what most desired is. When thou hast found the place and cann discover Where her content doth lye then as a Lover Should blush not to handle, touch, feele and finger Dalliance doth most delight when most wee linger Behold her eyes like sparkling fire they tremble Whose lightnes brightnes doth the sun resemble Daunceing upon the waves bow downe thy eare Those gentle murmeringes & complaint to heare These feigned sights and sweet wordes which shee Out of her panting brest shall breath to thee But oh, take heed least thou too fast do runn Least thy joyes end ere hers are scarse begun Both together strive and both endeavour Your kisses motions just in number ever Then are long sportes perform’d in perfect measure When both doe feele one paine & both one pleasure. (fos. 73v–74r)

What is interesting in this advice is its attention to female sexual responsiveness. There are many misogynistic epigrams and other short obscene pieces in manuscript collections: for example, the poems about the allegedly libidinous and ugly widow Mrs Mallet (Corbett’s ‘Have I renounc’d my faith or basely sold’ and ‘Skelton some rhymes, good Elderton a ballett’), an object of laughter for Christ Church poets in the 1620s. Some pieces mock women from lower-class and/or country backgrounds. One rare, 186-line obscene narrative poem found in Sir Walter Chute’s anthology, British Library MS Additional 33998, ‘The Merkin Maker’ (fos. 53r–55v) portrays an innocent young country woman who seeks out a pubic-hair-wig maker, who then comically fits her with his product and sexually exploits her: such a work was designed for a readership of male urban sophisticates receptive both to misogynistic humour and expressions of class snobbery. Finally, one of the most popular poems in manuscript circulation was Thomas Carew’s ‘A Rapture’ (‘I will enjoy thee now my Celia, come’), a 166-line display of witty eroticism that assumes its audience’s familiarity not only with such love elegies as Donne’s ‘To his Mistress Going to Bed’ (see Chapter 63, Donne’s Nineteenth Elegy) but also with that most pornographic example of visual and textual eroticism, the woodcuts by Marcantonio Raimondi (after Giulio Romano) to show a series of sexual positions, accompanied by Aretino’s Sonetti Lussoriosi (Talvacchia 1999; Chapter 33, The English Broadside Print c.1550–c.1650). Given the strong libel laws, which punished not just those who lied about, but anyone merely defaming, an individual, even if what was written was true, the really

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dangerous items in manuscript collections were political libels, especially since one could be prosecuted for mere possession of such texts. Verse critical of contemporary political figures, which would not have been approved for publication, found a home in the system of manuscript transmission, serving some of the purposes of manuscript and print news media (Cogswell 1995). Although there are Elizabethan examples of libellous or dangerously political verse – poems such as the libel against William Bashe (victualler of the navy), libels against Oxford and Cambridge figures (May and Ringler 2004: EV 2283 and EV 9510), and a poem about international politics, ‘The French Primero’ (May 1971) – the early Stuart period produced a much larger body of poetry of this sort. The manuscript system of literary transmission was a relatively safe environment for the dissemination of political libels and other material that might have fallen victim to press censorship. Poems criticising prominent political figures such as Sir Robert Cecil and the duke of Buckingham circulated widely in manuscript.6 Alistair Bellany and Andrew McRae’s (2005) online edition of early Stuart libels testifies to the vitality of manuscript political verse in this period.7 Bodleian MS Donation c.54, for example, has several libels: ‘A libell upon Mr Edw[ard] Cooke, then Atturney general and sithance Cheife Justice of the Comon pleas upon some disagreement between him & his wife being widow of Sir W[illia]m Hatton Kt. and daughter to the now Earle of Exeter then Sir Tho[mas] Cecill’ (‘Cocus the Pleader hath a Lady wedd’, fo. 6v), followed by four more on the same topic; ‘A Libell’ (‘Admire-all weaknes, wronges, the right’, fo. 7), against the earl of Essex’s enemies; ‘A dreame alludinge to my L[ord] of Essex, and his aduersaries’ (‘Where Medwaye greetes old thamesis silver streames’, fos. 19r–20r); a ‘Libel against Robert Cecill’ (‘Proude and ambitious wretch that feedest on naught but faction’, fo. 20); ‘A libell against Somerset’ (‘Poore Pilott thou art like to lose the Pinke’, fo. 22v), concerned with the Frances Howard/earl of Somerset marriage scandal; and ‘A libell against Oxford upon their first entertainment of the kinge’ (‘When the king to Oxford came’, fo. 25). Bellany and McRae’s collection of early Stuart libels from manuscript sources includes some late Elizabethan poems, particularly those dealing the unfortunate careers of the earl of Essex and Sir Walter Ralegh, before turning to anti-James/antiScots pieces and poems on Parliament/Crown conflicts, the death of Sir Robert Cecil, the Somerset/Howard marriage scandal and Overbury murder, the execution of Sir Walter Ralegh in 1618 as a political martyr, the rise, exploits, and assassination of George Villiers, duke of Buckingham, the impeachment of Sir Francis Bacon, the Spanish Match and international religious politics, the scandalous sexual behaviour of the earl of Castlehaven, and other, miscellaneous, topics. Other, not strictly libellous, pieces in manuscript circulation deal with contemporary domestic and international political situations: for example, ‘Upon the breach between the King & the Subject, at the dissolution of the Parliament, March 1628’ (‘The wisest King did wonder’ (Bodleian MS Rawlinson Poetry 26, fo. 8v)) and a poem related to the same context, ‘Our state’s a Game at cards, the councell deale’ (Bodleian MS Ashmole 36, 37, fo. 174v – see McRae 2004: 144–5). One of the most troubling of the political

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poems in the period was the so-called ‘Commons Petition’ (‘If bleeding hearts dejected souls find grace’), a piece that captured the nostalgia for the reign of Elizabeth and expressed strong anti-Stuart sentiment that persisted through both the Jacobean and Caroline period: this work, which appears in at least fifteen manuscripts, was finally put into print in 1642 as The Commons Petition of Long Afflicted England. Several of the poems of John Hoskins, the active parliamentarian and wit who earlier collaborated with colleagues in composing ‘The Parliament Fart’ (see below), was imprisoned for his threateningly critical speech in the 1614 Parliament, addressed topical political issues and the question of free speech in his much-circulated verse (Colclough 1998). Other poems that were relevant to the political and religious struggles of the period proved quite popular in the manuscript system. Take, for example, the long poem by that Christ Church, Oxford, poet Richard Corbett, ‘Iter Boreale’ (‘Four clerks of Oxford, doctors two and two’), a piece that survives in some thirty-seven manuscripts. It eventually found its way into print, through the agency of John Donne, Jr., in the (poor) 1657 and 1658 editions of Corbett’s poems. Written shortly after the 1618 Midlands journey it narrates, it is an anti-Puritan work reflecting Corbett’s ecclesiastical conservatism, but it continued to be copied through the 1620s and 1630s in manuscript poetical collections not only because it was associated with a body of other Christ Church poetry, but also because it remained relevant to the struggles between conservative and radical religious factions in the period leading up to the English Civil Wars. Many anti-Puritan and anti-Parliament poems were circulated by royalist poets and compilers in the pre-Civil War and Civil War and Interregnum periods: the Calfe manuscript, British Library MS Harley 6917–18, for example, has many pieces of this sort. We find in two different manuscripts a long poem on the assassination of the politically oppositionist Thomas Scott, ‘A distracted Elegy on the most execrable murther of Tho[mas] Scott, Preacher; who was kill’d by an English soldyer, in a Church Porch at Utrecht, as he entred to performe divine service’ (fos. 90r–96v) – a 444-line piece found also in Bodleian MS Rawlinson Poetry 160 (fos. 5r–10r). Scott, who opposed the Spanish Match and the Jacobean noninterventionist foreign policy, was made into a Protestant martyr. The conspiracytheory explanation of his death is that he was the victim of a Jesuit plot, not simply of a deranged soldier.

Shorter Poetry in Manuscript Collections One of the notable features of personal anthologies is the heavy proportion of epigrammatic poetry – especially epitaphs. These poems are of two sorts, comic or comic/ satiric and serious. Sometimes sharing a collection with prose characters, these poems bespeak a desire to capture the social and ethical essence of actual or representative persons, to assert a kind of mastery by way of placing and controlling others in a complex social world to which the compiler belonged, whether it was the university, the court, the Inns of Court, or London, for example. Take, for instance, the large

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collection of poems, Folger MS V.a.345, assembled by an unidentified person whose educational background seems to have been at Christ Church, Oxford, and who had an especial interest in medicine and medical professionals. On the first page of the collection, the compiler announces a strong interest in epigrams and, like Martial, defends the salacious subject matter found often in poetry of this sort: Pardon mee (kinde reader) though now & than I shew my selfe to bee a very man That Epigrams does write, and ’tis knowne wel For wanton jests they beare way the bell. Then when lascivious rimes, you heer shal see Impute them to the Epigram, not t’me.

In the course of assembling the contents of this 515-poem collection, the compiler not only included single pieces and groups of poems often found in other Christ Church anthologies, but he also evidently copied a large number of epigrams from published collections: those of Thomas Bastard, John Owen, Sir John Harington, Francis Fitzjeffrey, and Thomas Freeman. The popularity of the epigram in manuscript collections was due to several reasons. First, this kind of verse was especially attractive to male writers and readers: it allowed them to be plain-spoken, critical and satiric, and wisely pithy, as well as to be obscene, joking, misogynistic, and snobbish. Second, the form was traditionally quite flexible, suitable for epistolary and epitaphic uses in addition to other purposes. Third, epigrams, especially those with recognisable targets, were dangerous to print and so safer in the more socially restrictive manuscript environment. Fourth, epigrams were easier than longer poems to memorise and reproduce on one’s personal collection. Fifth, and perhaps the most significant factor, given the way many manuscript compilations had blank portions of some pages, original or later scribes found these receptive to short poems that would fit into the space available: horror vacui, or at least a sense of thrift, affected compilers in their use of the medium. Many manuscripts contain large numbers of these ‘filler poems’. In fact, someone with the initials ‘F.V.’ inserted at the bottom of one of the pages of Thomas Manne’s manuscript collection, British Library MS Additional 58215: Nature abhorres Vacuitie And so doe I For I am Natures pride, and will This voyd page fill. Leafe thou before wast but a blanke now thou maist thanke my pen, but doe not; for unless thou this expresse I serve your Mistress still there’s emptiness. (fo. 72v)

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Perhaps someone to whom Manne lent the manuscript took the opportunity to enter a poem in available space – a not unusual practice.

Women and the Manuscript System Commonplace-book miscellanies and manuscript poetical collections were mostly kept by men, especially in such all-male environments as the universities and the Inns of Court. Scholars looking for evidence of women’s literary activities in the early modern period first turned to the print record to direct attention to such authors as Isabella Whitney, Emilia Lanyer, Mary Wroth, and Katherine Philips, but, as Margaret Ezell (1993, 2008) and others have pointed out, the manuscript remains from this era reveal a much wider range of involvement than does print. The ‘Perdita’ project of recovering women’s writings in manuscript culture has uncovered women’s extensive involvement in manuscript composition, transmission, and compilation – both of prose and poetical texts.8 Women, such as Anne Cornwallis (Folger MS V.a.89; see Marotti 2002), Margaret Bellasis (British Library MS Additional 10309), Henrietta Holles (British Library MS Harley 3357), Elizabeth Lyttelton (Cambridge University Library MS Additional 8460; see Burke 2003), Lady Anne Southwell (Folger MS V.b.198; see Klene 1997), Eleanor Gunter (Bodleian MS Rawlinson Poetry 108), and Constance Aston Fowler (Huntington Library MS HM 904; see Aldrich-Watson 2000), owned or compiled collections, and some recorded their own and other women’s poetic compositions in this medium. The much-studied Devonshire manuscript (British Library MS Additional 17492), which circulated among several women of the late Henrician court, includes the poems Margaret Douglas wrote in the context of her tragic romantic relationship with Lord Thomas Howard (see Heale 2004). In Folger MS X.d.177, Elizabeth Clarke transcribed one of her own poems, which she claims she wrote at the age of 20 (‘you craggie rockes & mountains hie’, fo. 8r). As Victoria Burke has pointed out, Clarke also transcribed a lyric from Thomas Stanley’s Poems (1651), ‘I love thee not cause thou art fair’ (fo. 8v), rewriting some of its lines to counteract its misogyny (Burke 2004: 79–80). Some manuscripts were produced in whole or in part for women readers. The collection of eighty-seven of Richard Crashaw’s poems in British Library MS Additional 33219 done in a neat scribal hand was designed for a woman, addressed as ‘Fair one’ (Beal 1980–93: 2.1.269). Bodleian MS Firth e.4 was done for Lady Harflete, beginning with a dedicatory poem to her: To the Incomparably vertuous Lady the Lady Harflett Lo here a sett of paper-pilgrimes sent From Helicon, to pay an Homage-rent To you theyre sainte: each brings by arts command A gemme, to make a bracelet for your hand.

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Arthur F. Marotti you’le crowne theyre journey, if free entrance lies At those same Christall portalls of your eyes. Or here’s a garden, planted by the care Of fancee: every elegie drawes some teare To water it, verses which diviner bee, Are wholesome hearbes: others more light, and free, Are painted flowers without smell: Here’s fixt A band of Roses; violets there are mixt, In the cheife perfection of all standes. If you’le but add the Lillies of your hands. Or here’s a feast, where poets are the Cookes. Fancies are severall dishes; Its that lookes For brisker wine, findes onely lovers teares. Drawne out by spungie greife, or palsie feares: Pallas serves in her olives; Thetis bringes In stead of fish, her Venus from her springes. Those thankfull paire of wonted Graces, bee In this same banquet, multipli’d to three. you are that guest, whom all doe humbly pray you’de not let harsh detraction take away. Bt this same word detracts, ’tis more then bold that thinks this sun, will not turne earth to gold Which changing powre theese poets come to try Knowinge your favour’s skil’d in chimicie theyre paper serves, but for theyre windinge-sheete: In you theyse fortunes lie, you you alone; The Muses stand for ciphers, add but one (your noble selfe) to those, theyre noughts; and then the number of the Muses will bee ten. Or if you will not daigne a Muses name yet let the Muses commit yours to fame.

The collection of secular and religious verse this manuscript presents is assumed to be suitable to a noble patroness who has the sophistication and aesthetic sensitivity to appreciate what is being offered to her (Marotti 1995: 53–4). A very different collection, British Library MS Harley 3357, copied by the playhouse scrivener Ralph Crane, was done for Henrietta Holles, but its contents are religious and devotional, the kind of verse deemed appropriate for a young woman’s moral and religious education. Some poems by women show up in men’s poetry collections. Poems by or attributed to Queen Elizabeth appear in several manuscripts: ‘The doubt of future foes exiles my present joy’, ‘I grieve and dare not show my discontent’, and ‘When I was fair and young then favour graced me’ (May 2004: 7–9, 12–13, 26–7), the last a dubious ascription, for it reads more like a male ventriloquising of the queen’s voice than the utterance of the queen herself. In Harvard MS English 626, a poetry collection owned

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in 1640 by Anthony St John, we find a piece by Lady Dorothy Shirley, the sister of the third earl of Essex, a woman who was part of a Catholic social and literary coterie:9 Why did you faine both sighs and teares to gaine My hart from mee, and afterwards disdaine To thinke upon the oaths you did protest As if mens soules were to bee pawn’d in jest. I cannot thinke soe lively any Art Could frame a passion soe farr from the hart. Doth not your hart knowe what your tongue doth saye? Or doe they both agree for to betraye. Poore weomen, that believe that faithlesse you Speake what you thinke, because themselves are true But you like to an Eccho doe I feare Repeate the wordes, which you from others heare And ne’re speake that which from your hart proceedes Like noble mindes, whose wordes fall short their deedes. Then lett these lines this favoure from you gaine Either to love, or not att all to faine This is noe more, then honour ties you to Tis for your owne sake I would have you true For if your worth you once with falsehood staine When you speake truth, all will beleive you faine. Finis L. Dorothy Sherley (fos. 17v–18r)

This poem, which views conventional expressions of love with a critical eye, also survives in three other manuscripts (Bodleian MS English Poetry c.50, fo. 81; Huntington Library MS 904, fo. 136r–v; and British Library MS Sloane 1446, fo. 49v), but it did not find its way into print in its own time. One of the most remarkable features of the manuscript system of verse transmission and compilation is the presence of a very large number of rare or unique poems – some, no doubt, by women. Most of these are anonymous or they are compositions by scribes and compilers, but, as a body of work, they fall largely outside the definition of canonical literature and literary history has been, for the most part, silent about them. Although the absence of a reliable first-line index of post-Elizabethan poetry has hampered research in this area, Margaret Crum’s (1969) first-line index of manuscript poetry in the Bodleian Library and Carolyn Nelson’s (in progress) online ‘Union First Line Index of Manuscript Poetry, 13th to 19th Century’10 and Hilton’s Kelliher’s first-line index of poetry from manuscripts purchased by the British Library after 1895 (available in loose-leaf binders in the Manuscript Room of the British Library) together help us get a sense of which poems were unique or rare in surviving documents from the period. In Ann Cornwallis’s manuscript (Folger MS V.a.89), nine of the twentyseven poems in the main collection are apparently unique manuscript copies (Marotti 2002: 79–85). In Humphrey Coningsby’s much larger manuscript, there are some

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fifty-five unique poems (Marotti 2008: 101–2). Among the 515 poems of Folger MS V.a.345, close to 20 per cent of the poems are apparently unique copies.

Scribes, Compilers, and the Freedom of the Manuscript System The presence of a large body of unique and/or anonymous poems in surviving manuscript documents points to the activities of scribes and compilers in shaping their collections. The manuscript system of literary transmission encouraged responsiveness on the part of those receiving texts from others. The sharp lines between author and reader, or producer and consumer, which mark print culture, were not in place in this environment. Scribes and compilers were not only free to alter, rearrange, supplement, imitate, conflate, excerpt, ascribe (sometimes misascribe), title or retitle, parody, or answer the texts they received, but also to record their own poetic compositions – that is to exercise a degree of collaborative and co-creative participation in literary creation. In one manuscript, for example, Donne’s ‘The Will’ is rewritten to make it into a poem in regular couplets, but there are also other variants perhaps caused by misremembering a memorised text (rather than because of copyist errors ). The changes are indicated in bold: A Lovers Testament dying for Love Before I grone my last gaspe, let me breath Great Love: some legacie I here bequeath. My eyes to Argus if my eyes can see If they be blind, the[n] Love I give them the. My toung to fame, to ambushes my cares, To women or the sea, I give my teares. Thou love hast me long e’re this to fore By making me serve her who’d twenty more, And that I should give what I had to such, And to none else but those that had too much. My constancy I to the Plannets give My truth to them, who at the court doe live. My ingenuity, my opennesse To Jesuits: Buffounes my pensiven[e]sse. My spleene to any that abroad hath beene. My money give I to a Capuchine. Thou love did teach me, by appointing me To love wher love, should not rewarded be. [stanza omitted] My reputation I bequeath to those Which were my friends, my industry to foes. [2 lines missing]

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To nature all that I in rime have writ And to my companie I give my wit. Love thou wast partiall making me adore Her who begot this love in me before. Taught me to thinke that I did give, when I Did but restore my lent felicitie. To him for whom the passing bell next tolles I give my phisicke books my writing toules. My morall councells I to Bedlem give My brazen mettalls unto them which live In want of bread. To them which passe among All forreiners, I give my English toung. Thou love by making me deerely love one who thinkes her Love a fit proportion For such as are but young in foolish love Thus disproportioning my guiftes disprove. (BL Add. 10309, fos. 50v–51r)

In two other manuscripts there are examples of rewriting and imitation of Donne’s ‘A Valediction: forbidding mourning’: a poem ascribed to Simon Butteris in Bodleian MS Ashmole 38 (‘As dying saintes who sweetly pass away’, p. 121) and an anonymous author’s refiguring of its famous compass image in a new poem, ‘The man and wife that kinde and loving are’ (Folger MS V.a.345, pp. 44–5) (Marotti 1995: 152–8). Some poems in the manuscript system were open to literary supplements. For example, Sir John Harington’s popular epigram on a knight’s telling his wife she is unconsciously exposing herself while sitting with her legs apart, ‘A virtuous lady sitting in a muse’, appears in some thirty-six different manuscripts, in one of them (Folger MS V.a.339, fo. 275) expanded by four more lines, with the marginal annotation ‘A couplet or two fastened to Sir John Harrington his epigram, to do his Town’s knight yeoman service’ (Beal 1980–93: 1.2.140). In an Oxford anthology, Bodleian MS English Poetry e.14, there is a supplement to Sir Henry Wotton’s poem for Princess Elizabeth, ‘You meaner beauties of the night’, to which the scribe refers: ‘Two other Staves added by Another’ (fo. 68v). Sir Walter Ralegh’s lyric, ‘Farewell falce love, thou oracle of lies’, grew in size in the course of manuscript transmission from eighteen to thirty lines (Marotti 1995: 145). On a grander scale, the satirical political poem ‘The Parliament Fart’, written during the time of the discussion of the possible political union of Scotland and England during King James I’s first Parliament (1604–10), continued to accrete additional couplets and, passing beyond the time of its original occasion, grew, in its longest surviving version, to 244 lines (O’Callaghan 1998: 81–96; Whitlock 1982: 283–93). In some manuscript poetry collections, we find interesting examples of poems that have been produced by conflating two different texts. For example, in Rosenbach Library MS 1083/16 Shakespeare’s Sonnet 106 is joined to a non-Shakespearean poem

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associated with someone who has been identified as a possible addressee of the ‘young man’ section of the sonnet collection, William Herbert, earl of Pembroke, creating a new piece entitled ‘On his Mistress Beauty’ (Redding 1960: 670–1). Shakespeare’s sonnets may have been associated with Pembroke’s own poetry and the non-Shakespearean part of this piece appeared in the 1660 edition of Poems Written by the Right Honourable William Earl of Pembroke … Many of which are answered by way of Repartee, by Sir Benjamin Ruddier (pp. 54–5) (Marotti 1990: 148–9). However the two poems came to be conflated, their presentation as a single lyric is a sign of the flexibility of the manuscript system and of its looser attitude towards authors’ prerogatives and literary authority. In a mid-seventeenth-century manuscript now in the Houghton Library at Harvard (Harvard MS English 626), we come across the following lyric: To what a cumbersome unrulinesse And burdenous corpulence my love is growne; But that I did to make it lesse And keepe it in proportion, Give it a Dyett, made it feede upon That which Love worst endures, Discretion, Above one sighe a daye I allow’d him not Of which my fortunes, and my faults had part And yf sometimes by stealth, hee gott A shee [woman’s] sigh from my Mistresse hart And thought to feast mee; then I lett him see ’Twas neither verie sound, nor meate to mee Helpe Mistresse, Helpe, the flames of my desire Have sett my frozen patience on fire While I with teares doe seeke to quench the same My sighs doe fann, and kindle more the flame O from your Corall lipp, lett Nectar flowe For nothing else will putt it out I knowe. Finis (fos. 77v–78r)

The piece consists of the first two of the five stanzas of John Donne’s ‘Loves Diet’ and an additional six lines from an unknown source.11 There are, of course, many examples in the manuscript collections of poetic excerpts from larger poems, in which case the sentiments expressed or the felicity of the expression were valued as more important than the integrity of the complete poems. Sometimes poems are reduced in size: for example, in Sir John Perceval’s collection (British Library MS Additional 47111), William Strode’s thirty-eight-line poem ‘Look how the russet morn exceeds the night’ is shortened to a twenty-line piece (fo. 4r); in Rosenbach MS 1083/16, lines 53–70 of John Donne’s ‘The Perfume’ are recorded as a stand-alone poem entitled ‘One Proving False’ (pp. 303–4). In British Library MS

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Harley 3991, there is a short section labelled ‘Donne’s quaintest conceits’ (fos. 113r– 14v) consisting of excerpts from various Donne poems; in an earlier part of the manuscript, there are short excerpts from Shakespeare’s The Tempest and The Merchant of Venice (fos. 83v–84r). This kind of treatment of literary texts is also found in those printed volumes such as Puttenham’s Art of English Poesy (1589) or in such collections of poetical excerpts as Belvedere: or the Garden of the Muses (1600) and England’s Parnassus (1600). One seventeenth-century compiler, probably a student, recorded three whole poems and twenty-eight shorter or longer excerpts from Shakespeare’s Sonnets, apparently copied from John Benson’s 1640 edition (Marotti 1990: 163–5). John Ramsey was moved to write an imitation/paraphrase of Spenser’s Amoretti LXIV in his miscellaneous collection of verse and prose, Bodleian MS Douce 280, ‘To the Fayrest. A Sonnet. In Eandem dominae suae’ (‘Survaying with a curious serchinge eye’, fo. 35), signing the item ‘Poore J. R.’. Elsewhere in the manuscript he assumes a Spenserian pastoral persona, ‘Sheephearde Montanus’ in two other poems, the second of which is followed by a transcription of Spenser’s own Tears of the Muses, then another of Ramsey’s pastoral lyrics (‘Sheepheardes confesse with me’, fo. 43v), Spenser’s Visions of Petrarch, and another of his own pastoral pieces, ‘Montanus the Sheephearde his love to Flora’ (‘I serve sweete Flora brighter then Cinthias light’, fo. 45v) (Marotti 1995: 189–94). Ramsey signalled his attraction to Spenser in imitating him stylistically. As another example of poetic imitation, in the Calfe collection there is a poem modelled on Ben Jonson’s popular lyric from Epicoene, ‘Still to be neat, still to be dressed’: A Motion to pleasure Still to affect, still to admire yet never satisfy desire with touch of hand, or lypp, or that which pleaseth best, I name not what, like Tantalus I pining dye taking Loves dainties at the eye; Nature made nothing but for use, and fairest twere a grosse abuse to her best worke, if you it hold un-used, like misers ill gott gold, or keep it in a virgin scorne like rich Roabes that are seldome worne. (BL MS Harley 6917, fo. 41)

This was written in the spirit of the original, but another response to Jonson’s poetry circulated as a parodic version of a stanza from one of his poems to ‘Charis’ (‘Haue you seene the white Lilly grow’, which follows it as a separate poem in this manuscript, ‘A sonnet’, pp. 30–1):

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Arthur F. Marotti Have you seene a blackheaded Magott, A crawling one a deade Dogge? Or an old Witch with a fagott, A swayling of an Hedge-hogge? Have you smelt Cauf-bobby tosted Or a shipskin roasted: Or have smelt to the Babe in the whittle [baby blanket], Or the Leaper in the spittle? Have you tasted the Sabin tree? O so blacke, O so rough, O so sowre is Shee! (p. 30)12

Answer-poems were a familiar fixture of the manuscript system and are preserved in many compilations (Hart 1956; Marotti 1995: 159–71). From the Elizabethan era, in Ann Cornwallis’s poetry collection, Folger MS V.a.89, there is a poem by the imperious earl of Oxford, ‘Were I a king I might command content’, that is followed immediately by a piece critical of the earl’s social snobbery, ‘Were thou a king? yet not command content’ (p. 7) (Marotti 2002: 72). There is another example of class antagonism manifested in the response to Sir Edward Dyer’s lyric arguing for the ability of people of all levels of society to experience love, ‘The lowest trees have tops, the ant her gall’: Bodleian Library MS Rawlinson Poetry 148 has ‘The answer to Mr Diers dittie’ (fo. 106r) arguing for the social exclusiveness of refined love experience, a poem that is reproduced in the printed poetical miscellany, A Poetical Rhapsody (1602). Lady Mary Cheke wrote a feminist rejoinder to Sir John Harington’s epigram ‘Of a certain man’, ‘That no man yet could in the bible find’ (May 1991: 245–6). Queen Elizabeth gave a playfully condescending reply to Ralegh’s ‘Fortune hath taken thee away, my Love’, ‘Ah silly pugg, wert thou so sore afrayd?’ (May 1991: 318–19) and Sir Thomas Heneage answered Ralegh’s ‘Farewell false love, thow oracle of lyes’ with ‘Most welcome love, thow mortall foe to lies’ (May 1991: 339–40). Christopher Marlowe’s ‘Passionate Shepherd’ (‘Come live with me and be my love’) was answered by ‘The Nymph’s Reply to the Shepherd’ (‘If all the world and love were young’), a piece attributed posthumously to Sir Walter Ralegh and found both in manuscript (Bodleian MS Rawlinson Poetry 148) and print (England’s Helicon (1600); Izaak Walton, The Compleat Angler (1653)). Sir Walter Ralegh’s ‘The Lie’ (‘Go soul, the body’s guest’) elicited several politically intense replies (Rudick 1999: xlii– lxvii, 30–45). Richard Corbett’s ‘To the ladies of the new dress’ and Henry Reynolds’ ‘A Blackmore Maid wooing a fair boy’, both elicited answer poems, a practice common in an academic environment where students were used to composing competitive verse on set themes. Corbett, Strode and Jeramiel Terrent, all Christ Church poets, wrote poems on the topic of the stained-glass windows of Fairford Church, a target of Puritan iconoclasm (Corbett’s ‘Tell mee, you Anti-Saintes, why glasse’, Strode’s ‘I know no paint of poetry’, and Terrent’s ‘I hope at this time ’tis no news’). John Grange’s poem, ‘Black cypress veils are shrouds of night’, which appears in some eighteen surviving manuscripts, is a ventriloquised female answer to Richard Corbett’s poem, which

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criticises fashion-mongering women, but Corbett himself penned a ‘Reply to the Answer’ (‘If nought but love-charms power have’). Reynolds’ poem, itself a translation of a Latin poem by George Herbert (King 1965: 226), was answered by Henry King (‘The Boy’s answere to the Blackmore’ – ‘Black Mayd, complayne not that I fly’). Ben Jonson’s poem about retiring from the stage after the widespread criticism of his play The New Inn (‘Come leave the loathed stage’) was answered by his ‘adopted son’, Thomas Randolph, (‘Ben do not leave the stage’) as well as by Thomas Carew (‘Tis true, dear Ben, thy just chastising hand’).13 John Cleveland’s satiric poem on the 1643 Westminster Assembly (‘Flea-bitten synod! an assembly brewed’), which appears in British Library MS Harley 6918, fos. 70r–71r, is answered by two different poems that appear earlier in the collection: ‘Saltmarsh of Magdal[en College]: against Clevelands new commencement’ (‘Leave off vaine Satyrist, and doe not thinke’, fo. 40r), a piece that then elicited an answer to it, ‘by Wilde of Saint Johns [College]’ (‘Why how now sacred Epigrammatist’, fo. 40v). Some manuscripts preserve the record of epistolary verse exchange. British Library MS Additional 47111, a commonplace book of Sir John Perceval’s, has a poem by Lot Peere, of Audley End (‘Had Mr Percivall perceivd it well’), answered by the compiler (‘Had Mr Peere but learnt that money was’), the second, as the title notes ‘To the Tune of Honesti fures or Nihil perdidimus’ (fos. 80v–81v, 82v). Perceval’s manuscript, which the British Library catalogue states was ‘probably compiled while at Magdalene College, Cambridge: 1646–1649’, mainly consists of unascribed poems, but it also has ‘exercises in Latin and Greek verse, including sacred epigrams’ as well as ‘copies of family and other correspondence, partly in Latin’. In one of the prose pieces, a letter to his mother (fos. 46r–48r), he explains that he has fallen in love with an Englishborn Catholic widow he met in France, who had six children. Just a few pages before this, there is a poem about a Frenchwoman that appears to have survived in no other manuscript: Amor Is any here in love & faine would know from whome at first this deadly wound did grow Is any here in love and faine would see what pritty wight this God of love might bee see here love comes, heer’s that majesticke face that awes the world with his heart charminge grace And here I prove the kinge of love’s divine; for in his looke I see an angell shine; heer’s beuty planted, heere the springe garden France thy faire lilie growes, with the English rose. Thou art a Queene faire Nimph whose orient haire like early sunbeames guild th’amazed aire. Ah could those cullers the sun of Venus get hee’d weave of them soe fine soe stronge A net that with thy haire he’d captivate more hearts

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Arthur F. Marotti Then ere as yet he wounded with his darts heer’s that love knott where all relation tide heer’s Prince and kingdome, father sonne & bride. (fo. 43v)

Several other poems in the collection were also written by the compiler. Scribal or compiler poetry is a normal part of the documentary record. Those who copied, altered, supplemented, or imitated poems they received often decided to write their own independent verse for inclusion in their collections. Often this poetry was directly related to the scribe’s or compiler’s social relationships, as in Perceval’s case. Humphrey Coningsby recorded several of his own poems in his large anthology (British Library MS Harley 7392), including an epistolary offer of love, ‘my curious Eyes (whose wary syght)’ (fo. 32v) (Marotti 1995: 176–81). Another Elizabethan compiler, John Lilliat, inserted his own poems in his anthology, Bodleian MS Rawlinson Poetry 148, among which are two lyrics inspired by Marlowe’s ‘Passionate Shepherd’: ‘Upon a kiss given’ (fos. 97v–98r) and ‘The S[h]heperdisse her Replie’ (fos. 100v–101r) (Doughtie 1985: 110–12, 114–15). Henry Stanford set aside space in his anthology (Cambridge MS Dd.5.75) for poetry written by his pupils and by him, including sonnets he wrote to accompany books he sent as gifts to his female aristocratic employers (Marotti 1995: 187–9; May 1988). Compilers often composed epitaphs and elegies about friends or family members. For example, at the end of British Library MS Harley 6917–18, Peter Calfe (the younger?) has ‘An Elegy: On the much Lamented Death of his Ever honourd friend George Gore Esquire’ (‘Since thou art fledd, nere more for to appeare’, fo. 96r) as well as eight other elegiac poems, including one for his own wife that was obviously inspired by the popular elegy by Henry King, many of whose poems were transcribed in the collection (Marotti 1995: 204–6). In the Skipwith family manuscript, a five-part compilation mainly assembled over several decades by or for Sir William Skipwith and his son Sir Henry, we find some of their own verse. Sir William’s poems register the stylistic influence of both Donne and Jonson, the first of whose poems form a large group in the early part of the collection (Marotti 1995: 196–9). Nicholas Burghe’s four poems in his collection (Bodleian MS Ashmole 38) embody some of the different poetic styles and idioms of the verse he selected for his manuscript, a fact that left him open to a charge of plagiarism apparently levelled at him by the recipient of one of his poems, to whom he replied: You cal’d me Theefe, when I presumed to Raise Thes few rude Lynes, thy bewtye for to Prayse Tho stol’st my hart; why then tis past beliefe ytt tis not I; but Thou that arte the theefe. (p. 23)

In the act of copying, scribes internalised and appropriated the words and the styles of the poems in their possession. Thus, especially in a period in which modern notions

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of originality were not the norm, the boundary between others’ work and one’s own was blurred.

Poems Copied from Printed Books One of the common practices in manuscript culture, especially in the seventeenth century, is the transcription of poems from printed books. Earlier works, such as those that formed Tottel’s Miscellany, migrated from manuscript to print; similarly, the posthumous print editions of the poetry of Donne (1633) and Thomas Carew (1640) gathered work that had remained in manuscript circulation during the poet’s lifetime. The flow of texts, however, could be reversed, with work in print returning to manuscript. For example, British Library MS Harley 6910, as Katherine Gottschalk (1979– 80) has shown, was primarily based on printed texts. British Library MS Additional 34064 has poems copied from the 1593 edition of Sidney’s Arcadia, and from Spenser’s The Ruines of Time and Mother Hubbard’s Tale from the 1591 volume of his Complaints (Ringler 1984). The Burley Manuscript (Leicestershire County Council MS DG7/LIT 2), which has a selection of poetry and prose, has many passages from Edmund Spenser’s The Ruines of Time, undoubtedly copied from a printed edition.14 Bodleian MS Ashmole 38 has, among other items, many pieces lifted from the 1605 edition of William Camden’s Remaines. Folger MS V.a.162, a verse miscellany probably compiled at Oxford, not only has copies of Shakespeare’s Sonnets 32 (fo. 26r) and 71 (fo. 12v), but also, from other print sources, copies of Edmund Spenser’s Amoretti IV, appropriated for new use as ‘A Sonnett on the new yeere 1639’ (fo. 22v), George Herbert’s ‘The Altar’ (fo. 12v) and ‘Redemption’ (fo. 15v), poems by Thomas Watson, Henry Parrot, and William Habington (fos. 13v, 21v, 23v), as well as a piece ‘On Sir Thomas Overbury’ (‘Once dead and twice alive, death could not frame’), which was published in the 1616 posthumous edition of Overbury’s The Wife. A very large number of the other poems in this collection are rare, if not unique, pieces, suggesting that the two main scribes responsible for this manuscript wrote some of them – for example, ‘To his dear friend Mr Stephen Jackson’ (‘Brother for so I call thee, not because’, fo. 12r) and ‘On the wor[ship]full Sir Paul Pinder’ (‘Sir Paul of all that ever bare that name’, fo. 21r), an anagram poem the first letters of each line of which spell out the addressee’s name. The antiquary Marmaduke Rawden’s anthology (British Library MS Additional 18044) acknowledges in the text the printed sources from which poems were copied. Bodleian MS Douce 280 has texts from Spenser’s Mother Hubbard’s Tale, The Tears of the Muses, and The Visions of Petrarch, as well as songs from printed books (Doughtie 1993; Marotti 1995: 21).

Poems Popular in the Manuscript System If, with our familiarity with canonical texts, we look at the poems that were copied repeatedly in manuscript collections, we discover some expected and some unexpected

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things. We know, judging from the extraordinary number of manuscripts in which the poetry appears (some 250), that John Donne’s poems were in great demand in the manuscript system of literary transmission, particularly some of his love elegies and lyrics. There are poems by other canonical poets that, not surprisingly, recur often: for example, Ralegh’s ‘What is our life’, ‘Even such is time’, and ‘The Lie’; Sir John Harington’s ‘A virtuous lady sitting in a muse’; Jonson’s ‘The Hour-Glass’ and two of his Venetia Digby poems, ‘The Body’ and ‘The Mind’; Carew’s ‘Ask me no more whither do stray’, ‘A fly that flew into his mistress’ eye’ (‘When this fly liv’d, she us’d to play’), and ‘The Rapture’; King’s ‘The Exequy’; and Herrick’s ‘Curse’ (‘Go perjur’d man’), ‘Welcome to Sack’, and ‘Farewell to Sack’. What is, perhaps, surprising is the popularity of poems that, largely because of the low visibility of most of them in print, have not been well known beyond their own time: for example, Walton Poole’s ‘If shadows be a picture’s excellence’; William Browne of Tavistock’s epitaphs on the countess of Pembroke (‘Underneath this sable hearse’) and Anne Prideaux (‘Nature in this small volume was about’), and the lyric ‘On one drowned in the snow’ (‘Within a fleece of silent waters drown’d’); Sir Henry Wotton’s ‘The characters of a happy life’ (‘How happy is he born or taught’) and ‘O faithless world’; William Strode’s ‘On a blistered lip’ (‘Chide not thy sprowting lippe, nor kill’), ‘On a butcher marrying a tanner’s daughter’ (‘A fitter match hath never been’), ‘On a Gentlewoman walking in the snow’ (‘I saw fair Cloris walk alone’), and ‘My love and I for kisses played’; and such anonymous poems as ‘I’ll tell you how the rose did first grow red’ and ‘Farewell ye gilded follies’. Some of the popular pieces were popular because they were disseminated widely at the university, especially at Christ Church, Oxford. Others were popular because they were examples of wit like the pieces gathered in such mid-century miscellanies as (the much-reprinted and constantly expanding) Wits Recreations (1640), The Harmony of the Muses (1654), Sportive Wit (1656), and Parnassus Biceps (1656): they attracted the attention of educated, socially fashionable young men. Still others were popular because they dealt with socially or politically prominent individuals. Some of these poems, tied to their immediate contexts or not part, finally, of notable printed editions of particular canonical poets’ work, dropped out of sight. What is clear from the list of poems that were popular in manuscript transmission is that some poets who loomed large in print did not do so in manuscript, and vice versa. Some early modern English poets, such as Wyatt, Surrey, Sidney, Ralegh, Dyer, Greville, Harington, Gorges, Southwell, Donne, Carew, Corbett, Strode, Randolph, and Traherne, functioned almost exclusively in the system of manuscript transmission during their lifetimes, and their poetry was either put into print without their permission or published posthumously. Other poets, such as Gascoigne, Spenser, Daniel, Drayton, Jonson, Herrick, Shirley, and King, used the manuscript system of transmission, but also allowed their work to be printed or, as in the cases especially of Spenser, Daniel, Drayton, and Jonson, made a determined effort to publicise their names through print. Literary histories, which have been based largely on the products of print culture, have given less attention to manu-

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script-system poets such as Dyer, Gorges, Greville, and Strode (especially the last of these) and they have ignored most of the anonymous verse found in the manuscript medium.

Conclusions Manuscripts of poetry, first, highlight the connections of literary texts to their original and subsequent social and political contexts: lyrics by Sir Walter Ralegh, for example, could register one set of social and political attitudes in their original circumstances of composition, but also take on new significance in later historical contexts. Whereas printed collections, from the time of Tottel, tended to remove texts from their occasional matrices and lift them into a developing sphere of the literary, manuscript anthologies invited topical readings. Second, manuscript collections enact a different conception of textuality. Instead of maintaining an author-centred attitude, they present texts as changeable and changing, subject to the co-creative literary agency of the compilers and transmitters. Some authors’ works have a particularly interesting history in the manuscript system – Ralegh’s and Donne’s, for example. Michael Rudick’s (1999) edition of the former, which he terms ‘A Historical Edition’, presents the author as a changing sign within a materially grounded literary history rather than as a biographical entity whose texts need to be purged of (alleged) corruptions and misattributions, then reconstructed in an idealistic way. The manuscript evidence encourages this sociocentric approach. By contrast, authors not strongly represented in the manuscript anthologies of the period, such as Herbert and Milton, have a different relation to socio-literary history. Third, manuscript anthologies force us to pay attention to texts outside the familiar literary canon, especially to a large body of unidentified, rare, or unique poems – including verse written by the compilers themselves. Many of the pieces in the surviving manuscript collections are at least rare, if not unique. Some are skilful, some clumsy, but all are culturally symptomatic. Fourth, the combination of elements in personal anthologies is often idiosyncratic, a product not only of the developing interests of compilers, but also of happenstance (such as the acquisition from a particular source of a group of poems for transcription). The resulting collection may be quite heterogeneous, typically not arranged in a particular generic or other order, although some collections have an arrangement of their contents by genre. Fifth, manuscript anthologies often present individual authors within the social and literary networks in which they were enmeshed rather than in isolation from them. And so, if, for example, we compare the different ways we encounter their work within manuscript anthologies with its presentation in single-author editions, the traces of the social and political contexts are more visible in the former, as are the literary ‘conversations’ in which they were engaged with their contemporaries. The

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print publication of single-author editions removed poets from their socio-literary relationships. For example, we know that Spenser and Sidney exchanged verse with one another (Woudhuysen 1996: 297), but their published work does not reveal this reality. Sixth, the personal anthologies are important evidence for scholars to use in constructing narratives of changing aesthetic and literary tastes in the early modern period – a story worth telling, but one that should be based not simply on the printed remains from the period. Aesthetic judgement and connoisseurship were exercised to some degree in the construction of some of the personal anthologies of the period, and, although they were not the only or the consistent standards used to determine inclusion of particular pieces, it is fair to say that the artfulness and skill perceived in particular poems account for their presence in the collections. Just as keepers of commonplace books made judgements about what ideas and authoritative statements were worth recording (and internalising as part of their intellectual furniture), so too compilers of poetical anthologies, in a period in which the modern institution of literature was taking shape largely through the impact of print culture, transcribed poems whose artful expression made them worth preserving. To some extent, then, the compilers functioned as literary critics. There are, of course, many other reasons for examining these manuscript documents, including the important one having to do with the need to rewrite literary history to make it less dependent on print culture and more representative of the full system of textual circulation and transmission in all media – voice, manuscript, and print.

Notes 1 Woudhuysen (1996: 157) states that there are about 230 verse miscellanies surviving for the period before 1640, twenty-seven of which were compiled before 1600. 2 Ivy (1958: 40) states that ‘In manuscript times, the quire was the basic unit of the book. Most books were probably written by their authors in quires … Miscellaneous manuscripts were compiled by the quire.’ 3 In quoting from manuscript documents, I have modernised i/j and u/v and expanded contractions, but retained original punctuation. 4 See the description of this manuscript in Krueger 1975: 438–9. 5 On the last of these, see Brown 2003. 6 On the poetry concerning Cecil, see Croft 1991. On the latter, see McRae 2004: 46–80 passim and 120–43 passim and Marotti 1995:

107–10. Poems on both figures are reproduced in Bellany and McRae 2005. 7 See also Love and Marotti 2002: 74–80 and, for later satiric and political verse, Love 2004. 8 The manuscript catalogue developed through this multi-year project by Elizabeth Clarke, Victoria Burke, Jonathan Gibson, and others is now available online, accompanied by digitised copies of manuscripts, through Adam Matthew Publications: . 9 Lady Dorothy was close to the Catholic Tixall circle, a friend in particular of Constance Aston Fowler, in whose manuscript collection (Huntington MS HM 904) this poem also appears: for this, see Aldrich-Watson 2000: 105. Stevenson and Davidson (2001: 261–2) print another of her poems (from Fowler’s

The Manuscript Transmission of Poetry manuscript collection), ‘Deare Cosen pardon me, if I mistowke’. 10 This online resource, (now accessible only by password) should soon be posted on the Folger Shakespeare Library website. It conflates several separate first-line indexes: the old British Library handwritten index of poetry in manuscripts purchased before 1895, Crum’s Bodleian index, and the indexes of the Brotherton Collection (University of Leeds.), the Folger Library, the Houghton Library (Harvard), the Beinecke Library (Yale), and the Huntington Library. Peter Beal’s ongoing project of producing an expanded, online version of his Index of English Literary Manuscripts should help fill in some of the gaps in our knowledge. 11 The six lines beginning ‘Helpe Mistress Helpe, the flames of my desire’ also appear as a separate poem in Bodleian MS English Poetry c. 50, fo. 117v. Interestingly, two poems later, we find a transcription of the first two stanzas of Donne’s ‘Love’s diet’ (untitled), followed, on fo. 118r, by Ben Jonson’s ‘My Picture left in Scotland’ (untitled). The anonymous six-line poem is also found

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in Folger MSS V.a.96, fo. 51 and V.a.322, p. 127 and Bodleian MS English Poetry c.50, fo. 117v (ending ‘For nothing else will put it out I know’). 12 This piece is also found in British Library MSS Additional 19268, fo. 14 and Sloane 1792, fo. 92; Bodleian MS English Poetry f.25, fo. 64v; Westminster Abbey MS 41, fo. 89; and Yale Osborn MS b 205, fo. 73. 13 All three poems are found in Folger MS V.a.170, pp. 184–92, followed by Thomas Randolph’s and William Strode’s separate Latin translations of Jonson’s poem, pp. 192–7. 14 The Spenser selections are on fos. 317r–20v under the heading, ‘Verses taken out of the ruines of tyme’: (in order) The Ruines of Time, ll. 43–56, 83–4. 102–5, 106–19, 134–40, 159–61, 169–75, 183–96, 216–17; Mother Hubbard’s Tale, ll. 713–56, 891–908, 1021– 2, 1151–78; The Ruines of Time, ll. 223–8, 239–43, 258–64, 272–3, 302–5, 365–71, 435–59, 673–9, 517–28; The Tears of the Muses, ll. 571–82, 589–94; Mother Hubbard’s Tale, ll. 133–53, 254–8, 431–6, 457–8, 475–6.

References and Further Reading Aldrich-Watson, Deborah (ed.) (2000). The Verse Miscellany of Constance Aston Fowler: A Diplomatic Edition. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies/Renaissance English Text Society. Armitage, C. M. (1966). ‘Donne’s poems in Huntington Manuscript 198: new light on “The Funeral” ’. Studies in Philology, 63, 697–707. Beal, Peter (comp.) (1980–93). Index of English Literary Manuscripts, vol. 1, pts. 1 and 2: 1450– 1625; vol. 2, pts. 1 and 2: 1625–1700. London and New York: Mansell Publishing. Beal, Peter (1993) ‘Notions in garrison: the seventeenth-century commonplace book’. In W. Speed Hill (ed.), New Ways of Looking at Old Texts: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1985–1991 (pp. 131–47). Binghamton, NY:

Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies/ Renaissance English Text Society. Beal, Peter (1998). In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and their Makers in Seventeenth-Century England. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Beal, Peter and Margaret J. M. Ezell (eds.) (2000). ‘Writings by early modern women’. English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700, 9. Bellany, Alastair and Andrew McRae (eds.) (2005). ‘Early Stuart libels: an edition of poetry from manuscript sources’. Early Modern Literary Studies, Text Series I. . Boffey, Julia (1985). Manuscripts of English Courtly Love Lyrics in the Later Middle Ages. Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer. Brown, Cedric (2003). ‘Recusant community and Jesuit mission in Parliament days: Bodleian MS

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Eng. poet. b.5’. Yearbook of English Studies, 33, 290–315. Burke, Victoria E. (2003). ‘Contexts for women’s manuscript miscellanies: the case of Elizabeth Lyttleton and Sir Thomas Browne’. Yearbook of English Studies, 33, 316–28. Burke, Victoria E. (2004). ‘Reading friends: women’s participation in “masculine” literary culture’. In Victoria E. Burke and Jonathan Gibson (eds.), Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Writing: Selected Papers from the Trinity/Trent Colloquium (pp. 75–90). Aldershot: Ashgate. Chartier, Roger (1989). ‘Leisure and sociability: reading aloud in modern Europe’, trans. Carol Mossman. In Susan Zimmerman and Ronald F. E. Weissman (eds.), Urban Life in the Renaissance (pp. 103–20). Newark: University of Delaware Press. Cogswell, Thomas (1995). ‘Underground verse and the transformation of early Stuart political culture’. In Susan D. Amussen and Mark A Kishlansky (eds.), Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England: Essays Presented to David Underdown (pp. 277–300). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Colclough, David (1998). ‘ “The Muses Recreation”: John Hoskyns and the manuscript culture of the seventeenth century’. Huntington Library Quarterly, 61/3–4, 369–400. Crane, Mary Thomas (1993). Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Croft, Pauline (1991). ‘The reputation of Robert Cecil: libels, political opinion and popular awareness in the early seventeenth century’. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th ser., 1, 43–69. Crum, Margaret (1961). ‘Notes on the physical characteristics of some manuscripts of the poems of Donne and of Henry King’. The Library, 4th ser., 16, 121–32. Crum, Margaret (ed.) (1969). First-Line Index of Manuscripts in the Bodleian Library, 2 vols. New York: Modern Language Association of America. Crum, Margaret (1979). ‘Poetical manuscripts of Dudley, Third Baron North’. Bodleian Library Record, 10, 98–108. Cummings, Laurence (1960). ‘John Finet’s Miscellany’. Ph.D. diss., Washington University. Doughtie, Edward (1993). ‘John Ramsey’s manuscript as a personal and family Document’. In

W. Speed Hill (ed.), New Ways of Looking at Old Texts: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1985–1991 (pp. 281–8). Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies/ Renaissance English Text Society. Doughtie, Edward (ed.) (1985). ‘Liber Lilliati’: Elizabethan Verse and Song (Bodleian MS Rawlinson Poetry 148). Newark: University of Delaware Press. Ezell, Margaret J. M. (1993). Writing Women’s Literary History. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Ezell, Margaret J. M. (2008). ‘The laughing tortoise: speculations on manuscript sources and women’s book history’. English Literary Renaissance, 38/2, 331–55. Gottschalk, Katherine K. (1979–80). ‘Discoveries concerning British Library MS Harley 6910’. Modern Philology, 77, 121–31. Harrier, Richard (1975). The Canon of Sir Thomas Wyatt’s Poetry. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hart, E. F. (1956). ‘The answer-poem of the early seventeenth century’. Review of English Studies, ns 7, 19–29. Heale, Elizabeth (2004). ‘ “Desiring women writing”: female voices and courtly “balets” in some early Tudor manuscript albums’. In Victoria E. Burke and Jonathan Gibson (eds.), Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Writing: Selected Papers from the Trinity/Trent Colloquium (pp. 9– 31). Aldershot: Ashgate. Hobbs, Mary (1992). Early Seventeenth-Century Verse Miscellany Manuscripts. Aldershot: Scolar Press. Hughey, Ruth (ed.) (1960). The Arundel Harington Manuscript of Tudor Poetry, 2 vols. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Ivy, G. S. (1958). ‘The bibliography of the manuscript-book’. In Francis Wormald and C. E. Wright (eds.), The English Library before 1700: Studies in its History (pp. 32–65). London: Athlone Press. Kerrigan, John (1988). ‘Thomas Carew’. Proceedings of the British Academy, 74, 311–50. King, Henry (1965). The Poems of Henry King, ed. Margaret Crum. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Klene, Jean, C. S. C. (ed.) (1997). The Southwell– Sipthorpe Commonplace Book. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies/ Renaissance English Text Society.

The Manuscript Transmission of Poetry Krueger, Robert (ed.) (1961). ‘The Poems of William Herbert, Third Earl of Pembroke’. B. Litt. thesis, Oxford. Krueger, Robert (ed.) (1975). The Poems of Sir John Davies. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Leishman, J. B. (1945). ‘ “You meaner beauties of the night”: a study in transmission and transmogrification’. The Library, 4th ser., 26, 99–121. Love, Harold (1993). Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Love, Harold (2004). English Clandestine Satire 1660–1702. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Love, Harold and Arthur F. Marotti (2002). ‘Manuscript transmission and circulation’. In David Loewenstein and Janel Mueller (eds.), The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature (pp. 55–80). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McRae, Andrew (2004). Literature and the Early Stuart State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marotti, Arthur F. (1986). John Donne, Coterie Poet. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Marotti, Arthur F. (1990). ‘Shakespeare’s sonnets as literary property’. In Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katharine Eisaman Maus (eds.), Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry (pp. 143–73). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Marotti, Arthur F. (1995). Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Marotti, Arthur F. (2002). ‘The cultural and textual importance of Folger MS V.a.89’. In Peter Beal and Grace Ioppolo (eds.), ‘Manuscripts and their makers in the English Renaissance’. English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700, 11, 70–92. Marotti, Arthur F. (2008) ‘Humphrey Coningsby and the personal anthologizing of verse in Elizabethan England’. In Michael Denbo (ed.), New Ways of Looking at Old Texts, IV: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society 2002–2006 (pp. 71–102). Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies/Renaissance English Text Society. May, Steven W. (1971). ‘The “French Primero”: a study in Renaissance textual transmission and taste’. English Language Notes, 9, 102–8.

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May, Steven W. (ed.) (1988). Henry Stanford’s Anthology: An Edition of Cambridge University Library Manuscript Dd.5.75. New York and London: Garland Publishing. May, Steven W. (1991). The Elizabethan Courtier Poets: The Poems and their Contexts. Columbia: University Press. May, Steven W. (ed.) (2004). Queen Elizabeth I: Selected Works. New York: Washington Square Press. May, Steven W. and William A. Ringler, Jr. (2004). Elizabethan Poetry: A Bibliography and First-Line Index of English Verse, 1559–1603, 3 vols. London and New York: Thoemmes Continuum. Millman, Jill Seal and Gilliam Wright (eds.) (2005). Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Poetry. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Moulton, Ian (2000) Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nelson, William (1976–7). ‘From “Listen, lordings” to “Dear reader” ’. University of Toronto Quarterly, 46, 110–24. O’Callaghan, Michelle (1998). ‘Performing politics: the circulation of the “Parliament Fart” ’. Huntington Library Quarterly, 69/1, 121–38. Powell, Jason (2004). ‘Thomas Wyatt’s poetry in embassy: Egerton 2711 and the production of manuscripts abroad’. Huntington Library Quarterly, 67/2, 261–82. Redding, David Coleman (1960). ‘Robert Bishop’s commonplace book: an edition of a seventeenthcentury miscellany’. Ph.D. diss., University of Pennsylvania. Ringler, William (1984). ‘Bishop Percy’s quarto manuscript (British Museum MS Additional 34064) and Nicholas Breton’. Philological Quarterly, 54, 26–39. Rollins, Hyder Edward (ed.) (1965). Tottel’s Miscellany (1557–1587), rev. edn. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Rudick, Michael (1999). The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh: A Historical Edition. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies/ Renaissance English Text Society. Saunders, J. W. (1951a). ‘From manuscript to print: a note on the circulation of poetic MSS in the sixteenth century’. Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, 6/8, 508–28.

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Saunders, J. W. (1951b). ‘ “The stigma of print”: a note on the social bases of Tudor poetry’. Essays in Criticism, 1, 139–64. Stevenson, Jane and Peter Davidson (eds.) (2001). Early Modern Women Poets: An Anthology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sullivan II, Ernest W. (1988). The First and Second Dalhousie Manuscripts: Poems and Prose by John Donne and Others, A Facsimile Edition. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.

Talvacchia, Bette (1999). Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Whitlock, Baird W. (1982). John Hoskyns, Serjeantat-Law. Washington, DC: University Press of America. Woudhuysen, H. R. (1996). Sir Philip Sidney and the Circulation of Manuscripts 1558–1640. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Poets, Friends, and Patrons: Donne and his Circle; Ben and his Tribe Robin Robbins

Invention and Imitation, Art and Values Thomas Carew’s ‘Elegy upon the death of the Dean of Paul’s, Dr John Donne’ laments firstly the loss of England’s pre-eminent preacher, who ‘Committed holy rapes upon our will; / Did through the eyes the melting heart distil.’ Similarly, Izaak Walton’s hagiography prefixed to the LXXX Sermons in 1640 is of an antitype of St Augustine, the profligate youth becoming a saint of the church. Donne himself had fostered this image, for example in his letter of 1619 to Sir Robert Ker asking him to regard the treatise on suicide, Biathanatos, written before his ordination, as ‘by Jack Donne and not by Dr Donne’. Ben Jonson reported to Drummond in the same year that Donne, ‘since he was made Doctor, repenteth highly and seeketh to destroy all his poems’ (Jonson 1925–52: I, 136). But though Carew finally falls in with this change of identity in his last line, ‘Apollo’s first, at last the true God’s priest’, he devotes the intervening three-quarters of his 98-line poem to Donne’s achievement for English poetry. Carew sees Donne as throwing off the dominance of what young men were made to read at school and university, principally Latin poets: The Muses’ garden, with pedantic weeds O’erspread, was purged by thee, the lazy seeds Of servile imitation thrown away, And fresh invention planted.

Donne has ‘opened us a mine / Of rich and pregnant fancy, drawn a line / Of masculine expression’. To claim that the dead person is inimitable is usual in funeral orations, but Carew foresaw rightly that thy strict laws will be Too hard for libertines in poetry:

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Robin Robbins They will repeal the goodly exiled train Of gods and goddesses which, in thy just reign, Were banished nobler poems.

Ironically, though he echoes Donne’s Holy Sonnet ‘Batter my heart’ with that metaphysical conceit (not an ‘image’ but the adducing of abstract similarities between things materially different) of ‘holy rapes’, Carew looks back to Greece and Rome in ‘Promethean breath … Delphic choir … The Muses’ garden … good / Old Orpheus … crown of bays … two flamens … Apollo’. Moreover, while Donne was inventive in his imagery and diction, he deployed them in the classical genres of epigram, verseepistle, elegy, lyric, satire, epicede (commemorative poem), hymn, and epithalamion, as well as a Renaissance form, the sonnet. Classical writers such as Ovid provided some of the stock figures in his earlier poems, such as the libertine woman of ‘Confined love’. ‘Go and catch a falling star’ derives ultimately from a classical tradition, that of likening the breach of love or friendship to a list of impossibilities (adunata). In the Christian era the device was diverted onto female fidelity, as in the fifteenth-century example (Robbins 1952: 101): ‘When nettles in winter bear roses red … Then put in a woman your trust and confidence.’ Another example, beginning ‘Embrace a sunbeam’ (Osborn 1937: 299), is possibly by Donne’s contemporary at Oxford and the Inns of Court, John Hoskyns. In octosyllabics, as Donne’s is predominantly, both might derive from a contest of wit among a group of young courtier-wits in the early 1590s. Donne’s itself became a classic, copied and recopied in numerous collections of his poems and miscellanies, and imitated by other poets. In the Elegies this insouciant dispraise tilted towards misogyny, and in his epistle to the countess of Huntingdon he denies that women have souls at all (Donne 2008: II, 237n.) – a suggestion gracefully dismissed in Jonson’s Masque of Beauty (Targoff 2008: 43–4). It has been suggested that those poems reveal the tensions experienced by men who had to submit to the authority of a female monarch (Guibbory 1990). William Habington (1605– 54) at last turned the tables ‘Against them who Lay unchastity to the sex of women’ in Castara, 1635 (Donne 1965: 152, 157). Donne, Carew implies, challenges head-on the ideals of Jonson, who in his Poetaster, satirising the satirist John Marston, has Virgil prescribe a corrective diet of classical authors. To the Scots poet-laird William Drummond, Jonson boasted in 1619 that ‘He was better versed and knew more in Greek and Latin than all the poets in England, and quintessenced their brains.’ Moreover, so central and sufficient for him was Horace’s ‘Ars poetica’ that when his 1604 translation was affected by a new critical text from the continent in 1610, he meticulously revised it, and wrote a commentary (destroyed in the burning of his library in 1623). Jonson’s poetic work, like Donne’s, is largely in the traditional genres, with the difference that he is concerned to emulate but not go far beyond them. Rosalind Miles defends his classicism as ‘never mere pedantry … He strove always for the timeless classical virtues of unity, symmetry, clarity and proportion’ (Miles 1990: 278–9). Accordingly, he opined to Drummond

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‘That Donne for not keeping of accent deserved hanging … that Donne himself for not being understood would perish’ (Jonson 1925–52: I, 133, 138). This is a selective version, however, of ‘classical values’: Jonson does not often display in his poems Plato’s rationalism, Horace’s urbanity, or Seneca’s stoical avoidance of emotion. In his longest poem, ‘On the famous voyage’, the concentration on the filthy side of London life is far from Horatian in its deliberate excess, though as an overt burlesque of the underworld journeys of classical myth, it follows an alternative classical precedent, that of parody such as the Homeric Batrachomyomachia, ‘The Battle of the Frogs and Mice’, and works by Aristophanes and Lucian, Horace, Ovid and Petronius. It was because Greek and Latin cultures contained so much variety and contradiction that they provided rich opportunities for imitation and development. Begging the question of his own qualification, Jonson asserted ‘the impossibility of any man’s being the good poet without first being a good man’ so as ‘to be able to inform young men to all good disciplines, inflame grown men to all great virtues’ (Epistle to the two universities prefixed to Volpone: Dutton 2000: 114–31). For ‘being’ read ‘seeming’: it is by the persona he constructs, by what Miles (1990: 175) calls ‘a consistent self-imaging along the wished-for lines’, screening his own vigorous indulgence in all seven deadly sins (except, perhaps, sloth), that he achieves the sound of moral authority. In life, as he makes clear to Drummond, no Horatian ethos of civilised restraint regulated the actual proud, ambitious, lustful, envious, greedy, irascible Jonson. His frank self-portrait in ‘Epistle to my Lady Covell’ as ‘Laden with belly, and doth hardly approach / His friends, but to break chairs or crack a coach. / His weight is twenty stone …’ – this and the claim to Drummond that he was ‘in his youth given to venery: he thought the use of a maid nothing in comparison to the wantonness of a wife, and would never have another mistress’ – his illegitimate offspring, his drunkenness, his gluttony, undercut his habitually moralistic posture in, for example, ‘On Gut’ (Underwood, 9, 56; Epigrams, 118; Jonson 1925–52: I, 140). The high valuation of male friendship instilled at school through Cicero’s De amicitia was often voiced but inconstantly practised by Jonson, especially with fellowdramatists such as Marston, Chapman, and Brome. His favourite pupil, Nat Field, had to go to law to recover a large loan. Another classical attitude he could not share was the relaxed acceptance of same-sex love by Plato (when young), innumerable Greek writers, and his esteemed Catullus, Tibullus, Ovid, Horace, and Martial. But same-sex killing was to be celebrated: Jonson enthusiastically echoed for England the Roman belief in the inferiority of all other nations, the militarism of Julius Caesar, the imperialism of Augustan Rome as expressed in Virgil’s Aeneid. Jonson’s vividly eloquent ‘Epistle to a friend to persuade him to the wars’ sees peace as ‘vicious ease’ and soon becomes an unrestrained satire in a prophetic vein, Juvenalian-cum-Jewish, a denunciation of gluttony, lust, fine clothing, and, at length, women who firk and jerk, and for the coachman rail, And, jealous of each other, think it long

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Robin Robbins To be abroad, chanting some bawdy song, And laugh, and measure thighs, then squeak, spring, itch, Do all the tricks of a salt lady bitch … (Underwood, 15)

In ‘To the immortal memory and friendship of that noble pair Sir Lucius Cary and Sir Henry Moryson’ (Underwood, 70), who set out to fight in Ireland, Jonson celebrates Moryson’s death as ‘a soldier to the last right end, A perfect patriot and a noble friend’ – in fact he died in bed of smallpox in Wales. The poem was presumably written to please not Jonson’s feelings but Cary’s: he fulfilled Jonson’s ideal of a soldier-poet, an intelligent man of action, as passionate as Jonson in love and hate, and himself idealising his beloved Moryson as poet, soldier, classicist, and admirer of Jonson (Peterson 1981: 195–9). Cary was proud in his ‘Epistle to his noble father, Mr Jonson’ to call himself a poetic ‘son of Ben’ – a title also claimed by Edmund Gayton, James Howell, William Cartwright, Thomas Randolph, Richard Lovelace, and Robert Herrick (Miles 1986: 292), and loosely applied to other younger poets of the 1620s and 1630s such as Carew. Jonson responded not only to such verbal tribute but to Cary’s material generosity: Clarendon recorded in his autobiography that Lord Falkland, as he became, ‘seemed to have his estate in trust for all worthy persons who stood in want of supplies and encouragement, as Ben Jonson and many others of that time’ (Riggs 1989: 316). Jonson’s easy intimacy with classical writers appears in his sophisticated reworking of them. Many of his most spontaneous-seeming poems, such as ‘To Penshurst’ (The Forest, 2) and the songs ‘To Celia’ (The Forest, 5, 6, 9), are tissues intricately woven from classical poems. From an aesthetic point of view, the reused materials are so completely merged that they are integral parts of a new work. He shows his discrimination and control in choosing a highly apt non-classical allusion in ‘To Penshurst’, the reminiscence of Kalander’s house in Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, showing his brother Robert’s accord with traditional values, Roman and English, in his maintenance of hospitality (in particular, his unstinting provision of food and drink for Jonson). With this poem and ‘To Sir Robert Wroth’, Jonson celebrated a fruitful tradition in English poetry, that of the ‘country-house poem’, emulated by Herrick in ‘Panegyric to Sir Lewis Pemberton’, and Carew in ‘To Saxham’ and ‘To my friend, G.N., from Wrest’, and transformed by Marvell in ‘Upon Appleton House’. (Amelia Lanyer’s ‘Cookham’ was written before ‘Penshurst’ [see Chapter 25, An Emblem of Themselves’: Early Renaissance Country House Poetry). Modern continental writers, too, he reworked, as in a more overtly artful poem (very popular with manuscriptmiscellany compilers (Marotti 1986: 127), ‘The Hour-glass’ (Underwood, 8): Do but consider this small dust Here running in the glass, By atoms moved: Could you believe that this The body ever was

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Of one that loved? And in his mistress’ flame playing like a fly, Turned to cinders by her eye? Yes, and in death as life unblessed: To have’t expressed Even ashes of lovers find no rest.

Like a jeweller, Jonson exquisitely resets the gem of a conceit that he owes to a Renaissance Latin poet in an English poem with point, force, and whimsical humour. Word choice and verse form work together to produce between flow and restraint an engaging tension, just as the wit, jarring between frivolity and grim truth, gives both pleasure and pause for thought. Such crafting of tensions is as frequent an excellence in Jonson’s poems as in his plays. The reader who tires of strenuous abuse, moralising, and wit can find feeling and calm in equilibrium in his tenderly eloquent epitaphs (a genre in which his ‘son’ Herrick also excelled), such as ‘On my First Daughter’, ‘On my first son’, on the boy actor Salomon Pavy, ‘On Elizabeth, L.H.’, and on Vincent Corbett, the nurseryman father of Jonson’s poetic ‘son’ Richard Corbett (Epigrams, 22, 45, 120, 124; Underwood, 12). Reference to classical models functioned in various ways in the relationship between writer and reader. It borrowed authority for the new writing from the old that was taught as exemplary in school and university; it established, if perceived, that writer and reader shared membership of the educated minority, and thence, because these groups were largely congruent, the ruling gentry. Moreover, if a satire, or a tragedy such as Jonson’s Sejanus, could claim to follow closely a classical source, it might even manage to leave open (and so avoid prosecution) whether it was really aimed at contemporary people and institutions. But Elizabethans were instructed by their preachers in the application of old texts, in that case biblical, to themselves and their society, and the authorities were never short of perceptive, sometimes over-ingenious, denouncers: in 1605, at the behest of the earl of Northampton who alleged popery and treason, Jonson was summoned before the Privy Council for Sejanus (Jonson 1925–52: XI, 253). He had evidently composed an ‘argument’ for the text as it was printed in the quarto of that year which, in the manner of Tacitus, showed how men made their own history. As a consequence of his encounter with the Council, he added a pious gloss to his ‘argument’, invoking the orthodoxy of providential history: This do we advance as a mark of terror to all traitors and treasons; to show how just the heavens are in pouring and thundering down a weighty vengeance on their unnatural intents, even to the worst princes; much more to those for guard of whose piety and virtue the angels are in continual watch, and God himself miraculously working.1

This was printed in larger type in the quarto but then omitted when Jonson included the play in his folio Works of 1616 (Loewenstein 2002: 156). Some of Donne’s chosen classical genres put him in danger too: the new wine he put in old bottles could be explosive (Donne 2008: I, 363–460). In 1599, alarmed

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by the uneasy public situation concerning the succession to the aged queen, the archbishop of Canterbury and the bishop of London had ordered that all printed copies of Hall’s, Marston’s, and Guilpin’s satires, Marlowe’s elegies of Ovid and Sir John Davies’s epigrams, all books by Nashe and Gabriel Harvey, and various others, should be confiscated and burned, and ‘That no satires or epigrams be printed hereafter’. Donne voices anxiety about his poems in a letter of c.1599/1601 (Simpson 1948: 316): ‘To my satires there belongs some fear, and to some elegies and these [paradoxes] perhaps shame. … Therefore, I am desirous to hide them, without any over-reckoning of them or their maker.’ There are manuscript versions of Satire V, and some epigrams with and without possibly original proper names.2 Satire I is an innocuous imitation of Horace, reapplied to a universally ridiculed target, the fatuous, obsequious, quarrelsome devotee of fashion. Satire II, however, though its generalised target, the swindling professional lawyer, was despised by the gentry and hated by many more, chooses risky analogies for his lying, ‘Like a king’s favourite – yea, like a king’, and with his squalid law practice compares royal bastardy and churchmen’s corruption (65–76). That the reigning monarch was a queen, not a king would be no defence, since Elizabeth was notorious for her sometimes disastrously misjudged favouritism. Even more seriously, Donne went directly against the compulsory Oath of Allegiance in implicitly echoing the Pope’s decree that Henry VIII’s divorce from Catherine of Aragon was invalid and Elizabeth consequently illegitimate. Satire III interrogates the various brands of Christianity on offer in western Europe: Roman Catholicism, Genevan Calvinism, Anglicanism, independence, and eclecticism. Refusing to fall into any, yet feeling that ‘To stand enquiring right is not to stray, / To sleep or run wrong is’, Donne is nonetheless not impartial, coming out vehemently against the teaching and law of Elizabethan England: Some preachers – vile, ambitious bawds – and laws Still new, like fashions, bid him think that she Which dwells with us is only perfect … Fool and wretch! Wilt thou let thy soul be tied To man’s laws, by which she shall not be tried At the last day? (56–8, 93–5)

His fourth satire depicts treacherous machination at court, where a probable double agent tries to involve him in treasonous talk (119–20, 129–33). In line 216, some manuscripts read ‘Topcliffe’ (the officer Richard Topcliffe was notorious as a torturer) for ‘pursuivant’, suggesting a possibly earlier version prudently emended – not necessarily by the author, since anyone who owned manuscripts containing criticism of the authorities would be in danger. Even in Satire V (written when Donne is presumed to have converted to Anglicanism and become secretary to Lord Egerton), he denounces in lines 63–8 false accusations and extortion perpetrated by the government’s enforcers.

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Coteries It would be wrong to regard Donne and Jonson as conscious leaders of opposing poetic factions, innovators versus classicists. As well as using classical forms and materials, both showed that multivalent power esteemed as ‘wit’: mental sharpness, verbal ingenuity, fertile imagination, wide knowledge, and so on. Jonson declared in Epigram 23, ‘To John Donne’, that ‘every work of thy most early wit Came forth example, and remains so yet’, praising his ‘language, letters, arts, best life’. To Drummond he showed he treasured an image in ‘The Calm’ and knew by heart the epigram ‘Phryne’ (Jonson 1925–52: I, 135). Before readying his own epigrams for publication, he sent them to Donne That so alone canst judge, so alone dost make … and if I find but one Marked by thy hand and with the better stone, My title’s sealed. (Epigrams, 96)

Moreover, though a rival seeker of patronage, Jonson not only fulfilled the countess of Bedford’s wish to see Donne’s satires (perhaps prompted by Henry Goodyer), but added a poem lauding both them and her as ‘of the best’ (though one suspects no unwillingness to displace from Lady Bedford’s favour that Samuel Daniel whom he deemed ‘a good honest Man … but no poet’ (Jonson 1925–52: I, 132)). It may only have been in return for this favour that Donne provided the commendatory Latin verses prefixed to Volpone in 1607, but Jonson was the only living poet whose skill he ever praised. Both Donne and Jonson demanded acceptance as gentlemen: the son of a prosperous ironmonger, Donne used the arms ‘of the ancient family of Dwn of Kidwelly’ in Carmarthenshire. In 1604 Jonson claimed gentle ancestry and a coat of arms, telling Drummond later that ‘His grandfather came from Carlisle and he thought from Annandale to it; he served King Henry VIII and was a gentleman. His father lost all his estate under Queen Mary, having been cast in prison and forfeited, at last turned minister, so he was a minister’s son. He himself was posthumous, born a month after his father’s decease, brought up poorly, put to school by a friend’ (see Jonson 1925–52: vol. I). Jonson thus lacked Donne’s advantageous education at Oxford and Lincoln’s Inn, where he got to know lifelong friends among the gentry, such as Henry Wotton and Christopher Brooke. Instead, Jonson was taken away from Westminster School early, and set to work. In 1590–1 he preceded Donne at Lincoln’s Inn, not as a student but helping his bricklayer stepfather on a wall. Both served briefly against Spain, Donne as a gentleman volunteer with the earl of Essex to Cadiz and the Azores, Jonson in the Low Countries. From then on their courses differ: whereas there is no evidence that Donne was more than a spectator of the action, Jonson boasted of having killed and despoiled a Spaniard in single combat. Donne became secretary to the chief law

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officer of the Crown, Sir Thomas Egerton, Jonson one of Henslowe’s actors at the Rose. Both got into trouble, Jonson by killing a fellow-actor in a duel in 1598, and frequently over his plays, Donne ruining his prospects for a dozen years by eloping in 1601 with his employer’s niece by marriage. Jonson failed as an actor, and turned to writing plays, at first collaborating on hack-work that has perished. Donne probably exhausted his inheritance in the early 1590s, emulating the habits of his gentleman friends: a fellow-student remembers him as ‘not dissolute, but very neat; a great visitor of ladies, a great frequenter of plays, a great writer of conceited verses’ (Sir Richard Baker, in Bald 1970: 72). Jack Donne, young man about town in the early 1590s, seems to have popped like a cork from the dark bottle of an oppressive upbringing in the ‘old religion’ of Roman Catholicism. His maternal grandfather, John Heywood, was distantly related to the writer and martyr Sir Thomas More. Himself a courtier and epigrammatist, John and his son Jasper Heywood were exiled. The latter, one-time page to Princess Elizabeth and translator of Senecan plays, was caught after landing to head the Jesuit mission in England and imprisoned for two years under sentence of death in the Tower, where Donne as a 12-year-old may have visited him in the autumn of 1584. In May 1593 his brother Henry Donne was arrested by Topcliffe’s chief assistant, Richard Young, and died in prison for harbouring a priest who was hanged, cut down alive, castrated, disembowelled, and chopped into quarters at Tyburn. This was normal English practice in the fearful years when extreme Jesuits such as Robert Persons sought to bring about the death of Elizabeth and her replacement with the Spanish Infanta, so as to fulfil the Pope’s release of English Roman Catholics from their allegiance. Donne was telling no more than the truth in the preface to Biathanatos (Donne 1984: 29): ‘I had my first breeding and conversation with men of a suppressed and afflicted religion, accustomed to the despite of death.’3 Henry Donne was arrested in Thavies Inn: if elder brother John had not moved on to Lincoln’s Inn he might have shared his fate. But at Lincoln’s Inn a new life opened. Here, as with his last poem, the hymn to Hamilton, he started to write poems that were given only to friends in manuscript. The liberation he experienced at this time is expressed in the vigour and freedom of expression in his epigrams, lyrics, and love elegies. His earliest surviving poems include, for example, several erotically phrased verse-letters (Donne 2008: I, 31–120). In one, ‘To Mr T.W.’, he enjoins his verses to ‘Haste thee … to him my pain and pleasure’ (1–2): Plead for me and so, by thine and my labour, I’m thy Creator, thou my Saviour. Tell him, all questions which men have defended Both of the place and pains of Hell are ended, And ’tis decreed our Hell is but privation Of him, at least in this earth’s habitation: (5–10)

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These lines so outraged some later Christian fanatic and homophobe that he or she heavily inked them over in the manuscript compiled for the earl of Westmorland by Donne’s friend and contemporary at the Inns of Court, Rowland Woodward (Donne 2008: I, 43). The next poem but one in this Westmorland manuscript, again ‘To Mr T.W.’, begins ‘Pregnant again with the old twins Hope and Fear’, and is followed by one from T.W. ‘To J.D.’, which develops a lesbian image of his ‘sinful Muse … rubbed and tickled with thine’ in ‘mystic tribadry … oh strange and holy lechery’ (see Mueller 1993). It is evident that Donne and his set were not too pious to mix Christian and sexual metaphors for their private amusement.4 Donne’s coterie included more than the Woodwards, possibly including someone not suspected until recently. Curiously enough, between those two early poems to T.W., Rowland Woodward placed one he titled ‘To L. of D.’ This appeared in the posthumous printed edition of Donne’s Poems in 1633 as ‘To E. of D. with six holy sonnets’, an alternative title found in two out of the four surviving manuscripts, neither having the authority of Woodward’s. Poems itself is based on manuscripts at several removes from the author, so Dennis Flynn (1988) has argued plausibly that ‘L. of D.’ could denote ‘Lord of Derby’, referring either to Ferdinando, fifth earl from 1593 to 1594, or his brother William, sixth earl, and Donne’s fellow-student at Lincoln’s Inn. The similarity of its sexual metaphors for writing poems to those in Donne’s early verse epistles suggests it accompanied a group of poems much earlier than the Holy Sonnets: See, sir, how, as the sun’s hot, masculine flame Begets strange creatures on Nile’s dirty slime, In me your fatherly yet lusty rhyme (For these songs are their fruits) have wrought the same. But though the engend’ring force from whence they came Be strong enough, and nature do admit Seven to be born at once, I send as yet But six: they say the seventh hath still some maim.

If the printed title is ignored in favour of the more authoritative manuscript, the poem itself gives no hint of ‘holy sonnets’, and, unsurprisingly, Woodward placed the poem between those two ‘To Mr T.W.’. Both poet and patron, Ferdinando was celebrated as ‘Amyntas’ by Spenser in ‘Colin Clout’s Come Home Again’, and his taste for erotic verse is presumed from Thomas Nashe’s dedicating his ‘wanton elegy’ ‘A Choice of Valentines’ to ‘Lord S.’: he was summoned to Parliament as Lord Strange in his own right in 1589 and thus styled until he succeeded to the earldom on 25 September 1593. He himself punned on his name with the words ‘my lines strange things may well suffice’ in the poem ‘Of my Unhappy State of Life’ (printed in May 1991: 370–1). Donne punned on names too (see below), so could well have intended a quibble in likening the offspring of Ferdinando’s ‘fatherly yet lusty rhyme’ to ‘strange creatures’.

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Rather than hypothesise some lost (Roman Catholic) sonnets, we might more economically assume that by ‘these songs’ Donne refers to lyrics such as are found in the collection that was first entitled ‘Songs and Sonnets’ by the unknown editor of the second edition of Donne’s poems in 1635. One surviving manuscript (called the Dolau Cothi MS, pp. 100–5) does indeed group six lyrics as ‘Songs that were made to certain airs that were made before’: ‘The Message’, ‘The Bait’, ‘Community’, ‘Confined Love’, ‘Song: Sweetest Love, I do not go’, and ‘Song: go and catch a falling star’. It was, perhaps, this group of poems that was given to Lord Derby. Contemporary but subsequent musical settings exist for the first two and the last two, as well as for ‘The Expiration’ and ‘Break of day’, either of which (among numerous others) might have been ‘the seventh’ Donne alludes to. Whether or not that is so, these poems typify verse production by young wits and courtiers in the 1590s: imitations, responses, parodies, poems on shared themes. ‘The Bait’ is one of numerous rejoinders to Marlowe’s ‘The passionate shepherd to his love’, with its promise of an unflawed pastoral idyll (Donne 2008: 1, 132). There are parodies by Marlowe himself in The Jew of Malta (4.2.97–8), and by Shakespeare in The Merry Wives of Windsor (1597(?); 3.1.1619). In England’s Helicon (1600) it was followed by ‘The Nymph’s reply’ (anonymous, but generally ascribed to Ralegh), a detailed rejoinder pointing out the evanescence of all the promised pleasures, and by an anonymous parody which, as Gardner pointed out (Donne 1965: 155–6), may have sparked off Donne’s piscatorial version. In reading his poems, whether sacred or secular, we may understand them better, or at least not construct a false image of Donne, if we remember their status as fictions for particular readers.5 He is not seeking ‘to perplex the minds of the fair sex with nice speculations in philosophy’ (Dryden). No seducer as intelligent as Donne would expect results from handing to a woman poems such as ‘The Flea’, ‘Love’s alchemy’, with its ‘Hope not for mind in women’, the utterly callous ‘Anagram’, the crudely boastful ‘Comparison’, or ‘The Perfume’, with its frank admission that ‘Thy beauty’s beauty, and food of our love’ is the speaker’s desire for her father’s wealth: to call them ‘love poems’ blurs their original function in entertaining and winning admiration from male friends. Similarly, his disappointed hope in a letter to Goodyer of 1615 (Donne 1974: 149) that Lady Bedford would have forgotten his earlier life and believe in his reformation can warn us that when we read the Holy Sonnets, written probably during the period when he was actively courting her favour with the seven verse letters and funeral elegies on her friends Lady Markham and Cecilia Bulstrode, we should be as wary as perhaps she was of accepting them as transparent autobiography.6 Arthur Marotti has argued that salient features of Donne’s poems result from their being written for a coterie: His creation of a sense of familiarity and intimacy, his fondness for dialectic, intellectual complexity, paradox and irony, the appeal to shared attitudes and group interests (if not to private knowledge), the explicit gestures of biographic self-referentiality, the styles he adopted or invented all relate to the coterie circumstances of his verse. (Marotti 1986: 19)

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This ability to vary poems to suit their recipients matches the varied roles Donne plays in his portraits. He had at least five made. First came a miniature (surviving as the engraved frontispiece to the 1635 Poems), painted in 1591, in his eighteenth year, showing him dressed as a dapper courtier with a sword and a Spanish motto meaning ‘Sooner dead than changed’ – whether in religion or love is left to the imagination. He wears crosses in his ears, but the words come from a love story. In life-size oils in 1595 he is the melancholy lover with folded arms, a wide black hat and a Latin motto turned from the Prayer Book’s ‘Lighten our darkness, O Lord’ into ‘… O Lady’. Another miniature shows him in 1616, the year after his ordination, as a smart gentleman with ruff and pointed beard. In 1620, the year before he won the deanship of St Paul’s, he was again painted in oils (still in the deanery) as a bareshouldered ancient philosopher. In his last days he had the picture drawn which may have been the original of the frontispiece to his last sermon, Death’s Duel (1632), and the monumental effigy in St Paul’s, which survived the cathedral’s destruction in the 1666 Fire of London (see Figure 6). His poems are similarly dramatic portraits,

Image not available in the electronic edition

Figure 6 William Marshall, portrait of John Donne in his shroud, engraved frontispiece to his Devotions (London, 1634). The shroud is drawn aside to reveal his bearded head, and he wears a coronet – beneath the Baroque skull above. (Donne had died in 1631.) The four cameos depict biblical scenes. British Museum, London

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ventriloquising, posing as various personae – cynic, wit, seducer, lover, penitent, and more. Two at least are put in the mouth of a woman, ‘Break of day’ and ‘Confined love’. Readers have noticed some poems where Donne does introduce an autobiographical fact, his wife Anne’s maiden name, More. In the 1617 sonnet ‘Since she whom I loved hath paid her last debt’, asserting that ‘Wholly on heavenly things my mind is set’, he vacillates in this conviction, introducing the conflict that usually tautens his poems, when he hints at inability to forsake his earthly love entirely: ‘But why should I beg more love whenas thou / Dost woo my soul, for hers off ’ring all thine?’ Before he departed as chaplain to the earl of Doncaster on an embassy in 1619, he still demands God’s help in this: ‘Thou lov’st not till from loving more thou free My soul’ (‘A Hymn to Christ, at the author’s last going into Germany’). Seriously ill and expecting to die in 1623, he tells God thrice in ‘A Hymn to God the Father’ that he has not freed Donne from his dominating self or from his human love until he has promised salvation: ‘When thou hast done, thou hast not done, / For I have more’ (in manuscript, ‘done’ is sometimes spelt ‘donne’). In the past, readers seeking to idealise Donne as an exemplary figure tended to read all the songs and sonnets as addressed to Anne before and after marriage. That seems unlikely, but there are love poems that, like the three later religious poems quoted, echo her maiden name. One such is ‘A Valediction: of my name in the window’ (for possible dating in 1599 see Donne 2008: I, 162). This poem’s closing image of ‘dying men’ is the starting point of ‘A Valediction: forbidding mourning’ with its contrastingly quiet death-bed, which perhaps followed immediately on the same occasion, though the mutual love, described in religious terms, differs from the imagining of her ‘inconsiderate hand’ flinging open the window to greet a rich or witty lover. ‘A Valediction: of the book’ similarly uses religious terms (‘faith’, ‘schismatic’), a treatment most intensely applied to love in ‘The Canonisation’. In ‘A Valediction: of weeping’, the departing man says of her tears: For thy face coins them, and thy stamp they bear. And by this mintage they are something worth, For thus they be Pregnant of thee. Fruits of much grief they are, emblems of more: When a tear falls, that thou fall’st which it bore.

Later he asks her to ‘forbear To teach the sea what it may do too soon’, suggesting fearful anticipation of a sea crossing such as he made with Sir Walter Chute for a continental tour in 1605. Some of the songs and sonnets may thus have arisen from real occasions, but may well have been written with the coterie reader in mind. Whether they were intended for Anne More’s eyes, or for hers alone, is doubtful: Sir Henry Wotton concludes a letter from Ireland in April 1599, ‘May I after these kiss that fair and learned hand

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of your mistress, than whom the world doth possess nothing more virtuous’ (Bald 1970: 104). If Wotton is referring to Anne rather than Lady Egerton, he was party to Donne’s secret affair, and a likely recipient of poems stemming from it.7 Some of the most literally ‘metaphysical’ poems, containing abstract philosophical arguments, such as ‘Air and angels’ and ‘The Ecstasy’, are also likely to have been written for male readers, such as Sir Edward Herbert, who wrote three poems entitled ‘Platonic love’ (though one or more of them perhaps much later during the cult of it at King Charles’s court) and ‘An Ode upon a question moved, whether love should continue for ever’. Like ‘The Ecstasy’, this last poem is set in a spring landscape, with two unmoving lovers in a long embrace before they debate their love in octosyllabic quatrains in terms similar to Donne’s, but conclude, unlike his pair, by resuming ‘a moveless, silent peace’. The verbal similarities are such as to put beyond doubt that one poet had read the other’s work, and Donne’s closeness to a known source suggests he wrote first (Donne 1965: 259–65). There is, however, a crucial difference in tone in that Donne’s poem can be read not only as a celebration of the soul’s ability to ascend towards perfection but as a mannerly invitation to seduction: ‘small change’ would be observed if the lovers’ bodies were to be united in carnal love (Martin 2004). As to Wotton and to Goodyer, Donne wrote a verse epistle to Herbert at the siege of Juliers in 1610, confirming that they were all three in his poetic circle, though too concerned in worldly affairs to devote themselves in the same way to poetry. Identifying the probable contexts and recipients of Donne’s poems modifies his and his hagiographer Walton’s absolute distinction between rambling Jack the youthful author of erotica and the Doctor of Divinity devoting himself to sermons and hymns. The overlap and intermingling of categories is shown by poems associated with Sir Edward Herbert from 1610 to 1613. These might include ‘The Ecstasy’:8 Gardner (Donne 1965: 256–7) augments the close parallels with Herbert’s ‘Ode upon a question moved’ by noting Donne’s rare use of flower symbolism here and in ‘The Primrose’. To the latter’s title the 1635 second edition of Donne’s poems added ‘being at Montgomery Castle, upon the hill on which it is situate’; as Gardner (Donne 1965: 219, 255) observes, this is ‘too circumstantial not to be given credence’. Between ‘The Ecstasy’ and ‘The Primrose’ probably came the poem titled in the 1633 Poems ‘Good Friday, 1613. Riding westward’ (Donne 2008: 2, 102). We thus see a sequence of love poem–verse epistle–religious poem–love poem. We also have a picture of Donne circulating among his friends, repaying their hospitality with poetic currency. Donne and Jonson were members between about 1605 and 1615 of overlapping circles of acquaintances, largely comprising Inns of Court men, lawyers, parliamentarians, officers of government and court, men who appreciated wit and were capable of indulging in it themselves as a sideline. Both Donne and Jonson wrote epistles to Sir Henry Goodyer, for example, patron of Drayton, Gentleman of the Privy Chamber, Donne’s weekly correspondent, and entertainer at his country home of not only Donne and Drayton but also Jonson and Inigo Jones. Both Donne and Jonson were remembered among his circle of friends by Thomas Coryate (Bald 1970: 190–5). They include Christopher Brooke (addressee of Donne’s ‘Storm’ and ‘Calm’ and a verse

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letter), Hugh Holland (poet and, like Jonson, Old Westminsterian convert to Roman Catholicism), Inigo Jones, and two Inns of Court wits and MPs Richard Martin and John Hoskyns. The latter took a leading part in composing one of the century’s most popular poems on a response to the king’s wishes during the House of Commons debate on the Union of England and Scotland, ‘The Parliament Fart’.9 Towards the end of their lives, Donne and Jonson, when not at court, moved in largely different circles. Donne had among his acquaintance fellow-members of the Privy Council and other poet-clergymen such as Joseph Hall, Henry King, and George Herbert, while Jonson ended up in taverns (and, after a stroke in 1629, in bed) domineering over younger poets, his ‘sons’, who could tolerate his dogmatic assertions and rhodomontades. Donne seems to have bought from Jonson a copy of Nicholas Hill’s work on the soul Philosophia Epicurea, Democratica, Theophrastica, proposita simpliciter, non edocta (Paris, 1601). He heavily scored out Jonson’s name on the title page and covered it with a paper slip bearing his own signature (Targoff 2008: 7). So too he may have had Jonson in his sights when, in Satire II, he ridiculed those who professed playwriting: One (like a wretch, which at bar judged as dead, Yet prompts him which stands next, and cannot read, And saves his life) gives idiot actors means (Starving himself) to live by ‘his laboured scenes, As in some organ, puppets dance above And bellows pant below, which them do move.

Although it has been argued that this was written some four years before Jonson, having murdered the actor Gabriel Spencer, was saved from execution by reciting his neck-verse (Donne 1967: 127–8), it is difficult not to recall not only this event but Jonson’s lifelong disdain for playing and theatricality, his ambivalence towards the cony-catching literature of his time (Hanson 1998: 114–21), and, despite his theatrical successes, his hatred of what he termed ‘the loathèd stage’ in the ode he wrote on the occasion of the failure of his play The New Inn in 1629 (Jonson 1984: 204–9). One loyal ‘son’, James Howell, reported on a supper with Jonson in 1635 ‘that B[en] began to engross all the discourse, to vapour extremely of himself, and, by vilifying others, to magnify his own muse. T[om] Ca[rew] buzzed me in the ear that though Ben had barrelled up a great deal of knowledge, yet it seemed he had not read the Ethics, which, among other precepts of morality, forbid self-commendation, declaring it to be an ill-favoured solecism in good manners’ (Jonson 1925–52: XI, 429). Whereas Donne was regarded as a supreme preacher, Jonson did not achieve the universal literary dictatorship he would have liked: there were other gatherings of literary men without him in London in the 1620s: the playwright Philip Massinger, with his ‘Order of fancy’, and Edward Hyde, later earl of Clarendon, politician and historian; both had their circles, the latter’s including William Davenant and Thomas Carew (Hobbs 1992: 45, 100). And where Jonson was tolerated he was not given free rein

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if those present were more substantial men than his ‘sons’: at a gathering comprising ‘Sir John Suckling, Sir John Davies, Endymion Porter, Mr Hales of Eton, and Ben Jonson … Mr Hales … hearing Ben frequently reproaching him [Shakespeare] for the want of learning and ignorance of the ancients, told him at last, “That if Mr Shakespeare had not read the ancients, he had likewise not stolen anything from them (a fault that the other had made no conscience of)”’ (Miles 1986: 293, 262). Endymion Porter emphasised the difference in an epigram ‘Upon Ben Jonson and his zany, Tom Randolph’: But after times, with full consent, This truth will all acknowledge: Shakespeare and Ford from Heaven were sent, But Ben and Tom from college.10 (Miles 1986: 262)

The backhanded conclusion to Owen Felltham’s ‘To the Memory of immortal Ben’, was justified: But he Of whom I write this has prevented me, And boldly said so much in his own praise, No other pen need any trophy raise. (Jonson 1925–52: XI, 462)

Perhaps Jonson was wryly comparing his career as a would-be professional writer with that of Donne, whose verse its author regarded with studied indifference, as a private matter, complementary to his public life: Poetry, in this latter age, hath proved but a mean mistress to such as have wholly addicted themselves to her family. They who have but saluted her on the by, and now and then tendered their visits, she hath done much for, and advanced in the way of their own professions (both the law and the gospel) beyond all they could have hoped or done for themselves without her favour. (Jonson 1953: 51)

Poets, Patrons, and Publication Such members of the gentry were men whom Donne considered, like the recipients of his early verse letters, fellow-students, and young men about town, to be on his own social level: his relationship with later addressees of verse letters, funeral elegies, and epithalamia between 1607 and his ordination in 1615 is that of client to patron. Jonson was forced from the start to write for a living, a course which Donne, until he had spent his inheritance and forfeited his job, could disdain: as a student presuming on his own fine prospects, he asked in Satire II (20–1), ‘they who write to lords

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rewards to get, Are they not like singers at doors for meat?’ (He also sneers at ‘law practice for mere gain’, and in Satire I has the speaker portray himself as happily ‘consorted’ with books of theology, philosophy, political theory, history, and poetry – though the frivolous friend who lures him out into the town may well be a recognition of another side of the real Donne). Contemporary opinion was voiced by a friend of both Donne and Jonson, John Selden, in his Table-talk: ’Tis ridiculous for a lord to print verses; ’tis well enough to make them to please himself, but to make them public is foolish. If a man in a private chamber twirls his band-strings or plays with a rush to please himself, ’tis well enough; but if he should go into Fleet Street and sit upon a stall and twirl a band-string or play with a rush, then all the boys in the street would laugh at him. (Marotti 1995: 228)

When the need to pay debts forced Donne to crawl to the king’s favourite (the channel for most jobs and rewards), the soon to be disgraced earl of Somerset, he wrote to his close friend Henry Goodyer just before Christmas 1614: One thing more I must tell you, but so softly that I am loath to hear myself, and so softly that if that good lady [Bedford] were in the room with you and this letter, she might not hear. It is that I am brought to a necessity of printing my poems and addressing them to my Lord Chamberlain [Somerset]. This I mean to do forthwith, not for much public view, but at mine own cost, a few copies. I apprehend some incongruities in the resolution, and I know what I shall suffer from many interpretations, but I am at an end of much considering that; and if I were as startling [nervous] in that kind as ever I was, yet in this particular I am under an unescapable necessity … I must do this, as a valediction to the world, before I take orders. (Donne 1974: 196)

In the event, he escaped this indignity, his poems not being printed until 1633, after his death, and not from his own copies. Donne continued to write poems, but, like his earlier efforts, for transmission (and, almost unpreventably, circulation), only in manuscript. Even in this mode he for a time nursed the idea of restricting his output to the most useful recipient, Lady Bedford. When in 1609–10 his friend Henry Goodyer solicited complimentary verses for the countess of Huntingdon, whom Donne had known as Egerton’s stepdaughter, Elizabeth Stanley, he initially demurred: ‘I have these two reasons to decline it. That that knowledge that she hath of me was in the beginning of a graver course than that of poet, into which (that I may also keep my dignity) I would not seem to relapse. The Spanish proverb informs me that “He is a fool which cannot make one sonnet, and he is mad which makes two.”’ He then undermines his supposed disdain for poetry by admitting that ‘The other, stronger reason is my integrity to the other Countess … for her delight (since she descends to them) I had reserved not only all the verses which I should make, but all the thoughts of women’s worthiness’ (Donne 1974: 103–4). However, with typical inconstancy, he encloses verses to Lady Huntingdon (two verse epistles to her survive) as the ‘picture’ of Lady Bedford, to whom he later

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proposed the similar excuse that the others to whom he had written verses were ‘copies, not originals’. In 1612, Donne found that Lady Bedford was indeed offended by such disloyalty when he published the Anniversaries written for another patron, Sir Robert Drury (Donne 2008: 349–462). (Donne’s necessities had driven him, with some misgivings, to accept Drury’s offer to be his companion and secretary on a foreign tour.) Jonson was critical of the hyperbolic praise Donne bestowed on the young Elizabeth. Drummond of Hawthornden reported Jonson to have said ‘that Donne’s “Anniversary” was profane and full of blasphemies [and] that he told Mr Donne, if it had been written of the Virgin Mary, it had been something; to which [Donne] answered that he described the idea of a woman, and not as she was’ (Donaldson 1985: 596).11 Donne’s remorse was qualified: ‘Of my Anniversaries, the fault that I acknowledge in myself is to have descended to print anything in verse … I confess I wonder how I declined to it, and do not pardon myself ’ (Donne 1974: 255) – he regrets not the broken promise but the social descent. This was no eccentric prejudice: when in 1625 he acceded to Sir Robert Ker’s request for verses on the death of the marquess of Hamilton, disguising it as a ‘Hymn’ less inappropriate for a dean of St Paul’s to write, it was soon copied and circulated widely enough for the private newsletter writer John Chamberlain to observe the next month that ‘though they be witty, and reasonable well done, I could wish a man of his years and place to give over versifying’ (Donne 2008: II, 339). Indeed, ‘Upon the translation of the Psalms’ was embarrassingly obvious ammunition in his campaign for the deanship in 1621 (Bald 1970: 370–81) after Lady Pembroke’s death (God ‘hath translated these translators’, l. 53). She herself had sent the translation in hopeful tribute to Queen Elizabeth with an accompanying poem (Woudhuysen and Norbrook 1992: 131); in turn her son, the third earl of Pembroke, one of the most influential patrons in the land after Buckingham (whom Donne also courted) would have appreciated the tribute to his mother and famous uncle. Bald thinks it likely ‘that Donne had sedulously enlisted the aid of everyone who was capable of influencing the King in his favour’ (1970: 376). Jonson was held back by no such scruples as the churchman. He sought publication to augment his reputation and income. Unlike Shakespeare, he himself prepared his plays for the printers from Every Man out of his Humour in 1600 onward, ignoring any rights the players might have in the script, or, as with Sejanus, circumventing them by rewriting it so as to exclude his collaborator. As a writer of plays and masques, Jonson clearly understood the difference between the impermanence of performance and the durability of print. Like his old schoolmaster, William Camden, Jonson put his ‘Faith … in things.’ In his aspiration to a laureateship, he was the first English poet to take full advantage of the print medium to make durable, unchanging artifacts of his verse, editing two collections of his poems – Epigrammes and The Forrest – for inclusion in his 1616 Folio Workes. In publishing his plays and masques, he carefully altered performance scripts into artifacts. He did the same thing with his verse, frequently altering poems originally sent to individuals to make them appropriate

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for a general audience, both in his own time and thereafter, and stabilizing their public texts. For Jonson, even the pursuit of patronage – the most basic goal of the coterie poets with whom Donne was associated – could be accommodated within the print medium, as witness his Epigrammes and other tributes to the ‘great and good men: of his age’ (epistle dedicatory). Thoughout the medium of print, he was able to present patrons and prospective patrons not just to his age but to all time. (Pebworth 1989: 66; see also Loewenstein 2002)

Even Jonson’s ‘Charis’ poems, held in the nineteenth century to be autobiographical lyrics, are now best read not as charting the progress of a love affair but as charting ‘the progress of a story about that affair. Jonson is writing not only about the adventures of a lover, but also about the adventures of a poet; about the power of love and the power of poetry; and about the humorous, sublime, and troublesome ways in which those two great forces may tangle and intersect’ (Donaldson 1997: 150). When he claimed the status of classical authors, theologians, and the like by publishing selected plays and poems as The Works of Benjamin Jonson in 1616 (Loewenstein 2002: 182–97, 202–14), he was mocked for presumption, an attitude later embodied in Sir John Suckling’s ‘Session of the Poets’: The first that broke silence was good old Ben, Prepared before with canary wine, And he told them plainly, he deserved the bays, For his were called ‘works’, when others were but plays.

The status of both printing and poetry were thus contested: Drayton, in the general preface to his Poly-Olbion (1612), complains against the privileging of manuscript circulation: ‘Verses are wholly deduced [removed] to chambers, and nothing esteemed in this lunatic age but what is kept in cabinets, and must only pass by transcription.’ Donne, on the other hand, in a Latin poem to Dr Richard Andrews, who had punctiliously replaced a book borrowed from Donne and damaged by his children, warmly thanks him on the grounds that manuscripts are to be more greatly venerated. In contrast to Donne’s not wanting Lady Huntingdon to remember him as a poet, Jonson’s Epigram 10, ‘To My Lord Ignorant’, snaps ‘Thou call’st me poet as a term of shame: / But I have my revenge made in thy name’ (perhaps a riposte to Lord Rutland’s sarcastic accusation of his wife, ‘that she kept table to poets’, related to Drummond (Jonson 1925–52: I, 141)). The bleak truth for Donne was that, though Jack would be a gentleman, having destroyed his career in December 1601 by eloping with Anne More, he had to sing for his supper. The spendthrift Lady Bedford, leader of the queen’s ladies at court, revelling in prodigiously expensive masques, gorgeous clothes, and high living, patron of poets such as Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, and Ben Jonson, was a good prospect for a substantial handout. Thus he promised her that his last verses would be for her, his ‘Obsequies to the Lord Harington’ her brother (Donne 2008, II, 314), but alluded in the accompanying letter to ‘your noble brother’s fortune being yours’, and elicited

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an ‘offer to pay my debts’ before he entered holy orders. To his chagrin, he told Henry Goodyer in March 1615, she sent him only £30, far short of what he wanted, with the excuse that her immediate debts were ‘burdensome’, and a promise of good intentions ‘on all future emergent occasions’. Donne acknowledged her sincerity on both counts: apart from his having so trusted her earlier promise as to fix times with his creditors (Donne 1974: 218–19, 149), what really stung was her ‘suspicion of my calling, a better memory of my past life than I had thought her nobility could have admitted’. The would-be Doctor Donne was still haunted by Jack. We have seen how capable Donne was of evoking imaginary situations, so it is no surprise that poems associated with Lady Bedford are outstandingly skilful and inventive examples of their kind. Addressing love poems to a woman with whom no real erotic relationship can be envisaged is now a strange mode: in England it had been normalised at the court of Queen Elizabeth. That the central source of status, wealth, and power should be praised was to be expected; it is the terms in which the queen was presented, the idealising analogues and conceits that are remarkable. Just as the styles of royal portraiture were followed in paintings and engraving of non-royal subjects, so their literary equivalents were applied by Donne, Jonson, and a host of others to potential or actual patrons. There are multitudinous examples of courting the favour of the queen in the posture and with the images of Petrarch wooing Laura (see Wilson 1966: 239–55). Donne’s verse letters to ladies (Donne 2008: II, 205–72), mostly to Lady Bedford but also to Magdalen Herbert (for whom he also wrote the sequence of devotional sonnets, La Corona), to Lady Huntingdon, to the daughters of Sidney’s (later scandalously adulterous) Stella, to Lady Carey and Essex Rich, and to Lady Salisbury (sister of the also scandalous Frances Howard, countess of Essex and then of Somerset), all adopt a posture of humble devotion, praising, as such poems conventionally did, not just those qualities which the ruling class might be thought to need – prudence, insight, and so on – but their beauty, making them Neoplatonic types whose looks are the outward expression of inner goodness. The limited possibilities of the genre are suggested by the repetition of material from one author to another. Samuel Daniel, in ‘To the Lady Lucy, Countess of Bedford’, printed in 1603, lauded her as ‘So good, so fair; so fair, so good’, and praised her studiousness: ‘you run the rightest way’. In ‘To the Countess of Salisbury’, Donne praises her too as ‘Fair, great, and good’, and in ‘To the Countess of Bedford: honour is so sublime perfection’, he thus supports her religious conduct: ‘Go thither still; go the same way you went’. When Jonson wrote ‘To Lucy, Countess of Bedford, with Mr Donne’s Satires’, he punned on her name: Lucy, you brightness of our sphere, who are Life of the Muses’ day, their morning-star!

Donne too alludes, with a pious reservation, to the etymological significance of her name (‘To the Countess of Bedford’, 21): ‘But one, ’tis best light to contèmplate you’. Even Daniel’s unusual ‘clearness’ of her heart may also be a play on her name.

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But Donne ingeniously varies the routine, at least with Lady Bedford, drawing on his learning and imagination to adduce analogies for her excellences from the sun, religion, an epigram by Martial (on the bee), and a celebrated temple in ancient Rome that was built of translucent stone. Masquerading as a lower being addressing a higher in ‘Twickenham Garden’ (the countess’s current home county seat), he flatteringly laments the sin of carnal longing aroused by such beauty as hers: But oh, self-traitor! I do bring The spider love, which transubstantiates all, And can convert manna to gall, And that this place may thoroughly be thought True paradise, I have the serpent brought.

As in many of his poems, the tension between society’s laws and forbidden desire makes a little drama even of a poem suing for patronage. Other songs and sonnets, such as ‘The Fever’ and ‘The Relic’, may relate to Lucy Bedford. One of the most likely is ‘A Nocturnal upon St Lucy’s Day’, its seasonal setting functional, as in ‘Twickenham Garden’, but in tune with the mood. Lady Bedford was so seriously ill in 1612 that on 23 November she was described by Lord Dorset as ‘speechless, and … past all hopes’. The intensity of this poem’s language, which Marotti (1986: 233) compares to ‘the vivid hyperboles of the Anniversaries’, might seem, as it does there if misunderstood, to be inappropriate, but the sense of being ‘nothing’ which it so forcefully expresses usually related not to Donne’s wife (thought by some to be the subject) but to his lack of position in the world, as in a letter to Goodyer of September 1608: I would fain do something, but that I cannot tell what it is is no wonder. For to choose is to do, but to be no part of any body is to be nothing. At most, the greatest persons are but wens and excrescences, men of wit and delightful conversation [such as he could claim to be] but as moles for ornament, except they be so incorporated into the body of the world that they contribute something to the sustentation of the whole. (Donne 1974: 50–1)

With the countess all his worldly hopes of being something might die. Moreover, if Donne did not, for once, expect her to be able to read and reward the poem, that might well explain the focus on himself, even more intense than in ‘Twickenham Garden’, because more serious. Although Lucy Bedford may have been better by her name-day, 13 December, Donne could have anticipated it as an appropriate occasion for his lament. Panegyrics to patrons may now seem not just tedious but distasteful. Donne, Jonson, and most other poets of their time praised those they knew to be unworthy because there was no alternative for anyone who wished not just to rise in society but even to survive. Lady Bedford was interested in and capable of writing verse herself (see Donne 1978: 235–7), and might welcome some enhancement of her current

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image at court as an intriguer and extravagant pleasure-lover. But those with the power to assign the means of earning a living found it easy to keep petitioners at their mercy: as Robert Evans points out, the transaction was not one of guaranteed fairness; the supply of writers from the universities, expanded in the later sixteenth century to produce a literate clergy, far exceeded the available patronage. The very unreliability of patronage reinforced subservience, keeping people such as Donne and Jonson dangling in hope. Poetry was a central concern of poets, not those whose money and influence the poets wanted in exchange. Moreover, rivals were dependable in their hostility (Evans 1989: 29–33, 178). Nor was it only material reward that poets needed: Jonson was saved from hanging for homicide by being able to repeat the psalm verse requisite to prove his literacy, but when arraigned for his writings12 he depended on the favour of members of government and those who might influence them. After Eastward Ho his gratitude to James, Salisbury, Monteagle, Suffolk, and Aubigny was expressed in Epigrams, 35, 43, 60, 67, and 127. The incentive to keep in favour is made plain by the rumour that the prisoners ‘should then have their ears cut and noses’, so that his mother was ready to provide poison, he told Drummond, and kill herself with him (Jonson 1925–52: I, 140). Sheavyn (1967: 61) lists a couple of dozen writers of the period who suffered interference by the authorities. Without powerful protectors, Jonson would have been treated like the scholar of Merton College, Oxford, who in 1602 ‘was whipped in London and lost his ears in Oxford for libelling the Vice-Chancellor and the Council’ (Marotti 1995: 93). As Riggs puts it, after Jonson’s release from prison after The Isle of Dogs in 1597, he set his mind on acceptance as a man of letters, not a mere ‘playwright’ (his own derisory coinage for the lowly, ill-paid labour of a dramatist), ‘and patronage was the common denominator of all his new undertakings’ (Riggs 1989: 63). He took Every Man out of his Humour to a bookseller located, exceptionally, in Fleet Street, the main road between the City and the Inns of Court. He wrote poems to various noblemen and women, centring on the clan connected with Sir Philip Sidney, many of whose members were both patrons and writers: his brother, Sir Robert at Penshurst, his daughter the countess of Rutland, his nephew the earl of Pembroke, his niece Lady Wroth, his distant cousin Lucy Harington, countess of Bedford. Pembroke and Lady Bedford were generous patrons of poets such as the sonneteers Daniel and Drayton, and the pastoralist William Browne of Tavistock. In 1602 Thomas Overbury told the diarist John Manningham that ‘Ben Jonson the poet now lives upon one [Sir Robert] Townshend, and scorns the world’ (Riggs 1989: 92). He then made a better catch than this heir of a Norfolk squire in the person of Lord Aubigny, one of the six Gentlemen of the Bedchamber, and thus intimate with the king. For Lady Bedford and the queen, Jonson wrote court masques, and in dedicating his Epigrams to Lord Pembroke in 1612 as ‘the ripest of my work’ announced that he had risen clearly above the rank of playwright to that of man of letters, on familiar terms with the nobility, a status further enhanced by the almost unprecedented publication of them and choice plays in the grand folio of 1616. He was substantially rewarded, telling Drummond in 1619 that ‘every first day of the New Year he had £20 sent him from the Earl of

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Pembroke to buy books’ (Jonson 1925–52: I, 141). After the death of Salisbury, and temporary eclipse by the Howards and Somerset of the Pembroke–Lady Bedford faction, until they groomed and put before James’s eye young George Villiers (soon to be Buckingham), Jonson worked for Sir Walter Ralegh on the latter’s History of the World, and gained the position of tutor to his son Wat on a continental tour. So, despite Donne’s youthful scorn of poetic clientage and Jonson’s boast to Drummond that if made a churchman he would preach to the king, and ‘not flatter, though he saw death’ (Jonson 1925–52: I, 141), their urge to survive prevailed. The humiliation was covered by claiming a didactic role: in Essays in Divinity (Donne 1952: 34) Donne points out that ‘over-praising is a kind of libelling’. After three epigrams praising Salisbury’s virtues, Jonson places (prudently, for publication in 1612 after Salisbury’s decline and death) ‘To my Muse’, pointedly regretting his ‘fierce idolatry’ of ‘a worthless lord’ but in conclusion consoling himself that ‘Whoe’er is raised / For worth he has not, he is taxed, not praised’ (Epigrams, 43, 63–5). (He seems to have seen no irony in his complaint to Drummond that ‘Salisbury never cared for any man longer nor he could make use of him’ – exactly Jonson’s way with patrons.) In a commendatory poem of 1612 to a friend, the jurist John Selden (Underwood, 14), he admits that I have too oft preferred Men past their terms, and praised some names too much; But ’twas with purpose to have made them such.

However, this humanist precept of teaching by praising, in the hope that recipients would try to live up to the image made by the poet, and be shamed by publicly visible discrepancies, was effective more in saving the self-respect of poets than in preventing or reforming abuses of power. So desperate was Donne for employment that in 1613–14 he abased himself to Somerset, suing for any and every government job possibly available, whether ambassador to Venice or Clerk to the Privy Council or personal secretary. This last post was vacant because Somerset had contrived to get his then secretary Sir Thomas Overbury imprisoned in the Tower, so that he could not interfere with the countess of Essex’s scheme to divorce her husband and marry Somerset. Donne’s project for dedicating a collection of poems to the latter came to nothing, but he wrote a 235-line eclogue and epithalamion celebrating the marriage. Jonson provided a eulogy of ‘virtuous Somerset’ (Ungathered Verse, 18, excluded from his later collection, The Underwood), A Challenge at Tilt, and (to suit the taste of those honoured) the bawdy Irish Masque. In the latter he exhorted Frances Howard to ‘Outbe that Wife, in worth, thy friend did make’, referring to the popular poem by his friend Overbury, whom the Somersets were later convicted of murdering (but let off their sentences by King James). Jonson had been fortunate in arousing some feeling of affinity in James: apart from the former’s claim to Scots ancestry, both were irresponsible, scornful of the people, unashamedly lascivious, coarse, or downright filthy in their personal habits, and

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addicted to alcohol (Riggs 1989: 112, 207). And although Jonson, like Donne, gloried in being a self-confessed practising heterosexual, and denounced all other orientation, he brought himself to flatter the king’s physical attraction to young men with the sexual innuendo of the Porter’s invitation into Buckingham’s Burley-on-the-Hill in The Gypsies Metamorphosed (1621): ‘The house your bounty built, and still doth rear. … The master is your creature as the place … please you enter Him and his house, and search him to the centre.’ That earned Jonson £100, rather better than the £5 to be expected from playhouse or bookseller. To earn such rewards, he had to concur with ‘the half-baked whims of his capricious patrons’ (Miles 1990: 153), but also with central doctrines of royal power. From the start he deified James and Charles as God on earth, as in the courtier’ song of Pan’s Anniversary (1620): ‘by him we breathe, we live, / We move, we are’, reapplying the description of God in Acts 17:26–8. Donne as dean of St Paul’s had likewise to remember that he was put there to serve king and government: Jeanne Shami (Donne 1996: 24–35) has shown the differences between a sermon prepared by Donne for posthumous publication and the more circumspect version he actually delivered from the pulpit and then sent to the king to be vetted before printing (which, even so, did not take place). Donne managed his performance as the reformed doctor at St Paul’s as a preacher who could ‘through the eyes the melting heart distil’, including his final appearance in the pulpit as a dying man preaching on death, with the skill of an actor-manager. Ben Jonson in the end played a less admired part. On this praiser in his poems to patrons of all the traditional virtues of temperance, prudence, fortitude, and so on, Drummond’s verdict, after days of conversation, is borne out by Jonson’s life: He is a great lover and praiser of himself, a contemner and scorner of others; given rather to lose a friend than a jest [a joke Jonson had made of himself as ‘Horace’ in Poetaster 4.3]; jealous of every word and action of those about him (especially after drink, which is one of the elements in which he liveth) … For any religion, as being versed in both. Interpreteth best sayings and deeds often to the worst. Oppressed with fantasy, which hath ever mastered his reason (a general disease in many poets). His inventions are smooth and easy, but above all he excelleth in a translation. (Jonson 1925–52: I, 151)

In his strenuous self-assertion and competitive denigration of others, he was perhaps over-compensating for the humble occupation of his stepfather, which dogged him till the end. Henslowe wrote to his partner Edward Alleyn that ‘Gabriel [Spencer is] slain in Hoxton Fields … by the hands of Benjamin Jonson, bricklayer’ (Jonson 1925–52: I, 164) – not ‘fellow-actor and poet’. His self-praise and sneering at others inevitably prompted reminders of bricklaying from Dekker in Satiromastix (1601), a Paul’s Cross preacher in 1612 (Riggs 1989: 195), a courtier, Nathaniel Brent, in 1618 (Jonson 1925–52: X, 576–7), and Alexander Gill in 1632 (Jonson 1925–52: XI, 348). Though buried in Westminster Abbey, that was because he lived in the precinct; though followed to his grave by a throng of nobility and gentry, he had died almost destitute; writer of gracious epitaphs, his was simply ‘O rare Ben Jonson’ – and that

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possibly the mason’s error for ‘Orare …’, ‘Pray for …’. Donne arranged his own commemoration in inscription, effigy, and the publication of his sermons, perhaps even Walton’s biography emphasising the Christian, not the poet. As writer of the play of his own life, he rivalled Jonson’s creations for the theatre and Banqueting House. Jonson in his poems bore the standard for the classicism that after the Restoration was to dominate English writing for a century. Donne’s came into their own with the twentieth century’s preference for the innovator and inventor, evoker not of communal ideals but individual psychology. Both still fascinate as skilled writers and for the way they interacted as such with a society so foreign to the twenty-first century, yet sharing the human strengths and failings they brought vividly to life.

Notes This essay was updated by the editor for the second edition of these volumes. 1 Jonson, Sejanus, 1605, sig. A4r. 2 For the political context of the Satires and the way they differ from those contemporary poems that adopted the persona of a twisted and disappointed ‘satyr’, see Wiggins 2000: 25–59. 3 Dennis Flynn has advanced the intriguing hypothesis (which hangs primarily on identifying the names ‘Donnes’ and ‘Downes’ with Donne) that only three months after matriculating from Hart Hall, Oxford, the 12-yearold Donne was taken to Paris in the ambassadorial train of the Roman Catholic Henry Stanley, fourth earl of Derby, in order to avoid his being made to swear to the articles of the Church of England (Flynn 1995). However, such a short stay at Oxford would have made unlikely the gathering of the wide range of acquaintance he is supposed by others to have made there, and he shared his exact name, let alone ‘Downes’, with other recusants (Bald 1970: 23). Sir Richard Baker, who shared rooms at Donne’s Oxford college with their friend in common Henry Wotton, and then read law in London, says that Donne, ‘leaving Oxford, lived at the Inns of Court’, implying no interval. 4 Conversely, a later Donne applies the language and ideas of physical human love to religion, but in deep seriousness. The educated Christian reader knew the biblical Song of Songs, on whose originally erotic purpose

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had been imposed a religious reading as the courtship of Christ and his bride, the universal church, for instance of S. of S. 5:2: ‘Open to me, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled’. Donne’s more violent religious eroticism was to be found in the Spanish Counter-Reformation poet St John of the Cross. A letter of about 1600, probably written to Sir Henry Wotton, gives a good idea of Donne’s mixture of pride and diffidence as he sends his friend some of his ‘Paradoxes’ (Donne 2002: 5–6). That Lady Bedford saw at least one of the Holy Sonnets is indicated by the opening of her elegy on Cecilia Bulstrode: ‘Death, be not proud’ (Donne 1978: 235–7). Wotton’s own freer morality is suggested by an anecdote told by Jonson to Drummond: ‘Sir Henry Wotton, before His Majesty’s going to England, being disguised at Leith [as ‘Octavio Baldi’; sent in 1602 via Norway by the duke of Florence to warn James of assassination plot (see Wotton 1907: I, 40– 2)], on Sunday when all the rest were at church, being interrupted of his occupation by another wench who came in at the door, cried out “Pox on thee, for thou hast hindered the procreation of a child!” and betrayed himself ’ (HS 1.146). A verbal link occurs in the opening of what is evidently one of Donne’s Tuesday letters from Mitcham to Henry Goodyer (Donne 1974: 11), dated merely ‘9 October’, but

Poets, Friends, and Patrons: Donne and Jonson falling on a Tuesday in 1610 (its other echoes of ‘To Sir Edward Herbert at Juliers’, 1610, and Ignatius his Conclave, written in 1610, supporting this year): ‘I make account that this writing of letters, when it is with any seriousness, is a kind of ecstasy, and a departure and secession and suspension of the soul, which doth then communicate itself to two bodies.’ 9 See Marotti 1995: 93, 127–8. One of the longer versions is printed from manuscripts in Whitlock 1982: 288–92. 10 Shakespeare himself was alleged to have exacted a jest from this too in the anonymous Shakespeare’s Jests, or, The Jubilee Jester (c.1769): ‘Shakespeare seeing Jonson in a necessary-

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house with a book in his hand, reading it very attentively, said he was sorry his memory was so bad that he could not shite without a book’ (Miles 1986: 169). For the critical debate over this disagreement, see Targoff 2008: 87 and 195–6. He was imprisoned for The Isle of Dogs and Eastward Ho in 1597 and 1605; cited before the Lord Chief Justice for Poetaster, 1601; summoned before the Privy Council for Sejanus, 1603; ‘accused’ for The Devil is an Ass, 1616; examined by the Privy Council for alleged verses of his on Buckingham’s death, 1628; and cited before the Court of High Commission for The Magnetic Lady, 1632.

References and Further Reading Bald, R. C. (1959). Donne and the Drurys. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bald, R. C. (1970). John Donne: A Life. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bates, Catherine (1992). The Rhetoric of Courtship in Elizabethan Language and Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beal, John (2002). ‘John Donne and the circulation of manuscripts’. In J. Barnard, and D. F. McKenzie (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain (vol. 4, pp. 122–6). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bradley J. F. and J. Q. Adams (1922). The Jonson Allusion Book: A Collection of Allusions to Ben Jonson from 1597 to 1700. New Haven: Yale University Press Brennan, Michael G. (1988). Literary Patronage in the English Renaissance. London: Routledge. Carew, Thomas (1949). The Poems, with his Masque, ‘Coelum Britannicum’, ed. Rhodes Dunlap. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Carey, John (1986). John Donne: Life, Mind and Art. London: Faber & Faber. Cedric, C. B. (2008). ‘Presence, obligation and memory in John Donne’s texts for the countess of Bedford.’ Renaissance Studies, 22/1, 63– 85. Colclough, David (ed.) (2003). John Donne’s Professional Lives. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer.

Cummings, B. (2002). The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Donaldson, Ian (ed.) (1985). Ben Jonson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Donaldson, Ian (1997). Jonson’s Magic Houses: Essays in Interpretation. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Donaldson, Ian (2001). ‘Perishing and surviving: the poetry of Donne and Jonson’. Essays in Criticism, 51, 68–85. Donne, John (1952). Essays in Divinity, ed. E. M. Simpson. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Donne, John (1965). The Elegies and The Songs and Sonnets, ed. Helen Gardner. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Donne, John (1967). John Donne. The Satires, Epigrams and Verse Letters, ed. W. Milgate: Oxford: Clarendon Press. Donne, John (1974). Letters to Severall Persons of Honour (1651) [facsimile]. Hildesheim: Georg Olms. Donne, John (1978). The Epithalamions, Anniversaries and Epicedes, ed. W. Milgate. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Donne, John (1984). Biathanatos, ed. E. W. Sullivan. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Donne, John (1990). John Donne [the poems with a selection of the prose], ed. John Carey. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Donne, John (1996). John Donne’s 1622 Gunpowder Plot Sermon: A Parallel-Text Edition, ed. Jeanne Shami. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Donne, John (2002). Selected Letters, ed. P. M. Oliver. Manchester: Fyfield Books. Donne, John (2008). The Poems of John Donne, ed. Robin Robbins, 2 vols. Harlow: Longman. Dutton, Richard (2000). Licensing, Censorship, and Authorship in Early Modern England. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Evans, Robert C. (1989). Ben Jonson and the Poetics of Patronage. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University. Press. Flynn, Dennis (1988). ‘ “Awry and squint”: the dating of Donne’s Holy Sonnets’. John Donne Journal, 7, 35–46. Flynn, Dennis (1995). John Donne and the Ancient Catholic Nobility. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Guibbory, Achsah (1990). ‘ “Oh, let mee not serve so”: the politics of love in Donne’s Elegies’. ELH, 57, 811–33. Guibbory, Achsah (ed.) (2006). The Cambridge Companion to John Donne. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hanson, Elizabeth (1998). Discovering the Subject in Renaissance England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harp, Richard and Stanley Stewart, (eds.) (2000). The Cambridge Companion to Ben Jonson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hobbs, Mary (1992). Early Seventeenth Century Verse Miscellany Manuscripts. Aldershot: Scolar Press. Jonson, Ben (1925–52). The Works, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and E. Simpson. 11 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Jonson, Ben (1953). Timber; or, Discoveries, ed. R. S. Walker. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Jonson, Ben (1975). Poems, ed. Ian Donaldson. London: Oxford University Press. Jonson, Ben (1984). The New Inn, ed. Michael Hattaway. Manchester: Manchester University Press. King, Henry (1965). The Poems, ed. Margaret Crum. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Lewalski, Barbara K. (1973). Donne’s Anniversaries and the Poetry of Praise: The Creation of a Symbolic Mode. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Loewenstein, Joseph (2002). Ben Jonson and Possessive Authorship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Love, Harold (1993). Scribal Publication in Seventeenth-Century England. Oxford: Clarendon Press. McClung, W. A. (1977). The Country House in English Renaissance Poetry. Berkeley: University of California Press. McEuen, Kathryn (1968). Classical Influences Upon the Tribe of Ben. New York: Octagon Books. Marotti, Arthur F. (1986). John Donne, Coterie Poet. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Marotti, Arthur F. (1995). Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Marotti, Arthur F. (2005). Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Martin, Catherine Gimelli (2004). ‘The erotology of Donne’s “Extasie” and the secret history of voluptuous rationalism’. Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 44, 121–47. Martindale, Joanna (1993). ‘The best master of virtue and wisdom: the Horace of Ben Jonson and his heirs’. In C. Martindale and D. Hopkins (eds.), Horace Made New: Horatian Influences on British Writing from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century (pp. 50–85). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. May, Steven W. (1991). The Elizabethan Courtier Poets: The Poems and their Contexts. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Miles, Rosalind (1986). Ben Jonson: His Life and Work. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Miles, Rosalind (1990). Ben Jonson, his Craft and Art. London: Routledge. Montrose, L. A. (1977). ‘Celebration and insinuation: Sir Philip Sidney and the motives of Elizabethan courtship’, Renaissance Drama, 8, 3–35. Mueller, Janel (1993). ‘Troping Utopia: Donne’s brief for lesbianism’. In J. G. Turner (ed.), Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe (pp. 182– 207). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Norbrook, David (1990). ‘The monarchy of wit and the republic of letters’. In Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katherine Eiseaman Maus (eds.), Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry (pp. 3–36). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Poets, Friends, and Patrons: Donne and Jonson Osborn, Louise Brown (1937). The Life, Letters, and Writings of John Hoskyns 1566–1638. New Haven: Yale University Press. Pask, Kevin (1996). The Emergence of the English Author: Scripting the Life of the Poet in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Patterson, Annabel H. (1984). Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Pebworth, Ted-Larry (1989). ‘John Donne, coterie poetry, and the text as performance.’ Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 29/1, 61–75. Peterson, R. S. (1981). Imitation and Praise in the Poems of Ben Jonson. New Haven: Yale University Press. Riggs, David (1989). Ben Jonson: A Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Robbins, Rossell Hope (1952) (ed.), Secular Lyrics of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Saunders, Ben (2006). Desiring Donne: Poetry, Sexuality, Interpretation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sharpe, Kevin (1987). Criticism and Compliment: The Politics of Literature in the England of Charles I. Cambridge University Press.

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Sheavyn, Phoebe (1967). The Literary Profession in the Elizabethan Age, rev. J. W. Saunders, 2nd edn. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Simpson, Evelyn M. (1948). A Study of the Prose Works of John Donne, 2nd edn. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Smith, Barbara. (1995). The Women of Ben Jonson’s Poetry: Female Representations in the Non-Dramatic Verse. Aldershot: Scolar Press. Summers, Joseph H. (1970). The Heirs of Donne and Jonson. London: Chatto & Windus. Targoff, Ramie (2008). John Donne, Body and Soul. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Whitlock, Baird W. (1982). John Hoskyns, Serjeantat-Law. Washington, DC: University Press of America. Wiggins, Peter DeSa. (2000). Donne, Castiglione, and the Poetry of Courtliness. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Wilson, Elkin Calhoun (1966). England’s Eliza. London: Frank Cass. Wotton, Henry (1907). The Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton, ed. Logan Pearsall Smith. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Woudhuysen, H. R. and David Norbrook (eds.) (1992). The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse: 1509–1659. Penguin Press, no. 31. London: Allen Lane.

16

Law: Poetry and Jurisdiction Bradin Cormack

In his Defence of Poesy (c.1580; printed 1595) Sir Philip Sidney defines the truth and thus use value of literary fiction as the product of a kind of imaginative suspension. ‘What child is there’, he rhetorically asks, ‘that coming to a play and seeing “Thebes” written in great letters upon an old door doth believe that it is Thebes?’ Since poetic fiction presents things ‘not affirmatively but allegorically and figuratively written’, it follows that only those spectators or readers who come to poetry on its own terms will be able to determine its particular mode of truth-telling: ‘looking but for fiction, they shall use the narration but as an imaginative ground-plot of a profitable invention’, he posits.1 A ground-plot is a foundation or plan in outline, and invention is a term from classical rhetoric (Lat. inventio) for the discovery of where a persuasive argument for some position lies. In the idea of an imaginary foundation, Sidney is thus associating the reading and reception of poetry with its creation: just as a poetic fiction constructs its narrative argument from a hypothetical starting point, so the reader is released by that hypothesis into a parallel process of constructing, up from the fiction, the invention or thought experience that issues from poetry and can be said to define its value. Poetic fiction is a framework within which to discover ways of apprehending experience that might otherwise evade you. At this point in the Defence Sidney makes a highly tactical comparison by turning, as one critic has noted (Eden 1986: 1), to English common law: But hereto is replied, that the poets give names to men they write of, which argueth a conceit of an actual truth, and so, not being true, proves a falsehood. And doth the lawyer lie then, when under the names of ‘John of the Stile’ and ‘John of the Nokes’ he puts his case. (cit. Alexander 2004: 35)

Unlike modern law’s John or Jane Doe (fictive names that serve to protect the identity of parties in a real case), John of the Stile and John of the Nokes were names given to fictive persons as deployed in a genre of thought experiment whose purpose was to

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clarify a legal problem. To ‘put’ a case is to lay out a set of hypothetical circumstances in order to test their legal implications. Lawyers used this kind of experiment both in the courtroom, where they might put forward fictive cases as comparisons for the one being tried, and in their learning exercises or moots at the four Inns of Court (Inner Temple, Middle Temple, Lincoln’s Inn, Gray’s Inn), the common lawyers’ institutional home and the centre of legal education in England. A moot was a formal exercise in legal pleading in which, before the gathered members of an inn, a lawyer considered a problem as given by a set of hypothetical facts that, taken together, issued in some legal question to be put into conceptual order and so resolved (see Baker and Thorne 1990). As Karen Cunningham (2007) has argued, the hypothetical ‘facts’ in the moot are thus closely analogous to the imagined facts that, in literary fictions, generate emplotted situations requiring narrative resolution. Sidney’s comparison of law and poetry points, then, not just to the shared use of fictive names across disciplines, but to a whole method for analysing experience. The method’s end, furthermore, whether in law or the literary arts, was often less to generate an answer than to put on display the mind’s capacity to see, among all possible moves, where an answer to a complex problem might lie. In this way, the fictive hypothesis could be said to guide the hearer’s mind as it confronted some question of relevance to the world, before exiting the hypothesis (and the period of suspension therein granted), so as to decide the question in light of its expanded conceptualisation. Mooting is defended along just these lines in The Misfortunes of Arthur, a play written by Thomas Hughes and other members of Gray’s Inn, and presented to Queen Elizabeth in 1588, probably as a post facto justification for the 1587 execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, and as a warning about the ongoing danger of Spanish Catholicism. A chronicle history on King Arthur that combines native and Senecan elements, the play begins with an introductory stage debate between the Muses, who speak on behalf of poetic eloquence and the arts of language, and the common lawyers, who speak on behalf of law. The lawyers defend their linguistic practice as one that, weighing ‘with steady and indifferent hand / Each word of law’, in effect makes civil life possible, protecting the ‘Prerogative of Prince, respect to Peers, / The Commons liberty, and each mans right’ even as it suppresses ‘mutin[ous] force, and practic[al] fraud’ (‘Introduction’, 75–90).2 Answering the Muses’ argument that mooting uselessly generates ‘points strange, and doubts / Still argued but never yet agreed’, the lawyers defend the apparently recondite exercise by calling attention to the instrumental force of increasing doubt within the appropriate sphere: ‘One doubt in moots by argument increased / Clears many doubts, experience doth object’ (26–7). So the argument might go, too, on behalf of reading poems or plays, or of liberal education generally. In fact, against the Muses’ efforts to dismiss the law as crabbed ineloquence, the gentlemen of Gray’s Inn insist that it is ‘slander’ to say that lawyers have banished the ‘ornaments of knowledge [or] of tongues’, since their law allows ‘intercourse’ with the Muses and their ‘foreign freight’, without, however, ever rendering ‘homage nor acknowledgment / Such as of Subject’s allegiance doth require’ (92–8). According to this nice distinction, the law is sovereign in a way analogous to

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a state embedded in a global economy of other sovereign states. If, on the one hand, law and poetry operate in separate spheres, with the law demanding its ‘Subject’s allegiance’ and poetry implicitly demanding the same, the ornaments of knowing and of speaking across field are nevertheless one. When Sidney conflates legal and poetic hypothesis, he is making much the same point, from outside the law and now on behalf of poetry, rather than its sister art. Understood as a comment on discursive method, Sidney’s legal move in the Defence is superbly tactical because law, then as now, was a serious and paradigmatically profitable way to spend one’s time – just the kind of work, in contrast to poetry, that an ambitious parent or guardian might want a ‘child’ to take up. Even the law, Sidney avers, indulges the kind of thinking for which poets and writers for the stage are condemned. In a lovely doubling back of the argument, Sidney thus uses poetry to cast the fiction-making at law in high relief, even as law’s sanctioned fictions then work to authorise poetry’s unsanctioned ones. Especially when read against the claims made for the law by the lawyers at Gray’s Inn, Sidney’s witty analogy nicely exemplifies the point that the encounter between early modern law and literature derived its character as much from the complexity of law and legal thinking as from anything that imaginative literature might do to the law. This essay follows Sidney’s lead by offering, in place of a survey of early modern literature’s attention to the law, some further frames for thinking about the continuity between legal and literary thinking, legal and literary textuality, and legal and literary authority. The essay is in two parts: after some introductory remarks about the formal life of jurisprudential activity and the general shape of imaginative literature’s encounter with law, I offer, more speculatively, three readings as cases specifically of the production of literary authority in relation to the authority of law.

Law as Practice and Jurisdiction For the English sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, we will do best to characterise law as a complex set of related social and cultural functions. Then as now, law was first and foremost a practical activity undertaken by a range of institutional actors – judges, lawyers, justices of the peace (inferior magistrates appointed at the local level), sheriffs, bailiffs, jailers, jurors, clerks, scriveners – at all levels of society for the ordering of that society. Law was also a body of doctrine, of rules and norms that shaped political and social life and helped produce the individual’s identity as subject and social actor. As mediated through institutional practice, furthermore, the law was both worldly ideal – the utopian promise of justice – and, just as dramatically, the image of justice’s only ever imperfect instantiation in the historical here and now. In a yet different register, the law was a profession, one of the main routes to social and political advancement. For that reason it was both an important site of nationalism, with the lawyer here taking the role of protector of English liberty and identity, and a lightning rod for social critique and social satire, with the lawyer there taking the role of self-interested scoundrel. (The debate that introduces The Misfortunes of Arthur

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exemplifies both attitudes.) As a discipline, finally, law – along with theology, medicine, and, increasingly, natural philosophy – was one of the learned or bookish disciplines, a knowledge form whose textual method and transmission were essential to its identity as knowledge. Early modern poets and dramatists correspondingly represented law as image, doctrine, practice, institution, and discipline. In making their fictions, writers went to the law, first, as a site of unusual importance for the social production of meaning. This quality of literary production is easily grasped, for example, in the Renaissance stage’s extensive use of trials for dramaturgical effect, whether in courtroom scenes (e.g. The Winter’s Tale, Volpone, or The White Devil) or in scenes of judgment that simulate or even parody the courtroom (e.g. King Lear, The Cure for a Cuckold). The trial scene is dramatically effective, because, independent of whether it is shown to uphold justice or pervert justice, it stands always as a forceful instance of human activity in the process of making meanings that have a measurable effect in the world. Literature’s debt to law as a social phenomenon is similarly indexed by drama’s broad thematic attention to law, whether in relation to dynastic rule and political constitutionality, to the legal aspects of property, marriage, and inheritance, or to questions of debt and the place of contract in commercial exchange and the regulation of labour. So represented, the law stands as a social practice and framework that either produces good order or, in a satirical mode, dramatically undermines it. But even more importantly, it stands for a conspicuously modern mode of figuring identities within the rapidly differentiating culture and economy. The inhabitants of Tudor and Stuart England were haunted by law’s power and tormented by its constraints, but they were also absorbed, prodded, and excited by its possibilities. The drama of the period is peppered with law in part because post-Reformation England was itself awash in litigation, suffused by legality as the most important field for producing, naming, and regulating human relations. At a second level, the law presented itself to writers of imaginative literature as institutional knowledge and as a useful example of institutional authority. The case of drama is again suggestive. On the one hand, the lawyers and law students at the Inns of Court were powerful forces for early modern drama, acting both as sponsors of sometimes highly political performances within the Inns of Court and at the royal court, and as an important audience for the commercial theatre. The plays and masques that the common lawyers included as part of their holiday celebrations at the Inns (e.g. Gorboduc, Inner Temple, 1561–2; The Comedy of Errors, Gray’s Inn, 1594–5) or had produced for the monarch (e.g. The Misfortunes of Arthur, 1588; The Triumph of Peace, 1634) functioned not only as entertainments, but, especially during times of heightened political tension, as occasions for the lawyers to offer counsel, to celebrate the common law as a kind of knowledge that sustained the polity, and to advertise the lawyers’ own special authority as guardians of that law and polity (see Raffield 2004: 84–156; Winston 2005). If the lawyers used drama instrumentally to identify themselves as professionals uniquely capable of advising the royal court, writers of imaginative literature con-

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versely found in law an order of knowledge useful for their own poetic making, exploiting the example of legal method and legal epistemology in order to speak more effectively to their audiences. Thus playwrights looked, for example, to classical legal rhetoric for the shape of argumentation on both sides of the question (in utramque partem), a dialogic mode deployed on the English stage in the representation of characters’ opposing positions on some issue central to the plot (Altman 1978). Playwrights were equally energised by the legal-rhetorical concept of equity, the interpretative principle that, in the interest of justice, relaxes a strict rule in light of the particular circumstances in which an action took place or a written statute was to be applied. In equity, writers correspondingly found a model for the kind of judgment that a play or poem encourages when it presents a fictive world rich in particulars as the appropriate context for evaluating behaviour or norms (Eden 1986: 25–61). Alongside these more general imports from law and legal rhetoric, the more specialised side of English law had a similarly foundational impact on the theatre. For example, the common law’s increasingly complex doctrines for attributing intention to an agent involved in voluntary or accidental homicide, say, or in a contractual promise, provided playwrights with a powerful instrument to conceptualise action and intention on the stage (Wilson 2000). Similarly, playwrights discovered in the common law’s evolving norms for the evaluation of circumstantial evidence new ways of making mimetically convincing plots and compelling character, with the play audience taking the place of a jury in detecting the hidden causes and consequences of the action unfolding before them (Hutson 2007). In addition to such epistemological frames for representing action and character, writers of imaginative fiction found in law, too, a local and rapidly developing textuality useful for the articulation of their own textual authority as writers. The genre of the legal report is particularly useful as an indicator of the changing textual culture in English law. The common law was not codified, finding expression, instead, in the judges’ legal decisions and, most importantly, in the culture of professional learning at the Inns through which the law was learned, guarded, and transmitted. But the sixteenth century was a period in which, as a result of expanding litigation, lawyers and their clients came increasingly to feel the need for greater certainty about what to expect in a case than this system could provide. In light of this need, lawyers like Edmund Plowden, in the two parts of his Commentaries (1571, 1579), and, even more importantly, Sir Edward Coke, in his several volumes of Reports (1600–16), found an eager print market for carefully prepared collections of reports on recent cases in the common-law courts. These became foundational books. Coke compiled his volumes while he was Attorney General and Chief Justice first of Common Pleas and then of King’s Bench (the two principal central courts of common law). Of his texts, Sir Francis Bacon went so far as to assert, ‘Had it not been for [Coke’s] Reports, the law by this time had been almost like a ship without ballast.’3 Bacon’s evaluation reflects the fact that these were reports that, although few in number in comparison to the vast number of cases heard, could be received by the legal community as authorita-

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tive examples of the common law in action. The legal historian J. H. Baker notes that the case report had traditionally been more a professional instrument than a repository of legal principles per se – a guide not to legal precedent, but rather to how a lawyer might best approach a question when pleading the case: the decision, if reported at all, was to that extent irrelevant to the genre. As distinct from these older reports, Baker shows, Plowden and then Coke were highly selective in their approach, including only cases in which a decision had been taken by the court, and then shaping their narrative accounts of those cases in such a way as to make them authoritative guides to the unwritten law, as that had been expressed in the arguments on both sides of the question and in the legal decision itself (Baker 2000: 158–64). Coke’s and Plowden’s renovation of the older textual form they inherited is important, because it emblematised, and even facilitated, a fundamental shift in the nature of the common law, which saw the locus of its authority move from ‘doctrine (or common learning) to jurisprudence (or judge-made law)’ (Baker 1985: 59). Put another way, the early modern period is one in which a legal authority preserved by the common lawyers as specialised guild knowledge was giving way to a new kind of authority that, evolving case by decided case, could be located on the page and preserved as such in books. The cultural impact of these changes in the authority of legal reporting (and, relatedly, of the expanding market for legal treatises directed to professional lawyers, justices of peace, and laypersons) cannot be overestimated. As one of the most consequential cultures of writing and written interpretation in postReformation England, the law functioned as a body of writing both against which to measure the claims of imaginative literature and on which to model the authority towards which imaginative literature might aspire. In this period, literature and law were friendly antagonists, twinned experiments in the textual adjudication of experience and twinned expressions of a social system in which, as one critic has urged for post-Reformation writing, textual interpretation was increasingly understood as producing the very authority it also indexed (Weimann 1996). One further point is relevant for how writers of imaginative literature engaged law as contemporary social practice. A still under-appreciated indicator of law’s complex meaning for the broader culture is that English law was anything but single even in its most specialised aspect as a source for rules and norms. Against the image of law as order of discourse that is, as it were, always already effective in its normativising and disciplinary organisation of experience, a number of social historians describe law as being shaped, bottom-up, by the contestatory practices of legal actors at the local and central levels, and by the interaction among different kinds of legal forums as these managed the business brought before them (e.g. Hindle 2000; Stretton 1998; Wrightson 1980). Seen from the ground, that is, early modern law was a complex matrix of plural laws still in formation, a messy complex of multiple, overlapping, and sometimes competing jurisdictional spheres, each one potentially the source of an organising norm. English law was not so much Law as it was local law or central law, spiritual law or temporal law, common law or the ius

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commune (the combined Roman canon and civil laws, as these were used in English ecclesiastical courts, in some of the courts of equity, including Chancery, and in the Admiralty courts).4 If law in the early modern imagination was always a practice, it was also always a jurisdiction, a delimited sphere of practice among other such spheres. The cultural implications of this fundamental legal principle are worth pausing over. Jurisdiction is a formal framework for jurisprudential activity. But it matters for law’s substantive encounter with human experience because it shapes what the law is able or willing to see. In a series of important studies on the culture of medieval and early modern law, the legal theorist Peter Goodrich has focused attention on the ‘minor jurisdictions’ against which English common law defined itself in the ongoing historical process that eventually brought it to dominance as national law (e.g. Goodrich 1990: 15–52). In doing so, he has been particularly interested in excavating a law and jurisdiction more adequate to love, and to the idea of an intimate public space, than are the jurisdictions of state and church (Goodrich 1996, 2007). In this provocative understanding of law, jurisdictional plurality allows for a legal conceptualisation of areas of experience that might otherwise be excluded from the purview of law more narrowly conceived. So understood, jurisdiction promises an expanded encounter between the worlds of law and of human experience. For this reason, early modern writers found in jurisdiction a highly useful conceptual instrument for theorising authority in the social sphere. As a principle fundamental to law’s operation, jurisdiction was of interest, first, because it makes clear how little given the law is, and how far law’s authority emerges as a function of legal practice (Cormack 2007). Of equal interest to literary writers was the impact of jurisdiction on the idea of literature itself. Because jurisdiction is itself a mode of distribution – the law’s way of marking authority as a consequence of limits and delimitations – the concept of jurisdiction helped writers of imaginative literature test the authority of their own texts against the ‘real’ authority of the state. As we have seen in Sidney’s sense that a playwright’s fictions produce knowledge within a system analogous to the law’s system, or in the Gray’s Inn lawyers’ sense that law must not do ‘homage’ to the literary muses as to a foreign power, the authority of law amplifies the fact that literature, too, has authority in its sphere. Jurisdictionally speaking, poetry is not so much subordinate to power as parallel to it. The second part of this essay extends this last point by treating, rather more speculatively, three moments in the jurisdictional encounter between legal discourse and its literary twin. These cases – a few scenes from Ben Jonson’s Poetaster, a poem by Shakespeare, and a phrase from Thomas More’s Utopia – exemplify some of the ways in which writers of imaginative literature drew on law in order to define the peculiar authority of their own language. In each instance, the text exploits small turns in language, and small shifts in tone or register, to draw the reader into a semi-technical sphere of law, which then doubles back to charge the literary environment and thereby bring the technical and the non-technical into an intimate encounter.

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Poetry and Jurisdiction: Jonson, Shakespeare, More For Ben Jonson in Poetaster, the law stands professionally and textually against the work of poetry, while simultaneously making visible poetry’s special authority as a textual practice. First performed in 1601 and subsequently printed in a 1602 quarto and the 1616 folio, the play represents the literary culture and literary authority of classical Rome through two interrelated plots, each culminating in a legal judgment expressive of the power of the state. The first plot purports to explain the cause of Ovid’s historic exile from Rome to the Black Sea, and reaches its climax in a banquet scene in which Ovid and his friends impersonate the gods. The emperor Augustus intrudes on the banquet and, taking it for blasphemy and a kind of treason, formally exiles the poet who has presided over the fiction. Jonson’s second plot concerns Horace, usually understood as a stand-in for Jonson, as he defends himself against the poetic and legal assaults of Demetrius and the poetaster Crispinus, who aim through their slanders to ingratiate themselves at court, but who instead, in a triumphant final trial scene, are exposed and punished for their slanderous misuse of language. From different angles, the two plots take up the question of how poetic authority relates to state authority, asking both whether the poet’s authority over his fiction-making seals him off from state power (it doesn’t), and whether the state is needed to protect the poet, as one who pre-eminently embodies the power of language, from the injury that language can effect (it is). The play’s opening scene dramatically presents the relative claims of law and poetry through a microanalysis of legal language and form, turning the traditional opposition between law and poetry into an argument for their complementarity and for their operation in distinct textual jurisdictions. At the beginning of Act 1, instead of studying the law, as his father has instructed, Ovid is writing an elegy. Ovid Senior discovers his son, and chastises him for so wasting his time. In a passage first printed in the folio text of 1616 and probably excluded from the quarto printing through Jonson’s self-censorship, Ovid assures his father that he will attend to his proper studies, but he does so in a language that still binds him to the practice of poetic eloquence that so offends the father: ‘I’ll prove the unfashioned body of the law / Pure elegance’, he says, ‘and make her ruggedest strains / Run smoothly as Propertius’ elegies’ (Poetaster 1.2.103–5).5 Unsurprisingly, Ovid Senior is not consoled by his son’s conception of what legal study entails: ‘Why, he cannot speak, he cannot think out of poetry, he is bewitched with it.’ And when the tribune Lupus steps in, on behalf of the son, to urge, ‘Come, do not misprize him’, the father angrily replies: Misprize? Ay, marry, I would have him use some such words now: they have some touch, some taste of the law. He should make himself a style out of these, and let his Propertius’ elegies go by. (1.2.108–14)

The small exchange depends on hearing the force of two words, one from the legal arts and one from the literary ones. First, Jonson plays on a distinction between two

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meanings of ‘misprize’. Lupus means that the father has mistaken or misunderstood his son, but Ovid Senior hears in the word the legal category of ‘misprision’, a technical word in the Elizabethan period for ‘crime’, specifically a non-capital crime associated with, but less serious than, its capital counterpart: the word is most familiar, therefore, in phrases like ‘misprision of treason’ and ‘misprision of felony’. As Jonson exploits the language of law, this quibble around misprision turns out to be a grounding joke for the play’s major plot. For like Ovid Senior at the beginning of the play, Caesar at its crisis moment misprizes the force of poetic fiction when, coming upon the banqueters dressed as gods, he mistakes the poet’s fictive performance as a form of treason against the gods whom they make into ‘counterfeits’ (4.6.37), against the virtue whose ‘law’ they ignore (4.6.45), and implicitly against the state, whose divinely ordained authority the emperor dramatically reasserts at the moment he pronounces judgment against the masquers: ‘If you think gods but feigned and virtue painted, / Know we sustain an actual residence, / And with the title of an emperor / Retain his spirit and imperial power’ (4.6.47–50). In his poetic weighing of ‘misprision’, Jonson thus exploits the language of English law to align Augustus’ error of interpretation with Ovid Senior’s earlier linguistic conversion of a mistake into a crime: the emperor’s judgment against poetic fiction, in Jonson’s analysis, is misprision of treason, indeed. A second charged word in Ovid Senior’s attack on his son is ‘style’, which the father surprisingly associates with law, and which Jonson thus makes a keyword for his account of the relation between legal and literary discourse. Why might Jonson, for whom poetic style was so much the marker of poetic achievement, want to insist that law, the art of indifferently weighing words and motives and causes, has a style of its own? One answer, certainly, would be that, as opposed to poetic style, law’s style is bad style. In fact, this was a period commonplace, recycled in contemporary satires on the law such as George Ruggle’s academic drama Ignoramus (Latin 1615; English trans. 1660), which excoriates common-law culture by mocking the title character’s Latinisms and Gallicisms. In a satirical poem printed in 1614, John Taylor stages a dialogue between a pedantic lawyer and pedantic poet, each one arguing his authority by spewing forth the inkhorn terms proper to his discipline: the lawyer’s case and cause, attachments, citations, latitats, and delays are answered by the poet’s stops and commas, parenthesis, palinodes, accents, figures, and tautologies (Taylor 1614: fo. G1r). And John Donne, in his great ‘Satire 2’ from the 1590s, attacks the lawyer Coscus for misusing language, both by wooing in an absurdly technical court jargon – ‘I have been / In love, ever since tricesimo of the Queen, […] / You said, if I returned next ‘size in Lent, / I should be in remitter of your grace’ (49–55) – and by manipulating the technical legal instruments he draws up to his own material advantage (87–100). Certainly, in Poetaster’s allusion to a legal style there is something of this same satirical orientation, but that point is subordinate to Jonson’s interest in the more basic fact that law, like poetry, should be made in language and transmitted in books. Style for Jonson is the sign that, no less than poetry’s authority, law’s authority is

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made. Jonson emphasises this continuity between the two disciplines by adding to the distinction between legal and poetic textuality a distinction, within law, between the two primary models for the writing of law in books. The first is aligned with Rome and the second with England. On his father’s departure, Ovid, nauseated by his formal course of study, begs the gods of Rome to ‘give me stomach to digest this law’ (1.2.230), a sentence that punningly alludes to the Justinian Digest and thereby to the idea of Roman law as a written and contained code of law. A second pun identifies the second legal style. In the following scene, Tibullus enters the study to urge his friend to come into the city for a walk. ‘No, good Tibullus’, Ovid replies, ‘I’m not now in case’, which is to say, not in the appropriate state of mind. ‘How, not in case?’ Tibullus asks, ‘Slight thou ’rt in too much case, by all this law’ (1.3.11–13). As against Ovid’s joke, which references Roman civil law, Tibullus’ joke alludes to the case-oriented method of English common law, as exemplified by books like Plowden’s or Coke’s. As Jonson has represented him, Ovid is caught not just between law and poetry, but between the textual forms pertaining to English common law and its primary counterpart in the Roman civil law. Law allows Jonson to say that having a style means being in language in such a way that a book might not only imply your authority, but actually produce it. By amplifying the law as a place of competing textualities, Jonson suggests how, even in a world where poetry’s power is controlled by the state, poetry can be said nevertheless to have an authority parallel to the state’s. As the Digest is to Rome, and the case report is to England, so poetry is to the textual sphere in which it makes meaning. This is why, at the play’s opening, which finds Ovid working on his poems, Luscus urges him, in expectation of the father’s arrival, to put away the paper on which he is writing poems and become differently textual: ‘Get a law book in your hand’, he says, adding, when Ovid takes up the prop, ‘Why so: now there’s some formality in you’ (1.1.12–13). Like the ‘gown and cap’ that the student Ovid is also supposed to wear (1.1.5–6), the book effects a style by transforming the body that uses it, entering the body as formality, which we can understand as the very promise of institutional authority through textual form. In Jonson’s hands, the idea of a law that is made through different textual traditions belonging to different spheres gives to poetry, and to the idea of text and book that sustains it, the cast of authority within its jurisdictional sphere. As a second case for the kind of encounter between law and literature that analytically amplifies continuities between the two discourses, I turn to one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, which though printed in 1609 were written across the preceding two decades. Sonnet 30 is one of the most famous legal sonnets in the sequence, and probably belongs to the 1590s, a decade in which the literary culture around the inns of court sustained a frenzied production of sonnets, including many poems that, like Shakespeare’s, drew on the technical language of law to make their erotic arguments.6 Shakespeare’s poem uses the conceit of legal testimony and legal remedy to describe the experience of loss as a repetitively enacted trauma that no amount of affective work can quite counter. Hidden in the poem’s logic is a jurisdictional distinction that

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allows Shakespeare to intensify the poem’s analysis of erotic relation and lyric subjectivity: When to the sessions of sweet silent thought I summon up remembrance of things past, I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought, And with old woes new wail my dear time’s waste; Then can I drown an eye (unused to flow) For precious friends hid in death’s dateless night, And weep afresh love’s long-since-cancelled woe, And moan th’expense of many a vanished sight; Then can I grieve at grievances fore-gone, And heavily from woe to woe tell o’er The sad account of fore-bemoanèd moan, Which I new pay as if not paid before. But if the while I think on thee (dear friend) All losses are restored, and sorrows end.7

The conceit here is that, in an act of self-punishing remembrance, the speaker finds himself having to pay a debt of grieving (or moaning) owed for love on a bond of woe that, though cancelled in the sense of having been discharged (with the speaker’s fore-bemoaned moan), nevertheless continues to exert a claim upon him. The speaker’s ‘sad account’ of his grief is both testimony and the currency in which the debt must repeatedly be paid. Thinking about the beloved friend, as the couplet has it, allows the speaker to exit this cycle and, the cancelled debt paid once and for all, see his sorrows end. In the idea of a cancelled debt that yet remains in force, the poem alludes to a standard case about common-law jurisdiction. Lorna Hutson has shown that the same case structures the moment in Love’s Labour’s Lost in which Navarre insists to the Princess of France that her father has failed to pay a loan for which Aquitaine is security, and the princess responds that the debt has ‘faithfully been paid’ (2.1.156), only then to have Boyet reveal that the ‘acquittances’ which act as evidence of the debt’s payment are missing (2.1.160).8 As Hutson shows, the underlying structure here is the ‘archetypal case of “conscience” which defined the limits of the common law with relation to Chancery’, which as the principal court of equity had jurisdiction over various matters that the more formalist common law was unable to consider. Because the common-law courts ‘offered no remedy for the debtor who, bound in a written obligation, paid off his debt [but] failed to take, or lost, the written receipt or acquittance of his payment’, in such cases, the debtor had to seek remedy in Chancery, according to the more flexible operation of equity and the Chancellor’s freer investigation of ‘who was behaving unconscionably’ in the matter (Hutson 2007: 298).9 This is a highly illuminating context for Sonnet 30, since it allows us to see that the sonnet’s major turn, at the couplet, is a jurisdictional event. The speaker of the poem is in the difficult position (as the Princess of France potentially is in Love’s

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Labour’s Lost) of needing to ‘new pay as if not paid before’ a bond that has already been cancelled. In the legal context I have described, in which the lack of written testimony is at issue, a first point is that the poet’s oral testimony, his ‘sad account’ of his sorrow, might be exactly the wrong kind of witness to his debt’s having been paid. Read through the legal metaphor, the traumatic repetition of grief emerges as a consequence of the formal inadequacy of speech to close off an affective burden. In turning to the friend, however, the speaker finds the remedy that ‘sweet silent thought’ is juridically unable to provide: ‘But if the while I think on thee (dear friend) / All losses are restored, and sorrows end.’ The major effect of the poem’s argument is that, by analogy to the legal situation, the poem turns out to represent, across the break between quatrains and couplet, not one court, but, jurisdictionally, two. The shock of the poem, consequently, is that thinking is thus doubled as not one forum, but two: against the court of ‘sweet silent thought’, in which the speaker finds no remedy for his loss but only iterative expense, the poem imagines a second court – a court of thinking ‘on thee’ – in which a remedy does become available. In the technical version of Sonnet 30 towards which Shakespeare’s legal language pulls the reader, the idea is that, in the manner of jurisdictional complements, thought emerges as plural, in response to the very object of thought – as though the act of thinking, which pertains to the thinker, were altered by the object of thought, or as though the thinker, and lover, were suffused by his orientation towards the other. Shakespeare’s poem uses the idea of jurisdictional difference in law to invent a lyric and erotic self whose identity depends on the relational scene of which he is a part. In its connection to the object of knowledge or love, the poetic self emerges as a jurisdictional self, made by the same boundaries (in the other) that limit it. My third case for the encounter between the worlds of law and poetic fictionmaking comes from Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), a book whose portrait of the ideal republic is vexingly caught up with the practical question of how a manifestly speculative fiction can be relevant to the real world of politics. In an extreme form, Utopia poses the general question of where a fiction’s authority lies. At the beginning of the narrative, More makes a passing reference to English legal office that interestingly impinges on that question. Alluding to the 1515 diplomatic mission that brought him to Bruges, where the conversation about the island of Utopia is imagined to take place, More names Cuthbert Tunstall as his companion on the mission, adding that this is someone whom the king ‘has just created Master of the Rolls, to everyone’s immense satisfaction’.10 This biographical detail – Tunstall was indeed elevated to that office on 12 May 1516 – has two functions relevant to More’s fiction. The Master of the Rolls was the principal clerk in the court of Chancery and the chief assistant to the Chancellor, an office that since December 1515 had been held by Cardinal Wolsey. More’s opening detail is a first hint that the book has a special relevance to the new Chancellor and to the court over which he now presided, a court that in England embodied the idea of justice that is Utopia’s principal theme (see Cormack 2007: 102–9). The second function of Tunstall’s office relates to the meaning of the rolls he oversees. In legal

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culture, these are the parchment documents that preserved as formal record the matters that came before a court. The Chancery rolls had a primarily administrative function as an official register for legal instruments such as charters, grants, and patents. Like all formal records, however, they were the textual repository of what the law acknowledged and would admit into consideration. At its most extreme, the operative principle was that embodied by the medieval saying Quod non est in actis non est in mundo: ‘That which is not in the register in not in the world’ or, in one historian’s phrasing, ‘reality is what is found in files’.11 This textual reconstruction of the real is relevant to More’s own fiction in a very simple sense. In making a text that revels in its own fictiveness, and then insisting on its relevance for the polity, More is indulging a version of the true analogous to that implied in the idea of a formal and conclusive record. The roll is the form that truth takes, not because it is true, but because it is appropriately textual. In that sense, the legal office held by Tunstall provides More with a wonderfully simple case for the power of his textual Utopia, which gets its authority, not because it corresponds accurately to the political world, but because it opens a textual space that remains in conversation with that world precisely by defining its own mode of truth-telling. The space of Utopia, like the space of law itself, is a jurisdiction produced through text. We are back to Sir Philip Sidney’s claim that the poet’s ‘truth’ and the lawyer’s ‘truth’ are complementary expressions of a shared method for analysing experience. As an emblem for the force of poetic fiction generally, the power of More’s fictional Utopia derives, not from its author’s mimetic adherence to the real, but only from his control over the system in which the fiction operates. In their activation of law’s language for poetic ends, the texts of Jonson and Shakespeare similarly look inward, even as they reach outward to the kind of social authority that the law manifestly embodies. In their inwardness, too, literature is intimately law’s companion. Although poetry and law both belong to the world, the authority of each derives from a shared capacity to make in language a different world, which as jurisdiction meets the real and accommodates it, but without doing homage.

Notes 1 Cited from Alexander 2004: 34–5. Alexander’s excellent gloss on ‘imaginative groundplot’ is on p. 342. 2 Cited, in modernised spelling, from Corrigan 1992. On the political background, see pp. 41–51. 3 Cited from a letter written by Bacon to King James in 1616, as reprinted in Bacon 1857– 74:, XIII, 65. 4 For the jurisdictional complexity in English law during the Tudor period, see Baker 2003:

117–319. On the ius commune in English legal culture, see Helmholz 2001. On the canon law and ecclesiastical courts in relation to the dramatic representation of marriage and sexual life, see Mukerji 2006. 5 Cited from Poetaster, ed. Cain (Jonson 1995). 6 See e.g. poems 5, 6, 20, 37, and 38 in the anonymous Zepheria (London, 1594). Zepheria’s excessive use of law is parodied by John Davies in Sonnets 7 and 8 from his Gullinge

Law Sonnets, edited by Robert Krueger (Davies 1975: 166–7). 7 Cited from The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Burrow (Shakespeare 2002). 8 Cited from Love’s Labor’s Lost, ed. Woudhuysen (Shakespeare 1998). 9 For the case as given in Christopher St. German’s widely diffused treatise on equity and common law, see Plucknett and Barton 1974: 77–9.

10

11

261 Cited from Utopia, ed. Surtz and Hexter (More 1965). The original Latin is quem sacris scriniis nuper […] praefecit, which translates as ‘whom he [Henry VIII] recently appointed as superintendant of the royal [sacred] files’. Vissman 2008: 56. On the Chancery rolls as an official register, see Clanchy 1993: 69–70.

References and Further Reading Alexander, Gavin (ed.) (2004). Sidney’s Defence of Poesy and Selected Renaissance Literary Criticism. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Altman, Joel (1978). The Tudor Play of Mind. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bacon, Francis (1857–74). Works, ed. James Spedding. London: Longman. Baker, J. H. (1985). ‘English law and the Renaissance’, Cambridge Law Journal, 44/1, 46–61. Baker, J. H. (2000). The Common Law Tradition: Lawyers, Books and the Law. London: Hambledon Press. Baker, J. H. (2002). An Introduction to English Legal History, 4th edn. London: Butterworth. Baker, John (2003). The Oxford History of the Laws of England, vol. 6: 1483–1558. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Baker, J. H. and Samuel Thorne (eds.). (1990). Readings and Moots at the Inns of Court in the Fifteenth Century, vol. 2. Selden Society 105. London: Selden Society. Clanchy, M. T. (1993). From Memory to Written Record: England 1066–1307, 2nd edn. Oxford: Blackwell. Cormack, Bradin (2007). A Power to Do Justice: Jurisdiction, English Literature, and the Rise of Common Law, 1509–1625. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Corrigan, Brian Jay (ed.) (1992). The Misfortunes of Arthur: A Critical, Old-Spelling Edition. New York: Garland. Cunningham, Karen (2007). ‘ “So many books, so many rolls of ancient time”: the Inns of Court and Gorboduc’. In Dennis Kezar (ed.), Solon and Thespis: Law and Theater in the English Renaissance (pp. 197–217). Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press.

Davies, Sir John (1975). Poems, ed. Robert Krueger. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Eden, Kathy (1986). Poetic and Legal Fiction in the Aristotelian Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Goodrich, Peter (1990). Languages of Law: From Logics of Memory to Nomadic Masks. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Goodrich, Peter (1996). Law in the Courts of Love: Literature and Other Minor Jurisprudences. London: Routledge. Goodrich, Peter (2007). The Laws of Love: An Introductory Manual. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Helmholz, Richard (2001). The ‘Ius Commune’ in England: Four Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hindle, Steve (2000). The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c.1550–1640. London: Macmillan. Hutson, Lorna (2007). The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hutson, Lorna and Victoria Kahn (eds.) (2001). Rhetoric and Law in Early Modern Europe. New Haven: Yale University Press. Jonson, Ben (1995). Poetaster, ed. Tom Cain. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Jordan, Constance and Karen Cunningham (eds.) (2007). The Law in Shakespeare. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan. Kezar, Dennis (ed.) (2007). Solon and Thespis: Law and Theater in the English Renaissance. Notre Dame: Notre Dame University Press. More, Thomas (1965). Utopia, ed. Edward Surtz and J. H. Hexter, vol. 4 in The Complete Works. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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Mukherji, Subha (2006). Law and Representation in Early Modern Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Plucknett, T. F. T. and J. L. Barton (eds.) (1974). St. German’s ‘Doctor and Student’. Selden Society 91. London: Selden Society. Raffield, Paul (2004). Images and Cultures of Law in Early Modern England: Justice and Political Power, 1558–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shakespeare, William (1998). Love’s Labor’s Lost, ed. H. R. Woudhuysen. Arden edn. Walton-onThames: Thomas Nelson. Shakespeare, William (2002). The Complete Sonnets and Poems, ed. Colin Burrow. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sokol, B. J. and Mary Sokol (2004). Shakespeare’s Legal Language: A Dictionary. London: Continuum. Stretton, Tim (1998). Women Waging Law in Elizabethan England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Taylor, John (1614). ‘An inkhorn disputation, or mongrel conference, betwixt a lawyer and a poet’. In Taylors Water-worke. London.

Vissman, Cornelia (2008). Files: Law and Media Technology, trans. Geoffrey Winthrop-Young. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Weimann, Robert (1996). Authority and Representation in Early Modern Discourse, ed. David Hillman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wilson, Luke (2000). Theaters of Intention: Drama and Law in Early Modern England. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Winston, Jessica (2005). ‘Expanding the political nation: Gorboduc at the Inns of Court and succession revisited.’ Early Theatre, 8/1, 11–34. Wrightson, Keith (1980), ‘Two concepts of order: justices, constables, and jurymen in seventeenth-century England’. In John Brewer and John Styles (eds.), An Ungovernable People: The English and Their Law in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (pp. 21–46). New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Zurcher, Andrew (2007). Spenser’s Legal Language: Law and Poetry in Early Modern England. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer.

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Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Book 5: Poetry, Politics, and Justice Judith H. Anderson

Until quite recently it would have been inconceivable to focus the essay on Spenser in a Companion to the literature and culture of the English Renaissance on the fifth book of The Faerie Queene, the book treating justice and concluding with efforts to impose an effective political order on England’s unruly colony Ireland.1 By traditional moral and aesthetic standards, the fifth book is deeply flawed: as C. S. Lewis memorably asserted of its morality, ‘Spenser was the instrument of a detestable [colonial] policy in Ireland, and in his fifth book the wickedness he had shared begins to corrupt his imagination’ (Lewis 1936: 349). This book also doubly disappoints readers’ normal expectations of structural closure: both the hero Artegall’s quest to establish justice and his prophesied union with Britomart, the heroine of a love quest spanning the two preceding books, are summarily aborted, the latter never to be mentioned again in the poem. By comparison, the four earlier books of The Faerie Queene further magnify the shortcomings of Book 5. Like this book, the first two – on holiness and temperance – have a single major hero and a dominantly linear structure; the allegory in them is fairly tight, and a moralistic reading, while grossly oversimplified, is possible. Although the linear structure of the fifth book invites comparison with these, comparison highlights not only its problematical ending but also the persistent strains throughout: between metaphorical and material dimensions of meaning, between concept and history, word and thing. Instead of a linear structure, the two books immediately preceding the fifth, on chastity (pure married love) and friendship, have a romance structure in which the related experiences of many characters revolve around a mythological and thematic core; rather than linearity, the interlacing or entanglement of several stories characterises these books. Allegory in them is looser, more suggestive, and relatively closer to symbolism. Indeed, the fourth book is so loosely or experimentally structured as to challenge the assumptions and methods that underlie Books 1 and 2. When we work our way through Book 4 and then reach Book 5, the linearity and the superficially tight allegory of the later book are made to look

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and feel like the forceful, artificial imposition of order they are, and the strains of their reimposition are both everywhere evident and essential to interpretation. Even as order becomes conspicuous – indeed thematic – within Book 5, the concerns of this book engage history, first conceived as the general materialism(s) of social issues, such as crime, taxation, corruption, inheritance, patriarchy, and legal equity, and then of history conceived more specifically as current political problems in England, on the continent, and in Ireland. This combination of the messiness of history and tight order, whether understood theoretically, structurally, or allegorically, is a recipe for trouble and, to my mind, for deliberated trouble on the part of the poet who penned Book 5. Besides the clear signs of deliberation (or intention) I have mentioned to this point, the literary theory of the Renaissance, and particularly of the Italians, would have alerted Spenser to the dangers (and to the shock value) of treating current history. He appears to reflect its cautions when he notes in the Letter to Ralegh published with the 1590 instalment of The Faerie Queene that he ‘chose the historye of king Arthure [for the general frame of the poem], as … furthest from the daunger of enuy, and suspition of present time’ (Spenser 1932–57: I, 167; all further reference is to this edition ). Closer to home, the representative views of the idealising Sidney and the materialising Bacon would further have guaranteed Spenser’s awareness of the necessary difference between the immediate, specific concerns of history and the more general, fictive concerns of poetry. Sidney considers real poetry, or fiction, ‘truer’ than history because it is not restricted to what actually happened but necessarily is more nearly perfect or ideal; in contrast, Bacon distinguishes sharply between ‘true history’ and untrue history, which he dismissively terms ‘poetry’ and which, in his negative view as well as in Sidney’s positive one, is necessarily an idealising fiction (Anderson 1984: 124–5, 164–5). But if Spenser’s fifth book engages current history, as poetry it still remains at some distance from A View of the Present State of Ireland, the political tract presumably written by Spenser in the 1590s to persuade the English court to adopt severely repressive measures in order to establish a stable government in Ireland and thus to ensure peace and prosperity there.2 Far more deeply and extensively than the tract, Book 5 examines the abstract principle of justice as it relates to human experiences and material conditions, often questioning the principle itself and exposing the inadequacy or cruelty of its unqualified application. As poetry, Book 5 has different purposes, or ends, from the tract, and deals more hypothetically and conceptually than practically and immediately with the historical problems it addresses. Whether from a modern or a Renaissance view, it is finally a hybrid – what Shakespeare’s Perdita would consider a bastard – of poetry and history that threatens conventional moral, political, and aesthetic categories of interpretation. Precisely because this book is so fundamentally problematical, in an age suspicious of easy answers and neat solutions, especially political ones, it claims our attention. The problems of Book 5 begin with its titular virtue of justice. Unlike the virtues of the earlier books, justice, ‘Most sacred vertue she of all the rest’, is impersonal and external, committed to an objective world that is outside the subject (proem, 10).

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The justicer, according to such traditional definitions as those of Aristotle and Aquinas, is ‘a sort of animate justice’, a ‘personification of justice’, ‘a living justice’ (Anderson 1970: 74). He must abstract himself from respect of persons, maintaining objectivity at the expense of anger and empathy. Not surprisingly, the hero of Book 5, Artegall (‘art equal’, ‘art of equality’, ‘Arthur’s equal’), is often torn between his roles as romance knight and rational justicer. The contrary vices of cruelty and vain pity alike threaten the objectivity of his virtue, and his personal life as Britomart’s lover, while not irrelevant to our conception of him, stands apart from his quest as justice. But even before the action begins in Book 5, the length and anxiety of its proem (prologue) signal a difference in orientation from the earlier books of Spenser’s romance epic. This is the first of the proems with a truly dramatised speaker, one whose voice is not conventionally that of the poet describing his song. In the first two lines of the proem, the speaker laments the ‘state of present time’, comparing it unfavourably with the ‘image of the antique world’, the latter a recurrent figure of a lost age of virtue, and thus he introduces a contrast between past and present, poetic image and actual temporality, idealising fiction and material history. He substantiates his neardespair by reference to morality, the conditions of meaning, and physical mutability – more exactly, to an erosion of virtue, a lack of congruence between word and thing (‘that which all men then did vertue call, / Is now cald vice’; emphasis added), and to apparently irrational movements in the heavens, such as the precession of the equinoxes, the obliquity of the ecliptic, and the seemingly retrograde orbits of the planets. Since these phenomena were largely susceptible of rationalisation in the sixteenth century, we might suspect that the poet is merely setting his speaker up as a fin-desiècle worry-wart, were it not that the speaker’s awareness of degeneration emerges recurrently in Book 5, as well as in Book 6, where it has the last word, and in the Mutability Cantos, where it refers to the inexplicable presence of a new star and similarly worrisome appearances of comets in the seemingly unchanging heavens (Meyer 1984: 118–19). Perhaps the appropriate response is to recognise that the fifth proem represents the historically prevalent claims of degeneration for our consideration and, temporarily suspending an evaluative judgement, to read on.3 Seeking refuge from despair, the proem’s speaker pivots from the retrograde planet Saturn to myth, recalling the golden age of mythic Saturn’s reign before Jove supplanted him, a time when Justice sat ‘high ador’d with solemne feasts’ (proem, 9). Abruptly and not entirely convincingly, in the proem’s final stanza the speaker waxes idealistic and hopeful, addressing the ‘Dread Souerayne Goddess’ whose just instrument ‘here’ is Book 5’s hero Artegall. Blurring the identities of the mythic Astraea, Goddess of Justice in Saturn’s reign on earth, and Queen Elizabeth I, he leaves open whether ‘here’ is on earth or in Faerie, here in the present or in the mythic past. Clearly, however, Artegall is introduced with fanfare that is in discord with the dominant pessimism of this proem. Not an isolated effect, such dissonance recurs in the early cantos, which repeatedly pair hyperbolic praise of the justicer with questionable justice (e.g. 5.1.2–3, 5.2.1, 5.4.2).

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The history of the justicer, recounted at the beginning of the first canto, itself gives us reason for pause. As a child Artegall is lured from human company with gifts and kind speeches by Astraea and then brought up by her in a cave, where he is taught the discipline of justice, ‘which, for want there of mankind, / She caused him to make experience / Vpon wyld beasts’. By the time he reaches manhood, wild beasts fear the sight of him, ‘and men admyr’d his ouerruling might; / Ne any liu’d on ground, that durst withstand / His dreadfull heast, much lesse him match in fight’ (5.1.7–8). Notably, force, not authority, is at the beginning his strongest suit. Nonetheless, to ensure even greater dread of him, Astraea, ‘by her slight’, steals from Jove the sword he used against the Titans, now to become the sword of earthly justice (5.1.7–9). Her justicer thus educated and equipped, if somewhat dubiously for human society, Astraea makes her servant, the implacable iron man Talus (Latin talus, ‘heel’, talio, ‘an eye for an eye’), her final gift to him. She then flees the sinful earth, metamorphosing into the heavenly sign associated with her, the virgin in the zodiac (see also Spenser 1977: 532 n., 5.5.12) Once on his own, Artegall’s first exploit is to adjudicate the conflicting claims of the Knight Sanglier and a squire, both of whom claim possession of one lady and disavow responsibility for the decapitation of a second. To solve this mystery, Artegall imitates the biblical Judgment of Solomon, proposing to divide the living lady between the two claimants. The murderer quickly accepts his offer, but the squire, her true love, as quickly rejects it, preferring to spare his lady’s life and to accept the Artegallian penalty to be imposed on the murderer, namely, the bearing of the dead lady’s head for a year. Now satisfied that the squire is innocent, Artegall proceeds to judgment: the guilty knight gets the head, the guiltless squire ‘adore[s]’ Artegall for his great justice, and the latter takes his leave, ‘Ne wight with him but onely Talus went. / They two enough t’encounter an whole Regiment’ (5.1.30). Fanfare swiftly follows (5.2.1). Tonal dislocations, the result of pacing and the juxtaposition of incongruous details, slightly skew Artegall’s initial triumph. His resolution of the conflict is correct, but the punishment he metes out hardly seems adequate to the crime, which greatly exceeds that in his biblical model. His justice reduces the decapitated lady to the level of a dead albatross. While it might be argued that the Artegallian penalty is appropriate to romance, it ill suits the virtue of justice in a real world of men and women. In actuality, Artegallian justice in this instance mimics the barnyard, where a dog that kills a domestic animal such as a goose is first beaten with its carcass and then bears this around its neck, a folk remedy for the killer instinct. The Knight Sanglier’s name, ‘Wild Boar’, his initial apprehension by Talus, who seizes him in his ‘iron paw’, and Sanglier’s assuming his burden, the lady’s head, ‘for feare’ ‘As [does a] rated Spaniell’ all suggest that Artegall’s training among the beasts has enduringly marked him (5.1.22, 29). Artegall’s next exploit takes him to a bridge where Pollente, a powerful but corrupt lord, exacts unjust tolls from any who would pass over it. Although Artegall rectifies this injustice by killing Pollente and executing his daughter Munera (Latin

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munus, ‘office, duty, favour, gift’), he again does so at some cost to his own ideality. His defeat of Pollente comes with mundane and material detail that at moments gestures towards mock-epic. These include an emphasis on his swimsmanship (‘But Artegall was better breath’d beside’) that is digressive in length and focus, and descriptions of battle that disappoint heroic expectation. When Artegall and Pollente meet at close quarters, for example, ‘They snuf, they snort, they bounce, they rage, they rore’, thus expressing the sounds of mortal combat between a dolphin and a seal (5.2.15–17). The execution of Lady Munera affords tonal dissonance still more pronounced. One the one hand, Munera is said to have metal hands and feet, which suggest that she is merely an allegorisation of social corruption, and more specifically of bribery. On the other hand, she is described a little too much as an attractive but erring young woman, led astray by her wicked father. From the latter point of view, we can read her ‘hands of gold’ as richly adorned like those of her prototype Lady Meed, rather than as monstrously metallic or even as gold-dispensing, and we can see her feet similarly furnished with jewellery or net-work slippers of ‘trye’, that is, ‘choice’ silver. In fact, the word ‘trye’ itself intimates that the silver of the slippers carries a symbolic or an aesthetic meaning. To make matters worse, Lady Munera’s hands and feet are first ‘Chopt off, and nayld on high’ even while she is ‘Still holding vp her suppliant hands on hye, / And kneeling at his [ambiguously Artegall’s or Talus’] feete submissiuely’ (5.2.26). The remainder of her, ‘in vaine loud crying’, is cast over the castle wall to drown in the ‘durty mud’. And the dissonance does not end even here: in a biblical echo of purgation by water, the stream is said to have ‘washt away … [Munera’s] guilty blood’, suggesting the mercy she is denied by our heroic justicer. Just before, her plight has been described as ‘seemelesse’: that is, ‘unseemly’, ‘seamless’, ‘unseeming’, or real; this single word summarises the inseparability of her plight into human and abstract parts – parts of human flesh and parts of legal theory (5.2.25, 27). The whiff of parody that accompanied the justicer’s victories over Sanglier and Pollente has given way to questions more probing: how far can the objectivity and externality of justice be carried without denying the humanity of the justicer and reducing human beings to lifeless objects? Within the same canto, as if an effect of Munera’s elimination, Artegall next encounters the levelling Giant, who would reduce hierarchical distinctions to equality and distribute all wealth accordingly. Given the size of the Giant, he is somewhat ironically an equaliser, and he is fundamentally a materialist in the literal sense, since he bases his arguments exclusively on quantity and sight: ‘The sea it selfe doest thou not plainely see / Encroch vppon the land there vnder thee?’ (5.2.37). Yet his pessimistic view of present conditions accords with that of the speaker of the fifth proem, and the reassertion of this view within the fiction itself attests to its historically real pressure, owing not only to irrational movements in the heavens but also to persistent crop failures, rampant inflation, further enclosures of land, and consequent poverty and vagrancy in England, as well as to anxieties about the spread of the economic communism of religious radicals on the continent, such as the Anabaptists, and about

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uprisings and invasions in Ireland (Anderson 1996: 173; 167–89 are more generally relevant ). Debating the materialistic Giant and the mutability necessarily entailed by his view, Artegall takes an equally extreme position, however, arguing that nothing really changes and that ‘All change is perillous, and all chaunce vnsound’ (5.2.36). His position recalls the unnatural impasse in Book 2, where Guyon and the Palmer attempt to keep Occasion fettered, in effect stopping time and the forward movement of their own quest. As Mutability will declare in the cantos bearing her name: ‘all that moueth [that is, all that lives], doth mutation loue’ (7.7.55). Notably, Mutability is the offspring of the giant Titans and, like the levelling Giant, a natural enemy of the Jovian force invested in Artegall’s sword. But Artegall himself is more immediately caught in contradictions. Although he argues for intangible values and tells the Giant that ‘in the mind the doome of right must bee’, his justice relies conspicuously on physical signs, on spectacle (Pollente’s head on a pole, Munera’s extremities nailed on high), and above all, on physical force (5.2.47). His high-minded debate with the Giant ends when Talus abruptly shoulders the Giant off a cliff to destruction ‘in the sea’ below (5.2.49): Like as a ship, whom cruell tempest driues Vpon a rocke with horrible dismay, Her shattered ribs in thousand peeces riues, And spoyling all her geares and goodly ray, Does make her selfe misfortunes piteous pray. So downe the cliffe the wretched Gyant tumbled; His battred ballances in peeces lay, His timbered bones all broken rudely rumbled. (5.2.50)

Ironically, this stanza celebrates Artegall’s victory in the very terms the Giant embraced, not only levelling him but also drowning him in the punning of ‘sea’ with ‘see’. Although Talus is the immediate agent of this levelling, his charge from Astraea is to do whatever Artegall intends (5.1.12); the adjective ‘cruell’ in the simile therefore participates in the increasing association of Artegall with cruelty, traditionally the vice opposed to justice, prior to his crucial encounter with Radigund, the Amazon Queen. Leaving the seaside, Artegall next appears in the very different context of a tournament celebrating the spousals of Marinell and Florimell (the fruitful conjunction of water and earth, the harmonious union of a Mars with a Venus). Both characters are holdovers from the two preceding books of romance, and Artegall’s appearance in their romance world foreshadows his experiences at Radigund’s hands, in Radegone, her city of women. Here, he acts less as a justicer, an animate abstraction, and more as a knight. Indeed, to participate in the tournament, he borrows another’s shield and thereby his identity, disguising his own as a justicer. His doing so enables his knightly rescue of Marinell but soon after actually furthers injustice until he reassumes his identity as Justice. Once he reassumes it, however, his choler has to be calmed by the

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Knight of Temperance, a personal, inner virtue that by definition has no necessary relation to the impersonal, outer nature of justice yet obviously affects it – and I intend the word ‘affects’ for all it is worth. The paradox, indeed the bind, is that temperance is different in nature from justice and cannot be channelled directly into a quest for it. At the same time, Artegall’s human, knightly response to the abuse of his honour threatens to affect his ability to administer justice impartially. This whole romance episode takes ‘vsurie of time forepast’ (5.3.40); it lingers in memories of earlier times and earlier books of the poem. It also serves as a paradigm – a ‘foreconceit,’ in Sidney’s term – for the central cantos of Book 5, Artegall’s adventures among the Amazons and Britomart’s rescue of her lover. Artegall might be said to fall into full humanity in the fifth canto of Book 5 when he battles Radigund, who challenges men to battle, subdues them ‘by force or guile’, clothes them in shameful ‘womens weedes’, and sets them to spin cloth in her prison (5.4.31). He first overcomes her, but, stooping to behead her, he discovers in her face ‘A miracle of natures goodly grace’: he experiences, as if for the first time, ‘his senses straunge astonishment’ (5.5.12). Suddenly torn between insensitive cruelty and vain pity, he throws away his Jovian sword (which Radigund subsequently breaks) and yields himself to her. While hardly right, his response, like that of Milton’s Adam, is all too human. Had he decapitated the beautiful Radigund after experiencing passion for her, his act would have been perversely cruel and inescapably vicious, far worse than the death of Lady Munera, since he, not Talus, would have been be the executioner of a woman about whose humanity there is no ambiguity. Although the poet reflects here ironically on Artegall’s ‘goodwill’ in yielding, he offers no viable alternative to it, and indeed he cannot without denying history in the biblical Garden (5.5.17). Only when Artegall falls into the selfish city of Radegone – for him a city of the subject (in both senses) – does his prior history in the preceding books become relevant to him.4 Before this point it is treated as if it were non-existent, as it is for his impersonal quest, and indeed it would be hard to square with the figure we see operating in the early cantos. Now suddenly, his beloved Britomart enters the picture and does so with a vengeance. Learning of Artegall’s capture by another woman, she sets out to rescue him. In her own eyes, she is simply and literally rescuing her lover, not the personification of justice, but her route to him is a conspicuous process of suppression and transference. In it, the poem asks her to change from an immoderate woman, raging at the disloyalty of her lover, to a myth, a goddess of equity to complement her Jovian justicer. At the same time, however, the poem openly questions and indeed exposes what is lost in her progress – namely, her personal identity, which is synonymous with her own quest for chaste love in marriage. This loss is most evident in the episode in Isis Church, where Britomart has a richly mythopoeic ‘dream of sexuality, death, and birth’ which, as a myth of procreative power, is matched nowhere else in the poem (Miskimin 1978: 32–3). She dreams that she is the goddess Isis and that the phallic crocodile beneath her feet but enfolding her middle with his tail impregnates her. First she feels from below ‘an hideous tempest’

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that scatters the holy fire ‘Vppon the ground, which kindled priuily, / Into outragious flames vnwares did grow’: With that the Crocodile, which sleeping lay Vnder the Idols [statue of Isis’] feet in feareless bowre, Seem’d to awake in horrible dismay, As being troubled with that stormy stowre; And gaping greedy wide, did streight deuoure Both flames and tempest: with which growen great, And swolne with pride of his own peerelesse powre, He gan to threaten her likewise to eat; But that the Goddesse with her rod him backe did beat. (5.7.15)

Resisted, the crocodile becomes humble, throws himself at her feet, and sues for grace and love: ‘Which she accepting, he so neare her drew, / That of his game she soone enwombed grew, / And forth did bring a Lion of great might’ (5.7.16). The morning after, Isis’ priest rationalises all this fire and fear and potency into a dynastic allegory of justice, utterly failing to acknowledge or account for ‘The troublous passion’ in Britomart’s ‘pensiue mind’ (5.7.19). Her personal experiences are reduced, or sublimed, into an externalised allegory of justice, even while the text demands another reading. When Britomart finds and battles Radigund, she is wounded to the bone by her, allegorically suggesting not only her vulnerability to the tyranny of affection (emotion, passion) that Radigund represents, but also its depth. Yet there is a disturbing excess to their battle that is wasteful in a specifically sexual sense: ‘But through great fury both their skill forgot, / And praticke vse in armes: ne spared not / Their dainty parts … Which they now hackt & hewd, as if such vse they hated’ (5.7.29). As they fight on, the blood flows from their sides and gushes through their armour, so that they tread in blood and strew their lives on the ground, ‘Like fruitles seede, of which vntimely death should grow’ (5.7.31). Through this battle, Britomart is purged of more than her affections; she is fitted to perform as the agent of a purely symbolic love to free fallen man, Artegall the justicer, from Radegone. What I would stress, however, is the extent to which the poem has made the sacrifice of her own character, her own persona, visible. Freed from Radegone by love, Artegall returns to his quest for justice. Symbolically at least, he is now a whole person, ‘inly’ a human being with operative affections and not simply a personification of externalised Justice. His virtue, moreover, is presumably charged with a significance more specifically Christian, a justice more forgiving than Talus’ identity – an ‘eye for an eye’ – symbolises. But now it is Artegall’s task to realise his redeemed virtue in a real world, or at least in a world that refers openly, at times even blatantly, to Tudor history, including the defeat of the Spanish Armada (the Suldan and his chariot), the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots (Duessa), Henri de Navarre’s apostasy to gain the throne of France (Burbon and Fleurdelis), Spanish

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tyranny in the Netherlands (Belge and her seventeen sons) and rebellion, abetted by Spain and the papacy, in Ireland (Irena’s island). After leaving Radegone, accompanied only by Talus, Artegall encounters Prince Arthur, best and most Christian of princes, who ironically mistakes our justicer for the pagan villain he is pursuing. Both knights prepare to fight until the maiden Samient (sameness, togetherness) intercedes to stop them. Raising their ventails (moveable parts of their helmets) and thus exposing what is within, the knights recognise their kinship: Artegall, ‘touched with intire affection’, yields allegiance to Arthur, who for his part apologises for having ‘mistake[n] the liuing for the ded’ – the redeemed for the pagan, the saved for the lost – and enters into alliance with Artegall. This episode testifies to the inner transformation of Artegall as a result of Radegone, and it introduces the co-operation of the two knights in the following cantos. At the same time, Arthur’s initial misrecognition dramatises the fact that, from the outside, Artegall’s virtue still looks as unredeemed as ever. While Arthur and Artegall travel together, the course of justice runs smoothly because they can divide the tasks that would otherwise have pulled Artegall simultaneously in two directions. Arthur deals with the Suldan, the explicit historical threat, and Artegall with the Suldan’s wife Adicia, the principle of wrong whom the Suldan has wed. Arthur also deals with Malengin as a specific manifestation of guile in Ireland, be it rebel Irish or Jesuit priests and missionaries, and Artegall, through his ruthless agent Talus, eliminates Malengin when he turns into the metamorphic principle of Guile itself.5 In each of these exploits, Artegall has the more mythic task and represents the principle of justice without encountering the dissonant strains of realism. The advantages of his co-operation with Arthur are perhaps most obvious when the two knights stand like balances in the scale of justice on either side of Mercilla during the trial of Duessa. Arthur responds as would any knight to a damsel in distress; he is so ‘sore empassionate’ in heart that ‘for great ruth his courage gan relent’. Precisely because he is so, Artegall does not have to be. Instead, the justicer, ‘with constant firme intent, / For zeale of Iustice was against her bent’ (5.9.46, 49). Once Arthur and Artegall separate, however, their stories differ sharply. Arthur goes off to fairy-tale success in Belge’s land, success that is very much at odds with the actual history of English attempts to intervene against the Spanish power in the Netherlands. Meanwhile, Artegall returns to his original quest to assist the Lady Irena in reclaiming her kingdom (Ireland) and, unhappily, to the contradictions between his humanity and his principle, his knighthood and his justice, that earlier beset him. If anything, these are exacerbated by his having recovered the wholeness of his identity in his fall at Radigund’s hands and his redemption by Britomart. Encountering Burbon and Fleurdelis (France) under attack by a lawless mob, Artegall shifts abruptly back and forth between the responses of a knight and those of a virtue. Now he sees Burbon’s shield as merely a piece of armour and now as the emblem that morally and religiously defines him; now he regards Burbon as a fellow knight in need and now as a shameless apostate. There is no uncompromising way for him either to assist

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Burbon and his lady or to abandon them to the mob. The demands of virtue simply do not coincide here with those of history. Generously choosing to help Burbon, Artegall is further delayed in his quest on behalf of Irena, whose side he finally reaches just in time to stay her execution. He battles and defeats her oppressor, but when he tries radically to reform her country, pursuing and punishing those who resist, he is abruptly summoned back to Faerie Court. On his way there, the hags Envy and Detraction revile him and set on him the Blatant Beast, monster of slander, accusing him of having abused his honour and having stained the sword of justice with cruelty. Their words return us to the early cantos of Book 5 as if Artegall, our judgment of him, and our awareness of the dilemmas of justice had never been affected by the rest of his quest. Artegall’s ending is like – indeed, equal to – that of Arthur, Lord Grey de Wilton, whom Spenser served as secretary in Ireland and to whom the figure of Artegall unmistakably alludes in canto 12. In deliberate contrast to the providential version of history granted Arthur in canto 11, the version Artegall gets testifies loudly and discordantly to the injustice of a real world.

Notes 1

2

This essay draws on the various discussions of Book V of The Faerie Queene I have published: Anderson 1970, 1976, 1990, 1996. For additional extension and substantiation, these might be consulted. Brink (1997) has argued that Spenser was not the author of A View. The jury is still out on this issue: many Spenserians remain convinced of Spenser’s authorship on the basis of internal evidence.

3 My view of an appropriate response has shifted in emphasis from 1976: 184–6, to 1996: 172– 3. My effort to settle on an appropriate response is in Anderson 1998 (e.g. 97–8). 4 On Britomart’s history in The Faerie Queene prior to Book V, see Anderson 2009. 5 On the relevance to Malengin of laws against Catholic missionaries, see Clegg 1998: 250–5.

References and Further Reading Anderson, J. H. (1970). ‘ “Nor man it is”: the Knight of Justice in Book V of Spenser’s Faerie Queene’. PMLA, 85, 65–77. Anderson, J. H. (1976). The Growth of a Personal Voice: ‘Piers Plowman’ and ‘The Faerie Queene’. New Haven: Yale University Press. Anderson, J. H. (1984). Biographical Truth: The Representation of Historical Persons in Tudor-Stuart Writing. New Haven: Yale University Press. Anderson, J. H. (1987). ‘The antiquities of Fairyland and Ireland’. JEGP, 86, 199–214.

Anderson, J. H. (1990). ‘Artegall’ and ‘Britomart’. In A. C. Hamilton et al. (eds.), The Spenser Encyclopedia. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Anderson, J. H. (1996). Words that Matter: Linguistic Perception in Renaissance English. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Anderson, J. H. (1998). ‘Narrative reflections: reenvisaging the poet in The Canterbury Tales and The Faerie Queene’. In T. Krier (ed.), Refiguring Chaucer in the Renaissance (pp. 87–105). Gainesville: University Press of Florida.

Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Book 5 Anderson, J. H. (2000). ‘Better a mischief than an inconvenience: “The saiyng self.” In P. Cheney and L. Silberman (eds.), Worldmaking Spenser: Explorations in the Early Modern Age (pp. 219– 33). Lexington: University of Kentucky Press. Anderson, J. H. (2009). ‘Britomart’s armor: reopening cultural matters of gender and figuration’. English Literary Renaissance, 39, 74–96. Aptekar, J. (1969). Icons of Justice: Iconography and Thematic Imagery in Book V of ‘The Faerie Queene’. New York: Columbia University Press. Baker, D. J. (1997). Between Nations: Shakespeare, Spenser, Marvell, and the Question of Britain. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Berger, H. (1961). ‘The prospect of imagination: Spenser and the limits of poetry’. Studies in English Literature, 1, 93–120. Brink, J. R. (1997). ‘Appropriating the author of The Faerie Queene: the attribution of the View of the Present State of Ireland and A Brief Note of Ireland to Edmund Spenser’. In P. E. Medine and J. Wittreich (eds.), Soundings of Things Done: Essays in Early Modern Literature in Honour of S. K. Heninger, Jr. (pp. 93–136). Newark: University of Delaware Press. Clegg, C. S. (1998). ‘Justice and press censorship in Book V of Spenser’s Faerie Queene’. Studies in Philology, 95, 237–62. Coughlan, P. (ed.). (1989). Spenser and Ireland: An Interdisciplinary Perspective. Cork: Cork University Press.

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Fowler, E. (1995). ‘The failure of moral philosophy in the work of Edmund Spenser’. Representations, 51, 57–86. Hadfield, A. (1997). Spenser’s Irish Experience: Wilde Fruit and Salvage Soil. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hadfield, A. (1998). ‘Was Spenser a Republican?’ English, 47, 169–82. Lewis, C. S. (1936). The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Maley, W. (1997). Salvaging Spenser: Colonialism, Culture and Identity. London: Macmillan. Meyer, R. J. (1984). ‘ “Fixt in heauens hight”: Spenser, astronomy, and the date of the Cantos of Mutabilitie’. Spenser Studies, 4, 115–29. Miskimin, A. S. (1978). ‘Britomart’s crocodile and the legends of Chastity’. JEGP, 77, 17–36. O’Connell, M. (1977). Mirror and Veil: The Historical Dimension of Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene’. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Patterson, Annabel (1993). Reading between the Lines. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Spenser, Edmund (1932–57). The Works of Edmund Spenser: A Variorum Edition, ed. Edwin Greenlaw, Charles Grosvenor Osgood, and Frederick Morgan Padelford, 11 vols. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Spenser, Edmund (1977). The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton. London: Longman.

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‘Law Makes the King’: Richard Hooker on Law and Princely Rule Torrance Kirby

Much of Richard Hooker’s (1554–1600) career was spent in theological controversy concerning the constitutional provisions of the Elizabethan Settlement of 1559 (Kirby 2008: 1–26). In his capacity as Master of the Temple in the Inns of Court, Hooker preached a series of sermons in the mid-1580s on some of the central themes of Reformation theology, including A Learned Discourse of Justification, an influential piece on the doctrine of faith and salvation first published in 1612 (Hooker 1977–90: 5:83ff.). Hooker’s orthodoxy was formally challenged by the disciplinarian Puritan divine Walter Travers in A Supplication made to the Privy Council: he sharply challenged Hooker’s strong appeal to the authority of reason and natural law in religious and ecclesiastical matters as inconsistent with the chief tenets of reformed doctrinal orthodoxy (Hooker 1977–90: 5: 264–9). Hooker’s formal Answer (Hooker 1977–90: 5:227–57) to Travers’s objections laid the groundwork of the philosophical and theological system, which he expounded, in considerably greater detail, in his treatise of the 1590s, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity. From the outset the question of the consistency of Hooker’s defence of the ‘Erastian’1 presuppositions of the Elizabethan religious settlement with his theological premises – more specifically on the question of the unification of civil and ecclesiastical jurisdiction in the Crown – lay at the very heart of these disputes. The Laws is a very considerable undertaking, and consists of a lengthy preface and eight books, usually published in three separate volumes.2 The first four books address (1) the nature of law in general, (2) the proper uses of the authorities of reason and revelation, (3) the application of the latter to the government of the church, and (4) objections to practices inconsistent with the continental ‘reformed’ example. The final four address the more particular issues of (5) public religious duties, (6) the power of jurisdiction, (7) the authority of bishops, and (8) the supreme authority or sovereignty of the prince in both church and commonwealth, and hence their unity in the Christian state. Throughout the treatise Hooker’s express aim is to explicate systematically the principles underlying the religious Settlement of 1559 in such a manner as to

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secure conscientious obedience and conformity by means of all the instruments of persuasion: my whole endeavour is to resolve the conscience, and to show as near as I can what in this controversy the heart is to think if it will follow the light of sound and sincere judgement, without either cloud of prejudice or mist of passionate affection. Wherefore, seeing that laws and ordinances in particular, whether such as we observe, or such as your selves would have established, when the mind doth sift and examine them, it must needs have often recourse to a number of doubts and questions about the nature, kinds, and qualities of laws in general, whereof unless it be thoroughly informed, there will appear no certainty to stay our persuasion upon. I have for that cause set down in the first place an introduction on both sides needful to be considered, declaring therein what law is, how different kinds of laws there are, and what force they are of according unto each kind (Hooker 1977–90: preface, 7.1, 2; 1:34.20–35.2)

The treatise is framed as a response to Thomas Cartwright, who had been John Whitgift’s formidable adversary in the Admonition Controversy of the 1570s (see Chapter 27, English Reformations). The preface is in fact addressed formally ‘to them that seek (as they term it) the reformation of laws and orders ecclesiastical in the Church of England’ (Hooker 1977–90: preface title; 1:1.1), that is to disciplinarian Puritans who, like Cartwright and Travers, sought closer conformity to the pattern of the ‘best reformed churches’ on the continent, especially Calvin’s Geneva. The preface sets the tone of the work and announces Hooker’s main apologetic intent. There is a significant difference between Hooker’s rhetorical approach and that of previous contributions to Elizabethan polemics. He abandons the usual recourse to ridicule and personal abuse, which was so characteristic of the vast majority of tracts contributed by both sides of the controversy, and speaks irenically (in the spirit of peace) to the fundamental theological assumptions, with the professed aim of securing conscientious acceptance of the Settlement. To this end he sets out to persuade by an appeal to mutually acceptable theological assumptions and authorities: ‘we offer the laws whereby we live unto the general trial and judgement of the whole world’ (Hooker 1977–90: 1.1.3; 1:58.5–6). Hooker’s starting-point is to accept unconditionally the disciplinarian premise that the doctrinal tenets and the pastoral aspirations of the Reformation had to be fulfilled in the polity of the Church of England. The rhetorical slant is intended to serve the main apologetic aim of the treatise, namely to justify the Elizabethan Settlement as consistent with the principles of reformed doctrinal orthodoxy. Thus the grand cosmic scheme of laws set out in Book 1 is intended to place the particulars of the controversy within a foundational context: because the point about which we strive is the quality of our laws, our first entrance hereinto cannot better be made than with consideration of the nature of law in general and of that law which giveth life unto all the rest, which are commendable, just, and good, namely the law whereby the Eternal himself doth work. Proceeding from hence to the law, first of nature, then of scripture, we shall have the easier access unto those

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things which come after to be debated, concerning the particular cause and question which we have in hand. (Hooker 1977–90: 1.1.3; 1:58.11–19)

The rhetorical aim is to persuade opponents of the Settlement to conscientious conformity by demonstrating the coherence of the ‘particular decisions’ of the Settlement – the liturgy of the Book of Common Prayer, hierarchy, episcopacy, royal supremacy, and thus ultimately ‘ecclesiastical dominion’ or sovereignty itself, with certain ‘general meditations’ on the metaphysics or first principles concerning the nature of law. Hooker’s foundational proposal in Book 1 of the Laws is easily summarised: ‘God is Law’. From a metaphysical or theological point of view, this claim is neither original nor remarkable. It represents a restatement of classical ‘logos theology’ such as one finds in Platonic and Aristotelian metaphysics, in the thought of Philo of Alexandria derived from pre-Socratic sources (Heracleitus and Anaxagoras), and developed into the premise of a complete practical philosophy in the writings of the Stoics. Drawing upon the florilegium of Stobaeus (a Greek anthologist of the fifth century CE), Hooker cites all of these authorities. Christian appropriation of this Greek metaphysical theme is prominent among the early Church Fathers, for example Justin Martyr, Clement of Alexandria, Origen, Ambrose, Jerome, Eusebius of Caesarea, Gregory of Nyssa, Cyril of Alexandria, or Augustine (Kirby 2008: 51–88), as it was characteristic also of the later scholastic theology of such as Anselm, Bonaventure, Aquinas, and Duns Scotus, as well as Protestant reformers like Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli. Again, Hooker’s eclectic references remind us of the extraordinary breadth of his scholarship. For all of these theologians, an uncreated divine principle, the Word (logos, or ratio, or paradeigma – i.e. reason, order, or plan) constitutes the ‘idea of ideas’, the Platonic ‘archetypal idea’ and ‘first principle’ of all created order, while the creation itself, both visible-material and invisible-spiritual, proceeds from and is wholly dependent upon this original, underived, hidden, and transcendent first principle as its first and primary cause. For Hooker, an appeal to logos theology entails considerably more than a purely metaphysical claim concerning the nature of the first principle. As the argument of Book 1 develops it becomes clear that Hooker is thoroughly invested in the practical, political, and constitutional consequences of this elaborate theology of law, of the claim that ‘God is law’. Indeed the edifice of his apology of the Elizabethan Settlement rests upon this philosophical point of departure: The stateliness of houses, the goodliness of trees, when we behold them delighteth the eye; but that foundation which beareth up the one, that root which ministreth unto the other nourishment and life, is in the bosom of the earth concealed. And if there be at any time occasion to search into it, such labour is then more necessary than pleasant both to them which undertake it and for the lookers on. In like manner the use and benefit of good laws, all that live under them may enjoy with delight and comfort, albeit the grounds and first original causes from whence they have sprung be unknown, as to the greatest part of men they are. (Hooker 1977–90: 1.1.2; 1:57.6–16)

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The burden of his argument is thus to demonstrate that the entire constitutional arrangement of the Elizabethan Settlement – the ‘stately house’ of the established church and the ‘goodly tree’ of the flourishing commonwealth united under the rule of one sovereign – has its ultimate ground and justification in a ‘hidden’, transcendent first principle, a ‘first original’ of all external manifestations of order. For Hooker the institutions of the Elizabethan religious settlement rest upon this foundational proposition of metaphysical ontology, viz. that God is Law. This account of his apologetic purpose constitutes, moreover, Hooker’s own explicit claim to coherence of argument – he intends this theory of law to provide the necessary justification for his later defence of the institutions of the Settlement, and more specifically for his account of the theory of sovereignty. Hooker’s adaptation of this classical logos theology to the concrete political and constitutional issues of his particular time and place is unique when judged beside other contemporary contributions to Elizabethan religious polemics (Kirby 2008: 121–50). Indeed his prodigiously sustained effort to explore the underlying theological and metaphysical connections connecting the theories of law and sovereignty – his intimate knitting together of high theology and politics – is arguably the defining characteristic of Hooker’s thought, such that the designation ‘political theology’ is probably the most accurate designation of his venture (Kirby 1990: 1–4). Such an approach to political theory is thoroughly in keeping with Hooker’s repeated affirmation of the Neoplatonic logic of ‘participation’, whereby all things are understood to exist within their ‘first original cause’ and, conversely, the cause to dwell within all derivative beings (Kirby 2003: 165–84). As C. S. Lewis once commented in this connection, Hooker’s universe is ‘drenched with Deity’ (Lewis 1954: 462). ‘Nomos-theology’ or a theology of law, then, is the substantive proposition of Book 1 of the Laws. Hooker summarises his general aim towards the end of Book 1: the drift and purpose of all is this, even to show in what manner as every good and perfect gift, so this very gift of good and perfect laws is derived from the father of lights; to teach men a reason why just and reasonable laws are of so great force, of so great use in the world; and to inform their minds with some method of reducing the laws whereof there is present controversy unto their first original causes, that so it may be in every particular ordinance thereby the better discerned, whether the same be reasonable just and righteous or no. (1977–90: 1.16.1; 1:135.11–13)

Hooker defines law in general as ‘that which doth assign unto each thing the kind, that which doth moderate the force and power, that which doth appoint the form and measure of working … so that no certain end could ever be attained unless the actions whereby it is attained were regular, that is to say, made suitable for and correspondent unto their end, by some canon, rule or law’ (1977–90: 1.2.1; 1:58.26–9). This definition places him in a scholastic teleological tradition derived ultimately from the metaphysics of Aristotle and mediated by Thomas Aquinas. The definition is an

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almost verbatim quotation of Aquinas’s definition of the ‘essence of law’ (Aquinas 1947: Ia IIæ, qq. 90–6). Hooker asserts that everything works according to law, including God himself: ‘the being of God is a kind of law to his working: for that perfection which God is, giveth perfection to that he doth’ (Hooker 1977–90: 1.2.2; 1:59.6). Just as the traditional logos theology accounts for the genesis of the world by means of an emanation or processio from an originative principle of divine unity, so also Hooker derives a diverse hierarchy of laws from the eternal law as their ‘highest wellspring and fountain’. In this respect he also adheres to Aquinas’s position (compare Aquinas 1947: Ia IIæ, q. 91, art. 1). Hooker’s emphasis upon the divine unity is marked: ‘our God is one, or rather very Oneness and mere unity, having nothing but itself in itself, and not consisting (as all things do besides God) of many things besides’ (1977–90: 1.2.2; 1:59.14–19). It is precisely, however, in his insistence upon the divine unity and simplicity that we can begin to discern a glimmer of Hooker’s departure from the Thomistic paradigm. On a certain level, it is as if Hooker had conflated Aquinas’s treatise on law in the secunda pars with the argument of the articles on the divine simplicity in the third question of the prima pars (Aquinas 1947: Ia, q. 3, art. 7). All derivative species of law participate in the divine, undifferentiated unity of what Hooker calls ‘that law which as it is laid up in the bosom of God’ (1977–90: 1.3.1; 1: 63.15), and emanate from it ‘dispositively’, that is, by way of a gradual hierarchical ‘procession’ from higher to lower species. In this respect, Hooker’s nomostheology adheres to the Neoplatonic logic of the so-called lex divinitatis (the law of cosmic order, the law of the ‘great chain’ of being) whereby the original and generative principle of law remains simple and self-identical while simultaneously emanating beyond and below itself ‘dispositively’ in its process of bringing into being the manifold, derivative species of law (Kirby 2005: 29–44). Unlike Aquinas’s definition of eternal law in the second part of the Summa, however, Hooker distinguishes between a ‘hidden’ first eternal law and a ‘manifest’ second eternal law on the ground that God is a law both to himself (in se) in his inaccessible divine simplicity, and to all creatures besides (ad extra), and thus invokes the ineffably transcendent divinity of Thomas’s discussion of the ‘simplicity of God’ (Aquinas 1947: Ia, q. 3) in his definition of the original Eternal Law: ‘that law which as it is laid up in the bosom of God, they call eternal’ (Hooker 1977–90: 1.3.1; 1:63.6–64.3). While his discussion of the first eternal law adheres closely to traditional formulations of logos theology (such as found in the opening questions of the first part of Aquinas’s Summa), Hooker’s invention of the category ‘second eternal law’ introduces something thoroughly distinctive, unusual, and unexpected within the tradition of Christian legal theory (Hooker 1993–7: VI(1), 92). ‘All things’, Hooker maintains, including God’s own self, ‘do work after a sort according to law’ (1977–90: 1.2.2; 1:58.33–59.1). Whereas all creatures work ‘according to a law, whereof some superior, unto whom they are subject, is author’, nonetheless ‘only the works and operations of God have him both for their worker and for

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the law whereby they are wrought. The being of God is a kind of law to his working’ (1977–90: 1.2.2; 1:59.12–15). As the first principle of law, God alone is a completely self-regulated agent and, ‘being the first, it can have no other then itself to be the author of that law which it willingly worketh by. God therefore is a law both to himself, and to all other things besides’ (1977–90: 1.2.3; 1:60.16–18). All derivative species of law, therefore, have their origin in this first eternal law; however, for Hooker their derivation from the first eternal law is not in the first instance through a gradual, hierarchically mediated dispositio, but rather they are understood by him to be gathered together within the second eternal law. In this fashion Hooker simultaneously guards the transcendent simplicity and unity of the divine source of law – God in his ‘very oneness’, the first eternal law – and by positing the second eternal law he asserts the radical immanence of God in all the manifold participating forms bound together within it. The crucial consequence of this gathering together of the various species of law within a second eternal law is to diminish the overall significance of the hierarchical dispositio as the primary mode of mediation between the divine source of law and the finite, created order of laws. In place of the Thomist logic of a gradual, hierarchical disposition of the species of law, Hooker’s positing of the second eternal law sets up an Augustinian ‘hypostatic’ relation between the Creator/Eternal Law and creature/ manifold determinate species of law, i.e. a relation which presupposes such a radical distinction between their respective natures as to preclude the possibility of any proportional dispositio. The other principal aspect of the second eternal law, i.e. the law of God’s special revelation of himself in the Scriptures, presupposes a disruption of the order regulated by the natural law and introduced into that order by the Fall and by original sin. This divinely revealed law provides the means of the restoration or ‘return’ of the creation to its original condition of unity under the eternal law; the second eternal law thus works through the revelation of Scripture to ensure that nothing in the created order falls outside the regulation of God’s ordering purpose. Hooker’s distinction between these two summa genera of the second eternal law – viz. natural law and divine law – corresponds, as has already been shown, to the cosmic logic of procession and return of Neoplatonic metaphysics, but for Hooker it also reflects the epistemological distinction of the twofold knowledge of God (duplex cognitio Dei), namely by the light of supernatural revelation and by the natural light of reason so critically important to Protestant theology (Calvin 1986: 1.2.1). On the side of natural law there are further derivative and composite species of law – chief among them human positive law and the law of nations, for example – which depend upon a conscious, pragmatic reflection upon the general principles contained in the natural law and their application to particular, concrete circumstances. These additional derivative species of law are viewed by Hooker as a consequence of human sin and, like the divine law, they constitute part of the divinely ordained means of correction to the disorder introduced by the Fall – as Augustine would say, coercive human law is both a penalty and remedy for sin (Augustine 1998: Book 19). Throughout all this the human creature as the imago dei is portrayed by Hooker as the focal

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point of the divine operation of procession from and return to the original fount of order established in divine simplicity of the first eternal law. To sum up, Hooker’s theology of law displays many of the distinctive characteristics of the Thomist account of law as a hierarchical emanation of the Eternal Law. Yet, by gathering natural law and divine law together within the second eternal law, Hooker introduces a decisively significant Augustinian theological turn derived from the thoroughly Protestant assumptions of his doctrine of grace. The Eternal Law proper, i.e. the first eternal law, is distanced from its derivative forms of law in such a fashion that the natural law cannot serve to mediate between fallen humanity and the divine source of justice. In this respect Hooker’s theory of law takes on the marked Augustinian flavour of his theology of grace outlined earlier in A Learned Discourse of Justification: the light of nature is never able to find out any way of obtaining the reward of bliss but by performing exactly the duties and works of righteousness. From salvation, therefore, and life, all flesh being excluded this way, behold how the wisdom of God hath revealed a way mystical and supernatural, a way directing unto the same end of life by a course which groundeth itself upon the guiltiness of sin, and through sin deserving of condemnation and death. (Hooker 1977–90: 1.11.5, 6; 1:118.11–18)

There is no ‘natural’ mediation between fallen humanity and divine justice: solely by means of grace – ‘a way mystical and supernatural’ – is the gulf between man and God bridged. In this respect, the hierarchical dispositio of laws cannot serve to link heaven and earth in any saving fashion. Grace alone is capable of overcoming the distance. In this way, Hooker’s appropriation of the Thomist legal theory with its assumption of gradual hierarchical mediation is properly understood to be contained within the boundaries of an Augustinian logic of hypostatic mediation. Hooker allows the logic of hierarchy, but not at all in the Thomist sense of a gradual dispositio connecting heaven and earth, with nature assisting grace. This ‘containment’ of the hierarchical principle within an Augustinian hypostatic framework has very pronounced implications for ecclesiology and constitutional theory. Hooker works out these implications throughout the remainder of his treatise. Leaving Books 2 through 7 aside, in admittedly procrustean fashion, I propose to examine the consequences of my reading of Hooker’s theology of law for the interpretation of his theory of sovereignty.

‘Law Makes the King’ There are two critical features of Hooker’s theory of sovereignty that stand at the centre of the debate over the coherence of his thought. First is his claim that the power of ‘supreme jurisdiction’ over the church or ‘ecclesiastical dominion’ rightfully belongs to the ‘civil prince or governor’ to ‘order and dispose of spiritual affairs, as

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the highest uncommanded commander in them’ (Hooker 1977–90: 8.1.8; 3:330.14– 16); the second is the distinctively dialectical manner of his assertion of the divine right of sovereigns as ‘God’s lieutenants’ who, nonetheless, should attribute to the law what the law attributes to them, namely power and dominion (‘Attribuat rex legi quod lex attribuit ei potestatem et dominium’: 1977–90: 8.2.1; 3:332.23–4). unto kings by human right, honour, by very divine right, is due. Man’s ordinances are many times presupposed as grounds in the statutes of God. And therefore of what kind soever the means be whereby governors are lawfully advanced unto their seats, as we by the law of God stand bound meekly to acknowledge them for God’s lieutenants and to confess their power his, so they by the same law are both authorised and required to use that power as far as it may be in any sort available to his honour. (1977–90: 8.3.1 [Keble 1888: 2.6]; 3:335.22–336.4)

Scholars have frequently portrayed the Erastian constitution described and boldly defended by Hooker in Book 8 as essentially irreconcilable with the supposedly Thomistic theology of law outlined in Book 1. Peter Munz sets the pattern when he argues that in his defence of the royal ecclesiastical supremacy Hooker abandons his previous adherence to a Thomist theology of law with its gradual disposition of the powers of nature and grace in favour of a species of ‘Tudor Averroism’ (Munz 1970: 49–57). Hooker’s willingness to affirm subjection of the governance of the church to the civil power is deemed inconsistent with the Thomist first principles, that is to say, with the logic of the lex divinitatis whereby the temporal power must be subordinated hierarchically to the spiritual power, as the order of nature itself is subordinated to the order of grace, or as natural law is subordinate to divine law. Munz’s argument takes as its unspoken premise that Hooker actually affirms the Thomist metaphysics of hierarchical dispositio. Given such a premise, Hooker’s ‘general meditations’ of Book 1 are plainly contradicted – in the view of Munz and in that of many other scholars besides – by the ‘particular decisions’ concerning constitutional order argued in Book 8 (Munz 1970: 96–111). This conclusion concerning the logical incoherence of Hooker’s account of sovereignty with his legal principles rests, however, on a fallacy, namely that the theology of law of Book 1 is indeed a simple appropriation of Thomist metaphysical principles. I have attempted to show above how Hooker does indeed appropriate elements of Aquinas’s theory of law, how on occasion he appears almost to be quoting directly from the Summa, but how also, nonetheless, he modifies the Thomist legal theory substantively by setting it within a larger framework marked by its Augustinian soteriological assumptions. Our main purpose in comparing the arguments of Books 1 and 8 yet again is to attempt to show that, far from tending to logical incoherence, Hooker’s Erastian defence of the civil magistrate’s role as the ‘highest uncommanded Commander’ (Hooker 1977–90: 8.1.8 [Keble 1888: 2.1]; 3.330.15) of the ecclesiastical as well as the civil hierarchy is nothing less than the practical completion of his argument, the necessary fulfilment of his nomos-theology.

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Hooker’s defence of the constitutional arrangements of the Elizabethan Settlement is accurately described as an instance of ‘Tudor Averroism’ following the path blazed two centuries earlier by Marsilius of Padua (1275–1342).3 Marsilius was a resolute critic of the claims of the papacy to jurisdiction over princes on Augustinian theological grounds, very similar to those embraced by Hooker (see Marsilius of Padua 2005). The particular relevance of this fourteenth-century work of Augustinian political theology to Hooker is evident in Marsilius’ chief aim, namely to expose the Roman papacy’s quest for domination – the libido dominandi of Augustine’s earthly city – that is, supreme jurisdiction not only over the spiritual and ecclesiastical realms but over the temporal or civil realms as well. According to Marsilius, such over-reaching of spiritual authority was the central cause of conflict and disorder within Christendom. In the bull Unam Sanctam Boniface VIII (pope 1294–1303) set out a series of dogmatic propositions that culminated in the assertion of papal supremacy.4 His assertion of the pope’s supremacy with the corollary subordination of princes and civil rulers to the so-called papal ‘plenitude of power’ is grounded in an interpretation of Romans 13 according to the logic of the lex divinitatis – the same logic which informs Thomas Aquinas’s theory of the hierarchically ordered, dispositive emanation of the species of law in the Summa Theologica (Aquinas 1947: IIa IIæ, q. 172, art. 2). Over against logic of dispositio implied by the lex divinitatis favoured by both Aquinas and Boniface VIII, Marsilius proposes a radical redefinition of spiritual power along Augustinian soteriological lines and consequently in direct opposition to the hierarchical claims of the papacy to the plenitudo potestatis implicit in the lex divinitatis. Over against the metaphysics of hierarchical dispositio, Marsilius’ Augustinian critique asserts a hypostatic relation between the spiritual and temporal realms, between the orders of grace and nature. This Augustinian rejection of the metaphysical primacy of mediated hierarchy (lex divinitatis) undergirding the logic of Unam Sanctam led Marsilius to assert the converse and equally totalising claim of temporal power over all matters of ecclesiastical jurisdiction. An Augustinian hypostatic view of the relation between spiritual and temporal power similar to that which informs the Marsilian political theology also shapes Hooker’s interpretation of the relation between church and commonwealth and the unity of civil and ecclesiastical jurisdiction in the person of the godly prince: A church and a commonwealth we grant are things in nature the one distinguished from the other: a commonwealth is one way, and a church another way defined … We may speak of them as two, we may sever the rights and causes of the one well enough from the other in regard of that difference which we grant there is between them, albeit we make no personal [emphasis added] difference. For the truth is the church and the commonwealth are names which import things really different. But those things are accidents, and such accidents as may and should always lovingly dwell together in one subject. (Hooker 1977–90: 8.1.2, 5; 3:318, 324)

Proceeding from an Augustinian premise, that church and commonwealth can be united as ‘accidents’ within a single ‘subject’ and that civil and ecclesiastical jurisdic-

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tion may coincide in the person of the prince as the Act of Supremacy proclaims,5 is for Hooker a logical and necessary consequence of the nomos-theology set out by him in the first book of the Laws. Indeed it is the common thread of Hooker’s political Augustinianism that connects the arguments of Books 1 and 8 and renders them coherent with each other. Hooker’s interpretation of the royal supremacy certainly bears more than a passing resemblance to the political theology of Marsilius (Hooker 1977–90: 7.11.8; 3:208.17h). The common ground is their embrace of the precepts of political Augustinianism.6 It is precisely owing to Marsilius’ thoroughly Augustinian insistence upon the need to distinguish sharply and clearly – and therefore ‘hypostatically’ rather than ‘dispositively’ – between the spheres of the spiritual and the temporal powers that the ‘external’ and coercive jurisdiction over the church as a human, political organisation is ascribed by him to the sovereign power of the Legislator. By a similar line or reasoning Hooker maintains that Christ alone (solus Christus)7 exercises headship over the church as an inner, invisible, and mystical civitas – i.e. the church as a ‘society supernatural’ – while the ecclesiastical jurisdiction of the prince belongs properly to the outward, visible, and external civitas – i.e. the church as a ‘human, politic society’: The church, being a supernatural society, doth differ from natural societies in this: that the persons unto whom we associate ourselves, in the one are men simply considered as men; but they to whom we be joined in the other, are God, angels, and holy men. The church being both a society, and a society supernatural – although as it is a society, it have the self same original grounds which other politic societies have, namely the natural inclination which all men have unto sociable life, and consent to some certain bond of association, which bond is the law that appointeth what kind of order they shall be associated in – yet unto the church as it is a society supernatural this is peculiar, that part of the bond of their association which belong to the Church of God, must be a law supernatural, which God himself hath revealed concerning that kind of worship which his people shall do unto him. (Hooker 1977–90: 1.15.2; 1:131.6–20)

Just as the second eternal law is related hypostatically (and not dispositively) to the first eternal law, so also the church as a ‘society supernatural’ with its ‘law supernatural’ is related to the church as a human ‘politic society’ (1977–90: 1.15.3; 1:131.25) governed by positive human law which in turn is derived from a reflection upon the natural law – in short, by the authority of the Crown in Parliament. Yet, just when we think we have found our footing on solid Augustinian ground, Hooker gives us pause to consider further. Early in Book 8 he invokes the lex divinitatis in the most explicit terms: And if things and persons be ordered, this doth imply that they are distinguished by degrees. For order is a gradual disposition. The whole world consisting of parts so many so different is by this only thing upheld: he which framed them hath set them in order. Yea, the very deity itself both keepeth and requireth for ever this to be kept as a law, that wheresoever there is a coagmentation of many, the lowest be knit to the highest

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by that which being interjacent may cause each to cleave unto other, and so all to continue one. (1977–90: 8.2.1; 3:331.17–332.1)

Moreover, in Hooker’s Autograph Notes from Trinity College, Dublin (Hooker 1977– 90: 3:494.10–14) he quotes almost verbatim from the bull Unam Sanctam where Boniface VIII defends the doctrine of the papal plenitude of power (plenitudo potestatis) by asserting the necessary hierarchical subordination of temporal to spiritual jurisdiction: For according to the blessed Dionysius, it is [by] the law of divinity [lex divinitatis] that the lowest things are led to the highest by intermediaries. Then, according to the order of the universe, all things are not led back equally and immediately, but the lowest by the intermediary, and the inferior by the superior … Therefore if the terrestrial power err, it will be judged by the spiritual power. (Friedberg 1955, 1959: II, cols. 1245–6)

This relation of subordination between the spiritual and the temporal realms establishes the ecclesiastical hierarch as an ordained agent or sacramental mediator between the worlds. Hooker’s naming of the sovereign as ‘uncommanded commander’ – a probable allusion to Aristotle’s ‘unmoved mover’ – would no doubt have pleased both Thomas Aquinas and Boniface, yet the metaphysical premise concerning the manner of that mediation has been radically transformed. Hooker parts company with the two scholastics when he avoids inferring any necessary subjection of the terrestrial (i.e. civil) to the spiritual (i.e. ecclesiastical) power. On the contrary, he attributes the plenitude of power unequivocally to the civil magistrate, thereby completely redefining the meaning of the relation between the powers. Ecclesiastical power is reinterpreted as belonging to terrestrial government; the church is a ‘politic society’. Just as Aristotle’s unmoved mover gives life and motion to the entire physical cosmos, so also the prince is the lex animata of the political realm – ‘politic society’ – in the case of England, ‘a free Christian state or kingdom where one and the selfsame people are the church and the commonwealth’ (Hooker 1977–90: 8.3.5; 3:355.33). In making this claim is Hooker trapped in some deep internal contradiction of argument? Is this the product of an incoherent political theology? Such has been the prevailing judgement of numerous scholars for many years. By attending closely to the underlying Augustinian contours of Hooker’s thought, however, we can discern in this account of the nature of the sovereign power a theological pattern reminiscent of the subtle structure of his nomos-theology in Book 1. Just as the hierarchical dispositio of the generic division of laws is contained by a broader hypostatic logic on the basis of the distinction drawn between the first and second eternal laws, so here the hierarchical dispositio of jurisdiction and authority is interpreted within the larger Augustinian frame. The church, as a mystical, invisible, and divine ‘society supernatural’, is distinguished hypostatically from the church as an external, visible, and human ‘politic society’. Christ alone rules as head of the ‘society supernatural’, where he rules ‘by the inward influence of heavenly grace’:

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we make the spiritual regiment of Christ to be generally that whereby his church is ruled and governed in things spiritual. Of this general we make two distinct kinds, the one invisibly exercised by Christ himself in his own person, the other outwardly administered by them whom Christ doth allow to be the rulers and guiders of his church. (Hooker 1977–90: 8.4.9; 3:377.7–10)

The species of jurisdiction are hypostatically distinguished as visible/invisible, inward/ outward, temporal/eternal, yet Christ is nonetheless ‘personally’ the source of both. Being ‘severed in nature’, these two ‘kinds’ of power are incommensurable, and therefore cannot be ordered by means of gradual dispositio. Consequently, there can be no dispositive subordination of human jurisdiction to spiritual jurisdiction, but solely a hypostatic distinction – as Marsilius had also argued. The result is a ‘humanising’ of the church as an external, political organisation under the jurisdiction of the Crown, with the consequence that an ‘essential’ distinction between ecclesiastical and civil power was no longer a theological or metaphysical necessity; both powers are recognised by Hooker as properly belonging to the sphere of the ‘politic society’. At the same time, there is a parallel, symmetrical ‘sacralising’ of the commonwealth: ‘even as the soul is the worthier part of man, so humane societies are much more to care for that which tendeth properly unto the soul’s estate than for such temporal things as this life doth stand in need of … so in all commonwealths things spiritual ought above temporal to be provided for. And of things spiritual the chiefest is religion’ (Hooker 1977–90: 8.1.4; 3:321.10–16). Moreover, since civil jurisdiction derives authority directly from heaven, ‘God doth ratify the works of that sovereign authority which kings have received by men’ (1977–90: 8.3.1; 3:336.14). Consequently, power derived constitutionally from ‘below’, that is by consent of the governed, is itself recognised as having a divine sanction from ‘above’: vox populi, vox Dei or, as Hooker expresses this famous formula in his discussion of positive human law in Book 1, ‘The general and perpetual voice of men is as the sentence of God himself ’ (1977–90: 1.8.3; 1:83.33–84.2) For Hooker the logic of hierarchical dispositio is retained within the political organisation of the state – a term he uses in a remarkably modern sense for a sixteenth-century theorist – with its ‘natural’ but not ‘personal’ distinction between civil and ecclesiastical powers (1977–90: 8.1.2; 3:320.9–12). Speaking simultaneously of his adversaries in both Geneva and Rome, Hooker remarks that ‘they hold the necessity of personal separation which clean excludes the power of one individual’s dealing in both [i.e. civil and ecclesiastical jurisdiction], we of natural which does not prevent that one and the same person may in both bear a principal sway’ (1977–90: 8.1.2; 3:320.9–12). Both the disciplinarian Puritan polemicist Thomas Cartwright and the exponent of the Catholic Counter-Reformation Robert Bellarmine maintained the common position that ecclesiastical authority was autonomous in its foundation. Yet for Hooker these two distinct powers are united in the person of the sovereign, in a manner analogous to the uniting of diverse species of law within the embrace of what Hooker calls the ‘second’ eternal law. Hierarchical order properly obtains within the self-complete unity of the politic society, rather

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than through a subordination of a temporal jurisdiction to a separated spiritual jurisdiction. Hierarchy continues to obtain within the political realm, but a hierarchy answerable to the prince as sole and supreme ruler: in a free Christian state or kingdom where one and the selfsame people are the church and the commonwealth, God through Christ directing that people to see it for good and weighty considerations expedient that their sovereign lord and governor in causes civil have also in ecclesiastical affairs a supreme power, forasmuch as the light of reason doth lead them unto it, and against it, God’s own revealed law hath nothing; surely they do not in submitting themselves thereunto any other than that which a wise and religious people ought to do. (Hooker 1977–90: 8.3.5; 3:355)

Moreover, in a manner logically parallel to this unification of church and commonwealth, Hooker insists that power from above (divine right) and power from below (human right) are also to be understood as united and yet distinct. It is as if Hooker understood the sovereign power of the Elizabethan constitution to embody a reconciliation of the competing claims of Henry Bolingbroke and Richard II as represented by Shakespeare. On the one hand, Hooker acknowledges Richard’s assertion of the divine basis of royal authority and his claim concerning the mystical analogy of sacred kingship between Christ and that of an anointed ruler: Not all the water in the rough rude sea Can wash the balm from an anointed king; The breath of worldly men cannot depose The deputy elected by the Lord. (Richard II 3.2.54–7; see Mayer 2003: 103–20)

Hooker qualifies this by insisting that divine right is implicated in human right: ‘unto kings by human right honour by very divine right is due’. On the one hand, As for supreme power in ecclesiastical affairs, the Word of God doth nowhere appoint that all kings should have it, neither that any should not have it; for which cause, it seems to stand altogether by human right that unto Christian kings there is such dominion given. (1977–90: 8.3.1; 3:335.5–9, emphasis added)

Yet, at the same time, the Law of God doth give them, which once are exalted unto that place of estate, right to exact at the hands of their subjects general obedience in whatsoever affairs their power may serve to command, and God ratifies the works of that sovereign authority, which Kings have received by men. (1977–90: 8.3.1; 3: 336.11–15)

Thus, in a dialectical fashion, Hooker proposes a bridge to reconcile the competing claims concerning the ultimate source of political power. This subtle argument was destined to be largely ignored throughout the ensuing conflict of the Civil War.

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Notes 1

Taking its name from the late sixteenth-century theologian Thomas Lüber, alias ‘Erastus’ of Heidelberg, the ‘Erastian’ political theology conceives of society as a single, unified corpus christianum, where membership of church and commonwealth as well as civil and religious authority were understood to be coextensive, and consequently where the civil magistrate exercised sovereign jurisdiction over the church. 2 Books 1–4 were published in 1593, Book 5 in 1597, and Books 6 and 8 posthumously in 1648, and the first complete edition, including Book 7, was edited by John Gauden and published in 1662. 3 For a discussion of Tudor appeals to the political theology of Marsilius, see Lockwood 1990.

4 The bull was issued on 18 November 1302. For an English translation see Tierney 1988:188–9. 5 1 Elizabeth I, cap. 1; Statutes of the Realm, 4: 350–5. See also 26 Henry VIII, cap. 1; SR 3: 492–3. 6 On political Augustinianism in the Middle Ages, see Dyson 2003. 7 See Hooker 1977–90: 8.4.9 [Keble 1888: 4.10]; 3:377.16–20: ‘Him only therefore we do acknowledge to be that Lord which dwelleth, liveth, and reigneth in our hearts; him only to be that head which giveth salvation and life unto his body; him only to be that fountain, from whence the influence of heavenly grace distilleth …’.

References and Further Reading Aquinas, Thomas (1947). Summa Theologiae, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province. New York: Benziger Brothers. Augustine, Aurelius (1998). The City of God against the Pagans, ed. R. W. Dyson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Calvin, John (1986). Institutes of the Christian Religion. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans. Dyson R. W. (2003). Normative Theories of Society and Government in Five Medieval Thinkers: St. Augustine, John of Salisbury, Giles of Rome, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Marsilius of Padua. Lewiston, NY: Mellen. Eppley, Daniel (2007). Defending Royal Supremacy and Discerning God’s Will in Tudor England. Aldershot and Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Faulkner, Robert K. (1981). Richard Hooker and the Politics of Christian England. Berkeley: University of California Press. Friedberg, Emil (ed.) (1955, 1959). Corpus Iuris Canonici. Leipzig: B. Tauchnitz, 1879; repr. Graz: Akademische Druk-u. Verlagsanstalt. Gascoigne, John (1997). ‘Church and state unified: Hooker’s rationale for the English postReformation order’. Journal of Religious History, 21, 23–34.

Guy, John (1995). ‘The Elizabethan establishment and the ecclesiastical polity’. In John Guy (ed.), The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade (pp. 125–49). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Helgerson, Richard (1992). ‘Defending the ecclesiastical polity’. In Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood (269–83). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hill, W. Speed (1972a). ‘Doctrine and polity in Hooker’s Laws’. English Literary Renaissance, 2/2, 173–93. Hill, W. Speed (ed.) (1972b). Studies in Richard Hooker: Essays Preliminary to an Edition of his Works. Cleveland, OH: Press of Case Western University. Hooker, Richard (1888). The Works of … Mr. Richard Hooker, ed. John Keble, 7th edn., rev. R. W. Church and F. Paget, 3 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hooker, Richard (1977–90). The Folger Library Edition of the Works of Richard Hooker, gen. ed. W. Speed Hill. Vols. 1–5: Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press; (1993–7) vols. 6–7: Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies.

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Kirby, W. J. Torrance (1990). Richard Hooker’s Doctrine of the Royal Supremacy. Leiden: Brill. Kirby, W. J. Torrance (ed.) (2003). Richard Hooker and the English Reformation. London and Dordrecht: Kluwer. Kirby, W. J. Torrance (2005). Richard Hooker, Reformer and Platonist. Aldershot: Ashgate. Kirby, W. J. Torrance (ed.) (2008). A Companion to Richard Hooker. Leiden and Boston: E. J. Brill. Lake, Peter (1988). Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterian and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker. London and Boston: Unwin Hyman. Lewis, C. S. (1954). English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Lockwood, Shelley C. (1990). ‘Marsilius of Padua and the case for the royal ecclesiastical supremacy’. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6/1, 89–119. McCoy, Richard C. (2002). Alterations of State: Sacred Kingship in the English Reformation. New York: Columbia University Press. McGrade, Arthur S. (1985). ‘Constitutionalism late-medieval and early-modern – lex facit regem: Hooker’s use of Bracton’. In R. J. Schoeck (ed.), Acta Conventus Neo-Latini Bononiensis: Proceedings of the Fourth International Congress of Neo-Latin Studies, Bologna, 26 Aug.–1 Sept. 1979 (pp. 116–23). Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies. McGrade, Arthur S. (ed.) (1997). Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community.

Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies. McGrade, Arthur S. and Brian Vickers (eds.) (1975). ‘Hooker’s Polity and the establishment of the English church’. Introduction to Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, abridged edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marsilius of Padua (2005). The Defender of the Peace, ed. Annabel Brett. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mayer, Jean-Christoph (2003). ‘Shakespeare’s religious background revisited: Richard II in a new context’. In Dennis Taylor and David Beauregard (eds.), Shakespeare and the Culture of Christianity in Early Modern England (pp. 103–20). New York: Fordham University Press. Munz, Peter (1970). The Place of Hooker in the History of Thought. New York: Greenwood Press. Patterson, Patrick D. M. (2002). ‘Hooker’s apprentice: God, entelechy, beauty, and desire in Book One of Richard Hooker’s Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity’. Anglican Theological Review, 84/4, 961–88. Sommerville, Johann P. (1983). ‘Richard Hooker, Hadrian Saravia, and the advent of the divine right of kings’. History of Political Thought, 4/2, 229–45. Tierney, Brian (1988). The Crisis of Church and State, 1050–1300. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Williams, Rowan (2006). ‘Richard Hooker: The Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity revisited’. Ecclesiastical Law Journal, 8/3, 283–91.

19

Donne, Milton, and the Two Traditions of Religious Liberty Feisal G. Mohamed

In a recent adjustment of his views on the public sphere, Jürgen Habermas engages the ‘new, hitherto unexpected political importance’ of ‘religious traditions and communities of faith’ (Habermas 2006: 1). A truly democratic engagement of this importance, he claims, cannot simply treat believers as unenlightened secularists – as the equivalent of children who have not yet reached the maturity rewarded with full enfranchisement – a tendency enshrined in the liberal insistence on secular public discourse. If the public sphere is exclusively secular, it necessarily denies full access to those individuals motivated by beliefs for which they cannot articulate rational justification: ‘In the liberal view, the state guarantees citizens freedom of religion only on the condition that religious communities … accept not only the separation of church and state, but also the restrictive definition of the public use of reason’ (2006: 6). If, on the other hand, faith-based claims are allowed too much sway in public discourse and institutions, then arises the majoritarian imposition of religion that liberal toleration successfully avoids: ‘Majority rule turns into repression if the majority deploys religious arguments in the process of political opinion and will formation and refuses to offer those publicly accessible justifications which the losing minority, be it secular or of a different faith, is able to follow in the light of shared standards’ (2006: 12). The beliefs of citizens are thus potentially threatened both by the liberal state that is too severe in its demands for secular public discourse and by the state allowing religious expression too free a rein. Two approaches to religious liberty have arisen in response to this dilemma, both of which jurists find to be relevant to current debates: the one a negative liberty that allows scope for religious expression so long as it does not impinge upon the same right extended to others, and the other a positive liberty that allows full expression of religious enlightenment howsoever it chooses to present itself (see Ahdar and Leigh 2005; Kahn 2005). The former, liberal toleration, assumes that the state has a role to play in securing the condition of religious freedom to which all have equal access and in imposing the limits on religious expression necessary to maintaining that equality.

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In the latter, liberty of conscience, state non-interference in matters religious may be a temporary measure, and one not necessarily applied equally to all citizens, allowing believers to seek a divine truth that worldly institutions are expected to respect. The complexities of religious liberty are of course as much a part of the early modern period as they are of our own time, and exploring their dynamics in the temporally distant case of seventeenth-century England might help us refine our understanding of this currently pressing issue. To that end, this chapter explores views on religious liberty in the works of John Donne and John Milton. In Donne we find a position resembling liberal toleration avant la lettre. Though a liberal view of toleration cannot be said to have developed in his time, we see him anticipate several of its claims in his emphasis on the separation of religious worship and political obedience. Milton is quite clearly an advocate of liberty of conscience who becomes increasingly hostile over his career to state involvement in matters religious. Such hostility consistently defends the right of Protestant sects – and only Protestant sects – to seek and to apply divine truth.

Donne and Liberal Toleration Donne’s view of religious liberty emerges most fully in his 1610 treatise PseudoMartyr. The aim of the work is to encourage Roman Catholics in England (‘recusants’), to take the Oath of Allegiance that James had devised as a means of separating loyal recusant subjects from those extremists who accepted the Pope’s authority to declare that a king should be deposed – the kind of extremist, in other words, who might have sympathised with the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. In current scholarship on the oath, two polarities have emerged. The one takes James at his word when he describes himself as moderate: both when he points to the prominence of recusants in his court and when he claims that he demands only the civil obedience of his subjects. This view tends to present the oath as a relatively restrained response to the ‘Powder Treason’ in that it eschews persecution of all Roman Catholics and takes steps to distinguish between loyal subjects and fanatics (Fincham and Lake 1985). The other polarity is more sceptical of the oath’s good intentions, and sees it as a rather more cynical attempt to sow the seeds of division among recusants. Michael Questier has suggestively shown how it had the effect of creating confusion among English Romanists, including their leading divines, and that it was rather more rigorously enforced than we often suppose (Questier 1997). These facts must qualify, the argument runs, James’s self-styled moderation. We shall return to these apparently opposite views after exploring Donne’s tract. In some ways Donne’s defence of the oath adopts James’s own terms; it has been speculated that Donne wrote the piece at James’s request. Whether he did or not, it is his first published work of any real length and one seeking the favour of the king. Ameliorating the view of his earlier Paraphrase Upon the Revelation of St. John, at this juncture James identifies the Pope as Antichrist only in so far as he meddles in the

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temporal affairs of monarchs. His own defence of the oath, Triplici nodo, triplex cuneus, consistently emphasises the ‘natural obedience’ he is owed as temporal monarch and denies any intention to coerce Roman Catholic subjects into Protestant worship (James VI and I 1971: 249). Despite his focus on the monarch’s governance of externals, James also adopts the status of godly monarch of which he was clearly fond. His biblical examples of temporal obedience move from that paid by the Israelites to Pharaoh to a series of references indicating that the authority of the monarch is second only to God’s and suggesting the monarch’s role as political and spiritual leader, drawn from Tertullian, Justin Martyr, and St Ambrose, among others (James VI and I 1971: 255; see also Doelman 2000: 20–38 et passim; Sommerville 1991: 59–61). Several defenders of the oath followed his lead in this regard: writing from the Clink, Richard Sheldon adopts in his 1611 defence of the oath language satisfying to his keepers in emphasising the king’s role as God’s vicegerent (Sheldon 1611: 10–11, 18–19). Pseudo-Martyr travels some of the same ground, but in a fuller spirit of ecumenism and humanity – Victor Houliston claims that we can take the treatise’s ecumenism largely at face value, and Rebecca Lemon argues persuasively that Donne’s emphasis on conscience shows a recognition of the complex loyalties at stake for individual believers (Houliston 2006: 477; Lemon 2006: 112). Ecumenism seems to be a consistent concern for Donne in both his private and his public writings, early and late. In a letter to his friend Henry Goodyere, written as he formulated Pseudo Martyr, Donne sets himself apart from such defenders of the oath as William Barlow, bishop of Lincoln, whose Answer to a Catholic English-Man (1609) he dismisses not only as ‘unscholar-like’ but also as divisive and narrowly partisan in its handling of the Jesuit Robert Persons and in its insistence that only Protestant authors be considered in the debate (Gosse 1959: I, 222). In the same letter Donne declares his favour for ‘unity in religion’ and his view of Christendom as a single ‘corporation’, though he recognises the irreconcilability of the issue at hand (Gosse 1959: I, 223, 221–2). The balanced spirit in which Donne writes to his fairly unreligious friend Goodyere should not be overemphasised. Pseudo-Martyr is quite clearly a Protestant tract with flourishes in praise of ‘the good health and sound constitution of the Reformed Religion’ (Donne 1993: 21). It separates itself from more vitriolic controversialism, however, in the genuineness of its declared purpose to achieve ‘unity and peace’ in the church, and in the personal connection Donne makes with his recusant audience through his famous conversion narrative (Donne 1993: 12, 13). The humanity of Pseudo-Martyr is subtly signalled to the narrow circle of coterie readers familiar with Donne’s Biathanatos, a work circulated in manuscript before 1610 and arguing that suicide is not always and necessarily sinful. He begins both works by qualifying Aristotle’s unequivocal view of self-destruction in the Ethics, interrogating ecclesiastical and legal inflexibility on ‘this ordinary disease’, and referring to the presence of the human impulse of suicide even in the utopian visions of Plato and Sir Thomas More (Donne 1993: 29–30; cf. Donne 1984: 62–3, 72–4, 86). For the purposes of Pseudo-Martyr, he does adjust his reference to suicide among

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natives of the Indies more fully to emphasise Spanish brutality (Donne 1984: 52). This is more than innocent writerly recycling. It signals Donne’s recognition of the complex loyalties at stake for English Romanists and his reluctance to trade in highhanded dogmatism. Though fundamentally reformed, then, Donne’s approach does not dismiss Romish religion out of hand. It claims instead that in its pretension to terrestrial authority the Roman church is not ‘catholic’ at all. The tract extends an olive branch to the individual believer as it heaps scorn upon the Pope and his Jesuit henchmen – Pseudo-Martyr thus differs in prevailing tone, but not in substantive argument, from the satirical association of the papacy and the Jesuits with Lucifer in Ignatius His Conclave, published in 1611. While it is tempting to see this position as reflective of Donne’s personal experience as a convert, it must be recalled that several divines in the early Stuart church made claims on Romanism resembling those in Pseudo-Martyr, including James Ussher, William Bedell, and Joseph Hall (Milton 1995: 140–2). Somewhat more specific to Donne is the argument implied by his title. He claims that because the English church provides recusants with a place to take the sacraments and hear the Word preached, they are not being prevented from practising fundamental elements of Christian faith; and because England secures these fundamentals, the martyrdom and resistance encouraged by Rome is entirely baseless. Opposed to the Pope’s misguided foreign influence, he encourages a nationalist regard for civil order (Donne 1993: 26). This logic implies that recusants take the sacraments and attend sermons in the national church in a way going beyond ‘church papistry’, the token attendance required to avoid punitive aspects of laws concerning recusants. Donne suggests that the individual believer can participate in English church services while maintaining full spiritual allegiance to Rome. He is reading selectively from the Articles of Religion, emphasising the thirtieth article, which guarantees that ‘both parts of the Lord’s Sacrament … ought to be ministered to all Christian men alike’, but overlooking for the moment the twenty-eighth article, with its dutifully Calvinist interpretation of the significance of the Lord’s Supper and its anti-Roman remarks against transubstantiation and worship of the sacrament (Church of England 1562: 18–19). Such an approach holds significant implications for the nature of both church and state. It reduces the English church’s communitarian worship to external observance; by extension, the monarch as head of the church governs only external conformity. Donne’s emphasis on the individual believer provides quite a different view than had Hooker in his view of the Book of Common Prayer, which takes seriously the divine mystery of church worship suggested by the angelic presence of 1 Corinthians 11:10 (see Chapter 18, ‘Law Makes the King’: Hooker on Law and Princely Rule). As for the state, Donne pushes the secular character of the ‘natural obedience’ owed to the king a little further than do his contemporaries. Immediately after likening the king to his counterparts in Israel and to ‘emperors in the primitive church’, he proceeds to distinguish between the duties of prince and priest:

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It is entire man that God hath care of and not the soul alone; therefore his first work was the body and the last work shall be the glorification thereof. He hath not delivered us over to a prince only, as to a physician and to a lawyer, to look to our bodies and estates; and to the priest only, as to a confessor, to look to and examine our souls, but the priest must as well endeavour that we live virtuously and innocently in this life for society here, as the prince, by his laws, keeps us in the way to heaven. (Donne 1993: 38–9)

Though the prince governs the body with regard for the soul, and the role of the body in creation cannot be discounted, the office of the priest is more fully associated with the higher calling of spiritual care (see also Donne 1993: 173–4, 190–1). This is not the typical Jacobean argument for the prince as a David or a Solomon; he is instead a legislator who guides subjects on the path to heaven in so far as encouragement of external virtue can. While Donne’s defence of the oath thus appeals to the nationalist sentiment valuing preservation of peace in the realm, it also subtly adjusts James’s pretensions to spiritual authority over his subjects as it adjusts the Pope’s pretensions to temporal authority. More than other defenders of the oath, Donne rests his argument on a separation of the order of nature and the order of grace. Though critics can tend to brand him a time-server, he consistently holds this distinction early and late: it is the standard by which he criticises papal intervention in temporal affairs in the Pseudo-Martyr and by which he defends James’s directions to preachers in 1622. It is the claim of the Third Satire, composed in the 1590s, that every individual must make a doctrinal choice on which no terrestrial authority provides reliable guidance – the poem is best summed up by a Beastie Boys couplet that captures its central argument and its tone of direct challenge: ‘Wheredja get your information from, huh? / Ya think that you can front when Revelation comes?’ (Beastie Boys 1999). Nowhere else in the satires are we confronted with so many imperatives – ‘Know thy foes’ (33), ‘Seek true religion’ (43), ‘Be busy to seek her’ (74), ‘doubt wisely’ (77), ‘Keep the truth’ (90) – urging us to make the religious commitment for which, we are ominously reminded over and again, we will be judged at the end of time. The poem provides one model after the next of conclusions falsely drawn from the superficial qualities of churches, which gives over the active search for truth: Mirreus turns to Rome (43–5), Crantz to Calvinist Geneva (49–50), Graius turns to the English church out of jingoism and blind conformism (55–8), Phrygius uncritically thinks that all must be wrong (62–4), and Graccus uncritically thinks that all must be right (65–9). Despite these satirical portraits, the option implied as positive in the poem seems very much like the English church, with the proviso that it be joined as part of an ongoing and energetic process of spiritual seeking. In emphasising individual conscience, the poem presents the law as unable to illumine spiritual matters: ‘Fool and wretch, wilt thou let thy soul be tied / To man’s laws, by which she shall not be tried / At the last day?’ (93–5). The knowing soul does not resist terrestrial authority but rather knows the magistrate’s ‘bounds’ (100); the state is obeyed in the order of nature, Donne implies, but one must rely on God alone for guidance in the order of grace.

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In Donne we receive a glimpse – small, perhaps, but perceptible – of the liberal argument on toleration, which relegates religion to the private sphere and demands that all citizens, regardless of religious affiliation, recognise the state’s authority in preserving law and order. Pseudo-Martyr suggests that it is the role of the monarch to govern externals in a way that does not impinge upon a subject’s conscience, and that it is the role of divines to attend to the spiritual state of the laity without interfering in civil affairs. Donne’s view resembles in some respects current communitarian adjustment of liberal theory, what John Rawls describes as a ‘pluralism’ that does not ‘impose the unrealistic – indeed, the utopian – requirement that all citizens can affirm the same comprehensive doctrine’, but only ‘the same conception of political order and justice’ (Rawls 1993: 39). In examining Pseudo-Martyr we also see that this Rawlsian principle offers limited incorporation into the liberal state of those with strong religious conviction, for at bottom Donne is saying that it is all right to be Roman Catholic so long as one does not take the Pope entirely seriously. Questier is certainly correct in noting that the separation of the orders of nature and grace is itself a disruption of a core Roman Catholic belief, which held the ‘unity of spirituals and temporals in a single hierarchy’ (Questier 1997: 320). Donne would move beyond the modus vivendi toleration that Rawls associates with sixteenth-century divisions between Protestants and Roman Catholics, which only defers conflict – the principle of ‘toleration’ as ‘a mere modus vivendi’ implies that ‘if either faith becomes dominant, the principle of toleration would no longer be followed’ (Rawls 1993: 148). By making the kingdom, rather than the church, the site of aspiration and sacrifice in the order of nature, recusants are being enlisted not only to preserve the peace but also to hold allegiance to a state in conflict with their co-religionists. It shouldn’t surprise citizens of the twenty-first century that the memory of terrorist threat is kept fresh by the state as a device by which to solidify such allegiance – James gets as much mileage as possible from the shock and horror of the Powder Treason in the exordium to Triplici nodo. With this in mind we can return to the polarities on the oath controversy with which we began, and see that it both extends an opportunity to recusants to lead an unencumbered life of obedience to the state and that it forces upon them a change in beliefs that some would see as central to religious identity. These two arguments on the oath are not antithetical; they are, rather, two sides of the same coin. In demanding natural obedience the oath both provides a way for recusants to lead relatively unobstructed lives within the realm while also forcing them to accept a view of the state potentially at odds with fundamentals of faith. If we search today for a Donne redivivus, we might find one in Abdullahi Ahmed An-Na’im, a professor of law at Emory University and author of such titles as Toward an Islamic Reformation (1996) and Islam and the Secular State (2008). He prefaces the more recent of these with a declaration of confessional allegiance: ‘I speak as a Muslim in this book because I am accountable for these ideas as part of my own religion and not simply as a hypothetical academic argument’ (An-Na’im 2008: vii). This calling higher than mere intellectual exchange lends him an aura of identification with Islam

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– much like Donne’s prefatory conversion narrative does with recusants – that serves as cover for a model of toleration so aggressively secularist that it would make Rawls blush. An-Na’im questions the very notion of belief, arguing that any human perception or iteration, even if it takes a verse of the Qur’an as its subject, is necessarily a by-product of reason (An-Na’im 2008: 46–7); the test of reason must thus be applied to all human affairs, in religion and the state. It is not inconsistent with their religious beliefs, he continues, for Muslims to embrace the principle of universal human rights and to affirm the ‘obligations of citizenship of their country and of the world at large’. While An’Na’im recognises that it is the politics of states that determine how universal human rights are enforced, he offers the optimistic view that citizens can hold the state accountable in this regard even as he diminishes the role of religion in providing a communitarian critique of liberal democracy (An-Na’im 2007: 18). He is concerned that Muslims in Europe become accepted as European Muslims, but predicates that acceptance upon their embrace of a liberal theology. This is a position with a great deal of merit, and, like Donne, one can see a fundamental humanity driving An-Na’im’s approach to the issue of religious freedom. But we can discern at its heart the same double bind of toleration and solidification of state authority: in fully becoming citizens, tolerated subjects must accept a fundamentally secular view of civil society that disempowers their religious communities’ critique of state power. The limits of An-Na’im’s argument are the limits of the human rights approach to religious toleration that has grown out of the natural law tradition: it depends upon the individual’s acceptance of a conception of justice and external governance existing over and above demands that religion can make in these areas. Those who defend this position claim that the liberal state must demand conformity in certain essentials necessary to its preservation – that such a state imposes only those limits on personal freedom necessary to preserve basic law and order. In a climate of terror, however, such ‘essentials’ tend to proliferate, so that the state can justify domestic wire-tapping, as was done in the United States after 9/11, or surveillance of mosques, as was done in the United Kingdom after July 2005.

Milton and Liberty of Conscience The subject of religious liberty exercised Milton over his entire career. Indeed, his first prose tracts decry the religious conformity imposed by the bishops, and his last prose tract, Of True Religion (1673), argues for the relaxation of laws limiting the right to worship of nonconforming Protestant sects. By his own (perhaps exaggerated) account, he cut short a continental tour of 1638–9 in which he delighted in meeting leading intellectual and artistic luminaries – Galileo among them – in order to rush home and apply his pen to the cause of religious liberty coming to its head during the Bishops’ Wars, Charles I and William Laud’s ill-conceived attempt to impose English liturgy and church government forcefully upon a staunchly Presbyterian Scotland. The result of that homecoming was a series of tracts directed against the

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bishops, supporting the growing movement against them that found legislative expression in the bill for ‘Root and Branch’ extirpation of episcopacy being urged through Parliament under the considerable steam of Oliver Cromwell and the younger Sir Henry Vane. But at that juncture Milton wished to do more than simply criticise the religious conformity of the English church under the aegis of the bishops. The invective tone of the tracts is deliberately inflammatory, and seeks to sour the climate of the debate on church government and so to derail negotiations on the preservation of some elements of prelacy. The fate of the bishops described in the famous conclusion to Of Reformation illustrates this strategy: But they contrary that by the impairing and diminution of the true faith … aspire to high dignity, rule and promotion here, after a shameful end in this life (which God grant them) shall be thrown down eternally into the darkest and deepest Gulf of Hell, where under the despiteful control, the trample and spurn of all the other damned, that in the anguish of their torture shall have no other ease than to exercise a raving and bestial tyranny over them as their slaves and negroes, they shall remain in that plight for ever, the basest, lowermost, the most dejected, most underfoot and down-trodden vassals of perdition. (Milton 1935–82: I, 617)

It is hard to imagine this as the deserved end of such learned and urbane bishops as Joseph Hall and Lancelot Andrewes, the latter of whom is the subject of Milton’s third Latin elegy, composed in 1626 and thus well before the full awakening of his iconoclastic spirit – even in those early days the poem on Andrewes may not have indicated deep emotional sympathy; elegy-writing was a promiscuous endeavour for the young Milton. This passage in Of Reformation is not the only time when Milton would take the African slave trade to be a simple fact of life. It is equally so in his handling of the curse of Ham, often taken in the period to provide biblical sanction for slavery, in his systematic theology De doctrina Christiana (Milton 1953–82: VI, 387) and in Paradise Lost (12.101–4; see Jablonski 1997). Among the antiprelatical tracts, The Reason of Church Government unfolds most fully Milton’s view of the course that the English church should take as an alternative to episcopacy. There he describes the biblical sanction of Presbyterian church government, as opposed to Paul’s installation of bishops in Timothy (1 Tim. 1:3–4) and Titus (1:5), which had been deployed in scriptural arguments for episcopacy since the reign of Elizabeth (see Chapter 27, English Reformations). We must not confuse, however, such an argument for Presbyterian church government with full support for the Presbyterian party, those English divines who wished to retain a national church but to do away with episcopal hierarchy. Upon the elimination of the bishops in 1643 and sitting of the Westminster Assembly, Milton is quickly distressed by the Presbyterians’ desire to exercise authority over matters religious. It is something of an open question as to whether this reflects a change of heart from those pamphlets supporting such Presbyterians as the Smectymnuans, among whom was his tutor Thomas Young, or whether Milton had never realised in the heat of the anti-episcopacy debate

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the extent of Presbyterian desire for control over religion (see Smith 2007: 29; von Maltzahn 2007: 100–1). The first expression of what would become a recurring antiPresbyterian refrain emerges in Areopagitica (1644): Who cannot but discern the fineness of this politic drift, and who are the contrivers; that while bishops were to be baited down, then all the presses might be open; it was the people’s birthright and privilege in time of parliament, it was the breaking forth of light. But now, the bishops abrogated and voided out of the church as if our Reformation sought no more but to make room for others into their seats under another name, the episcopal arts begin to bud again, the cruse of truth must run no more oil. (Milton 1953–82: II, 541)

The accusation of hypocrisy is just: the Presbyterian camp that had argued against the bishops’ stifling of religious liberty had themselves become energetic heresyhunters, as attested by that paranoid multi-volume diatribe against the growing infection of religious schism, Thomas Edwards’ Gangraena (1646). Milton himself had come under fire from Edwards and had his divorce tracts cried down in a sermon before Westminster Assembly by Herbert Palmer: ‘If any plead Conscience for the Lawfulness of Polygamy (or for divorce for other causes then Christ and His Apostles mention; Of which a wicked book is abroad and uncensured, though deserving to be burnt, whose Author hath been so impudent as to set his Name to it, and dedicate it to your selves,) or for Liberty to marry incestuously, will you grant a Toleration for all this?’ (Palmer 1644: 57; see Parker 2003: I, 263–4). The divorce tracts had argued only for the relaxation of divorce laws, but Palmer is incisive in one respect: early and late Milton is sympathetic to polygamy, from the Commonplace Book to the Christian Doctrine, and implicitly in Paradise Lost as the brand of wedded love ‘by Saints and Patriarchs used’ (Milton 1953–82: I, 397–400, VI, 355–68; PL 4.762; see Miller 1974 and Rudrum 1970). Over the remainder of the 1640s, the shafts of ridicule he once hurled at the bishops thus find a new target, most savagely if brilliantly in the tailed sonnet ‘On the new forcers of conscience under the Long Parliament’, likely composed in 1646: Dare ye for this adjure the civil sword To force our consciences that Christ set free, And ride us with a classic hierarchy Taught ye by mere A. S. and Rutherford? Men whose life, learning, faith and pure intent Would have been held in high esteem with Paul, Must now be named and printed heretics By shallow Edwards and Scotch What-d’ye-call. (5–12)

As in his eleventh sonnet, Milton satirises those Scottish divines whose works were cramming the bookstalls. Here he refers to Adam Stewart, Samuel Rutherford, and

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the heresiographer Thomas ‘Shallow’ Edwards; the ‘Scotch What-d’ye-call’ could be a catch-all for this class of Presbyterian, or it could have someone specific in mind whom Milton wishes to impugn with anonymity (Robert Baillie, who attacked the divorce tracts, has been suggested). ‘New Presbyter’, the poem concludes, ‘is but old Priest writ large’ (20) – a barb that plays with the etymological roots of the word ‘priest’ from contraction of the Latin presbyter. The poem also indicates the standard by which Milton consistently measures debates on religious liberty: the conscience that Christ set free. As his views on religious liberty develop over his career, and as events of the Interregnum make him increasingly sceptical of worldly authorities claiming to preserve God’s order on Earth, his ideal of Christian liberty develops greater prominence. In the antiprelatical tracts and in Areopagitica (1644), he seems optimistic about the possibility of a new era in English governance, civil and ecclesiastical, that would place the nation on the vanguard of Reformation. If we glimpse a liberal position in Milton, it is in those moments where these early tracts imagine a tolerationist state guiding the nation’s progress towards enlightenment (see Mohamed 2008). The later tracts on disestablishment of the church, A Treatise of Civil Power in Ecclesiastical Causes (1659) and Considerations Touching the Likeliest Means to Remove Hirelings out of the Church (1659), do not entertain such a possibility in unfolding policy consistent with the principle of Christian liberty. The preface to Civil Power, addressed to Richard Cromwell’s parliament, presents its argument as completing the task envisioned in the English republic’s heyday of 1649–51 (Milton 1953–82: VII, 240). Milton adopts similar language in Hirelings, praising Parliament in his exordium and calling attention to his own achievements on behalf of the Cause: ‘Owing to your protection, supreme Senate, this liberty of writing which I have used these eighteen years on all occasions to assert the just rights and freedoms both of church and state’ (Milton 1953–82: VII, 274). This allows Milton to adopt a topos of loyalty to a Parliament suppressing groups like the Quakers even as he argues for a position very close to such sectarians. These passages also show that Milton is not necessarily advancing the Quaker cause; he seems to refer to that champion of rootand-branch extirpation of episcopacy, Sir Henry Vane, whose mixed feelings about the Society of Friends are revealed in his objections to their overemphasis of external moral conduct rather than internal seeking – a damning criticism in enthusiast circles (Vane 1655: 184, 211). Vane and his disciple Henry Stubbe did, however, share the Quakers’ animosity towards a paid ministry, as evinced in the latter’s Light Shining Out of Darkness (1659), a tract that, as David Hawkes observes, is frequently described as influencing Milton’s statements on tithing (Hawkes 2004: 76–7). Milton associates the idea of a ‘national church’ with the ‘Jews’ and points to the universality of the Christian church: ‘the Christian church is universal; not tied to nation, diocese or parish, but consisting of many particular churches complete in themselves’ (1953–82: VII, 291–2). A Protestant state is one allowing individuals freely to interpret Scripture and to follow inner light:

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First, it cannot be denied, being the main foundation of our protestant religion, that we of these ages, having no other divine rule or authority from without us warrantable to one another as a common ground but the holy scripture, and no other within us but the illumination of the Holy Spirit so interpreting that scripture … can have no other ground in matter of religion but only from the scriptures. And these being not possible to be understood without this divine illumination, which no man can know at all times to be in himself, much less to be at any time for certain in any other, it follows clearly, that no man or body of men in these times can be the infallible judges or determiners in matters of religion to any other men’s consciences but their own. (Milton 1953–82: VII, 242–3; emphasis added)

In this, the third paragraph of the tract proper, Milton twice draws our attention to the applicability of his arguments to a specific moment in biblical history – ‘we of these ages’ must rely on Scripture; no ‘body of men in these times’ can judge religious matters infallibly – emphasising the consequences of the Edenic fall, which occupies a good deal of his attention at a time when he is composing his great epic, and anticipating that time when the human darkness necessitating reliance on Scripture will cease to exist and God will be ‘all in all’. But we also find in the logic of Milton’s argument the limits on religious toleration inscribed within the principle of liberty of conscience. In associating a national church with Judaism, he is presenting its defenders as menacing to true Christians: their desire for external conformity reveals imperfect embrace of the spiritual principles of the Gospels; they rest on implicit faith and superstition rather than searching for God’s truth through Scripture and the promptings of grace. Those who make such claims for uniformity of external worship are not to be tolerated, as evinced in Milton’s opposition first to the bishops, then the Presbyterians, and always to Roman Catholics. His claim that no ‘body of men in these times’ can determine matters religious would be recognised by those close to him as anticipating an age when the religiously enlightened would govern. Vane’s Retired Mans Meditations (1655) shows that the separation of church and state for which proponents of liberty of conscience argued was a temporary measure. In the ‘day of their ascension and final exaltation’ the spiritual elect will commence a terrestrial reign that Vane identifies with the power of the keys: ‘they have committed unto them, the power of the keys, in the full extent and exercise thereof, whereby, all that they bind in earth, shall be bound in heaven, and all that they loose on earth, shall be loosed in heaven’ (Vane 1655: 410). The liberty of conscience for which Vane argues over his career is intended to provide conditions by which the elect would make this ascension. It does not separate obedience in the orders of nature and grace as a matter of principle, but rather as an expedient to be set aside when God’s chosen are in a position to exercise authority in matters temporal and spiritual. Sir James Harrington is thus right to see a potential threat to civil stability in lending priority to liberty of conscience. In 1659–60 he advances claims resembling what we have described as liberal toleration: ‘The distinction of liberty into civil and spiritual is not ancient but of a latter date, there being indeed no such distinction;

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for the liberty of conscience once granted separable from civil liberty, civil liberty can have no security’ (Harrington 1977: 742). Like Donne before him and John Locke after him, Harrington seems to see a measure of outward religious conformity as necessary to civil stability. Nicholas von Maltzahn has recently and persuasively shown how Milton’s friend and fellow-poet Andrew Marvell is allied with such proto-liberals in his arguments for a ‘more comprehensive but still national church’ (von Maltzahn 2007: 89). Liberty of conscience is thus not a claim for religious liberty per se but rather an argument for state non-interference, advanced by a group anticipating their rise to authority in God’s time. In his accounts of political liberalism, Rawls describes groups making such claims as ‘free-riders’ in a liberal state ‘who seek the advantages of just institutions while not doing their share to uphold them’ (Rawls 2003: 340). The clearest example of such individuals in our own time are so-called Christian Conservatives in the US, whose ‘conservatism’ is a radical desire to make government conform to their brand of religion, and whose arguments for religious freedom typically claim the right to public expressions of belief – defending the public installation of Christmas trees, or the display of the Decalogue outside a courthouse, or the supposed right of hospital or government officials not to perform such duties as abortion or gay marriage on the grounds of tender conscience. (Lest we think that the last of these is only an American affliction, the UK has provided an example of such conscientious objection: a civil registrar whose refusal to perform a gay marriage ceremony was upheld by an employment tribunal (Verkaik 2008).) For such ‘Christian Conservatives’ the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), with its aim of equal treatment for all citizens and thus of preserving the secular character of public institutions, engages in a satanic oppression of the godly. To counter such influence, Pat Robertson founded the American Center for Law and Justice (ACLJ), which claims that ‘religious freedom and freedom of speech are inalienable, God-given rights’. Given such a source for these freedoms, there can be no limit placed on them on secular grounds; the ACLJ is thus representing an Ohio state judge, James DeWeese, in a suit brought against him by the ACLU for the display of a poster in his courtroom titled ‘Philosophies of Law in Conflict’. One side of the poster, titled ‘Moral Absolutes: The Ten Commandments’, features the Decalogue, while the other side, ‘Moral Relatives: Humanist Precepts’, features, among other items, quotations from former Supreme Court Chief Justice Charles E. Hughes and from the Supreme Court decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, which upheld the right to abortion in Pennsylvania. The poster also features DeWeese’s own words, which state that ‘the cases passing through this courtroom demonstrate we are paying a high cost in increased crime and other social ills for moving from moral absolutism to moral relativism since the mid 20th century’ (Sekulow 2008). In liberal terms to have a court official dismiss precedents and a chief justice of the Supreme Court in favour of Mosaic law is troubling, to say the least. Not so in the liberty of conscience view, which does not accept the secular state as referee in the arena of religious claims.

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Conclusion Habermas has suggested that the return of religion to the centre of debates on the public sphere forces us to revise our view of modernity into one ‘washing away or at least levelling the thresholds hitherto assumed to pertain between “traditional” and “modern” societies. In this way, the Occident’s own image of modernity seems, as in a psychological experiment, to undergo a switchover’ (Habermas 2006: 2). The student of the early modern period will know that modernity at its roots is predicated upon confessional divisions much more than a secularist telos: one of its founding moments is the emergence of Protestantism, and it is from the turmoil of this diminution of Roman influence that the modern nation-state with its confessional commitments, secularism among them, is born. Searching for the roots of liberal toleration in the early modern period might also lead us to be chary of the supposed neutrality of the secular state: those in the seventeenth century who anticipate such toleration tend to favour some measure of religious conformity under the aegis of a national church, an argument we find not only in Donne, but also in Marvell, Harrington, and Locke. In this light we see how ‘toleration’ can serve to incorporate individuals into institutions under state authority, which institutions gradually take on a more secular caste under the truth regimes of the Enlightenment described by Foucault. Analysing liberal democracy in the early essay ‘On the Jewish Question’, Karl Marx noted how separation of the orders of nature and grace, which we have seen somewhat in Donne, leads to a subject’s double life, ‘a heavenly one and an earthly one’; such subject formation occurs in the ‘complete state’ that no longer needs the external approval of religious institutions (Marx 1971: 93–4). In this completion the state effects a political emancipation only in so far as the political life of the individual is freed from religious expression. This is not to be confused with human emancipation in Marx’s terms, which would depend upon liberation from the demands of religion and state, and the formation of collectives not bound to these bodies that creates a freedom based on ‘the union of man with man’ rather than the freedom ‘of a man treated as an isolated monad’ (1971: 103). Analysing the persistence today of ‘the Jewish question’ in his Defence of Lost Causes, Slavoj Žižek claims that ‘fidelity to the name “Jews”’ is the silent recognition of ‘the defeat of authentic emancipatory struggles. No wonder those who demand fidelity to the name “Jews” are also those who warn us against the “totalitarian” dangers of any radical movement’ (Žižek 2008: 5). While we might be rightly suspicious of the search for a new Messianism endorsed by Žižek – which finds most ludicrous expression in his defences of Stalinism – there is justice in his Marxian recognition that the reduction of religion to private identity promotes the creation of a state no longer answerable to forces outside itself. We thus end with a more informed view of precisely the dilemma with which we began: the triumph of liberal toleration can impinge upon the beliefs of the subject and be little more than a solidification of state power, and the potentially forceful critique of the

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state that can emerge from communities of believers can devolve into intolerant theocracy if those communities are allowed unfettered sway. References and Further Reading Achinstein, Sharon and Elizabeth Sauer (eds.) (2007). Milton and Toleration. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ahdar, Rex and Ian Leigh (2005). Religious Freedom in the Liberal State. Oxford: Oxford University Press. An-Na’im, Abdullahi Ahmed (1996). Toward an Islamic Reformation: Civil Liberties, Human Rights, and International Law. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press. An-Na’im, Abdullahi Ahmed (2007). ‘Global citizenship and human rights: from Muslims in Europe to European Muslims’. In M. L. P. Loenen and J. E. Goldschmidt (eds.), Religious Pluralism and Human Rights in Europe: Where to Draw the Line? (pp. 13–55). Antwerp: Intersentia. An-Na’im, Abdullahi Ahmed (2008). Islam and the Secular State: Negotiating the Future of Shari’a. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Armitage, David, Armand Himy, and Quentin Skinner (eds.) (1998). Milton and Republicanism. Ideas in Context 35. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beastie Boys (1999). ‘So wat’cha want’. Beastie Boys Anthology: The Sounds of Science. Hollywood: Capitol Records. Church of England (1562). Articles Whereupon it was Agreed by the Archbishoppes and Bishoppes. … London [STC 1003811]. Colclough, David (ed.) (2003). John Donne’s Professional Lives. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Doelman, James (2000). King James I and the Religious Culture of England. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Donne, John (1984). Biathanatos, ed. Ernest W. Sullivan II. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Donne, John (1993). Pseudo-Martyr, ed. Anthony Raspa. Montreal and Kingston: McGill–Queen’s University Press. Donne, John (2001). The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose, ed. Charles M. Coffin. New York: Modern Library.

Fincham, Kenneth and Peter Lake (1985). ‘The ecclesiastical policy of King James I’. Journal of British Studies, 24, 170–206. Gosse, Edmund (1899; repr. 1959). The Life and Letters of John Donne, 2 vols. Gloucester: Peter Smith. Habermas, Jürgen (2006). ‘Religion in the public sphere’, trans. Jeremy Gaines. European Journal of Philosophy, 14, 1–25. Harrington, James (1977). Political Works, ed. J. G. A. Pocock. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hawkes, David (2004). ‘The concept of the “hireling” in Milton’s theology’. Milton Studies, 43, 64–85. Houliston, Victor (2006). ‘An apology for Donne’s Pseudo-Martyr’. Review of English Studies, ns 57, 474–86. Hughes, Ann (2004). Gangraena and the Struggle for the English Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jablonski, Steven (1997). ‘Ham’s vicious race: slavery and John Milton’. Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 37, 173–90. James VI and I (1971). The Workes (1616). Anglistica and Americana 85. New York: G. Olms. Kahn, Paul (2005). Putting Liberalism in its Place. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Lemon, Rebecca (2006). Treason by Words. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Marx, Karl (1971). ‘On the Jewish question’. Early Writings, trans. and ed. David McLellan. New York: Barnes & Noble. Miller, Leo (1974). John Milton Among the Polygamophiles. New York: Loewenthal. Milton, Anthony (1995). Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Milton, John (1953–82). Complete Prose Works, ed. Don Wolfe et al., 8 vols. in 10. New Haven: Yale University Press. Milton, John (2006). Paradise Lost, ed. Alistair Fowler, 2nd edn. Harlow: Pearson Longman.

Donne, Milton, and Religious Liberty Milton, John (2007). Complete Shorter Poems, ed. John Carey, 2nd edn. Harlow: Pearson Longman. Mohamed, Feisal G. (2008). ‘Liberty before and after liberalism: Milton’s shifting politics and the current crisis in liberal theory’. University of Toronto Quarterly, 77, 940–60. Palmer, Herbert (1644). The Glass of God’s Providence Toward his Faithful Ones. London [Wing P235]. Papazian, Mary Arshagouni (ed.) (2003). John Donne and the Protestant Reformation: New Perspectives. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Parker, William Riley (2003). Milton: A Biography, ed. Gordon Campbell, 2nd edn., 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Patterson, Annabel (2006). Early Modern Liberalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Questier, Michael C. (1997). ‘Loyalty, religion and state power in early modern England: English Romanism and the Jacobean Oath of Allegiance’. Historical Journal, 40, 311–29. Rawls, John (1993). Political Liberalism. New York: Columbia University Press. Rawls, John (2003). A Theory of Justice, rev. edn. Cambridge, MA: Belknap. Razack, Sherene H. (2008). Casting Out: The Eviction of Muslims from Western Law and Politics. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Rudrum, Alan (1970). ‘Polygamy in Paradise Lost’. Essays in Criticism, 20, 18–23. Sekulow, Jay (2008). ‘Standing up against the ACLU’. Jay Sekulow’s Trial Notebook, 11 Dec. 2008. American Center for Law and Justice. < http://www.aclj.org/TrialNotebook/Read. aspx?id=700>, accessed 18 Dec. 2008.

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Sheldon, Richard (1611). Certain General Reasons, Proving the Lawfulness of the Oath of Allegiance. London [STC 22393]. Skinner, Quentin (1998). Liberty Before Liberalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Skinner, Quentin (2002). Visions of Politics, 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, Nigel (2007). ‘Milton and the European contexts of toleration’. In Sharon Achinstein and Elizabeth Sauer (eds.), Milton and Toleration (pp. 23–44). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sommerville, Johann P. (1991). ‘James I and the divine right of kings: English politics and continental theory’. In Linda Peck (ed.), The Mental World of the Jacobean Court. (pp. 55–70). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sullivan, Ceri (2008). The Rhetoric of the Conscience in Donne, Herbert and Vaughan. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tuck, Richard (1982). Natural Rights Theories: Their Origin and Development. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vane, Sir Henry (1655). The Retired Man’s Meditations, or the Mystery and Power of Godliness. London [Wing V75]. Verkaik, Robert (2008). ‘Registrar wins right to refuse gay weddings’. The Independent (London), 11 July, 6. von Maltzahn, Nicholas (2007). ‘Milton, Marvell, and toleration’. In Sharon Achinstein and Elizabeth Sauer (eds.), Milton and Toleration (pp. 86–104). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Žižek, Slavoj (2008). In Defence of Lost Causes. London: Verso.

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Court and Coterie Culture Curtis Perry

When we speak of a Renaissance court, we refer to the royal household as well as to those attending upon the monarch and the staff required by the domestic and governmental operations surrounding the ruler. There might be upwards of a thousand people employed in various ways at a monarch’s court in early modern England at any one time. English monarchs had multiple dwellings, but the principal residence of the English monarchy for most of our period was Whitehall Palace, on the west side of London (Thurley 1999). The court, in the sense of the monarch’s retinue, could also be peripatetic. Henry VIII travelled with his court in England and into France, Elizabeth I regularly travelled throughout England to reinforce and consolidate her authority, and James I and his court visited the king’s native Scotland in 1617 (Cole 1999). But the monarchy’s regular residence in the London area encouraged aristocratic families to secure estates in and around the west of London, and so Whitehall and its surroundings can properly be thought of as the epicentre of Tudor and early Stuart court culture. When we speak of courtiers, however, we refer not to the myriad humble employees of the royal household but specifically to important office-holders in the royal household, together with those men and women fortunate enough to be granted access to the monarch’s presence chamber by virtue of family prestige, connections, or personal charm. Royal favour could bring enormous rewards, so access to the monarch was a prize highly sought after. Recipients of royal favour were much courted in turn, for they were influential and had the opportunity to broker suits for others. The ability to reap benefits for clients was one way of demonstrating and maintaining prestige, and therefore much of the wealth doled out through the court was distributed to various associates of successful courtiers. As a result, the social and political world of the upper classes organised itself into shifting and overlapping networks of patronage that served, among other functions, as conduits to distribute royal bounty in the forms of grants, patents, and offices. A great courtier would tend to have a sizeable number of dependants and clients, whose reciprocated services helped to cement the social and

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political importance of their patron. These affiliations were the very stuff of public life in a society that imagined government as more personal than bureaucratic. Some offices within the royal household were especially coveted because they guaranteed access to the monarch. For example, the earls of Leicester and Essex, two of Queen Elizabeth’s favourites, each served as Masters of the Horse, a position entailing supervision of the royal stables that ensured access to the queen during excursions. In a pre-bureaucratic system built on personal intimacy, however, patronage relationships were frequently less official than such titles would suggest. Moreover, though men held all official administrative positions, there are numerous cases in which wellplaced women were able to exert considerable personal influence within networks of court patronage. The ladies of Elizabeth’s Privy Chamber seem to have had some control over the access male courtiers had to the queen and apparently used their own intimacy with her to obtain suits for others. Lucy, countess of Bedford, became one of the more influential power brokers of the Jacobean period as well as being an important literary patron.1 The overriding importance of personal intimacy within this form of social organisation also helps explain why the theme of sexual corruption should be so common in negative accounts of court life. As Alan Bray (1994) has argued, patronage relations between men that were seen by contemporaries as socially corrupt tended also to attract accusations of sodomy. And in literary texts as diverse as Sir Thomas Wyatt’s ‘They flee from me’ and Christopher Marlowe’s Edward II (1591–2) the unruliness of sexual desire stands in for the troubling instability of personal intimacy and the anxieties built into a social system predicated upon it.2 The practice of patronage ensured that something like a court culture extended well beyond those men and women who attended the monarch in any immediate capacity. Moreover, the premium placed within this system upon personal relationships put a tremendous amount of pressure on the behaviour and taste of courtiers and aspirants alike. Even those who hoped for patronage at several removes from the monarch were eager to follow changes in fashion that ultimately emanated from the court. Court culture, as a category for literary analysis, can thus be understood to mean something a great deal larger and more nebulous than the court itself. Its reach encompasses the reading and writing practices of members of extended patronage networks eager to reap the benefits of the court’s bounty, of active aspirants of all kinds, of interested observers, both within and beyond London, and of various kinds of hangers-on. As a result, most of what we now think of as early modern or Renaissance literature can be profitably studied in terms of its relationship to court culture broadly construed. As the government of England became increasingly centralised in the Tudor period and beyond, success at court came to rival family pedigree as a vehicle for prestige. This explains the resentment generated by men like Cardinal Wolsey (1475–1530) or George Villiers, duke of Buckingham (1592–1628), who were able to parlay success at court into wealth and social prominence, despite having come from relatively obscure families. As a result, courtliness took on an ever greater importance as a marker of rank, and the ambitious became increasingly eager to keep up. The desire

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among those outside the inner circle to seem courtly in manner and taste contributed to the popularity of courtesy books that promised to offer guidance on matters of courtly fashions and behaviours to those outside of the charmed circle. Thomas Hoby’s translation of Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier (1561), for example, was published with a brief epitome that could serve as a checklist of courtly attributes for those whose interest was more practical than literary. Eagerness on the part of outsiders to copy the taste and manners of the court could, however, be self-defeating. If a particular manner or style were to be successfully copied by aspirants outside of the inner circles of the court, it would cease to be useful as means of distinction. Fashions had to be endlessly changeable in order to maintain their function as a marker of the difference between insiders and outsiders. For aspirants, the pursuit of courtly elegance could thus be fraught with uncertainty and anxiety (Whigham 1984). Mocking the affectations of would-be courtiers is a staple of early modern satirical writing, and there are two separate Caroline plays – William Davenant’s The Cruel Brother (1627) and Lodovick Carlell’s The Fool Would Be a Favourite (c.1632–8) – that feature comic plotlines making fun of bumpkins who aspire to become royal favourites. The impact of court culture upon the literature of the period is so pervasive as to be unavoidable. For one thing, much of what we think of as literature was produced by courtiers like Sir Walter Ralegh or Sir Philip Sidney or for their immediate entertainment. Masques, plays, tournaments, and pageants were put on regularly at court, and courtiers were interested in many forms of poetry and prose. This has partly to do with the pervasive idea of the court as an ideal or mirror representing the highest cultural attainment of the realm. Entertainments at court are part of the monarch’s magnificence, demonstrations of conspicuous wealth and culture, presentations of fictions that often allegorise harmonious government. And rulers often encouraged literary and artistic achievements cultivated by courtiers as a way of bolstering international reputation and prestige. Even outside of the immediate demi-monde of the court, however, most writers sought some form of support or preferment from the wealthy and well connected. In an era before copyright and royalties it was difficult to make ends meet as a professional writer, and even printed books were often intended to attract patronage. It was traditional for educated young men to aspire to serve the commonwealth either in the church or the state, and court preferment was important for success in either arena. Consequently, a great deal of what we today think of as literature was written in the hopes of obtaining money or position from a patron with court connections. If we think of early modern literary production as a form of commerce, taking place within networks of interpersonal patronage emanating from the court, then we can understand that literary fashions follow the same kind of cultural logic governing fashion in areas like clothing or behaviour. In each case, style becomes a marker of social distinction. In the case of literary fashion, this can encourage a kind of mannerism that is sometimes off-putting to modern readers, and it also ensures that literary modes pass out of fashion relatively rapidly as they become too well known and lose the distinctiveness that was their initial appeal. The best example here is

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the highly mannered style of John Lyly, named ‘euphuism’ after his briefly fashionable 1578 romance Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit. The euphuistic manner already seemed risibly affected by the 1590s, but the style’s extremity of ornamentation nevertheless contributed to its popularity in the 1580s as a marker of literary courtliness. The publication of George Puttenham’s The Arte of English Poesie (1589) – a how-to book for would-be court poets – attests to the desire among non-elite writers to copy courtly styles. A demonstrated facility with the latest literary manner might help a writer secure the patronage of a courtier who admired literature or who had need of a tutor or a secretary. Moreover, since the court provided a highly visible focus for the dreams and aspirations of the educated and literate, identifiably courtly styles were frequently copied in texts produced far from the centres of patronage. For instance, the vogue for pastoral in late Elizabethan England – fuelled by the cultural prestige of Sidney’s posthumously printed Arcadia – spurred imitators who enjoyed little direct connection to the courtly elite. The publication of the pastoral miscellany England’s Helicon in 1600 testifies to the spread of the mode’s popularity; the book contains poems by Sidney as well as by non-courtly writers like Robert Greene and Anthony Munday. This process of imitation ensured that the influence of the court on literary culture extended beyond the limits of actual patronage networks. In this way, court culture generated a good deal of the literary fashion of Tudor and early Stuart England. Because so much of it is occasional in nature, understanding Renaissance literature typically involves understanding the social situation of its production. Dedicatory epistles marking actual or wished-for patronage can be an invaluable starting point for this, though further biographical research is often required in order to understand the nature of the relationship between writer and dedicatee. Looking beyond the patron–client nexus, many literary texts were written with a specific circle of acquaintances in mind. These literary communities, or ‘coteries’ as they are sometimes called, could have a profound effect on the types of texts produced within them. The notion of coterie production offers a useful way to think about the kinds of social groupings and networks that provided the social occasions for a great deal of Renaissance literary production. Coteries took a number of forms, from extended family circles to patronage networks to other kinds of institutionally determined groupings. One example of a literary coterie is the sizeable group of writers associated with the Sidneys. Philip Sidney, his brother Robert, and his sister Mary, the countess of Pembroke, were all active both as writers and in encouraging others to write. The cultural prestige of Sir Philip, the family’s connections with other intellectually ambitious gentlemen like Fulke Greville, and the countess of Pembroke’s active patronage of poets like Samuel Daniel combined to establish a network of writers with interrelated interests. The fact that members of this extended circle experimented with many of the same forms – devotional and amatory lyric, for example, and Senecan closet drama – demonstrates the kind of give and take typical of coterie literature. Lady Mary Wroth, niece to Sir Philip Sidney and the countess of Pembroke and an ambitious author in her own

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right, fashioned herself as an heir to the Sidney family’s literary legacy in the next generation. A more institutionally structured example of coterie production is provided by the literary gamesmanship indulged in by gentlemanly aspirants within the different Inns of Court. The Inns served simultaneously as law schools for would-be common lawyers and finishing schools for would-be courtiers. A significant percentage of the young men who were members of these institutions saw them as a leaping-off point for careers at court, and such men competed with one another in the mastery of courtly manners and taste (Prest 1972). The display of writerly wit was part of this rivalry: this means that texts produced within these circles tended to be written in order to demonstrate virtuosity for and among peers. Many of John Donne’s early poems, for instance, were written while he was at Lincoln’s Inn. Their witty playfulness, sophistication, erotic content, and satiric bite can all be understood as part of Donne’s social performance within this coterie of ambitious young men (Marotti 1986: 25–95). Other kinds of literary production likewise show the influence of this would-becourtly milieu. Early Elizabethan members of the Inns of Court were active in bringing classical and Italian literary forms into English and, as playwrights and as patrons of theatres, they had an important and ongoing role in the development of English Renaissance drama (Corrigan 2004; see Chapter 46, Drama of the Inns of Court). The imprint of the Inns of Court as a dramatic milieu can be seen, most famously, in the signature combination of knowing political cynicism, of erudition and artistic sophistication in the plays of John Marston, a member of the Middle Temple (Finkelpearl 1969). But a more general indication of the importance of the Inns of Court for mainstream English drama can be given by listing some of the wellknown playwrights who were also members: Francis Beaumont, John Ford, James Shirley, and, probably, George Chapman and John Webster. Because Renaissance texts were written for a variety of audiences – patrons and coteries as well as the larger reading public – not everything was intended for print publication (see Chapter 12, Publication: Print and Manuscript). Too much has been made of the idea that courtiers avoided the crass commercialism of print publication – courtiers like Sir Walter Ralegh and the earl of Oxford did not hesitate to have their works printed – but manuscript circulation was common and well established enough in some cases to form an alternative form of publication. John Donne was well known as a poet in his lifetime despite the fact that his poems were printed only posthumously: he seems to have been the seventeenth-century poet whose work was the most frequently copied and widely disseminated in manuscript. In the case of material written for a limited audience, this would have been by far the most efficient means of distribution. Manuscript circulation may have appealed to courtly writers for other reasons as well. For one, the informality of manuscripts made it possible to circulate politically charged or libellous writings that would have been too dangerous for the more public mechanisms of print publication. The anonymous libel known as Leicester’s Commonwealth (1584) was printed abroad and smuggled into England. But the text, which describes Elizabeth’s great favourite as a sexually corrupt poisoner, was vigorously

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suppressed. Though only a handful of printed copies exist, its modern editor has tracked down upwards of fifty handwritten copies, a survival rate that attests to a rather wide manuscript circulation (D. C. Peck 1985: 222–7). Similarly, there is an enormous body of political libel dealing with Jacobean political figures that has survived only in manuscript form (Bellany 1993). This material seems to have been exchanged and collected by a broad cross-section of literate English men and women with an interest in court politics. For another, it may be that manuscript circulation sometimes appealed to courtly elites as a way of keeping their thoughts and observations out of the hands of social inferiors. Since manuscripts are copied from one reader to the next, manuscript circulation tends to follow pre-existing lines of social acquaintance. The readership of a text produced for manuscript circulation is thus more likely to be limited to a specific coterie or class. * Though the administrative efficiency of Henry VII’s reign (1485–1509) was instrumental in the establishment of a stable Tudor dynasty, it was Henry VIII (1509–47) who brought the conspicuous magnificence of continental courts to England. To some degree this was probably a matter of personality – the young king enjoyed entertainments and liked to demonstrate his prowess in tournaments – but there is also an element of careful calculation behind Henry’s magnificence. Ambassadors from abroad saw the splendour of the court, and came away impressed with England and the king. Henry, who dramatically increased England’s involvement in the military and diplomatic world of continental Europe, was eager to establish a commensurate prestige on this international stage. An ambassadorial description of the English court from 1517 demonstrates England’s poor reputation and attests to the effectiveness of Henry’s magnificence: The wealth and civilization of the world are here; and those who call the English barbarians appear to me to render themselves such. I here perceive very elegant manners, extreme decorum, and very great politeness; and amongst other things there is this most invincible King, whose acquirements and qualities are so many and excellent that I consider him to excel all who ever wore a crown. (cit. Anglo 1969: 123)

Demonstrating ‘the wealth and civilization of the world’ meant among other things spending money on the arts. Henry was an energetic builder, for example; he also employed the great German painter Hans Holbein as a member of his household. Likewise, much of the literature produced by Henrician courtiers displays a sophisticated internationalism that is both innovative and clearly related to the magnificence of Henry’s court. Writers like Sir Thomas More and Sir Thomas Elyot are typically credited with bringing the accomplishments of European humanism to English letters. Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, adapted the elegant lyric poetry of Petrarch and his European imitators to the English vernacular. Surrey also translated Virgil into English blank verse. Though the lyric poems of Wyatt and Surrey were circulated in manuscript during their lifetimes, many were printed in

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1557 in Richard Tottel’s verse miscellany Songes and Sonnettes. Their prosody and style thus provided a template for court poetry that was influential during the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Sir Philip Sidney found in Surrey’s lyrics ‘many things tasting of noble birth, and worthy of a noble mind’ (Sidney 1966: 64). The administrative style of Henry VII emphasised the king’s distance. By holding himself aloof he was able to manage his court with an even hand. Because Henry VIII was always an active participant in the life of the court, however, his personal relationships took on a tremendous political importance. The difference would have been immediately obvious to contemporaries, for the youthful Henry VIII made splashy appearances in court entertainments and surrounded himself with a group of young noblemen who accompanied him everywhere. Referred to by contemporaries as the king’s minions, these men parlayed their intimacy with the king into considerable influence within Henry’s court. Until 1518, this intimacy was informal. Then, in imitation of a similar title bestowed upon the intimates of King Francis I of France, the minions were made into Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber. This gave them control of access to the king’s suite of private rooms, and provided an institutional structure to match the king’s penchant for government by intimacy. The exclusivity of access gave the minions an important political advantage over courtiers whose contact with the king was more limited. Members of the Privy Chamber also took on important administrative duties, managing the finances of the Privy Purse and obtaining the king’s signature to authorise official documents. These institutional innovations helped shape the nature of court politics well into the seventeenth century (see Starkey 1987b). The minions’ influence was matched for a time by that of Cardinal Wolsey, whose administrative talents made him indispensable to the king. Wolsey recognised the threat that Privy Chamber favourites represented to his position, and used his own influence to limit theirs until 1529. He was finally brought down in the factional intrigue surrounding his attempts to obtain an annulment for Henry’s first marriage to Catherine of Aragon. From this point on, Henry’s reign was characterised by intense factional in-fighting over royal intimacy. Anne Boleyn, Henry’s second wife, who led a powerful faction with connections in the Privy Chamber, was tried and executed in 1536. Thomas Cromwell, whose faction helped push Anne from favour, fell victim to the vicissitudes of factional politics in 1540. He was convicted of heresy and treason and executed. The large number of Henry’s intimates who wound up in prison or executed testifies to the instability of royal favour as a basis for power. To be sure, the tumultuous nature of Henry’s domestic and political life – his many wives, the break from Rome – created ample opportunity for reversals of favour and alliance at court. Looked at from the Olympian perspective of the survey, however, the reign of Henry VIII looks like a series of cautionary tales about the problematics of government by intimacy. It is not surprising, therefore, that the literature of the Henrician court should demonstrate an obsessive interest in these problems as well. The description of the ideal state in Book 2 of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), for example, is ironised by

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a rather pessimistic discussion of court service in Book 1. Raphael Hythlodaeus, one of More’s personae in that complex fiction, argues that idealism and courtliness are incompatible, since the courtier is forced to please the ruler instead of serving the state. As he puts it, ‘there is no room for philosophy with rulers’ (More 1965: 99). More’s eventual execution is a bitter irony in light of such concerns. A similar ambivalence about court service runs through Wyatt’s lyrics, and though Wyatt was a successful courtier, he was also imprisoned for over a month in the contretemps surrounding Anne Boleyn in 1536 (Zagorin 1993). There are also some biting satires of court written by Henry’s courtiers. The best known are probably Wyatt’s – especially ‘Mine own John Poynz’ – but those of John Skelton deserve mention as well. Skelton, who had been tutor to the young Henry, was the most successful of the would-be court poets during the first years of his reign. Henry even granted him the title orator regius sometime around 1512. Skelton’s signature verse form – short rhyming lines, now known as skeltonics – is ideally suited to boisterous vituperation, and much of his extant poetry lampoons the favourites of the Henrician court. His one extant play, Magnificence (1519), satirises Henry’s minions, and several of his poems – ‘Speak, Parrot’ (1521), ‘Colin Clout’ (1522), and ‘Why come ye not to court’ (1522) – attack Wolsey. Though traditional literary history treats Skelton’s verses as primitive precursors to the elegant vernacular poetry of Wyatt and Surrey, they all share an insider’s concern with the problems of favour in the court of Henry VIII. When Henry VIII died in 1547, his 9-year-old son Edward, who was King Edward VI for a mere six years, succeeded him. Edward’s elder sister, Mary I, then ruled for five years (1553–8), returning England to the Catholic Church before succumbing to illness. Mary was never particularly concerned with entertainments or the display of courtly magnificence, and the most active periods for shows and tournaments occurred when her husband, Philip II of Spain, came to England (Anglo 1969: 281–343). After these two short reigns, the sheer duration of the reign of the Protestant Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603) helped to ensure the development of an elaborate court culture with its own distinct conventions. Because Elizabeth ruled England for such a long time, it is dangerous to generalise too broadly about the nature of her reign or the court culture it spawned. The familiar image of Elizabeth as the Virgin Queen took hold primarily after the late 1570s, as the possibility of her marrying became increasingly remote. And John Guy has argued that the political climate in England after 1585 differed enough from the councilcentred or monarchical-republican political culture of earlier decades as to warrant being called ‘the second reign of Elizabeth I’ (Guy 1995: 1–19). Nevertheless, Elizabeth managed for the most part to avoid the kinds of tumultuous, factional discord characteristic of the courtly world of her father. There were rivalries, to be sure – especially during the queen’s so-called ‘second reign’, which featured among other upsets the earl of Essex’s ill-fated rebellion of 1601 – but the cast of characters at the centre of the court was nevertheless remarkably stable and fairly homogeneous. Kinship ties among the courtiers were strong, and many of them came from families

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with previous ties to Tudor courts. Though her stinginess with wealth and titles aroused plenty of frustration, the literature produced by and for Elizabeth’s court featured less of the pessimism characteristic of Henrician court literature (Adams 2002: 1–67). Elizabeth’s ability to balance the politics of favour may have had something to do with her unusual position as an unmarried queen. Because her most intimate chamber service had to be performed by women – who could use their influence to obtain suits for others, but who were themselves shut out of administration – Elizabeth avoided the kind of institutionalised intimacy that featured so prominently in the factionalism of the Henrician court. Ministers like William Cecil, Baron Burleigh, handled the administrative duties built up for the Privy Chamber under Henry for Elizabeth. Instead, the queen’s entourage of women helped to insulate her from the demands of the court. This in turn gave Elizabeth flexibility in the management of access to her person, for no powerful favourite could bolster his standing by means of an official position in the monarch’s intimate chamber service. Though Elizabeth’s favour was never as mercurial as that of her father, the resulting uncertainty of access and favour contributed to the frustration of her courtiers. Even Elizabeth’s own godson Sir John Harrington complained about her distance from the court, describing her in 1602 as ‘a lady shut up in a chamber from her subjects and most of her servants, and seldom seen but on holy days’ (cit. Adams 2002: 77). This change in the institutionalisation of access put added pressure upon less immediate means of catching and holding Elizabeth’s attention. Since intimacy with the queen was for the most part no longer secured by position, active courtship of her favour seemed more important than ever. Fiction-making was one way of casting for the queen’s attention, and indeed one cannot help but be struck by the elaborate web of literary conceits developed in pageants and entertainments, poetry, and even direct addresses to the queen. An example will serve to demonstrate the overlapping social functions of such fictions within the world of Elizabethan court politics. In April 1581, as part of the entertainment for a French delegation, Sir Philip Sidney, Fulke Greville, and two other knights used the tilt-yard to stage an allegorical spectacle: in the personae of four foster-children of desire, they laid siege to the queen, whose gallery was figured as an impregnable fortress of perfect beauty. In these roles, bedecked in sumptuous armour and equipment, the knights participated in a tournament, before finally offering a ritualised apology for their violent courtship (Holinshed 1808: IV, 434–45). Such a tournament serves many purposes simultaneously. Though its primary function was to entertain the court and its visitors while displaying English magnificence, it also served as an occasion for participants to display themselves before the queen. The pageant’s emphasis on the queen’s inviolable chastity may also have been intended to comment obliquely upon the marriage proposals that were the occasion of the French visit. Finally, since Sidney had a hand in it, the show may also have been designed to express his ambition and frustration in Elizabeth’s service. The symbolic complexity of the event is indicative of the highly sophisticated fiction-making of

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Elizabeth’s court. Elizabeth herself was learned, literate, and highly sensitive to nuances of representation. As a result, many of her courtiers either cultivated or hired literary talent, and used allegorical conceits to entertain and entreat the monarch. This in turn was a major impetus behind the creation of the vast allegorical vocabulary of praise for the queen that has come to be known as the cult of Elizabeth (Frye 1993; Strong 1977). Moreover, though Steven May is correct to differentiate between full-fledged courtier poets like Sidney and Ralegh and mere aspirants (May 1991), interest in poetry and allegorical fiction among the Elizabethan elite clearly helped to stir and shape courtly ambition among a less elevated class of ambitious and literate men. Elizabethan writers like George Gascoigne, John Lyly, Samuel Daniel, and Edmund Spenser (to name a few of the better-known examples) inhabited the periphery of the world of court while attempting with varying degrees of success to use their writing to catch its attention. The cultivation of literary taste within the Elizabethan court is one of the reasons for the remarkable flowering of literature during Elizabeth’s reign. As the tilt-yard pageant suggests, the gender of the unmarried queen helped shape the kinds of fictions that became popular in her court and beyond. In addition to the countless personae used to embellish Elizabeth’s image in poems and pageants, writers drew heavily upon the analogy between the desire of the courtier to serve his queen and the desire of the lover to serve his lady. It is no coincidence that the literary genres associated with the Elizabethan period in standard literary histories – pastoral, for example, and Petrarchan love lyric – should feature amatory fictions so prominently. Of course, figurations of the queen and literary responses to her court changed during the course of her long reign. Much of what is commonly read as representative Elizabethan literature today was produced during the 1580s and 1590s, as the queen herself moved from her late forties to her sixties. The enormous popularity of fictions concerning unrequited love during these years attests in part to the growing frustrations of the courtiers and would-be courtiers who were becoming restless with the notorious stinginess of the ageing queen. Elizabeth, of course, had no heirs. James VI of Scotland, who had been in clandestine negotiations with the leading statesmen in Elizabeth’s government, became James I of England (1603–25) upon Elizabeth’s death. A court grown weary of Elizabethan parsimony welcomed him, and he wasted no time demonstrating his own largesse with both wealth and titles. In his first four months as king in England, for example, James granted more knighthoods than had been given in the whole of Elizabeth’s reign. His generosity with money was similarly striking. While it is possible that the foreign king misunderstood English finances, his generosity had a purpose. James urgently needed to secure loyalty in his new country. But James also wanted to create a court that would mirror his dual position as king of both England and Scotland. While he retained most of the officials from Elizabeth’s court, he created the office of Gentleman of the Bedchamber and filled it with his own Scottish entourage. The Bedchamber supplanted the Henrician Privy Chamber as the key site of the king’s intimate service, and Gentlemen of the Bed-

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chamber got the lion’s share of the king’s generosity (see Cuddy 1987). To the English, James and his imported Scottish intimates seemed uncouth, and their prominence at court seemed a shocking departure from Elizabethan decorum. The diary of Lady Anne Clifford records such feelings in a memorable account of her first visit to the new king’s court: ‘we all saw a great change between the fashion of the Court as it is now and of that in the queen’s time, for we were all lousy by sitting in the chamber of Sir Thomas Erskine’ (Clifford 1997: 3). The allegedly infested Erskine was First Gentleman and Groom of the Stool in James’s Scottish Bedchamber. Generally, English courtiers resented seeing English wealth flow into the coffers of the Scots. James was much more loyal to his personal favourites than Henry VIII had been, and as a result they were able to use their position to dominate royal patronage. English courtiers did not like it, but they had to play along. One can find evidence of resulting dissatisfaction with the court from very early in the reign, in personal letters as well as in the lurid depictions of court corruption featured in numerous Jacobean plays (Tricomi 1989). In 1615–16, when Robert Carr – earl of Somerset and Gentleman of the Bedchamber – his wife, and their associates were convicted of poisoning Sir Thomas Overbury, the scandal seemed to confirm people’s deepest suspicions about the moral corruption of James’s court (Bellany 2002). The Scottish Carr had been James’s favourite, and a huge number of manuscript news items and poems commenting upon the scandal were circulated among those interested in the court. In fact, some contemporary accounts of the scandal – such as ‘The Five Years of King James’ – make the denizens of James’s court sound like characters in a lurid Jacobean tragedy.3 Though the Scottish hold on the Bedchamber gave way in 1615 with the rise of George Villiers, his domination of royal patronage also provoked enormous resentment. Commentary and libel dealing with Villiers (who became duke of Buckingham) is also a staple of the period’s manuscripts. It is not an overstatement to say that the rise of political verse libel in the early seventeenth century is an important literary manifestation of the dissatisfaction with favouritism in James’s court (Bellany 2002). Like Elizabeth, James was conspicuously well educated. As king of Scotland, he had published two volumes of poetry and learned treatises on subjects as diverse as kingship and witchcraft. He admired and encouraged scholarship, but did not like to make a public spectacle of himself or welcome the kind of elaborate allegorical fictions that Elizabethan writers so frequently used to explore political topics. Poets, he declared in a treatise on verse published in Scotland in 1584, should not presume to meddle with or advise about affairs of state. James has sometimes been criticised, in fact, for failing to promote the kind of cultural embellishments that lent lustre to the monarchy in the eyes of subjects. Writers eager to attract James’s attention traded in Elizabethan allegories for a plainer style, emphasised their learning, and were careful not to seem to be telling the king what to do. Ben Jonson, whose poems in praise of the king appeal to him as a fellow scholar while celebrating the royal self-sufficiency, was able to make himself into the central literary spokesman for the Jacobean court.

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He and the architect Inigo Jones prepared the lion’s share of the masques put on before king and court. So closely was Jonson identified with courtly entertainment that when James announced plans to dine with the Merchant Taylors of London in 1607 the company felt that it had to hire Jonson to organise the evening’s entertainment (Perry 1997: 194). As well as works by Jonson and court masques, characteristic literary productions encouraged by James are scholarly or religious: sermons, the Bible translation that bears the king’s name (1611), and Francis Bacon’s Advancement of Learning (dedicated to James in 1605). James’s family also played an important role in the shaping of Jacobean court culture: his sons and his wife Anne of Denmark set up households of their own. Before his death in 1612, Prince Henry became the focal point for a brand of Protestant imperial nationalism associated with the memory of Sir Philip Sidney, the earl of Essex, and Elizabethan chivalry. His court at St James’s became an alternative cultural centre fostering values antithetical to King James’s policy of negotiated peace with Spain. One literary manifestation of this tension is Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (1612): dedicated to Prince Henry, this massive work celebrates England’s imperial destiny and rather pointedly snubs King James. There has been debate about the nature of the relationship between Prince Henry’s court and that of his father. On the one hand, Henry clearly fostered and encouraged a militarism that tended to chafe under James’s pacific rule. On the other hand, it is possible that this alternative centre may have helped contain hostility to Jacobean policies: so long as men like Drayton could look forward to the accession of Henry they were less likely to express open hostility towards the policies of his father. Anne and her court provided yet another cultural centre, and were particularly active as patrons of literature (Barroll 1991, 2000; Lewalski 1993: 15–43). Anne organised and danced in court masques, for example, and Lucy, countess of Bedford, her most important associate, was active as a patron to writers such as Donne and Daniel. Anne, like Prince Henry, sometimes encouraged literary production that would never have been supported by James. Her patronage thus made it possible for the Children of the Queen’s Revels, under the licensing authority of Samuel Daniel, to present a series of scandalously topical anti-court plays at Blackfriars between 1603 and 1608. With its competing households and dual nationalities, Jacobean court culture can seem like something of a hodge-podge. It is much easier to identify specific styles and tastes associated with the court of Charles I (1625–49). To a considerable degree, this is the result of the active interest that Charles and his French wife Henrietta Maria took in poetry and drama. Indeed, as the involvement of the royal couple with painters such as Rubens and Van Dyke suggests, they were actively interested in the arts as an integral part of court life, and each was interested in bringing continental art forms to the English court. Charles had a theatre built at Whitehall to accommodate court performances of plays, and he and his wife both actively encouraged the cultivation of poetic talent. The poet Thomas Carew was given a position among Charles’s entourage, and writers like Sir William Davenant, Sir John Suckling, and Edmund

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Waller enjoyed positions at court largely on the basis of their literary talents (Smuts 1987: 183–213). Charles and Henrietta Maria maintained separate households and patronised different writers, and Karen Britland has demonstrated that Henrietta Maria often used court plays and entertainments to display her own independent political positions and cultural agendas (Britland 2006). Still, the couple’s famous domestic happiness – itself a theme in many Caroline court masques emphasising harmony and union – prevented the kind of conflicting court cultures typical of Jacobean England. Charles’s interest in the arts can be understood as part of his larger concern with the formal and ceremonial aspects of government. Perhaps in reaction to his experience with the informal decorum of his father’s household, Charles aggressively sought to reform the manners and administrative protocols of the court. Especially after the assassination of the duke of Buckingham in 1628, the king was careful to insist upon the ceremonial aspects of monarchy and made efforts to separate intimate friendship from public policy. The Caroline reform of the court was itself the subject of Carew’s great masque Coelum Britannicum (1634). A related interest in decorum and restraint informs both the themes and styles of Caroline court literature. Accordingly, in addition to literature and art celebrating the achievement of peace, harmonious government, idealised nature, and Neoplatonic love, Caroline court culture produced an aesthetic predicated upon neoclassical orderliness and controlled elegance. In art, as in government, Charles put a premium upon formal control. Students of literary history will most likely associate Caroline court culture with the poetry of writers like Carew, Robert Herrick, or Richard Lovelace, men typically lumped together in anthologies as Cavalier poets. Though recent scholarship has demonstrated that generalisations about this group can be misleading (Sharpe 1987: 1–53), it is nevertheless clear that much of their poetry shares an interrelated set of aesthetic and social values, which in turn reflects the influence of the Caroline court. This is not surprising, since many of these writers had active ties to the court: Herrick was a Buckingham client, for example, and Carew was Sewer in Ordinary to Charles himself. To generalise, their poems celebrate liberty without licentiousness, the social harmony of good fellowship, hostility to puritanical abstemiousness, and a natural order that includes both plenty and hierarchy. Even those poems whose erotic frankness might seem antithetical to the austere manners of the Caroline court qualify their erotic abandon with the evident self-discipline of artistic decorum. The result – in poems like Carew’s ‘The Rapture’ or Herrick’s ‘Upon Julia’s Clothes’ – is mixed: they celebrate desire and formal self-control at once, the former contained and made acceptable by the latter. Self-control is also thematically central to many of the masques and poems designed explicitly to celebrate the royal family. Time and again the self-command and domestic order of the royal couple are depicted as mirror and model for social harmony on a national scale. The realm, in such fictions, enjoys and participates in the peace, plenty, and liberty secured at the top by personal virtue. As his household reforms

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suggest, Charles attempted to live up to this image, and he was also eager to use it as propaganda in order to secure the love and loyalty of subjects (Smuts 1987: 245–76). There is some irony to the fact that Charles’s court, with its emphasis on order, civility, and peace, should have been destroyed by civil war. Perhaps this decisive event tells us that the image of Charles promulgated within the court was ineffective in securing loyalties outside it. Charles, who decided against all precedent to rule without consulting Parliament from 1629 to 1640, has often been characterised as being increasingly out of touch with his subjects. Perhaps, however, the emergent strains tell us merely that even the sacred image of a king was no longer sufficient to forestall political crisis brought on by other factors. The royal court was restored with the king in 1660, and it was arguably not until the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1688 that the institution of Renaissance monarchy gave way to a more modern form of representative government in England. The court of Charles II was suitably lavish, and its writers celebrated the achievements of Elizabethan and early Stuart culture. But the prevalence of Restoration nostalgia suggests, too, a sense of loss: a sense, that is, that post-revolutionary monarchy could no longer be quite the same kind of political or cultural institution.

Notes 1 2

On Elizabeth’s ladies, see Wright 1987; on Bedford, see Lewalski 1993: 95–123. Since Wyatt’s lyrics were circulated in manuscript, it is often impossible to date them precisely. For further remarks on the political

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language of eros see Lerer 1997, Levin 1994, and Perry 2006. This libel, which was finally printed in 1643, appears in several manuscripts from the 1620s and 1630s (Bellany 2002: 96–7.)

References and Further Reading Adams, S. (2002). Leicester and the Court: Essays on Elizabethan Politics. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Anglo, S. (1969). Spectacle Pageantry, and Early Tudor Policy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barroll, L. (1991). ‘The court of the first Stuart queen’. In L. L. Peck (ed.), The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (pp. 291–308). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Barroll, L. (2000). Anna of Denmark, Queen of England: A Cultural Biography. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Bellany, A. (1993). ‘ “Raylinge rymes and vaunting verse”: libellous politics in early Stuart

England, 1603–1628’. In K. Sharpe and P. Lake (eds.), Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (pp. 285–310). Stanford: Stanford University Press. Bellany, A. (2002). The Politics of Court Scandal in Early Modern England: News Culture and the Overbury Affair, 1603–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bray, A. (1994). ‘Homosexuality and the signs of male friendship in Elizabethan England’. In J. Goldberg (ed.), Queering the Renaissance (pp. 40–61). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Britland, K. (2006). Drama at the Courts of Queen Henrietta Maria. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Castiglione, B. (1561), The Book of the Courtier, trans. T. Hoby. London. Clifford, A. (1997). The Diary of the Lady Anne Clifford, 1590–1676, ed. Isabella Barrios. Boulder, CO: Aardvark Press. Cole, M. H. (1999). The Portable Queen: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Ceremony. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Corrigan, B. J. (2004). Playhouse Law in Shakespeare’s World. Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Cuddy, N. (1987). ‘The revival of the entourage: the Bedchamber of James I, 1603–1625’. In David Starkey (ed.), The English Court: From the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War (pp. 173–225). London: Longman. Finkelpearl, P. J. (1969). John Marston of the Middle Temple: An Elizabethan Dramatist in his Social Setting. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Frye, S. (1993). Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation. New York: Oxford University Press. Guy, J. (ed.) (1995). The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holinshed, R. (1808). Chronicles of England Scotland, and Ireland [1587], 6 vols. London: J. Johnson et al. Lerer, S. (1997). Courtly Letters in the Age of Henry VIII. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levin, C. (1994) The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Lewalski, B. K. (1993). Writing Women in Jacobean England. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lytle, G. F. and S. Orgel (eds.) (1981). Patronage in the Renaissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Marotti, A. F. (1986). John Donne, Coterie Poet. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Marotti, A. F. (1995). Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. May, S. W. (1991). The Elizabethan Courtier Poets: The Poems and their Contexts. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. More, T. (1965). Utopia, ed. J. H. Hexter and E. Surtz. New Haven: Yale University Press. Peck, D. C. (ed.) (1985). Leicester’s Commonwealth: The Copy of a Letter Written by a Master of Art of

Cambridge (1584) and Related Documents. Athens: Ohio University Press. Peck, L. L. (1990). Court Patronage and Corruption in Early Stuart England. Boston: Unwin Hyman. Peck, L. L. (ed.) (1991). The Mental World of the Jacobean Court. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Perry, C. (1997). The Making of Jacobean Culture: James I and the Renegotiation of Elizabethan Literary Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Perry, C. (2006). Literature and Favoritism in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Prest, W. R. (1972). The Inns of Court Under Elizabeth I and the Early Stuarts, 1590–1640. London: Longman. Sharpe, K. (1987). Criticism and Compliment: the Politics of Literature in the England of Charles I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sidney, P. (1966). A Defense of Poetry, ed. J. A. Van Dorsten. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smuts, R. M. (1987). Court Culture and the Origins of a Royalist Tradition in Early Stuart England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Starkey, David (ed.) (1987a). The English Court: From the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War. London: Longman. Starkey, D. (1987b). ‘Intimacy and innovation: the rise of the Privy Chamber, 1485–1547’. In Starkey (ed.), The English Court: From the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War (pp. 71–118). London: Longman. Strong, R. (1977). The Cult of Elizabeth: Elizabethan Portraiture and Pageantry. London: Thames & Hudson. Strong, R. (1986). Henry, Prince of Wales, and England’s Lost Renaissance. London: Thames & Hudson. Thurley, S. (1999). Whitehall Palace: An Architectural History of the Royal Apartments, 1240–1690. New Haven: Yale University Press. Tricomi, A. (1989). Anticourt Drama in England, 1603–1642. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Walker, G. (2007). Writing Under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Whigham, F. A. (1984). Ambition and Privilege: The Social Tropes of Elizabethan Courtesy Theory. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Court and Coterie Culture Wilson, E. C. (1939). England’s Eliza. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wilson, Jean (ed.) (1980). Entertainments for Elizabeth I. Woodbridge: Brewer. Wright, P. (1987). ‘A change in direction: the ramifications of a female household, 1558– 1603’. In David Starkey (ed.), The English Court:

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From the Wars of the Roses to the Civil War (pp. 147–72). London: Longman. Zagorin, P. (1993). ‘Sir Thomas Wyatt and the court of Henry VIII: the courtier’s ambivalence’. Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 23, 113–41.

21

Courtship and Counsel: John Lyly’s Campaspe Greg Walker

Comparing the literary merits of the classical authors and his own contemporaries, the Elizabethan scholar Francis Meres famously traced the metempsychosis of the soul of Ovid into the body of a sixteenth-century Englishman. As the soul of Euphorbus was thought to live in Pythagoras, so the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous, honey-tongued Shakespeare. (Meres 1904: II, 317–18)

But, if Shakespeare was indeed the fortunate recipient of the genius of Ovid, the transfer may not have been entirely spontaneous or unmediated, for the claim to be the first truly Ovidian author in England can be made by another, earlier, ‘honeytongued’ individual, the playwright and prose writer John Lyly, whose romantic narratives explored the transformative, metamorphic powers of love a decade and a half before Shakespeare wrote A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Lyly, born circa 1554, the son of a Kentish ecclesiastical administrator and grandson of the grammarian William Lyly, is perhaps best known for his prose works, Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578) and Euphues and His England (1580), and for the influential prose style, dubbed euphuism, which characterised them. Slightly less well known, but currently enjoying something of a return to scholarly favour are his prose dramas, written during the 1580s and early 1590s: Campaspe, Sappho and Phao, Galatea, Endymion (perhaps the best known), Midas, The Woman in the Moon, Love’s Metamorphosis, and Mother Bombie.1 At the high point of his career in the early 1580s, Lyly was writing for performance at the Blackfriars Theatre in the City of London and the royal court, employing a company of boy actors drawn from the boys of St Paul’s and the children of the Chapel Royal, under the general patronage of Edward de Vere, earl of Oxford (see Chapter 45, Boys’ Plays). Lyly’s Campaspe, perhaps the most politically engaged of these court plays, was performed before Elizabeth I at Whitehall on 1 January 1584. In it, as in each of Lyly’s early dramas, a classical figure undergoes a sea change into a form that more

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directly addresses the preoccupations of the court of England’s Virgin Queen. In Lyly’s source for another play, Sapho and Phao, for example, Sapho, the Lesbian poetess, is an ageing bawd who is converted from the love of women by her lust for the supernaturally beautiful ferryman Phao. But in Lyly’s hands she becomes a chaste young maid who resists her own desires and rejects the advances of the amorous boatman. In Campaspe, the bisexual adventurer Alexander the Great is similarly transformed into a chaste heterosexual who, although temporarily floored by desire for the young Theban captive, Campaspe, is restored to his senses when he discovers she loves another, his favourite artist Apelles. In the somewhat perfunctory denouement to this play, Alexander blesses the union of prisoner and painter before departing to pursue his greater imperial destiny alone. In each of these dramas, Lyly depicts a prince who is tempted to abandon political duties in favour of a sexual relationship with an inappropriate commoner, but eventually thinks better of it. To strengthen this similarity of situation Lyly elevates Sapho from a poetess to a queen, and – to remove any last trace of sexual impropriety – shifts her from Lesbos to Syracuse, so making her probably the least Sapphic Sapho in literary history. The political resonance of presenting this theme of unwise, unequal dalliances at court when Elizabeth I was controversially considering marriage to a non-royal Catholic, Francis, duke of Anjou, has been noted by a number of critics, and does not need labouring here.2 But it is important to note at this stage that these plays, and Campaspe in particular, do touch upon issues of intense political importance to their contemporary audiences, and so Lyly was inevitably flying close to the wind. Direct intervention in politics by writers outside the charmed circle of the court was always a perilous business if the rules of engagement were not carefully followed. A powerful reminder of this fact had been delivered some five years earlier on 31 August 1579 when the printer John Stubbes had his right hand publicly severed as punishment for publishing a pamphlet, The Discovery of A Gaping Gulf, critical of the queen’s willingness to consider marriage to Anjou. Lyly’s play takes as its theme the very issues that Stubbes’s case raised: the nature of political counsel and the manner in which criticism of the sovereign might be expressed in a personal monarchy. Indeed Lyly’s choice of protagonist and the form in which he is represented are tailored to highlight the discussion of the theory and practice of princely government. Lyly’s play seems, however, to have been carefully designed to avoid the appearance of the sort of ill-judged, direct political canvassing that Stubbes’s tract represents. For scholars of the Renaissance, the life of Alexander the Great brought philosophy and politics into conjunction in their most obvious and extreme forms. Alexander was, of course, tutored by Aristotle, and so could be presented as a humanist icon, a type of Plato’s ideal philosopher king, mingling the martial and political skills of the governor with the intellectual and moral training of the philosopher. It is in this mode that Alexander is introduced in the first scene of Campaspe in a brief but exemplary exchange with his companion and dramatic foil, Hephestion:

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hephestion:

Greg Walker …it resteth now that we have as great care to govern in peace as conquer in war, that while arms cease arts may flourish, and joining letters with lances we endeavour to be as good philosophers as soldiers, knowing it no less praise to be wise than commendable to be valiant. Your Majesty therein showeth that you have as great desire to rule as to subdue; and needs must that commonwealth be fortunate whose captain is a philosopher and whose philosopher is a captain. (1.1.94–103)3

Not only was Alexander trained by the greatest philosopher of the classical period, but he subsequently came into contact with other great thinkers at key moments in his career, most notably Diogenes the Cynic, whose robust rejection of authority and refusal to flatter were the source of many anecdotes exemplifying the problems of reconciling princes with their outspoken subjects (Erasmus 1542; Lievesay 1948). Thus exemplary stories accumulated around Alexander as around no other classical figure during the Middle Ages and the early Renaissance, not least because the model of a martial prince that he provided was more readily applied to early modern monarchies than stories set in republican Rome. As Chaucer’s Monk remarks in The Canterbury Tales: The storie of Alisaundre is so commune That every wight that hath discrecioun Hath herd somwhat or al of his fortune. (The Monk’s Tale, 2631–4)4

He was even made the hero of a number of medieval romances, which transformed his historical campaigns into the stuff of fantasy, involving encounters with mythical beasts, space flights, and submarine journeys among their itinerary (see Cary 1956; Salter 2001). And yet there was also sufficient information in circulation about the historical Alexander to confirm that he had actually been far from the ideal sovereign that Plato imagined (North 1579). His killing of a number of his companions, one in a drunken rage, another through the ignoble employment of an assassin, created problems for those who wished to use Alexander as an unproblematic model of princely wisdom and enlightened patronage. As the heir of both the medieval romance tradition and the more critical legacy of the Renaissance historians, Lyly consequently inherited a profoundly ambivalent figure as the protagonist of his first courtly play, and he exploited that ambivalence to the full (Pincombe 1996: 29). As Michael Pincombe has observed, although the Alexander we see on stage commits no acts of violence and eventually behaves with admirable political correctness in resolving the dilemma created by his actions, the other characters around him act as if they were aware of the Alexander of history, whose behaviour is less predictable and potentially more threatening (Pincombe 1996: 29–30). In this phenomenon lies one of the play’s most interesting features: its

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conscious deployment of anachronism. The action is ostensibly set early in Alexander’s reign, immediately following the destruction of Thebes in 335 BC, but characters speak and act as if they have knowledge of their king’s entire career. Chrysippus alludes to his apparent aspirations towards divinity, a feature of his conquest of Egypt in 332 BC, and Alexander himself refers to the death of Callisthenes, which occurred even later, during his central Asian campaign in spring 327 BC, while other judgements of his character sound like retrospective summations of his life as a whole (see, for example, 3.4.21–3). Perhaps the most strikingly anachronistic role is played in this respect by the soldiers Clitus and Parmenio, who behave oddly like the citizens of a modern totalitarian regime, conducting their conversations in anxious, semi-public tones and spicing their talk with assurances of their loyalty to the state. When the opportunity to speculate directly about the causes of what the audience knows to be Alexander’s lovesickness, Parmenio rejects it outright in terms that make his political anxieties clear: In kings’ causes I rather love to doubt than conjecture, and I think it better to be ignorant than inquisitive; they have long ears and stretched arms, in whose heads suspicion is a proof and to be accused is to be condemned. (3.4.6–10)

The unsettling effect that this has upon the play is clearly deliberate, and relies upon irony. For, as those members of the audience familiar with the Alexander story would know, Clitus and Parmenio were historically, along with Callisthenes, the best-known victims of the king’s anger, each being killed (in 329 BC and 330 BC respectively) for just such ‘suspicions’ of disloyalty as they are here so anxious to dispel. Such allusions play upon the audience’s familiarity with the Alexander story, drawing upon their knowledge of his life and legacy to create ironic resonance at key moments in the plot. The drama thus takes on the aspect of an academic exercise, the philosophical dissection of a problem through the application and study of a historical analogue. Alexander is represented whole, as the sum of his achievements and reputation, as he provides an extreme example of the problem of statecraft that Lyly is exploring. What if he were the exemplary philosopher king that many of the humanist anecdotes imply? How might he react to the emotional stress created by love? Could civic virtue stand up to the potential for Ovidian psychological metamorphosis brought about by extreme emotion? And yet Lyly is also able to deploy the rest of the Alexandrian narrative by implication, alluding metatheatrically to the threat of what might happen if hypothetical virtue was to give way under the promptings of passion. The capacity of the true prince to discipline his or her own natural instincts in the interests of the commonweal through the application of philosophical detachment and the will to virtue is, of course, the ‘point’ of Campaspe. The key to Lyly’s portrayal of his ideal Alexander is self-restraint, his capacity to resist in peacetime those urges to decisive, brutal action, which characterised his ‘terrible’ leadership in time of war. The threat to that restraint is provided by his passion for Campaspe. What brings the king back to reason and self-control is his relationship with his advisers, and, notably,

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not the horrified reaction of Hephestion to the very idea of Alexander in love, still less the overarching criticisms of Diogenes, but the amiable personality and gentle conduct of Apelles the painter, and of Campaspe herself. The moral is itself celebrated in the final scene: alexander:

hephestion: alexander:

Let the trumpet sound, strike up the drum, and I will presently into Persia. How now, Hephestion, is Alexander able to resist love as he list? The conquering of Thebes was not so honourable as the subduing of these thoughts. It were a shame Alexander should desire to command the world if he could not command himself. (5.4.163–9)

This translates precisely Pliny’s reading of the ‘original’ story of Alexander’s ‘giving up’ of Campaspe: the king ‘in this act of his … won as much glory as by any victory over his enemies: for now he had conquered himself ’ (Pliny 1601: II, 539). This victory of self-control and the reconquest of the self which it enables are deeply inscribed in Campaspe, not only in the narrative, but in the very form in which it is presented, Lyly’s characteristic euphuistic prose. For Lyly, euphuism, with its careful balancing of phrases and poised antithetical tropes, was not simply a stylistic innovation but the linguistic embodiment of an entire classical philosophical tradition. In Campaspe, the best state of human existence is presented in the embrace of the Aristotelian mean, the ideal midpoint between antithetical extremes of conduct. Hence Alexander’s characteristic magnanimity is defined as the condition in which niggardliness and profligacy are held in equal disdain, just as good government is the ideal accommodation between the rival tendencies towards anarchy and tyranny, the virtuous point at which powerful and malevolent forces are brought to a benevolent and productive equilibrium. The linguistic equivalent of this philosophy is precisely euphuism, with its selfconscious deployment of the tropes of equipoise: isocolon (the balancing of equally long parallel clauses), paramoion (the even balancing of parallel clauses repeating key sounds), and parison (the balancing of parallel clauses employing a repeated pattern of the parts of speech). Thus, in Sapho and Phao, Phao reveals his happy, balanced state in the very language that he employs to describe the advantages of his humble condition: Thou art a ferryman, Phao, but a free man, possessing for riches content, and for honours quiet … Thy heart’s thirst is satisfied with thy hands’ thrift, and thy gentle labours in the day turn to sweet slumbers in the night. (1.1.1–2, 5–7, emphasis added)

When he came to write drama, Lyly found a theatrical equivalent for euphuism, and thus for the exploration of his Aristotelian philosophy, in a stagecraft of balanced locations. As critics have frequently noted, Lyly’s plays are not packed with action, nor do they conspicuously develop their characters. Rather their interest lies in the

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alignment, and periodic realignment, of the philosophical and emotional principles at their core, a process which Lyly plots with almost geometrical precision through the movement of characters between the onstage locations or ‘mansions’ (three dimensional structures placed about the hall or stage, visible throughout the performance, and where characters congregate for particular sequences (Saccio 1969: 12–14)), and sometimes of the real or imagined movement of those mansions themselves. In each of his earliest plays there are three symbolic locations, each at odds in some way with the others, and each representative of an important aspect of the play’s central problem. In Campaspe the problem involves the proper relationship between government and philosophy, itself merely a more politically charged rehearsal of the medieval opposition of the active and contemplative lives, the ways of Martha and Mary. Government, the active life, is represented by the court of Alexander, philosophical withdrawal by Diogenes’ ‘cabin’ or tub. The impossibility of reconciling service in the court with the extreme form of the contemplative life is demonstrated physically by the impossibility of bringing the court and the tub together. Although Alexander tells Hephestion, ‘Were I not Alexander, I would wish to be Diogenes’ (2.2.167), his duties as a governor and general prevent him from embracing the stoic or cynic life. Similarly, Diogenes’ rejection of the world prevents him embracing the life of the court. When in 1.3 Alexander summons the philosophers to court, Diogenes pointedly refuses to attend. When the king subsequently attempts to bring about a reconciliation by shifting the symbolic geography of the stage, he meets with no greater success: alexander: diogenes:

Diogenes, I will have thy cabin removed near to my court, because I will be a philosopher. And when you have done so, I pray you remove your court further from my cabin, because I will not be a courtier. (5.4.78–83)

Ultimately, the two can only rehearse the absolute positions that they had adopted in their earlier encounter: alexander: diogenes:

I have the world at command. And I in contempt. (2.2.161–2)

Diogenes’ uncompromising criticism of Alexander’s position is theoretically admirable but politically ineffective, and it is ineffective precisely because it is uncompromising. In courtly politics the essence of political engagement was an unequal, hard-won, and continually renegotiated compromise between ruler and ruled. At its simplest it involved the prince’s willingness to mitigate his own power in order to address the needs of his subjects, and his subjects’ willingness to present those needs in a range of prescribed and acceptable forms. The medium in which this compromise

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was achieved was ‘courtliness’ itself, one of the most effective of the enabling fictions of early modern political culture. In Campaspe this political theory is given a concrete form. The median point, the compromise location between the court and the cabin, is Apelles’ workshop – the site at which loyal service of the Crown can be reconciled with independence of mind and the practice of virtue. Unlike Diogenes, Apelles is able to tell the king unwelcome truths without entirely rejecting everything for which he stands. The painter’s integrity, and his refusal to flatter, are presented in a scene in which Alexander seeks to try his hand as an artist: alexander: apelles: alexander: apelles:

Where do you first begin, when you draw any picture? The proportion of the face, in just compass as I can. I would begin with the eye as a light to all the rest. If you will paint as you are, a king, your Majesty may begin where you please; but as you would be a painter you must begin with the face. (3.3.81–7)

When Alexander takes a charcoal to test his skill, Apelles similarly mingles courtesy with a refusal to disguise the truth, a quality that effectively communicates to the king his lack of real aptitude in the artistic sphere: alexander: apelles: alexander:

How have I done here? Like a king. I think so, but nothing more unlike a painter. (3.4.126–8)

Apelles’ workshop gives three-dimensional form to the semi-private theoretical space created by good counsel. Unlike the public rebukes delivered by Diogenes from his tub – symbolically located in the marketplace, the most common of civic spaces – the artist’s workshop is a private space that Alexander chooses to enter of his own volition, and in which he willingly agrees to suspend the normal rules of public deference and decorum. There Apelles has the initiative and can exercise his own authority to criticise (albeit employing the protocols of courteous exchange) the weaknesses or presumptions of his sovereign. Thus good princes forestalled the tendency to slide into tyranny by willingly subjecting themselves to criticism, and loyal subjects reinforced the public honour of their princes by offering in private the sound guidance that prevented their acting inappropriately in public. Exactly this interplay of the private and public personae of the sovereign is evident in Pliny’s account of Alexander’s relationship with Apelles. The historian describes how the king, being in [Apelles’] shop, would seem to talk much and reason about his art, and many times let fall some words to little purpose, bewraying [revealing] his ignorance, Apelles after his mild manner would desire his grace to hold his peace, and said, ‘Sir, no more words, for fear the prentice boys there, that are grinding of colours, do laugh you to scorn’. (Pliny 1601: II, 538–9)

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Alexander, seeing the good intentions behind the painter’s advice, accepts the tacit rebuke gracefully. So reverently thought the King of him, that being otherwise a choleric prince, yet he would take any word of his hands in that familiar sort spoken in the best part, and never be offended. (Pliny 1601: II, 538–9)

In Diogenes we thus see a model of the wrong use of counsel, a dramatic analogy to John Stubbes’s presumption in launching his criticism of Elizabeth’s marriage negotiations in the very public medium of print. In Apelles we see a model of how princely government works in its ideal form. The good counsel of the courtier, appropriately delivered, prompts the well-educated prince to discover within himself the strength of character necessary to conquer his own baser instincts and desires (Hunter 1991: 7–8). There is, as I have suggested, something of the schoolroom about Campaspe, with its exemplary exposition of clear and absolute positions, and the ease with which the emotional complications are ultimately swept away and order restored once everyone reverts to type and behaves in the way that the textbooks say that they should. It is something of a laboured lesson in the foundations of good kingship and sound government that the play offers. In part, no doubt, its rather ponderous deference to courtly sensibilities (evident in both the portrayal of Alexander and the short shrift finally given to Diogenes’ principled objection to courtliness (Pincombe 1996: 34)) was a response to circumstances, a conspicuous attempt to stay with Sir Andrew Aguecheek on ‘the windy side of the law’ in the wake of Stubbes’s case, with its grotesquely fitting punishment for a particularly undextrous intervention in court politics. Yet in part it is also a conscious strategy to draw the audience’s attention to the play’s own method of representing political issues, for Apelles’ decorous use of counsel is similar, of course, to that employed by Lyly himself, who took to court, at the royal request, plays which touched decorously on political themes. Campaspe loyally pointed out the inappropriateness of publicly rebuking the sovereign on an issue which was felt, by Queen Elizabeth at least, to be among those ‘kings’ causes’ not open to general discussion, yet the play nonetheless also manages to imply to her by decorous analogy the need to refrain from unwise marriages below a prince’s station.

Notes 1

2

All have recently been re-edited for Manchester University Press’s Revels Plays series (see Pincombe 1996). Lyly 1902: II, 366ff.; Feuillerat 1910: 107ff.; and Jankowski 1991. Pincombe (1996) and Bevington (Lyly 1991: 165–7) are more sceptical.

3 4

All references are to the edition by Hunter and Bevington (Lyly 1991). References are to The Riverside Chaucer (Chaucer 1988).

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Best, M. R. (1968). ‘Lyly’s static drama’. Renaissance Drama, 1, 75–86. Bevington, D. (1966). ‘John Lyly and Queen Elizabeth: royal flattery in Campaspe and Sapho and Phao’. Renaissance Papers, 1, 56–67. Cary, G. (1956). The Medieval Alexander. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chaucer, Geoffrey (1988). The Riverside Chaucer, ed. L. D. Benson, 3rd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Erasmus, Desiderius (1542). The Apophthegms of Erasmus, trans. Nicholas Udall. London. Feuillerat, A. (1910). John Lyly. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Guinle, F. (2008). ‘John Lyly’s Alexander and Campaspe: an exercise in tautology: selfhood as cultural and literary construction’. In Pauline Blanc (ed.), Selfhood on the Early Modern Stage (pp. 50–64). Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. Houppert, J. W. (1975). John Lyly. New York: Twayne Publishing. Hunter, G. K. (1962). John Lyly: The Humanist as Courtier. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Hunter, G. K. (1991). ‘Introduction’. In G. K. Hunter and D. Bevington (eds.), Campaspe and Sapho and Phao. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Jankowski, T. A. (1991). ‘The subversion of flattery: the queen’s body in John Lyly’s Sapho and Phao’. Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 5, 69–87. Jeffery, Violet M. (1928; repr. 1969). John Lyly and the Italian Renaissance. New York: Russell & Russell. Lievsay, J. L. (1948). ‘Some Renaissance views of Diogenes the Cynic’. In J. G. McManaway et al.

(eds.), J. Q. Adams Memorial Studies (pp. 447– 55). Washington DC: Folger Shakespeare Library. Lyly, John (1902). The Complete Works, ed., R. Warwick Bond, 3 vols. Oxford. Lyly, John (1991). Campaspe and Sapho and Phao, ed. G. K. Hunter and D. Bevington. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Lyly, John (2003). Euphues, the Anatomy of Wit; and, Euphues and his England, ed. L. Scragg. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Meres, Francis (1904). Palladis Tamia. In G. Gregory Smith (ed.), Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2 vols. Oxford. North, Thomas (1579). ‘Alexander’. In The Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, trans. Sir Thomas North. Pincombe, Michael (1996). The Plays of John Lyly: Eros and Eliza. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Pliny the Elder (1601). The History of the World, commonly called the Natural History of C. Plinius Secundus, trans. P. Holland, 2 vols. London. Saccio, Peter (1969). John Lyly: A Study in Allegorical Drama. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Salter, David J. (2001). Holy and Noble Beasts: Encounters with Animals in Medieval Literature. Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer. Tassi, Margaret (2005). The Scandal of Images: Iconoclasm, Eroticism and Painting in Early Modern English Drama (especially ch. 2). Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press. Walker, Greg (1998). The Politics of Performance in Early Renaissance Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

22

Bacon’s ‘Of Simulation and Dissimulation’ Martin Dzelzainis

For over three-quarters of a century, the agenda for interpreting Francis Bacon’s Essays (1597, 1612, 1625) has been set by a handful of commentators, notably R. S. Crane and Morris W. Croll, whose articles originally appeared together in 1923, and Stanley Fish, whose ‘Georgics of the Mind: The Experience of Bacon’s Essays’ was published in 1971 and then expanded into a chapter of his Self-Consuming Artifacts (1972). Fish begins by endorsing Crane’s suggestion that many of the essays that appeared for the first time in the editions of 1612 and 1625 were written specifically to fulfil the scientific programme Bacon had announced in The Advancement of Learning (1605). According to Fish, however, the fact that several of these new essays appear to address the deficiencies in the state of moral and civil knowledge identified in 1605 is not what gives them their scientific quality. For this we must look to the experience of reading them, since ‘this experience, rather than the materials of which it is composed, is what is scientific about the Essays’. The keynote of this experience is that the reader is left more uncertain and puzzled at every turn – a strategy designed to promote ‘a more self-conscious scrutiny of one’s mental furniture’ and hence to ‘foster the curious blend of investigative eagerness and wary scepticism which, according to Bacon, distinguishes the truly scientific cast of mind’ (Fish 1972: 81, 95). For Fish himself, the Essays are a crucial exhibit in the case for a phenomenological approach to criticism; that is, ‘a method of analysis which focuses on the reader rather than the artifact’. Instead of making a fetish of the ‘objectivity of the text’, we should accept literature as a form of kinetic art, which only operates by virtue of ‘the actualizing role of the observer’. The task of criticism accordingly is to analyse ‘the developing responses of the reader in relation to the words as they succeed one another in time’ (Fish 1972: 387–8, 400–1). While this has proved a very influential method of reading Bacon’s later essays in particular, it also has severe drawbacks. Firstly, it means that no particular significance attaches to the essay topics in themselves, since a title ‘merely specifies the particular area of inquiry within which and in terms of which the reader becomes

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involved in a characteristic kind of activity, the questioning and testing of a commonly received notion’. For these purposes, an essay on, say, received notions of love, is indistinguishable from one on, say, received notions of adversity. Fish also equivocates on the issue of authorial intentions: on the one hand he maintains that it is entirely possible to ‘analyze an effect without worrying about whether it was produced accidentally or on purpose’, but on the other hand the question does not arise since it so happens that he is dealing with ‘texts in which the evidence of control is overwhelming’ (Fish 1972: 92, 409). He is therefore quite certain that what Bacon intended to achieve by writing as he did was to induce a state of confusion in the reader as a preliminary step towards acquiring a more open and ‘scientific cast of mind’. One difficulty with this view is that by the time Bacon came to prepare a new edition of the Essays in 1625 he had arguably abandoned the project of a demonstrative civil science – if he ever thought it was feasible in the first place (see Box 1982; Peltonen 1996: 292–5). Another difficulty is that this account of Bacon’s aims is hard to reconcile with his intentions in writing as he did (on the distinction between intentions in and by writing, see Skinner 1988: 260–1). The 1625 volume was clearly a contribution to the genre of the advice book, as is underlined by the two presentation copies intended for the duke of Buckingham (the dedicatee) and the Prince of Wales (see Bacon 1985: xix–xxxi). But if Bacon’s intention in writing and publishing the work was to offer immediately useful political advice, then it is hard to see why he chose to do so in what is, according to Fish at least, a ‘style that confuses and unsettles’ (Fish 1972: 378). At the last moment, Fish appears to recoil from his own thesis by revealing that notwithstanding ‘their provisionality the Essays are finally objects; they are not used up in the reading but remain valuable as source material for future consultation’ (Fish 1972: 154). But it is the Essays that have failed, not the theory. For as artefacts which are not altogether ‘used up in the reading’, they fall short of the theoretical ideal of total self-consumption. And even as ‘objects’ they are drearily literal stuff, ‘valuable’ only for reference purposes. The most direct way of challenging this somewhat depressing verdict on the Essays is to recontextualise them and thereby restore their historical identity. Of the essays from the 1625 collection that are discussed by Fish, the one which would benefit most from such an approach is ‘Of Simulation and Dissimulation’ (for the text, see Bacon 1996: 349–51). The origins of this essay on simulation (pretending to be what you are not) and dissimulation (not seeming to be what you are), lay not in any scientific programme but in the so-called new humanism of the late sixteenth century. The complicated alignment of leading figures like Lipsius, Montaigne, and Bacon in relation to each other and to their classical mentors, the Stoic philosopher Seneca and the historian Tacitus, was first sketched by Croll. But he was looking largely at the prose style(s) that characterised the new humanist configuration, whereas recent scholars have been more interested in the intellectual programme that underpinned it. According to Richard Tuck, the years following the Massacre of St Bartholomew’s Eve in 1572 were the time ‘when scepticism, Stoicism and Tacitism came together to make

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a mixture as powerful and soon as all-pervasive as the Ciceronian humanism of the Quattrocento had been’ (Tuck 1993: 63). The crucible for the these developments – at least in northern Europe – was the French court, presided over by the Queen Mother, Marie de Medici, the daughter of the ruler of Florence to whom Machiavelli had dedicated The Prince. Italian émigrés were prominent in these circles, and one of their number, the historian Davila, later described how King Henri III would retire every day after dinner with Baccio de Bene, and Giacopo Corbinelli, both Florentines, men exceedingly learned in the Greek and Latin studies, making them read unto him Polybius and Cornelius Tacitus; but much more often The Discourses and Prince of Machiavel; whose readings stirring him up, he was so much the more transported with his own secret plots. (cit. Tuck 1993: 42)

The least surprising item here is Machiavelli’s Prince, a work that systematically inverts orthodox political morality (see Machiavelli 1988: xix–xx). For example, whereas the Roman moral philosopher Cicero advised in his De officiis (On Duties) that the force and deceit typified by the lion and the fox are alien to human nature, Machiavelli urges in chapter 18 (‘How rulers should keep their promises’) that the ruler ‘should imitate both the lion and the fox’. And whereas Cicero decreed that pretence and concealment ought to be eliminated from the whole of our lives (ex omni vita simulatio dissimulatioque tollenda est), Machiavelli positively insists that one must be a great feigner and dissembler (gran simulatore e dissimulatore) (Cicero 1975: 44–5 (1.13.41), 330–1 (3.15.61); Machiavelli 1988: 62). Having in effect rejected Cicero, it is no surprise that this group embraced Tacitus. The writings in which he dissected imperial Rome were increasingly regarded as a storehouse of political techniques to be employed for the purposes both of setting up a tyranny and surviving under one. Thus the account of Tiberius in the Annals dwells repeatedly on his power to manipulate others through the art of dissimulation (see 1.4, 4.71, 6.50). Moreover, in 1574 the Stoic scholar Justus Lipsius published a definitive new edition of Tacitus, and followed this up in 1589 with a political handbook (translated from the Latin in 1594 as Six Books of Politics or Civil Doctrine) that quoted Tacitus no fewer than 547 times. Lipsius agreed fully with Machiavelli about the importance of simulation and dissimulation; a prince ‘having to deal with a fox’ should ‘play the fox’ (1594: 113). Finally, Jacopo Corbinelli’s involvement suggests that the work of Francesco Guicciardini, another admirer of Tacitus, was also read by this group since in 1576 he published the first edition of Guicciardini’s Ricordi (maxims) as Piu consigli et avvertimenti and dedicated it to the Queen Mother. What made this a key text in the new humanism as much as anything was its aphoristic style; indeed Guicciardini was soon hailed by Francesco Sansovino as il primo inventore di queste Propositioni, Regole, Massime, Assiomi, Oracoli, Precetti, Sentenze, Probabili (Sansovino 1583: 100b). As a member of the entourage of Sir Amias Paulet, the English ambassador to the French court, Bacon was able to observe this milieu for himself between 1576 and

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1579, a period he came to regard as formative in his own development. His awareness of the influences at work on the French monarchy would have been sharpened in 1577 when his brother Edward became one of the dedicatees of the Latin edition of Innocent Gentillet’s Anti-Machiavel, which, as its title suggests, systematically denounced the Machiavellianism of the Queen Mother and her acolytes (Jardine and Stewart 1998: 62). At one point in ‘Of Counsel’, drafted after 1607 and first published in 1612, Bacon canvassed various solution to ‘inconveniences’ such as the lack of secrecy, noting that ‘the doctrine of Italy, and the practice of France, in some kings’ times, hath introduced cabinet councils’, which he thought ‘a remedy worse than the disease’. Although Kiernan suggests that Bacon was thinking especially of Henri IV, the particular conjunction of doctrine and practice is actually more redolent of his predecessor. Indeed, Bacon’s fascination with this Franco-Italian brand of politics shows itself even at the level of etymology. Thus the use here of ‘cabinet’ in a political sense is one of the earliest recorded, but while in 1612 this appears to reflect the influence of the French cabinet, the 1638 Latin translation of the essay employs the Italianate form cabinetti (properly gabinetti, first used in its political sense in Italian by Davila) (Bacon 1996: 380; 1985: 216). The same conjunction is writ large in the title of the 1625 edition: The Essays or Counsels Civil and Moral; just as Essays gestures towards Montaigne’s Essais, so Counsels gestures towards Guicciardini’s Consigli. For although Bacon is often associated most closely with just the two genres of essay and aphorism, he was actually familiar with the full repertoire which Sansovino identified as appropriate to civil knowledge; advertisements (avvertimenti), rules (regole), axioms (assiomi), maxims (massime), precepts (precetti), and sentences (sentenze) (for examples, see Bacon 1996: 265, 267, 270, 286). Judged by its title alone, ‘Of Simulation and Dissimulation’ identifies itself as a contribution to a well-established discourse, the parameters of which were set by Cicero’s earnest repudiation of these complementary forms of deceit, and Machiavelli’s satirical endorsement of them. However, Bacon does not wish to sanction either of these positions but to explore a rather different range of possibilities. This is signalled by the opening words of the essay: Dissimulation is but a faint kind of policy or wisdom; for it asketh a strong wit and a strong heart to know when to tell the truth, and to do it. Therefore it is the weaker sort of politiques that are the great dissemblers. (Bacon 1996: 349)

What makes this gambit so arresting is that Bacon emphatically chooses to focus on dissimulation alone. That is to say, he splits apart the double formula that was entrenched in the literature both conceptually and linguistically (simulatio et dissimulatio, simulazione e dissimulazione, simulación y dissimulación, and so on), and discards one element of it. Indeed it should be noted that, other than in the title, the two terms are only considered together as a pair in the concluding paragraph of the essay (and arguably not even then). Considered singly, dissimulation is then dismissed as the hallmark not of the strong but of the ‘weaker sort of politiques’.

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In the next phase of his argument, Bacon persists with dissimulation but now treating it in apposition to ‘arts or policy’ rather than, as might have been expected, simulation. This new pairing is decisively established on the authority of Tacitus, with a pulverising battery of quotations from the Annals, the Histories, and the Agricola (it is likely that these were taken from the 1595 Lipsius edition; see Bacon 1985: 250): Tacitus saith, ‘Livia sorted well with the arts of her husband and dissimulation of her son’; attributing arts or policy to Augustus, and dissimulation to Tiberius. (Bacon 1996: 349)

Once again, however, dissimulation comes off worse, as Bacon finds in favour of the Augustan rather than the Tiberian mode of conduct. This is because those who have ‘that penetration of judgment’ which enables them to decide what matters are appropriate ‘to be laid open, and what to be secreted, and what to be showed at half-lights’, would actually be hampered in their conduct of affairs by a constant ‘habit of dissimulation’. While for those lacking in judgement dissimulation is ‘generally’ the safest option, it is merely one of the choices open to the more able: Certainly the ablest men that were have had all an openness and frankness of dealing; and a name of certainty and veracity; but … at such times when they thought the case indeed required dissimulation, if then they used it, it came to pass that the former opinion spread abroad of their good faith and clearness of dealing made them almost invisible. (Bacon 1996: 350)

In short, openness incorporates dissimulation. However, that is not quite the end of it. For Bacon also appears to be suggesting that openness is not merely inclusive of, but itself actually is, a form of dissimulation. This becomes clearer when we consider some of the materials upon which this passage is based. The first is one of Guicciardini’s maxims: A truthful, open nature [natura vera e libera] is universally liked and is, indeed, a noble thing; but it can be harmful. Deception [simulazione], on the other hand, is useful and sometimes even necessary, given the wickedness of man; but it is odious and ugly. Thus, I do not know which to choose. I suppose you ought ordinarily to embrace the one without, however, abandoning the other. That is to say, in the ordinary course of events practice the former so that you will gain a reputation for being a sincere person [el nome di persona libera]. And nevertheless, on certain important and rare occasions, use deception. If you do this, your deception will be more useful and more successful because, having a reputation for sincerity, you will be more easily believed. (Guicciardini 1970: 107; 1951: 114; see 1576: 39–40)

Here Guicciardini coolly opens up a distinction between nature and reputation, suggesting that, whether or not you actually are sincere, acquiring a reputation for sincer-

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ity will certainly facilitate deceit. The second source is Bacon’s Latin portrait of Julius Caesar (‘Imago Civilis Julii Caesaris’), of unknown date but first published posthumously in 1658. Caesar, Bacon observes, was taken to be by no means cunning or wily, but frank and veracious [apertus et verax]. And though he was in fact a consummate master of simulation and dissimulation [summus simulationis et dissimulationis artifex esset], and made up entirely of arts, insomuch that nothing was left to his nature except what art had approved, nevertheless there appeared in him nothing of artifice, nothing of dissimulation; and it was thought that his nature and disposition had full play and that he did but follow the bent of them. (Bacon 1870: 336, 342)

Caesar’s sincerity, however, can have been nothing other than a matter of reputation because his persona was artificial through and through. In his case, apparent sincerity was not so much a means of facilitating deceit as the ultimate instance of it – the art that conceals art. The paradox Bacon thus arrives at is that to be open and truthful (or apertus et verax or libera e vera) is in fact the best way to render oneself and one’s dissimulation ‘almost invisible’. For the next phase of argument, Bacon’s model is not Tacitus but Lipsius, whose work he clearly admired. (In a letter of Advice to Fulke Greville on his Studies, nominally from the earl of Essex but actually from Bacon, Greville was urged to make use of epitomes such as Lipsius’ Politicorum sive civilis doctrinae libri sex (1589) or Six Books of Politics or Civil Doctrine (see Bacon 1996: 102)). When discussing political prudence, Lipsius discriminates between ‘light’, ‘middle’, and ‘great’ deceit, of which he urges the first, tolerates the second, and condemns the third (Lipsius 1594: 115). Bacon now adopts the same triple structure, considering secrecy, dissimulation, and simulation in turn. The first, secrecy, is when a man leaveth himself without observation, or without hold to be taken, what he is. The second, Dissimulation, in the negative; when a man lets fall signs and arguments, that he is not that he is. And the third, Simulation, in the affirmative; when a man industriously and expressly feigns and pretends to be that he is not. (Bacon 1996: 350)

Secrecy he finds ‘both politic and moral’, while dissimulation can hardly be avoided if secrecy is to be maintained, but simulation is ‘more culpable’. The simple arithmetical progression that governs the essay is maintained to the end. Thus the last paragraph rather insistently considers three advantages and three disadvantages of simulation and dissimulation, treated for these purposes not as a complementary pair but as completely synonymous terms. Only in the very last sentence, which recapitulates the argument of the essay as a whole, is its full quadruple structure finally revealed: The best composition and temperature is to have openness in fame and opinion; secrecy in habit; dissimulation in seasonable use; and a power to feign, if there be no remedy.

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The four elements are thus folded into one ‘composition’. At no point, however, has Bacon allowed the essay to come to rest on the conventional pairing of simulation and dissimulation as promised in the title. But that of course is the point of the essay. A recontextualised reading may not seem very different from Fish’s; in both Bacon is intent on rearranging the reader’s ‘mental furniture’. From the phenomenological point of view, however, there can be no consequences other than purely mental ones, such as being confused or troubled. But for Bacon and his readers challenging the conventional categories might well give them an edge in the practical world of politics. After all, what they were living through was not only the era of the Reformation and the Counter-Reformation, but, as Zagorin aptly terms it, the ‘Age of Dissimulation’ (Zagorin 1990: 330).

References and Further Reading Bacon, Francis (1870). The Works of Francis Bacon, vol. 6, ed. James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis, and Douglas Denon Heath. London. Bacon, Francis (1985). The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall, ed. Michael Kiernan. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bacon, Francis (1996). Francis Bacon, ed. Brian Vickers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Box, Ian (1982). ‘Bacon’s Essays: from political science to political prudence’. History of Political Thought, 3, 31–49. Bradford, Alan T. (1983). ‘Stuart absolutism and the “utility” of Tacitus’. Huntington Library Quarterly, 46, 17–55. Burke, Peter (1991). ‘Tacitism, scepticism and reason of state’. In J. H. Burns (ed.), The Cambridge History of Political Thought 1450–1700 (pp. 479–98). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Butler, Todd (2006). ‘Bacon and the politics of the prudential imagination’. Studies in English Literature, 46, 93–111. Cicero (1975). De officiis, ed. Walter Miller, Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press/William Heinemann. Crane, Ronald S. (1968). ‘The relation of Bacon’s Essays to his program for the advancement of learning’. In Brian Vickers (ed.), Essential Articles for the Study of Francis Bacon (pp. 272–92). Hamden, CT: Archon Books. Croll, Morris W. (1971). ‘Attic prose: Lipsius, Montaigne, Bacon’. In Stanley E. Fish (ed.),

Seventeenth-Century Prose (pp. 3–25). New York: Oxford University Press. Dzelzainis, Martin (2006). ‘ “The feminine part of every rebellion”: Francis Bacon on sedition and libel, and the beginning of ideology’. Huntington Library Quarterly, 69, 139–52. Fish, Stanley E. (1971). ‘Georgics of the mind: the experience of Bacon’s Essays’. In Fish (ed.), Seventeenth-Century Prose: Modern Essays in Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press. Fish, Stanley E. (1972). Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press. Guicciardini, Francesco (1576). Piu consigli et avvertimenti, ed. Jacopo Corbinelli. Paris. Guicciardini, Francesco (1951). Ricordi, ed. Raffaele Spongano. Florence: G. C. Sansoni. Guicciardini, Francesco (1970). Maxims and Reflections of a Renaissance Statesman (Ricordi), trans. Mario Domandi, introd. Nicolai Rubinstein. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith. Jardine, Lisa and Alan Stewart (1998). Hostage to Fortune: The Troubled Life of Francis Bacon. London: Victor Gollancz. Levy, F. J. (1986). ‘Francis Bacon and the style of politics’. English Literary Renaissance, 16, 101–21. Lipsius, Justus (1594). Sixe Bookes of Politickes or Civil Doctrine, trans. William Jones. London. Machiavelli, Niccolò (1988). The Prince, ed. Quentin Skinner and Russell Price. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Peltonen, Markku (1995). Classical Humanism and Republicanism in English Political Thought 1570– 1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peltonen, Markku (ed.) (1996). The Cambridge Companion to Bacon. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Salmon, J. H. M. (1989). ‘Stoicism and Roman example: Seneca and Tacitus in Jacobean England’. Journal of the History of Ideas, 50, 199–225. Sansovino, Francesco (1583). Propositioni, overo considerationi in materia di cose di stato. Vinegia. Skinner, Quentin (1988). Meaning and Context: Quentin Skinner and his Critics, ed. James Tully. Cambridge: Polity Press. Smuts, R. Malcolm (1987) ‘Court-centred politics and the uses of Roman historians, c.1590–1630’. In Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (eds.), Culture

and Politics in Early Stuart England. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 21–43. Tuck, Richard (1993). Philosophy and Government 1572–1651. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vickers, Brian (1968). Essential Articles for the Study of Francis Bacon. Hamden, CT: Archon Books. Zagorin, Perez (1990). Ways of Lying: Dissimulation, Persecution, and Conformity in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Zagorin, Perez (1998). Francis Bacon. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Zimmerman, Shari A. (1999). ‘Disaffection, dissimulation, and the uncertain ground of silent dismission: juxtaposing John Milton and Elizabeth Cary’. ELH, 66/3, 553–89.

23

The Literature of the Metropolis John A. Twyning

Economic growth, a vast shift of people from the country to the city, and the increased formalisation and power of city government are among the factors that shaped metropolitan London during the sixteenth century. In becoming a metropolis, London continued to expand outwards from the medieval walls, which defined the city proper, and grew into its satellite villages, parishes, and liberties. When the crown and its administration took up more or less permanent residence at Westminster, the resulting confluence of court and commerce made London as spatially complex as it was culturally and politically influential. As the city burgeoned, it enabled and required different forms of representation: to itself, to the nation, and to the rest of the world. Civic pageantry adapted older forms of street theatre (mummings and religious plays, carnivals, festivals, and other celebrations), and these formal and monumental spectacles grew in size and significance with the city. Staged annually, the most prestigious of these was the Lord Mayor’s inaugural pageant, which sought to circumscribe the city politically, morally, and topographically. Literally moving around, and therefore territorialising, the places that constituted London, pageants stopped for various theatrical interludes at key points of the city. Grand civic pageants painted the city with moralising dramas such as Thomas Middleton’s The Triumphs of Truth, written and staged to honour the city’s Lord Mayor in 1613. Rivalry between the dozen or so premier trade or liveried companies that constituted the ruling commercial elite of the City of London funded ever more ostentatious pageants. Never ones to overlook the benefits of displays of power were the Tudor and Stuart monarchs, who co-opted the form of civic pageantry for their own political purposes. Both Elizabeth and James took part in elaborate royal entry pageants into the city, thereby instantiating their sovereignty while a grateful London looked to reckon the cost. In terms of promotion, the royal entry pageant was a two-way street, mutually confirming the city’s significance as the premier site and stage for shaping as well as recognising the monarch’s supreme presence. If James’s 1604 inaugural entry pageant

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aimed to outdo Elizabeth’s of 1559, it succeeded. Most notable was the Magnificent Entertainment, as it can be called in short, which guided James around London as he passed under seven spectacular arches, each of which was several storeys high and purpose-built for the occasion. The arches, or ‘pegmes’, were funded by various business or ethnic groups based in the city, and each was a distinct artistic, political, and cultural event. Within the main theme of the pageant, each pegme or arch featured a different style of architecture, set of emblems, artistic style, tableau, or sculpture – all or part of which often incorporated a dramatic event and poetry. A variety of literature emerged from James’s Magnificent Entertainment. Some were specialised, like Michael Drayton’s A Paean Triumphal, commissioned by the Society of the Goldsmiths of London to congratulate and pay homage to King James as he entered the city. Major publications of the event appeared from those involved in the overall design, building, and scripting of the pageant: Thomas Dekker, Stephen Harrison, and Ben Jonson. The latter’s immodestly and eponymously titled B. Jonson: His Part of King James His Royal and Magnificent Entertainment through His Honourable City of London (1604) begins by tying the king, the city, and English history together within classical and allegorical forms. Designed by Jonson, the first arch James would have encountered was built at Fenchurch Street and featured a large sculpted form of Monarchia Britannica. Beneath her were figures representing Divine Wisdom, the Genius of the City, the Counsel of the City, and, under all, the River Thames. Covering the whole top of the 50-foot-high arch, and some 50 feet across, was an extraordinary scale model of the city of London. Built by Stephen Harrison, who published drawings of his seven designs in The Arches of Triumph (1604), we can see London rendered in precise detail. In his own version of the pageant, The Magnificent Entertainment Given to King James (1604), Dekker comments on the accuracy of the model’s representation of the city, which included steeples, churches, and the identifiable houses of the wealthy. That this huge realistic model of London was placed on top of a structure which mixed allegorical, nationalistic, mythic, and a variety of symbolic forms, gives us some sense of the complex tensions that were built or written in to the representation of London. Although the incredibly extravagant Magnificent Entertainment provided employment for a small army of actors and craftsmen, London’s desire and ability to stage displays of civic and courtly pride provided unprecedented opportunities for all kinds of writing, all of which helped to create and support an expanding constituency of urban readers. Jonson certainly brought concepts from the increasingly popular Stuart neoclassical courtly masques to the streets. And writers like Middleton and Dekker, along with Anthony Munday, John Webster, Thomas Heywood, and Michael Drayton, drew upon writing traditions in folk literature and popular festivities, romance, and religious and moral drama as they wrote pageants for the city and its companies (see Chapter 53, Local Drama and Custom). Although pageants may have been the most visible of the scripted products dedicated to celebrating the city (albeit with political overtones), by the late sixteenth century writing that represented a different kind of London was increasingly displayed on the bookstalls of the city’s lively book trade. As London’s official profile expanded

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and diversified, the demographic influx, whose energies seemed to catalyse metropolitan culture, became the subject of darker speculation in a multitude of literary treatments of the city’s underworld. Some of the writers who charted London’s official progress also turned to write about this seemingly threatening unofficial realm, a space both real and imaginary, inhabited by a seemingly endless mass of masterless men and women. Most of these men and women had been torn, one way or another, from what Marx called the ‘motley feudal ties’ that bound them to their place on the land or within the village (Marx and Engels 2004: 64). As these delegitimised subjects came to London to seek a living, they were quickly deemed to be the very tricksters, parasites, and rogues that the literature of the metropolis delighted in portraying them to be. Much of our sense of what constituted London’s underworld has been and still is shaped by the cony-catching pamphlets that began to be written during the latter half of the sixteenth century. Relatively cheap, these chapbooks were connected to the desire for newer kinds of entertaining urban literature. The earlier cony-catching pamphlets purported to offer admonition and instruction in the nefarious ways of London’s rogues and tricksters; works such as Gilbert Walker’s A Manifest Detection of Dice-Play (1552), and John Awdeley’s The Fraternity of Vagabonds (1561). Notwithstanding its moralising tone, this literature of exposure was laced with sensational and salacious material that sought to describe the tricks and fraudulent trades of the unscrupulous poor: the so-called masterless men. Lurid and alliterative titles like Thomas Harman’s A Caveat for Common Cursitors Vulgarly Called Vagabonds were deliberately designed to tempt the browsing client who frequented the bookstalls that proliferated around St Paul’s Cathedral. As London expanded, the lanes and alleys around the cathedral, including its long thoroughfare (Paul’s Walk), became a kind of Elizabethan Grub Street and bazaar – its unofficial news hub. All kinds of printed material for sale – including playscripts, chapbooks, pamphlets, almanacs, maps, chronicles, and romances – had to competed with gewgaws, tobacco, and other catchpenny products for the omnivorous attention of the metropolitan consumer. Ironically, the cony-catching pamphlets that purported to protect the unwary client or to educate the out-of-town cony (the tame rabbit, the trickster’s mark) were being bought and sold in the very milieu about which the reader was being warned. That the pamphlets circulated in such a hustle-and-bustle economy adds to the difficulty of gauging how they should be read. Writing by Gilbert, Awdeley, and Harman exemplifies the first phase of conycatching literature. Posing as morally upright, civic-minded activists, these authors claimed to offer first-hand knowledge of certain underhand activities or a comprehensive catalogue of the various types who inhabited the underworld, with the ostensible aim of undermining the effects of such rogues. Usually the author claimed access to the information either through personal observation or, more often, direct interlocution. The rhetorical structure of the writing often works hard to establish the reliability of the author and the veracity of the witness. Whether any punters of the cony-catching pamphlets actually wanted or went to play dice with London’s rogues

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forearmed with a copy of A Manifest Detection of Dice-Play is difficult to say. But, as it directly addressed the potential reader-cony, this was the implied purpose of the pamphlets as written by their omniscient author-informers. It was a clever and profitable rhetorical move by these writers. As the reader surveys the pamphlet, he is made both aware of and curious about his apparent ignorance of something that may well be making him anxious. In that moment, the proffered pamphlet claims to be able to dispel his ignorance, decipher that which makes him curious, and quell his anxieties. The pamphlets generate a miniature drama in which the reader is endangered and rescued, trapped by and relieved of his naivety – all through the lightening of his purse and the acquisition of a good read. Most cony-catching literature was based on the detection or discovery of things that were, by that very process, made real and threatening. While such pamphlets offered the promise that a vast army of rogues and vagabonds could be rendered comprehensible through taxonomy, their writers also looked to extend and expand the circulation of their work. As the reader purchased the means by which to defend himself – by learning all the ways in which he could be conned at cards, at dice, on the street, or in the ordinary – the more he realised he needed to secure the gaps in his knowledge. Consequently, the more the underworld was adumbrated with arcane terms like ‘ruffler’, ‘whipjack’, ‘jarkman’, or ‘swigman’, the more complexly populated it appeared to be. The more it was comfortingly ordered into categories, the more threateningly organised it appeared to be. Seemingly in competition with one another, each pamphlet added to rather than reduced the dimensions of the underworld, rendering it potentially unfathomable. One of the notable features of this kind of writing was the recycling of the same or similar material, which put its canting terms into more or less continuous circulation. Readers, it seems, were held in a state of perplexed anxiety, as the pamphlets deliberately generated as much anxiety as they assuaged. Despite the difficulties of reading cony-catching literature as a sign of a real underground army of rogues, the positivist approach has its exemplars. In The Canting Crew: London’s Criminal Underworld, John McMullan reads the pamphlets as documentary evidence of widespread organised crime in the city (McMullan 1984). As he attempts to hunt down the criminals, track down the illegal organisations, crack their nefarious codes, and map the infrastructure of the city’s criminal underworld and its multifarious operations, McMullan’s work echoes and reinforces the dubious claims of the pamphlets. Although McMullan recognises that, as a source, the authors of the pamphlets might be unreliable, eventually he falls into the trap set by the texts: simply trying to identify roguish and criminal behaviour by looking for corroborative empirical evidence. In his search for real crime behind the literature, McMullan runs into the problem that cony-catching literature exploited the same anxieties, and employed some of the same rhetorical tactics, as the authorities who were in the business of redefining criminality to supplement their search for social order. A masterless man or vagrant, for example, in another period might plainly be described as an unemployed person looking for work. As Craig Dionne has recently emphasised, the definition of crime is one of social and historical contingency, and of changing perspectives

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(Dionne and Mentz 2004). Ideas about crime changed during the sixteenth century as the number of those designated vagrants, who had moved about the country for one reason or another, increased and as they became more socially diversified. Phrased around the deserving or undeserving poor, the organising principles that governed such legislation were founded upon the definition of the itinerant’s relationship to work. Therefore, the primary distinction made was between those designated as sturdy beggars, meaning able-bodied and capable of working, and those who could then be deemed legitimately disabled. Although a plethora of categories arose later, most legislation was aimed at defining the differences between these two groups: ‘the civic counterpart of the sturdy beggar was but a species – with an infinite number of varieties – of the genus rogue’ (Judges 1930: xxxviii). To put it crudely, unemployment was criminalised because the metropolitan authorities had no way to deal with those dispossessed of their livelihood other than by demarcating them from the rest of society through branding and whipping, eradicating them altogether by hanging, or by attempting to send them back to the very place from which they had been evicted (Kinney 1990; Twyning 1998). According to Dionne, the writers of London’s underworld (Walker, Awdeley, Harman, Greene, and others) colluded with the authorities as they sought control. The cony-catching pamphlets used stereotypes of sloth and indolence to incite anger in their readers about the transient poor. In so doing they worked as ideological handmaids to the legal reforms that attempted to deal with the effects of severe social and economic shifts at root in the dislocation of manorial production: rapid industrial expansion, dispossession of tenant farms, debasement of currency, periods of uncontrolled inflation, a doubling of population, all this during a time of heavy government expenditures for defence, exploration, and an expansionist economy. (Dionne and Mentz 2004: 43)

That the pamphlets were intimately connected to the vast socio-economic upheavals of the sixteenth century cannot be ignored. However, to refer to them as ‘ideological handmaids’ to the penalising institutions of the city means accepting that in some sense the texts were what they purportedly claimed to be: caveats against conycatchers. Sandra Clark accepts this view, arguing that the pamphlets are ‘moralistic’ that their ‘primary function … was to inform rather than to entertain, and [that] they are presented as factual accounts of the deceptions currently practiced by so-called rogues and vagabonds’. But it does not do to take them entirely at face value; undoubtedly they are factual, truthful, realistic to different degrees – but none of them is without an element of literary artifice, and the desire to tell the truth is modified by pressures conscious and unconscious, to entertain, to moralize, to conform to traditional ways of telling a tale. (Clark 1983: 41)

Clark seeks to maintain a distinction here between facts, truth, and literary artifice, which the cony-catching pamphlets simply do not uphold. For the most part, though,

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the pamphlets have been taken at face value; and, in so doing, risk trying and convicting London’s transient poor all over again. One reason for this reductive reading of the pamphlets as transparently empirical documents is that there is so much historical evidence that appears to correspond to their content. So convincing is the air of veracity attached to the literature that the editors of Crime and Punishment in England; A Sourcebook cite the cony-catching pamphlets as an authentic contemporary view on crime in Tudor England (Barrett and Harrison 1999). Like many critics and historians of the period, the authors cite Harman, whose ‘very detailed account’ of ‘the case of Nicholas Jennings’ is deemed to be ‘the best we have of such criminals … it illustrates the skill and success of such counterfeit-cranks’ (Barrett and Harrison 1999: 36). Urban fact, metropolitan literature, and early modern history appear to synchronise in the case of Jennings: a man fitting the description of Jennings ‘alias Blunt … appeared before the Court of Aldermen in January 1567’ (Beier 1985: 117–18). Is Harman’s case of Nicholas Jennings simply as good as its word? Harman, a justice of the peace from Kent, is interrupted one day at a moment when his ‘book was half printed’, whereupon he tells us how came ‘early in the morning a counterfeit crank [one who feigns sickness] under my lodging at the Whitefriars’. At this stage, though, according to the story, he purportedly does not know that the crank is an impostor. The man appears ‘loathsome’, covered in blood, and sporting a ‘horrible countenance’. Harman strikes up a conversation with the man, demanding to know what is wrong with him. The man, Harman is told, has ‘the falling sickness’ (epilepsy), and refuses to be cleaned by an ‘honest poor woman’. When asked why, the Crank claims that he should fall to ‘bleeding afresh again’. According to Harman, ‘These words made me more to suspect him’ and instigate further interrogation. Harman seeks evidence for locations and origins: ‘Then I asked him where he was born, what his name was, how long he had this disease, and what time he had been here about London, and in what place.’ This information, from the man he now knows as Nicholas Jennings, prompts the need for further information. Harman starts sleuthing. He sends the printer of the very book in which the crank now appears, ‘to Bethlem to understand the truth of the illness’.1 Two boys are employed by Harman to follow the suspect ‘diligently and vigilantly’ as he goes about his begging business. They report that he stops to refresh his disguise of blood and dirt, and that he takes a lot of money begging. Meanwhile, the deputised and ‘zealous’ printer finds a constable, and Jennings is charged with being a ‘malefactor and a dissembling vagabond’. Upon being arrested, he is literally dis-covered: ‘They stripped him stark naked, and as many as saw him said they never saw a handsomer man, with a yellow flaxen beard, and fair skinned, without any spot of grief.’ Jennings is summarily punished, in effect, for being a fake. [Jennings] was stripped stark naked, and his ugly attire put upon him before the masters thereof, who wondered greatly at his dissimulation. For which offence he stood upon the pillory at Cheapside, both in his ugly and handsome attire. And after that went in the mill while his ugly picture was a drawing. And then [he] was whipped at a cart’s

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tail through London, and his displayed banner carried before him unto his own door and so back to Bridewell again, and there remained for a time, and at length let at liberty, on the condition he would prove an honest man, and labour truly to get his living. And his picture remaineth at Bridewell for a monument. (Judges 1930: 90)

In many ways, the case of Nicholas Jennings stands as the paradigmatic conycatching account. Undoubtedly the country roads and the streets of London bore witness to many beggars, but that does not mean that the texts that depict them are simply citing proof, precedent, and evidence of their existence and activities. In contemporary literature, the appearance of cranks, counterfeit or otherwise, could, like Edgar’s role in King Lear, indicate considerable social breakdown or stress. It could also, like the Jennings case, make manifest a certain crisis in the nature of representation both in words and images, and in what is depicted on the city street. Harman’s writing is reflexive about the fiction and evidence that it offers. He interrupts the very book you are reading in order to interpolate the counterfeit crank, immediately putting the text, the evidence, and their circulation into play. The ensuing story of detection, in which his printer plays detective, reveals what the author already knows: that Jennings is not as he appears. Undermining his own purported claim to an authentic account, the disconcerting truth that Harman eventually reveals is that the world is full of ‘artificial persons’ and that counterfeiting and writing are infrangibly intertwined (Agnew 1986: 101–48). Cony-catching pamphlets operated between the presentation of apparently authentic descriptions of a cultural fiction and providing seemingly accurate accounts of a social fact. Significantly, Jennings is punished in both his ugly and handsome attire as if neither persona could denote him truly or completely. Harman’s literature of detection depends upon the continuous discovery of dissimulation. As each layer is removed it promises, for a moment, the naked truth, but subsequently reveals what the reader deeply suspects: that the masterless man has no place, no quiddity, and offers no secure form of representation. It was the act of punishment by the authorities that ultimately sought to prove who and what Jennings was: a fake who was whipped into shape as an honest man. But the whip of the authorities only rationalised its own sense of failure. What Harman discovers is that Jennings’ crime is one of dissimulation: of not being who he really was. But all the itinerant rogues – evicted from the land, demobbed from the army, every vagrant and masterless man – were no longer who they were. In effect, every crank could be a counterfeit crank; every vagrant was likely an idle rogue, every migrant a potential malefactor. Through Harman’s account we can see how the casualties of a changing economic system quickly become its scapegoats and the embodiment of that change. And Jennings’ story, that an unemployed beggar could make more money on London’s streets than his so-called honest and sturdy hard-working counterpart, became and remained part of the city’s apocrypha. A generation after Harman’s Caveat appeared, the prolific author Robert Greene turned to writing cony-catching pamphlets just before he died around 1591–2. With a dazzling display of wit and rhetoric, Greene wrote A Notable Discovery of Cozenage,

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The Second Part of Cony-Catching, The Third and Last Part of Cony Catching, and A Disputation Between a He Cony Catcher and She Cony Catcher, which, according to Clark, form the heart of the cony-catching genre (Clark 1983: 46). Reworking material from the earlier pamphlets, Greene effectively restructured early modern prose narrative and redefined the role of the author. In many ways, Italo Calvino’s concept of an author perfectly suits Robert Greene: ‘The author of every book is a fictitious character whom the existent author invents to make him the author of his fictions’ (Calvino 1981: 180). Before the benefits of copyright, and at a time when the writer was poorly paid and barely recognised, Greene developed an extraordinary metafictional and authorial persona. Paradoxically, the more we find out about Greene from his contemporaries and from Greene himself, the less clear our picture of him becomes. Such a lack of biographical coherence, combined with a paucity of facts about his life, seems to continuously trouble critics and scholars. Despite and because of such little evidence, Charles Crupi feels compelled to rely on scant accounts and hearsay, and reluctantly agrees with the word on the street: that Greene ‘was a notorious character in literary London’ (Crupi 1986: 47). As he is pursued, Greene appears to be elusive and at times as fabricated as the catchers about whom he writes. Yet, ironically, the veracity of the characters cited by Greene depends upon the author being a credible and authentic witness. To understand Greene’s mystique means coming to terms with the complex way in which he was embedded in the forms and function of his writing. He begins A Notable Discovery of Cozenage by setting up a mock-distinction and an intimate relationship between continental erudition and native English custom and wit in order to write a discourse upon ‘the art of cony catching’ (Kinney 1990: 164). In so doing he created a new urban style, a ‘comic prose’, which, according to Manley, ‘depended foremost on its contamination of the traditional humanistic canons of Ciceronian prose with the base element of popular idiom, marketplace, and theatre’ (Manley 1995: 321). This interrelationship between various discourses gives Greene’s writing a dynamic hybridity. According to Kinney in a Notable Discovery, there is ‘a bifurcation of perspective’ which is due to Greene’s position as ‘active narrator … and the moral commentator’ (Kinney 1990: 158). As Greene deploys the tropes of classical learning, the plain speech of the urban moralist, the idiomatic language of the underworld such as canting and other slang, it becomes impossible to find a single authoritative voice or style in or through his writing. This creates a ‘split between the narrative voice and the authorial voice’ according to Constance C. Relihan, who, in Fashioning Authority, argues that this gap distinguishes Greene from earlier writers: The differences between Harman’s narrative approach and that Robert Greene adopts in his criminal pamphlets is clear. As we shall see, Greene allows the reader to doubt the veracity of his narrative voices much more overtly than does Harman, and Greene even actively causes his readers to perceive a gap between authorial and narrative voice. Instead, Harman repeatedly refers to his role as an auditor of criminal anecdotes, to criminals who have appeared before him when he was ‘in Commission of the Peace’ …

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[his] emphasis throughout is to present allegedly factual information in an impersonal narrative voice. (Relihan 1994: 61)

Even if Harman’s writing can be understood to collude with the structures of power by forming or informing the authorities of the catchers’ cons, it would be much more difficult to ascribe this function to Greene’s intricate texts. Greene’s writing is more concerned with discourse than discovery, with rhetorical complexities than caveats. A ‘University wit’, Greene put a wide variety of voices and discursive elements into play as he manipulated and developed the traditions of rogue literature. Even his early cony-catching text, A Notable Discovery, was ‘not designed to reveal cony-catchers but to play games with language as cony-catchers do’, says Kinney. Rather, ‘the author [Greene] is transformed by the pamphlet into a cony-catcher himself; and we in turn teased into becoming conies by buying this book, tricked into thinking it was the exposé it proposed to be’ (Kinney 1990: 158). As the text brings reader, author, and catcher into its folds, the bounds between cony and catcher, fiction and non-fiction, authorial voice and subversive voice, become increasingly commingled and confused. In A Disputation Between a He Cony Catcher and She Cony Catcher, ‘Nan’ and ‘Laurence’ attempt to discover that which is ‘most prejudicial to the commonwealth’. The ensuing mock-dialogue challenges the point of view that is determined to see the likes of ‘Nan’ and ‘Laurence’ avidly plotting to bring disorder to the state. Is the state more threatened by male or female rogues? Significantly, the narrative voice in the Disputation moves between versions of ‘Greene’, ‘Nan’, and ‘Laurence’. At one point the two rogues are discussing their fellow cross-biters but refuse to name them, whereupon ‘Nan’, somewhat ambiguously, invokes Greene’s authorial persona: ‘I fear R.G. will name them soon in his Black Book. A pestilence on him! They say he hath set down my husband’s pedigree, and yours too, Laurence’ (Judges 1930: 220). The purported strategy of the pamphlet as an effective caveat – that rogues should cease their activities because ‘R.G.’ will discover them – is compromised in a way that adds to the aura of the author. ‘Laurence’ takes on this apparent writer-as-informant: ‘Nan, Nan, let R.G. beware!’, he says, and proceeds to condemn him to dissolution and infamy – charges uncannily echoed by most of Greene’s biographers. Similarly, in The Defence of Cony-Catching, ‘Cuthbert’, the narrator, begins by addressing the person who authored him: ‘I cannot but wonder, Master R.G., what poetical fury made you so fantastic, to write against cony-catchers?’ (Salgãdo 1984: 345). Cuthbert’s question is a good one. And it is one that those looking for truth about the denizens and their deeds on the streets of London would do well to consider. Disconcertingly, perhaps, the credibility of ‘R.G.’ to write authentically about London’s rogues depends upon Greene’s own contentious and slippery fictional characters. By fictionalising his authorial persona along with an array of roguish narrators Greene, like the cony-catching pamphlets of which he was a part, generated urban characters who exist beyond both evidentiary fiction and urban fact. Such was the force of this literary centrifuge that even Greene’s actual death could not gainsay his death as an author.

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Greene’s extensive deathbed output was surprisingly surpassed by his posthumous production. From The Repentance of Robert Greene and Greene’s Groats-worth of Wit to Greene’s News Both from Heaven and Hell and Greene’s Ghost Haunting Cony Catchers, ‘Greene’ proved that it was both possible and profitable to perish and publish. That Greene was popular and others wanted to cash in on his reputation only takes us part of the way towards explaining this write-after-death phenomenon. Few characters, and maybe fewer writers, have had such an extensive career after they have died. Undaunted by the chimerical nature of this posthumous writing, some scholars are determined to discover the ‘authentic Greene’, often through various kinds of textual taxonomy. From scrutinising biographical evidence to crunching Greene’s words and those of other suspect authors through a computer, attempts are made to identify the real Greene and distinguish him from con-artists and ‘forgers’ like Henry Chettle. This is the scope of D. Allen Carroll’s edition of Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit (Chettle and Greene 1994). But Carroll’s aspiration that we are approaching the time when all questions of attribution may one day be settled by computer-based statistical analysis (stylometry) is a forlorn hope. Greene’s style was produced not just by quoting and adapting the writing of others and himself, but by tapping into the complex set of representations, languages, and realities that defined and redefined conies and their catchers. Greene took shape as the author of a new kind of metropolitan literature. He became, as Manley says, a posthumous luminary because he ‘successfully negotiated the pre-existing boundaries between life and art, entertainment and literature, outlaw urban setting and in-law society’ (Manley 1995: 326). In the first decade of the seventeenth century Thomas Dekker took up Greene’s mantle as writer of London’s underworld. Few writers in this period were more avowedly embedded in London than Dekker, who was born, lived, and died there. Like Greene, Dekker was a skilful picklock of the work of his predecessors. Both Kinney and E. D. Pendry see Dekker as Greene’s closest and self-appointed heir (Kinney 1990; Pendry 1968). Financial pragmatics turned Dekker towards pamphleteering because the relatively more lucrative activity of writing for the stage was continually disrupted by theatre closures due to increased outbreaks of the plague. Early professional writers like Greene and Dekker usually received a one-time payment for their work. The rate for a pamphlet was somewhere between £1 and £2, whereas a playscript could be double that or more. Without the financial security of copyright, or the regular support of a patron, writers who sustained themselves solely by their pen lived precariously – usually existing on the verge of bankruptcy. Dekker (like Greene), for example, had no consistent patron and spent more than seven years in prison for debt. Consequently, he continually sought to establish a viable relationship with the pamphlet-buying public and to generate a large constituency of faithful readers. To do this Dekker appealed directly to his customers by developing a popular and intimate style of urban literature. Casting Dekker, then, as a ‘hack’ writer because of his often hasty and repetitive output tends to obscure the important contribution he made to the structure, narrative strategies, and development of metropolitan prose literature.

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In his three main cony-catching pamphlets – The Bellman of London, Lantern and Candlelight, and O per se O – Dekker riffs on Greene’s riff on Diogenes: the ancient Greek philosopher, moralist, and satirist who reputedly walked around Athens carrying a lantern by daylight, searching for an honest man. As he in turn shines a light on London, Dekker’s ostensible position as a moralist is both underscored and overwritten with the sense that the reader should be entertained: ‘Read and laugh; read and learn; read and loathe. Laugh at the knavery; learn out the mystery; loathe the base villainy’ (Pendry 1968: 183). Tongue-in-cheek, perhaps, but Dekker’s metropolitan writing self-consciously looked to dramatise the reader’s outrage and anxieties and turn them into a form of literary pleasure. Dekker mystified London, presented it as an alien underworld populated with all kinds of shadowy characters, then offered to guide readers into it. Give me leave to lead you by the hand in a wilderness where are none but monsters – whose cruelty you need not fear, because I teach the way to tame them. Ugly they are in shape and devilish in conditions. Yet to behold them far off may delight you, and to know their qualities, if ever you should come near them, may save you from much danger. (Pendry 1968: 177)

Anyone seeking to arouse their thrills by quelling their anxieties was in considerably more danger of losing tuppence than of actually facing cruel monsters. Dekker’s skill in presenting the delights of fears being tamed produced a literature that needed to be more than one-stop shopping. The underworld necessarily had to expand or be continually recycled, the criminal conspiracies needed to be ever more elaborate and detailed, as ever more enormities were inevitably discovered for the delectation of the reader and the sustenance of the writer. Dekker’s metropolitan prose leaned on Greene’s style to include a huge grab-bag of voices, and wide variety of discourses and social registers. This extravagant mix included allegory, realism, classical allusions, canting and other slang, erudite and bawdy language, homily, colloquy, sentimentalism, satire, moralism, mockery, parody, and piety – often in a close and contaminating proximity. Dekker created a rich and dense narrative medium that laid the foundations for the urban prose of later London writers like Defoe and Dickens. Ironically, that for which Dekker is most condemned – lack of coherence and structural inconsistencies – is inextricably linked to that which made him so innovative. Hs stylistic tours de force stem from his ability to blend social landscape and London’s topography within an imaginative panoramic narrative in which both reader and writer were embedded. In The Wonderful Year, a populist panegyric to Elizabeth after death, ‘Death’ appears ‘like a Spanish leaguer’ and ‘Plague’ sports his ‘purple colours’ as both band together to attack London. Writer and reader find themselves in the midst of the urban fray as Dekker works in dense layers of metaphor and figurative language to fuse experience and literary form. Join all your hands together, and with your bodies cast a ring about me: let me behold your ghastly visages, that my paper may receive their true pictures: echo forth your

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groans through the hollow trunk of my pen, and rain your gummy tears into mine ink, that even marble bosoms may be shaken with terror, and hearts of adamant melt into compassion. (Pendry 1968: 43)

It is writing like this that has enabled Dekker to be cast as both a kind of painter of London’s colourful life and a powerful social critic. Arguably Dekker’s chief literary innovation was the panoramic sentence: this was not so much a harbinger of realism as a way of revisualising a cultural event or moment by saturating it with words, ideas, metaphors, and imagery, often culled from other writers and refashioned by his pen. This not only explains why critics chastise Dekker for his unevenness and lack of originality, but also why terms like plagiarism, copying, or even theft, are inappropriate concepts through which to think about his appropriations for writing conycatching pamphlets and other literature. To look for stylistic origins or authorial truth or integrity in the literature of London’s underworld would be as fruitless as trying to identify the authentic Greene, or dissect Dekker’s plagiarism, or detect a ‘real’ counterfeit crank. One way to understand cony-catching literature depends upon putting aside modern conceptions of authorship and to see it in its entirety: as part of an integrated, unfinalisable whole rather than as the province and product of distinct and separate authors. If Dekker’s unfinalised observations of London touched upon almost every aspect of metropolitan culture, from another contemporary perspective John Stow’s The Survey of London (1603) was no less panoramic. Stow was supported and patronised by London’s civic elite, and so wrote to a different set of concerns than those that generated the cony-catching pamphlets. Nevertheless, the Survey taps into anxieties about, and a fascination with, the shifting contours and dimensions of the city. When The Survey was published at the very end of the sixteenth century, London’s economic growth and huge demographic increase had radically altered the city and the forms of its representation. Among those who benefited considerably from the exploitation of so much surplus labour and through the deployment of wealth for commercial enterprise were the members of London’s mercantile class. And we should remember that it was the fruits of those enterprises that financed the city’s pageantry, thus enabling London’s city fathers to rival the Crown at times. It was this merchant class, too, that steadily expanded and appropriated civic government quite visibly by regulating poverty, vagrancy, and prostitution. London, though, has never been simply a bourgeois edifice. As we know, the city had close connections with the Tudor–Stuart government, which continued to centralise state power throughout our period. Stow’s Survey is thoroughly embedded in the confluence of forces and circumstances that attend the juxtaposition of the monarchy and aristocracy with the city’s burghers and its smaller traders and artisans. Son of a tallow-chandler, and member of the Merchant Taylors’ Company, Stow was intimately connected to the upper reaches of the city’s ruling bourgeoisie. Most identifiable in Stow’s Survey is the reconstruction of London’s history as one of bour-

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geois benefaction. In Stow’s account, civic pride – founded on London’s citizen worthies – is to be built on patricianism, charity, and other good works. With a compelling mix of rhetorical allusion and antiquarian discovery, Stow suggests that nowadays such values are in decline and that the fabric of the city is under threat. This sense of impending dilapidation in the city’s social and material infrastructure underpins a discontinuity in the trajectory of the Survey. According to Manley, ‘Stow confronted a register of change at odds with the temporal continuities stressed at the beginning of the work’ (Manley 1995: 162). Consequently, the story of London’s development in the Survey is one of disjuncture rather than of a smooth and productive progression. The catalogue of changes he registers adds up to a diminution of community and the undermining of London’s civic values. Stow’s record, then, could be seen as an indictment of the incumbent city fathers, who spent less on charity than they could and more on feasts and pageants for their own glory than they should. Stow’s compendious taxonomy in the Survey could be seen as an attempt to stabilise and define a city, which, for many, was transgressing its socio-historical bounds. As he charted, catalogued, and named the various sites of London, Stow’s taxonomy gave his readers both a sense of order and a sense of the past. Stow effectively reorganised urban space as he reclassified London’s history. At times it seems as if he echoes the city government’s attempt to bring order to the streets through institutions of containment and the application of judicial control. William Fleetwood – who was aptly entitled London’s Recorder – was an ardent fan and supporter of Stow, and he spent many hours locating, identifying, and punishing vagrants and others in the city. Although the two men sought to organise London in very different ways, Stow’s compassion and wider sense of social responsibility meant that the form of the Survey was often at odds with its content. Fleetwood literally wanted to regulate and purify the metropolitan body politic, to expunge it of its unruly elements. Stow’s itinerary, on the other hand, articulates a kind of political nostalgia – a reminiscence that harks back to a time of charity, hospitality, and an all-inclusive harmony (Smith, Strier, and Bevington 1995). This nostalgic quality of The Survey appears to contradict Stow’s avowed intention, which was to produce a detailed and dispassionate description of London. His nostalgia might also compromise the way in which the Survey is often used: as an evidential source and as a factual historical account. But to read the Survey in such a straightforward way would radically diminish its textuality and its potential for historical insight. What Stow’s text sets up is the discovery of the reader’s longing for London’s past. The Survey uniquely creates this effect, not least because the past he invites the reader to imagine is one that could never be reconciled with his or their contemporary London. Stow’s metropolitan present was underwritten by an ideological clash between residual feudal principles (ostensibly, harmony and community) and the vigour of a competitive mercantile ethos. Ironically, one of the most enduring aspects of the Survey is the way in which it meticulously articulates the irrevocability of its own longings. As Stow chastises those responsible for not upholding the principles of charity, the nostalgia generated by

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the Survey could also be read as a muted critique of, or anxiety about, the growing absolutism of the late Tudor state. Either way, Stow’s nostalgic discoveries – an escape from the future into the past – set the tone for much English literature to come. Notes 1

Bethlem, Bethlehem Hospital, Bedlam, was London’s infamous asylum, one of the first for those troubled in the mind.

References and Further Reading Agnew, Jean-Christophe (1986). Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Archer, Ian W. (1991). The Pursuit of Stability: Social Relations in Elizabethan London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Aydelotte, F. (1913). English Rogues and Vagabonds. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Barrett, Andrew and Christopher Harrison (1999). Crime and Punishment in England: A Sourcebook. London: University College London Press. Beier, A. L. (1985). Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England 1560–1640. London: Methuen. Beier, A. L. and Roger Finlay (1986). London 1500–1700: The Making of the Metropolis. London: Longman. Bergeron, David M. (1971). English Civic Pageantry, 1558–1642. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Calvino, Italo (1981). If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Chettle, Henry and Robert Greene (1994). Greene’s Groatsworth of Wit: Bought with a Million of Repentance (1592), ed. D. A. Carroll. New York: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies. Clark, Sandra (1983). Elizabethan Pamphleteers: Popular Moralistic Pamphlets 1580–1640. London: Athlone Press. Crupi, Charles W. (1986). Robert Greene. Boston: Twayne.

Dionne, Craig, and Steve Mentz (eds.) (2004). Rogues and Early Modern English Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Fumerton, Patricia (2006). Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Greene, Robert (1881–3). The Life and Complete Works in Prose and Verse of Robert Green, ed. Alexander B. Grosart, 15 vols. London: Huth Library. Judges, A. V. (1930). The Elizabethan Underworld. London: Routledge. Kinney, Arthur F. (1990). Rogues, Vagabonds, and Sturdy Beggars. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. McMullan, John L. (1984). The Canting Crew: London’s Criminal Underworld, 1550–1700. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Manley, Lawrence (1995). Literature and Culture in Early Modern London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marx, Karl and Freidrich Engels (2004). The Communist Manifesto, ed. L. M. Findlay. Plymouth: Broadview Press. Pendry, E. D. (ed.) (1968) Thomas Dekker. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Relihan, Constance C. (1994). Fashioning Authority: The Development of Elizabethan Novelistic Discourse. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press. Salgãdo, Gãmini (1984). The Elizabethan Underworld. Totowa, NJ: Rowman & Littlefield. Smith, David L., Richard Strier, and David Bevington (eds.) (1995). The Theatrical City: Culture,

The Literature of the Metropolis Theatre and Politics in London 1576–1649 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stow, John (1908). A Survey of London, ed. C. L. Kingsford from the text of 1603. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Taylor, Gary and John Lavagnino (eds.) (2007). Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture: A Companion to the Collected Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Twyning, J. A. (1998). London Dispossessed: Literature and Social Space in the Early Modern City. Basingstoke: Macmillan Press. Woodbridge, Linda (2001). Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

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Tales of the City: The Plays of Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton Peter J. Smith

In one way the period to which we refer as the English Renaissance might be thought of as the age of the new city, and a case could be advanced for the fruition of one being inseparable from the rise of the other. Not that this attention to the formation of cities was an especially new phenomenon; literature had long dwelt on the importance of urban communities. Epic poetry celebrated the founding of cities and the nation-states that grew up around them. Virgil’s Aeneid for instance, documented the exile of Aeneas, following the fall of Troy, and his founding a new capital, Rome, which was to become the centre of the Roman empire and an exemplary city for the classically inspired humanists of the Italian (and later English) Renaissance. When Geoffrey of Monmouth composed his Historia Regum Britanniae in the twelfth century, he recounted the myth of the Trojan warrior Brut, the great-grandson of Aeneas, who conquered the race of giants that inhabited the ancient land of Albion. He too founded a city, which he called Troynovant. It was this city that became London, the conspicuous seat of both royal and civic power, consolidated during the Tudor and Stuart dynasties, a position that it continues to occupy to this day. During the course of the later Middle Ages and throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, London’s importance increased considerably. Standard English, as a result of official communications and other governmental and mercantile administrations, rippled out from London. The impact of this remains and, for example, accounts for the fact that Chaucer, writing in a London dialect for the court of Richard II, is so much easier to read than his West Midlands contemporary, the Gawain-poet. Chaucer’s is the English that we have inherited, entirely because of the centrality, politically rather than geographically, of London. Of course, by modern standards, the capital was tiny. Tottenham Court and Hampstead were outlying villages and Westminster was still a separate town. But the city was beginning to expand at an alarming rate. In the reign of Henry VIII, the population was some 50,000 (Heinemann 1980: 4). By the end of Elizabeth’s reign it had more than tripled, and by the 1630s had reached 300,000. Such population growth

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was the result of a massive influx of foreign immigrants as well as the domestic relocation of hitherto rural communities. Thomas Middleton’s Richard Easy and Ben Jonson’s Kastril are two such country gentlemen who come to learn the ways of the city. Middleton’s father and Jonson’s stepfather, who were both construction workers, would have profited from the building boom associated with the growth of London’s housing stock: semi-official and often poorly regulated living areas, increasingly inhabited by the itinerant poor, spread out from the ancient walls of the city and incorporated once distinct villages and parishes (see Chapter 23, The Literature of the Metropolis). During James’s reign as much as two-thirds of the population was located without the city walls, and the king himself lamented this urban sprawl: ‘with time England will only be London, and the whole country be left waste’ (Middleton 2007: 63). Contemporary opinion relished the magnificence of the new metropolis as well as the consequent availability of consumer goods. John Lyly enthuses: London, a place both for the beauty of building, infinite riches, variety of all things, that excelleth all the cities in the world: insomuch that it may be called the storehouse and mart of all Europe. Close by this city runneth the famous river called the Thames … What can there be in any place under the heavens, that is not in this noble city either to be bought or borrowed? It hath divers hospitals for the relieving of the poor, six-score fair churches for divine service, a glorious burse which they call the Royal Exchange for the meeting of merchants of all countries where any traffic is to be had. (Lyly 1919: 434)

But if Lyly’s response anticipates the excitement of Wordsworth, Thomas Dekker regarded the place with despair: in every street, carts and coaches make such a thundering as if the world ran upon wheels: at every corner, men, women, and children meet in such shoals, that posts are set up of purpose to strengthen the houses, lest with jostling one another they should shoulder them down. Besides, hammers are beating in one place, tubs hooping in another, pots clinking in a third, water-tankards running at tilt in a fourth. (Dekker 1922: 37)

Dekker bemoans the ubiquitous urban scourges – pollution and traffic jams. His less than flattering portrayal of London recognises that culture comes at a price. London may have contained palaces and hosted royal entertainments like the masques written by Jonson or the pageants composed by Middleton, but it also played host to grinding poverty, dispossession, and crime. In the Middle Ages England had consisted of virtually self-sufficient, isolated communities producing foodstuffs and wool for their own consumption. From the fifteenth century, under the influence of exploration and foreign trade requirements, this wool began to be sold abroad. Sheep farmers were now transformed into commodity producers for an international market. The boom in the textile trade required large tracts of land for sheep grazing. Hitherto available for cultivation by villagers, areas of land

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were fenced off and the peasants evicted, losing their rights of common. Thomas More’s Utopia captures the rapacity of the landowners as well as the pathos of the dispossessed. In this perverse world, sheep have become so great devourers and so wild, that they eat up and swallow down the very men themselves. They consume, destroy and devour whole fields, houses and cities … [Landowners] leave no ground for tillage: they enclose all in pastures: they throw down houses: they pluck down towns, and leave nothing standing but only the church to make of it a sheep-house … Either by hook or crook they must needs depart away, poor silly, wretched souls, men, women, husbands, wives, fatherless children, widows, woeful mothers with their young babes, and their whole household small in substance, and much in number, as husbandry requireth many hands. Away they trudge, I say … [and when their savings are spent] what can they else do but steal, and then justly God wote be hanged, or else go about a begging? And yet then also they be cast in prison as vagabonds, because they go about and work not; whom no man will set a work, though they never so willingly offer themselves thereto. (More 1551: C viv–viiv)

More’s description offers a moving account of those who find themselves trapped in the no-man’s-land between a residual agrarian feudalism and the emergent wageearning economy of early modern London: crime is their only option. Many of these so-called ‘masterless men’ had nowhere to go but the capital, where they attempted to eke out a living by all manner of activity – legal and, inevitably, illegal, constituting what Alec Ryrie describes as ‘the seamy underworld of Tudor England’ (Ryrie 2008: 2). The authorities responded with Draconian measures. According to a piece of 1572 legislation, vagrants were to be whipped and branded on the ear for the first crime and receive the death penalty for any subsequent offence, unless taken into service. In 1591 vagabonds were set to work in London cleaning ditches around the city. In his account of ‘dicing houses … within the bowels of the famous City of London’, George Whetstone laments the current degradation and the manner in which England’s capital is inhabited by unsavoury individuals who belong more properly in Italian cities: The daily guests of these privy houses, are masterless men, needy shifters, thieves, cutpurses, unthrifty servants, both serving men, and prentices. Here a man may pick out mates for all purposes, save such as are good. Here a man may find out bravoes [villains for hire] of Rome and Naples who, for a pottle of wine, will make no more conscience to kill a man than a butcher a beast … Here are they that will not let to deceive their father, to rob their brother, and fire their neighbour’s house for an advantage … forsooth they have yet hands to filch, heads to deceive, and friends to receive: and by these helps, shift meetly [very] badly well. (Whetstone 1584: Kir–v)

It is this ‘many-headed hydra’ which jostles at the edge of Renaissance drama – the fickle multitude in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar manipulated by the cynical Mark

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Antony, or the hysterical rout in Jonson’s Sejanus who tear the politician limb from limb. For the authorities, they constituted a dangerously volatile social force. Seventeenth-century London, then, is the origin of two contradictory perspectives. It is the seat of government and the court, the centre of banking and commerce, the home of city professionals and the civil service. On the other hand, it is a concentration of vice, a den of iniquity, a cesspool of prostitution, alcoholism, pick-pocketing, and confidence trickery, documented in sensational accounts of the criminal underworld such as John Awdeley’s Fraternity of Vagabonds (1561) or Thomas Harman’s Caveat for Common Cursetors (1566). Moreover, there is an alarming coincidence between the location of the nefarious activities described in such pamphlets and the very place of their circulation. As we saw in Chapter 23, ‘As London expanded, the lanes and alleys around the cathedral, including its long thoroughfare (Paul’s Walk), became a kind of Elizabethan Grub Street and bazaar – its unofficial news hub.’ The popularity of these sordid tracts indicates both a fascination with and an anxiety towards the (under)world that they document, while the dramatisation of their criminal fraternities yields such centres of theatrical energy as the Eastcheap tavern of Henry IV or the brothels of Measure for Measure. The new metropolis, seat of a new and vigorous English Protestantism, is also riddled with corruption, and nowhere is this tension between virtue and vice as visible as in the theatre. The purpose-built playhouse, run by professional companies and staffed by professional actors, was a comparatively recent innovation, and dramatic writing was proliferating in quantity and sophistication. The theatres themselves were microcosmic versions of the city, riven in precisely the same way between virtue and vice – places in which culture was disseminated, national identity celebrated (as in the often jingoistic history plays), and moral exempla broadcast – but also, especially according to their opponents, places of immorality that displayed lewd and subversive acts of crossdressing, political insurgence, and social discord (see also Chapter 36, Reading the Body). Moreover, their iniquity was not only confined to the stage. More than once the theatres were shut down because they were thought to provide devastating opportunities for the contagion of plague, while disease was seen to be a just retribution for the immoralities of the players. Women’s presence in theatre audiences was considered indelicate, and the siting of the theatres on the South Bank, beyond the jurisdiction of the Lord Mayor, placed them in close proximity to the brothels, which also sought to elude the imposition of civic authority while pandering to the patronage of an immodest clientele. The theatres existed, both geographically and ideologically, in a liminal zone, on the margins of the city. The varied careers of Jonson and Middleton are testament to the ambiguities inherent in this relationship between city and theatre. Both achieved celebrated establishment status. Jonson became the first Poet Laureate in receipt of a royal pension for his authorship of court masques and entertainments. A volume of his work was presented to Prince Henry, and he held the position from 1628 of the Chronologer of the City of London (see Chapter 15, Poets, Friends, and Patrons). But more than once he found himself on the wrong side of the law. Having been convicted of

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the murder in 1598 of Gabriel Spencer, a fellow actor, he escaped the death sentence only by pleading benefit of clergy (he demonstrated that, since he could read the Bible, he would be more use alive than dead). But Jonson’s subsequent dramatic career was no less controversial. After his involvement with The Isle of Dogs he may well have been imprisoned. Jonson’s truculence continued to upset the authorities. Sejanus (1603) dramatised the relationship between the corrupt Tiberius and his eponymous favourite. Jonson was had up before the Privy Council, which regarded his attacks on tyranny and favouritism as a little too close to home. As Richard Dutton puts it, ‘There is every possibility … that Jonson had deliberately done in Sejanus what Shakespeare found himself inadvertently having done in Richard II: constructed an allegory of contemporary events’ (Dutton 1983: 139). Jonson’s conversion to Roman Catholicism made his plays all the more suspicious in the first teetering months of the new regime, and the cutting and adaptation of the printed text of the play demonstrates (as also does the difference between the stage and page versions of Richard II) that the playwright was treading on some powerful and sensitive toes. In 1604 he was briefly imprisoned following his involvement in Eastward Ho – a play containing antiScottish satire and attacks on the selling of knighthoods (the Scottish King James had been raising money by selling honours). Yet from 1605 to 1634 Jonson was to provide masques for the very king he had been satirising. Middleton too had something of a chequered career in relation to the city fathers and court authorities. He preceded Jonson in the job of Chronologer of the City of London (1620–7) and composed pageants celebrating the place’s virtues. Yet he was also the author of the most infamous play of the English Renaissance. His A Game at Chess, written right in the midst of his career as Chronologer, was both the most successful and ‘the most controversial play of the Jacobean period’ (White 1992: 128). Richard Dutton describes it frankly as ‘a phenomenon’ while Gary Taylor identifies it as ‘The play that made literary history’ (Dutton 2004: 424; Middleton 2007: I, 1773). In a theatrical era in which the repertoire would change daily, the nine-day run (5 to 14 August 1624) of A Game at Chess was unprecedented. Before the authorities shut it down, it played at the Globe to packed houses. John Chamberlain wrote to Dudley Carleton that the play was ‘frequented by all sorts of people old and young, rich and poor, masters and servants, papists and puritans, wise men etc., churchmen and statesmen’ (Middleton 1966: xii). The reason for this popularity was the play’s topical anti-Catholicism. Since the Reformation, Protestant England had been in a constant state of paranoia about the proximity and possible invasion of the Catholic superpowers of France, Spain, and Italy to the south and east and the less powerful but a good deal more immediate Ireland to the west. The victory of the English navy over the Spanish Armada in 1588 (which animates plays like Henry V and gets a mention in The Alchemist) demonstrated both the iniquity of the continental enemy as well as the providential righteousness of embattled Protestantism. These anxieties were further fuelled by the possibilities of domestic insurgence from Catholics at home. In 1605 Robert Catesby and Guy Fawkes nearly succeeded in destroying both king and Parliament in the spectacular Gunpowder Plot, a conspiracy that Jonson

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helped to expose and which forms the basis for the exaggerated suspicions of Sir Politic Would-be in Volpone. However, Elizabethan Protestant pride had declined at court since the accession of James VI and I. Son of the Catholic Mary, Queen of Scots, James’s foreign policy was motivated by a desire to form rapprochements with Catholic foes rather than to dare or challenge them. To this end, he had sought to appease the Spanish ambassador, Count Gondomar, by having the vehement Protestant, Sir Walter Ralegh, executed on a trumped-up charge in 1618. Ralegh had long been a thorn in the side of Spain, having slaughtered Spanish troops in Ireland at Smerwick and having defeated Spanish forces at Cadiz in 1596 and the Azores in 1597. His execution typified the connivingly pacific policy of the Jacobean court and the shift from the belligerence of the Elizabethan state. A Game at Chess satirises James’s own aspirations to weld the United Kingdom to Spain through their dynastic coupling. Early in the 1620s James had sent his son Charles, escorted by the duke of Buckingham, to Madrid to woo the Spanish Infanta, but the project failed and they returned empty-handed in 1623, much to the delight of the London populace and the fury of the Spanish ambassador. Thomas Scott, a Puritan satirist and preacher, capitalised on this popular feeling and, in 1620, published anonymously Vox Populi or News from Spain, which pretended to be Gondomar’s account of how he was toying with England diplomatically to advance the Catholic objective of world domination. At one point, the fictional Gondomar describes how he indulged in spying under the guise of securing the Spanish match: First, it is well observed, by the wisdom of our state, that the King of England … extremely hunts after peace and so affects the true name of a peacemaker, as that for it he will do or suffer anything … And for this purpose, whereas there was a marriage propounded betwixt them and us (howsoever, I suppose our state too devout to deal with heretics in this kind, in good earnest, yet) I made that a cover for much intelligence, and a means to obtain whatsoever I desired, whilst the state of England longed after that marriage, hoping thereby (though vainly) to settle peace, and fill the exchequer. (Scott 1809: 512)

Identified and pursued by the authorities, Scott fled to Holland, from where he continued with a stream of anti-Spanish pamphlets. Middleton drew upon these as he prepared his play for production in 1624. A Game at Chess opens with an induction comprising a conversation between Ignatius Loyola (founder of the Jesuit order and, as such, a Puritan bête noire) and Error in which the two discuss the Jesuit aspiration to take over the world. Ignatius tells Error, ‘I would rule myself, not observe rule … I would do anything to rule alone. / It’s rare to have the world reined in by one’ (Induction, 71–4).1 As well as for this despotic urge, Ignatius is pilloried as a figure of lustful appetite: he remarks that he would happily cut the throat of one of his own bishops in order to get close to the queen and whisper ‘a love tale in her ear / Would make her best pulse dance’ (66–7). It is

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not difficult to imagine the Globe audience hissing at this pantomime villain as he rehearses his iniquitous aspirations. A Game at Chess offers a series of characters as chess pieces in the manner of Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass and what Alice Found There. Obviously, the white pieces embody the virtue of Britain while the blackness of the opposite set symbolises the depravity of the Spanish court. The moral implications of the colours are illustrated when the Black Knight unmasks the White King’s Pawn: black knight gondomar: Pawn, thou art ours. white knight charles: He’s taken by default, [to White Horse] By wilful negligence. Guard the sacred persons. Look well to the White Bishop, for that Pawn Gave guard to th’ Queen and him in the third place. black knight gondomar: See what sure piece you lock your confidence in. I made this Pawn here by corruption ours, As soon as honour by creation yours. This whiteness upon him is but the leprosy Of pure dissimulation. View him now: His upper garment being taken off [the White King’s Counsellor Pawn], he appears black underneath His heart and his intents are of our colour. (3.1.254–63)

The symbolic associations of blackness appear elsewhere in Middleton. At the opening of Michaelmas Term, Michaelmas, the personification of corrupt law, removes his white country cloak and dons his black lawyer’s gown with the imprecation, ‘We must be civil now, and match our evil; / Who first made civil black, he pleased the devil’ (1.1.3–4). For Alan Brissenden this malignancy springs from the very city itself: the black cloak ‘indicates the pervasive dark wickedness of London, the soil from which the play’s action grows’ (Brissenden 2004: 29–30). In A Game at Chess, in addition to this allegorical significance of colour, some of the chess pieces stand in for real people. The identity of the White King as James is self-evident, while the White Knight and the White Duke would have been fairly recognisable as Prince Charles and the duke of Buckingham. Elsewhere the identification of chess pieces is more ambiguous. Queen Anne had herself converted to Catholicism and, in any event, had died by the time the play was being staged. Thus the White Queen may more profitably be identified as the Anglican Church figured as James’s spouse, by direct analogy with the metaphorical ‘marriage’ between Christ and the Catholic Church. Middleton’s play actually steers clear of the controversy of the proposed marriage, but at one point dramatises the attempted seduction of the White Queen’s Pawn by the Black Bishop’s Pawn. This is clearly an allegory of the subversion of the Church of England by Jesuits, who were, it was feared, actively proselytising and converting Protestants to Catholicism. But it is in the play’s

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Figure 7 Title-page portrait of the Spanish ambassador to the court of James I, Diego Sarmiento de Acuña, count of Gondomar, in Thomas Scott, The Second Part of Vox Populi, or Gondomar Appearing in the Likeness of Machiavel in a Spanish Parliament, Wherein are Discovered his Treacherous and Subtle Practices to the Ruin as well of Englanders as the Netherlands. Faithfully Translated out of the Spanish Copy [Or Rather, Written] by a Well-Willer to England and Holland (2nd edition, London, 1624). It shows the special chair Gondomar used to ease the pain of his anal fistula. British Museum, London

portrayal of the Spanish ambassador, Gondomar, as the Black Knight, that it lands its most palpable hit. The players had obtained one of Gondomar’s own suits as well as his litter and a special chair he habitually occupied, designed to ease the pain caused by his anal fistula. The second edition of The Second Part of Vox Populi (1624) has a title page with Gondomar in full fur cape and hat, arrogantly regarding the reader with a look of contemptuous superiority. His swaggering authority is undermined as behind him, out of his gaze, is his chair with its seat cut away in the manner of a commode. (Figure 7). At one point, the Black Knight, in soliloquy and like so many stage villains of the period, relishes his own Machiavellian deviousness:

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Peter J. Smith But let me a little solace my designs With the remembrance of some brave ones past To cherish the futurity of project Whose motion must be restless till that great work Called the possession of the world be ours. Was it not I procured a gallant fleet From the White Kingdom to secure our coasts ’Gainst th’infidel piràte, under pretext Of more necessitous expeditïon? Who made the jails fly open, without miracle, And let the locusts out – those dangerous flies, Whose property is to burn corn without touching? (3.1.82–93)

The Black Knight refers here to the manner in which Gondomar had successfully persuaded the English to fight the Turks, who had repeatedly attacked the Spanish fleet while, during the negotiations over the marriage, Gondomar sought and achieved the release of imprisoned Jesuits. The Black Knight is a slyly effective diplomat – one without moral principle. Clearly it is not difficult to see why the play caused Gondomar’s successor, Don Carlos Coloma, such offence. On the 18 August the players were called before the Privy Council, but they pleaded that, since the play had been properly licensed, they were innocent. They were banned from playing till further notice, and Middleton’s 19-year-old son Edward was arrested (his father seems to have gone to ground). Since he was unable to offer any useful information, he was quickly released, and within ten days the players were allowed to recommence playing, provided they never again staged A Game at Chess. Both Middleton and Jonson deliberately flirted with political controversy, and these examples illustrate the manner in which their satires on court politics could profoundly inflect public opinion. In their city comedies, however, it is London itself, as site of both opportunity and vice, which provides the vehicle for larger social satire. Brian Gibbons identified the roots of city comedy in an amalgam of native and learned traditions. He argues that the genre is a blend of the medieval morality play with its allegorical characters and timeless ethical lessons, and the classical tradition of ‘Roman intrigue comedy in Plautus and Terence, and its descendant in the commedia dell’arte’ (Gibbons 1980: 4). Both traditions are clearly visible. On the one hand characters with names like Bungler, Pursenet, Richard Easy, Sir Bounteous Progress, Penitent Brothel, Frank Gullman, Savourwit, Master Overdone, Pecunius Lucre, Harry Dampit, Moneylove, Sir Walter Whorehound, Mr Allwit (all from Middleton’s plays) and Face, Subtle, Doll Common, Surly, Sir Epicure Mammon, Dame Pliant, Tribulation Wholesome, John Littlewit, Trouble-All, Morose, Sir Amorous La Foole, Truewit, Lady Tailbrush, Sir Paul Eitherside (all from Jonson’s) stem from the morality tradition with its readily identifiable types who personify human virtues and flaws (see Figure 8). As Anne Barton has noted, ‘It was … in the nature of morality drama as a form that these authorial acts of naming should be absolutely essential,

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Figure 8 Satirical etching known as The Monopolist or The Picture of a Patentee, after Wenceslas Hollar, c.1641–50. A man with a fox’s head and press-screws for legs bears on his back a pack labelled ‘Ragges, P[atent]’. He carries pipes and playing-cards that are slung over his chest and a jug identified as ‘Wine P:’ on his right arm; pins are bandaged to his left arm (identified ‘Pinnes. Pat’); ‘Salte P’ and ‘Soepe. P’ are his coat pockets; ‘Buter. P’ and ‘Coles P’ are attached to his breeches. His hands terminate in hooks instead of fingers, with strings to money-bags lettered with various values, some in an open chest. The fox-head recalls the animal allegory in Jonson’s Volpone. British Museum, London

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controlling plot as well as character to a degree unheard of in ancient comedy … In morality drama, names sum up the true nature of their bearers … [T]he identity of name with nature [is] a cardinal rule of morality play nomenclature’ (Barton 1990: 44–5). It is in Bartholomew Fair, a play that contains perhaps the most ridiculous of all Jonson’s characters, that the playwright relishes the absurdity of this representative naming: winwife: littlewit: quarlous: littlewit: quarlous:

littlewit: winwife: littlewit:

winwife: littlewit:

What call you the reverent elder, you told me of? Your Banbury man? Rabbi Busy, sir, he is more than an elder, he is a prophet, sir. Oh, I know him! A baker, is he not? He was a baker, sir, but he does dream now, and see visions, he has given over his trade. I remember that too: out of a scruple he took, that (in spiced conscience) those cakes he made were served to bridals, Maypoles, Morrises, and such profane feasts and meetings; his Christian name is Zeal-of-the-land. Yes, sir, Zeal-of-the-land Busy. How, what a name’s there! Oh, they have all such names, sir; he was witness for Win, here (they will not be called Godfathers) and named her Win-the-fight, you thought her name had been Winifred, did you not? I did indeed. He would ha’ thought himself a stark reprobate, if it had. (1.3.100–17)2

While the idiotic compound of the first name indicates the self-endowed gravitas of the Puritan’s evangelical mission, the surname with its implications of ‘busy-body’ exposes the preacher’s sanctimoniousness. As if that were not enough, the fact that Win is an abbreviation of Win-the-fight rather than the expected Winifred, catches out the audience as well as Winwife because, up until this point in the play, she has been identified only as Win. Jonson’s technique is to offer the audience a sort of advance insight into his characters in the manner of a morality play. Again, in The Alchemist, Subtle tells the Anabaptists that, once they are in possession of the philosopher’s stone, they will have no need to Rail against plays, to please the alderman, Whose daily custard you devour. Nor lie With zealous rage, till you are hoarse. Not one Of these so singular arts. Nor call yourselves, By names of Tribulation, Persecution, Restraint, Long-Patience, and such like, affected By the whole family, or wood of you, Only for glory, and to catch the ear Of the disciple. (3.2.89–97)

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But Subtle’s satire is entirely wasted on Tribulation, who unwittingly admits that personal fame and profit are as important as the advance of Anabaptist cause: Truly, sir, they are Ways that the godly Brethren have invented For propagation of the glorious cause, As very notable means, and whereby also Themselves grow soon, and profitably famous. (3.2.97–101)

If naming is one of the devices that indicates that city comedy is derived in part from the native morality tradition, the emphasis on local colour and the use of intrigue plotting demonstrates that the genre is equally indebted to classical comedy. It is in ‘L’Allegro’ that John Milton contrasts the educated Jonson with the natural Shakespeare as though the former is more cultivated while the latter is somehow more empirical: ‘Then to the well-trod stage anon, / If Jonson’s learnèd sock be on, / Or sweetest Shakespeare fancy’s child, / Warble his native wood-notes wild’ (131–4).3 The sock here is the low-heeled slipper worn conventionally by actors in classical comedy, and it is ‘learnèd’ because Jonson’s comedy shares with its classical models both form (in its use of intrigue plotting) and content (the acquisition of money or the satisfaction of lust – the two are frequently indistinguishable in the figure of the rich widow, for example). It employs a series of stock commedia characters such as witty servants, young lovers, old misers, cuckolded husbands. In particular, for the historical reasons explored above, contemporary London life – with a series of concrete settings – is set before the audience, warts and all. Both Jonson and Middleton relish the immediacy of London. A Trick to Catch the Old One includes references to Fleet Street and Holborn (1.4.60), Cole Harbour (2.1.257) and Highgate (4.2.7); the very first scene of Your Five Gallants includes mention of St Clement’s (41), St Bride’s and St Dunstan’s (44), St Martin-in-the-Fields (63) and Blackwall (298). Later in the same play the relative merits of the taverns, the Mermaid, and the Mitre are discussed (2.1.219–22), while a robbery takes place beyond the city on the way to Kingston at Coombe Park (3.1.3, 28). The thieving boy is threatened with Newgate and Bridewell (3.4.97, 129) and the play’s final meeting is scheduled for St Paul’s (4.3.39). No Wit/Help Like a Woman’s mentions Clerkenwell and Houndsditch (1.297–8), Town-bull Street and the Red Lion tavern on Tower Hill (4.236–9), the Sun tavern in New Fish Street (4.305), and Shoreditch (9.129). Occasionally the very titles of these city comedies locate the action in precise parts of London: A Chaste Maid in Cheapside or Bartholomew Fair, for instance. The explanation for this geographical specificity can be most clearly found by reference to the Prologue of The Alchemist: Our scene is London, ’cause we would make known No country’s mirth is better than our own. No clime breeds better matter, for your whore,

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Peter J. Smith Bawd, squire, impostor, many persons more, Whose manners, now called humours, feed the stage: And which have still been subject for the rage Or spleen of comic writers. Though this pen Did never aim to grieve, but better men; Howe’er the age he lives in doth endure The vices that she breeds above their cure. (5–14)

Jonson’s moral aim is targeted directly at his London audience. The purpose of his art is not to grieve his public but to improve them, to educate them: ‘To mix profit with your pleasure’ (Volpone, Prologue, 8). City comedy then, is fundamentally didactic, exposing the faults of human desire for financial or sexual fulfilment at the expense of other people. With characteristic precision, Jonson emphasises the exact contemporaneousness of his drama. Dame Pliant in The Alchemist gives the date of her birth as 1591 (4.4.30) while Drugger mentions that she is now ‘But nineteen, at the most’ (2.6.31). This dates the action of the play to 1610. In the folio of Jonson’s Works (1616) we are told that ‘This comedy was first acted in the year 1610 by the King’s Majesty’s Servants.’ This company had recently acquired the Blackfriars Theatre in which they played as well as the Globe. Constant reference within the play sets the action in Blackfriars. Both in terms of exact date and geography, then, The Alchemist is a play for today. Face, the crafty servant figure, has succeeded in outwitting all the play’s dupes and even his own co-conspirators. He has gone on to pacify his master (by giving him the rich widow and all the stolen property amassed over the course of the play) and steps forwards in the epilogue to address the audience directly: ‘I put myself / On you, that are my country: and this pelf, / Which I have got, if you do quit me, rests / To feast you often, and invite new guests’ (5.5.162–5). We are forced to acknowledge that in applauding Face’s efforts we become complicit in his offences; we sanction his thieving and have no one to blame but ourselves if we are plucked by the sleeve as we leave the theatre by one of his real-life peers. In their exclusion of fantastic, romantic, heroic, or ‘Shakespearean’ qualities, these city comedies bring their audiences into direct contact with the world as it presently exists around them: ‘This focus on the playgoers’ immediate, everyday reality was without precedent on the English stage. All early modern stage plays about contemporary London were “realistic” ’ (Stock and Zwierlein 2004: 3). The pleasure of this theatre of cruelty is in seeing others suffer the kinds of duping to which we could so easily fall victim ourselves. The intelligence of the tricksters – when not exercised on our own wallets – is a joy in itself. Face’s master, the significantly named Lovewit, voices the delight we all share as we witness the adroit improvisations performed by the conspirators at the expense of the gulls, ‘I love a teeming wit, as I love my nourishment’ (5.1.16). Volpone seconds this, remarking that he actually enjoys the trickery more than the profits: ‘I glory / More in the cunning purchase of my wealth / Than in the glad possession’ (1.1.30–2).

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But while Jonson succeeds in forcing us wryly to acknowledge our own avarice and culpability, Middleton’s is a less jovial satire. For all his dexterity in multiple plotting, his detailed local colour, and his masterful ear for cant (all qualities he shares with Jonson), the tone is much darker. Quomodo in Michaelmas Term, for instance, has no charm such as that displayed by Volpone in the Mountebank scene (2.2). Rather his grim cupidity obscures all else; consider his perverse satisfaction at the demise of his dupe, Richard Easy: shortyard: quomodo:

What is the mark you shoot at? Why, the fairest to cleave the heir in twain; I mean his title: to murder his estate, Stifle his right in some detested prison. There are means and ways enough to hook in gentry, Besides our deadly enmity, which thus stands: They’re busy ’bout our wives, we ’bout their lands. (1.2.106–12)

This is London at its lowest ebb and, in Jonson’s The Devil is an Ass, we hardly wonder, in a world so corrupt, that even a devil is out-devilled by the capital’s iniquity. Pug, who has spent a day away from Hell observing the vice of the city, has proved an embarrassment to Satan, who tells him that he is ‘A scar upon our name! Whom hast thou dealt with, / Woman or man, this day, but have outgone thee / Some way, and most have proved the better fiends?’ (5.6.60–2). The final lesson of city comedy, it seems, is that the only way to triumph over craft and iniquity is with an even more powerful cocktail of the same.

Notes 1

Unless otherwise specified, references to Middleton are to Middleton 2007.

2 3

References to Jonson are to Jonson 1981–2. References to Milton are to Milton 1968.

References and Further Reading Barton, Anne (1990). The Names of Comedy. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Brissenden, Alan (2004). ‘Middletonian families’. In Dieter Mehl, Angela Stock, and Anne-Julia Zwierlein (eds.), Plotting Early Modern London: New Essays on Jacobean City Comedy (pp. 27–39). Aldershot: Ashgate. Cave, Richard Allen (1991). Ben Jonson. London: Macmillan.

Cave, Richard, Elizabeth Schafer, and Brian Woolland (eds.) (1999). Ben Jonson and Theatre: Performance, Practice and Theory. London: Routledge. Cox, John D. and David Scott Kastan (eds.) (1997). A New History of Early English Drama. New York: Colombia University Press. Dekker, Thomas (1922). The Seven Deadly Sinnes of London, ed. H. F. B. Brett-Smith. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

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Dutton, Richard (1983). Ben Jonson: To the First Folio. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dutton, Richard (2004). ‘Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess: A case study’. In Jane Milling and Peter Thomson (eds.), The Cambridge History of British Theatre (vol. 1, pp. 424–38). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Friedenreich, Kenneth, (ed.) (1983). ‘Accompaninge the players’: Essays Celebrating Thomas Middleton, 1580–1980. New York: AMS Press. Gibbons, Brian (1980). Jacobean City Comedy: A Study of Satiric Plays by Jonson, Marston and Middleton, 2nd edn. London: Methuen. Grantley, Darryll (2008). London in Early Modern English Drama. Houndmills: Palgrave. Greenblatt, Stephen (1980). Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Heinemann, Margot (1980). Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama under the Early Stuarts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jonson, Ben (1970). Selected Masques, ed. Stephen Orgel. New Haven: Yale University Press. Jonson, Ben (1981–2). Complete Plays, ed. G. A. Wilkes, 4 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Limon, Jerzy (1986). Dangerous Matter: English Drama and Politics, 1623/4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lyly, John (1919). Euphues the Anatomy of Wit and Euphues and his England, ed. Edward Arber. London: Constable. Middleton, Thomas (1966). A Game at Chess, ed. J. W. Harper. London: Ernest Benn. Middleton, Thomas (2007). The Collected Works, ed. Gary Taylor and John Lavagnino, 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Milton, John (1968). The Poems, ed. John Carey and Alastair Fowler. London: Longman. More, Thomas (1551). Utopia, trans. Raphe Robynson. London: Abraham Vele. Neill, Michael (2008). ‘Old Dad dead?’ London Review of Books, 4 Dec. 2008 (review of Middleton 2007). O’Callaghan, Michelle (2009). Thomas Middleton, Renaissance Dramatist. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Ryrie, Alec (2008). The Sorcerer’s Tale: Faith and Fraud in Tudor England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Scott, Walter (ed.) (1809). A Collection of Scarce and Valuable Tracts on the Most Interesting and Entertaining Subjects. London: T. Cadell and W. Davies. Smith, David L., Richard Strier, and David Bevington (eds.) (1995). The Theatrical City: Culture, Theatre and Politics in London, 1576–1649. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stock, Angela and Anne-Julia Zwierlein (2004). ‘Our scene is London’. In Dieter Mehl, Angela Stock, and Anne-Julia Zwierlein (eds.), Plotting Early Modern London: New Essays on Jacobean City Comedy (pp. 1–24). Aldershot: Ashgate. Whetstone, George (1584). The Enemy of Unthriftiness. London. White, Martin (1992). Middleton and Tourneur. London: Macmillan. Womack, Peter (1986). Ben Jonson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Yachnin, Paul (1997). Stage-Wrights: Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton, and the Making of Theatrical Value. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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‘An Emblem of Themselves’: Early Renaissance Country House Poetry Nicole Pohl

In 1956 G. R. Hibbard published his article ‘The country house poem of the seventeenth century’, where he catalogued a ‘homogeneous body of poetry’, united by common social and political ideals (Hibbard 1956: 159). Recent scholarship has taken Hibbard’s work as point of departure, but has identified a much larger formal and ideological diversity within the body of texts. However, while poems such as Geoffrey Whitney’s ‘To Richard Cotton, Esq.’ (1586), Aemilia Lanyer’s ‘The Description of Cookham’ (1611), Ben Jonson’s ‘To Penshurst’ (1616) and ‘To Sir Robert Wroth’ (1616), Thomas Carew’s ‘To Saxham’ (1640), and Marvell’s ‘Upon Appleton House’ (1681) might be formally distinct, they all present ideals of patronage, community, simplicity, responsible use of wealth and property, good housekeeping, and hospitality. The poems’ rich literary ancestry ranges from Martial, Horace, Statius, Virgil’s Georgics, and Catullus’ poem XXXI to Pliny’s Epistle II, 6, from English emblem poems to memorial poems. The early modern contestation between country and city or court, the change from a feudal to a monetary land ownership, the emergence of ‘possessive individualism’ (Macpherson 1962), accompanied by the introduction of the Palladian building styles for country houses, and the increasing development of a money economy (so aptly symbolised in the building of the New Exchange in 1609 in London) underscored the formation of this distinctive literary tradition. ‘Through the logic of the metonym’, the country estate has come to represent profound ideological and cultural conflicts (Duckworth 1989: 396). By calling upon mythological resonances of the Golden Age and Arcadia, the estate is elevated to a mythical place ‘in which dwelling is the relationship with others, without denial or deprivation of one’s own being, and of such a place as a model for human relationships on a larger social scale’ (Wayne 1984: 173). This mythical quality explains why aspects of the estate poetry heritage are perpetuated from the seventeenth century into the modern age, with manifestations in Daniel Defoe’s Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–6), Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (1813), Emma (1816), and Mansfield Park (1814), Vita Sackville-West’s The Land (1926) and The Garden (1946), the novels

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of Agatha Christie, Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (1945), and Ian McEwan’s Atonement (2001). The longevity of the genre has led critics such as Lewis Mumford to believe that the country house ideal is indeed a social myth, a ‘collective utopia’ that springs from ‘a collective consciousness’ (Mumford 1963: 193). From the Renaissance onwards, the country house has become a receptacle of public memory and national identity, founded on the (by then endangered) notion of English chivalry and hospitality, in short, a stable social and political system. Marxist critics such as Raymond Williams have read the country house poem less as an idealistic celebration of ancient English hospitality than an oversimplification of feudalism that ignores existing economic structures (Williams 1973). Lewis Mumford unveils the idolum of the country house as a social myth (read: ideology) based on privilege, acquisition, force, and fraud (Mumford 1963: 203). The naturalisation of this order is based on the principle of ‘passive ownership’ and ‘passive enjoyment’; there is, argues Mumford too, ‘no active communion between the people and their environment’ (Mumford 1963: 202). This is further developed by K. Biddick, who particularly highlights the country estate’s complicity in colonialism and conspicuous consumption. Thus, the ‘pastoral moves’ in the neo-pastoral of Renaissance, and indeed modern, literature are ideological strategies to disavow England’s imperial past (Biddick 1999: 67). Susan Stewart equally interprets Jonson’s nostalgia for an imaginary feudal community as hostility to material history, a longing towards ‘a future-past’, a past that only has ideological reality (Stewart 1993: 23). Clearly, as Hugh Jenkins suggests, ‘the country-house poem occupies the uneasy, shifting ground between a popular, residual, and communal ideology and a more egalitarian, emerging bourgeois ideology’ – an ambivalence that is not easily resolved (Jenkins 1998: 12). It is necessary to distinguish the thematic shape and poetic structure of this genre (see Chapter 39, Theories of Literary Kinds). Critics still differ on the question of the former. While Raymond Williams and William McClung identify country house poetry as ‘quasi-pastoral’ and ‘neopastoral’, Alistair Fowler argues for the georgic as the basic configuration, Kathryn Hunter highlights its proximity to the emblem tradition and continental country house poetry, and Tom Lockwood underscores the convention of patronage poetry as an important influence. The external form of the estate poetry is less disputed, and ranges from verse epistles, elegies (Lanyer’s ‘To Cookham’), and valedictions to encomiastic epigrams such as Jonson’s ‘To Penshurst’. In addition to these formal divisions, Fowler suggests definite sub-genres which include (1) invitations; (2) welcomes; (3) entertainment poems; (4) appreciations; (5) retirement poems; (6) park poems; (7) closet and gallery poems; (8) building or reconstruction poems; (9) hunting poems; (10) satires (Fowler 1994: 15–16). *** Perhaps the first country house poem is Geoffrey Whitney’s ‘To Richard Cotton, Esq’., published in Book II of Geoffrey Whitney’s A Choice of Emblems (1586). The collection, based on Alciati’s (Andreas Alciatus) Emblemata (1531 onwards), includes two

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Image not available in the electronic edition

Figure 9 The emblem attached to a poem addressed to Richard Cotton, ‘Patria cuique chara: [native land, dear to each]’: Geoffrey Whitney, A Choice of Emblems (Leyden, 1586). British Library, London

poems addressed to Richard Cotton, (1539–1602), owner of Combermere Abbey, Shropshire. Combermere Abbey was originally a Savignac then a Cistercian Abbey, but was dissolved in 1538 and handed over to Cotton’s father Sir George Cotton as a reward for his service to Henry VIII. Most of the buildings were pulled down, and the estate was rebuilt in 1563. The first poem, ‘To R. Cotton Esquire’, reminds Richard Cotton of the mutually beneficial and indeed necessary relationship between the rich and the poor, the estate owner and its dependants (Whitney 1586: 65). The image of the estate as a beehive, a quasi-commonwealth, based on co-operation, ‘mutual friendship’, and ‘trade and intercourse’ is carried over to the second poem, ‘To Richard Cotton Esquire’ (Figure 9): A commonwealth, by this, is right expressed: Both him that rules and those that do obey, Or such as are the heads above the rest, Whom here the Lord in high estate doth stay: By whose support the meaner sort do live, And unto them all reverence duly give. (Whitney 1586: 201, 19–24)

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Combermere Abbey is likened to this commonwealth of bees: A stately seat, whose like is hard to find, Where mighty Jove the horn of plenty lends: With fish, and fowl, and cattle sundry flocks; Where crystal springs do gush out of the rocks. There, fertile fields, there, meadows large extend; There, store of grain with water and with wood. And in this place, your golden time you spend, Unto your praise, and to your country’s good This is the hive, your tenants, are the bees – And in the same, have places by degrees. (25–34)

Whilst the later poem by Ben Jonson, ‘To Penshurst’, equally celebrates the abundance and fertility of nature as an emblem for cosmic order in the sponte sua (‘by their own will’) motif, Whitney highlights the co-operation of labour and effort that goes into the estate. The success of the estate as a commonwealth is founded on the reciprocity between nature and man but also between ‘the poor’ and ‘the rich’.1 Ben Jonson published his estate poem ‘To Penshurst’ in The Forest in 1616, but probably composed it sometime in 1612 (Fowler 1994: 53–62; Woods 1999: 184). Formally, ‘To Penshurst’ is an encomiastic epigram and epitomises the metonymic employment of the estate and especially the architecture of the house, something that Whitney’s poem does not do. Jonson’s celebration of Penshurst is framed by a historical and aesthetic comparison between the Old Hall and more ostentatious country houses such as Theobalds or Salisbury House: Thou art not, Penshurst, built to envious show, Of touch, or marble; nor canst boast a row Of polished pillars, or a roof of gold: Thou hast no lantern whereof tales are told, Or stair, or courts; but standst an ancient pile, And these grudged at, art reverenced the while. … Now, Penshurst, they that will proportion thee With other edifices, when they see Those proud, ambitious heaps, and nothing else, May say, their lords have built, but thy lord dwells. (1–6, 99–102)

The change implied in these lines from the archaic Old Hall to the fashion of grand Elizabethan country houses ‘suggests many metaphors and analogies: from community to the individual, from anonymous to idiosyncratic design, from utility to display, from timelessness to “modernity”, and stylistically, from horizontal to vertical thrust’ (McClung 1977: 90):

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Where comes no guest but is allowed to eat, Without his fear, and of thy lord’s own meat: Where the same beer, and bread, and self-same wine That is his lordship’s, shall be also mine; And I fain to sit (as some, this day, At great men’s tables) and yet dine away. (61–6)

Penshurst represents the good stewardship and social virtue of Robert Sidney, who nurses an organic, self-sufficient but, as the above quotation also shows, still hierarchical community. It is he who is not ‘envious to show’, who does not boast and who is neither proud nor ambitious. This specific endorsement of Penshurst is continued in a rather different vein: Thy Mount, to which the Dryads do resort, Where Pan and Bacchus their high feasts have made, Beneath the broad beech, and the chestnut shade; That taller tree, which of a nut was set, At his great birth, where all the Muses met. … And thence, the ruddy Satyrs oft provoke The lighter Fauns to reach thy Lady’s Oak. (10–14, 17–18)

Penshurst, the historically specific place, is blended with Penshurst, the mythologised social model. It is worth pointing out that Jonson’s realistic description of the estate was already tainted by his utopian desire. By the time Jonson wrote the poem, Penshurst was more than a humble medieval hall. In 1594 staterooms and the Long Gallery were added to the original structure, and Jonson’s contemporary, Robert Sidney, planned to turn Penshurst into a ‘prodigy house’. Rathmell argues that Jonson perhaps warned Sidney not to become a proud owner of an ‘ambitious heap’ (Rathmell 1971: 256–8).2 This warning is also echoed in the hyperbolic sponte sua motif that reminds Sidney of his commitment to hospitality and generosity: The purpled pheasant, with the speckled side: The painted partridge lies in every field, And, for thy mess, is willing to be killed. … Bright eels, that emulate them, and leap on land Before the fisher, or into his hand. Then hath thy orchard fruit, thy garden flowers, Fresh as the air, and new as are the hours. (28–30, 37–40)

It is not only the land and the wild life that offer themselves to the good of Penshurst’s community. Lady Sidney is herself an ideal host, an eager provider for the guests, her

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husband and her children. In the manner of the poem, she is naturalised as ‘fruitful’: These, Penshurst, are thy praise, and yet not all. Thy lady’s noble, fruitful, chaste withal. His children thy great lord may call his own: A fortune, in this age, but rarely known. (89–92)

Her daughters are represented in the same manner: By their ripe daughters, whom they would commend This way to husbands; and whose basket bear An emblem of themselves, in plum, or pear. (54–6)

Wayne interprets this comparison as a depiction of a ‘natural’ chain of events, where ‘the land gives of itself, animals give themselves, ripe daughters give of themselves, ladies give of themselves to lords, lords give of themselves to kings. Moreover the giving is voluntary and constitutes an equivalent exchange in kind, hence, nothing and no one is exploited’ (Wayne 1984: 75). Jenkins adds that Lady Sidney’s body is indeed the site where residual (feudal) and emerging (bourgeois) ideologies are negotiated and subsumed (Jenkins 1998: 56–62). Jonson presents his model of an ideal commonwealth and engages with the socioeconomic changes of the early seventeenth century: he therefore sets up a dialectic between social reality, as perceived by him, and his ideals. This dialectic is the basis for poems such as ‘To Penshurst’ and his masques, The Entertainment of the Two Kings (1606), An Entertainment of the King and Queen at Theobalds (1607), and The Entertainment at Britain’s Burse (1609). Whilst ‘To Penshurst’ celebrates a model of an ideal feudal commonwealth, the masques acknowledge the iconographic importance of the ‘proud, ambitious heaps’ and indeed liken the splendour of Salisbury House or Theobalds to Robert Cecil, the earl of Salisbury. The Entertainment at Britain’s Burse fashions the New Exchange as a commercial and colonial microcosm of the world, and rewrites the sponte sua motif into the idea of commercial plenty: ‘All other places give for money, here all is given for love’ (Robert Cecil, cit. Knowles 2002: 45). Jonson’s poem was clearly formative for the genre, and echoes of ‘To Penshurst’ can be found in later estate poetry. The recently discovered anonymous ‘All Hail’ poems addressed to Hatfield House and the household of William Cecil, and, more so, the ‘His first all Hail to Hatfield’ refer very distinctly to Jonson’s poem: ’Tis not a mightie pile or costly gilding Nor yett the antique fashion of a building That speaks his owners wisdom; to bee neate (Which is a better praise than to be greate)

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Is not enough; the builders arte is knowne Even in the laying his foundation stone. (Lockwood 2008: 278, 11–16)

A close textual comparison reveals that Hatfield indeed outshines Jonson’s idealised Penshurst. Hatfield’s ‘Situation’ (89), the fertility of the gardens, and the magnificent yet well-proportioned architecture are all ‘emblems’ (161) of William Cecil’s virtue, good housekeeping, hospitality, and good stewardship, as well as of Hatfield’s Edenic qualities. The first poem closes with a long, enthusiastic description of the vineyard, which, like Jonson’s The Entertainment at Britain’s Burse, conjures up problematic and complex images of colonial wealth from China and Virginia, ‘Pomp and glory’ (284). These images contradict in many ways the initial description of Hatfield (which is continued in the second ‘Hail’) as a self-sufficient organic community. Thus, the country house ethos in the Hatfield poems re-evaluates ancient feudal power and at the same time legitimises the new and moneyed aristocracy by constituting their authority through the discourse of good stewardship, hospitality, benevolence, and material abundance. *** In 1611 Aemilia Lanyer published a small volume of verse, the Salve Deus Rex Judæorum.3 This religious work is preceded by several dedicatory verses that implicitly seek patronage: Princess Elizabeth, Queen Anne, the countesses of Kent, Pembroke, Bedford, Cumberland, and Dorset, and ‘all virtuous Ladies in general’. The title page suggests four separate poems: ‘The passion of Christ’, ‘Eve’s apology in defence of women’, ‘The Tears of the daughters of Jerusalem’, and ‘The Salutation and sorrow of the Virgin Mary’. However, the poems are linked through an iconoclastic rereading of the Bible and the creation of a virtual female community. In this sense, biblical events such as the Fall are reinterpreted and, more radically, the figure of Christ is appropriated as an exemplary icon for women. The concluding poem of this collection is ‘The Description of Cookham’, an estate poem written at the request of Lanyer’s patron Margaret Clifford, countess of Cumberland. It precedes Jonson’s ‘To Penshurst’ in publication, and possibly in creation (Woods 1999). Formally, ‘The Description of Cookham’ is an elegiac valediction with elements of both the pastoral and the georgic, mourning the loss of a female community at the estate of Cookham. Margaret and Anne Clifford were given this royal manor in Berkshire as temporary accommodation between 1603 and 1605 while Margaret Clifford was fighting a legal battle against her estranged husband George Clifford and his brother to secure her and her daughter’s rights to the Clifford estates.4 Aemilia Lanyer joined the two women for an indefinite period of time, probably as a tutor to Anne (Woods 1999: 30). The whole of Salve Deus Rex Judæorum is deeply indebted to the patronage and spiritual inspiration of Margaret Clifford ‘A Description of Cookham’ celebrates the existence, and at the same time mourns the loss, of a unique paradise:

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The estate, the personified natural surroundings, and indeed the women of the place blend into a locus amoenus (Curtius 1953: 195–200). The walks put on their summer liveries, And all things else did hold like similes: The trees with leaves, with fruits, with flowers clad, Embraced each other, seeming to be glad, Turning themselves to beauteous canopies To shade the bright sun from your brighter eyes; The crystal streams with silver spangles graced, While by the glorious sun they were embraced; The little birds in chirping notes did sing, To entertain both you and that sweet spring. (21–30)

Still, as Susanne Woods has pointed out, the personification of nature is inferred through ‘the poetry of surmise’, which not only ‘distances the poem’s pathos’ but also highlights the role of the poet in the depiction of this earthly paradise (Woods 1999: 119): Oh how methought each plant, each flower, each tree Set forth their beauties then to welcome thee. (33–4)

This bliss, though, is transient: And you, sweet Cookham, whom these ladies leave, I now must tell the grief you did conceive At their departure: when they went away, How everything retained a sad dismay; Nay, long before, when once an inkling came, Methought each thing did unto sorrow frame: The trees that were so glorious in our view Forsook both flowers and fruit; when once they knew Of your depart, their very leaves did wither, Changing their colours as they grew together. But when they saw this had no power to stay you, They often wept, though, speechless, could not pray you; Letting their tears in your fair bosoms fall, As if they said ‘Why will ye leave us all?’ (127–40)

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With the departure of the three women, the paradise withers away; ‘The house cast off each garment that might grace it, / Putting on dust and cobwebs to deface it’ (201–2), but the poet remains to celebrate and eternalise these blissful times and herself in poetry: This last farewell to Cookham here I give: When I am dead, thy name in this may live. (205–7)

This couplet epitomises the process of poetic self-fashioning, which Stephen Greenblatt has developed in his Renaissance Self-Fashioning. Greenblatt has conspicuously ignored the issue of women’s subject formation., Kari Boyd McBride suggests ‘that the poetic construction of virtuous female community is [indeed] the first step in her [Lanyer’s] poetic self-fashioning. But within that female community, Lanyer fashions herself as a poet by using material that traditionally had silenced women, manipulating features of Petrarchism, the pastoral, and the country house genre to construct her poetic vocation’ (McBride 1994: 14–15). In the tradition of the genre, the estate Cookham becomes a mythical place, a model for human relationships, and at the same time it provides a profound socio-political critique. The legal system of patrilinear descent is overturned by a creation of a pastoral community. However, while the exclusion of men guarantees a gynocentric locus amoenus in ‘Cookham’, a very well-defined class division between writer and patron remains intact:5 Unconstant Fortune, thou are most to blame, Who cast us down into so low a frame, Where our great friends we cannot daily see, So great a difference is there in degree. (103–6)

This deep social separation is finally resolved in the context of the whole of Salve where, as McBride has shown, Lanyer ‘bows to authority in her patronage poems and at the same time condemn social privilege by invoking the greater authority of Christ. She both decries her weakness of her social position and makes use of it by allying herself to Christ, occupying both positions of authority, that of holy poverty and that of holy power’ (McBride 1994: 17). Cookham does not represent the political integrity or good stewardship of its owner, but is an emblem of the empowered subjectivities of its female guests and chronicler. Katherine Austen’s poem ‘On the situation of Highbury’ (1665) equally adapts the country house poem to her situation as an outsider and a writer. As a wealthy widow, she contemplated acquiring the estate of Highbury for herself and her family, and the poem seems to have been written during that period. It not only follows the genre’s iconography of abundance and fruitfulness through the sponte sua motif, but it also elevates Austen as a poet and potential owner of the estate. Like Jonson, Austen

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highlights the idea of community and an Edenic state of being. In Penshurst, the lord ‘dwells’ (102): in Highbury, the ‘dweller’ enjoys pleasure and joy, without Toile’ (Hammons 2000: 127). As with Lanyer, Austen’s ultimate wish is, however, to remain known as a writer rather than as the mistress of a country estate: To clear my muddy brain and misty eyes And find a Helicon t’enlarge my muse, Then I no better place than this would choose In such a laver [basin of a fountain] and on this bright hill I wish Parnassus to adorn my quill. (12–16)

The country house poem here thus serves as a ‘poetic monumentalisation’; her virtue, skill and ownership is expressed in the emblem of poetry (Hammons 2000: 125). Both Lanyer’s and Austen’s poems also document that the country house poem was gendered right at its revival in the seventeenth century. Jonson’s ‘To Penshurst’ and the Cavalier poems, such as Thomas Carew’s ‘To Saxham’, and Richard Lovelace’s ‘Amyntor’s Grove’ dominated the first phase of the country house poetry. The second phase, framed by the Civil Wars and the Restoration, experiences a shift in the metonymic use of the country house. Given the political upheavals of the period, it is perhaps not surprising that the theme of retirement prevails. The image of the country house as a political microcosm, hence actively involved in local and national politics, is replaced by the country house as private and contemplative retreat away from disruption. Notes 1

2

3

It is perhaps not surprising that Geoffrey Whitney’s own emblem is Victoria ex labore honesta, et utilis (Green 1866). Malcolm Kelsall indeed suggests that ‘Thou art not’ ‘carries with it a sense of “Thou shalt not”, as if the house were a Biblical commandment reified’ (Kelsall 1993: 35). The work was entered in the Stationers’ Register on 2 October 1610. Quotations are from Fowler 1994: 45–52.

4 5

See Lewalski 1993 on the biography of Margaret and Anne Clifford. On the aspect of patronage and class, see Coiro 1993; Krontiris 1992; Lamb 1998. On the erotic aspect of this relationship, see Goldberg 1997.

References and Further Reading Biddick, Kathleen (1999). The Shock of Medievalism. Durham: Duke University Press. Chedgzoy, Kate, Julie Sanders, and Susan Wiseman (eds.) (1998). Refashioning Ben Jonson: Gender,

Politics and the Jonsonian Canon. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Coiro, Anne Baynes (1993). ‘Writing in service: sexual politics and class position in the poetry

Early Renaissance Country House Poetry of Aemilia Lanyer and Ben Jonson’. Criticism, 35, 357–76. Curtius, Ernst Robert (1953). European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. Willard R. Trask. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Duckworth, Alistair (1989). ‘Gardens, houses, and the rhetoric of description in the English novel’. In Gervaise Jackson-Stops, Gordon J. Schochet, Lena Cowen Orlin, and Elisabeth Blair MacDougall (eds.), The Fashioning of the British Country House (pp. 395–417). Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Elrington, C. R. and B. E. Harris (eds.) (1980). ‘Houses of Cistercian monks: the abbey of Combermere’. In The Victoria County History, vol. 3: A History of the County of Chester, 150–6; , accessed 26 Sept. 2009. Fowler, Alistair (1986). ‘Country house poems: the politics of genre’. The Seventeenth Century, 1/3, 1–14. Fowler, Alistair (1994). The Country House Poem: A Cabinet of Seventeenth-Century Estate Poems and Related Items. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Goldberg, Jonathan (1983). James I and the Politics of Literature: Jonson, Shakespeare, Donne, and their Contemporaries. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Goldberg, Jonathan (1997). Desiring Women Writing: English Renaissance Examples. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Green, Henry (1866). Whitney’s ‘Choice of Emblems’. London: Lovell Reeve & Co. Grossman, Marshall (ed.) (1998). Aemilia Lanyer: Gender, Genre and the Canon. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Hammons, Pamela (2000). ‘Katherine Austen’s country-house innovations’. Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 40/1, 123–37. Hibbard, G. R. (1956). ‘The country house poem of the seventeenth century’. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 19, 159–74. Hunter, Kathryn (1977). ‘Geoffrey Whitney’s “To Richard Cotton, Esq.”: an early English country house poem’. Review of English Studies, 28/112, 438–41. Jenkins, Hugh (1998). Feigned Commonwealths: The Country-House Poem and the Fashioning of the Ideal Community. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.

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Kelsall, Malcolm (1993). The Great Good Place: The Country House and English Literature. New York: Columbia University Press. Knowles, James (2002). ‘ “To raise a house of better frame”: Jonson’s Cecilian entertainments’. In Pauline Croft (ed.), Patronage, Culture and Power: The Early Cecils (pp. 181–95). New Haven: Yale University Press. Krontiris, Tina (1992). Oppositional Voices: Women a Writers and Translators of Literature in the English Renaissance. New York: Routledge. Lamb, Mary Ellen (1998). ‘Patronage and class in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum’. In Jane Donawerth, Mary Burke, Linda Dove, and Karen Welson (eds.), Women, Writing and the Reproduction of Culture (pp. 38–57). Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Lanyer, Aemilia (1611). Salve Deus Rex Judæorum. London. Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer (1989). ‘The lady of the country-house poem’. In Gervaise JacksonStops, Gordon J. Schochet, Lena Cowen Orlin, and Elizabeth Blair McDougall (eds.), The Fashioning of the British Country House (pp. 261–75). Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer (1993). Writing Women in Jacobean England. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lockwood, Tom (2008). ‘ “All Hayle to Hatfeild”: a new series of country house poems from Leeds University Library, Brotherton Collection, MS Lt q 44’. English Literary Renaissance, 38, 270–303. McBride, Kari Boyd (1994). ‘Engendering authority in Aemilia Lanyer’s Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum’, diss., University of Arizona. McBride, Kari Boyd (1998). ‘Remembering Orpheus in the poems of Aemilia Lanyer’. SEL, 38, 87–108. McBride, Kari Boyd (2001). Country House Discourse in Early Modern England: A Cultural Study of Landscape and Legitimacy. Aldershot: Ashgate. McClung, William A. (1977). The Country House in English Renaissance Poetry. Berkeley: University of California Press. McGuire, Mary Anne (1979). ‘The Cavalier country-house poem: mutations on a Jonsonian tradition’. SEL, 19, 93–108. Macpherson, C. B. (1962). The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Mumford, Lewis (1963). The Story of Utopias, 3rd edn. New York: Viking Press. Nicolson, Adam (2008). Earls of Paradise: England and the Dream of Perfection. London: Harper Press. Pohl, Nicole (2006). Women, Space and Utopia, 1600–1800. Aldershot: Ashgate. Rathmell, J. C. A. (1971). ‘Jonson, Lord Lisle, and Penshurst’. English Literary Renaissance, 1, 250–60. Stewart, Susan (1993). On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection. Durham: Duke University Press. Wayne, Don E. (1984). Penshurst: The Semiotics of Place and the Poetics of History. London: Methuen. Whitney, Geffrey (1586). A choice of emblemes, and other deuises, for the moste parte gathered out of

sundrie writers, Englished and moralized. And diuers newly deuised, by Geffrey Whitney. A worke adorned with varietie of matter, both pleasant and profitable: wherein those that please, maye finde to fit their fancies: bicause herein, by the office of the eie, and the eare, the minde maye reape dooble delighte throughe holsome preceptes, shadowed with pleasant deuises: both fit for the vertuous, to their incoraging: and for the wicked, for their admonishing and amendment. Leyden: Christopher Plantyn. Williams, Raymond (1973). The Country and the City. London: Hogarth Press. Woods, Susanne (1999). Aemilia Lanyer: A Renaissance Poet in her Context. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Literary Gardens, from More to Marvell Hester Lees-Jeffries

If there is a popular idea of the English Renaissance garden, it is probably that fostered by many National Trust and other ‘heritage’ properties: neatly clipped box hedges forming elaborate knots or compartments, geometric and figurative topiary, and herb gardens almost entirely planted with the varieties mentioned by name in Shakespeare’s plays. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literary texts, however, together with the surviving descriptions of early modern gardens and other sources, such as gardening manuals, paint another picture, one that is at once less familiar and more complex and sophisticated. Knots, topiary, and herbals most certainly have their place in it, but as details rather than defining features. In literary texts, gardens can be found as both settings and symbols, as markers of genre and as notable features of wider debates about art and nature, mimesis, and the active life as opposed to the contemplative. In the seventeenth century in particular, both real and literary gardens come to be treated more frequently as environments to be experienced as well as to be looked at; plants become as important as design, and the relationships between gardens and the people who create or inhabit them are presented, and evaluated, in different ways. The great gardens of Renaissance England were almost entirely lost, uprooted, demolished, and levelled in the eighteenth century by changing fashions which established the English landscape gardening tradition still familiar at most country houses today: sweeping lawns, serpentine lakes, picturesque vistas, and majestic trees, joined in the nineteenth century by the walled kitchen garden, and in the early twentieth by the herbaceous border. Yet country house gardens, whether landscaped or ‘Elizabethan’, are again only part of the picture: Renaissance literary texts do not simply record, shape, or respond to elite experiences and preoccupations, and their presentation of gardens is no exception to this. The idea of a garden is an enduringly powerful one in English literature and culture throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It is explored in humanist colloquies and lyric poems, prose romance and epic poems, royal pageants and popular drama, theoretical essays and practical handbooks.

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Although this discussion will necessarily focus on a small group of texts, this wider context in both literary and social terms remains important. Renaissance gardens, both real and literary, were built upon earlier traditions, some of which remained central to their construction and imagining well into the seventeenth century and beyond. The classical motif of the ideal landscape or locus amoenus (‘pleasant place’) is refined in medieval texts into the enclosed garden, the hortus conclusus. More than simply a place of refreshment for heroes, the medieval enclosed garden becomes a more specifically erotic space, in part through the influence of the biblical ‘Song of Solomon’: ‘A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed’ (S. of S. 4:12). Medieval biblical scholarship interpreted the enclosed garden and the sealed fountain as symbols of the Virgin Mary; secular texts borrowed from the Song in more straightforwardly erotic terms. In Chaucer’s Merchant’s Tale, ‘fresshe May’ (appropriately named for the lusty spring) is described as her husband Januarie’s ‘paradys’ (Chaucer 1987: 1822). He makes for her a garden ‘waled al with stoon’, into which he summons her with words borrowed from the Song – Rys up, my wyf, my love, my lady free! The turtles voys is herd, my dowve sweete … The gardyn is enclosed al aboute; Com forth, my white spouse! (2138–9, 2143–4)

– only for her to betray him there with Damien the squire. Other medieval texts draw on the erotic tradition of the enclosed garden less explicitly, in particular establishing gardens as places in which it is appropriate to talk about, express, or fall in love: Malory’s knights, for example, are most likely to lament their lovelorn state beside fountains in the forest. This association between garden settings and a preoccupation with love continues in Renaissance texts. Translating a sonnet by Petrarch, Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, looks back to the medieval lyric tradition at the same time as he employs a characteristically Renaissance form: The soote [fragrant] season, that bud and bloom forth brings, With green hath clad the hill and eke the vale. The nightingale with feathers new she sings; The turtle to her make [mate] hath told her tale. Summer is come, for every spray now springs … And thus I see among these pleasant things Each care decays; and yet my sorrow springs. (Jones 1991: 102)

Yet there is little sense here of the evocation, let alone the description, of a real garden: Surrey’s spring landscape is a literary one. In a more directly autobiographical poem

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(‘So cruel prison’) nostalgically describing his youth at Windsor as the companion of Henry Fitzroy, illegitimate son of Henry VIII, even the more realistic details of the castle’s grounds remain vague, subordinated to the poem’s lament for lost freedom, friendship, and innocence: … Where each sweet place returns a place full sour: The large green courts, where we were wont to hove [tarry] … The secret groves, which oft we made resound Of pleasant plaint and of our ladies’ praise … (Jones 1991: 109)

Surrey’s poem suggests that Windsor had a formal garden and an orchard or ‘wilderness’; there would have been a kitchen garden too, and perhaps a bowling green. Surviving contemporary sketches and paintings suggest that Windsor’s ‘large green courts’, like those of Hampton Court, would most likely have been decorated with wooden poles, striped in the Tudor colours of green and white, and topped with heraldic beasts. Court accounts include payments for painting such decorations, and for fountains and elaborate sundials. Almost nowhere in such records, however, is there any indication of what might have been planted in the gardens, and this remains true of surviving household accounts through the sixteenth century and beyond. While Surrey was drawing on both Petrarch and the medieval lyric tradition in his evocation of garden spaces, humanist writers such as Thomas More and Desiderius Erasmus looked further back to the conventions of the classical symposium, as they used garden settings in their colloquies. The conversation between Thomas More and Raphael Hythlodaeus in More’s Utopia (1516; English translation 1555) takes place in the garden of a house in Antwerp, ‘upon a bench covered with green turves’; more elaborately, Erasmus uses a garden setting for some of his colloquies. All of these are reminiscent of the conventions found in classical texts, and emphasise the relaxing qualities of a natural environment in which all the elements are in harmony with each other, an ideal place for discussion and debate. Pliny the Younger, a busy civil servant, describes the idyllic situation of his ‘Tuscan’ villa, an attractive retreat from city life with an elaborate garden featuring topiary, a colonnade, fountains, and pools, an outdoor dining area, and a riding ground: ideal for otium, ease, relaxation and pleasure (Pliny 1969: 2.17, 5.6). Even in the midst of his savage Satires, Horace is able to praise his country villa: This is what I prayed for! – a piece of land not so very large, where there would be a garden, and near the house a spring of ever-flowing water, and up above these a bit of woodland. More and better than this have the gods done for me. I am content. (Horace 1978:2.6)

Erasmus and More take these classical conventions of the garden as an indispensable part of the good life and develop them further; their gardens are moralised spaces. In Utopia,

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They set great store by their gardens. In them they have vineyards, all manner of fruit, herbs, and flowers, so pleasant, so well furnished, and so finely kept, that I never saw thing more fruitful nor better trimmed in any place. Their study and diligence herein cometh not only of pleasure, but also of a certain strife and contention that is between street and street concerning the trimming, husbanding, and furnishing of their gardens, every man for his own part. And verily you shall not lightly find in all the city anything that is more commodious, either for the profit of the citizens or for pleasure. (More 1999: 54)

More himself had a large garden at his house in Chelsea. His description of the Utopian gardens first emphasises pleasure: a garden is a good thing of itself, a motif returned to again and again by writers on gardens in the Renaissance. Second, gardens have an aspirational quality; they become a vehicle for human ambition and display. Even in such an apparently straightforwardly idealised context, More undermines the apparent egalitarianism of Utopia: the human instinct for competition will always find an outlet. Erasmus’ garden settings are still more complex. In ‘The Godly Feast’, the goodness of nature is presented in specifically Christian terms, with some of the garden’s features being allegorised by the host, Eusebius, in this way: Nature … is not silent but speaks to us everywhere and teaches the observant man many things if she finds him attentive and receptive. What else does the charming countenance of verdant nature proclaim than that God the creator’s wisdom is equal to his goodness? … This entire place is intended for pleasure – honest pleasure, that is: to feast the eyes, refresh the nostrils, restore the soul. (Erasmus 1997: 175, 178)

This attitude is gently satirised by Erasmus in ‘The Sober Feast’ (1529), where the commonplaces of the ideal landscape are dutifully rehearsed, only to be set aside in favour of more pressing matters: albert: bartholinus: charles: denis: francis: gerard: jerome: james: lawrence:

Have you ever seen anything more delightful than this garden? The Fortunate Isles have scarcely anything more pleasing, I dare say. Indeed I seem to see the paradise for which God appointed Adam guardian and gardener. Nestor and Priam both could grow young again here. Nay, even the dead could revive. I’d willingly add to your exaggeration if I could. Everything, in fact, is wonderfully attractive. We ought to dedicate this garden with a few drinks. Our friend James is right. (Erasmus 1997: 925–6)

(Nestor and Priam were bywords for old age in the Iliad, among the Greeks and among the Trojans respectively.)

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In ‘The Poetic Feast’ (1523), the participants are more high-minded: at the prompting of their host, they compete in improvising poems and mottoes for which the garden furnishes the subject: ‘That man’s a fool whose garden blooms with countless delights when his mind is uncultivated by learning and virtue’ (Erasmus 1997: 404). Both the mind and the soul had been allegorised as gardens since antiquity: to read was to gather both flowers (examples of particularly elegant expression, which might be annotated with a flower in the margin) and nectar, the transformation of nectar from many flowers into honey being a commonplace for poetic imitation since classical times. It was used by Seneca and Horace: as the bee makes honey from many different flowers, so poets draw on the works of their predecessors (Horace, Odes 4.2; Seneca, Letters 84). Elsewhere in the garden of ‘The Godly Feast’, a painted mural prompts a meditation on art and artifice: We are twice pleased when we see a painted flower competing with a real one. In one we admire the cleverness of nature, in the other the inventiveness of the painter, in each the goodness of God, who gives all these things for our use and is equally wonderful and kind in everything. (Erasmus 1997: 179)

For Erasmus, the garden becomes both setting and symbol, seamlessly integrated into the more sustained discussion of moral and philosophical questions that it both facilitates and illustrates. Many later Renaissance writers, Sidney, Spenser, and Marvell among them, follow Erasmus in using gardens as case-studies in a wider exploration of the relationship between art and nature, and of the morality of art in particular. The idea of a garden as a legible space, in generic, political, moral, or spiritual terms, is one that can be found in most Renaissance literary gardens, and also in many of their real-world counterparts. In the revised version of his Arcadia (c.1583), Philip Sidney uses a garden space to frame the beginning of the main plot of the romance. The shipwrecked prince Musidorus, guest of the kindly nobleman Kalander, when he has sufficiently recovered from his ordeal, is shown by his host into the garden, The backside of the house was neither field, garden, nor orchard, or rather it was both field, garden, and orchard; for as soon as the descending of the stairs had delivered them down, they came into a place cunningly set with trees of the most taste-pleasing fruits; but scarcely they had taken that into their consideration but that they were suddenly swept into a delicate green; of each side of the green a thicket, and behind the thickets again new beds of flowers, which being under the trees, the trees were to them a pavilion and they to the trees a mosaical floor, so that it seemed that Art therein would needs be delightful by counterfeiting his enemy Error and making order in confusion. In the midst of all the place was a fair pond whose shaking crystal was a perfect mirror to all the other beauties, so that it bare show of two gardens; one in deed, the other in shadows. And in one of the thickets was a fine marble fountain made thus: a naked Venus made of white marble, wherein the graver had used such cunning that the natural blue veins of the marble were framed in fit places to set forth the beautiful veins of her body. At her breast she had her babe Aeneas … (Sidney 1977: 73–4)

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This is an entirely recognisable Elizabethan garden. It is divided into three parts: a formal garden, with ‘new beds of flowers’, an orchard, and a ‘green’, a lawn bordered with ‘thickets’, possibly arbours. More important here, however, is that the young prince Musidorus moves through the garden to a picture gallery in a summer house, where he sees the portrait of the princess Philoclea with whom his companion Pyrocles will shortly fall in love (and with whose sister Pamela he will fall in love himself). The garden setting is the catalyst for thoughts of love for both characters and readers, but here that garden is additionally furnished with devices that raise other concerns. Sidney emphasises that gardens are both art and nature: the trees are like the canopies of tents, and the flowers planted beneath them look like a mosaic tiled floor, looking more the ordered product of art than the disorder of nature. Further blurring the categories of nature and art, the garden’s pool reflects it so perfectly that there seem to be two gardens, ‘one in deed, the other in shadows’. Here, it may be that the reflected garden – that of art – is the truer garden, in the Platonic sense, given Sidney’s ideas about art and imitation (mimesis) in his Defence of Poesy: Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done, neither with so pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers, nor whatsoever else may make the too-much-loved earth more lovely: her world is brazen, the poets only [i.e. only poets] deliver a golden. (Sidney 2004: 9)

The fountain is also described as disconcertingly realistic. There, too, Venus nurses her son Aeneas, rather than the more usual Cupid. This suggests that the romance, which is about to begin in earnest, will not be concerned simply with love, but with politics and morality also. In the late sixteenth century, Aeneas was praised not only as a model of heroic virtue and filial piety, but also for his forsaking of Dido in pursuit of his imperial destiny, the founding of Rome. Love is all very well, but passion must be tempered with both reason and a sense of the moral obligations of power. The Arcadia is a serious romance; it does have political concerns, and the inclusion of Aeneas here with Venus, in what would otherwise be a straightforward and conventional garden of love, asserts those concerns from its outset. The most famous garden in Elizabethan literature is found in the second book of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), when, at its climax, the book’s hero, the knight Guyon, with his companion the Palmer, visit the Bower of Bliss. Guyon’s quest has been an exploration of the virtue of temperance, and he journeys to the Bower to punish the beautiful witch Acrasia, who has been seducing young knights away from a life of virtuous action into decadence and torpor. Spenser’s description of the Bower borrows some of its details from Italian romance, Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso and Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata, as well as from classical sources. Critics (notably C. S. Lewis) have tended to see the Bower as staging a debate about the morality of art in more or less Protestant terms; Stephen Greenblatt has influentially described its eventual destruction as expressing a colonial desire for, and fear of, the exotic. More than any of its sources, Spenser’s Bower suggests the way in which

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any garden, not simply an enchanted one, can mingle art and nature to sometimes disturbing effect, and it also demands a particular kind of reading from both Guyon and the readers of the poem: active, sceptical, moral, self-aware. Like the gardens of medieval romance, the Bower of Bliss is walled, with an elaborate gate: And eke the gate was wrought of substaunce light, Rather for pleasure, then for battery or fight. Yt framed was of precious yvory, That seemd a work of admirable witt; And therein all the famous history Of Iason and Medæa was ywritt; Her mighty charmes, her furious louing fitt, His goodly conquest of the golden fleece, His falsed fayth, and loue too lightly flitt, The wondred Argo, which in venturous peece First through the Euxine seas bore all the flowr of Greece. Ye might have seen the frothy billowes fry Vnder the ship, as thorough them she went, That seemd the waues were into yuory, Or yuory into the waues were sent; And otherwhere the snowy substaunce sprent With vermell, like the boyes blood therein shed, A piteous spectacle did represent, And otherwhiles with gold besprinkeled; Yt seemd th’enchaunted flame, which did Creusa wed. All this, and more might in that goodly gate Be red … (2.12.43–6)

The gates and wall establish an important context for what is to follow, and part of that context is the temptation for both Guyon and the reader simply to pass through the gates, impatient to enter into the garden proper and therefore heedless of the many aesthetic clues given by the gates and the way in which they are described that the Bower is a place of acute moral danger. Both the gates and the garden whose entrance they frame must be read: ‘All this, and more might in that goodly gate / Be red…’ This garden is the successor to the moralised garden spaces of Erasmus’ colloquies as well as the enclosed gardens of the medieval romance tradition, but with the burden of interpretation and moral application placed squarely on the reader. For Spenser and his readers the verb ‘to read’ carried a wider range of meanings than are current in modern usage: for them, and for Guyon, to read was to discern, to interpret, to choose, to judge. These gates must be examined with care and some scepticism: what is the reader to make of the story of Medea which

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decorates them, surely an odd choice for what in many other respects announces itself as an erotic paradise? The gates are clearly a marvel of craft, but the emphasis on ‘seeming’ is problematic: they seem ‘a worke of admirable witt’, the ivory waves seem like real waves transformed, but to seem is not to be. And should it not be a source of some disquiet that the only colours contrasting with the ivory are the golden flames with which Medea killed her rival Creusa, and the ‘vermell’ (red, vermilion) of her children’s blood? The gates are, in fact, ‘a piteous spectacle’ (45), deliberately recalling the ‘pitifull spectacle’ encountered by Guyon at the very beginning of the book (2.1.40), the suicide of a woman following the seduction and death of her lover at the witch Acrasia’s hands, which is the origin of his quest and journey to the Bower. ‘Spectacle’, like ‘read’, is a loaded word for Spenser, and its appearance here in the account of the gates which frame the Bower is vital: looking, like reading, is a moral enterprise, and, like reading, it can be a dangerous one. As Guyon and the Palmer enter the Bower proper, many of its physical characteristics are utterly conventional, if particularly lush and appealing in their description: Thus being entred, they behold arownd A large and spacious plaine, on euery side Strowed with pleasauns [pleasure grounds, lawns], whose fayre grassy grownd Mantled with greene, and goodly beautified With all the ornaments of Floraes pride, Wherewith her mother Art, as halfe in scorne Of niggard [mean, stingy] Nature, like a pompous bride Did decke her, and too lauishly adorne, When forth from virgin bowre she comes in th’early morne (2.12.50)

The lawns covered with flowers are familiar in the tradition of the locus amoenus, and so is the explanation in the following stanza that here it is always spring, but here there is a suggestion of excess: this is not simply the ‘rich tapestry’ of the poets evoked by Sidney, but a place that goes too far. Initially Guyon is able to cope with the distractions of his surroundings: Much wondred Guyon at the fayre aspect Of that sweet place, yet suffred no delight To sincke into his sence, nor mind affect, But passed forth, and lookt still forward right, Brydling his will, and maystering his might … (2.12.53)

The garden is a place that can excite the passions (the ‘will’), above all through the eyes. In the Bower looking can be dangerous: can the evidence of the eyes be trusted; is all as it seems? A second gate is covered with a vine,

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Whose bounches hanging downe, seemd to entice All passers by, to taste their lushious wine, And did them selues into their hands incline, As freely offering to be gathered: Some deepe empurpled as the Hyacint, Some as the Rubine, laughing sweetely red, Some like faire Emeraudes, not yet well ripened. And them amongst, some were of burnisht gold, So made by art, to beautify the rest, Which did themselves emongst the leaues enfold, As lurking from the vew of couetous guest, That the weake boughs, with so rich load opprest, Did bow adowne, as ouerburdened … (2.12.54–5)

There is more to this vine than simply its excess. The golden grapes ‘lurk’, serpentlike, among the leaves, presuming a gaze that is not simply appreciative of their beauty, but greedy and avaricious. This garden, so lush in its sensual appeal, both expects and encourages the worst of its onlookers. The grapes should send the cautious reader back to the preceding stanza: if there are lurking grapes of gold on this enticing vine, are all the grapes made of precious stones, only seeming to promise ‘lushious wine’? The golden grapes anticipate the garden’s most striking feature, the elaborate fountain that stands at its centre. Made ‘of richest substaunce, that on earth might be’, a material that is at once shiny and transparent, it is ‘ouerwrought’ with ‘curious ymageree’, ‘shapes of naked boyes … playing their wanton toyes’ (2.12.60), And ouer all, of purest gold was spred, A trayle of yuie in his natiue hew: For the rich metal was so coloured, That wight, who did not it well auis’d it vew, Would surely deeme it to bee yuie trew … (2.12.61)

The spray of ivy is unambiguously intended to deceive, and the fountain itself to titillate both Guyon and the reader, for two naked women swim in its waters, ‘wrestl[ing] wantonly’ with each other, and stopping the supposed knight of temperance in his tracks: Whom such when Guyon saw, he drew him neare, And somewhat gan relent his earnest pace; His stubborn brest gan secret pleasaunce to embrace (2.12.65)

The reader, like Guyon, is tempted to linger on the spectacle, not least because the following three stanzas describe the bathers’ naked bodies as they reveal to Guyon

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‘many sights, that corage cold could reare’ (2.12.68), explicitly arousing him. That arousal is described as a ‘secret pleasaunce’: the word elides both pleasure or desire with the garden space itself (a ‘pleasaunce’ being a pleasure ground), and the reader, like Guyon, is wooed not only by the specific detail of the women in the fountain, but by the totality of the experience of reading the garden. The Bower of Bliss has become a metaphor for fiction itself, perhaps directly building on Sidney’s Arcadian garden, in which the real cannot be distinguished from the imitation. But whereas Sidney’s garden is a framing device, a temporary (if catalytic) location, the Bower threatens to be all-consuming. When the Palmer interrupts the knight’s erotic reverie – ‘On which when gazing him the Palmer saw, / He much rebukd those wandring eyes of his’ (2.12.69) – the reader must share in the rebuke. The garden must be more than a spectacle to be wondered at, slack-jawed: it must be read, and read by those who are ‘well auis’d’; so, it is suggested, must art and literature. It might be thought that there could be no counterparts to the elaborate devices of Spenser’s Bower of Bliss among the real gardens of Elizabethan England, let alone any equivalent of its moral content. Like Spenser’s landscape, however, the real gardens of early modern England also aimed to instruct as well as to divert; they too sometimes addressed issues of artifice, voyeurism, and power, or promoted particular moral or political agenda. At Kenilworth, for example, the Warwickshire seat of the earl of Leicester, an elaborate aviary was decorated with woodcarvings painted and gilded to look like precious stones, ‘by skilful head and hand, and by toil and pencil [paintbrush], so lively expressed as it might be great marvel and pleasure to consider how near excellency of art could approach unto perfection of nature’ (Langham 1575: 13v); wood or cement painted to look like more expensive stone was common even in the most elite gardens. The detailed account of the gardens at Kenilworth was written by Robert Langham as part of his description of the visit there by Queen Elizabeth in July 1575. Langham had made friends with Adrian the gardener, and through him gained access to the privy garden while the household and royal party were out hunting one day: In the centre (as it were) of this goodly garden, was there placed a very fair fountain, cast into an eight square, reared a four foot high … the bowl, the pillar, and eight sides beneath, were all hewn out of rich and hard white marble. A one side, Neptune with his tridental fuskin [spear] triumphing in his throne, trailed into the deep by his marine horses. On an other, Thetis in her chariot drawn by her dolphins. Then Triton by his fishes. Here Proteus herding his sea bulls. There Doris and her daughters solacing [enjoying] a sea and sands. The waves surging with froth and foam, intermingled in place with whales, whirlpools, sturgeons, tunnies [tuna], conches, and whelks: all engraven by exquisite device and skill, so as I may think this not much inferior unto Phoebus’ gates, which (Ovid says), and peradventure a pattern to this, that Vulcan himself did cut. (Langham 1575: I4v–K1)

Here there is above all an emphasis on richness, artifice, and display; in the early years of James I’s reign an undated inventory of the castle valued the fountain at £50, an

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enormous sum. Like Spenser, Langham looks to Ovid to contextualise his description, and perhaps even to the same passage in Ovid (the beginning of the second book of the Metamorphoses) that Spenser draws on for the description of both his fountain and the ivory gates. There is more to this elaborate fountain, however, than simply skilful sculpture or expensive marble. Langham explains: Here were things ye see, might enflame any mind too long after looking; but whoso was found so hot in desire, with the wrest [twist] of a cock [tap] was sure of a cooler: water spurting upward with such vehemency as they should by and by be moistened from top to toe. (Langham 1575: K1)

Look too long on these scenes of Ovidian dalliance, these naked nymphs and, like Guyon, the viewer is rebuked, and with a literal cold shower. Such ‘water jokes’ were a common feature of great gardens in both England and on the continent, and they could be employed to make a serious political point as well as a moral one. In the gardens at Nonsuch, a royal palace occupied at the same time by John, Lord Lumley, and frequently visited by the queen, similar hidden waterspouts awaited those who (like Actaeon, depicted in statue form) gazed too long on a grotto depicting Diana in her bath: Diana was incensed against such madness in a man; she put out the flames of unlawful love with sprinkled water, remade the fashion of his body; from a man she created a beast, from Actaeon a stag, from the noble hunter a wretched prey to dogs … Now the divine virgin enjoys the pleasures of the rock-well in peace, washes her limbs in the icy liquid … Of no matter what art, nature, or divinity it may be, who is there who does not admire in this hard rock, the skilful arrangement of stones, the plentiful variety of blossoms and fruits, but especially how the rush of spraying water now subsides with gentle murmur, now bubbles up on high in full force? (Biddle 1999: 176–7)

The Grove of Diana at Nonsuch may have represented more than a playful condemnation of voyeurism, however. Other fountains depicting the goddess at Nonsuch clearly also represented the queen, the virgin goddess Diana being one of her most familiar personae. To look inappropriately on a representation of the queen was not simply voyeurism but a form of presumptuous disrespect verging on sacrilege or even treason, and the Grove of Diana may have been an elaborate apology from Lord Lumley to the queen for his involvement in the Ridolfi plot, one of several plots in the 1570s to depose her in favour of her cousin, Mary Stuart. The gardens at Nonsuch contained many poems and mottoes protesting loyalty to the queen; other ornaments included a pelican fountain (the queen also used the Christian symbol of the pelican at this time) and two pillars topped with parrots, Lumley’s personal badge, which loyally flanked one of the other Diana fountains in the privy garden. With these ‘real-life’ counterparts, it is not surprising that Spenser writes such a morally legible garden. Yet the Bower of Bliss lacks the straightforward didacticism

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of the water jokes, mottoes, and fountains at Kenilworth and Nonsuch. At the climax of the episode, Guyon and the Palmer surprise the witch Acrasia in her seduction of the young knight Verdant; Acrasia must remain chained, but Verdant is freed and counselled. His name – ‘spring-green’ – and the signs of his youth (‘And on his tender lips the downy heare / Did now but freshly spring, and silken blossoms beare’, 2.12.79) identify him with the garden itself. He too has been corrupted, and, as has been the case with Guyon and the reader, through the medium of sight: Acrasia ‘through his humid eyes did sucke his spright, / Quite molten into lust and pleasure lewd’ (2.12.73). At the end of the book, Guyon destroys the Bower: But all those pleasaunt bowres and Pallace braue, Guyon broke downe, with rigour pittilesse; Ne ought their goodly workmanship might saue Them from the tempest of his wrathfulnesse, But that their blisse he turn’d to balefulnesse: Their groues he feld, their gardins did deface, Their arbers spoyle, their Cabinets suppresse, Their banket houses burne, their buildings race, And of the fayrest late, now made the fowlest place (2.12.83)

Yet the question remains: is destruction the only answer to temptation? Guyon’s actions here are explicitly wrathful, not temperate. Rather than simply portraying the extremes of iconoclasm, Spenser here perhaps contributes to a debate about censorship as much as a consideration of the morality of art: better to be ‘well auis’d’, able to discern the false ivy from the true, than to destroy both. Gardens that are both settings and symbols, that are (like Spenser’s Bower and Nonsuch’s Grove of Diana) erotic, moral, political, and, above all, legible spaces are also found in abundance in early modern drama, usually in ‘shorthand’ form. The ‘greenworld’ as a setting for love and romance, found, for example, in the Forest of Arden in As You Like It and the wood near Athens in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, build on many of the erotic associations of gardens in literature, as well as the idea of the forest as a place of transformation and adventure in the classical and medieval tradition. More specifically drawing on the tradition of the enclosed garden, in Measure for Measure Mariana tricks Angelo into consummating their relationship in ‘a garden circummured [walled] with brick, / Whose western side is with a vineyard backed’ (4.1.27–8), and, in the balcony scene of Romeo and Juliet, Juliet mentions casually that ‘the orchard walls are high’ over which Romeo has climbed, and Romeo attempts to vow by the moon ‘that tips with silver all these fruit-tree tops’ (2.1.105, 150). More sinisterly, in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1587) the lovers Horatio and BelImperia meet by moonlight in a garden, but are betrayed to Horatio’s enemies, who hang him there in an arbour, where his body is found by his father Hieronymo, who protests ‘This place was made for pleasure, not for death’ (2.4.74). The murder in the garden becomes both the motivation for Hieronymo’s revenge and a symbol for the

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corrupt and fallen nature of the Spanish court; this device is taken over by Shakespeare in Hamlet, where it matters that Old Hamlet is murdered while ‘sleeping in [his] orchard’, when ‘a serpent stung [him]’ (1.5.35–6). The garden setting evoked by the Ghost is not simply a recollection of Eden and the Fall, however, but also one of the most common metaphors for the state in early modern political discourse and civic and royal pageantry. Every pageant that formally welcomed a new monarch into London before his or her coronation, from Henry VI’s in 1432 to James I’s in 1604, as well as many mayoral pageants, included some representation of the state as a garden – sometimes reduced to a tree, well, or fountain, sometimes far more elaborate – suggesting that the monarch was similarly a source of plenty and refreshment, and that England (or Britain) was another Eden. In the Descensus Astraeae, a mayoral pageant written by George Peele in 1591, Elizabeth I was represented as the defender of a fountain against Ignorance (a priest) and Superstition (a friar); in 1604 James I’s mere presence caused the Fountain of Virtue to run with milk, wine, and balm during his coronation pageant, and he himself was greeted as the ‘nourishing silver streams’ that watered an elaborate tableau representing ‘the Garden of Plenty’. Perhaps the most famous invocation of the idea of the garden of the state in all of Shakespeare’s plays is that by John of Gaunt in Richard II, as ‘This other Eden, demiparadise … This blessed plot, this earth, this realm, this England …’ (2.1.42, 50). Later in the play, three gardeners (one probably played by the same actor who had earlier played John of Gaunt) use the garden as an extended metaphor for the state of the nation, which is bankrupt and plagued by upstarts and royal favourites, the caterpillars: Go thou, and, like an executioner, Cut off the heads of too fast-growing sprays That look too lofty in our commonwealth. All must be even in our government. You thus employed, I will go root away The noisome weeds, which without profit suck The soil’s fertility from wholesome flowers … … our sea-wallèd garden, the whole land, Is full of weeds, her fairest flowers choked up, Her fruit trees all unpruned, her hedges ruined, Her knots disordered, and her wholesome herbs Swarming with caterpillars (3.4.34–40, 44–8)

This is the most sustained appearance of the metaphor of the garden as state in Shakespeare’s history plays, but it extends through both tetralogies and beyond, from the scene in Temple Garden in 1 Henry VI, where the Lancastrian and Yorkist factions pluck the roses that will become their badges (2.4), through the death of the rebel Jack Cade at the hands of Alexander Iden (or Eden) in a garden in Kent in 2 Henry

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VI (4.9), to the end of Richard III, where Richmond promises that he ‘will unite the white rose and the red’ (5.8.19). (In one of the pageants that had welcomed Elizabeth I to London before her coronation in 1559, her family tree was depicted as a gigantic rose bush, in which her parents and grandparents sat.) When the dying Falstaff is described as having ‘fumble[d] with the sheets, and play[ed] with flowers, and … babbled of green fields’ in Henry V (2.3.13–17), the description evokes not simply nostalgia for the character but for a particular view of the state, bucolic and benign, that has become alien in the realpolitik of the conflict with France (it is notable that Falstaff ’s death immediately follows the exposure of the traitors). At the end of the play Burgundy speaks movingly of the destruction of France, ‘this best garden of the world’ (5.2.23–67, a phrase repeated in the play’s Epilogue (7). At the end of Henry VIII, Cranmer’s prophecy of the future prosperity of England under Elizabeth hopes that ‘In her days, every man shall eat in safety / Under his own vine which he plants, and sing / The merry songs of peace to all his neighbours’ (5.4.33–5). When reading Francis Bacon’s essay ‘On Gardens’ (published 1625), it is therefore tempting to discern a political or moral subtext. Its opening is elegantly concise in its evocation of the ideal, and many of his ideas are still familiar: God Almighty first planted a garden. And indeed it is the purest of human pleasures. It is the greatest refreshment to the spirits of man; without which, buildings and palaces are but gross handiworks: and a man shall ever see that, when ages grow to civility and elegancy, men come to build stately sooner than to garden finely; as if gardening were the greater perfection … (Bacon 2002: 430)

Bacon’s essay includes general instructions about the design and ornamentation of the garden. It should be divided into three, a formal garden, a ‘green’ or lawn for exercise, which should have a shady arbour to allow for walking in the heat of the day, and a ‘wilderness’, which he describes as being ‘framed, as much as may be, to a natural wildness’, consisting largely of less regular planting of the trees, shrubs, and wildflowers than in the formal garden. He is dismissive of knots, which are ‘but toys [such as] you may see as good sights many times in tarts’, and of topiary, which he similarly sees as childish in its devices. Elaborate fountains are amusing and are ‘pretty things to look on, but nothing to health and sweetness’ unless they help to keep the water aerated and in motion and, in general, ‘statues, and such things [add] state and magnificence, but nothing to the true pleasure of a garden’ (2002: 432, 433, 435). Bacon’s garden differs from earlier descriptions of gardens, however, in the huge detail into which it goes about plants. After the essay’s famous opening, he gives long lists of what should be planted in a garden so as to have interest and colour all year round: ‘For March there come violets, specially the single blue, which are the earliest; the yellow daffodil; the daisy … In April follow the double white violet … These particulars are for the climate of London; but my meaning is perceived, that you may have ver perpetuum [perpetual spring], as the place affords [allows].’ He makes suggestions as to what plants are best planted for a perfumed garden, ‘because the breath of

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flowers is far sweeter in the air (where it comes and goes like the warbling of music) than in the hand’, and (for the ‘wilderness’) lists those shrubs which are best for using as standards, provided that they be kept well pruned ‘that they grow not out of course’ (2002: 431–2). By contrast, the only plants named in Spenser’s garden are the vine, the ivy, the laurel, and the rose; Sidney’s garden mentions only generic flowers and trees, as does Shakespeare’s gardener. (When flowers are specifically named en masse in Shakespeare, they are wildflowers in garlands, Ophelia’s or Perdita’s, not growing in a garden.) Bacon’s essay is still far from being a horticultural manual, but the shift of focus that it expresses from the design elements so central to Spenser’s Bower – the gates, the fountain – or the general impression of a locus amoenus sketched with its bare essentials, found in other texts, to the emphasis on plants, is an important one. This shift in focus is reflected in the practical horticultural manuals of the early seventeenth century. Descriptions of real English gardens by writers like Robert Langham (who noted only ‘sweet trees and flowers … apples, pears and ripe cherries’ in the gardens at Kenilworth) (Langham 1575: I2v, I3) or of Italian gardens by tourists in the sixteenth century, had barely mentioned plants; plant lore was to be found in herbals, describing the properties of plants rather than primarily their cultivation. Later works such as Gervase Markham’s The English Husbandman (1613, and many subsequent editions), however, gave exhaustive advice for different kinds of situations and different sizes of property, including diagrams: ‘Against the north side of your orchard wall … you shall plant the apricot, verdicchio [a variety of white grape], peach, and damask-plum [damson]’, not for any aesthetic reasons, but because that is the wall ‘against which the south sun reflects’ (Markham 1613: F2v). The mid-seventeenth century also saw the establishment of the first botanic gardens, which aimed to recreate the Garden of Eden not as an impressionistic paradise, but by bringing together samples of all known species of plant in a systematic way. The best-known ‘garden’ poems of the later seventeenth century are probably those by Andrew Marvell (1621–78), and even the shorter poems among them reflect this shift in emphasis from the garden as a generic green space to one where questions about plants and science are raised, as well as the longer-established concerns to do with love and politics, art and nature, the active and the contemplative life. In ‘The Garden’ the speaker compares ‘this lovely green’ to the conventional red and white of women’s beauty (17–18); the garden is a place of retreat both from public life (‘How vainly men themselves amaze / To win the palm, the oak, or bays’, 1–2) and the pain of love: ‘Such was that happy garden-state, / When man walked there without a mate … Two paradises ‘twere in one / To live in paradise alone’, 57–8, 63–4). Yet even as the garden is celebrated as a place of simple solitude and refreshment, it remains subject to human intervention. This is not so much in the form of design, although the poem concludes with the description of a sundial made with flowers and herbs (65–8), but the manipulation of the plants themselves: What wondrous life is this I lead! Ripe apples drop about my head;

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This garden might initially seem akin to the Bower of Bliss in its plenty and lush sensuality. The near-sentience of the fruit here seems almost sinister, however, more so when one realises that (with the exception of the apples) all of the fruit named here relied on complex methods of cultivation to enable them to be grown in England, such as grafting, heated walls, or hothouses. The peach is ‘curious’ because it is an exotic cultivar, as are the nectarine and the melons: there was great interest in growing exotic fruit in late seventeenth-century England, the presentation of a home-grown pineapple to Charles II by his gardener John Rose, c.1670, being recorded in a special portrait. Marvell’s garden is an already fallen Eden: the flowers that ensnare him are not simply those of love or sex, but the human capacity for ingenuity also. In ‘The Mower against gardens’ the Mower describes the gardener’s skill as a kind of corruption: With strange perfumes he did the roses taint, And flowers themselves were taught to paint. The tulip, white, did for complexion seek, And learned to interline its cheek … No plant then knew the stock from which it came; He grafts upon the wild the tame: That th’ uncertain and adulterate fruit Might put the palate in dispute … ’Tis all enforced, the fountain and the grot, While the sweet fields do lie forgot: Where willing nature does to all dispense A wild and fragrant innocence … (11–14, 23–6, 31–4)

It is tempting to think that Marvell’s Mower looks forward, as he looks beyond the garden into the apparently uncultivated landscape beyond it, to the landscape gardens of Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown (1716–83) and his followers, which swept away the elaborate formal gardens of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in favour of parks, lakes, trees, and ‘prospects’. Marvell’s gardens reflect a further shift in thinking and writing about gardens in early modern England, a shift in which Spenser’s Bower also participates. When Sidney wrote of nature as a ‘tapestry’ or flowerbeds as ‘a mosaical floor’, he expressed a conception of gardens that was ultimately pictorial, and indeed the privy gardens of the great Elizabethan houses were designed, at least in part, to be looked at from

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above. They might include arbours and alleys for walking in, but ‘knots or figures with divers coloured earths’ were placed ‘under the windows of the house on that side which the garden stands’ (Bacon 2002: 432), and seen to best advantage from the house’s principal rooms. Spenser’s Bower is a hybrid in this respect: its description proceeds as a series of tableaux, but it is at least experienced in motion, as Guyon and the Palmer walk through it to Acrasia’s bower. Marvell’s garden is entirely experiential, evoking the garden’s local details in immediate and sensual ways. The garden is no longer simply a symbol or a setting, but a total experience. References and Further Reading Archer, J. E., E. Goldring and S. Knight (2007). The Progresses, Pageants, and Entertainments of Queen Elizabeth I. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bacon, F. (2002). The Major Works, ed. B. Vickers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Biddle. M. (1999). ‘The gardens of Nonsuch: sources and dating’. Garden History, 27, 145–83. Bushnell, R. (2003). Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Chaucer, G. (1987). The Riverside Chaucer, ed. L. D. Benson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Christianson, C. P. (2005). The Riverside Gardens of Thomas More’s London. London: Yale University Press. Erasmus, D. (1997). Colloquies, ed. C. R. Thompson. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Greenblatt, S. (1980). Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Henderson, P. (2005). The Tudor House and Garden. New Haven: Yale University Press. Horace (1978). Satires, trans. H. Rushton Fairclough. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Howard, H., earl of Surrey (1985). Selected Poems, ed. D. Keene. Manchester: Carcanet. Hunt, J. D. (1996). Garden and Grove: The Italian Renaissance Garden in the English Imagination. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Jones, E. (1991). The New Oxford Book of SixteenthCentury Verse. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kyd, T. (1995). The Spanish Tragedy. In Four Revenge Tragedies, ed. K. E. Maus. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Laneham [Langham], R. (1575). A Letter. London. Lees-Jeffries, H. M. M. (2007). England’s Helicon: Fountains in Early Modern Literature and Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Leslie, M. (1992). ‘Spenser, Sidney, and the Renaissance garden’. English Literary Renaissance, 22, 3–36. Lewis, C. S. (1936). The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Markham, G. (1613). The English Husbandman. London. Marvell. A. (2007). The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. N. Smith. London: Pearson Education. More. T. (1999). Utopia. In Three Early Modern Utopias, ed. Susan Bruce. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pliny (1969). Letters and Panegyricus, trans. B. Radice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Saunders, C. J. (1993). The Forest of Medieval Romance: Avernus, Broceliande, Arden. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Sidney, P. (1977). The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, ed. M. Evans. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Sidney, P. (2004). A Defence of Poesy and Other Renaissance Literary Criticism, ed. G. R. Alexander. London: Penguin. Spenser, E. (2001). The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton. London: Pearson Education. Stewart, S. (1966). The Enclosed Garden: The Tradition and the Image in Seventeenth-Century Poetry. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Strong, R. (1979). The Renaissance Garden in England. London: Thames & Hudson.

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English Reformations Patrick Collinson

I The pluralisation of ‘Reformation’, a departure from the traditional concept of ‘the English Reformation’ – as in the title of a book once thought to have been almost definitive of its subject (Dickens 1989) – is a recent historiographical development. Christopher Haigh now insists that the Reformation must be ‘broken up or deconstructed’ (Haigh 1993: 12–21, 335–42). Haigh’s ‘English Reformations’ implies that the process of Protestantisation occurred in irregular and inconsistent stages, that the new religion was neither popular nor widely adopted, and that its promotion was not coincident with a state reformation consisting of pragmatic and piecemeal measures to reconstruct the church institutionally and constitutionally in its relation to the state, which is to say, the English Crown. His account of the matter ends dismissively: ‘Some Reformations’ (Haigh 1993: 295). Both the official restoration of Catholicism under Mary I (1553–8), and unofficial attempts to sustain and reinvent English Catholicism in the time of Elizabeth I (1558–1603) and her Stuart successors, were episodes and movements that deserve in their own right to be called ‘Reformations’. Replacement of the term ‘Marian Reaction’ by ‘Marian Reformation’ marks a departure from a traditional Protestant, or ‘Whig’, take on English history, the assumption that the old religion was a lost cause, with England predestined to achieve its modern greatness in the world as a Protestant nation and power. Among a number of historians currently reinventing the reign of Mary as anything but the story of ‘sterility’ which once prevailed, the work of Eamon Duffy is outstanding, especially in his controversial Cambridge Birkbeck Lectures, Fires of Faith: Catholic England under Mary Tudor. Marian England was not the fag-end of an exhausted and passé medievalism. Rather it witnessed something like the invention of the Counter-Reformation, which is to say, the Catholicism of 1600 to 1900, thanks to Mary herself and to her archbishop of Canterbury, the papal legate Reginald Pole (Duffy 2009).

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It is important that such revisionisms not be taken too far. The English Reformation, in something like its traditional sense, did happen (while the Counter-Reformation happened mostly elsewhere). One of the most Catholic countries in western Europe did become, within two or three generations, if not one of the most Protestant nations, culturally and politically profoundly anti-Catholic, an alteration of global significance. Not only the traditional narratives of the English Reformation but the configurations in post-Reformation England of religious allegiance, belief, and practice, are now in the course of being ‘broken up and reconstructed’. It appears that our familiar labels of ‘Catholic’, ‘Conformist Protestant’ (or ‘Anglican’), and ‘Puritan’ no longer begin to fit the nuanced complexity of a polity and religious culture in which innumerable individuals, kinships, and communities had to square in one way or another their relation to a state-defined orthodoxy which, at the very least, required attendance at and participation in church services which were unequivocally Protestant in their theological underpinnings, if in some respects traditional in form: everything, to the merest detail, defined and prescribed in the Elizabethan Act of Uniformity of 1559. Legislated uniformity was to conflict and yet coexist with what Elizabeth’s lord keeper, Nicholas Bacon, called ‘milliformity’ (Nicholson 1843: 147). Crude labellings, which once served a polemical purpose, have obscured the true picture from historians, who have mostly served the interests of the denominations that derive from the contested religions of the sixteenth century. The greatest change has affected our understanding of the world of the Elizabethan and post-Elizabethan Catholics. For four centuries we were led to believe that to be an English Catholic, beyond and against the Reformation, was to be a ‘recusant’, a refusenik in respect of the Elizabethan Settlement, staying away from the parish church, cultivating a separatist religion sustained by the ministrations of fugitive priests, a religion of priest-holes and scaffolds. We now understand that an alternative way, that of the semi-conforming so-called ‘church papists’, persisted over generations, and that to speak of a ‘Catholic Community’, as historians have done, is to overlook the fact that there were many Catholic communities, and Catholics of no definable community, but who maintained cordial relations on both sides of the confessional divide (Questier 2006; Walsham 2000a). These insights should be applied to the no less variegated scene of post-Reformation Protestantism. To make this point concrete: was William Shakespeare a Catholic? What might it mean to call Shakespeare a Catholic? And what, exactly, was the religion of his father, John Shakespeare, the glover of Stratford-upon-Avon? It is perhaps unlikely that an exact answer to that question can be given, but a better understanding of the complicated Elizabethan religious scene might be helpful to an ongoing debate (Collinson 1994b: 218–52). This often confusing and tumultuous scene can be visited in the religious literature of this age of reformations, much of it (but by no means all – scribal publication still mattered) in the burgeoning medium of print. The first point to be established is that there was an awful lot of it. ‘Religious books’ is a convenient anachronism, a category hard to define or to measure with statistical precision, for religious and moral values

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and intentions pervaded a great many literary genres, just as ‘religion’ itself was not a discrete phenomenon but something which permeated virtually all areas of early modem culture. Politics was inseparable from religion (Collinson 1967; Collinson, Hunt, and Walsham 2002). When a lawyer called John Stubbes wrote a bold and even seditious book attacking the proposed marriage between Elizabeth I and the French duke of Anjou, it was obvious that the author was motivated by his ardent Protestantism. It would be not so much political folly as ‘a sin, a great and mighty sin’, ‘to couple a Christian lady, a member of Christ, to a prince and good son of Rome, that anti-Christian mother city’ (Berry 1968: 6). Even the cheap broadsheets and pamphlets conveying ‘true’ reports of the latest hideous murder or monstrous birth claimed a religious or at least moral inspiration. Belief in divine providence dominated how the world and its processes and accidents were understood (Walsham 1999). But taking a more conventional view of what constituted a religious book, it appears that religion was the great staple of the sixteenth-century book trade, making up, roughly, half its total output.1 (Much of this huge output, for example some hundreds of different catechisms and other didactic works, lie beyond the scope of this literary and cultural survey (Green 2000)). Protestantism, it has been assumed, was a religion of the printed book, its devotees people of the book in a sense that traditional Catholics had never been. Martin Luther called printing ‘God’s ultimate and greatest gift’, through which he would instruct ‘the whole world’ in ‘the roots of true religion’, and the English martyrologist John Foxe said similar things. ‘God hath opened the press to preach, whose mouth the Pope is never able to stop with all the puissance of his triple crown’ (Walsham 2000b). There was much in this. Pre-Reformation Christianity in the West was a religion of orality, visuality, and plasticity, polemically caricatured by Protestants as a contrivance to keep the people in a state of ignorance, ‘the mother of devotion’. If the English Reformation was nothing else, it was a massive onslaught on the concrete apparatus of that kind of religion, an iconoclastic holocaust of imagery (Aston 1988; Duffy 1992). Luther’s principle of sola scriptura, the Bible replacing the church as the only authority for doctrine and for life, put a premium on the printed word, to the extent that more radical reformers would regularly accuse the Protestants of having erected ‘a paper pope’. In Germany, if print made the Reformation possible, the Reformation made the fortunes of many printers, a benign symbiosis. If we want to explain how it was that in England Protestantism took firm root in the sixteenth century, whereas the Wycliffite heresy of the fourteenth century, the religion of the so-called Lollards, had proved a premature and largely abortive reformation, it may be enough to point to the mass production of printed New Testaments in English, within ten years of the first copy coming off the press in Worms in 1526. For these were not religiously neutral publications. Efforts to suppress William Tyndale’s tendentious Testament, smuggled into England and sold at about three shillings a copy, were futile. When the authorities bought up copies in order to burn them, good money was thrown after bad, to pay for more. In a liberal age we say that if you can’t beat them you must join them. But two generations would pass before English

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Catholics would overcome their resistance to the principle of Scripture in the vernacular, to the extent of printing their own version of the New Testament in English (Rheims, 1582), hedged about with health warnings. But some revisionary adjustment to this conventional scenario is called for. On the one hand, Protestantism as propaganda, persuasion, polemic, and evangelism was by no means restricted to the printed page. Oral communication in the form of the sermon (admittedly a Bible-based sermon) was primary. Many Protestants even insisted that it was only through hearing the Word preached, not through ‘bare reading’, that saving faith could be engendered, for St Paul had pronounced: ‘Faith cometh by hearing, and hearing by the Word of God’ (Romans 10: 17). It was even doubted that deaf people could be saved. The 2,300 sermons that John Calvin is known to have preached in Geneva were not intended for publication, and some of the most celebrated English preachers of the age never appeared in print, or only when prevented from preaching. Nor was the sermon the only medium through which the Protestant message was communicated, especially to the illiterate majority. Psalms and so-called ‘Scripture songs’, (often songs of anti-Catholic protest), pictures, stage plays, and street demonstrations were all exploited, especially in the early years of the Protestant movement. Some of these ‘popular’ media were more typical of the culture of Lutheran Germany than of the kind of Protestantism that came to prevail in late sixteenth-century England. But metrical psalm-singing endured as a powerful and popular religious affirmation (Aston 1988; Collinson 1988b; Temperley 1979; Watt 1991). On the other hand, Catholicism proved that it too could be a religion of the book. That was nothing new. Long before Luther and Foxe, churchmen had recognised the value of print, and the press had been used on a large scale for a variety of religious purposes, including the production of indulgences, lists of relics, and reports of miracles at shrines of pilgrimage, but also for the encouragement of lay devotion (Duffy 2006). This was an established tradition, which the Reformation could be said to have hijacked. In England, the Bridgetine monk Richard Whitford was the first popular spiritual writer to exploit the medium of print in A Work for Householders and other handbooks of practical divinity, published in the 1530s. With the political entrenchment of Protestantism, printed books for English Catholics became a simple necessity. Protestantism as the state religion enjoyed all the resources of an established and relatively well-endowed church, including its pulpits, a monopoly, one might say, of broadcasting; whereas Catholicism was a proscribed and clandestine faith, its human agents thin on the ground, living under cover, and at risk of their lives. To a considerable extent, books took their place. Secret presses operated in England itself, and large quantities of printed books were smuggled into the country from abroad, including an English version of the little book by St Charles Borromeo called The Last Will of the Soul, to which Shakespeare’s father may have put his name before concealing it in the roof of his house in Henley Street, Stratford-upon-Avon.2 This was an enterprise on a larger and more highly organised scale than the better-publicised activities of dissident Protestants and Puritans. A catalogue of Catholic imprints between 1558

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and 1640 lists 932 items in English, and no fewer than 1,619 in other languages (Allison and Rogers 1994).

II We may locate the spirit of all Protestant literature in the principle that Janel Mueller has called ‘scripturalism’ (Mueller 1984). And we may further define scripturalism as a religious and literary aesthetic of the plain, literal, and open sense; but also, almost conversely, as a bottomless well of metaphor and allegory on which the entire range of human emotion and experience could draw. John Donne wrote: ‘There are not so eloquent books in the world as the Scriptures.’ Barbara Lewalski provides examples from seventeenth-century religious poetry of some of the Bible’s ‘richly tentacular tropes’: sin as sickness, Christ as physician; sin as darkness or blindness, Christ as light; human life as warfare, pilgrimage, childlikeness; the tropes of sheep and shepherding, of the husbandry of seed, plant, fig tree, vine; the metaphors of marriage, the body, the temple, the heart (Lewalski 1979: ch. 3). The beginnings of the scripturalist imperative are to be found in the activities of the translators of the fourteenth-century Wycliffite Bible. Nicholas Purvey (in about 1395) declared his purpose ‘to make the sentence as true and open in English as it is in Latin, either [or rather] more true and more open than it is in Latin’ (Mueller 1984: 111–12). The claim that Mueller makes on Purvey’s behalf is audacious: that the preference for an ‘open’, sense-determined version of the Bible was almost the same thing as an instinct for a natural, truly vernacular English as the proper mode for written as well as oral expression. There was to be a long unfulfilled appetite for religion to be enjoyed and expressed in these accessible terms, since in England (and the situation was different in Germany and the Low Countries) the association of translated Scripture with heresy held back the publication of a vernacular Bible long after the invention of printing, until the advent of Tyndale. Tyndale was the fulfilment of what Purvey had promised, a man heaven-bent to make the Bible freely available to lay readers and hearers, driven by the urgent and Protestant conviction that the Bible contained what he called ‘the pith of all that pertains to the Christian faith’, which was faith itself, ‘a living thing, mighty in working, valiant and strong, ever doing, ever fruitful’.3 Sir Thomas More took exception to Tyndale’s tendentious translation of certain key scriptural terms (‘all these Christian words’, which, as someone else complained, were lost in his translation): ‘congregation’ rather than ‘church’ for ecclesia; presbyteros no longer ‘priest’ but ‘elder’; metanoia not ‘do penance’ but ‘repent’. More was contemptuous: to suggest ‘that all England should go to school with Tyndale to learn English is a very frantic folly’ (Pollard 1911: 124; Schuster et al. 1973: 206–7, 212). But More chose to miss the point. Tyndale had gone to school with all England to learn the language of his translation, which is essentially the language we use today. How it was that a native of the remote hill country of the Forest of Dean in

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Gloucestershire, where presumably an impenetrable dialect was spoken, should have discovered our language, derived from Chaucer, will always remain a mystery.4 But it is relevant that Tyndale was a precocious linguist and classical philologist, not only an expert Greek scholar but learned enough in Hebrew to be able to detect the Hebrew implicit in New Testament Greek; and that he was convinced, at least at first, of the perfect affinity of both Hebrew and Greek with English. ‘The manner of speaking is both one. So that in a thousand places thou needest not but to translate it into English, word for word.’ So different from the introversions of the Latin language! (Later, as he grappled with the Old Testament, much of it almost untranslatable, Tyndale was not so sure. Luther had had his own struggles with the problem.) The typical word order of the original biblical languages was a significant source for what would become standard English syntax.5 Tyndale’s one-eyed resolve to put the Bible into the hands of the people was hugely important. Whereas More’s friend Erasmus of Rotterdam had said ‘would that’ (utinam) the farmer at the plough and the weaver at his loom should know the New Testament (and had said it in Latin, in the preface to an edition in Latin and Greek), Tyndale boasted (his famous ‘vaunt’) that he would cause the ploughboy to know Scripture better than the ignorant clergy.6 But as an exile from Henry VIII’s England, about to be kidnapped, imprisoned, and executed, Tyndale had conveyed to his king the message that if Henry would only make the Bible available to his subjects, printed in their own language, he would be content ‘never to write more’, as it were to cease to exist (Daniell 1994: 216). And that is what happened. Tyndale’s translation soon became the basis of the royally endorsed Great Bible, and of all subsequent versions in English, until modern times. And Tyndale’s name was all but forgotten. Yet 80 or 90 per cent of the words in versions of the Bible in English for a hundred years to come are his, for the New Testament and of those parts of the Old Testament which he was given time to finish (Daniell 1994). It was Tyndale who gave us ‘the burden and heat of the day’, ‘filthy lucre’, ‘God forbid’, ‘the salt of the earth’, ‘the powers that be’. Tyndale’s English is actually more English, more demotic, than the so-called Authorized Version of 1611, where a committee has smoothed over many rough edges to produce something safer and more ecclesiastical: once again ‘charity’ in 1 Corinthians 13, rather than Tyndale’s more earthy ‘love’. As for the effect on English civilisation of the direct exposure to scripturalism which Tyndale facilitated, we may quote from the official Homily of the Reformed Church of England, ‘On the Scripture’: the reader who will profit the most is the one who is ‘turned into it, that is … in his heart and life altered and changed into that which he readeth’. According to the title page of the Great Bible designed by Holbein, what the reader was supposed to be changed into was an obedient subject, forever crying ‘Vivat Rex’. But this was absurdly optimistic, and Tyndale was almost unbelievably naive. What scripturalism in fact led to were bitter and ultimately irresolvable disputes, essentially about grammar, the grammar of certain critical New Testament texts. The Reformation aimed at certainty in religion but ran into endless difficulties over

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interpretation. As Montaigne remarked; ‘Nostre contestation est verbale.’ Luther had expressed absolute faith in language, and had simultaneously ensured that faith in language would be henceforth impossible. The groundwork of arguments destined to last for a century and more was laid in the battle of books between Luther and Erasmus (De libero arbitrio versus De servo arbitrio), which was not only an argument about texts but an argument about how to argue about texts. Luther accused Erasmus of a nova et inaudita grammatica, by which ‘anything might be made of anything’ (Cummings 2002; Simpson 2007). Out of these grammatical conflicts came a wave of polemic, one of the dominant literary forms of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, unjustly neglected by those committed to the study of the literature of the age on account of its supposed literary vacuity. Jesse M. Lander tells us: The literary culture of early modern England was fractious, robust, and deeply polemical, a fact not registered by received literary histories, which, impatient with theological squabbling and polemical exchange, have approached the period through modem editions that regularize and sanitize the hurly-burly of early modern print. (Lander 2006: 55)

Tyndale himself inaugurated the torrent of religious polemic that accompanied every stage of the English Reformations. His most notable controversial work was The Obedience of a Christian Man and how Christian Rulers ought to Govern (1528). The full title is of some importance. Henry VIII, reading perhaps only the first half of the book, duly noted that, according to Tyndale, the prince is in this world without law, and may ‘at his lust’ do as he pleases without correction. This, said Henry, was a book for all Christian princes to read, an ideological cornerstone, we might say, for royal supremacy. But if the king had read on he would have found Tyndale instructing him, publicly and in print, in what rulers ought to do. This pointed forward to a critique of monarchy that would be mounted by religious writers from both sides of the confessional divide. Christopher Goodman’s home thoughts from abroad, How Superior Powers Ought to be Obeyed of their Subjects (Geneva, 1558), a Calvinist attack on the Marian regime, seems to have a ‘not’ missing from its title. The first major battle of the books of the English Reformation pitted Tyndale against More. More opened fire in A Dialogue Concerning Heresies, or Dialogue Against Luther and Tyndale (1529), a modest 175,000 words; to which Tyndale responded in the mere 80,000 words of his Answer Unto Sir Thomas More (1531), which provoked the almost interminable Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer (1532), weighing in at half a million words (Lawler et al. 1981; Schuster et al. 1973; Walter 1850). Both men were outstanding English stylists, and what was at stake was the right language in which to express the religion of the English people, as much as the theological rights and wrongs of the matters in dispute. More began gracefully, deploying the rhetorical art of concessio by telling scandalous and even dirty stories about ecclesiastical abuses to demonstrate that he was not unaware of the need for religious reform. Tyndale, who

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was not amused, defended his corner with the plain dignity that was his hallmark. But in the Confutation More lost it, at least to the satisfaction of Janel Mueller, who writes that his effort to domesticate an authoritative Latinate manner of expression in English was a failure. He was now resorting to intimidation rather than persuasion. It is hard to avoid the conclusion that More deliberately resigns to Tyndale and the Protestants generally the exercise of native resources for prose composition. He is conceding that the open, vernacular style is a suitable mode for undermining the authority of the Church, not for defending it. (Mueller 1984: 220–2)

Presently this would apply equally to the prose styles deployed by Puritans in their attacks on the Elizabethan establishment, and, by imitation, by their opponents. Authority tended to rely upon authority rather than on the cut and thrust of vernacular argument; although it has to be said that, towards the end of the century, the decorous polemic of Richard Hooker made a huge difference, finding a new and smoother kind of apologetic language (Vickers 1997). The adoption of a plain English vernacular as the appropriate medium for religious expression, even in the very words with which Almighty God was to be addressed, was powerfully reinforced by the Book of Common Prayer, a text as inexorably linked to the name of Thomas Cranmer as the Bible with Tyndale. Cranmer’s Prayer Book in its first birth in 1549 and even in the more radically reformed recension of 1552 (substantially re-enacted in 1559), was not an original composition but a skilful reworking of an inherited liturgical tradition, leaving a deep and permanent mark on English religious experience in the slender prayers known as ‘collects’: ‘Lighten our darkness we beseech thee, O Lord, and by thy great mercy defend us from ail perils and dangers of this night.’ But Cranmer combined the instincts of a liturgist with the Tyndale-like conviction that everything said and done in worship should be ‘understanded of the people’, who were given a significant participatory role in the ‘responses’, which punctuated the two new and standard services of Morning and Evening Prayer. The minister was to face the congregation and to read ‘distinctly, with a loud voice, that the people may hear’. When parts of the service were sung, a ‘plain tune’ was to be used, ‘after the manner of distinct reading’. However, Cranmer thought it appropriate that for such solemn purposes plain English should be weighed down with ‘doublings’, which for the purpose of sense were strictly redundant, such as ‘devices and desires’, ‘sins and wickednesses’, ‘all good counsels and all just works’ (MacCulloch 1996). But for all its considerable artifice and respect for tradition, there can be no doubt that the Book of Common Prayer was the principal vehicle for an uncompromised protestant Reformation. The demotic inclusiveness of these new services was compromised, at least in the perception of a more liberal age, by their compulsory status. Uniformity was the name of the game, and successive parliamentary Acts of Uniformity (the last of these, in 1559, achieving virtual perpetuity) both required the regular attendance at church of the entire population, and made illegal even the slightest departure from the text of

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the Prayer Book and its ‘rubrics’ (or stage directions). For centuries to come it would be possible to check one’s watch at 11.08 on a Sunday morning, and to be certain that at that moment everyone in the land was intoning the psalm known as the Venite. Bible and Prayer Book were the foundations for the Protestant ‘plain style’ which, as Nicholas Udall explained, was preferable to ‘elegancy of speech’, out of ‘a special regard to be had to the rude and unlettered people’. But ‘plain’ is deceptive. Udall also insisted that if divinity ‘loveth no cloaking’ it did not necessarily eschew ‘eloquency’. Roger Ascham repeated an Aristotelian dictum: ‘speak as the common people do’, ‘think as wise men do’. Some of the best examples of the Protestant plain style will be found in the sermons of Bishop Hugh Latimer, full of homely imagery and reminiscence, loosely anecdotal in structure, and printed in the ‘black letter’ preferred by relatively illiterate readers: which in the very appearance of the thing was to put a populist spin on the content. The Word of God was not strawberries ‘that come but once a year, and tarry not long, but are soon gone’. It was ‘meat … no dainties’. Lurking behind the arras, as it were, was the living ghost of Piers Plowman, who was accorded honorary Protestant status, and printed for the first time in 1550 by the evangelical publicist Robert Crowley. And Piers Plowman was behind Edmund Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender (King 1982: ch. 3, ‘Vox Populi, Vox Dei’).

III Soon the history of the events we call the Reformation (and Catholics the Great Schism) became in itself a major bone of contention, with each side presenting its own version of the story in the context of two radically different understandings of the church, its pedigree, descent, and destiny. The Protestants got in first, with a potent mixture of martyrology and an apocalyptic vision of the meaning of time itself and of its end, which we find in the mind-blowing imagery of the last book of the Bible. A former Carmelite monk, John Bale, led the way in the exploration of these genres. The Image of both Churches, after the Revelation of Saint John (1545?) created for English Protestants a radically dualistic ecclesiology, Christ against Antichrist, True Church in historic contention with False Church, ostensibly almighty but destined to fall. ‘Babylon is fallen, that great city’ – which, of course meant Rome. And Bale’s edited accounts of the trials and execution of Anne Askew, a Lincolnshire gentlewoman burned at the stake in the dying days of Henry VIII’s tyranny, was the overture to a whole opera of English martyrology. The witty, incorrigible Askew was presented as the author of her own testament, but the second of these books, The Latter Examination of Anne Askew, acknowledged The Elucidation of J. Bale (1547). Askew’s sex was significant, and not only for modern feminists and historians of ‘gender’. Bale’s ‘elucidation’ identified her with the second-century martyr Blandina, a type of the church itself, the spouse of Christ, an apocalyptic image.7 Bale’s lead was followed by his friend John Foxe, who in collaboration with the printer John Day produced one of the most stupendous literary achievements of the

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Image not available in the electronic edition

Figure 10 Title page to John Foxe, Acts and Monuments (London, 1641; this gigantic book of about 1,800 pages was first published in English in 1563). See Margaret Aston and Elizabeth Ingram, ‘The Iconography of the Acts and Monuments’, in David Loades (ed.), John Foxe and the English Reformation (Aldershot, 1997), 66–142. British Library, London

age, Acts and Monuments or The Ecclesiastical History, known to generations of readers as Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’, a book which grew and changed its shape through four successive editions published in Foxe’s lifetime (1563, 1570, 1576, 1583) into a vast but skilfully constructed compilation of some millions of words, a medley of a variety of literary genres and forms) in truth the work of many hands, but with Foxe in over all control.8 It is significant that an Exeter worthy of the early seventeenth century, whose daily spiritual diet was a chapter of the Bible and a chunk of Foxe, had, after some years, read the Bible twenty times over, but Foxe, which was altogether more demanding, a mere seven times. What it was to read Foxe, and how he was read, not necessarily from beginning to end, but selectively guided by the critical apparatus provided, is currently a fruitful area of reception studies (Collinson 1994c: 151). Foxe’s engraved title page (Figure 10) turned into virtual reality Bale’s ‘image of both churches’, an adaptation of the medieval doom painting, with Christ in glory. On his left hand, devils, with the shaven tonsures of Catholic ecclesiastics, are cast down into Hell; on his right, the martyrs, tied to their stakes but wearing their

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crowns, are praising him with trumpets. On earth, the Catholics are depicted in their fond religious exertions, while the godly Protestants sit quietly with open Bibles on their laps under a pulpit occupied by a grave and bearded minister. Through apocalyptic spectacles, this was the scenario spelt out through the entire history of the church, but thickening in texture and detail as the chronology approached the events of Foxe’s own time and that of his readers. Foxe was a scrupulous historian and editor, faithfully reproducing his sources, whether the contents of a bishop’s register or the eyewitness account of the burning of bishops Ridley and Latimer at Oxford. But this was also history as ruthless propaganda, with much inconvenient evidence airbrushed out of sight. The book would not have been the same, and might have had less impact, if the text had not been supplemented by stunning woodcuts deployed to dramatise events in themselves sufficiently dramatic, pictures that some readers chose to have coloured in (Highley and King 2002; King 2006a; Loades 1997). Large assumptions have been made about Foxe’s impact. He is justifiably regarded as a major progenitor of the virulent anti-Catholicism, which was the most powerful political ideology of the seventeenth and even the eighteenth centuries, fuelling a sense of xenophobic nationalist exceptionalism. If it was never Foxe’s intention to elevate England to the rank of a uniquely favoured, elect nation, and it was not, he cannot be held responsible for the effect of his book on generations of readers, many of whom will have found in his pages justification for what would eventually become British imperialism. But the serious, unprejudiced, study of the reception of Foxe has only just begun. On the one hand, it can be demonstrated that such a large and expensive book, with restricted print runs in all of its editions, cannot have been as widely promulgated as it has become conventional to suggest. But on the other, the ‘Book of Martyrs’ generated many ‘little foxes’, abridgements of the majestic original which served a variety of interests, and purposes (Nicholson 1997; Oliver 1943: 243–60; see also Colley 2003). Catholic historical polemicists were not slow to catch up. Already, before Foxe, the reign of Mary had seen the construction of a version of recent events interpreted in terms of disorder, corruption, and social upheaval, with their roots in Henry VIII’s carnal lust for Anne Boleyn. For heresy itself was a false harlot. An anonymous Life of John Fisher, the bishop whom Henry had executed, exploited to the full the imagery of filthy carnality. Henry, ‘in ripping the bowels of his mother, the holy Church and very spouse of Christ upon earth’, had torn her in pieces, monstrously taking it upon him to be her supreme head. It was fitting that when his own body accidentally fell to the floor while being prepared for burial, there issued forth ‘such a quantity of horrible and stinking filthy blood and matter’. Another writer exclaimed: ‘What a restless evil heresy is!’ It was common ground for both Catholics and Protestants to smother their opponents in more than metaphorical ordure, and to credit them with gross physical deformities; while the very language they were made to utter was suggestive of radical disorder (Betteridge 1999: 120–60). John Foxe did not have long to wait to be answered by Catholic controversialists, and at appropriate length. Nicholas Harpsfield, who in Mary’s reign had played an

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active role in the making of some of Foxe’s martyrs, led the way in attacking ‘Johannis Foxi mendacia’ in his Dialogi sex contra … oppugnatores et pseudomartyres (Antwerp, 1566), a work of formidable scholarship which might be better known if it had not remained untranslated. But Foxe read Harpsfield and was indebted to him for some of the corrections in his next edition, to the extent that his detractors may be counted among his contributors. A generation later the Jesuit Robert Persons published a Treatise of Three Conversions of England (Saint-Omer, 1603–4). The aim of all this industry was to prove Foxe a liar. People claimed to have found no fewer than 120 lies in fewer than three pages. (On the other side of the confessional divide, the ‘Book of Martyrs’ was more or less officially and conventionally regarded as almost infallible, ‘a book of credit’ second in status only to the Bible itself.) But some of the most telling Catholic criticism was of a more subtle and sophisticated order. In the preface to his translation of the Venerable Bede’s Anglo-Saxon text, The History of the Church of England (Antwerp, 1565), the learned Thomas Stapleton asked why Foxe should take such exception to the legends of Catholic miracles, since his own martyr stories were full of miraculous and improbable happenings. Some modern commentators on Foxe, who have exaggerated the extent to which his work was part of the supposed ‘disenchantment of the world’ proposed by Max Weber, would do well to pay attention to Stapleton, for Foxe’s Protestant world was still very much a world of wonders.9 There was soon a Catholic martyrological industry to rival Foxe, as Richard Verstegan and others (Verstegan was living on a generous Spanish pension in Antwerp) produced luridly edifying accounts of the deaths of the Catholics executed by Europe’s anti-papal regimes, and especially of the victims of the increasingly draconian Elizabethan penal laws. (See especially Verstegan’s Theatrum crudelitatum haereticorum nostri temporis (Antwerp, 1587 – Figure 11). This was a collection that reached its intentional climax in an image, almost an icon, of the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, which circulated widely in Catholic Europe. Verstegan’s copperplate engravings surpassed Foxe’s woodcuts in their near-pornographic detail, as products of a more sophisticated technology, ‘the most gruesome and explicit images of martyrdom which had emerged thus far in the Reformation’. Evidently, death by evisceration provided voyeuristic opportunities to rival incineration. Anne Dillon (see Dillon 2002) will shortly demonstrate that the pictures of the execution of the London Carthusian monks in the 1530s came out of Michelangelo’s workshop.10 In 1593 that same Verstegan proposed a ‘general ecclesiastical history of the Church of England’, ‘one entire piece of work’, designed as a direct rebuttal of Foxe. What Verstegan looked for never materialised, although parts of his project did see the light of day, whether in print or manuscript. What was in the course of appearing was Harpsfield’s Historia Anglicanae Ecclesiasticae (not published until 1622), and Nicholas Sanders’ stupendous De Origine ac progressu schismatis anglicani (1585). The battles over history between Protestant and Catholic polemicists were about much more than a competition in suffering and atrocity. At stake were the very title-deeds of English Christianity, and both accounts of this subject claimed to be moved by a patriotism which was a feature of this Renaissance age. Were those title-deeds British, long

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Image not available in the electronic edition

Figure 11 The Execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, from Richard Verstegan, Theatrum Crudelitatum Haereticorum Nostri Temporis (3rd edition, Antwerp, 1592). Verstegan, under the name of Rowlands, had studied at Christ Church Oxford, where, having converted to Rome, he could not take a degree. Several of his books were denunciations of the iniquities of Protestant ‘heretics’, but he was also an antiquarian. This volume offers a sequence of gory and graphic engravings that depict the torture and killing of Roman Catholics by Protestants and Calvinists. Mary’s execution took place in February 1587: the first edition of the book appeared in the same year, and this careful engraving, the last in the book and rendered as though it were a depiction of an episode from Scripture, depicts the climactic event, the execution of a queen. To the left, the headsman holds the head aloft. British Library, London

anticipating the mission of St Augustine of Canterbury in the late sixth century, which for Protestants was less a mission than a violent takeover bid (like the contemporary ‘mission’ of the Jesuits); or did Augustine’s Roman mission lay the foundation for the true Catholic faith in those islands? Both sides were bound to address the proto-history of England, Bede’s Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum (which virtually invented the idea of England). For Catholics, Bede testified that it all began with Augustine and Pope Gregory, a position powerfully defended by one of the most learned of the controversialists and Bede’s translator, Thomas Stapleton. For Elizabethan Protestant counter-apologists, a lot of them treading carefully, for Bede was sacred ground, the story he told was one of a Roman invasion from which only the

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sixteenth century had rescued their church. Archbishop Matthew Parker set up a programme which, through the printing of Anglo-Saxon texts (with appropriate fonts cast to make that possible) proved that King Alfred’s people were more like Tudor Bible-reading Protestants than Catholics (Heal 2006; Highley 2006).

IV Meanwhile, the first decade of Elizabeth’s reign had witnessed what has been called the ‘Great Controversy’ between more or less official spokesmen for the church of the Elizabethan Settlement, and especially John Jewel, bishop of Salisbury, and some leading Catholics who, like the Protestant cadres in the reign of Mary, had now retreated into continental exile (Milward 1977: ch. 1, ‘The Anglican challenge’; Southern 1950: 60–6). In a sermon preached from the national pulpit of Paul’s Cross in London on 29 November 1559, Jewel appealed to history, turning on its head the familiar Catholic taunt: where was your church before Luther? He challenged the Catholics to demonstrate that four principal articles of their belief and practice had been known in the first six Christian centuries: communion in one kind, prayers in a language unknown to the people, the papacy, and transubstantiation. If they could prove their credentials on these terms, he undertook to ‘give over’. Thomas Harding, whose career, until they had divided confessionally, had curiously shadowed Jewel’s own, responded in An Answer to Master Jewel’s Challenge (Antwerp, 1564), which met with A Reply from Jewel (1565), duly provoking Harding’s A Rejoinder to Master Jewel’s Reply (1566). As if this were not enough, a parallel debate between the same authors was set in motion by Jewel’s all but official Apologia ecclesiae anglicanae (1562), which the mother of Francis Bacon translated into impeccable English. Harding published A Confutation of the Apology, to which Jewel duly responded. No fewer than sixty-four distinct books were perpetrated in the course of this controversy, in this, the first great age of polemic. Their literary merits, consisting to a modern eye of a depressing mixture of scholastic tedium and vulgar abuse, is conveyed in Harding’s denunciation of Jewel for his ‘impudency in lying’, ‘his continual scoffing’, ‘his immoderate bragging’; and in Jewel’s more icy plea: ‘If ye shall happen to write hereafter, send us fewer words and more learning’ (Ayre 1845: 1092). This was but the beginning. The literary confutation of Catholicism became a major industry in Elizabethan and Jacobean England, the life work of such academics as John Rainolds in Oxford and William Fulke and William Whitacre in Cambridge. Eventually it was institutionalised, not very successfully, in a College of Controversy at Chelsea. Andrew Willett’s Synopsis papismi (1592) addressed itself to ‘three hundreds of popish errors’. These became 400 in the second edition (1594) and 500 in the third (1600). Peter Milward in his Religious Controversies of the Jacobean Age lists 764 titles. Of these, no fewer than 526 were engagements across the Catholic/Protestant divide. Even these figures conceal the full extent of the Catholic polemical input, since many

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ostensibly devotional works had a hidden, controversial purpose (Milward 1978; Walsham 2000a, 2000b).

V In these same years what one Elizabethan called ‘civil wars of the Church of God’ (Collinson 1967: 165–6) were productive of parallel controversies between critics of the Elizabethan Settlement as both deficient and defective, people who were beginning to be called ‘Puritans’, and its defenders, the bishops and their subalterns. The opening salvoes contested what on the surface appeared to be trivial, ‘indifferent’ matters, such as the costume prescribed for the clergy in their ministrations, a white linen surplice in church, and the head covering for outdoors known to later generations as a mortarboard. Hence what church historians call, rather awkwardly, ‘the Vestiarian Controversy’ (Primus 1960). But in reality such things were no more trivial or indifferent than the refusal of the Clydeside MPs elected in the 1920s to exchange their cloth caps for top hats, the symbols of the ruling class; or, in our own time, for young Muslim women to refuse to take off their headscarves. These items of attire were symbols of the old order, signifiers of a ‘popish’ priesthood. Moreover, their compulsory retention was intended, and understood, to blur the distinction between sheep and goats in a church which one contemporary accurately defined as ‘a constrained union of protestants and papists’ (Ainsworth 1608: 228). A number of obstreperous London ‘gospellers’, veterans of the underground congregation which had functioned in Mary’s reign and, now reluctant to share their parish churches with their old enemies, assured their judges in 1567 that there was still ‘a great company of papists’ in the city, ‘whom you do allow to be preachers and ministers’. As for surplices and square caps, ‘it belongeth to the papists, therefore throw it to them’ (A Parte 1593: 51). The year 1566 saw what we may call the first printed Puritan manifesto, A Brief Discourse Against the Outward Apparel of the Popish Church, to which a conformist, in all likelihood none other than Archbishop Matthew Parker himself, promptly responded in A Brief Examination for the Time. This manifesto was the work of the printer and preacher Robert Crowley, editor of Piers Plowman, but assisted, or so it was alleged, by ‘the whole multitude of London ministers’, evidence of how far Puritanism was already a concerted movement, with a sense of constituting a ‘church within the Church’, with a voice of its own, and a programme (Collinson 1967: 77–8). However, the next major manifesto, which announced an escalation of the programme of ‘further reformation’, spoke for a more extreme and younger element, from which some of original nonconformists were careful to distance themselves. This proclaimed itself An Admonition to the Parliament, although it was nothing of the kind. The title was a thin cover for an appeal to the public at large, what the seventeenth century would learn to call ‘telling stories to the people’. Print, and polemic through

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print, was proving its potential to create its own popular politics. The authors were two young London preachers, Thomas Wilcox and the more dominant John Field who, in his letters to one of the veterans of nonconformity, Anthony Gilby, complained that his seniors had limited their concern to mere ‘shells and chippings of popery’, neglecting matters which were fundamental. These were the Prayer Book, not merely in a rubric or a ceremony here or there, but in something like its structural entirety, ‘an unperfect book, culled and picked out of that popish dunghill the massbook, full of all abominations’; and the retention of an episcopal and essentially popish hierarchy, with all its attendant offices, institutions, and laws. To apply a word not yet invented, these were some of the first Presbyterians. In his portion of the pamphlet, Wilcox declared, soberly, that England was so far from having a church rightly reformed, ‘according to the prescript of God’s Word’, that as yet it had not come ‘to the outward face of the same’. (As an afterthought ‘not’ was prudently altered to ‘scarce’, a better indication of the marker which Puritans, who were not separatists, put on the Elizabethan church. ‘Scarce’ kept them inside the tent, if only just.) Field’s contribution, a ‘View of popish abuses yet remaining in the English Church’, was more witty and vituperative, a landmark in the emergent history of English satire. Caricaturing Sunday worship in the parishes of the Elizabethan Settlement, he wrote that ‘they toss the Psalms in most place like tennis-balls’; ‘the people some standing, some walking, some talking, some reading, some praying by themselves’. When Jesus was named, ‘then off goeth the cap and down goeth the knees, with such a scraping on the ground that they cannot hear a good while after’. Field, who later fell out with Wilcox, was proud to take full responsibility for ‘the bitterness of the style’.11 The immediate literary sequel to the Admonition was not more satire, although that would come, but another ponderous exchange of weighty tomes rivalling the Jewel– Harding exchanges, the so-called ‘Admonition Controversy’. It was John Whitgift, master of Trinity College Cambridge and a future archbishop, who assumed the mantle of Jewel (who was by now terminally ill), to write an Answer to a Certain Libel, a large hammer to crack a rather modest chestnut. The academic ideologue of a nascent English Presbyterianism, Thomas Cartwright, also of Trinity, whom Whitgift was in the course of expelling from Trinity and from Cambridge, took the bait and wrote A Reply to an Answer, to which Whitgift responded in The Defence of the Answer, which invited from Cartwright not only The Second Reply but The Rest of the Second Reply, itself a fat little book of some hundreds of pages. In these gladiatorial polemical exchanges, the contender left standing was often deemed to have won, which enabled Puritans to claim the victory for Cartwright. (But that correspondence had to end somewhere, sometime.) Anglican apologists have tended to rubbish Cartwright’s narrow scripturalism. But winner or not, he is not to be taken lightly. No one now, unless he has to, reads the Admonition Controversy, but it is a different matter with Richard Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity (first four books published 1593), a still living work sufficiently philosophical and magisterial to persuade generations of

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Anglicans and American Episcopalians, quite incorrectly, that Hooker had had the very last word in the ongoing contention with Puritanism (Lake 1988; McGrade 1997). In the Armada year, 1588, the satirical potential bottled up in the Puritan movement finally exploded in the series of pamphlets published in the name of a pseudonymous and clown-like figure, Martin Marprelate, and produced by a fugitive underground press.12 In his own way, ‘Martin’ did have the last word on so much tedious religious controversy. The conformist tome to which he was ostensibly replying, John Bridges’ A Defence of the Government Established in the Church of England, was ‘a very portable book, a horse may carry it if he be not too weak’. Scandalous anecdotes about the bishops were interspersed with a brilliant parody of scholastic, syllogistic learning. Although contemporaries may have enjoyed Martin’s jokes as much as we do, Authority was not amused. The tracts were seditious and criminal. That they were published at all is an indication of desperation among radical Puritans, whose literary and political efforts to bring about ‘further reformation’ had come to nothing, thanks above all to Queen Elizabeth. They have been compared to the use of poison gas in warfare. Gas is liable to blow back into the faces of those who use it, and Martin invited not only the heavy hand of the law but a spate of anti-Martinist tracts, written in the same vein by Thomas Nashe, John Lyly, and other less talented writers; and even anti-Martinist jigs performed in the public theatres. This was a strategy attributed to the most relentless enemy of Puritanism, the future Archbishop Richard Bancroft, a strategy deplored by the young Francis Bacon in an Advertisement Touching the Controversies of the Church of England (Collinson 1995a; Lander 2006: ch. 2). Much of the scholarly literature devoted to the Marprelate Tracts has concentrated on the question of authorship, which is one of the less interesting things to ask about them. (The principal author seems to have been a Warwickshire squire and outspoken MP, Job Throckmorton, but this was an enterprise in which many people must have been involved (Carlson 1981).) What the tracts tell us about is the interaction of print with the living street culture of Elizabethan England, in which it was common practice to pursue private and public quarrels by means of defamatory libels or ‘ballads’, ‘cast abroad’ or stuck up in public places. But the tracts also employed print to arouse a debate about religion and religious abuse, which was intended, in language and style, to extend to a wider public than the usual godly suspects. (The usual godly suspects were among those not amused.) The tracts are evidence of the interplay of reality and polemically distorted perceptions of reality, theatre, and life. For the anti-Martinist reaction served to create the stock figure of the stage Puritan that we encounter in Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton, or through the Shakespearean prism, in the ambivalent character of Malvolio. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the Martinist affair created the idea and image of the hypocritical Puritan and gave it half a century and more of life, reaching a kind of climax in the 1650s in Samuel Butler’s mock-heroic Hudibras, the English Don Quixote. ‘Marry’, says one actor to another in a jest-book by Thomas Dekker, ‘I have

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so naturally played the Puritan that many took me to be one’ (Collinson 1995a, 1995b).

VI By now the reader may want to know what the religious literature of this polemical age of Reformation had to offer by way of spiritual nourishment. Was it a case of the hungry sheep looking up unfed? The first generation of Protestants reaching mature years under Elizabeth was perhaps rather poorly nourished. But its grandchildren would reap a bountiful harvest of ‘practical divinity’ in best-sellers like the Essex preacher Richard Rogers’s Seven Treatises (five editions between 1602 and 1629, and six abridgements of what was a large and expensive book); the enormously popular works of applied theological learning by the prince of English Calvinist theologians, William Perkins; the more modest and dialogic The Plain Man’s Pathway to Heaven (1601, twenty-five editions by 1640) by another Essex preacher, Arthur Dent, which prefigured Pilgrim’s Progress; and the enormously successful The Practice of Piety by the Welsh bishop Lewis Bayly (1612, getting on for forty editions by the 1630s). The seeds had been sown in the letters of spiritual comfort addressed to distressed consciences, which were familiar to all readers of Foxe, and of a companion text, Letters of the Martyrs (1564), gathered and edited by Foxe’s collaborator Henry Bull and published over the name of Bishop Miles Coverdale. Certain Godly and Very Comfortable Letters by the exemplary Puritan divine Edward Dering, posthumously published in 1590, were mostly addressed to religiously troubled gentlewomen. What did it mean to write ‘comfortably’? Dent’s Plain Man’s Pathway was written, or so says its title, in order that every man might clearly see whether he shall be saved or damned. But practical divinity was about much more than that simple, if crucial, Calvinist distinction, with the issue of predestination perhaps looming less large than many have supposed. To know that one was on the pathway to salvation was not to press a magic button but to engage in unremitting spiritual endeavour, guided by these increasingly systematic manuals. Salvation was not so much an event as a process (Collinson 1998; Yiannikkou 1999). But when it came to books which plumbed the depths of spirituality it was the Catholics who were in the van, especially those writers who had been touched by the genius of the Society of Jesus and of its founder, Ignatius Loyola. Here was instruction in how to pray, how to confess, how to receive the sacrament. English Protestant religion was a native plant, its ‘practical’ divines internationally acknowledged in the seventeenth century as an unusual religious resource. But English Catholics were part of a pan-European book culture, to which they made a significant contribution. Edmund Campion’s Rationes decem, first clandestinely printed at Stonor Park in Oxfordshire in 1581, ran to no fewer than forty-five editions in the original Latin, with translations into Czech, Flemish, French, German, Hungarian, and Polish (Allison and Rogers 1994: I, 24–9; Birrell 1994). Ignatian spirituality was given

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notable literary expression in the poems of the English Jesuit Robert Southwell, written in the course of a mission which ended on the scaffold, and the source of a tradition which has been called English Catholic baroque, which Southwell bequeathed to one of the most neglected poets of the age, Richard Crashaw (Shell 1999: 56–104). The best evidence of the quality of the spiritual sustenance offered by the English Counter-Reformation was its appropriation by Protestants. The most celebrated example of cross-confessional cross-fertilisation was The First Book of the Christian Exercise, an adaptation by Robert Persons of an Italian Jesuit text. In 1584 a Protestant minister in Yorkshire, Edmund Bunny, published a version of Persons that removed all references to such distinctively Catholic doctrines as purgatory, but still retained 90 per cent of the original. Bunny’s bowdlerised version went through many more editions than the original. By 1623 the ratio was 24:1. The fact that no fewer than sixteen editions of Bunny/Persons were published in the single year 1589 suggests that the most generous springs of Christian spirituality were still Catholic, even if they were made to pass through a Protestant filter.13 There were, of course, paths between the religious traditions that were rougher and more painful. John Donne wrote in Satire III: On a huge hill, Cragged and steep, Truth stands, and he that will Reach her, about must, and about must go.

But truth and falsehood were ‘near twins’, and what posterity has regarded, critically, as Donne’s ‘apostasy’ was also a kind of resolution.

Notes 1 Klotz 1938; see also the statistical analysis of STC imprints (Barnard and McKenzie: 2002: 779–93), and Collinson, Hunt, and Walsham 2000a; for the wider scope of ‘religious’ print, see Walsham 1999. 2 Walsham 2000a; for Shakespeare and Borromeo, see Schoenbaum, 1975: 41–6; Collinson 1994b. The evidence is unclear and is the subject of debate. 3 For ‘pith’, see Walter 1850: 507; also see especially ‘A prologue upon the Epistle of St Paul to the Romans’ (closely following Martin Luther) in Duffield 1964: 119–46. 4 For most aspects of Tyndale’s life, see Daniell 1994, and Collinson 1996. But that his origins were not on the western scarp of the

Cotswolds but west of the Severn is a new and persuasive suggestion made by Andrew J. Brown (Brown 1996). I owe this reference to Diarmaid MacCulloch. 5 This draws on a number of papers communicated to the 1994 Oxford International Tyndale Conference and published in Reformation, 1 (1996), and on the papers read at a Tyndale Conference in Washington, DC, in 1994, and published in Day, Lund, and O’Donnell 1998. 6 Erasmus, ‘Paraclesis’, in Olin 1965: 97; Collinson 1996. 7 The first examinacyon of Anne Askew (Wesel, 1546), The lattre examinacyon of Anne Askew (Wesel, 1547), both in Beilin 1996;

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Betteridge 1999: 80–119; King 1982: 73–4. The nineteenth-century edition of Acts and Monuments published in the names of S. R. Cattley and G. Townsend is now superseded by the variorum, online edition of the successive versions of 1563, 1570, 1576, and 1583, sponsored by the British Academy and published by the Oxford University Press (2009). See King 2006a, 2006b. A major contribution to this subject has been made by Thomas Freeman of the British Academy Foxe Project, in a wide scattering of important articles, and in a monograph co-authored with Elizabeth Evenden, forthcoming from Cambridge University Press. Collinson 1994c: 151–2; Sullivan 1999. These remarks are indebted to the work of Dr Tom Freeman of the British Academy Foxe Project.

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The Michelangelo connection, the subject of a forthcoming monograph, was trailed in the Robert Southwell SJ lecture, given by Dr Dillon in Fordham University in October 2008. Collinson 1967: 101–21; Collinson 1983b. The Admonition and associated publications, including the anonymous Second Admonition to the Parliament, are printed in Frere and Douglas 1907. A modern, scholarly, but student-friendly edition of the Marprelate Tracts, edited by Joseph Black, is forthcoming. The tracts were edited by William Pierce in 1908, and were published in facsimile by the Scolars Press in 1967. Gregory 1994, and, for a different interpretation, Houliston 1996.

References and Further Reading Ainsworth, Henry (1608). Counterpoison. Amsterdam. Allison, A. F. and D. M. Rogers (1994). The Contemporary Printed Literature of the English CounterReformation between 1558 and 1640, 2 vols. Aldershot: Scolar Press. Aston, Margaret (1988). England’s Iconoclasts: Laws Against Images. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ayre, John (ed.) (1845). The Works of John Jewel. Cambridge: Parker Society. Barnard, John and D. F. McKenzie (eds.) (2002). The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, 1557–1695, vol. 4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bede (1565). The History of the Church of England, trans. Thomas Stapleton. Antwerp. Beilin, Elaine V. (ed.) (1996). The Examination of Anne Askewe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Berry, Lloyd E. (1968). John Stubbs’s ‘Gaping Gulf ’ with Letters and Other Relevant Documents. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Betteridge, Thomas (1999). Tudor Histories of the English Reformations, 1530–83. Aldershot: Ashgate. Birrell, T. A. (1994). ‘English Counter-Reformation book culture’. Recusant History, 22, 113–22.

Boulton, J. P. (1984). ‘The limits of formal religion: the administration of Holy Communion in late Elizabethan and early Stuart London’. London Journal, 10, 135–54. Brown, Andrew J. (1996). William Tyndale on Priests and Preachers with New Light on his Early Career. London: Inscriptor Imprints. Carlson, Leland H. (1981). Martin Marprelate Gentleman: Master Job Throkmorton Laid Open in his Colours. San Marino, CA: Huntington Library. Coffey, John and Paul C. H. Lim (eds.) (2008). The Cambridge Companion to Puritanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Colley, Linda (2003). Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837. London: Pimlico. Collinson, Patrick (1967). The Elizabethan Puritan Movement. London: Jonathan Cape. Collinson, Patrick (1983a). Godly People: Essays on English Protestantism and Puritanism. London: Hambledon Press. Collinson, Patrick (1983b). ‘John Field and Elizabethan Puritanism’. In Collinson, Godly People (pp. 332–70). London: Hambledon Press. Collinson, Patrick (1988a). The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

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Collinson, Patrick (1988b). ‘Protestant culture and the cultural revolution’. In Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England (pp. 94–126). Basingstoke: Macmillan. Collinson, Patrick (1994a). Elizabethan Essays. London: Hambledon Press. Collinson, Patrick (1994b) ‘William Shakespeare’s religious inheritance and environment’. In Collinson, Elizabethan Essays (pp. 218–52). London: Hambledon Press. Collinson, Patrick (1994c). ‘Truth and legend: the veracity of John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’. In Collinson, Elizabethan Essays (pp. 151–78). London: Hambledon Press. Collinson, Patrick (1995a). ‘Ecclesiastical vitriol: religious satire in the 1590s and the invention of Puritanism’. In John Guy (ed.), The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade (pp. 158–82). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Collinson, Patrick (1995b). ‘Ben Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair: the theatre constructs Puritanism’. In David L. Smith, Richard Strier, and David Bevington (eds.), The Theatrical City: Culture, Theatre and Politics in London, 1576– 1649. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Collinson, Patrick (1996). ‘William Tyndale and the course of the English Reformation’. Reformation, 1, 72–97. Collinson, Patrick (1997). ‘The English Reformation, 1945–1995’. In M. Bentley (ed.), Companion to Historiography (pp. 336–53). London: Routledge. Collinson, Patrick (1998). ‘John Knox, the Church of England and the women of England’. In R. A. Mason (ed.), John Knox and the British Reformations (pp. 74–96). Aldershot: Ashgate. Collinson, Patrick, Arnold Hunt, and Alexandra Walsham (2002). ‘Religious publishing in England 1557–1640’. In John Barnard and D. F. McKenzie (eds.), The History of the Book in Britain (vol. 4, pp. 29–96). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cummings, Brian (2002). The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Daniell, David (1994). William Tyndale: A Biography. New Haven: Yale University Press. Day, John T., Eric Lund, and Anne M. O’Donnell (eds.) (1998). Word, Church and State: Tyndale

Quincentenary Essays. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. Dickens, A. G. (1989). The English Reformation, 2nd edn. London: Batsford. Dillon, Anne (2002). The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community, 1535–1603. Aldershot: Ashgate. Duffield, Gervase (ed.) (1964). The Work of William Tyndale. Appleford: Sutton Courtenay Press. Duffy, Eamon (1992). The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400–c.1580. New Haven: Yale University Press. Duffy, Eamon (2001). The Voices of Morebath: Reformation and Rebellion in an English Village. New Haven: Yale University Press. Duffy, Eamon (2006). Marking the Hours: English People and their Prayers 1240–1570. New Haven: Yale University Press. Duffy, Eamon (2009). Fires of Faith: Catholic England Under Mary Tudor. New Haven: Yale University Press. Fincham, Kenneth and Nicholas Tyacke (2007). Altars Restored: The Changing Face of English Religious Worship, 1547–c.1700. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Foxe, John (1583). Actes and monuments of matters most speciall in the church. London: John Day. Published by Oxford University Press on CD-ROM (1999); online variorum edition of the editions of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, 1563, 1570, 1576, 1583, Oxford University Press, 2009. Frere, W. H. and C. E. Douglas (eds.) (1907). Puritan Manifestoes: A Study of the Origin of the Puritan Revolt. London: SPCK. Gilmont, J.-F. (1998). The Reformation and the Book, trans. K. Maag. Aldershot: Ashgate. Green, Ian (1995). The Christian’s ABC: Catechisms and Catechising in England, c.1530–1740. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Green, Ian (2000). Print and Protestantism in Early Modem England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gregory, Brad (1994). ‘The “True and zealous service of God”: Robert Persons, Edmund Bunny and the first book of the Christian Exercise’. Journal of Ecclesiastical History, 45, 238–68. Gregory, Brad (1999). Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modem Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

English Reformations Haigh, Christopher (1993). English Reformations: Religion, Politics and Society under the Tudors. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Haigh, Christopher (2007). The Plain Man’s Pathways to Heaven: Kinds of Christianity in Post-Reformation England, 1570–1640. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heal, Felicity (2006). ‘Appropriating history: Catholic and Protestant polemics and the national past’. In Paulina Kewes (ed.), The Uses of History in Early Modem England (pp. 105–28). San Marino, CA: Huntington Library. Highley, Christopher (2006). ‘ “A pestilent and seditious book”: Nicholas Sanders’ Schismatis Anglicani and Catholic histories of the Reformation’. In Paulina Kewes (ed.), The Uses of History in Early Modem England (pp. 147–67). San Marino, CA: Huntington Library. Highley, Christopher and John N. King (eds.) (2002). John Foxe and his World. Aldershot: Ashgate. Houliston, Victor (1996). ‘Why Robert Persons would not be pacified: Edmund Bunny’s theft of the Book of Resolution’. In T. M. McCoog (ed.), The Reckoned Expense: Edmund Campion and the Early English Jesuits (pp. 159–177). Woodbridge: Boydell. Hunt, Arnold (1998). ‘The Lord’s Supper in early modern England’. Past and Present, 161, 39–83. King, John N. (1982). English Reformation Literature; The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press. King, John N. (2006a). Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and Early Modern Print Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. King, John N. (2006b). ‘Guides to reading Foxe’s Book of Martyrs’. In Paulina Kewes (ed.), The Uses of History in Early Modem England (pp. 129– 45). San Marino, CA: Huntington Library. Klotz, Edith L. (1938). ‘A subject analysis of English imprints for every tenth year from 1480 to 1640’. Huntington Library Quarterly, 1, 417–19. Lake, Peter (1988). Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker. London: Unwin Hyman. Lander, Jesse M. (2006). Inventing Polemic: Religion, Print, and Literary Culture in Early Modem England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Lawler, Thomas M. C., Germain Marc’hadour, and Richard C. Marius (eds.) (1981). Complete Works of St Thomas More, vol. 6: A Dialogue Concerning Heresies. New Haven: Yale University Press. Lewalski, Barbara (1979). Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Loades, David (ed.) (1997). John Foxe and the English Reformation. Aldershot: Ashgate. Loades, David (ed.) (1999). John Foxe: An Historical Perspective. Aldershot: Ashgate. MacCulloch, Diarmaid (1996). Thomas Cranmer: A Life. New Haven: Yale University Press. MacCulloch, Diarmaid (1999). Tudor Church Militant: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation. London: Allen Lane, the Penguin Press. McGrade, A. S. (ed.) (1997). Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community. Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies. Marprelate Tracts (1967). Leeds: Scolar Press. Marshall, Peter (2003). Reformation England 1480– 1642. London: Arnold. Milward, Peter (1977). Religious Controversies of the Elizabethan Age: A Survey of Printed Sources. London: Scolar Press. Milward, Peter (1978). Religious Controversies of the Jacobean Age: A Survey of Printed Sources. London: Scolar Press. Miola, Robert S. (ed.) (2007). Early Modem Catholicism: An Anthology of Primary Sources. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mueller, Janel (1984). The Native Tongue and the ∼Word: Developments in English Prose Style 1380– 1580. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Nicholson, Eirwen (1997). ‘Eighteenth-century Foxe: evidence of the impact of the Acts and Monuments in the “Long Eighteenth Century” ’. In David Loades (ed.), John Foxe and the English Reformation (pp. 143–78). Aldershot: Ashgate. Nicholson, W. (ed.) (1843). The Remains of Edmund Grindal. Parker Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Olin, J. C. (ed.) (1965). Christian Humanism and the Reformation. New York: Harper & Row. Oliver, Leslie M. (1943). ‘The seventh edition of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments’. Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 37 243–60. A Parte of a register (1593). Middelburg: Richard Schilders. Peel, Albert (ed.). (1915). The Seconde Parte of a Register. Being a Calendar of Manuscripts under

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that title intended for publication by the Puritans about 1593, and now in Dr Williams’s Library, London, 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pollard, A. W. (ed.) (1911). Records of the English Bible. London: Oxford University Press. Primus, John H. (1960). The Vestments Controversy. Kampen: J. H. Kok. Questier, Michael C. (1996). Conversion, Politics and Religion in England, 1580–1625. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Questier, Michael C. (2006). Catholicism and Community in Early Modem England: Politics, Aristocratic Patronage and Religion, c.1550–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schoenbaum, Samuel (1975). William Shakespeare: A Documentary Life. New York: Oxford University Press. Schuster, A. C. et al. (eds.) (1973). Complete Works of St Thomas More, vol. 8: The confutacyon of Tyndales answere. New Haven: Yale University Press. Shell, Alison (1999). Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Simpson, James (2007). Burning to Read: English Fundamentalism and its Reformation Opponents. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Southern, A. C. (1950). Elizabethan Recusant Prose 1559–1582. London: Sands & Co. Sullivan, Ceri (1999). ‘ “Oppressed by the force of truth”: Robert Persons edits John Foxe’. In David Loades (ed.), John Foxe and the English Reformation (pp. 154–66). Aldershot: Ashgate.

Temperley, Nicholas (1979). The Music of the English Parish Church, 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vickers, Brian (1997). ‘Public and private rhetoric in Hooker’s Lawes’. In A. S. McGrade (ed.), Richard Hooker and the Construction of Christian Community (pp. 95–145). Tempe, AZ: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies. Walsham, Alexandra (1999). Providence in Early Modem England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Walsham, Alexandra (2000a). Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modem England, 2nd rev. edn. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer. Walsham, Alexandra (2000b). ‘“Domme preachers”? Post-Reformation English Catholicism and the culture of print’. Past and Present, 168, 72–123. Walsham, Alexandra (2006). Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–1700. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Walter, H. (ed.) (1850). William Tyndale. An Answer to Sir Thomas More’s Dialogue. Parker Society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Watt, Tessa (1991). Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1500–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yiannikkou, Jason (1999). ‘Protestantism, Puritanism and practical divinity in England, c.1570– 1620’, Ph.D. thesis, University of Cambridge.

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shylock:

antonio: shylock:

antonio:

When Jacob grazed his uncle Laban’s sheep – This Jacob from our holy Abram was, As his wise mother wrought in his behalf, The third possessor; ay, he was the third – And what of him? Did he take interest? No, not take interest; not, as you would say, Directly int’rest; mark what Jacob did: When Laban and himself were compromised That all the eanlings which were streaked and pied Should fall as Jacob’s hire, the ewes, being rank, In end of autumn turned to the rams; And when the work of generation was Between these woolly breeders in the act, The skilful shepherd pilled me certain wands, And, in the doing of the deed of kind, He stuck them up before the fulsome ewes, Who, then conceiving, did in eaning time Fall parti-coloured lambs, and those were Jacob’s. This was a way to thrive, and he was blest; And thrift is blessing, if men steal it not. This was a venture, sir, that Jacob served for; A thing not in his power to bring to pass, But swayed and fashioned by the hand of heaven. Was this inserted to make interest good? Or is your gold and silver ewes and rams? (Shakespeare, The Merchant of Venice 1.3.66–90)

Taunting Antonio with the implication that because he is a Christian he is unlikely to know the Old Testament in any detail, Shylock, in Shakespeare’s most extensive biblical allusion, tells in loving detail a story from Genesis 30. By contriving the

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unlikely birth of many parti-coloured lambs, which the contract between them had promised to him, Jacob, whose name means ‘cunning’, outfoxes his wily relative Laban. Such trickery, Shylock implies, may act as a precedent for his own guile in making excessive profits when opportunity offers itself. Antonio opposes this argument with an emphatic denial that the Genesis story is any kind of precedent. It reveals only God’s grace at work in the world, to be interpreted as a one-off act of Providence rather than as a pattern for human action. This exchange shows how creatively Shakespeare read his Bible, its text and its margins. Twice in their annotations the translators of the Geneva Bible indicate that this episode should not be taken as a justification for deceit, in words that clearly inform Antonio’s response. To the story itself the marginal note reads, ‘Jacob herein used no deceit: for it was God’s commandment’; and in the next chapter, when Laban’s sons complain that they have been cheated, the note alongside Jacob’s claim that it was an act of God re-emphasises the point: ‘this declareth that the thing which Jacob did before was by God’s commandment and not through deceit’. The Geneva margins might even have generated the dramatic scene, for in their double annotation the translators reveal their anxieties about how the story might be interpreted, a response which would have registered with a careful reader like Shakespeare on the lookout for ways to dramatise the collision of Old with New Testament values. Not only Shakespeare, but also probably every literate Elizabethan, owned and read the Geneva Bible, making it perhaps the single most influential English book ever published. First printed in 1560, soon after Elizabeth’s accession, it ran through multiple editions right into the 1640s.1 Reliable estimates calculate that over half a million copies were sold in the sixteenth century, a figure high enough in proportion to the total population to put into question our assumptions about Elizabethan literacy levels. It was cheaply printed, generally affordable, and read by the highest and lowest in the kingdom. Its copious annotation helped fulfil the demands of the early sixteenth-century reformers that Scripture alone should sit at the centre of the national culture, to be accessible to everyone without the mediation of priest and bishop. It was the first English Bible to be divided into chapters and verses, thereby encouraging its readers to become their own interpreters, to play with the text by matching verse with verse from one end of the Bible to the other. In essence, its text and notes gave them control over their own reading. James I certainly sensed the threat to authority from such freedom to read and interpret. At the Hampton Court Conference, called at the beginning of his reign to help assuage the tensions between Anglicans and Puritans, the one concession which he allowed the Puritan party was for a new translation of the Bible which would embody the most recent research of Protestant scholars into Old Testament Hebrew and Aramaic and New Testament Greek.2 But James’s concession was characteristically duplicitous, for he not only kept outspoken Puritan scholars like Hugh Broughton off the translation committees but he also forbade the new version to include interpretative notes in its margins. The model to avoid was the Geneva Bible.

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It was, James thought, ‘the worst of all’ English Bibles; strong criticism since in his opinion they were a generally poor bunch. In particular, its notes were grievously seditious. He claimed to have found in them annexed to the Geneva translation ‘some very partial, untrue, seditious, and savouring too much of dangerous and traitorous conceits, as, for example, Exod 1:19 where the marginal note alloweth disobedience to kings’ (Pollard 1911: 46). But with a Geneva Bible in every household this was a case of bolting the stable door too late; and even when the new Bible appeared in 1611 it failed to replace the earlier version in popular affection. Not for two generations, after the Restoration, did the Geneva Bible cease to be printed, leaving the field clear at last for the Authorized Version (also known as the King James Version) to become the accepted English Bible for the next 300 years.3 James clearly intended the Authorized Version to be translated in opposition to the Geneva version, ordering the translators to rely primarily upon the Bishops’ Bible of 1568; but there are clear signs that his wishes were subverted from within. In overall charge of the project was Archbishop Bancroft, the author of the brief dedication to James, which can still be found in today’s reprints, while day-to-day coordination of the work seems to have been the responsibility of Miles Smith, the writer of the extensive and celebrated preface to the version. These men and their documents make an interesting contrast. Bancroft, theologically Calvinist, used his dedication to attack the Puritan opposition within the country; but Smith’s preface emphasised the external Catholic threat and, significantly, guided its readers into seeing this version as merely the finishing touch to the collaborative and accumulative achievement of nearly a hundred years of Protestant translation. Smith, it seems, was a closet Puritan, as his post-1611 career bears out. Appointed bishop of Gloucester in 1612, he behaved in a very unbishoplike way, being eventually reprimanded by Archbishop Laud for his contempt for ceremony and his neglect of the fabric of his cathedral.4 Whatever their politics, however, Smith and his fellow translators were too good scholars to rely heavily on the Bishops’ Bible, a ramshackle, patchy effort by the Elizabethan church establishment to rival the potentially subversive and highly popular Geneva version. In practice, the Authorized Version’s text is highly dependent upon the Geneva text, and where it does use other versions, particularly in the New Testament, it is as likely to use the scholarly, respectable Catholic Rheims version (1582) as the Bishops’ Bible. And Smith’s preface makes the vital point that this ‘new’ version is really only a revision. In words designed to contradict James I’s proclaimed view of the inferiority of earlier English Bibles, he wrote, ‘we never thought from the beginning that we should need to make a new translation, nor yet to make of a bad one a good one … but to make a good one better, or out of many good ones one principal good one’ (Pollard 1911: 369). Conceivably, the preface’s insistence upon the continuity of English translation might well have irritated the king, for it remains a puzzling fact that there exists no record at all that the Authorized Version was ever actually authorised. The first and most important of the Protestant translators in the line leading up to the Authorized Version was William Tyndale, who turned to Bible translation after

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having run into trouble among his local clergy for his supposedly heretical teaching. Tyndale had naively assumed that their hostility to what he regarded as evident truth could only be based upon his opponents’ ignorance of Scripture. Equally naively he then made his way to the bishop of London in 1523 to seek his permission to translate the Bible into English.5 His need to do this reveals much about the political and cultural concerns that inform the whole issue of Bible translation in early modern England. While there were, for example, vernacular German Bibles in existence, all of them translations of the Latin Vulgate, there was no English Bible. There had been one: a version translated by the followers of John Wyclif in the 1380s, before the age of printing, whose popularity is borne out by the many manuscripts which survive. But its association with the Lollards, an embryonic Protestant movement with politically subversive tendencies, had led to its suppression. Throughout the fifteenth century and into the sixteenth the English people, uniquely in western Europe, were forbidden to own, translate, or even read a vernacular Bible without their bishop’s permission.6 The bishop of London’s contemptuous treatment of Tyndale and plain refusal to countenance a translation soon revealed the hollowness behind the pretence that there could ever be an officially sanctioned English Bible. As Tyndale later put it, he ‘understood at the last not only that there was no room in my Lord of London’s palace to translate the New Testament, but also that there was no place to do it in all England’ (Pollard 1911: 97–8). The New Testament which Tyndale published from the continent in 1525 began the process which culminated nearly a century later in the Authorized Version. Indeed, in any estimation of cultural influence Tyndale’s may be thought the greatest of all, for in those parts of the Bible which he lived to translate, the whole of the New Testament and half of the Old, his versions supply the skeleton and much of the flesh for the Bibles which followed. Here is his translation of one of the New Testament’s most poetic passages, 1 Corinthians 13: Though I spake with the tongues of men and angels, and yet had no love, I were even as sounding brass: or as a tinkling cymbal. And though I could prophesy, and understood all secrets, and all knowledge: yea, if I had all faith so that I could move mountains out of their places, and yet had no love, I were nothing. And though I bestowed all my goods to feed the poor, and though I gave my body even that I burned, and yet had no love, it profiteth me nothing. Love suffereth long, and is courteous. Love envieth not. Love doth not frowardly, swelleth not, dealeth not dishonestly, seeketh not her own, is not provoked to anger, thinketh not evil, rejoiceth not in iniquity: but rejoiceth in the truth, suffereth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth in all things. Though that prophesying fail, or tongues shall cease, or knowledge vanish away, yet love never falleth away. For our knowledge is imperfect, and our prophesying is imperfect. But when that which is perfect is come, then that which is imperfect shall be done away. When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I imagined as a child. But as soon as I was a man, I put away childishness. Now we see in a glass even in a dark speaking:

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but then shall we see face to face. Now I know imperfectly: but then shall I know even as I am known. Now abideth faith, hope, and love, even these three: but the chief of these is love.

A few words are different, but in its rhythms, syntax, and much of its language this is immediately familiar to anyone who knows the Authorized Version text. It bears out Smith’s claim that the 1611 translation committees were essentially doing a work of revision; and we might reflect that the most significant presence on those committees was the long-dead Tyndale’s. Stylistically, the main result of such an intense reliance upon the translators of the past was that in a period of radical language change and experimentation the English Bible which emerged in 1611 was both archaic and simple. It preserved the syntax and language forms of the 1520s and 1530s and it retained the plain untheological and unscholarly language of the man whose aim was for every ploughboy to sing psalms as he worked. It is easy to measure the effects of this policy today. A modern reader needs the help of a historical dictionary or editorial gloss much less often to make sense of the Authorized Version than when reading other early seventeenth-century texts, by Shakespeare, Donne, or Bacon, for instance. In spite of the simplicity of his language, Tyndale’s achievement was as much a scholarly as a literary one, for unlike other Protestant translators in Reformation Europe, who tended mainly to translate Luther’s German Bible into their own vernacular, he had mastered Greek and Hebrew and translated from those original languages.7 In 1530 he used his Hebrew knowledge to translate an English Pentateuch, and he then revised his New Testament in 1534, not long before he was executed by Henry VIII’s allies in Belgium. Soon after his death Henry embraced the Reformation and with great historical irony encouraged the first of a succession of English versions which all built on Tyndale’s work. The first complete English Bible was translated by Miles Coverdale in 1535. Then the Matthew Bible in 1537 included more of Tyndale’s Old Testament work which had survived, followed by the Great Bible, the first ‘authorised’ version in 1539. All of these Bibles maintained Tyndale’s basic text, revising it in the light of the burgeoning biblical scholarship going on all over Europe, in Catholic as well as Protestant centres, a process continued by the Geneva Bible, the base text of the Authorized Version. As with Tyndale’s translations, smuggled into the country and read and owned clandestinely at great risk, the main concern for state and church authority in relation to all of these English versions was to keep control over their use. The initial Reformation impulse, encouraged by Thomas Cranmer the archbishop of Canterbury, had been permissive, to get an English Bible into the people’s hands; but this was soon countermanded by other powerful figures who were concerned that unmediated access to God’s word might be used to validate all kinds of seditious and heretical attitudes. Something of this conflict can be perceived a few years earlier in the attitudes of major humanist figures like Erasmus and Thomas More. Erasmus, the pioneer of a modern textual scholarship of the New Testament, would never

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approve a vernacular translation: it was far safer to keep God’s word in Latin. More also set his face against an English version, taking time off from his state duties to write attacks upon Tyndale and his associates. He argued that Tyndale’s English New Testament had been designed to destroy the power of the church, citing its use of ‘congregation’ and ‘senior’ in preference to ‘church’ and ‘priest’. But behind this specific charge lay a deeper concern about the cheapening effects of translation exemplified in Tyndale’s preference for ‘love’ rather than ‘charity’ to translate the Greek word agape, as in the passage from 1 Corinthians quoted earlier.8 Tyndale’s reply was disarmingly direct, pointing to the impossibility of translating according to More’s demands: And when Mr More sayeth ‘every love is not charity,’ no more is every apostle Christ’s apostle, nor every angel God’s angel, nor every hope Christian hope, nor every faith or belief Christ’s belief, and so by an hundred thousand words, so that if I should always use but a word that were no more general than the word I interpret [i.e. translate], I should interpret nothing at all.9

The argument goes right to the heart of possession of the biblical text. ‘Charity’, Tyndale argues, is a technical term removed from common speech, so that even an English version which uses it still requires a gloss. ‘Love’, More fears, throws the Bible open to all and reduces its mysteries to the level of common worldly experience. And to add to More’s discomfort there was the flagrancy of Tyndale’s use of his versions to support his polemical purposes, for in his margins was a succession of notes designed to delight the people by their anti-papal invective. Not all of the people, however, were prepared to see their traditional faith treated so cavalierly, and there are strong indications that among the general population there was a generational divide, the youth of England embracing a vernacular Bible which their parents feared, even despised. William Maldon’s account of his youthful experience, derived from Foxe’s papers, is a case in point. He describes a situation in which at one end of the church the official service in Latin was being conducted while at the other end the younger members of the congregation were crowding round one of their own who was reading an English Testament out loud. Stimulated by this, he and his father’s apprentice put their money together to buy a New Testament which they hid in their bed straw, William teaching himself to read so that the two of them might study it together. His mother, fearing for his soul, informed on him to his father, leading to a terrible scene in which his father tried to strangle him.10 In the domestic milieu as much as the political, the English Bible was a means of self-assertion and resistance to authority in the early modern period. Bible translation had a major cultural role in areas other than English Bible versions. Translations and paraphrases of the Psalms, for instance, repeatedly embodied significant personal and national issues. At the end of the period John Milton first translated a set of psalms which addressed the national situation at a time of civil war and then another set which related to his own concerns, including his blind-

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ness. Over a hundred years earlier Cranmer’s Book of Common Prayer contained the Psalms from the Great Bible, which accordingly formed the central element in the liturgy of the newly founded Anglican Church. At around the same time Thomas Wyatt used his paraphrase of the so-called Penitential Psalms as a means of making covert criticism of Henry VIII’s behaviour. Interleaved between the psalms is a verse narrative which fixes them into the context of David’s adulterous liaison with Bathsheba, offering a salutary model for the even more adulterous king of England. In the Elizabthan period Mary Herbert, countess of Pembroke, took up her brother Philip Sidney’s translation of the Psalms (he ended at Psalm 43; she began at Psalm 44) and wrote versions which are more experimental and daring than her brother’s efforts, but which have only recently begun to be appreciated. In her explorations of the original’s imagery, often taking the form of expansions, the English reader may begin to see how the Psalms gave a strong impulse to the fashion for personal and meditative lyric poetry in the late sixteenth century. So, in the first two verses of Psalm 139, thirteen Hebrew words become twenty-two in the Authorized Version: ‘O Lord, thou hast searched me, and known me. / Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising, thou understandest my thought afar off.’ In the first two stanzas of her translation Herbert expands the verses to forty words and introduces her own domestic imagery, but without any loss of simplicity or directness: O Lord in me there lieth nought But to thy search revealed lies: For where I sit Thou markest it; No less thou notest when I rise. Yea, closest closet of my thought Hath open windows to thine eyes. Thou walkest with me when I walk; When to my bed for rest I go, I find thee there, And ev’rywhere; Not youngest thought in me doth grow, No, not one word I cast to talk, But yet unuttered thou dost know. (Davie 1996: 77)

A little later in the psalm it is clear that her creativity far outgoes the cumbrousness of the later Authorized Version translation. Here is first the Authorized Version text of verses 13–16, followed by Herbert’s paraphrase. For thou hast possessed my reins [kidneys]: thou hast covered me in my mother’s womb.

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I will praise thee: for I am fearfully and wonderfully made: marvellous are thy works: and that my soul knoweth right well. My substance was not hid from thee, when I was made in secret, and curiously wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Thine eyes did see my substance, yet being unperfect; and in thy book all my members were written, which in continuance were fashioned, when as yet there was none of them. Each inmost piece in me is thine: While yet I in my mother dwelt, All that me clad From thee I had. Thou in my fame hast strangely dealt; Needs in my praise thy works must shine, So inly them my thoughts have felt. Thou, how my back was beam-wise laid And raft’ring of my ribs, dost know; Know’st ev’ry point Of bone and joint, How to this whole these parts did grow, In brave embroid’ry fair arrayed Though wrought in shop both dark and low. Nay, fashionless, ere form I took, Thy all-and-more beholding eye My shapeless shape Could not escape; All these, time framed successively Ere one had being, in the book Of thy foresight enrolled did lie.

While Mary Herbert’s psalms embody art of a high order, by far the most popular texts in Renaissance poetry were the metrical psalms of Sternhold and Hopkins, which from the mid-sixteenth century were commonly attached to English Bibles. A byword for doggerel in later centuries and nearly beneath contempt for a modern reader, these ‘poems’ were loved, learned by heart, and sung by successive generations of England’s and Scotland’s increasingly Puritan communities. This is their version of those verses just quoted from Psalm 139: For thou possessed hast my reins, And thou hast covered me, When I within my mother’s womb Enclosed was by thee. Thee will I praise, made fearfully And wondrously I am: Thy works are marvellous, right well My soul doth know the same.

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My bones they are not hid from thee, Although in secret place I have been made, and in the earth Beneath I shaped was. When I was formless, then thine eye Saw me: for in thy book Where written all, wrought was before That after fashion took.11

The monotonous metrical regularity is carefully designed for communal chanting, in line with an ethic which regarded the only proper art as one which was plain and functional. The future for such verse as this lay largely in America, in the New England psalters and perhaps in the black spiritual. In England the Methodist hymn was its eventual development, but by then the Bible’s grip upon the popular imagination had been radically attenuated. With the Restoration a new way of looking at the world regarded the early modern Bible as an increasingly grotesque and misleading object; as when John Locke, trying to make his own sense of the Pauline Epistles, expressed his irritation at the way the English Bible had been misleadingly divided into chapters and verses. ‘They are so chopped and minced, as they are now printed,’ he complained, and stand so broken and divided, that not only the common people take the verses usually for distinct aphorisms, but even men of more advanced knowledge in reading them, lose very much the strength and force of the coherence, and the light that depends on it.12

But for 150 years of the early modern period the English Bible, largely in the form of the chapters and verses of the Geneva Bible, had dominated the country’s cultural, political, and religious life, and in its psalms it had provided a stimulus both for the period’s great achievements in lyric poetry and for the rise of militant Puritanism. Notes 1 2 3 4 5 6

At least 144 editions according to Darlow and Moule 1968: 62. For details of the conference, see Hammond 1993. See volume 2 of Norton 1993 for an account of the AV’s influence. See the article on Smith in the DNB. See the account in Daniell 1994: 82–107. According to the prohibition issued by the Provincial Council in Oxford, 1408 (see Pollard 1911: 79–81).

7 8

9 10

For Tyndale’s Hebrew knowledge, see Hammond 1981. More’s sustained attack upon Tyndale is in the third book of his Dialogue Concerning Heresies (1529). From An Answer Unto Sir Thomas More’s Dialogue (Walter 1850). For the details of William’s story, see Pollard 1911: 268–71; for popular resentment towards the Reformation, see Duffy 1992, passim.

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11 Text taken from my own copy, attached to a 1609 Geneva Bible. For a mature poet’s imitation of a metrical psalm, see Andrew Marvell’s ‘Bermudas’.

12

From A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of Paul (Wainwright 1987: 105).

References and Further Reading Allen, Ward (1969). Translating for King James. Kingsport, TN: Vanderbilt University Press. Alter, Robert and Frank,Kermode (eds.) (1987). The Literary Guide to the Bible. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Backus, Irena Dorota (2000). Reformation Readings of the Apocalypse: Geneva, Zurich, and Wittenberg. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Benjamin, Walter (1973). ‘The task of the translator.’ In Benjamin Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (pp. 69–82). London: Fontana. Bobrick, Benson (2000). Wide as the Waters: The Story of the English Bible and the Revolution It Inspired. New York: Simon & Schuster. Buber, Martin and Frank Rosenzweig (1994). Scripture and Translation. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Bray, Gerald (ed.) (1994). Documents of the English Reformation. Minneapolis: Fortress Press. Butterworth, C. C. (1941). The Literary Lineage of the King James Version, 1340–1611, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Daniell, David (1994). Let There be Light : William Tyndale and the Making of the English Bible. London: British Library. Daniell, David (2001). William Tyndale: A Biography. New Haven: Yale University Press. Daniell, David (2003). The Bible in English: Its History and Influence. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Daniell, David (2006). The Apocrypha: Translated out of the Greek and Latin tongues being the version set forth AD 1611 compared with the most ancient authorities and revised AD 1894. London: Folio Society. Darlow, T. H. and H. F. Moule (1968). Historical Catalogue of Printed Editions of the English Bible 1525–1961, revd. A. S. Herbert. London: British & Foreign Bible Society. Davie, Donald (ed.) (1996). The Psalms in English. London: Penguin.

Duffy, E. (1992). The Stripping of the Altars. New Haven & London: Yale University Press. Freer, Coburn (1972). Music for a King: George Herbert’s Style and the Metrical Psalms, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Hammond, Gerald (1981). ‘William Tyndale’s Pentateuch: its relation to Luther’s German Bible and the Hebrew original.’ Renaissance Quarterly, 33, 351–85. Hammond, Gerald (1982). The Making of the English Bible. Manchester: Carcanet. Hammond, Gerald (1993). ‘The Authority of the translated word of God: a reading of the Preface to the 1611 Authorized Version of the Bible.’ Translation and Literature, 2, 17–36. Hill, Christopher (1993). The English Bible and the Seventeenth-Century Revolution. London: Allen Lane. Jackson, Gordon (2004). Selected Psalms from the Geneva & King James Psalters for Textual Comparison. Lincoln: Asgill. McEachen, Claire and Debora Shuger (eds.) (1997). Religion and Culture in Renaissance England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Norton, David (1993). A History of the Bible as Literature, 2 vols, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Norton, David and Frederick Henry Ambrose Scrivener (2005). A Textual History of the King James Bible. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Opfel, Olga (1982). The King James Bible Translators. Jefferson and London: McFarland. Pelikan, Jaroslav, The Reformation of the Bible / The Bible of the Reformation. Yale University Press, 1996. Pollard, Alfred W. (ed.) (1911). Records of the English Bible. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schwarz, W. (1958). Principles and Problems of Biblical Translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Translations of the Bible Shuger, Debora (1994). The Renaissance Bible: Scholarship, Sacrifice and Subjectivity, Berkeley: University of California Press. Tyndale, William (1992). Tyndale’s Old Testament: being the Pentateuch of 1530, Joshua to 2 Chronicles of 1537, and Jonah, ed. D. Daniell. New Haven: Yale University Press. Tyndale, William (1995). Tyndale’s New Testament, ed. D. Daniell. New Haven: Yale University Press. Wainwright, Arthur (ed.) (1987). A Paraphrase and Notes on the Epistles of Paul (1705). Oxford, Clarendon Press.

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Walter, H. (ed.) (1850). An Answer Unto Sir Thomas More’s Dialogue (1531). Cambridge: Parker Society. Watt, Tessa (1991). Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Williams, Arnold (1948). The Common Expositor: an Account of Commentaries on Genesis, 1527–1637. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Zim, Rivka (1987). English Metrical Psalms: Poetry as Praise and Prayer 1535–1601. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Lancelot Andrewes’ Good Friday 1604 Sermon Richard Harries

The major sermons of Lancelot Andrewes (1555–1626) were preached at the courts of Elizabeth and James I. McCullough has established the importance of the setting: the preacher, raised in a pulpit, faced the sovereign in a closet in the west gallery. The closet windows both advertised and guarded the royal presence and the iconographical features surrounding it accentuated the monarch’s role as head of both church and state. Sovereigns could interrupt the sermon, as when Queen Elizabeth told a preacher to stop railing against images. Below the gallery the court was arranged with lords on one side and ladies on the other, all seated according to rank. Monarchs lived a hidden life and preachers had privileged access, which could be used for criticism as well as praise. Against the background of turbulent political events and court intrigues, this setting created an atmosphere of immediacy and drama. Preaching of a high standard was expected and appreciated. ‘The sermon – not Shakespearean drama, and not even the Jonsonian masque – was the pre-eminent literary genre at the Jacobean court’ (McCullough 1998a: 125). Andrewes spent much of his academic life in Cambridge, eventually becoming Master of his college, Pembroke, in 1589. Puritanism was increasingly influencing Cambridge but, as John Aubrey recounts in a waspish anecdote against Puritan hypocrisy, Andrewes ‘was not of the brotherhood’ (Aubrey 1962: 116). Andrewes turned down two bishoprics, but in 1605 became bishop of Chichester, then bishop of Ely before becoming bishop of Winchester, where he remained from 1619 until he died in 1626. The Good Friday sermon of 1604 was preached when he was dean of Westminster, which he became in 1601. He was famed as a preacher in his own time and much appreciated by Elizabeth and especially James I. But from the end of the seventeenth century until mid-way through the nineteenth century his style went out of fashion (Chadwick 1999). Samuel Johnson, whose high Anglicanism was akin to that of Andrewes, and who had read omnivorously, never refers to him. It was the Catholic revival (the Oxford Movement) that brought about a new appreciation of Andrewes, and his eleven-volume Works were published in the Library of Anglo-Catholic

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Theology. It was T. S. Eliot, in his 1928 essay on Andrewes, who re-established the position of Andrewes as a prose stylist. Eliot wrote of the sermons that ‘They rank with the finest English prose of their time, of any time’ (1928: 3). In addition to recent historical work on Andrewes there has been an emphasis on the affinity between the theology of Andrewes and that of the Orthodox Church and an appreciation of him as a person who unites in his outlook both Western and Eastern Christianity. Andrewes was called upon to preach for the court on the major festivals of Christmas, Easter, and Whitsun as well as the special thanksgivings for deliverance from the Gunpowder Plot (5 November) and the Gowrie conspiracy (5 August), but we know that he was deeply immersed in the liturgical cycle of the church from his remarkable private prayers in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew (the Preces privatae). Each sermon sets out the whole scheme of salvation but around the axis of the particular festival being celebrated (Lossky 1991). Among the ninety-six of his sermons published three years after his death by royal command, three Good Friday sermons are preserved, those for 1597, 1604, and 1605. The text for the 1604 sermon is Lamentations 1:12: Have ye no regard, O all ye that pass by the way? Consider and behold, if ever there were sorrow like my sorrow, which was done unto me, wherewith the Lord did afflict me in the day of the fierceness of his wrath.

This text is the refrain of the reproaches used at the traditional liturgical service on Good Friday, again indicating Andrewes’ feeling for the liturgical year. As these had been excised from the reformed rite, part of the thrill of hearing the sermon would have been the slightly dangerous reference to a pre-Reformation liturgy. Even more significant, this text, like others used by him, was the exact opposite of a peg on which to hang a few thoughts. All through the sermon he stays close to the text, unwrapping layers of meaning, digging deeper and deeper into its significance. There is in Andrewes no trace of self-indulgence, no gimmicks, no rhetoric for its own sake, no concession to fashion. He is wholly given over to the text and what it seeks to communicate. He does not play with words, as King James complained (Aubrey 1962: 116–17), nor does he use his enormous erudition (besides Latin, Greek, and Hebrew he came to know Aramaic, Syriac, and Arabic among the oriental languages and no fewer than fifteen modern languages). His philology is always at the service of the text and its message. As T. S. Eliot wrote: ‘When Andrewes begins his sermon, from beginning to end you are sure that he is wholly in his subject, unaware of anything else, that his emotion grows as he penetrates more deeply into his subject’ (1928: 21). Andrewes read and prayed from 7 a.m. to 12 noon every day. Indeed, ‘He doubted they were no true scholars, that came to speak with him before noon.’ The sermon that is considered here is one of the fruits of that kind of prolonged intellectual and spiritual attention over many years. The central theme and image, the point on which the whole sermon revolves, is the notion of regarding. The text begins ‘Have ye no regard’ and continues ‘Consider

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and behold’. To regard is to look, to turn away from ourselves and behold what is actually there. But it also indicates a proper valuation of what is there, so opening ourselves to it that it matters to us. These words, as used in the liturgical tradition of the church and as treated by Andrewes, are ones that are in effect spoken by Jesus from the cross. They are spoken not so much to the historical figures associated with the crucifixion as to the listeners before him in the chapel of Whitehall Palace: Be it then to us, as to them it was, and as most properly it is, the speech of the Son of God, as this day hanging on the cross, to a sort of careless people, that go up and down without any manner of regard of these his sorrows and sufferings, so worthy of all regard.1

‘A sort of careless people, that go up and down without any manner of regard’ well conjures up the image of courtiers walking up and down the spacious rooms of the palace, gossiping, perhaps even sneaking in late to the royal gallery, which they could do relatively unobserved. He knows that some who pass by come to church because they have little else to do, but others have great matters on their mind, especially great personages. But they too must stay and consider: ‘The regard of this is worthy the staying of a journey. It is worth the considering of those, that have never so great affairs in hand.’ Then, with pastoral affirmation, he makes the point that those before him have stayed. If the axle or pivot is regard, the method Andrewes chooses in order to bring about a proper regard is that of comparison. So the refrain that runs through the sermon is ‘if ever there was … si fuerit sicut’. In a series of comparisons and considerations he shows that there is nothing comparable, non sicut (not thus). What emerges here is the clear, logical ordering of the sermon. Andrewes presents a structure, like some Renaissance building, with a proper symmetry and elegance. Yet the image of a classical building going up does not do justice to the ever-increasing depth of analysis of the text, with an accompanying intensity of emotion to those following the analysis. It is remarkable but understandable for those drawn into the logic of the sermon that Eliot should use a phrase like ‘ecstasy of assent’ for the culmination of this logical learned analysis. Andrewes describes the physical suffering of Christ but does not indulge in this. He dwells more on the anguish of spirit, focusing on Luke 22:44 when Jesus, in the Garden of Gethsemene, is said to be in an agony. No manner of violence offered him in body, no man touching him or being near him; in a cold night, for they were fain to have a fire within doors, lying abroad in the air and upon the cold earth, to be all of a sweat, and that sweat to be blood; and not as they call it diaphoreticus, ‘a thin faint sweat’ but Grumosus, ‘of great drops;’ and those so many, so plenteous, as they went through his apparel and all; and through all stream to the ground, and that in great abundance; read, enquire and consider, sic fuerit sudor sicut sudor iste; ‘if ever there were sweat like this sweat of his’. Never the like sweat certainly, and therefore never the like sorrow.

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It is interesting that he relates Jesus in a sweat in the Garden of Gethsemene to the story of the denial of Peter, when the gospels say that Peter came close to the fire to keep warm, hence the cold. We are reminded of the line in the famous Christmas sermon of Andrewes, on the three kings, which Eliot incorporated into a poem: ‘A cold coming they had of it at this time of the year’. Andrewes then goes on to consider the third aspect of distress, that in all this sorrow Jesus had no one to comfort him. Even God had apparently abandoned him and left him like a weather-beaten tree, all desolate and forlorn. ‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?’ [Matthew 27:46] Weigh well that cry, consider it well, and tell me, sic fuerit clamor sicut clamor iste, ‘if ever there were cry like that of his;’ never the like cry, and therefore never the like sorrow.

Although the strength of a sermon by Andrewes lies in its cumulative effect there are individual sentences which themselves have extraordinary poetic qualities. The one just quoted is an example. There is alliteration and assonance. There is a musical contrast between the deep ‘weigh well … consider it well, and tell’ with the rising, interpolated pain of ‘sic fuerit clamor sicut clamor iste … cry … never the like cry’. There is also the sense of solemnity brought out by the balance of particular sentences ‘never the like cry, and therefore never the like sorrow’. Having considered the suffering of Jesus on the cross, Andrewes then goes on to consider who it is that really suffers. This is not just a human being, nor even a prince or king, however noble. This is the Son of God. This is not just an innocent person but also an innocent God who is suffering. Andrewes is appalled and awestruck. Then in a nice pastoral touch, which again brings home the immediacy of the sermon, a sense that real people are being addressed and their very souls struggled with, Andrewes adds ‘Men may drowsily hear it and coldly affect it, but principalities and powers stand abashed at it.’ The preacher goes on to consider why all this happens, and draws out the meaning of the last part of the text ‘wherewith the Lord did afflict me in the day of the fierceness of his wrath’. This suffering is nothing less than the wrath of God, wrath visited on human sinfulness but voluntarily borne by the innocent Jesus on our behalf. Andrewes emphasises that this is for every single human being. Quoting Isaiah 53:6, ‘All we as sheep were gone astray, and turned every man to his own way; and the Lord has laid upon him the iniquity of us all’, he continues: ‘“All,” “all” even those that pass to and fro, and for all this regard neither him nor his passion.’ To bring home the fact that it is human sin that has brought Jesus to this state he cleverly uses the story in 2 Samuel 12 about King David and Nathan. David wanted some land owned by one of his military commanders, Uriah, so David arranged for him to go to the front line and be killed. Nathan the prophet comes to David and tells a story about a rich man who stole a poor man’s single lamb. David is angry when he hears this story and says that the rich man deserved to die. At which point Nathan tells David that he is the man. It is an indication of the background biblical

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knowledge that could be assumed by Andrewes that he does not need to tell the incident or story at all. He simply refers to Nathan’s tu es homo, ‘Thou art the man.’ Although it was human sin that brought Christ to the cross, it was also God’s love in order that he might rescue us from the effects of that sin both now and in eternity. In a fine phrase, Andrewes refers to that from which Christ delivers us as ‘a never dying death’. Out of his compassion Christ went to the cross. ‘Even then in his love he regarded us, and so regarded us that he regarded not himself, to regard us.’ Andrewes pleads with his congregation. The court of James I was often a pretty coarse and lewd affair. It is said that Andrewes was held in very great respect and that people put aside some of their coarseness when he was around. He knew much of what went on. They knew that he knew. He wrestles with them for their eternal salvation. Yes sure, his complaint is just, ‘Have ye no regard?’ None? And yet never the like? None? And it pertains unto you? ‘No regard?’ As if it were some common ordinary matter, and the like never was? ‘No regard?’ As if it concerned you not a whit, and it toucheth you so near? As if He should say, ‘Rare things you regard, yea, though they no ways pertain to you: this is exceeding rare, and will you not regard it?’ Again, things that nearly touch you you regard, though they be not rare at all: this toucheth you exceeding near, even as near as your soul toucheth you, and will you not yet regard it? Will neither of these by itself move you? Will not both these together move you? What will move you? Will pity? Here is distress never the like. Will duty? Here is a Person never the like. Will fear? Here is wrath never the like. Will remorse? Here are sins never the like. Will kindness? Here is love never the like. Will bounty? Here are benefits never the like. Will all these? Here they be all, all above any sicut, all in the highest degree.

Then he comes to the final thrust, a last desperate attempt to pierce their hearts: the complaint of Jesus on the cross, ‘Have ye no regard, all ye that pass by the way?’, is indeed just. Sure it moved Him exceeding much; for among all the deadly sorrows of His most bitter Passion, this, even this, seemeth to be His greatest of all, and that which did most affect Him, even the grief of the slender reckoning most men have it in; as little respecting Him, as if He had done or suffered nothing at all for them.

This complaint moves heaven and earth but will it move us? The sun in Heaven shrinking in his light, the earth trembling under it, the very stones cleaving in sunder as if they had sense and sympathy of it, and sinful men only not moved with it.

Andrewes ends his sermon on two notes that bring to the fore his long experience as a pastor and confessor. For he knows that our motives are always mixed and he knows

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that, however intense the protestations of our love for Christ, they quickly fade. Yet, though they may fade, though we can offer but little in that Whitehall chapel in the way of concentration or devotion, nevertheless that little is still better than nothing. But God help us poor sinners, and be merciful unto us! Our regard is a non sicut indeed, but it is backward, and in a contrary sense; that is, no where so shallow, so short or so soon done. It should be otherwise; it should have our deepest consideration this, and our highest regard. But if that cannot be had, our nature is so heavy, and flesh and blood so dull of apprehension in spiritual things yet at leastwise some regard. Some I say; the more the better, but in anywise some, and not as here no regard, none at all.

Most of the characteristic features of sermons by Andrewes are apparent in this one. First, his understanding of the Hebrew scriptures, the Old Testament, as providing types or figures which find their focus and fulfilment in Jesus. Andrewes was not primarily interested in the literal or historical understanding of the text or its allegorical interpretation. He saw Christ speaking in the Old Testament in ways that could be recognised as such in the New. So, for example, he does not deny that the text on which he preaches appears in the book of Lamentations, which people believed was written by the prophet Jeremiah. But he argues that these words are most properly understood as words of Jesus from the cross, spoken to every generation. This highlights Andrewes’ understanding of time and history. For him the past is brought into the present through an anamnesis, a remembrance that is not just confined to the Eucharist. Scriptural history has been raised into a universal contemporaneity. Lossky believes that this influenced Eliot in the Four Quartets. This way of interpreting Scripture was not individualistic but belongs to the mind of Christ in the church. Andrewes is steeped in the early Church Fathers. But he does not use their sayings as proof-texts. Instead he sees them as part of a living tradition of which he also is a part. In this there is a particular affinity with the Eastern Fathers (Lossky 1991). Andrewes also has a profound sense of the limitations of words, a sense of the apophatic way, a proper reticence before the appalling mystery of Christ’s death. Reflecting on the anguish of soul in the Garden of Gethsemene, he says: That hour, what His feelings were, it is dangerous to define; we know them not, we may be too bold to determine of them. To very good purpose it was, that the ancient fathers of the Greek church in their liturgy, after they have recounted all the particular pains, as they are set down in His passion, and by all, and by every one of them, called for mercy, do after all shut up all with this … ‘By thine unknown sorrows and sufferings felt by thee, but not distinctly known by us, have mercy upon us, and save us!’

Then before the cry on the cross, developing a meaning of a Hebrew word he says: His soul was even as a scorched heath-ground, without so much as any drop of dew of divine comfort; as a naked tree – no fruit to refresh him within, no leaf to give him shadow without; the power of darkness let loose to afflict him, the influence of comfort

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restrained to relieve him. It is a non sicut this, it cannot be expressed as it should, and as other things may; in silence we may admire it, but all our words will not reach it.

Mention was made earlier of the drama, the genuine drama, of Andrewes wrestling for the soul of his sovereign and the souls of the sovereign’s sycophants. The playwright John Osborne was once quoted as saying that he would far rather go to church on Sunday than attend a play in the West End. During the 1970s, frustrated with passive middle-class audiences, he sought to shock and engage them in new ways. He failed. In the Royal Chapel of Whitehall, performer and audience were engaged in a struggle of life and death, everlasting life and everlasting death. For a preacher who went too far in his criticism could, at the very least, end in prison. A sovereign who did not go far enough in the way of righteousness would, in the conviction of the preacher, end up in everlasting darkness, ‘a dying death’. The audience would want to turn it into a play, one that they could applaud or execrate, from which they could stand apart or to which they could be indifferent. The preacher sought always the existential engagement, the point of personal responsibility, tu es homo. When it comes to Andrewes’ style an equally surprising modern comes to mind, though this time someone who succeeded, Samuel Beckett. Beckett achieved his effects in part through a culmination of subtle, complex, poetic repetitions. Andrewes does the same both in individual paragraphs and in the sermon as a whole, especially in the variations he rings on the theme of non sicut. He asks ‘If ever there were sorrow like my sorrow’. But in respect of dolor there is nothing comparable, non sicut; nothing comparable either to Christ’s sweat in the Garden of Gethsemene, no sudor; nor to the cry from the cross, no clamor. And above all there is no comparable love, no amor. Always there is a non sicut. Few have preached on this theme with the power of Andrewes. No one has done so with his combination of precision and passion; a passion totally contained in and expressed through such carefully ordered learning; learning wholly given over to its subject. There is a non sicut here too. Notes 1

The text used is Seymour-Smith 1976 (capitals have been kept only for the divine names). The eleven-volume Works, ed. J. P. Wilson and James Bliss, was published in the Library of

Anglo-Catholic Theology, Oxford 1841–54. There are selections of sermons edited with introductions by G. M. Story (1967) and P. E. Hewison (1995).

References and Further Reading Allchin, A. B. (1992). ‘Lancelot Andrewes’. In Geoffrey Rowell (ed.), The English Tradition and the Genius of Anglicanism (pp. 145–64). Wantage: Ikon.

Aubrey, John (1962). Aubrey’s Brief Lives, ed. O. L. Dick. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Chadwick, O. (1999). ‘A defence of Lancelot Andrewes’ sermons’. Theology, 102, 431–5.

Lancelot Andrewes’ Good Friday 1604 Sermon Chapman, Raymond (2008). Before the King’s Majesty: Lancelot Andrewes and his Works. Norwich: Canterbury Press. Eliot, T. S. (1928). For Lancelot Andrewes: Essays on Style and Order. London: Faber & Faber. Hewison, P. E. (ed.) (1995). Lancelot Andrewes: Selected Writings. Manchester: Fyfield. Lake, P. (1991). ‘Lancelot Andrewes, John Buckeridge, and avant-garde’. In Linda Levy Peck (ed.), The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (pp. 113–33). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lossky, N. (1991). Lancelot Andrewes the Preacher (1555–1626). Oxford: Clarendon Press. McCullough, P. E. (1998a). Sermons at Court: Politics and Religion in Elizabethan and Jacobean Preaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McCullough, P. E. (1998b) ‘Making dead men speak: Laudianism, print, and the works of

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Lancelot Andrewes, 1636–1643’. Historical Journal, 41, 401–24. McCullough, P. E. (2005). Lancelot Andrewes: Selected Sermons and Lectures. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McCutcheon, Elizabeth (1968). ‘Lancelot Andrewes’ “Preces privatae”: a journey through time’. Studies in Philology, 65, 223–41. Miller, E. C. Jr. (1984). Toward a Fuller Vision. Wilson, CN: Morehouse Barlow. Scott, David (ed.) (2002). Lancelot Andrewes: The Private Prayers. London: SPCK. Seymour-Smith, M. (1976). The English Sermon, vol. 1: 1550–1650. Cheadle: Carcanet. Story, G. M. (ed.) (1967). Lancelot Andrewes: Sermons. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Welsby, P. A. (1958). Lancelot Andrewes. London: SPCK.

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Theological Writings and Religious Polemic Donna B. Hamilton

Challenges throughout the sixteenth century to the authority of the church from both Catholics and Protestants account in many respects for the pivotal nature of this period. Central to the pace and trajectory of these developing ecclesiastical issues was the body of polemical writing that defined and argued various positions. As ponderous and off-putting as many of the volumes seem, the commitments they articulated had comprehensive spiritual, political, and economic implications. Many authors experienced exile, imprisonment, or execution for the positions they took; others gained position and wealth. While consensus not conflict is more often the emphasis in history writing today, the value of that perspective does not alter the fact that the polemical writings were interventions in important controversies, and that virtually every controversy presented itself in binaries. The issues, of course, were usually more complex, with disagreements existing also among Catholics, for example, and among the conformist leaders of the English church.

William Tyndale, Thomas More, and Christopher St German Influenced by Martin Luther and Huldreich Zwingli, the earliest English Protestant reformers – Robert Barnes, Thomas Bilney, William Tyndale, Hugh Latimer, and John Frith – constructed a platform that privileged the authority of the Bible and preaching over papal authority, classified cults of saints and the veneration of images as idolatry, rejected the penitential system wherein deeds were efficacious for salvation, and replaced it with a theology of grace (Guy 1988: 119–20). Tyndale’s special contribution lay in his translating the New Testament into English (1525) and, in Obedience of a Christian Man (1528), defending the role of the godly prince over the church. Thomas More’s replies to Luther, Tyndale, Frith, and Barnes, in response to which Tyndale defended both himself and Frith, established the key lines along which many future debates would be structured. More also engaged with other works that called

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for reform of the corrupt clergy, including those by two anticlerical common lawyers, Simon Fish, A Supplication for the Beggars (1529), and Christopher St German, A Treatise Concerning the Division Between the Spirituality and Temporality (1532). In The Debellation of Salem and Bizance (1533), More replied to St German’s arguments for reform of heresy laws, common law jurisdiction over ecclesiastical matters involving issues of property, and secular control of the church. Faced with the Act of Supremacy, St German upheld the role of Parliament in the making of law (Guy 1988: 122–3). More’s defences of traditional policy remained significant to Catholics and became useful as well to Protestants such as Matthew Sutcliffe and Richard Cosin, who, during the 1590s, defended the authority of the episcopacy and the church courts against pressures for further reform.

John Bale At first, Henry’s Act of Supremacy provided opportunities for more reformist publications. Under the patronage of Thomas Cromwell, Richard Grafton and Edward Whitechurch printed the Great Bible (1539) with its bold title page representing Henry VIII as head of the church ‘between God and man’ (King 1982: 53). But when protests broke out, fuelling Henrician conservatism in religious policy, Cromwell was executed. Some Protestants, displeased with this conservatism, chose exile, including John Bale, who, fleeing to the Low Countries, developed in The Image of Both Churches after the Revelation of Saint John (1545) a history of the church based on the book of Revelation and within that history the crystallising and divisive definition of Protestants as the Christian elect and Catholics as among the reprobate, ideas that would make their way broadly into Protestant writing. While in exile, Bale wrote a polemical history of English literature, Illustrium Majoris Britanniae Scriptorum Summarium, that promoted John Wyclif ’s importance as a forerunner of Tyndale, as well as accounts of the martyrdom of Sir John Oldcastle and Anne Askew, the latter of whom had been martyred by the conservatives in Henry’s court and burned at the stake in 1546 for denying transubstantiation and the Mass. Early in the reign of Edward VI, Stephen Gardiner’s attempt to suppress copies of Bale’s Examinations of Anne Askew registered the extent to which Bale had intended the account as an attack on Gardiner (King 1982: 72–5, 78–80). The aggressive Protestant policies of Edward Seymour, duke of Somerset and Protector under Edward VI, included a renunciation of censorship and resulted in the publication of works by the early reformers – including previously banned works of Luther and Henry Bullinger, and works of Bale, Barnes, Frith, John Hooper, Tyndale, and Wyclif – and in a significant opportunity for printers and publishers. There were ‘thirty-one mass tracts published in 1548’ supporting Cranmer’s liturgical reforms (King 1982: 89). Seymour’s openness backfired when rebellion erupted in 1549; the Act of Uniformity of that year subsequently muffled debate. Put on trial, Seymour was executed in 1552.

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Thomas Cranmer In a career that would span the reigns of Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Mary, Thomas Cranmer, archbishop of Canterbury (1533–53), participated actively in writing the key documents that shaped religious policy under Henry VIII and Edward VI, beginning with The Necessary Doctrine and Erudition of a Christian Man (1543), the product of a commission which met under the authority of Henry VIII. Upon the accession of Edward VI, the documents that were to define England’s stake in Protestantism emanated largely from Cranmer. He had charge of producing the Book of Homilies – or Certain Sermons, or Homilies, Appointed by the King’s Majesty (1547) – a set of official sermons to be preached in all churches; during the reign of Elizabeth, they would become sources of polemical debate for Presbyterians and other nonconforming Protestants. Of the twelve sermons issued in 1547, Cranmer probably wrote ‘Exhortation to the reading of holy scripture’ and the homilies ‘Of Salvation,’ ‘Of Faith,’ and ‘Of Good works annexed to faith’, which together represent the core of beliefs along which Cranmer sought reform (MacCullough 1996: 372–3). Cranmer also presided over the commission that was to write the first Book of Common Prayer, which, along with the Book of Homilies and the Bible in English, represented the standard for Protestant conformity and, according to Maltby, served as a central tool of Protestant polemic and propaganda (Maltby 1998). At the heart of Catholic worship had been the primarium or primer, which, available in various forms, tended to contain the calendar of saints’ days and holy days, the hours of the Virgin Mary, the seven penitential psalms, the litany of the saints, the fifteen gradual psalms, the office for the dead, and the commendations of souls. From 1530 the primer was regularly revised according to Protestant reformulations. In 1545 Richard Grafton printed the first authorised Primer of Henry VIII, which included a shortened calendar of saints’ days and holy days, prayers, the penitential psalms, a revised set of psalms of the passion, and, throughout, emendations reflecting Protestant theology and biblical translation. This Primer and the one issued during the reign of Edward VI condemned the use of any but the official versions (see Blom 1982; Butterworth 1953; Dickens 1964; Duffy 1992; MacCullough 1996). Incorporating sections from Henry’s Primer, Cranmer supervised the writing of the Book of Common Prayer (printed in 1549), which, while doctrinally ambiguous, established English as the language of worship. Despite the popular protests in 1549, the revised second Prayer Book (1552) shifted the focus of the Holy Communion from an emphasis on the bread and wine to the changes being wrought on the communicant during the act of worship, and the language of the sacrament took the Zwinglian form of emphasising not the presence of the body of Christ but the remembrance of Christ. After the accession of Elizabeth, the Book of Common Prayer adopted the more conservative policy of conjoining the 1549 and 1552 language of administering the sacrament. A later but important Catholic response to Protestant inroads on popular worship was Richard Verstegan’s The Primer, or Office of the Blessed Virgin Marie, in

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Latin and English (1599), which used Gregory Martin’s translations of both Old and New Testaments (Blom 1982: 16). Cranmer also drafted, in 1552, the Forty-Two Articles, which under Elizabeth would become the Thirty-Nine Articles, and which iterate the doctrine of predestination, denounce purgatory, declare against the worship of images, relics, and saints, and, according to Dickens, place the English church against both Rome and the Anabaptists (Dickens 1964: 252–3). Historians disagree in their assessment of Cranmer’s changes in theological positioning and his declining to offer support to Protestants martyred under Henry VIII for positions he would later take himself. His execution in 1556 occurred as Mary continued to dismantle the forms of worship he had constructed.

Hugh Latimer Another early supporter of Henry VIII’s divorce and the supremacy, Hugh Latimer delivered a sermon to Convocation in 1536 calling for the clergy to lead a more aggressive Reformation, an event that propelled Latimer to the centre of reform activity. In response, the clergy denounced him and then, with his assistance, drew up the Ten Articles; this first official doctrinal formulary of the Church of England reduced the sacraments from seven to three and endorsed justification by faith, but gave qualified approval to worship of images and saints and to the practice of praying for the dead. Duffy has detailed the reformers’ next step, a scheme for diminishing the number and the observance of holy days and feast days (Duffy 1992: 394–5). When rebellion followed in the Pilgrimage of Grace, there also followed a series of reversals regarding policy. In June 1539 Henry VIII endorsed traditional Catholic theology by way of his Act of Six Articles; ‘denial of transubstantiation became punishable by automatic burning’ (Guy 1988: 185). In 1539, amidst the seesaw of Henrician religious negotiations, Latimer was asked to resign, was ordered to stop preaching, and was later apprehended. Released from prison on Edward VI’s accession, Latimer was enlisted to preach at Paul’s Cross, in the Chapel Royal, and, to accommodate the court and city dignitaries who wanted to hear him, in the king’s private garden at Westminster. From 1548 to 1549 his sermons were printed, in single and collected editions, including ‘The Sermon on the plough’ and several sermons preached before Edward VI. Among his most political sermons were those supporting the execution of Seymour and attacking the conservative bishops (MacCullough 1996: 408). Following the fall of Seymour, Latimer became the guest of Katherine Willoughby, the duchess of Suffolk, in Lincolnshire, where again he preached regularly. He was executed in 1555. In 1562 John Day printed an edition of twenty-seven of Latimer’s sermons, including Seven Sermons Preached at Westminster and Certain Godly Sermons upon the Lord’s Prayer. While the earlier sermons focused on the king’s role in relation to the church and the role of the clergy in the Reformation, the sermons preached in Lincolnshire show Latimer more

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in his pastoral role, denouncing abusive landlords, telling biblical stories, explaining doctrinal points, and urging the value of obedience, work, manners, and virtuous living. Latimer exemplifies the social criticism, rhetorical power, and spiritual leadership available to Protestant preachers.

John Jewel In exile during the reign of Mary, John Jewel returned at the accession of Elizabeth, and took his place alongside the leaders of the new English establishment. A significant polemical move was his ‘Challenge’ sermon, preached at Paul’s Cross on 26 November 1559, in which he appealed to the primitive church and the Scriptures as having authorised none of the Catholic practices, including their Mass, prayers in a foreign tongue, papal authority and power, and image worship. Subsequent to this success, William Cecil commissioned him to write the official treatise defending the English Reformation. Drafted in the context of the Council of Trent and printed in 1562, Jewel explained in the introduction to Apologia Ecclesiae Anglicanae that England’s break with Rome was founded on the premise that religious authority resided in Scripture and the Church Fathers. Jewel summarised the doctrinal beliefs on which the English clergy agreed, rebutted charges that England was now overrun with division and sects, accused the papists of immorality, and cited the Church Fathers and councils in order to demonstrate how far the Roman church had departed from the primitive church. In a final section, Jewel argued for the authority and right of Christian princes to govern the church in their own realms, asserting again England’s right not to submit to the Pope or to the Council of Trent (Jewel 1963: xxxiii–xxxvii). Written in Latin, and translated into several languages, the Apologia prompted Catholic replies. Over the course of five years, 1564–8, the intellectual leaders of the English Catholics – Thomas Dorman, John Martiall, John Rastell, William Allen, Thomas Stapleton, Richard Shacklock, Nicholas Sander, and Thomas Harding – all in exile, responded with one or more books, including Harding’s An Answer to Master Jewel’s Challenge (1564), Stapleton’s A Fortress of the Faith (1565), Allen’s A Defence and Declaration of the Catholic Church’s Doctrine touching Purgatory (1565), and Sander’s The Rock of the Church (1567) and A Treatise of the Images of Christ (1567) (Southern 1953: 60–118). Written in English, these replies made necessary an English translation of Jewel, which Anne Bacon, wife of Nicholas Bacon, provided in 1564. The Apology for the Church of England remains a storehouse of information regarding the doctrine and defence of early English Protestantism.

John Foxe An equally authorising but more affecting account of English Protestantism came in the form of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments of These Latter and Perilous Days Touching

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Matters of the Church, the significant editions of which were printed in 1563, 1570, 1576, and 1583, each a revision of the preceding. The initial impetus to the work was the drive to record and report on Protestants martyred under Mary. After the succession of Elizabeth, Foxe’s project took on larger historiographical goals. Seizing on methods current on the continent (Firth 1979: 74) and on interest in the apocalypse, Foxe developed a periodisation scheme that synthesised themes from the book of Revelation, English history and church history, patterns of persecution and martyrdom, and Protestant theology. Using the prophecies and images in Revelation as the grid on which to map English history, Foxe divided all history into periods, characterised by the degree to which the true church or Antichrist was in power. Assessing each segment of English history by the same criteria allowed him also to promote the British and Tudor agenda valued by Cecil, Nicholas Bacon, and Matthew Parker. With these rhetorical strategies, Foxe developed a definition of English Protestantism that set it against Catholicism in a system of binaries that opposed the true church to the false church of Rome (similar to Bale’s construction), and that set the godly prince defending true religion against the Pope, identified as Antichrist. Haller’s view that hereby Foxe defined England as an elect nation has been challenged (Firth 1979:106–9). During later decades of the sixteenth century and continuing through the seventeenth century, Foxe’s rhetoric of difference became the defining discourse for Protestant polemics (Kemp 1991: 84–5). Catholic response included Stapleton’s translation of Bede’s History of the Church of England, Nicholas Harpsfield’s Dialogi Sex (1566), and Richard Verstegan’s A Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (1605).

The Jesuits and the Enterprise of England During the 1570s and 1580s, new challenges appeared from both the Catholics and the Protestants. In the late 1570s, the Jesuits launched their Enterprise of England, by which they would return Jesuit priests to England to minister to the Catholic community and prepare for returning England to Catholicism. In this context of resistance, Gregory Martin’s Treatise of Schism (1578) and Robert Persons’ (or Parsons’) A Brief Discourse Containing Reasons Why Catholics Refuse to Go to Church (1580) urged Catholics to choose recusancy rather than obedience to the government’s orders for conformity. Edmund Campion’s arrest and martyrdom, along with the execution of several other priests, called into being Burghley’s The Execution of Justice in England, an attempt to justify the executions to European nations on the grounds that they had been for treason not religious belief. William Allen, replying with A True, Sincere, and Modest Defence of English Catholics, took the opposite position and also made the case against royal supremacy (see Kingdon 1965). Persons’ The Persecution of Catholics in England provided a detailed account of the conditions of living under a persecutory government. And Gregory Martin completed an English translation of the Latin Vulgate that included marginal glosses and essays on doctrinal points; his Rheims New Testament was printed in 1582, and the Douay Old Testament in 1610. In 1584

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Persons’ A Christian Directory, a devotional work aimed at Catholics and at conversion to Catholicism but framed rhetorically as non-polemical, prompted Edmund Bunny to reproduce the book in a slightly revised form and claim it for the Protestant side (see also Chapter 31, Catholic Writings).

Presbyterians and Puritans Protestants also tested and re-examined the results of anti-Catholic reform. With the principal polemical treatises emanating from Thomas Cartwright, Walter Travers, Dudley Fenner, John Penry, John Udall, and Job Throckmorton, the opposition focused not on doctrine but on church ceremonies (in opposition to kneeling, using the sign of the cross in baptism, wearing elaborate clerical vestments, and enforced use of the Book of Common Prayer), on a preference for individualised preaching (not enforced use of the Homilies), and on reform of church government (to replace the episcopacy with parity among ministers). Defenders of the reformed English Protestant church were chiefly John Whitgift, soon to be archbishop of Canterbury, who answered the books of Cartwright; John Bridges, dean of Salisbury, who entered into debate with Fenner and Travers; and Matthew Sutcliffe, dean of Exeter, who engaged Cartwright and Throckmorton (see Collinson 1967). At a point in time when the Presbyterian movement was meeting its toughest opposition, suddenly the Martin Marprelate Tracts, printed on secret presses, began to appear. During 1588–9 these anonymous tracts rearticulated the attack on the Protestant episcopacy with a satiric and comedic vigour that nearly outstripped the ability of the authorities to respond. In this print venture we find an illustrating moment of how censorship could function when the authorities were sufficiently provoked. Whether or not the tracts contributed to the demise of the Presbyterian movement, they represent a boldness in the use of print with which only Catholic polemicists publishing from the continent could compete. Hired to reply, John Lyly and Thomas Nashe wrote pamphlets in a similarly satiric tone; more traditional polemical replies by Bancroft, bishop of London, Thomas Cooper, bishop of Winchester, and Sutcliffe confirm that the Marprelate event struck hard at the interest in muting dissension. In the early 1590s, when Cartwright and eight ministers were being tried for disloyalty, the lawyers attacking and defending them became participants in these disputes. On the government’s side were ecclesiastical lawyers Sutcliffe and Richard Cosin; on Cartwright’s side were common lawyers Robert Beale and James Morice, the latter of whom was put under house arrest for his 1593 speech in Parliament against the ex officio oath and so against practices that promoted self-incrimination. Morice’s speech and writings challenged the totalising conceptualisations of the Protestant episcopacy. (Collinson 1967: 403–31). In 1589, in the midst of Marprelate’s satiric attacks, Bancroft had preached his famous Paul’s Cross sermon declaring that the episcopacy was a divine institution with absolute power. That position was carried

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forward in his and Thomas Bilson’s books in the early 1590s (see also Chapter 32, Sectarian Writing).

Richard Hooker We may use the scholarly disagreement in evidence in the work of Lake (1988), White (1992), and Maltby (1998) over how to describe Richard Hooker – his theology, politics, and influence all being at issue – and to emphasise how Hooker’s arguments call attention to the competing and mixed ideologies current in the 1580s and 1590s. In Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, which began to appear in 1590, Hooker’s call for a more broadly constructed church in which worship and ceremonies displaced wrangling over theological distinction and his identifying Rome and Geneva as the two poles between which the church had to be constructed may be read as the oppressive voice of conformity or as the envisioning of an consensual alternative to an eversplintering ecclesiological situation. For Hooker, ‘since Christ died for all men, all men were actually or potentially part of Christ’s body, the church’ (Lake 1988: 42). In imagining a Christian community in which Catholics were understood as part of the true church, he opposed other conformists, including Bancroft, and marked out an ideological space different from the more exclusive definition provided by William Perkins’ Calvinist prescriptions (see further on Perkins below, and see also Chapter 18, ‘Law Makes the King’: Hooker on Law and Princely Rule).

The Policy of King James Both Puritans and Catholics greeted the accession of King James with anxiety. The Puritan ministers, seeking reform of ceremonies, confronted James with the Millenary Petition. To give them a hearing, James called the Hampton Court Conference. Nevertheless, as is clear from William Barlow’s The Sum and Substance of the Conference (1604), few concessions were granted: no changes in church government or church courts, and only minor changes in ceremonies. Meanwhile, the Catholics too pleaded their cause, as in A Petition Apologetical, Presented to the King’s most excellent Majesty, by the Lay Catholics of England (1604), and in works by Persons, including his attack on Foxe, Treatise of Three Conversions of England (1603), and his reply in An Answer to the Fifth Part of Reports Lately Set Forth by Sir Edward Cook (1606) to Edward Coke’s defence of royal supremacy. In these years, Sutcliffe maintained a high profile responding to Catholic works.

The Gunpowder Plot and Oath of Allegiance On 5 November 1605, a group of Jesuit conspirators, discontented with English policies towards Catholicism, tried to blow up king and Parliament by packing

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gunpowder into the cellar of a house that extended below the space where Parliament was to meet. The subsequent trials and executions of Guy Fawkes and Henry Garnet stirred deeply both anti-Catholic feeling and Catholic fear of persecution. The Gunpowder Plot and its aftermath also generated a large body of writing, including the report giving the government’s view, A True and Perfect Relation of the Proceedings against the Late Most Barbarous Traitors (1606), written by Henry Howard, the earl of Northampton, with the assistance of Robert Cotton, and translated into Latin by William Camden. One result of the plot was the development by James of an Oath of Allegiance to him as temporal ruler, a move that triggered an enormous international paper war in which the English archpriest George Blackwell, Cardinal Robert Bellarmine, and Persons were chief representatives of the Catholic position, while King James, Lancelot Andrewes, John Donne, and William Barlow took their places as the most prominent Protestant polemicists. These authors debated the authority of king and Pope over matters temporal and spiritual and the implications of a Catholic’s choosing obedience or martyrdom. Some Catholic polemicists, including Richard Sheldon and William Warmington, argued for taking the oath. And the Protestant William Barrett, who had converted to Catholicism in 1597, defended the king against the Pope (see Patterson 1997).

Calvin and Arminius Late in James’s reign dissension among Protestants became focused around the doctrine of predestination, the implications of which have been debated especially by Tyacke (1987), Lake (1987), and White (1992). In 1590, England’s predominantly Calvinist theology had received a massive articulation in William Perkins’ Armilla Aurea (1590), translated in 1591 as A Golden Chain … containing the Order of the Causes of Salvation and Damnation. When William Barret preached against it, the ensuing controversy led to the reaffirmation of the doctrine of predestination in the Lambeth Articles (1595), and subsequently to Barret’s leaving Cambridge with his mentor Peter Baro. A major challenge to predestination came in the form of Jacobus Arminius’ reply to Perkins, Examen Modestus (1612), in which Arminius opposed the predestinarian belief that God had willed salvation to some and damnation to others and argued that God wills the salvation of all people who believe. While many defended Perkins, an important sign of change was William Laud’s anti-Calvinist sermon in 1615, to which Robert Abbot replied. James responded to the Arminian challenge on an international level when, in 1619, he sent English representatives to the Synod at Dort, organised to condemn the doctrines of the Dutch Arminians. Later, during negotiations for an Anglo-Spanish marriage for his son Charles, James softened his position on Arminianism, partly to moderate his stance on the Pope. James continued to move in an Arminian direction, supporting publication of Richard Montagu’s A New Gag for an Old Goose (1624). The central issues in the 1620s were ‘the debate about the visibility and continuity of the church … the role and nature of ‘worship’

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… and the relative importance of preaching compared to that of set prayer and the sacraments’ (Lake 1987: 43). Those who wished to advance in the church ‘had to keep quiet about conformity and the polity of the church … had to defend the iure divino case for episcopacy and defend the king’s status as a ruler by divine right’ (Lake 1987: 49–50). While most English people did not engage in religious debate to the degree that polemicists did, we confront in polemical works a level of speaking out that is characteristic of the sixteenth century, and that resulted ultimately in an increased sectarianism within English religious society among both Catholics and Protestants. Nevertheless, efforts continued to construct the English religious community so that the values of uniformity and conformity could retain meaning as official policy and as normative practice. References and Further Reading Allison, A. F. and D. M. Rogers (1989, 1994). The Contemporary Printed Literature of the English Counter-Reformation between 1558 and 1640, vol. 1: Works in Languages other than English; vol. 2: Works in English. Aldershot: Scolar Press. Blom, J. M. (1982). The Post-Tridentine English Primer. London: Catholic Record Society. Butterworth, Charles C. (1953). The English Primers, 1529–1545. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Carrafiello, Michael L. (1998). Robert Parsons and English Catholicism, 1580–1610. Selinsgrove: Susquehanna University Press. Collinson, Patrick (1967). The Elizabethan Puritan Movement. Berkeley: University of California Press. Collinson, Patrick (1982). The Religion of Protestants: The Church in English Society. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Dickens, A. G. (1964). The English Reformation. London: B. T. Batsford. Dillon, Anne (2002). The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community 1535–1603. Aldershot: Ashgate. Duffy, Eamon (1992). The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c.1400–c.1580. New Haven: Yale University Press. Firth, Katharine R. (1979). The Apocalyptic Tradition in Reformation Britain, 1530–1645. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Greenslade, S. L. (1963). ‘English versions of the Bible, 1525–1611’. In S. L. Greenslade (ed.),

The Cambridge History of the Bible: The West from the Reformation to the Present Day (pp. 141–73). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gregory, Brad S. (1999). Salvation at Stake: Christian Martyrdom in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Guy, J. A. (1988). Tudor England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Haller, William (1963). Foxe’s Book of Martyrs and the Elect Nation. London: Jonathan Cape. Hamilton, Donna B. (2005). Anthony Munday and the Catholics, 1560–1633. Aldershot: Ashgate. Highley, Christopher (2008). Catholics Writing the Nation in Early Modern Britain and Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Houliston, Victor (2007). Catholic Resistance in Elizabethan England: Robert Person’s Jesuit Polemic, 1580–1610. Aldershot: Ashgate. Jewel, John (1963). An Apology of the Church of England, ed. J. E. Booty. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Kemp, Anthony (1991). The Estrangement of the Past: A Study in the Origins of Modern Historical Consciousness. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kilroy, Gerard (2005). Edmund Campion: Memory and Transcription. Aldershot: Ashgate. King, John (1982). English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kingdon, Robert (ed.) (1965). Burghley’s Execution of Justice and Allen’s Defense of English Catholics. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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Lake, Peter (1987). ‘Calvinism and the English church, 1570–1635’. Past and Present, 114, 32–76. Lake, Peter (1988). Anglicans and Puritans? Presbyterianism and English Conformist Thought from Whitgift to Hooker. London: Unwin Hyman. Lake, Peter and Michael C. Questier (2002). The Anti-Christ’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England. New Haven: Yale University Press. Lander, Jesse M. (2006). Inventing Polemic: Religion, Print, and Literary Culture in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McCoog, Thomas M. (1996). Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland, and England 1541–1588: ‘Our Way of Proceeding?’ Leiden: E. J. Brill. MacCullough, Diarmaid (1996). Thomas Cranmer: A Life. New Haven: Yale University Press. Maltby, Judith (1998). Prayer Book and People in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Milton, Anthony (1995). Catholic and Reformed: the Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protes-

tant Thought, 1600–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Milward, Peter (1977). Religious Controversies of the Elizabethan Age: A Survey of Printed Sources. London: Scolar Press. Milward, Peter (1978). Religious Controversies of the Jacobean Age: A Survey of Printed Sources. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Patterson, W. B. (1997). King James VI and I and the Reunion of Christendom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Questier, Michael C. (1996). Conversion, Politics and Religion in England, 1500–1625. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Southern, S. V. (1953). Elizabethan Recusant Prose, 1559–1582. London: Sands & Co. Tyacke, Nicholas (1987). Anti-Calvinists: The Rise of English Arminianism, c.1590–1640. Oxford: Clarendon Press. White, Peter (1992). Predestination, Policy, and Polemic: Conflict and Consensus in the English Church from the Reformation to the Civil War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Catholicism in early modern England, no less than Protestantism, was a ministry of the word. Catholics practised their religion in private and public prayer and protest, in words meditated, whispered, spoken, sung, written, and printed. Such words, of course, were forbidden and felonious. After King Henry VIII had broken ties with Rome and declared himself Supreme Head of the Church in England (1536), successive administrations undertook the long and complicated process of suppressing, outlawing, and eliminating Roman Catholicism. Legislation in the reign of Elizabeth I (1558–1603) made it a crime to say or sing Mass, to administer Catholic sacraments, to speak against the state religion, and to possess or publish Catholic writing; penalties included heavy fines, forfeiture of goods and land, imprisonment, and execution for treason. Catholics still spoke the words of their faith in prayer. They regularly braved persecution to attend Mass in the homes of the faithful, as is abundantly clear from the surviving records of Jesuit missionaries – Edmund Campion, Robert Southwell, John Gerard, Henry Garnet, and William Weston, for example – as well as from many state records of arrest and trial. At the end of the sixteenth century Lady Magdalen Montague converted part of her home at Battle Abbey into a private chapel for Mass, known as ‘Little Rome’. With two Acts of Parliament, Henry VIII dissolved the monasteries and helped himself to church goods, lands, and buildings, but he could not eradicate the Divine Office, the monastic prayers recited at specified hours of the day. These combined with the Little Office or Hours of the Virgin Mary and other traditional prayers and hymns to supply Catholic (and sometimes Protestant) worship throughout the early modern period. This worship included powerful, affective medieval devotions, such as ‘A prayer unto the wounds of Christ’ and ‘The Fifteen Odes of St Bridget’, as well as St Thomas Aquinas’s great eucharistic hymns (Lauda, Sion, Pange, lingua, Sacris solemniis, Verbum supernum, Adoro te), which affirmed the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist:

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Richard Verstegan gathered these and many other prayers together in his English Primer (1599), which achieved forty-two editions in the seventeenth century. Prominent here are Marian prayers (Obsecro te, for example) and hymns, including the famous antiphon Salve, regina, which begins, ‘Hail holy queen, mother of mercy, our life, our sweetness and our hope, to thee do we cry poor banished children of Eve’, and which the pilgrim Dante hears in the Valley of the Rulers (Purgatorio 7). Martin Luther objected to this hymn, and John Hollybush wrote a refutation that substituted Christ for Mary amidst copious scriptural reference (An Exposition upon the Song of the Blessed Virgin Mary, 1538). Despite such opposition Catholics continued to ‘venerate’, as opposed to ‘worship’, Mary, the distinction precisely maintained in the theological terms hyperdoulia and latria. Catholics prayed the Litany of Loreto, a series of invocations to Mary as mother, virgin, vessel, mediatrix, and queen and, of course, they prayed the rosary, perhaps the most misunderstood Catholic devotion. Dismissed as idolatry or merely mechanical repetition, the rosary consisted of a series of prayers correlated to a string of beads; it provided ordered access to the fifteen traditional mysteries of redemption – Joyful, Sorrowful, and Glorious. Church teachings and handbooks, such as that of John Bucke (Instructions for the Use of the Beads, 1589), continually explained that the person praying the rosary was to meditate upon each mystery in sequence. Catholics also spoke the words of their faith in protest, in the officially forbidden speech of literates and illiterates alike – ballads, stories, conversations, sacrilege narratives, epigrams, popular verse, remembrances of martyrs and saints. This heterogeneous oral mix, part devotional, part polemical in character, sometimes simple, sometimes complex and allusive, Alison Shell has called an ‘insistent background noise’ in the period, one that assumed various forms and functions: An antiquarian would have pointed to the rich anecdotal tradition surrounding ruined abbeys, which kept England’s Catholic past and the depredations of the Reformation alive in the popular memory, a puritan minister in a rural parish might well have deplored the use of popish spells among his flock, while a seminary priest would have recognised the missionary usefulness of ballad-singing to drive home the anti-Protestant message and commemorate martyrs. (Shell 2007: 1)

The oral traditions surrounding ruined abbeys inform Shakespeare’s lament for the ‘bare, ruined choirs, where late the sweet birds sang’ (Sonnet 73) and inspire tales of supernatural punishment for sacrilege; the lore of popish superstition and spells finds late expression in the devils and exorcisms of his King Lear.

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One important manuscript from the period, moreover, preserves some Catholic ballads that reveal their polemical ‘missionary usefulness’ as well as the fears and hopes of Catholic singers. Winter Cold into Summer Hot catalogues the astonishing and unnatural changes brought about by the Protestant revolution: Abstinence is Papistry, As this new error saith; Fasting, prayer, and all good works Avoid, for only faith Doth bring us all to heaven straight – A doctrine very strange, Which causeth men at liberty Of vice and sin to range. From angels honour taken is, From saints all worship due; The mother of our living God – A thing most strange yet true! – Comparèd is by many a Jack Unto a saffron bag, To a thing of naught, to a paltry patch, And to our vicar’s hag! (British Library MS Additional 15225, fos. 33v–34)

The speaker marvels at the world turned upside down, winter cold into summer hot, at the loss of traditional religious practices for the doctrine of sola fides (‘faith alone’), a doctrine that in his view promotes licence and sin. Protestant ‘purification’ here abolishes the proper respect due to angels, saints, and, most important, to the Blessed Virgin Mary, a long and well-beloved focus of Catholic devotion and art, now dishonoured and scorned. The allusion to the ‘saffron bag’ pointedly evokes the Protestant argument that denied Mary’s intrinsic worth and holiness, reducing her to a mere vessel for the incarnation. Hugh Latimer used the metaphor in a sermon preached at St Paul’s, 18 January 1548: ‘as the saffron bag that hath been full of saffron or hath had saffron in it doth ever after savour and smell of the sweet saffron that it contained, so our Blessed Lady, which conceived and bare Christ in her womb, did ever after resemble the manners and virtues of that precious babe’ (A Notable Sermon, 1548, sig. Aiiii). The preservation of such ballads in manuscript reveals the complex intersection of orality with this important form of early modern publication. Protest songs and ballads appear in other handwritten anthologies, Constance Aston Fowler’s book (Fowler 2000), Huntington 904, and British Library Cotton Vespasian A-25. Denied access to printing presses, Catholics naturally resorted to manuscript publication, and some of their most important documents circulated in this form: Edmund Campion’s challenge to the Privy Council (known as his ‘Brag’), Philip Howard’s letter to Elizabeth explaining his intended flight from England, Robert Persons’ Memorial for the

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Reformation of England and his four-volume Certamen Ecclesiae Anglicanae, much of Robert Southwell’s poetry and prose, Peter Mowle’s grand miscellany, now at St Mary’s College, Oscott. Catholics passed such handwritten works around, along with more ephemeral productions, newsletters, broadsides, devotions, catechisms, and eyewitness accounts of persecutions and executions. Of course, many Catholic manuscripts eventually found their way into print, normally through the agency of foreign presses or the twenty-one secret presses operating in England. From 1608 to 1642 the Jesuit Press at Saint-Omer published over 300 English books. Allison and Rogers’s bibliography of Catholic works printed between 1558 and 1640 identifies 932 titles in English and 1,619 in Latin and other languages. In The Foot out of the Snare (1624) John Gee complained about the proliferation of Catholic books available in the London market, listing 156 objectionable titles. The list includes medieval authors (Bede and Augustine), contemporary theologians (Bellarmine, Richard Smith), continental writers (Granada, Canisius, Puenta), and English polemicists (More, Persons, Brereley). Gee also fulminated against Catholic histories, translations of the Bible, catechisms, devotional works, prayer books, and saints’ lives. As Gee’s list indicates, Catholics in this period produced a large, multilingual corpus of controversial writing. Some of the most important works appeared in Latin: Erasmus’ prefaces to his translation of the New Testament, Novum Instrumentum (1516); Nicholas Sander’s defence of the church, De Visibili monarchia ecclesiae (1571); John Gibbons’s account of English martyrs, Concertatio ecclesiae Catholicae in Anglia (1583); Robert Bellarmine’s polemical masterpiece, Disputationes de Controversiis (1586–9). Many, however, wrote in English, beginning with Thomas More, who supported Erasmus’ translation of the Bible and excoriated Tyndale’s Protestant version. In A Dialogue Concerning Heresies (1529), More argued that Tyndale’s use of the word ‘senior’ for ‘priest’ devalues Holy Orders. Similarly, his choice of ‘congregation’ for ‘church’ democratises and diminishes the historical institution. The use of ‘love’ for ‘charity’ reduces Christian agape to a generalised emotion in order to undercut the doctrine of good works. As a controversialist, More used learning, humour, reason, and scorn to demolish the opposition. So too did Thomas Harding, another important figure who, as did many others, took up the challenge of Archbishop John Jewel (1559) to demonstrate the scriptural and historical authenticity of Roman church practices. And so, likewise, did Jane Owen, the only female Catholic polemicist in the period, whose An Antidote against Purgatory (1634) defended the doctrine of purgatory and urged readers to avoid its pains by almsgiving and good works. She wittily includes in her diatribe the fantastic lament of a reader facing death, who laments his folly and his inattention to such worthy books as hers. Most Catholic controversial writing in the period defends church doctrine and attacks Protestant practice as heretical innovation. But a significant number of Catholic polemicists disagreed among themselves. A principal translator of the Bible in the period, Gregory Martin, author of the Rheims version of the New Testament (1582), differed from Erasmus on many points: Martin reluctantly undertook his translation, warned against the potential dangers to the uneducated reader, and adopted the

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Vulgate, rather than Greek manuscripts, as his copy-text. The issue of church papistry (outward conformity to the Church of England) was also divisive. The Catholic Church and its most powerful spokesman in English, Robert Persons, advocated uncompromising refusal to attend English services, or recusancy, while others such as Alban Langdale, along with most rank-and-file English Catholics, believed that Catholics could in good conscience attend Protestant services to save their land or their lives. Radical Catholics such as Persons and Cardinal William Allen eventually called for rebellion against Elizabeth and for Spanish intervention, but most Catholics rejected such extreme measures and remained loyal to their country: witness Robert Southwell’s A Humble Supplication (1591), or William Watson’s condemnation of Allen and Persons as traitors. Disagreement about the power of the papacy, its limits and prerogatives, also occasioned serious dispute in the fold. Arguing against his fellow Catholic William Barclay, Robert Bellarmine claimed that the spiritual authority of the Pope necessarily conferred an indirect authority in matters temporal. Protestantism, of course, remained the principal target of Catholic theological and political writing, and each side proffered a different vision of history. Catholics argued that the true church descended continuously and visibly from Christ and the apostle Peter to the present Roman institution and Pope. Scripture, and the very fact of the church’s existence, thus functioned as the prime guarantor of authenticity. ‘Where was your church before Luther?’, they repeatedly asked. Luther himself had anticipated this question by arguing that the true church began to recede into invisibility as the false Roman one appeared. Matthias Flacius provided chapter and verse of the deterioration over time in his massive, thirteen-volume Centuriae Magdeburgenses (1559–74). Robert Barnes and John Bale articulated this theory in England, as did John Foxe (Acts and Monuments, 1563), the most important and influential creator of Protestant English history. Foxe tells the story of the English church from its founding by Joseph of Arimathea, though its captivity to Rome, to its present emancipation under the Tudors. In this narrative England emerges as the elect nation, the place that most purely restores and embodies the vision of Jesus Christ. The proof of England’s sanctity and of Rome’s perfidy, Foxe triumphantly concludes, is the blood of her martyrs, especially those executed in the reign of the Catholic Queen Mary I (1553–8). Catholics strenuously dissented. Thomas Stapleton published a translation of the Venerable Bede’s Historia (1565) to show the dedicatee Queen Elizabeth and the English ‘in how many and weighty points the pretended reformers of the Church in Your Grace’s dominions have departed from the pattern of that sound and Catholic faith planted first among Englishmen by holy St Augustine [of Canterbury]’ (sig. *3). Bede’s history proves, according to Stapleton, that England became Catholic through papal intervention, as Pope Gregory the Great (r. 590–604) had dispatched Augustine as a missionary to the Saxons. Moreover, Stapleton’s preface and notes point out the authenticity of doctrines and practices lately rejected by Protestants – transubstantiation, auricular confession, the intercession of saints, miracles, prayers for the dead, and the primacy of the Roman See. Nicholas Sander developed this line of argument in several histories, notably in De Origine ac progressu schismatic Anglicani (On the Origin

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and Progress of the English Schism, 1585), which joined such works as A Treatise of Treasons (1572) and Leicester’s Commonwealth (1584) to expose the hidden secrets of the so-called ‘Reformation’. Sander focused on the characters in the drama, those who starred in a compelling clash of saints and sinners. In his narrative the Catholic Catherine of Aragon appears as the virtuous victim of her bestial husband Henry VIII, whose lust for the conniving, promiscuous, and deformed Anne Boleyn, ‘the mule of the king of France’, precipitated the religious changes in England. Sander’s sensational account captivated many English and European readers. There were, of course, more substantive Catholic histories and rebuttals. Having meticulously assembled historical sources, Robert Persons’ three-volume A Treatise of Three Conversions of England (1603–4) argues that England thrice received the faith from Rome, first from the apostles, then from Joseph of Arimathea and Pope Eleutherius, and finally from Augustine and Pope Gregory. The Treatise denounces Foxe’s history as inaccurate and heretical, including one famous chapter that reveals ‘more than one hundred and twenty lies uttered by John Foxe in less than three leaves of his Acts and Monuments’ (Book 3, ch. 19). Persons turns his considerable learning and energy against Foxe’s conception of martyrdom and his new calendar of saints, ridiculing the canonisation of such figures as Cowbridge, who denied Christ, Collins, whom Foxe himself declared mad, Flower, the apostate monk who wounded a priest, and Eleanor Cobham, who was condemned for witchcraft. Foxe commended such figures, along with many who held conflicting, even contradictory, religious doctrines (Waldo, Wyclif, Huss, Zisca, Lollard, Zwingli, and Calvin). Such a motley assortment of madmen, heretics, cobblers, and spinsters, Persons thunders, Foxe presumes to substitute for St Barnabas, the Greek and Latin Church Fathers, and many holy martyrs and virgins. The Catholic challenge to Foxe’s vision of the elect English Protestant nation came also from other quarters, particularly from Ireland. Philip O’Sullivan Beare’s revisionary history, Historiae Catholicae Iberniae Compendium (1621), for example, protested English colonialism and religious oppression in Ireland, telling the story of Elizabeth’s ‘tyranny’ and of the various invasions from the Irish point of view. This history refutes the prevalent propagandistic narratives of English chronicle and poetry: O’Sullivan Beare’s account of Lord Grey’s treacherous massacre of the assembled troops at Smerwick, for example, leaves the reader little disposed to identify him with justice, as Spenser did in Book 5 of The Faerie Queene. The clash between Protestant and Catholic history engendered conflicting evaluations of many other figures, as heroes and villains frequently changed places. For Protestants the reviled King John found new life as an anti-papal champion; the treasonous Sir John Oldcastle, executed for his rebellion, enjoyed rehabilitation as a proto-martyr. (Shakespeare, by the way, declined to follow the party line on both figures.) The missionary Augustine of Canterbury metamorphosed into an agent of papal contamination. Thomas Becket, long revered as a martyr for resistance to civil authority, received formal denunciation as a traitor; in 1538 government agents destroyed his shrine at Canterbury and scattered his bones. The struggle to contain

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and control the meaning of an individual life and death rages through the Tudor period, beginning with the executions of Bishop John Fisher and Thomas More. Roper’s Life of More, part biography, part apology, circulated for years as a manuscript that contradicted the official judgment of treason. Similarly, the Protestant figures whom Queen Mary I executed for heresy – Cranmer, Ridley, Latimer, and the rest – Protestants celebrated as heroic martyrs in narrative and chronicle. Such tensions in the early modern period engendered much Catholic biography, hagiography, and polemic, often with little distinction between the genres. In a wellcirculated manuscript, John Mush told the story of the ‘virtuous and holy martyr’ Margaret Clitherow, a Yorkshire butcher’s wife who had turned her home into a centre for Catholic liturgy and fellowship. Authorities condemned her to die under the weight of heavy stones. In his biography Mush presents a Catholic saint’s life that answers the Protestant canonisation of Anne Askew. The execution in 1581 of Edmund Campion, the brilliant and silver-tongued Jesuit, ignited a larger firestorm of controversy. Campion had won notoriety for his challenge to ‘avow the faith of our Catholic Church by proofs innumerable’ in public debate, confident that none of the Protestants living could ‘maintain their doctrine in disputation’ (British Library MS Harley 422, fo. 132r–v). After his capture, torture, and execution, William Cecil, Lord Burlegh, felt obliged to justify the persecution in a pamphlet, The Execution of Justice in England (1583, revised 1584), which convicted Campion of treason. Catholics told a different story, however, beginning with Thomas Alfield’s A True Report (1582), which depicted Campion as a martyr, recounting his virtuous demeanour, his disavowal of any seditious activity, his sole concern with religious ministry, his final prayers for queen and country, and his courageous submission to God’s will. At the gallows, Alfield reports, someone asked Campion if he renounced the Pope; he replied that he was a Catholic. A voice declared, ‘In your Catholicism, I noted the word, all treason is contained’ (Alfield, sig. C2). William Allen further developed this portrait of Campion as martyr in A True, Sincere, and Modest Defence of English Catholics (1584), as did Circignani in his fresco cycle at the Venerable English College of Rome. Living in the shadow of persecution, Catholics struggled to keep the flame of faith alive. A large literature of instruction and devotion, some old and some new, enabled their efforts. Saints’ lives, many descending from the Legenda Aurea of Jacobus de Voragine (thirteenth century) proliferated. Catechisms by Laurence Vaux and Robert Bellarmine provided basic instruction in doctrine and the sacraments. The severe piety of Thomas à Kempis continued to challenge and inspire, as did the spiritual struggles of St Augustine of Hippo, recorded in the Confessions. (These texts found readers among Protestants as well as Catholics.) A sub-literature of consolation drew upon classical and Christian teaching to foster contemptus mundi and focus attention on heavenly reward. Thomas More’s A Dialogue of Comfort Against Tribulation (1534) reminded readers that every man, woman, and child is born into the prison of this life under the sentence of death. Robert Southwell’s An Epistle of Comfort (1588) recounted St Damascene’s grimly moving allegory of human life: Pursued by a unicorn, a man fell into a well but saved himself by getting hold of a little tree.

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Thinking himself secure, he saw two mice, one black and one white, gnawing the roots of the tree, and underneath a terrible dragon. At his feet he saw four adders and in the branches of the tree a little bit of honey. He, therefore, unmindful of all his dangers, not remembering that above the unicorn waited to spoil him, that beneath the fiery dragon watched to swallow him, that the tree was quickly to be gnawn asunder, that the stay of his feet was slippery and not to trust unto – not remembering, I say, all these perils, he only thought how he might come by that little bit of honey. The unicorn is death; the pit, the world; the tree, the measure and time of our life; the white and black mice, the day and the night; the stop borne up by four adders, our body framed of four brittle and contrary elements; the dragon, the devil; the honey, worldly pleasure. Who, therefore, would not think it a madness in so many dangers rather to be eager of vain delight than fearful and sad with consideration of so manifold perils? (sig. F3–F3v)

To offer comfort and hope to the afflicted flock, writers described in vivid detail the heavenly joys awaiting the faithful after a successful sojourn in such a vale of tears. The ballad ‘Jerusalem, my happy home’, for example, depicts heaven as a place of ivory houses, golden tiles, fruit-filled orchards, gardens of flowers, nectar, ambrosia, and spices, and heavenly choirs, populated by the communion of saints in joyful worship of the Almighty. Officially denied access to church services, books, and priests, Catholics naturally turned inward, contrary to popular canards about Protestant ‘interiority’ and poetics. Guidebooks by such writers as Antonio de Molina, Gaspare Loarte, and Luis de Granada formed part of a substantial literature of meditation that guided their efforts. The practice of Catholic, like Protestant, meditation entailed strict self-examination and lectio divina, the contemplation of biblical passages; it enlisted the imagination and understanding to move the heart and reform the will, to free the meditant from slavery to sin and to open the soul to the movements of grace. Prominent in this tradition is the Spiritual Exercises of Ignatius Loyola (1521–2), a much-imitated teacher’s manual of drills and meditations. The Exercises are designed to guide a retreatant to election, the making of a choice of life, and to perfection, the surrender of the self to God. They proceed in four stages, called ‘weeks’, that begin with reflection on the self as a sinner saved by God, proceed to contemplation of events in Christ’s life, and then focus on the crucifixion and resurrection. Robert Persons incorporated some of the Exercises in his enormously successful Christian Directory (1582), the most popular devotional work in English before 1650, achieving some forty authorised and unauthorised editions. Among the unauthorised editions stands the Protestant adaptation made by a Yorkshire clergyman, Edmund Bunny, who republished the book after deleting or altering references to good works, acts of penance, the Virgin Mary, and the like. Persons’ powers of instruction and clarity are evident in his gloss on Ignatius’ First Principle and Foundation, namely that man was created to praise, reverence, and serve God and thereby to save his soul, and that all things on earth were created to

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serve man in this end. Our life here on earth, Persons explains, is like that of a merchant sent overseas by his master: If the merchant factor, which I spake of before, after many years spent beyond the seas returning home to give accounts to his master, should yield a reckoning of so much time spent in singing, so much in dancing, so much in courting, and the like, who would not laugh at his accounts? But being further asked by his master what time he bestowed on his merchandise which he sent him for, if he should answer, none at all, nor that he ever thought or studied upon the matter, who should not think him worthy of all shame and punishment? And surely with much more shame and confusion shall they stand at the day of Judgment, who, being placed here to so great a business as is the service of Almighty God and the gaining of his eternal kingdom of heaven, have, notwithstanding, neglected the same. (sig. C3)

Early modern Catholics produced a remarkable and varied body of poetry, which, like the prose, voiced their protests, polemics, and prayers. The ‘Lament for our Lady’s Shrine at Walsingham’ mourns the destruction of the beloved shrine as a place of pilgrimage: Owls do screech where the sweetest hymns Lately were sung, Toads and serpents hold their dens, Where the palmers did throng. (Bodleian MS Rawlinson Poetry 219, fo. 16v)

Protest in poetry frequently sounds an elegiac note as it records the vast cultural struggles in terms personal and emotional. Toby Matthew’s poem of exile, ‘Upon the sight of Dover Cliffs from Calais’, expresses his own pain and loss: ‘Better it were for me to have been blind, / Than with sad eyes to gaze upon this shore’ (Huntington MS 198 fo. 95). Chidiock Tichborne’s verses, made three days before his execution, ‘My prime of youth is but a frost of cares’, express the poignant paradoxes of an early death: The spring is past and yet it hath not sprung, The fruit is dead and yet the leaves are green, My youth is gone and yet I am but young, I saw the world and yet I was not seen. My thread is cut and yet it was not spun, And now I live and now my life is done. (Bodleian MS Tanner 169, fo. 79)

With a pin and candle coal for pen and ink, Francis Tregian, who spent over twenty years in prison, expressed his grief in verse epistles, ‘A Letter from prison’ and ‘A Letter to his wife’.

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At times protest turned to polemics of various kinds. ‘A Challenge unto Foxe’, perhaps by the Jesuit lay brother Thomas Pounde, mocks ‘the rabble rout / Of monstrous martyrs’ in Foxe’s ‘brainsick book’ (Public Record Office 12/157/48, fo. 105). The poem ends with Christ’s speech of comfort and encouragement to the Catholics who suffer persecution. Anthony Copley attempts a more ambitious revisionary project, A Fig for Fortune (1596), which rewrites the first book of Spenser’s Protestant epic, The Faerie Queene. Copley refigures the Redcrosse Knight as a Catholic quester, the evil enchantress Duessa as Doblessa, Queen Elizabeth rather than Mary, Queen of Scots. He envisions a New Jerusalem with Catholic nuns, priests, and sacraments. Climactically, the poet reverses the usual symbolism of religious controversy by concluding with an image of Protestantism, not Roman Catholicism, as the Whore of Babylon: She had no altar, nor no sacrament, No ceremony, nor oblation; Her school was cavil and truthless babblement, Riot her reign, her end damnation. This was the haggard Whore of Babylon, Whose cup envenomed all that drunk thereon. (sig. K3v)

Later in the period, John Beaumont refutes those Protestants who interpreted an accident that resulted in Catholic deaths as God’s judgment on the wicked. Rather, he argues, those who died during the ‘Fatal Vesper’ in 1623, when the roof collapsed upon worshippers, become a model for the rest of us of holy death: Thrice happy they whom that last hour shall find, So clearly watching in such ready mind As was this blessèd flock, who filled their ears With pious counsels and their eyes with tears. (MS Stowe 960, fo. 10)

Others, following ancient traditions, turned verse to prayer. After his conversion to Catholicism in 1590, Henry Constable wrote the Spiritual Sonnets, that contemplate such mysteries as the Trinity and the Eucharist, and the Virgin Mary. Richard Verstegan, indefatigable translator, historian, newsman, and publisher, produced an accomplished volume of Catholic poetry, Odes in Imitation of the Seven Penitential Psalms (1601). Also at the turn of the century, William Alabaster employed paradox and conceit in a series of sonnets, rich with biblical imagery and allegory. John Beaumont’s Bosworth Field (1629) showed a flair for drama and metaphysical conceit as well as talent for rhyming couplets. His long manuscript poem, The Crown of Thorns, meditates on Christ’s passion in the Baroque manner of contemporary emblematists like Henry Hawkins. Taking the circle as his central symbol, Beaumont develops analogies to circles in nature, mathematics, Scripture, and medieval philosophy. He begins the

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fifth book by invoking the angels who move the spheres to help him ‘To see my Saviour in this sphere divine, / And trace the son in his ecliptic line’ (British Library MS Additional 33392, fo. 47v). A nun at Cambrai and a descendant of Thomas More, Gertrude More interspersed her prose works with a mystical poetry that expresses the soul’s yearning for God: And let our souls seek nothing else But in this joy to swim, Till we, absorbed by his sweet love, Return from whom we came, Where we shall melt into that love, Which joyeth me to name. (Spiritual Exercises, Paris, 1658, sig. Civ)

The most accomplished Elizabethan Catholic poet is undoubtedly the Jesuit martyr Robert Southwell. Brilliant and well born, Southwell joined the Society of Jesus in 1578 and returned to England in 1586 to minister to Catholics, including the imprisoned nobleman Philip Howard. He endured imprisonment and multiple tortures by the notorious Richard Topcliffe before his execution in 1595. His poetry circulated in manuscript and (remarkably) in several printed editions beginning in 1595, expurgated for publication in Protestant England. Southwell combines Ignatian meditative methods with the love of ingenuity, paradox, and startling imagery that characterises the best poetry of the early seventeenth century. In ‘The Burning Babe’, the speaker sees a flaming child who declares: My faultless breast the furnace is. The fuel, wounding thorns; Love is the fire and sighs the smoke, The ashes shames and scorns. The fuel Justice layeth on, And Mercy blows the coals; The metal in this furnace wrought Are men’s defilèd souls. (‘St Peter’s Complaint’, 1595, sig L4v)

After the child vanishes, the speaker remembers that it is ‘Christmas day’. Here Petrarchan imagery of burning, melting, and dying furnishes reflection on the incarnation and on the power of Christ’s sacrifice to burn away sin. Ben Jonson commented, ‘so he had written’ this poem, ‘he would have been content to destroy many of his’ ( Jonson 1925–52: I, 137). Another poem, ‘Christ’s Bloody Sweat’, begins with four lines, each presenting four elements in tightly controlled series: Fat soil, full spring, sweet olive, grape of bliss That yields, that streams, that pours, that dost distil,

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Christ’s bloody sweat in Gethsemane thus becomes metaphorically linked to the blood/wine of the Eucharist, just as it is in iconographic traditions, wherein angels gather the blood in chalices. The poem compares Christ to a pelican, feeding its young with its blood, and the phoenix, fabled to rise from the dead. It recalls Elijah’s triumph over the priests of Baal with the help of the divine fire that consumed stones and dust (1 Kings 18:37–9). The last stanza implores the sacred fire to show its force ‘on me, / That sacrifice to Christ I may return’, then ends abruptly and powerfully in stark confession: If withered wood for fuel fittest be, If stones and dust, if flesh and blood will burn, I withered am, and stony to all good, A sack of dust, a mass of flesh and blood. (British Library MS Additional 10422, fo. 13)

The poem ‘St Peter’s Complaint’ shows the poet in a more expansive mood. Combining the native complaint genre with the continental literature of tears, this poem adapts Luigi Tanzillo’s Lagrime di San Pietro into 132 six-line stanzas of metaphysical conceits. First St Peter meditates on Christ’s eyes: O pools of Hesebon, the baths of grace, Where happy saints dive in sweet desires, Where saints rejoice to glass their glorious face, Whose banks make echo to the angels’ choirs, An echo sweeter in the sole rebound Than angels’ music in the fullest sound. (sig. C2)

Then he reflects on his own tears as he laments his triple denial of Jesus, a betrayal recounted in all the gospels (e.g. Matt. 26:69–75). In a few successive stanzas he describes his tears as distillations from the alembic of his doleful breast, the children of his grief, good effects of ill-deserving cause, showers that bring forth fruit and flowers, the unpleasant brine of a barren plant. The imagery is not merely adventitious, however, but serves a doctrinal argument. These tears are purgative and penitential, part of the sinner’s payment of temporal satisfaction for sin, an illustration of the Catholic doctrine of penance, as ratified in the Council of Trent. ‘By you’, says Peter addressing his tears, ‘my sinful debts must be defrayed’ (sig. C3v). Later he recalls the examples of David bathing his bed with tears (Psalm 6:7) and Anna shedding ‘inconsolable tears’ for her missing son (Tobias 10:1–7, a book not accepted by Protestants as canonical) as precedents for his penance: ‘Then I to

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days and weeks, to months and years, / Do owe the hourly rent of stintless tears’ (sig. C4). Officially a Catholic for only the last few years of his life (when most of his poetry was published), Richard Crashaw (1612–49) has often been dismissed as an eccentric. (‘Over-ripeness is all’, quipped Douglas Bush). But Crashaw distinguished himself as a translator and poet in Latin and English; he is a Baroque artist – lavish in imagery and emotion, rich in intellectual energy. Crashaw’s devotion to the Virgin Mary inspires several poems, including his translation of the hymn, Stabat Mater Dolorosa. Among the poems written to honour Teresa of Ávila, ‘The Flaming Heart’ explores the erotic wounding and self-annihilation of mystical experience, evident in Bernini’s famous sculpture in the Cornaro Chapel, Rome. O thou undaunted daughter of desires! By all thy dower of lights and fires, By all the eagle in thee, all the dove, By all thy lives and deaths of love, By thy large draughts of intellectual day, And by thy thirst of love more large than they, By all thy brim-filled bowls of fierce desire, By thy last morning’s draught of liquid fire, By the full kingdom of that final kiss That seized thy parting soul and sealed thee his, By all the heav’ns thou hast in him, Fair sister of the seraphim, By all of him we have in thee, Leave nothing of myself in me. (Carmen Deo Nostro, Paris, 1652, sigs. O1v–O2)

‘The Hymn to the Name above every Name, the Name of Jesus’ moves majestically from meditation of biblical texts to a vision of Last Judgement and the fate of the sinful. Alas, what will they do When stubborn rocks shall bow, And hills hang down their heav’n-saluting heads To seek for humble beds Of dust, where in the bashful shades of night, Next to their own low nothing they may lie, And couch before the dazzling light of their dread majesty. (sig. Bi)

The lyricism and power of the verse mark Crashaw as the most distinguished Catholic poet of the early seventeenth century. Catholic writings provide a context that redefines the culture and literature of early modern England. Voices that have long been dismissed or silenced challenge

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the regnant myths of religious ‘Reformation’ and the providential emergence of an elect (and unbloody) English nation. Figures such as Edmund Campion, Thomas Stapleton, Robert Persons, Margaret Clitherow, Nicholas Sander, Philip O’Sullivan Beare, Robert Southwell, and Richard Crashaw claim their due place in our histories and handbooks. Attention to such Catholic voices, moreover, offers new perspectives on familiar figures – the elegant Poet Laureate Edmund Spenser, for example, who profited from the ruthless colonisation of the Catholic Irish and who celebrated the victory apocalyptically in his Protestant epic. William Shakespeare’s representations of Catholicism in the plays have recently sparked fruitful reevaluation. John Donne kept pictures of the Virgin Mary in the deanery and wrote poetry that reflected his early Catholicism and that contradicted his sermons. According to his own testimony, Ben Jonson spent his most productive years in the forbidden religion. John Milton’s Areopagitica, revered uncritically for too long as an enlightened call for freedom of speech, advocates the extirpation of popery and rehearses noisome prejudices against Jews and Turks. Catholic writings in manuscript and print constitute a new world of early modern discourse that instructs and delights even as it unsettles comfortable assumptions and received judgements.

References and Further Reading Allison, A. F. and D. M. Rogers (1989). The Contemporary Printed Literature of the English CounterReformation between 1558 and 1640: An Annotated Catalogue, 2 vols. Aldershot: Scolar Press. Catholic Record Society. This group publishes monographs, occasional publications, records, and the journal Recusant History. Dillon, A. (2002). The Construction of Martyrdom in the English Catholic Community, 1535–1602. Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Duffy, E. (1992). The Stripping of the Altars. New Haven: Yale University Press. Fowler, Constance Aston (2000). The Verse Miscellany of Constance Aston Fowler: A Diplomatic Edition, ed. D. Aldrich-Watson. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Guiney, L. I. (1938). Recusant Poets. London: Sheed & Ward. Highley, C. (2008). Catholics Writing the Nation in Early Modern Britain and Ireland. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jonson, B. (1925–52). The Works, ed. C. H. Herford, P. Simpson, and E. Simpson, 11 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Marotti, A. F. (ed.) (1999). Catholicism and AntiCatholicism in Early Modern English Texts. Houndmills: Macmillan. Marotti, A. F. (2005). Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy. South Bend: University of Notre Dame Press. Milward, P. (1977). Religious Controversies of the Elizabethan Age: A Survey of Printed Sources. London: Scolar Press. Milward, P. (1978). Religious Controversies of the Jacobean Age: A Survey of Printed Sources. London: Scolar Press. Miola, R. S. (ed.) (2007). Early Modern Catholicism: An Anthology of Primary Sources. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Monta, S. B. (2005). Martyrdom and Literature in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. O’Malley, J. W. (1993). The First Jesuits. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. O’Malley, J. W. (2000). Trent and All That. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pelikan, J. (1996). Mary Through the Centuries. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Catholic Writings Pollen, J. H., ed. (1908). Unpublished Documents relating to the English Martyrs, 1584–1603. London: J. Whitehead. Questier, M. C. (1996). Conversion, Politics, and Religion in England, 1580–1625. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shell, A. (1999). Catholicism, Controversy, and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660. Cambridge University Press.

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Shell, A. (2007). Oral Culture and Catholicism in Early Modern England. Cambridge University Press. Walsham, A. (1993). Church Papists. Woodbridge: Boydell Press. Walsham, A. (2000). ‘ “Domme Preachers?” ’. Past and Present, 168, 72–138.

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Sectarian Writing Hilary Hinds

On 7 February 1654 Marchamont Needham, a journalist and government informer, sent a letter to Oliver Cromwell reporting on the activities of a Baptist congregation that met at Allhallows the Great in Thames Street, London. Attention was focused on this congregation because of the activities of two of its high-profile lecturers, Christopher Feake and John Simpson, both in jail for preaching against the government, and of Anna Trapnel, who in January had generated a flurry of public interest by prophesying against Cromwell while in a visionary trance lasting eleven days. That this had taken place in Whitehall, the centre of national government, can only have added to the excitement. Needham wrote: Wishing to know how the pulse beat at Allhallows, I went there last night. It was a dull assembly without Feake or Simpson, for they were the men that carried it on with heat … But the congregation is crowded, the humours boiling, and as much scum comes off as ever.

The pulse was clearly beating fast at Allhallows. Recent events were attracting significant numbers to assemblies, and the atmosphere was, it seems, feverish. Needham goes on to outline the congregation’s plans for Anna Trapnel following the interest shown in her trance. He tells Cromwell that her prophecies, ‘desperate against your person, family, children, friends and the government’, were to be published, and she was to be sent ‘all over England, to proclaim them viva voce’ (CSPD 1856–1972: 7 February 1654). He was right on both counts: two versions of the Whitehall prophecies were swiftly published, and Trapnel soon set off on a proselytising journey to Cornwall that resulted in her arrest, trial, and imprisonment, and two further publications within the year (Trapnel 1654a, 1654b, 1654c, 1654d). This particular thorn in the governmental flesh was showing no signs of disappearing anytime soon. Needham’s account creates a vivid, if partisan, sense of this sectarian congregation, and of the importance attributed to such religious groups. The 1640s and 1650s saw

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the proliferation of radical religious sects, which separated from the national church, claiming a right to self-governance and to worship in accordance with their own interpretation of the Scriptures. Groups such as the Baptists, Quakers, and Independents (now known as Congregationalists) multiplied in the middle years of the century, as did others now no longer extant, such as the Ranters, Muggletonians (Hill et al. 1983), and Fifth Monarchists. These sects were part of the pervasive, intense, deeply felt, and complex seventeenth-century English Protestant conversation about religion, concerning its modes of organisation, practices, and doctrines, and ranging from the learned and esoteric through to the popular and sometimes ecstatic. The outpouring of spiritual autobiography in the seventeenth century, charting the twists and turns of the author’s spiritual history, suggests that this was a conversation that profoundly shaped those individuals interpellated by and participating in it. These texts typically alternate between extremes of joy at the prospect of salvation and despair at the lack of assurance regarding the subject’s own salvific status, and are often powerfully informed by what John Stachniewski (1991) termed the ‘persecutory imagination’, a state of tormented and fearful uncertainty resulting from the prevailing Calvinist doctrine of predestined and unalterable salvation and damnation. The significance of this religious debate extended, however, far beyond the individual believer. It proved to be highly culturally generative, as manifested in writing as diverse as Marlowe’s Dr Faustus, Donne’s Holy Sonnets, Herbert’s The Temple, Milton’s Lycidas and Paradise Lost, and Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress. ‘Seek true religion. O where?’ asked John Donne (Satire III, l.43), and the work of such writers testifies to the urgency of the imperative and the uncertainty of where ‘true religion’ was to be found. Moreover, this religious debate was also the matrix of many of the most profoundly transformative of seventeenth-century events, as the English Revolution itself was driven by religious agendas, aspirations, and refusals as much as by political ones. Indeed, the two domains cannot be separated at this time, as ideas about the proper religious order were necessarily caught up with ideas about its consequences for the social and political order. So the Fifth Monarchist John Tillinghast argued that the work of the elect (those predestined to eternal salvation) included what we might now identify more readily as ‘political’ duties as well as religious: it concerned not only the ‘propagation of the Gospel’ and ‘the exaltation of Christ’, but also the ‘pulling down of all high and lofty things and persons that oppose Christ’ and ‘the establishment of justice and righteousness in the world’ (Tillinghast 1653: 70–1). Anna Trapnel, also a Fifth Monarchist, offered a succinct analysis of the symbiotic relationship between religion and politics, arguing that ‘one depends upon another, rulers upon clergy, and clergy upon rulers’ (Trapnel 1654d: 77). Seventeenth-century sectarian religion in all its many forms and inflections – individual self-scrutiny, prayer, preaching, debating, prophesying, writing, and publishing – was without question an important contributor to debates about social and political change in the turbulent years of the English Revolution. The religious sects were a part of the diverse and continuing Puritan challenge to the perceived failure of the Anglican Church to implement proper levels of religious

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reform in England. They were at their most influential during the Civil Wars and Commonwealth: in the later 1640s, for example, the Independents were in the ascendancy in Parliament; in 1653 there was a significant presence of millenarian sympathisers in the short-lived Nominated Parliament; and Cromwell himself met with George Fox, founder of the Quakers, on several occasions. After the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, however, the pendulum swung decisively against religious enthusiasms, now perceived as injurious and divisive; Acts were passed clamping down on religious nonconformity, and most of the sects either adapted to survive or gradually disappeared. By definition, therefore, these religious groupings were not a part of the cultural mainstream, but to categorise them as marginal would not do justice to their extraordinary diversity, their discursive rigour and intricacy, their seriousness and sense of divine purpose, or their cultural and political influence. Certainly, more orthodox believers frequently lambasted them as heretics, subversives, or lunatics. Thomas Edwards, for example, a vociferous commentator of the 1640s, published an exhaustive checklist of sectarian errors in three volumes entitled Gangraena: or a Catalogue and Discovery of Many of the Errors, Heresies, Blasphemies, and Pernicious Practices of the Sectaries of this Time (1646), where he characterised the sects as not only theologically erroneous but also divisive, blasphemous, and seditious. Edwards was poacher turned gamekeeper: a Presbyterian opposed to the Anglican orthodoxy in the 1630s who had himself become an inveigher against religious dissent in the 1640s. His tone, probably partly fuelled by a sense that his position of new-found influence was not as secure as he might have wished because of the eruption of the many sects challenging the Presbyterian ascendancy, is one of tireless outrage at the fact that the many-headed monster of sectarian error was proliferating and thriving. Evidence from some of the sects themselves suggests that, however intolerant of deviation from his own position Edwards might have been, his view of the sects as places where debates of arcane precision were conducted was not entirely without foundation. In the early 1640s, for example, Katherine Chidley, an Independent, confronted Edwards in print by publishing a closely argued challenge to his objections to the separation of congregations from the national church; and in 1650 John Simpson conducted two public debates with Thomas Goodwin at Allhallows the Great concerning the precise meaning of the contested notion of free grace (Goodwin 1650). The finer points of doctrine and interpretation were detailed, scrutinised, and contested in the sects, and beyond, with an exhaustive fervour that is likely to be perplexing to a twenty-first-century reader’s first encounter with them. The writings of some few sectaries, moreover, give credence to the idea that radical religion might license challenges to, and even contempt for, the proper order of godly behaviour. Antinomianism – the belief that for the elect life under the law of the Old Testament had been absolutely superseded by the state of grace initiated by Christ – usually provided the discursive framework for the expression of such views, associated in their most extreme form particularly with the Ranters, the most vilified sect. In his autobiography, Lawrence Clarkson recalled that, during his time as a Ranter, ‘my judgment was this, that there was no man could be freed from sin, till he had acted that

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so called sin, as no sin’ (Clarkson 1998: 185); and the writings of Abiezer Coppe, also a Ranter, suggest his relish for the refusal of conventional morality, holding that ‘there’s swearing ignorantly, i’the dark, vainly, and there’s swearing i’the light, gloriously’ (Coppe 1649: 8–9). Such provocative statements as these, however, were untypical of most sectarian writing, and to focus too long on them would be to distort the picture of the sects’ agendas. More accurate would be a view of these religious groups as outward-looking, expansive, and ambitious, vigorously claiming major political, religious, social, and spiritual issues as within their remit. Their projected audiences ranged from the local – ‘Woe to thee, city of Oxford’, warned Ester Biddle (Biddle 1655) – through to the international: Lawrence Clarkson cited with approval St Paul’s words, ‘go ye teach all nations, baptizing them’ (Clarkson 1998: 180), and Anne Gargill published A Warning to All the World (Gargill 1656). Nor was Gargill’s a purely rhetorical position: the Quakers developed their movement through the itinerancy of so-called ‘Public Friends’ who travelled extensively spreading the Quaker word. Beginning in north-west England in 1652, by 1656 there was a Quaker presence in Barbados and New England, and later Friends also travelled to Holland, Germany, Spain, Portugal, Malta, and Turkey (Braithwaite 1961: 401–33, 577). Marchamont Needham noted plans to disseminate Trapnel’s prophecies by sending around the country to ‘proclaim them viva voce’; in taking to the road to promulgate her message, Trapnel was only doing what many other religious radicals, including Richard Coppin, Lawrence Clarkson, George Fox, James Nayler, and Elizabeth Fletcher, had already done. In publishing her prophecies, Trapnel’s actions were also indicative. Sectaries’ frequent recourse to the printed word was one of the most groundbreaking aspects of their practice. As censorship broke down in the early 1640s, there was a proliferation of unlicensed books and pamphlets, with the extraordinary result that ‘more items were published in England between 1640 and 1660 than in the whole of the previous two centuries’ (McDowell 2003: 136). Indeed, it was the possibility of authorship and publication offered by the sects that has struck one critic as the most revolutionary achievement of the seventeenth century (Smith 1994: 6). The sects attracted a much broader social mix, from ‘the lower professions and merchants, the artisanal groups in the cities, and the yeomanry in the country’ (Smith 1989: 11), than typically had access to writing and publishing, including many women as well as men. Sectaries were aware of these new times overturning the conventions of who might speak and write: ‘The time is coming’, wrote Mary Cary, when ‘not only men, but women shall prophesy; not only aged men, but young men; not only superiors but inferiors; not only those that have university-learning, but those that have it not; even servants and handmaids’ (Cary 1651: 238). Prophecy, a broad category which included biblical exegesis and personal testimony as well as visionary or predictive writing, was sanctioned for women as well as men by the Bible: ‘And on my servants and on my handmaidens I will pour out in those days of my Spirit; and they shall prophesy’ (Acts 2:18). Women’s prophetic writings contributed significantly to the increase in femaleauthored publication, which more than doubled after 1641 (Raymond 2003: 300).

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If access to authorship for both women and men was expanded by the radical sects, the range of kinds of writing they undertook was equally broad. Generically, sectarian writing was diverse, broadly comprising prophecy, religious polemic, and spiritual autobiography, but this description does not do justice to the sheer variety of these texts’ forms, registers, and tones. Some prophecy was ecstatic, associative, and largely self-referential, based on the interpretation of dreams or visions (Trapnel 1654b); some was measured, reasoned, and principally exegetical, presenting its vision of a desired or projected future through close analysis of a scriptural text (Cary 1651). Some autobiography took the form of conversion narrative, detailing the anxieties of the subject’s early life and journey towards the spiritual enlightenment and reassurance of the conversion experience (Rogers 1653), while a good deal of Quaker autobiographical writing took the form of accounts of ‘sufferings’: catalogues of the persecutions and imprisonments experienced by Friends (Anon. 1656). The tone of this writing was equally diverse; while much was angry, disputatious, and confrontational, taking the form of furious diatribes against opponents (Cotton and Cole 1655), some of it was scholarly (Tillinghast 1653) or reflective (Turner 1653). Politically, some prophecy was pro-royalist, but more commonly it was in favour of still more thoroughgoing social, political, economic, and legal changes than had hitherto been instigated by Parliament; many, like John Rogers, ‘came to be convinced of the Parliament’s proceedings and cause, to be more regular and in order to the great work that God hath to do in nations than the King’s’ (Rogers 1653: 438). As well as writing prophecy and spiritual autobiography, sectaries also published religious polemic, debating matters of topical religious contention, such as church governance, discipline, and practice, and answering opponents’ objections to their belief and practice (Fox 1653). We find accounts of disputes about separation (Chidley 1641) or free grace (Goodwin 1650), a petition to Parliament against tithes (These Several Papers 1659), and letters sent by travelling sectaries to their home congregations (Trapnel 1654c). The enumeration of such variations could continue indefinitely, for the address of sectarian writing was as wide as its authorship and projected audience were diverse, its remit as comprehensive and its articulation as nuanced as might be found in any body of writing. To cast the radical sects as a site for the democratisation of authorship, however, raises further questions about the significance ascribed to the related, but (since they were taught separately) distinct acts of reading and writing in a seventeenth-century sectarian context. Writing of many kinds won a place in the repertoire of sectarian activities, but what place was accorded reading in the sectarian journey towards assurance and salvation? What kinds of dynamics between writing and reading, writers and readers, are explored? Were visions and prophecies to be interpreted in the same way as written texts? In what ways did sectarian writers assume the identity of author? Through an examination of these questions, the rest of this chapter will explore and assess the significance of sectarian writing in the literary, religious, and social histories of the seventeenth century.

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Protestantism is a famously bibliocentric creed (see Chapter 27, English Reformations). ‘The abolition of mediators, the stress on the individual conscience, left God speaking direct to his elect’, wrote Christopher Hill (Hill 1975: 91), hence the emphasis on the reading of the Bible, the touchstone text giving all believers direct access to the Word of God. What the Word’s meaning might be, however, was not always straightforward. It had to be studied, discussed, and interpreted; moreover, its truth had to be experienced in the heart and tried by the conscience, not just reasoned out by the intellect. Study of the Bible was at the heart of Protestantism’s interpretation of Christianity, in contradistinction to the Roman Catholic emphasis on priestly and ceremonial mediation of the divine. The publication of the Bible in the vernacular, especially the Geneva Bible (favoured by most sectaries for its Calvinist-inflected annotations) and later the King James translation, was of fundamental importance, making the sacred text accessible to all who were literate in their own tongue, and, still more broadly, to those who heard it read aloud in church or at home. Sectaries, as well as more orthodox Protestants, testified to the powerful impact of Bible-reading on their spiritual selfapprehension. Jane Turner recalled how ‘the Gospel came not to me at that time in word only, but in power, and much assurance, and joy in the Holy Ghost’ (Turner 1653: 60), and John Bunyan’s spiritual autobiography affirmed repeatedly the affective power of the Bible in shaping his belief: ‘And now methought I began to look into the Bible with new eyes and read as I never did before … and indeed I was then never out of the Bible, either by reading or meditation’ (Bunyan 1998: 17). Here the Bible comes to sound almost elemental, an environment in which he lived and moved, and which sustained and supported him. Such a benign characterisation of his experience of the Bible is unusual, however. More typically, Bunyan reports being taken unawares by a scriptural text, ambushed and taken prisoner by it in the course of his daily activities, his sense of spiritual identity and destiny profoundly shaken by it: And withal, that scripture did seize upon my soul, Or profane person, as Esau, who for one morsel of meat sold his Birth-right … he was rejected, for he found no place of repentance, though he sought it carefully with tears, Heb. 12. 16, 17. Now was I as one bound … These words were to my soul like fetters of brass of my legs, in the continual sound of which I went for several months together. … that scripture would lie all day long, all the week long, yea, all the year long in my mind, and hold me down so that I could by no means lift up myself, for when I would strive to turn me to this scripture or that for relief, still that sentence would be sounding in me. (Bunyan 1998: 40–1)

‘That sentence’ is grammatical, alluding to the biblical quotation from Hebrews, but also judicial: these words immobilise or imprison him, suggesting the imposition of a verdict of guilt and a punishment which fetters his soul in as palpable and painful way as if it were his body. God’s Word, in the form of the Scriptures, intervenes in the life of the questing and questioning believer powerfully, materially, and quite unmediated.

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It is not only the immediate word of God, however, that figures in sectarian accounts of the power of reading. Protestant bibliocentrism comprehends and commends other godly books too. Bunyan wrote, ‘I do prefer this book of Mr Luther upon the Galatians, (excepting the Holy Bible) before all the books that ever I have seen’ (Bunyan 1998: 38). Jane Turner also refers to her wider reading: ‘I cannot omit to write something concerning the reading of a book, by which as a means in the hand of God I received these never to be forgotten mercies’ (Turner 1653: 49). This is carefully phrased: this book is not itself God’s Word, written as it is by a fallen and imperfect human author, but is instead a ‘means’, an instrument in the hand of God for conveying his divine will and grace. Godly reading thus extends beyond the Bible itself, as a means or an encouragement to a more faithful and accurate apprehension of the Word. Turner came to describe this influential book in this way in retrospect. Initially, however, she had approached it nervously, anxious whether to trust the apparent godliness of its message: being much afraid of error, I was at a great dispute in my own spirit whether I should read it or not; but fearing lest I should seem to shut my eyes against the light, at last I came to this result, that I would read it, but first set apart a day by fasting and prayer to seek the Lord, that what was truth in it I might embrace, and that he would keep and preserve me from error. (Turner 1653: 51)

Turner’s misgivings suggest something of the complexity of sectarian engagement with the written word: was this truly the word of God, mediated by a godly human instrument, or was it prompted by Satan and likely to propagate error and lead the godly reader astray? Reading was a risky activity, necessitating an encounter with a language as flawed and fallen as the human subject from whom it emanated. It had the potential for serious and eternal consequences; hence Turner’s careful preparation of body and soul, through prayer and fasting, before reading. Such uncertainty regarding the ways in which God might work was compounded by the ultimate unknowability of one’s own condition vis-à-vis salvation: was one predestined by God to be saved as one of the elect, or doomed to damnation as a reprobate? ‘That the Elect only attained eternal life, that I without scruple did heartily close withal’, wrote Bunyan, ‘but that myself was one of them, there lay all the question.’ Unsurprisingly, such profound and irresolvable uncertainty had its effect. ‘By these things’, said Bunyan, ‘I was driven to my wit’s end’ (Bunyan 1998: 20). Uncertainty occasioned by reading the Bible concerned the clues it gave to one’s own status with regard to God’s promise; but to read more widely occasioned anxiety about the additional errors to which this might lead. The Baptists relied more on the Bible as the only authentic guide to God’s will in this world and beyond than did other sects. While not questioning the primacy of the Bible, they emphasised the need for ‘experimental’ knowledge of the Word: one had to experience the truth of the Scripture, not just understand it. Anna Trapnel

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wrote of her anxiety while seeking the truth, finding no rest until she ‘found a witness’ within: ‘suddenly my soul was filled with joy unspeakable, and full of glory in believing, the spirit witnessing in that word, Christ is thy well-beloved’ (Trapnel 1654a: ch. 9; emphasis added). Not until this moment of the internalisation of the truth of the Word could she fully make it her own. Quakers took furthest this internalisation of the Word, elevating the indwelling spirit above even the Scriptures. For Quakers, the Bible confirmed the witness of divine truth within the believer, rather than vice versa: ‘the saints are the temples of God’, wrote Fox, ‘and God doth dwell in them, that I witness and the scripture doth witness’. More succinctly, Fox concludes an account of his new spiritual understanding with the words, ‘And this I knew experimentally’ (Fox 1952: 134, 11). Many sectaries also combined their interpretation of the Bible with some acceptance of the continuing possibility of the direct revelation of God’s will: God had spoken not only in the days of the Old Testament prophets and New Testament apostles, but continued to speak to his people now. He spoke in part through providential signs: everyday events, both commonplace and extraordinary, which demonstrated (or could be said to demonstrate, for signs were always ambiguous) the divine will at work in the world: Seventeenth-century Englishmen knew that God intervenes continually and continuously in the world He has made. His hand could be seen in every change of weather or the wind; in every good crop and every bad one, in every sickness and recovery, in every misadventure of the traveller and his every safe return. Diaries, commonplace-books, public speeches, government declarations: all voluminously testify to the pervasiveness of the belief in providence, and to the anxious vigilance which attended the detection and interpretation of divine dispensations. (Worden 1985: 55)

Such a perspective dissolves any sense of chance or coincidence, imbuing all events with a potential, albeit an ambiguous one, for significance. As Blair Worden suggests, providentialism was a widespread phenomenon, and not the preserve of the sects; so Richard Norwood, a Calvinist Puritan, recalls as a child falling into a ditch of water, ‘but by God’s providence I was drawn out by one that came with a cart’ (Norwood 1998: 125). Sectaries also habitually viewed the world through a providentialist lens, however. Fox notes the deaths of two justices of the peace who had tried him for blasphemy in Lancaster: ‘this persecuting John Sawrey at last was drowned and the vengeance of God overtook the other justice Thompson, that he was struck with the dead palsy upon the Bench and carried away off his seat and died’ (Fox 1952: 140). Vengeance might be the preserve of the Lord, but that was no reason not to note its providential execution with some satisfaction. The Lord also continued to speak to people through dreams, visions and prophecies (see Chapter 38, Dreams and Dreamers) These were not the preserve of ministers and other public figures, but were regularly reported as part of the conversion experience: Henry Johnson ‘had a vision, and an appearance (as it were) round about me,

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and full of glory, which I cannot express’; and Edward Wayman testified that his ‘first call was upon a dream, which I had of a great black terrible dog, which seized upon me, and took hold on my ear fast, which I thought was the Devil’ (Rogers 1653: 408–9). Anna Trapnel’s prophetic texts included many such immediate divine communications; she had a vision of grassroots empowerment, seeing ‘a very lovely tree … before which the great oaks crumbled to dust, and the little shrubs were raised up’, and another which figured the sense of threat and betrayal felt by Fifth Monarchists as a result of Cromwell’s recent actions: ‘I beheld’, she wrote, ‘a great company of cattle … the foremost his countenance was perfectly like unto Oliver Cromwell’s … He run at many precious saints that stood in the way of him’ (Trapnel 1654b: 14, 15). George Fox also recorded a number of visions, including one in which: I was walking in the fields and many Friends were with me, and I bid them dig in the earth, and they did and I went down. And there was a mighty vault, top-full of people kept under the earth, rocks, and stones. (Fox 1952: 578)

The vision suggests Fox’s apprehension of how the carnal world oppressed and constrained fallen humanity, and of his own mission to free them; but, still more strikingly, it concludes with a note on the interpretation and status of such visions: ‘And much I could speak of these things but I leave them to the right eye and reader to see and read’ (Fox 1952: 578). Such visions, he suggests, are not the preserve of the visionary, but are open texts, subject to ‘the right eye and reader’, and guaranteed by the witness of the spirit within. Just as Protestantism had opened up the act of reading to a wider readership, so Fox insists here that the interpretation of visions be in the hands of a community of ‘right’ readers. Meaning is not the sole property of the vision, but lies in the legitimacy and rectitude triangulated between vision, interpreter, and interpretation. Spoken or written prophecy, like dreams and visions, also raised questions about interpretation for sectarian prophets and their audiences. While the meanings of biblical texts might be opaque, there was at least no doubt about their divine origin. Prophecies and visions, however, generated anxieties similar to those experienced by Jane Turner when she was wondering whether to read the book she had borrowed: was the provenance of these words truly godly, or only apparently so? Anne Wentworth understood the importance of seeking certainty about the genesis of her words, knowing ‘how dangerous and desperate an attempt it is to put the commission and authority of God upon the dreams and visions of my own heart’ (Wentworth 1677: 185). Delusions, either induced by ‘spiritual pride’ (Wentworth 1677: 185) or prompted by the great deceiver Satan, seeking to ensnare the unwary, might take a form almost indistinguishable from the truth. George Fox elucidated the problem: I came among a people that relied much on dreams. And I told them, except they could distinguish between dream and dream, they would mash or confound all together; for there were three sorts of dreams; for multitude of business sometimes caused dreams:

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and there were whisperings of Satan in man in the night-season; and there were speakings of God to man in dreams. (Fox 1952: 9)

For Fox, it was the responsibility of the right reader to scrutinise the signs – the words, dreams, or visions, the circumstances of their production, the demeanour of the prophet – for indications of their true status as (to use Fox’s categories) merely human, satanic, or godly. So Anna Trapnel’s amanuensis notes how: after she had kept her bed eleven days together, without any sustenance at all for the first five days, and with only a little toast in small beer once in twenty-four hours for the rest of the time, she rose up in the morning, and the same day travelled on foot from Whitehall to Hackney, and back to Mark Lane in London, in health and strength. (Trapnel 1654b: 79)

The rapid recovery of her health and strength following a protracted period of fasting is offered as evidence of the divine sanction of her words, for it fulfilled a prophecy Trapnel had made two days earlier: ‘Father, when thou withdrawest thy glory from thy handmaid, thou shalt leave so much heat as shall refresh the body, and her health shall return again from thee to her’ (Trapnel 1654b: 54). The prophet’s body, as well as her words, was open to interpretation, so that the prophetic text needs to be understood as corporeal and circumstantial as well as verbal. So it was too with Sarah Wight’s prophecies, recorded and published by Henry Jessey, and those of Elinor Channel, whose intermittent inability to speak convinced her husband of the godliness of her prophetic message ( Jessey 1647; Channel 1653). Prophetic words were to be tested against the history, reputation, bodily state, and circumstances of the prophet, and vice versa; each could validate or undermine the other. What impact did such ideas about interpretation have on the way that prophetic and other sectarian texts were presented to their readership? In the light of the anxieties occasioned by the impossibility of finally determining either the provenance of a prophetic message or the soteriological status of the believer as elect or reprobate, how did authors seek to secure their own positions or those of their texts as legitimate and authoritative? Many writers justified their writing by attributing responsibility for it not to the human author but to a divine call. For some, the call was a simple one: Abiezer Coppe was told to ‘Go up to London, to London, that great city, write, write, write. And behold I writ’ (Coppe 1649; A3v), and the Quaker Dorothy White recorded that: ‘The Word of the Lord came unto me, saying, “Write, and again I say, write with speed, to the heads and rulers of this nation”; Oh! earth, earth, earth, hear the Word of the Lord’ (White 1659: 1). Such lack of equivocation suggests White’s characteristic Quaker confidence in the simple and godly rectitude of her call to write. For others – particularly, but not only, for women writers – the call to write was more complicated. The author needed to assure the reader that he or she wrote from the promptings of neither Satan nor self-aggrandisement, but for loftier purposes. So Bunyan wrote not for his own good, but for that of his readers, presenting his writing

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as an extension of his pastoral duties towards his congregation: ‘that, if God will, others may be put in remembrance of what he hath done for their Souls, by reading his work upon me’ (Bunyan 1998: 4). The weightiness of his task required a cognate seriousness of written style: I could also have stepped into a style much higher than this in which I have here discoursed, and could have adorned all things more than here I have seemed to do: but I dare not: God did not play in convincing of me; the Devil did not play in tempting of me; neither did I play when I sunk as into a bottomless pit, when the pangs of hell caught hold upon me: wherefore I may not play in my relating of them, but be plain and simple, and lay down the thing as it was. (Bunyan 1998: 5)

A plain style, Bunyan asserts, will not only guard against a demeanour of inappropriate levity, but will also guarantee the truth of the account by avoiding the pitfalls of ‘curling with metaphors a plain intention’, as George Herbert put it (‘Jordan II’, 5). In contrast to ecstatic prophets such as Trapnel, Bunyan sought to distance his writing from accusations of mystical enthusiasm through recourse to the promise of transparency offered by the plain style’s rendition of ‘the thing as it was’. For women, the justification required for going into print was more complex. To write contravened the general cultural imperative against women participating in public discourse, compromising their claim to a properly deferential feminine modesty and honour; and it also breached biblical injunctions requiring women to ‘keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak’ (1 Corinthians 14:34). Sectarian women writers risked accusations of immodesty and vainglory as well as of disobedience to scriptural prescriptions, and most were well aware of such pitfalls. Anne Wentworth knew that ‘if spiritual pride, the eagerness of my own spirit, any worldly design’ was responsible for her actions, ‘the holy God will discover me herein’ (Wentworth 1677: 185). For women writers to ascribe responsibility for the act of writing to God was of enormous importance for their entry into the world of published religious debate, for it enabled them to sidestep accusations compromising their authorial legitimacy and their writing’s trustworthiness. ‘I am a very weak, and unworthy instrument’, wrote Mary Cary; ‘I could do no more herein (wherein any light, or truth could appear) of myself, than a pencil or pen can do, when no hand guides it’ (Cary 1651: ‘To the Reader’). Anna Trapnel described her prophetic voice as ‘a voice within a voice, another’s voice, even thy voice through her’, concluding that ‘there is no self in this thing’ (Trapnel 1654b: 45). This rhetorical position of authorial self-erasure was facilitated by the widespread sense that to admit fully the grace of God into one’s life brought with it the demise of the old, fallen, and carnal self, so that a state of self-dissolution was a discursive commonplace in sectarian writing. ‘I live now’, wrote John Rogers in his testimony, ‘above self in an higher self, altogether where I have my abode; so that I am not I, but by the grace of God it is that I am what I am’ (Rogers 1653: 438). Rogers’s sense of self is multiple, simultaneously present and absent in (respectively) its spiritual and

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carnal manifestations, but unified under the flexible sign of the first-person pronoun, so that he both is and is not himself – or, rather, his new self emerges by the grace of God at the moment of the dissolution of the old. Such claims were, unsurprisingly, founded in readings of the Bible. As well as believers being born again in Christ (John 3:3), there were many references to the kinds of reversals effected by a newfound faith, as in Anne Wentworth’s invocation of 1 Corinthians 1:28, in which God chooses ‘things which are not, to bring to nought things that are’: my God … has been so many years emptying me from vessel to vessel, breaking me all to pieces in myself, and making me as nothing before him; and who has … thereby called and commanded me into this work, when I was as a thing that is not in my own eyes. (Wentworth 1677: 185)

It was in the space left by the erasure of the carnal self that the new, divinely originating self was to be found, to which Wentworth credits anything of God that may be discerned in her work. Insistence on the absence of the carnal self provided the surest guard – rhetorically, at least – against charges of vanity or self-interest, hence ensuring the legitimacy of her message. If radical sectarian religion opened up the field of writing by these means, it is nonetheless instructive to recall the reception given to sectarian writers by Thomas Edwards and others like him. The emergence of a substantial body of sectarian writing did not constitute a utopian moment in which a thousand flowers were encouraged to bloom in a rich efflorescence of intellectual and religious diversity. Indeed, we could as easily attribute the plethora of sectarian writing to quite the opposite impulse: as well as being prompted by visions of a longed-for future, sectaries also wrote from a need constantly to rebut opponents, to undermine the grounds of their likely objections, to stake a claim to a belief, a position, an argument, in a field of public discourse that was disputatious, factious and bitterly contested. So the Quakers Priscilla Cotton and Mary Cole, writing from prison, sought not only to persuade the ‘People of England’ of the Quaker message, but also to silence the priests who had ‘railed on us with filthy speeches’ (Cotton and Cole 1655: 226); and Fox’s Journal is punctuated by the refrain that ‘the Lord’s power was over all’, a power repeatedly needed to subdue opponents: ‘the Lord’s power came over them all, and put them to silence, and restrained the rude people, that they could not do the mischief they intended’ (Fox 1952: 150). If this was not a utopian moment (though perhaps such a collective investment in a projected future is in itself a reminder of the power of the desire for utopia, the insistent longing for something more, something better, even if its realisation is always elusive), it was nonetheless an acutely intense moment in a period of profound social, political, and cultural transition. Sectarian writing comprises a discourse of signs and wonders, the seeking and finding of divinely ordained meaning in the opaque and turbulent social, political, and natural world that had given birth to it. It was a way of seeing that aligned itself with the providentialist Puritan theology at

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the heart of the English Revolution, but increasingly out of kilter with the Restoration antipathy to such ‘enthusiastic’ discourse. This might seem to represent a failure on the part of the sects, their activities no more than the final throes of an exhausted socio-scriptural literalism before the advent of Enlightenment rationalism. Perhaps, however, rather than reading radical sectarian writing with the benefits – or prejudices – of retrospect, we might do it fuller justice by seeking to understand it as a serious response to the exigencies of its own times, a response that mustered its discursive resources in ways that were creative, dextrous, and ambitious. In this, as well as in the detailed analysis of the multiple forms of that response, this writing still has much of importance to say to us. Perhaps as significant as the proliferation of sectarian writing, however, and its opening up of authorship to new social constituencies, was the emphasis on reading and interpretation within a sectarian context. The sects represent, in many ways, the culmination of the bibliocentrism of Protestantism and its democratisation of the elucidation of the divine text. In this, they were part of a hermeneutic revolution. In their very existence, but also in the attention they give to the acts of reading, writing, and interpreting, the radical sects testify to a profound investment in the seizure of the means of production of meaning. At stake was the power to interpret, to pore and wrangle over signs; and the justification for this activity was the refusal to defer to the expertise of priestly interpretation, and the concomitant insistence on the authority of the individual experience of divine truth in the interpretation of the Word. This emphasis on ‘experimental knowledge’ opened up the practice of reading as much as that of writing, and in this, sectarian writing truly contributed to a revolution of not only the Word, but also the word.

References and Further Reading Anon. (1656). The Lamb’s Defence against Lies. London. Biddle, E. (1655). Woe to Thee, City of Oxford. n.p. Braithwaite, W. C. (1961). The Beginnings of Quakerism, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bunyan, J. (1998). Grace Abounding, with Other Spiritual Autobiographies, ed. and introd. J. Stachniewski and Anita Pacheco. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Capp, B. S. (1972). The Fifth-Monarchy Men: A Study in Seventeenth-Century English Millenarianism. London: Faber & Faber. Cary, M. (1651). The Little Horn’s Doom and Downfall. London. Channel, E. (1653). A Message from God, by a Dumb Woman. London.

Chidley, K. (1641). The Justification of the Independent Churches of Christ. London. Clarkson, L. (1998). The Lost Sheep Found (1660). In J. Bunyan, Grace Abounding, with Other Spiritual Autobiographies, ed. and introd. J. Stachniewski and Anita Pacheco (pp. 171–90). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Coppe, A. (1649). A Fiery Flying Roll. London. Cotton, P. and M. Cole (1655). To the Priests and People of England (London). In H. Hinds, God’s Englishwomen: Seventeenth-Century Radical Sectarian Writing and Feminist Criticism (pp. 222–6). Manchester: Manchester University Press. CSPD (Calendar of State Papers: Domestic Series, 1547–1704: 1653, 1654) (1856–1972). London: HMSO.

Sectarian Writing Edwards, T. (1646). Gangraena: or, A Catalogue and Discovery of Many of the Errors, Heresies, Blasphemies and Pernicious Practices of the Sectaries of this Time. London. Fox, G. (1653). Saul’s Errand to Damascus. London. Fox, G. (1952). The Journal of George Fox, ed. John L. Nickalls. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gargill, A. (1656). A Warning to All the World. London. Goodwin, J. (1650). The Remedy of Unreasonableness. London. Graham, E., et al. (eds.) (1989). Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen. London: Routledge. Hill, C. (1975). The World Turned Upside Down: Radical Ideas during the English Revolution. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Hill, C., B. Reay and W. Lamont (1983). The World of the Muggletonians. London: Temple Smith. Hinds, H. (1996). God’s Englishwomen: SeventeenthCentury Radical Sectarian Writing and Feminist Criticism. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Holstun, J. (2000). Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution. London: Verso. Jessey, H. (1647). The Exceeding Riches of Grace. London. Keeble, N. (2001). The Cambridge Companion to Writing of the English Revolution. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Loewenstein, D. (2001). Representing Revolution in Milton and his Contemporaries: Religion, Politics, and Polemics in Radical Puritanism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Longfellow, E. (2004). Women and Religious Writing in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McDowell, N. (2003). The English Radical Imagination: Culture, Religion, and Revolution, 1630– 1660. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McGregor, J. F. and B. Reay (eds.) (1984). Radical Religion in the English Revolution. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mack, P. (1992). Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England. Berkeley: University of California Press. Norwood, R. (1998). ‘Confessions’. In J. Bunyan, Grace Abounding, with Other Spiritual Autobiogra-

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phies, ed. and introd. J. Stachniewski and Anita Pacheco (pp. 123–55). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nuttall. G. (1947). The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience. Oxford: Blackwell. Raymond, J. (2003). Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rogers, J. (1653). Ohel or Beth-shemesh. London. Smith, N. (1989). Perfection Proclaimed: Language and Literature in English Radical Religion 1640– 1660. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Smith, N. (1994). Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660. New Haven: Yale University Press. Stachniewski, J. (1991). The Persecutory Imagination: English Puritanism and the Literature of Religious Despair. Oxford: Clarendon Press. These Several Papers Were Sent to the Parliament. (1659). London. Tillinghast, J. (1653). Generation Work. Or A Brief and Seasonable Word, Offered to the View and Consideration of the Saints and People of God in this Generation. London. Trapnel, A. (1654a). Strange and Wonderful News from Whitehall. London. Trapnel, A. (1654b). The Cry of a Stone (London), ed. Hilary Hinds. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 2000. Trapnel, A. (1654c). A Legacy for Saints. London. Trapnel, A. (1654d). Anna Trapnel’s Report and Plea. London. In E. Graham et al. (eds.), Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen (pp. 71–86). London: Routledge, 1989. Turner, J. (1653). Choice Experiences of the Kind Dealings of God. London. Wentworth, A. (1677). A Vindication of Anne Wentworth (1677). In E. Graham et al. (eds.), Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen (pp. 180–96). London: Routledge, 1989. White, D. (1659). Upon the 22 Day of the 8th Month, 1659. London. Wiseman, S. (2006). Conspiracy and Virtue: Women, Writing and Politics in Seventeenth-Century England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Worden, B. (1985). ‘Providence and politics in Cromwellian England’. Past and Present, 109, 55–99.

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The English Broadside Print c.1550–c.1650 Malcolm Jones

Unaccountably neglected by scholars until very recently, the corpus of woodcut and engraved broadside prints issued in England during our period has much to offer the student of English Renaissance culture. If for convenience we divide these sheets into secular and religious, the number of the former may surprise us. The overall tone of so many prints is satirical, whether at the expense of women, social types, or – in this era in particular – the Roman Catholic clergy. From the 1620s come a number of prints of traditional misogynist type: especially the popular and striking European monsters, known in their English manifestation as Bulchin and Thingut (engraved version), or Fill Gut and Pinch belly (woodcut version), the latter with verses by John Taylor and the explanatory subtitle, One being Fat with eating good Men, the other Lean for want of good Women (Hind 1952–64: II, 210–13; O’Connell 1998, 1999b), The Several Places Where You May Hear News issued at much the same time is the title given to a late sixteenth-century composition, which also enjoyed Europe-wide popularity. In a series of unified scenes, A New Year’s Gift for Shrews (Figure 12) depicts the traditional nagging wife eventually beaten by her husband and ultimately chased off by the Devil, and is accompanied by the following traditional rhyme: Who marrieth a wife upon a Monday. If she will not be good upon a Tuesday Let him go to the wood upon a Wednesday And cut him a cudgel upon the Thursday And pay her soundly upon a Friday And [if] she mend not, the Devil take her on Saturday Then may he eat his meat in peace on the Sunday.

A Good Housewife of c.1600 (Figure 13) depicts a paragon who spins while her son reads and her daughters sew, and the maid sweeps her well-regulated household,

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Figure 12 A New Year’s Gift for Shrews (London, c.1630). In a series of unified scenes, the conventional nagging wife is shown being beaten by her husband, and ultimately chased off by the Devil (for caption text of the traditional rhyme, see p. 478), leaving him free to spend Sunday ‘in peace’ down ‘The Swan’, eating and drinking! Apart from the pub sign, a board painted with a swan, note the lattice (which signified an inn), and compare Arden of Faversham (1592): ‘He had been sure to have had his sign pulled down, and his lattice borne away the next night’ (sig. H2). British Museum, London

seated beneath a picture of Time with his Occasio forelock, while outside we see a hive of symbolically busy bees and industrious ants. An obvious and thoroughgoing counterpart to The Description of a Virtuous Woman and Good Housewife – and another unique survival – is The Description of a Bad Housewife,1 bearing the imprint ‘London. Printed for George Minikin, and are to be sold at his Shop at the Sign of the Kings Head in St. Martins le Grand, near Aldersgate. 1699’. The costume of the two women is Elizabethan, however, and the image must have already been about a century old by the time it was reissued by Minikin. Two women dominate the foreground of the domestic interior, one – in pointed contrast to our just-discussed Good Housewife – has fallen asleep at her spinning-wheel, head in hand, the other (whom the verse suggests is the maid, ‘her sluttish servant’) is wiping a dish with the tail of a dog, whose head is in a cooking-pot on the floor (see further below). In the background an ape is acting as turnspit, while a cooking-

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Figure 13 A Good Housewife, anonymous woodcut sheet (?London, c.1600). An important image of the ideal housewife. This paragon, who spins while her son reads and her daughters sew and the maid sweeps her well-regulated home, sits beneath a picture of Time (with his Occasio forelock – ‘Take Time by the forelock’ (Tilley 1950: T311)), while outside we see (right) a hive of symbolically busy bees (compare Figure 9) and (left) industrious ants (‘Go to the ant, thou sluggard’ (Proverbs 6:6)). British Museum, London

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pot hangs over the fire in which sits a cat (‘The puss cries “mew” within the pot / But cannot come to catch the rat’). Apart from items on the floor, a prominent spider’s web, and a rat climbing up the candlestick in order to feed off the tallow reinforce the impression of slovenliness! Perhaps in the same vein as the print licensed in 1656 entitled The Skill to Choose a Virtuous Wife, the verse-writer suggests that the ‘single man that is to choose / A wife, ere choice he make’ should peruse the present print! For ‘he that’s tied to such a wife / As this doth represent, / Is bound to sorrow all his life, / [ … ] eed from all content’. The Dog’s Head in the Pot was a popular shop- and inn-sign from the early sixteenth century onwards (Lillywhite 1972: no. 5882): there is an early literary reference datable to 1518, and a definite inn of this name in Elizabethan Cheapside (attested in the 1550s and in 1580), as well as references in the works of Thomas Heywood (1605) and Gabriel Harvey to what is possibly the same establishment, and midseventeenth-century tokens survive issued from more than one inn so named, including one in St Martins le Grand, Aldersgate, close to where Minikin had his premises. One of the Roxburghe ballads, Seldom Cleanly, dated 1665, is illustrated with a woodcut depicting a street in which one of the houses bears just such a sign of a dog with its head in the pot, and includes the lines If otherwise she had But a dish-clout fail, She would set them to the dog to lick, And wipe them with his tail.

These are verses that are close – in sentiment, at least – to those on the present sheet: It is (methinks) a cleanly care, My dish-clout in this sort to spare. While dog you see doth lick the pot, His tail for dish-clout I have got.

The motif was clearly something of a commonplace from at least the Elizabethan period. The Good Housewife finds her match in the bust of the prudent Good Householder, subject of a bold woodcut sheet dated 1607. A unique series of twelve engraved sheets issued in 1628 includes suggestive images as well as a characteristic English emphasis on the cuckold’s horns, the latter significantly having no continental source (Figure 14a). Another of the prints shows a woman walking with her lover, who places horns on her old husband’s head; a second woman holding her distaff rides on her old husband’s back, two spindles are stuck in his hat forming another pair of horns. A third (Figure 14b) depicts a virago belabouring her husband with her key-bunch, this ‘unnatural’ inversion of the marital power relations being publicly satirised by a skimmington ride in the background, and in the verse. Another depicts a smoking, drinking woman with her young lover, whom

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Figure 14 Satires on marriage; anonymous engraved sheets (London, 1628). a In the foreground a virago beats her husband (whose hands are held in the praying pose) with her bunch of keys, while, in the background, this ‘unnatural’ inversion of marital power relations is being publicly satirised by a skimmington ride accompanied by ‘rough music’ (here a drummer) and derisive pointing: the couple are represented sitting back to back on a horse so that the husband faces and holds the tail, holding aloft his wife’s distaff and wearing a horned cap (the sign of a cuckold), while she holds aloft his breeches, symbol of the masculine power she would usurp. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC

she allows to fondle her breasts behind the back of her elderly husband, who holds a distaff and rocks the baby’s cradle with his foot. ‘The foot on the cradle and the hand on the distaff is the sign of a good housewife’ was a proverbial admonition addressed to seventeenth-century women (Tilley 1950: F563). She is also shown directing the lateral ‘horns’ gesture at the old man: to the implication of cuckoldry is added that of effeminacy in that the husband is depicted spinning, a quintessentially feminine occupation, as well as rocking the cradle. Smoking was the sort of habit affected only by ‘roaring girls’, of the sort found personifying Taste in Jan Barra’s contemporary set of the Five Senses, which were used, incidentally, as the model for wall-paintings at Hilton Hall in Huntingdonshire in 1632. Another of the 1628 suite is the only English representative of the motif of Woman and the Men of the Four Elements, but in a somewhat toned-down, bowdlerised form, suitable for English sensibilities. The first collected edition of John Donne’s poems was published two years after his death, in 1633. Because of the erotic nature of some

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Figure 14 Satires on marriage; anonymous engraved sheets (London, 1628) b The wife puts on (‘wears’) her husband’s breeches while he spins from the distaff – that quintessential attribute of femininity – and wears her apron, making him an ‘apron-husband’. Compare Middleton and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl (1611): ‘I cannot abide these apron-husbands: such cotqueans [wimps]’ (3.2.20). To early modern Englishmen this is seriously unnatural role reversal, which the caption verse describes as ‘The world … turned upside down’. Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC

of his verse, however, several poems were refused a licence, including ‘Elegy 18: Love’s Progress’, which did not appear in his collected Poems until the seventh edition of 1669 (Poems, and etc. by John Donne late Dean of St Pauls …), though the poem in question had, in fact, been first published fifteen years earlier in The Harmony of the Muses: or, The Gentlemen’s and Ladies’ Choicest Recreation (1654). There are similar indications of censorship in the visual arts. The important set of a dozen prints satirising relations between the sexes which bears the imprint ‘Sold by Hugh Perry, 1628’ (apparently his only excursion into print-selling), survives uniquely in the proof third state bearing the imprimatur of the licenser Roger L’Estrange, and dated in his hand, 28 October 1672. Ten of the set have four-line verse captions, but two have had the original verses burnished off the plate – faint traces remain, but insufficient to enable the words to be recovered. One of these evidently suggestive subjects depicts a man unlacing his breeches in front of a seated woman with raised skirt. The English engraver has given her the feathered beaver hat that was part of the wardrobe of the ‘fast’ women of the day, but also – and surely suggestively –

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deviated from his source by showing her with one raised hand, the index finger of which thrusts upwards in what it is not anachronistic to see as a decidedly phallic gesture. The source engraving for this (and most of the rest of the suite) first appeared in the Pugillus Facetiarum (Strasbourg, 1608, 1618, 1643, etc.), but was also copied in the Nieuwen Jeucht Spieghel (Arnhem, 1617). The German verse caption to the print just described reads (in literal translation) ‘Here I ask you to judge whether it’s happened or is about to happen. / Judge who wants to judge, as long as I have the best of the game.’ But on the print that concerns us in the present context, although the verses survive, they are not, in fact, the ‘original’ verses. A woman stands foursquare in the centre of the present composition, two men on either side of her engaged in activities that clearly symbolise the four elements, one man at a forge (Fire), the others digging (Earth), fishing (Water) and hawking (Air). In the English version the woman’s hand rests innocuously enough on her belly, but in the earlier Continental versions she points unmistakably to her crotch. The present verse-caption reads, Fire, Air, Earth, Water, represents, To thee their sundry Elements. By which thou mayst receive thy fill, That powerful can preserve and kill.

We should perhaps understand the verses to mean that the author compares Woman to the Four Elements, essential to life, but sometimes also the cause of death. This was certainly not the original message of this motif, however, as we can tell from its immediate source in the Pugillus Facetiarum, but which is itself only one of several representatives of the composition. The bilingual Latin/German captions read thus: Aera perlustrant & aquas & viscera terrae Et flammas fatui o coram quam quaeritis adsum [They comb the skies, the waters, the flames, the bowels of the earth. Fools, what you seek is here right in front of you!] O ihr narren alle vier Waβ ihr sucht das fint ihr hier [Oh you fools, all four, What you seek you’ll find right here!]

With her right hand she points to the general region of her crotch. Two years after the first edition of the Pugillus, the print was reissued in the Jeucht Spieghel (1610), and again in the Nieuwen Jeucht Spieghel (Arnhem, 1617). But these seventeenthcentury versions are rather less explicit than those of the previous century – at least these women are fully clothed, whereas their predecessors are entirely naked, and drive home the moral rather more pointedly. The Pugillus designer may have taken his inspiration from a print engraved by Johannes Wierix issued in 1601, where the words spoken by the naked woman are, if anything, more explicit:

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Graeft, vist, voghelt, En soeckt int vier Tis niet om vinden dan recht alhier [Dig, fish, fowl, seek it in the fire, It’s only to be found right here]

or as her French couplet baldly puts it: En vain cherches en terre eau ou flame Car c’est a faire au seul trou de madame. [In vain you search in earth, water or fire, For it is only to be found in my lady’s hole.]

And there are least three further sixteenth-century examples of the motif: the words issuing from the mouth of Balthasar Jenichen’s naked woman, engraved some time in the 1580s, her fingers in her crotch, mock the vain strivings of the four fully clothed men who surround her, busily engaged in what she clearly sees as no more than ‘displacement activity’: Habt Ir kein Weibsbilt nie erkennt Das Irs svcht in den 4 Element? Solts Ir … gsehn habn an den Kindn Drvm svchts alda hie wert Irs findn. [Have you never known a woman That you seek her in the Four Elements? You’re looking all over for it like these children Though it’s here you will find it.]

It seems likely that an earlier and almost certainly woodcut version of such a sheet was once in the extraordinary print collection of Ferdinand Columbus (d. 1539), for inventory no. 2071 is described as featuring a standing naked woman with hair down to her buttocks, her right hand over her ‘natura’, and her left hand over her left breast, while below to our right is a man (presumably clothed) with a dog and a glove on his left hand, above which is a bird – so he is presumably out hawking (McDonald 2004). But though this is categorised as one of the sheets featuring five persons,2 the other three are not described. If we can accept that the cataloguer is describing a (centrally placed) naked woman and four other men, one of whom is hawking, I believe we may quite reasonably accept this as an example of Woman and the Men of the Four Elements, not least, because we know the subject was available this early, in the form of a unique woodcut sheet attributed to Hans Weiditz c.1521. This, however, cannot have been the copy in Columbus’s collection, as there a dog does not accompany the representative of Air. I hope the European popularity of this visual motif of Woman and the Men of the Four Elements has now been sufficiently established – as well as, pace the English verses

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that accompany the 1628 print issued by Perry, its ‘moral’. Though we do not know exactly when Donne’s ‘Elegy 18: Love’s Progress’ was written, the love-poet is unlikely to have been influenced by this particular English sheet, but as we have seen, the image on which it was itself based appeared in three separate illustrated volumes published between 1608 and 1617, not to mention Jenichen’s version dating from the 1580s. I would therefore like to propose that Donne’s eighteenth elegy was inspired by this visual tradition, and that it clearly alludes to it. The speaker of the poem is, as Arthur F. Marotti succinctly characterised him, ‘interested in proving that the right true end of love is a woman’s sexual parts and not her soul’ (Marotti 1968–9: 25). Search every sphere And firmament, our Cupid is not there.

And, in the seven lines immediately following this observation, Donne mentions fire, earth and airs, before concluding in the next line, ‘but we love the centric part’ (of woman). Immediately thereafter follows an extended metaphor of a sea-voyage of discovery around the woman’s body. While it might be objected that ‘airs’ here is used literally in the sense ‘mien, demeanour’ (OED s.v. 14a), that would be an absurdly limited, literalist, and blinkered reading of such a notoriously ‘conceited’ writer. When he reaches the end of the poem, he writes, so may that man [move faster far] Which goes this empty and ethereal way [i.e. through the air] Than if at beauty’s elements he stay.

That is surely the mistake for which the outspoken women of the prints so roundly condemn all the busy little men beavering away at their several pursuits in the four elements – they have become obsessed with – ‘stayed at’ – ‘beauty’s elements’, and in so doing, quite lost the plot! Donne is here envisaging woman as the quintessence – etymologically, of course, the ‘fifth essence’ – ‘a supposed substance distinct from the recognised four elements’ (OED, s.v. ‘essence’ 2b). It is noticeable that in Jenichen’s presentation of this motif – the one that on chronological grounds, at least, it is conceivable Donne could have seen, and closest in date to the presumed date of his poem – the woman appears at the centre of this quincunx3 – ‘but we love the centric part’. And at the centre of her – precisely so if one measures the engraving – is ‘the centric part’ to which she points. The busy striving manikins cannot see what is literally staring us, the viewers, in the face – full-frontal and central. There is reason to believe that another print from the same 1628 series, which may be termed The Four (Sexual) Ages of Man, has been similarly bowdlerised, or rather, adapted. A young couple on the far left of the engraving are regarded by three men who increase in age and beard-length – a symbolic indicator of their age, of course – as we look towards the right. A rare piece of wholly secular Tudor wall-painting in

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the lodge of West Stowe Manor in Suffolk reveals the ‘proper’ import of this print (which German evidence confirms), for the characters speak thus: youngest man embracing woman: middle-aged man: mature man: old man:

‘Thus do I all the day’ ‘Thus do I while I may’ ‘Thus did I when I might’ ‘Good lord will this world last forever?’

The same composition is found in the Pugillus Facetiarum (Strasbourg, 1608) with the following German captions under each figure: Das thu ich alle Tag, Ach so oft ich mach Mich gedenckt das ick och pflag; Och tut man das noch? [Thus do I all the day, And I as often as I may I seem to remember I used to too; Oh, do people still do that?]

The earliest extant example of the motif, however, would seem to be a German woodcut sheet entitled Wer weiβ ob’s war ist (‘Who knows if it’s true’), issued around the middle of the sixteenth century. The next earliest example is an undated woodcut sheet of probable late sixteenth-century date preserved in Amsterdam with corresponding Dutch captions. Shortly after the publication of the Pugillus Facetiarum, the motif reappears in the second edition of Theodor de Bry’s influential Emblemata saecularia (Oppenheim, 1611), from which it was copied the following year on a humorous ‘wedding-card’ issued by the same publisher (Harms 1980: I, 85). By a strange coincidence we know that what is essentially the same joke as that purveyed by our print was current in the Elizabethan oral tradition, thanks to the autobiography of the lute teacher, Thomas Whythorne, written in the 1570s: A good fellow, which being somewhat steeped in years and had passed the snares of Venus’ darlings and babes … came by chance into a secret place where he found a young man and a young woman embracing and kissing together, wherewithal he stood still a little and then he made a cross on his forehead with thumb, and then with hand he made, as it were, a pent-house over his eyes, as one doth whose sight is troubled by the brightness of the sunlight if he look toward it, the which being done, he said, ‘Jesus, doth this world last yet?’, as who would have said, ‘Doth this embracing and kissing continue still?’ Because all such kind of occasions were past with him, he thought that they had been done with everybody else.4

The last print from the 1628 series to be discussed depicts a wife putting on her husband’s breeches while he spins wearing an apron, accompanied by the following verse:

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Malcolm Jones The world is turned upside down When wives so on their husbands frown, As by their wheels [spinning-wheels] to gain least riches, Shall forced give leave to wear the breeches.

Here is the ‘nightmare scenario’ of the monde renversé, the man so unmanned that he does ‘woman’s work’ and bears her quintessential attribute – do we not still speak of ‘the distaff side’ of the family? – while it is she who ‘wears the trousers’. The image is certainly attested in the late Middle Ages on the continent, but the expression and image appear remarkably late in England, not certainly before the Elizabethan era, after which it is frequently quoted. In 1613, for example, Elizabeth Edwardes told Alice Baker, ‘I would be ashamed to have a husband and wear the breeches’, and apparently posted a paper at her door repeating the words (Gowing 1993: 11). If women came in for some tediously predictable criticism, men were not wholly exempt either. Men’s dress was criticised in at least two sheets, The Funeral Obsequies of Sir-All-in-New-Fashions (c.1630) (Figure 15) a reversed copy of one of the German Allamodo sheets of 1629 – and thus not to be trusted as a guide to contemporary English fashion – and The Picture of an English Antic (1646); and the fashion for smoking is similarly satirised in a burlesque coat-of-arms entitled The Arms of the Tobacconists (i.e. smokers) (1630). A sheet issued in 1641 entitled The Sucklington Faction: or (Suckling’s) Roaring Boys (BM Sat Cat 268) depicts two extravagantly hatted Cavaliers sitting smoking round a makeshift table. As the title makes clear, the text satirises the dandified members of the troop of horse raised in the service of King Charles by the poet, Sir John Suckling. The two quatrains that caption the inset engraving clearly, and appropriately, poke fun at the habit of smoking: Much meat doth gluttony produce. And make a man a swine – But he’s a temperate man indeed That with a leaf can dine – He needs no napkin for his hands His fingers for to wipe He hath his kitchen in a box, His roast meat in a pipe.

All the more strange, therefore, that there is no mention of smoking in the lengthy text! The text is a preacher’s harangue against such ‘Prodigal Sons’ as waste their substance thus – through drinking in the main, along with all the attendant vices that drunken rioting leads to. It would appear that the printer has pressed into service an originally mildly amusing, almost cartoon-like, swipe at smokers to illustrate Suckling’s dissipated Cavaliers. In fact, the English plate copies very closely (though in reverse) an engraving made c.1630 by Abraham Bosse (after Jean de Saint-Igny) known as Les Fumeurs5 captioned with a single quatrain:

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Figure 15 The Funeral Obsequies of Sir-All-in-New-Fashions, anonymous engraved sheet (London, 1630). A satire on male fashion c.1630, but actually copied from a German sheet issued in 1629. The mourners include the dandy’s poet, painter, and musician, as well as a large number of the tradespeople he patronised – the verses imply he died owing them money. They include four tailors, a haberdasher, a feather-maker (dealer in or dresser of feathers), a shoemaker, a spurrier (spur-maker), a fencing-master, and a number of laundresses and their maids. The mourners leading the procession hold aloft many of the deceased’s clothes and other accoutrements. Bodleian Library, Oxford

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Malcolm Jones Quand nous sommes remplis d’humeur melancolique La vapeur du Tabac rauiue noz espris; Lors de nouuelle ardeur entierement surpris, Nous veincrions le Dieu Mars en sa fureur bellique. [When we are filled with the melancholy humour The vapour of tobacco revives our spirits; Then, entirely surprised by a new ardour, We could vanquish the god Mars in his warlike fury.]

The importance of this particular uniquely surviving print – as so many English prints of this era are – is twofold: firstly it shows, once again, dependence on a foreign model, and secondly it shows how very ready contemporary English print publishers were to shoehorn into their money-spinning prints anything vaguely appropriate, in order to seize a commercial opportunity while the subject was still topical (a practice very familiar from the woodcut illustrations to broadside ballads). What it is not, pace F. G. Stephens et al., is a satire of Suckling – it is a satire of the contemporary Cavalier dandy and not even an English one at that! The horns of the complaisant cuckold only too happy to live off his wife’s ‘immoral earnings’ become cornucopias in a late sheet copied from a French engraving, Le Cornard contant (The Contented Cuckold ), the title pun of which is lost in translation (Figure 16). Gambling is the subject of at least two sheets of a very popular appearance engraved c.1650, the one featuring a lawyer and soldier playing cards to the former’s evident discomfiture, the other, a monkey and a cat; an engraving by John Droeshout (d. c.1652) of a gambler and his girl cheating a youth at cards, missing for some decades, surfaced again recently amongst Douce’s collection in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. It is signed by Droeshout who died c.1652, and shows a young man being cheated by a gamester and his female associate who, while appearing to pay the youth attentions, is in fact holding up what the caption calls a ‘deceiving glass’ behind his head, so that her accomplice can see what cards he holds. The caption is critical of all three participants and of the activity itself: ‘such youths deserve to lose that take delight in such’. The great collector, Francis Douce (1757–1834), also helpfully owned what is clearly the French original of this engraving, perhaps by Michel Lasne (one of the coins depicted bearing a ligatured ‘ML’). But the motif was probably already popular, as there is a similar French print engraved by Louis Spirinx,6 and an oval etched print by Callot, sometimes called Le Brelan, issued c.1628. The vices to which young men were felt to be particularly prone were further admonished in an image accompanying A Looking-Glass for Lascivious Young Men: or, the Prodigal Son Sifted, a broadside ballad issued c.1690 but – as so often – illustrated with a woodcut which must belong to the Jacobean era. The Prodigal Son Sifted is the central subject of prints issued in the late 1670s showing the son’s mother and father literally sieving him of his vices, symbolised by the bastards, wineglasses, lace cuffs, dice, cards, pipes, tennis rackets, etc. which pour through the sieve. One of the miniature bordering scenes to this print depicts ‘the device of the horn’, referred to in the

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Figure 16 The Contented Cuckold, anonymous etched sheet (?London, c.1660). Not only does this cuckold have the traditional horns, but also they shower forth coins and jewellery – they are cornucopias. Smilingly he counts the money and jewels he has acquired from his wife’s ‘occupation’ (as the caption cunningly puts it) and cynically concludes, ‘the disgrace is my wife’s, the profit mine’. It is a copy of a French sheet entitled Le Cornard contant, the last word punning on contant (counting) and content (contented). Compare the figure of Allwit in Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside. A version with verses in Dutch and French is also known. John Overton (publisher) also sold a second version (New York, Library of Congress), and it was copied in woodcut to illustrate various broadside ballads of the 1680s. British Museum, London

opening scene of the comedy Eastward Ho (1605): ‘I had the horn of suretyship ever before my eyes. You all know ‘the device of the horn’, where the young fellow slips in at the butt end, and comes squeezed out at the buccal [mouthpiece].’ The device is found as the subject of a panel painting as early as the mid-sixteenth century and appears, for example, on the engraved title page of The Unlucky Citizen (1643) – it was clearly a visual commonplace throughout the entire period we are concerned with, and yet how few of us would know it today ( Jones 1999)? An untitled sheet engraved by Cross c.1650 (Figure 17) satirises the pursuit of money, and depicts a winged coin on legs fleeing from a party hunting it on foot labelled Frugality, Flattery, Prodigality and Covetousness, and their dogs, named respectively ‘Diligence’, ‘Industry’, and ‘Labour’; ‘Rapine’, and ‘Hazard’; [none]; and

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Figure 17 Hunting Money, sheet engraved by Thomas Cross (London, c.1650). Based on an original engraving by Goltzius (d. 1617), this untitled sheet satirises the pursuit of money, and depicts a winged coin on legs fleeing from a party hunting it with dogs. Frugality walks barefoot and carries his shoes and socks over his shoulder (to save the shoe leather!). Flattery wears a cockerel-headed hat (he is a cock’s comb/coxcomb), the dandified Prodigality throws money into the air while trampling on the sword and scales of Justice, a crouching Covetousness lets slip the dogs Deceit and Usury. A gallows is visible on a hill in the background. British Museum, London

‘Deceit’ and ‘Usury’; it is copied from an original by the Dutch engraver Goltzius (d. 1617). The fashion for numerical series of prints is reflected in George Glover’s output, who alone, c.1635 engraved The Four Complexions (i.e. humours), The Four Virtues, the recently discovered Four Winds, The Seven Liberal Arts and Sciences, The Seven Deadly Sins, and The Nine Women Worthies; the virtues and vices are often represented by figures of women (William Marshall’s contemporary Four Complexions with their unflattering couplets are reproduced here in (Figure 18). Robert Vaughan’s The Twelve Months … in Habits of Several Nations depicts couples of various nationalities above verses which are, incidentally, a good indication of how Jacobeans regarded various foreigners: the French who ‘love to wench’ represent March, and are ‘given to bulling, horns, and cuckoldry’; the Spanish represent June (zodiac sign Cancer) whose ‘canker God grant that we may well … miss’; while ‘September’s temperate season here is shown / By the well-tempered English Nation’. Sets of circular engravings in dozens

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Figure 18 The Four Complexions, sheets engraved by William Marshall (London, 1630s). One of the ‘numerical’ series of prints popular at this period in which abstractions were personified as half- or threequarter-length female figures, mostly with far from flattering verses; here each temperament is a woman labelled according to the misogynist proverb, ‘Fair and foolish, little and loud, long and lazy, black and proud’ (Tilley 1950: F28 – from about 1600), i.e. Phlegmatic, Choleric, Melancholic, and Sanguine. They are accompanied, respectively, by a fish, a cockerel, a cat, and stringed instruments, which ‘speak’ the names of their temperaments. Kunstsammlungen der Fürsten zu Waldburg-Wolfegg

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or half-dozens are occasionally found pasted to banqueting trenchers – see, for example, the reference in Middleton’s No Wit, no Help Like a Woman’s (1612), 2.162ff., referring to ‘Twelve trenchers, upon every one a month … and their posies under ’em’. A unique half-dozen circular emblems engraved by Marshall specifically for trenchers and dated 1650 also survives (Daly and Silcox 1989). Other such sets known to have been pasted to trenchers include Martin Droeshout’s copies of twelve Crispin van de Passe engravings of the Sibyls (1620s), and an anonymous engraver’s Twelve Aesop’s Fables after Marcus Gheeraerts the Elder, both issued c.1630. Twenty named social types are criticised in the surprisingly little-known Pack of Knaves etched by Hollar c.1640, though ‘most of the figures are based on designs by Abraham Bosse’ (Pennington 1982: 96–7). The title card, The Whetstone, depicts the notorious liar, ‘in allusion to the former custom of hanging a whetstone round the neck of a liar; especially in the phrase “to lie for the whetstone” (Tilley W298), to be a great liar. (OED s.v.)’, In the late Middle Ages convicted liars – dishonest tradesmen, in particular – were frequently sentenced to the punishment of ‘the pillory and the whetstone’, the whetstone being hung around the neck of the offender, and explained by one fourteenth-century document as the ‘ensigne dun faux mentour’ (the sign/ badge of a false liar) (Jones 2002a: 89). There are frequent allusions in the early modern period too to ‘lying for the whetstone’, and an actual stone may well have been the prize awarded to the most accomplished liar in burlesque lying competitions. The implicit metaphor, of course, must be to do with sharpening the wits or tongue in order to produce the slickest lie. A full publication of Hollar’s Pack would be a valuable service to seventeenthcentury English studies. Though the title puns on the notion of a pack of cards consisting solely of jacks, they are ‘knaves’ too, in the sense, ‘rogues’, of course – though two of the pack are, in fact, accompanied by a woman, one of whom, the ‘Busye’, is evidently little more than a pimp, as the caption explains: Busye is one that doeth unite young pairs, Prefer [settle in marriage] spruce gallants unto City heirs,7 And rather then employment want will be A pander to the basest venery.

It must be admitted, however, that with one or two exceptions, these stereotypes – F. P. Wilson noted that Surly, Overdo, Cokes, and Fly are also the type-names of characters in Jonson’s comedies (Wilson 1959) – are not especially interesting iconographically, but taken as a set, and especially taking due account of the verse captions that accompany each – they do provide an interesting anthology of social criticism on the eve of the Civil War. Surly appropriately turns his back on us, while the swaggering Dam[m]ee stands confronting us aggressively, ‘a roaring knave, ‘so named (as OED explains) because ‘addicted to using this oath’, (OED ‘damme’ 2b), while the Cokes (‘silly fellow … simpleton, one easily taken in’, OED) has forgotten the errand he was sent on and stands admiring a parrot in a cage. The Overdo is depicted bran-

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dishing an alarmingly large clyster-pipe for administering an enema, which prompts the author to moralise, ‘ ’tis better to do little than do much!’ Similarly scatological is the figure labelled All-hid, who sits on the privy, head in hands – apparently he is hiding, ostrich-like, from some reproof: He that absents himself, not to be chid [reproved], For a committed fault, call him all-hid; He, foolish knave, thinks all secure hath been, When’s head is covered, though his breach [arse] is seen.

As OED explains, (s.v. ‘hide’ 1e), ‘all hid’ was ‘the signal cry in hide-and-seek; hence, an early name of the game itself ’, citing Berowne’s ‘All hid, all hid, an old infant play’ in Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost (1588), to which we may add Cotgrave’s definition of Cline-mucette from his French-English dictionary of 1611: ‘The game called Hoodman-blind; Harry-racket; or, are you all-hid’. Intriguingly, four of the designs were copied onto the important popular print issued some forty years later and recently acquired by the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven. This oddly little-known rogues’ gallery of Hollar’s bears comparison with a similarly motley crew, roughly contemporary (c.1650), issued by Peter Stent and surviving uniquely (yet again) in the Guildhall Library’s print collection. Interestingly, it is a partial copy – reversed and omitting the bottom two registers – of the Beggars print after Bosch issued by Cock – and, importantly (to my knowledge), the earliest such Bosch ‘quotation’ in English art. The sheet first appears in Stent’s 1662 advertisement as Lame Crew of Beggars (but is not in his first advertisement of 1654), though the caption text interprets the multitude of crippled beggars who inhabit the print as an allegory of the fissiparous state of religion in England, perhaps suggesting it was first issued in the 1640s. The present impression, however, proclaims itself a general critique of the … blind and most decrepit sectaries, Seducing Jesuits and Incendiaries, And many sects besides. Yet the unhappy days above all other A stranger weakness far in us discover: Even in religion we grow lame and halt [limp(ing)]; None walk upright, none truth strive to exalt, We are full of putrefaction lameness all …

On the other hand, The Cries of London, of which there were several versions by c.1650, is the English representative of the European tradition of prints depicting numbers of itinerant tradespeople together with their characteristic advertising cries (Shesgreen 1990, 1992). All social types are criticised in Elstrack’s satirical engraving, All do Ride the Ass (1607) (Figure 19), in which various ranks and types all seek to

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Figure 19 All do Ride the Ass, engraved sheet attributed to Renold Elstrack (London, 1607). Based on a German original, this is a general rather than a particular satire in which, with the exception of the judge (far left), all social ranks and types of early Jacobean society (including Dame Punk, Don Pandar, Don Gull, and a Gallant) are associated with asinine folly. Though unrecorded elsewhere, Burton appears to use the idiom in the same sense in his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621): ‘they may go “ride the ass”, and all sail along … i’ the “ship of fools” ’. Compare the title-page woodcut to The Fool’s Complaint to Gotham College (London, 1643), which depicts a fool riding on an ass which says: ‘The fool rides me’. British Museum, London

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ride an ass, which is given four stanzas of moralising protest ( Jones 2001a). Droeshout’s Doctor Panurgus (1620s) is another generalised satire, also dependent on a continental source, in which the doctor purges his well-dressed patients of all the ‘strange chimera crotchets’ which make them mad, and which we see being voided by one patient (under the influence of a purgative labelled ‘Wisdom’) into a closestool, and escaping from a gallant whose head is shown entering a furnace; a small inset picture of two churchmen, bearing several churches on their shoulders, more specifically aims at pluralists.8 The taste for prodigies and portents so evident in the broadside ballad repertoire, and popularly interpreted as a sort of supernatural social criticism, is reflected in the print record too. As early as 1531, This Horrible Monster/Diss Monstrum is a remarkable sheet with front- and back-view woodcut images of conjoined piglets born in Germany, with a bilingual text. Monstrous fish (including beached whales) abound, as do portraits of conjoined twins, such as the sheet bearing front- and back-view woodcuts of the twins born at Middleton Stoney in 1552, or The Two Inseparable Brothers who appear as a woodcut heading the ballad of this name by Martin Parker issued in 1637, clearly copied from the rather more upmarket engraving which heads Historia aenigmatica de gemellis Genoae connatis. The previous year Glover had engraved the broadside, The Three Wonders of this Age, with text by Thomas Heywood, depicting three superlative human phenomena, William Evans the giant, Jeffrey Hudson the dwarf, and Thomas Parr, reputedly 153 years old. The popular Jacobean proverbial notion that it is ‘A mad world, my masters’ (Tilley 1950: W880), enshrined in the title of Middleton’s play published in 1608, was literally interpreted in a Dutch sheet engraved in Antwerp c.1590 (Figure 20), one of the many Dutch engravings now known to have been circulating in England at this time, and specifically referred to in Robert Burton’s vastly learned Anatomy of Melancholy (1621): all the world is mad … is melancholy … is (which Epicthonius Cosmopolites expressed not many years since in a map) made like a fool’s head (with that motto, Caput helleboro dignum) … (‘Democritus Junior to the Reader’)

Thomas Nashe’s incidental comment that ‘It is no marvel if every ale-house vaunt the table of the world upside down, since the child beateth his father, and the ass whippeth his master’ is a valuable confirmation of the popularity of such monde renversé sheets in Elizabethan England, and of the fact that they might be seen, along with broadside ballads, pasted up on the walls of taverns. Some of the captions from a recently discovered, unique late sixteenth-century sheet entitled A Pleasant History of the World Turned Upside Down will suffice to describe the many small scenes represented: The Hog Singest the Butcher; Horses Ride on their Masters’ Backs; Ships and Galleys Float on Hilltops; Wives go to War and Husbands sit in [by] the Fire; The Servant Calleth his Master to Reckoning; The Child Rocketh his Father in the Cradle; The Countryman sits on a Horse and the King Follows him; Beasts of Chase Pursue the

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Figure 20 ‘Fool’s Head World Map’, anonymous engraved sheet (?Antwerp, c.1590). The globe is given a fool’s hood as a token of universal folly and blows a soap bubble as a symbol of the transience and vanity of human existence (homo bulla est). Alluding specifically to this print in his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), Burton noted that ‘all the world is mad’ – the commonplace was widespread in the Jacobean period (Tilley W880) and is enshrined in the title of Middleton’s A Mad World, My Masters (1608). Bodleian Library, Oxford

Greyhounds; Fishes come out of the Air to Angle for Fowls in the Water; Stones do Swim (see Figure 21). A far less threatening topsy-turvy world was the medieval Land of Cockaygne, often known in our period as Lubberland – the Christmas revels at St John’s College, Oxford, in 1607, for example, included an Embassage from Lubberland. It was Peter Stent who issued The Map of Lubberland or the Isle of Lazy (c.1654) and it is captioned with twelve lines of descriptive verse below the image, which is, in fact, a copy in reverse of a Dutch engraving from the 1560s by Pieter Baltens. A similarly popular pan-European subject was the Cat’s Castle Besieged and Stormed by the Rats also issued by Stent – while there is some reason to believe that this subject was sometimes capable of a political interpretation, it seems that for the majority of viewers most of the time it was a purely humorous image.

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Figure 21 A Continued Inquisition Against Paper-Persecutors, anonymous engraved title page to Abraham Holland, A Scourge for Paper-Persecutors. This is the title page to the second part of J[ohn] D[avies] et al., A Scourge for Paper-Persecutors (London, 1625), a diatribe against trivial literature such as ballads and news-sheets, and their authors who thus waste paper. The engraving depicts Wit whipping one of these ‘paper-spoilers’, who, in the manner of a schoolboy being flogged, is borne on Time’s back. Note the same Occasio forelock as in Figure 13, and also Time’s scythe and hourglass – attributes that he has had to put on the ground. The offending author wears the three-belled hat of a fool. British Library, London

The carnivalesque subject of the battle between personifications of Shrovetide and Lent, companion prints with accompanying verses by John Taylor, were first issued in 1636 (Figure 22). The depiction of this burlesque joust was entered to Matthew Simmons in the Stationers Register on 15 February that year as Two Pictures [of ] Lent and Shrovetide with Verses to them by John Taylor. Lent only survives in the original 1636 state (in BM Prints and Drawings), but both appear on broadsides dated 1660, ‘Printed by M.S. for Thomas Jenner’, preserved in the British Library, and are advertised in Jenner’s 1662 catalogue of prints as Lent on Horseback and Shrovetide on a Bull.9 They are an important pair of prints, the earliest visual testimony to English familiarity with this European tradition of the ‘Battle between Carnival and Lent’ – surprisingly sparsely attested in England in the Middle Ages and early modern era (Jonassen 1991) – best known to us today in Bruegel’s exuberant painting of 1559, but a subject of which there were several Netherlandish prints circulating.

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Figure 22 Shrovetide and Lent, a pair of anonymous engraved sheets (London, 1636). a Shrovetide: the earliest English representatives of ‘The Battle between Carnival (Shrovetide) and Lent’ (with verses by John Taylor). For a marginally earlier reuse of a German version of the battle on a sheet published in England, see the discussion of A Nest of nuns’ eggs (before 1626) on p. 515. The present sheet shows a plump Shrovetide, wearing a cooking-pot as helmet, mounted on a stout ox, carrying a broom from which a ‘cooks foul apron’ flutters as his banner, and armed with a roasting-spit as his lance, on which various pieces of meat are skewered; a gridiron hangs over his shoulder by a string of sausages, and a bottle and two bags are slung at his side, two ‘plump capons’ behind him

When the two English prints are set side by side it is clear that Lent and Shrovetide are intended to be jousting against each other, an impression that the verse captions on the plates themselves and Taylor’s verses below them confirm. Lent is described in the caption as ‘In warlike manner … to combat come’, and Shrovetide as the ‘Champion … [who] in this fray would murder Lent.’ The verses beneath the left-hand combatant (Lent) set the scene for the battle: Here Lent and Shrovetide claim their proper right, Are both resolved, and prepared to fight.

Lent has an angling-rod as her lance, a ‘fishing-net hath for his [sic] banner’, and a fish-kettle for her helmet, while her steed is a very meagre-looking horse. She is hung about with fish of various species as the pre-eminent ‘Lenten fare’. Fat Shrovetide, on

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b Lent: Sharp-faced and grim, Lent is mounted on an appropriately thin horse, carries his fishing rod as his lance and a fishing-net as his banner, and wears a fish-cauldron as his helmet. He is hung about with fish (typical Lenten fare), and his foot has broken through his threadbare stocking. British Library, London

the other hand, is ‘mounted on a good fat ox’, with a roasting-spit as his lance, a cooking pot for his helmet and for his banner, ‘a cook’s foul apron’, and carries with him a brace of capons and a flask of wine, not forgetting the ‘fat pig, and a piece of pork’ spitted on his lance! The two combatants also exchange ritual insults, Lent referring to Shrovetide as a ‘puff-paunched monster’, and being herself abused by her opponent as a ‘lean-jawed anatomy’ (i.e. skeleton, or – rather more precisely – in the lexicographer Cotgrave’s definition, ‘an anatomies or body whereon there is nought left but skin and bone’ – OED ‘anatomy’, 5). Like Taylor, I had assumed that Lent was intended to be male – until I happened upon the French original which the unknown English engraver has copied very closely but not perfectly, for the French Lent is depicted with a bare breast on which the nipple is prominent. The English copyist (whether inadvertently or not) has omitted the nipple but the bare breast is, in fact, clearly discernible – once one is alerted to its presence in the French original, at least. That Caresme Prennant should be female is also in accord with the sex of Lent in Bruegel’s famous painting. The French Mardy gras is also clearly the original of the English Shrovetide. The French prints are not

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Figure 23 Jack a Lent by John Taylor, anonymous title-page woodcut (2nd edition, London, 1620). A thin Jack-a-Lent, so poor that his ‘hair grows through his hat’ (Tilley 1950: H17 var.), rides a herring (typical Lenten fare), led by a fat Shrove Tuesday carrying a ladle over his shoulder. Behind them walks the skeletal figure of Hunger carrying a pole from which fish and an onion dangle. The figures of Jacka-Lent and Shrove Tuesday derive from Bruegel’s Thin Kitchen published in 1569, a rare testimony to the familiarity with Bruegel’s work in Jacobean England. It further shows how dangerous it is for modern historians to make assumptions about seventeenth-century English popular culture (for example that this title page represents a contemporary London carnival procession) when they are not as familiar as they might be with the extent of the visual record. British Library, London

signed but bear the imprint, ‘Mel[chior] Tauernier excud Auec Priuilege du Roy’.10 That they were issued before 1636, however, seems certain in that, in that year, the two images – again closely copied – appeared in a unified composition entitled Le Combat de Mardygras and bearing the imprint, Jasper Isac fecit et excudit 1636.11 John Taylor, the ‘Water Poet’, is the popular author par excellence of this period and also one, as Bernard Capp has pointed out in his excellent study (Capp 1994), who seems to have been aware of the value of an original image on his title pages. Another Lent and Shrovetide (quite different in style) also adorn the title page of Taylor’s Jack a Lent his Beginning and Entertainment: with the Mad Pranks of his Gentleman-Usher Shrove-Tuesday that goes before him and his Footman Hunger Attending (1620; Figure 23).

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There, a skinny Jack-a-Lent, his hair growing through his hat (a proverbial indicator of poverty) and riding on a herring, is followed by his skeletal servant Hunger, who holds aloft such Lenten fare as onions and fish, and is preceded by a fat Shrove Tuesday with basting-spoon over his shoulder – but, interestingly, these figures derive unmistakably from Bruegel’s Thin Kitchen engraving of 1569 (Davies 1979), intriguing testimony to the familiarity with Bruegel’s work in Jacobean England. This 1620 title page further demonstrates how dangerous it is for modern historians to make assumptions about seventeenth-century English popular culture – that this woodcut image represents a contemporary London carnival procession, for example – when they are not as familiar as they might be with the extent of the visual record. In 1637 the Stationers’ Register licensed ‘a pamphlet called we be seven etc. by John Taylor’ – though not extant, this would undoubtedly have carried on its title page a version of the popular European joke at the viewer’s expense which depicts a group of six foolish animal and human figures, leaving the viewer by his puzzled enquiry to make himself the seventh. Included in Peter Stent’s earliest known advertisement of 1654 is a sheet with the Latin title Sumus septem (‘we are seven’), which is almost certainly the same as the We are Seven listed in the advertisement of his successor, John Overton – this latter state, survives uniquely in the Library of Congress in Washington. But a contemporary version of the sheet – the earliest extant English version of this motif, entitled We be Seven, is found as a frontispiece woodcut bound into the anonymous Turn over behold and wonder (1655), also attributed to John Taylor, and bearing the facetious imprint, ‘Printed at Leighton Buzzard (Brother) within 10 miles of Dunce stable [Dunstable], by the Assigns of Tom Ladle, and are to be sold at the sign of the Seven Wise-men of Gotham’. After the ‘Epistle Dedicatory’ the text proper begins, headed ‘We be Seven’, and includes the lines, Though we want wit, yet let’s not play the fools; Our beasts and we are six, the number’s even, Except some looker-on do make up seven.

The image depicts three men, two of them in profile, recognisable as the commedia dell’arte characters Pantalone and Harlequin, all mounted on asses, below a titlebanderol reading We are Seven, and the following verse caption to explain the apparent mismatch between title and representation: Welcome, my friend, thus long we have been even, Now thou art come: thou mak’st our number seven. A perfect number so men do it call. As perfect are we, in our follies all.

A numerical variant of this popular visual joke is The Picture of ‘We Three’ alluded to by the clown Feste in Twelfth Night (1601) which, by the same logic, features two fools – contemporary continental prints survive, but the closest English representative is a painting entitled We Three Loggerheads recently acquired by the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Stratford-upon-Avon. This depicts two fools with ass-eared hoods, one

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carrying a ‘bauble’ (Figure 24). Another Shakespearean reference to The Picture of Nobody (Tempest 3.2.124) alludes to another joke picture, which was clearly very popular in the first decade of the seventeenth century. A pun available only in English, this Nobody is depicted with ‘no body’, i.e. as a head on legs; it was famously the sign under which the publisher John Trundle traded; he seems to have specialised in the popular end of the market (Johnson 1986), and so it is not surprising to see entered to him in the Stationers’ Register on 8 January 1606 The picture of No Body, as well as No Body and Some Body later the same year. The earliest detailed allusion to the figure appears in Ben Jonson’s Entertainment at Althorp, also known as The Satyr (1603), in which ‘the person of Nobody appeared, attired in a pair of breeches, which were made to come up to his neck, with his arms out at his pockets, and a cap drowning his face’. However, Six Pictures of Nobody was one of the outstanding items for which payment was claimed by the London printer and bookseller Abraham Veale in Michaelmas term 1571 (Plomer 1916: 323). Another sort of visual trick is represented by the ‘anthropomorphic landscape’ in which the recumbent human form is reinterpreted by the artist as a landscape – one such (after Merian) was being issued by Stent c.1650. When reference is made in Richard II (1593) to ‘perspectives, which rightly gazed upon / Show nothing but confusion, eyed awry, / Distinguish form (2.2 18–20), it is to anamorphoses, the best known of which is the distorted picture of Edward VI in the National Portrait Gallery, which has to be viewed from the edge – in Ben Jonson’s words ‘as you’d do a piece of perspective, in at a key-hole’ (Every Man Out of His Humour (1599), 4.4). Ironically, the only such engraved print of this type to survive is a head of Charles I. From the very end of our period, c.1650, there survives in Douce’s collection now housed in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, yet another unique engraved sheet of four oval ‘puzzle’ designs.12 Three of the four designs are visual ‘tricks’ of a familiar kind: a reversible head, a composite head, and an image in which the figures have torsos in common, while the fourth design, though not any sort of visual pun, is of considerable interest in its own right. The reversible head is the familiar Cardinal/Fool device,13 though curiously, the caption-writer seems to be confusing and conflating it with its pendant/companion, the Pope/Devil: The Pope and Fool as twins together joined: View well ye one and you’ll the other find.

The reversed caption is a biblical quotation: I Cor.: 3: 19. The wisdom of this world Is foolishness with God.

The composite Arcimboldesque head (compare Figure 35) is made up of foods (the face principally composed of two roast chickens) and kitchen implements, with the caption,

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Figure 24 We Three Loggerheads, anonymous oil painting on panel (c.1650). A visual joke at the viewer’s expense (a ‘logger-head’ is a blockhead or fool). The third loggerhead is the viewer, who is tricked into asking where the third fool is. This is the sort of picture to which the clown Feste alludes in Twelfth Night (1601) as the picture of ‘we three’ (2.3.16). Continental prints of this trick survive from the era of Shakespeare, but no English examples survive before the date of this painting. The motif later appeared on inn signs. Shakespeare Birthplace Trust Museum, Stratford-upon-Avon

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Malcolm Jones Behold a wonder here in nature shown: An old tough hag tender as chicken grown, Her cap adorned with plenty, Her age from seven times twenty.

The ‘conjoined triplets’ design bears two inscriptions thus: The mystery at first you’ll hardly mind: They seem but three, yet you may seven find.

and below: This shows that union and cemented love All things to vigour and increase improve.

The final, non-tricksy representation I find I cannot help thinking of as anything other than ‘The Owl and the Pussycat’, for it features an owl in a ruff and a cat in a shouldercape, holding a fan in one paw and the owl’s upraised talon in the other. The owl wears a pendent medal of a small bird, and the cat a mouse-pendant. They seem to be related to two anonymous prints after Adriaen van de Venne (1589–1662) showing two clothed animal couples dancing, a cat and dog, and a pair of owls, the female of the latter pair wearing a very similar pendent mouse (Schuckman and de Hoop Scheffer 1990: nos. 18 and 19). Above the animals’ heads a banderol reads ‘Ye nightrambling ladies’, with below the couple a quatrain thus: Here Lady Mage* leads Madam Puss to dance Not in our mode but as they do in France. The jig being ended [,] in a trice They are revelling ‘mongst birds and mice. (*Madge: traditional type-name for the owl)

Thanks entirely to the existence of internet search-engines, I am able to state that these four designs were intended to decorate the inner and outer surfaces of the lid and base of an oval pill-box, as on a surviving example in the collection of the Puzzle Museum in Devon.14 By the late sixteenth century the Establishment had begun to commemorate some of its non-monarchic institutions in print form, and engraved pictures of Parliament survive from 1628 and 1640, of the Convocation of the Church of England from 1623/4, of the Lord Mayors of London from 1601: The Arms of the Earls Lord Barons and Bishoprics according to the Degrees in Parliament from c.1600, The Arms of all the Chief Corporations of England with the Companies of London (1596), and The Arms … of all the several Companies and Corporations … of London (c.1635). Similarly, the loyal citizen might have on his wall tributes to the army and navy in the shape of The True Portraiture of the Valiant English Soldiers (1588?), or the table of drill postures engraved by Cockson and first issued in 1619, or perhaps a magnificent ship, such as the large

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woodcut sheet of the Ark Royal (1588), which led the fleet against the Armada, or Payne’s engraving of The Sovereign of the Seas (1637). The domestic political sensation of the era – with international implications – was, of course, the Gunpowder Plot. The Papists’ Powder Treason was engraved some time between 1606 and 1613 but probably closer to the latter date; similarly anonymously engraved is A Plot with Powder 1605, but Michael Droeshout’s Powder Treason is probably to be dated c.1621, the year in which Samuel Ward’s iconic composition, The Double Deliverance 1588: 1605 (i.e. deliverance from the Armada and the Gunpowder Plot) was published in Amsterdam. An important sheet which, to judge from the costume style, must have first been issued c.1625, and is, generically, a variant on the Death and the Four/Five Alls motif (see below), is The Common Weal’s Canker Worms or the Locusts both of Church and State ( Jones forthcoming). Arranged in a circle round a grotesque devil issuing from a hell-mouth, twelve human types (all but two of them provided with an inset pictorial ‘emblem’) describe their relations with the previous persons. Each character performs his (usually negative) office for all the preceding characters, and the Devil reveals that ultimately they are all his agents, and that he will use the chain composed of human fingers, ears, and tongues that links them to drag them all into hell. There are further clues to a late Jacobean dating to be had in the text below the image portion of the print, which allots a quatrain to each character, and in their accompanying ‘emblems’. The verse given to the ‘Courtier’ who – in an extraordinary scene – stands on (cf. ‘trample down’) the prostrate body of a (presumably dead) king, reads: With sly protexts15 and fox-like fallacy I’ll compass earth, Spain’s mighty monarchy, And or by force or fraud I’ll trample down, All opposites that hinder our renown.

This clearly implies Spain’s imperial ambitions, and that the figure in question is working cunningly (‘fox-like’) for Spain – and I have given my reasons elsewhere for regarding him as a thinly disguised avatar of the Spanish ambassador, Gondomar. Anti-Catholicism is obvious in the verses and emblems assigned to the two men in monks’ garb and the figure I am identifying as the Spanish ambassador, and in some of the coded language, such as the term ‘locusts’ in the title (Pierce 2009).16 A ‘seducing’ Jesuit – whom I am inclined to identify as Stephen Garnet, the Gunpowder Plotters’ confessor – holds a book and rosary, but his civilian disguise is visible beneath the otherwise all-enveloping cloak and cowl, his verses openly proclaim his intention to ‘bring in Popery … By cunning plots, devised for Romish use’ and, significantly, his emblem shows a man setting light to a trail of gunpowder which leads to what looks like a castle – surely an allusion to the Gunpowder Plot, especially when combined with the other Catholic monk, the confessor who absolves all the others. The inset ‘emblems’ are certainly worthy of consideration in their own right. Though the published emblem-book had only been available to an English readership

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for some forty years at the time I suggest this print was issued – since Whitney’s selection of 1586 (followed up by translations of Paradin (1591), La Perrière (1606, 1614) and Peacham’s Minerva Brittana (1612)) – recent scholarship has supplied ample evidence of the familiarity of English writers with the emblem genre already in Elizabethan times (Bath 1994). Each emblem here consists of an image in a rectangular frame and a Latin motto. The wealthy man’s emblem is a man embracing a globe, a literal worldling, whose motto is sperno superna (‘I despise the heavenly’); the tailor’s emblem is Aesop’s ass in a lion’s skin, for his work similarly disguises his clients; the janiform figure which appears to be a woman from the front, but has a bearded male face behind its head, has for emblem a monstrous bare-breasted female torso with a sting in its tail ( fronti nulla fides (Juvenal, Satires) – ‘put no faith in appearance’), while the predatory lawyer’s emblem is a fox about to pounce on a goose (lege ponem – ‘let’s see the colour of your money!’ ‘Cash down!’). The farmer’s motto cor laetum facit horrea plena mihi (‘full barns make my heart happy’) is, at first reading, innocent enough, and his ‘emblem’ shows a man standing at corner of a thatched haystack or barn, but his verse shows him threatening to ‘hoard my grain up for a scarcer year’, i.e. that he is a greedy farmer of the type regularly complained against, who hoarded grain up waiting for a less good year when prices would be much higher due to scarcity, a popular bête noire in late Elizabethan and Jacobean England, and moreover, one with biblical sanction – witness Proverbs 11:26: ‘Who so hoardeth up his corn, shall be cursed among the people’ (Coverdale trans., 1535). The Porter’s joke in Macbeth (1606) concerning the ‘farmer that hanged himself on th’expectation of plenty’ (2.3.4) would have struck a chord with many in Shakespeare’s audience. At the very end of our period came the great societal schism of the Civil War and – especially with the collapse of the official licensing authority – a spate of associated prints. The title-page woodcut of another of John Taylor’s productions, draws on the ‘World Turned Upside Down’ topos we have already noted above: Mad fashions, Odd Fashions, All out of Fashions, Or The Emblems of these Distracted times (1642) depicts a man who wears gloves on his feet, boots on his hands, trousers on his arms, and a jacket on his legs, while a mouse chases a cat, a hare chases a dog, fish swim in the air, a church hangs upside down in the air, as does a flaming candle, a wheelbarrow pushes a man and a cart pulls a horse. Marshall’s engraving to the broadside Heraclitus’ Dream (1642) also invokes this monde renversé imagery in the shape of the shepherd whose hair and beard are shorn by his sheep. Similarly proclaiming itself An Emblem of the Times is a broadside issued five years later, which ‘presents our isle’s late misery’, and shows Libertines and Anti-Sabbatarians, in company with a literally two-faced Hypocrisy, fleeing before an armoured War and a cloud-borne Pestilence. At the beginning of our period the emblem-book had not yet been born, and yet it was to become the publishing sensation of the era, so that by the end of the era any artist wishing to suggest that his picture was to be understood in anything other than a purely literal manner would reach for the fashionable term; thus it is that in 1646 appeared England’s Miraculous Preservation Emblematically Described, in which England’s ark containing the Lords, Commons, and Assembly is about to make land safely,

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while in the stormy seas various prominent royalists drown. In the somewhat similar The Invisible Weapon, or Truth’s Triumph and Errors (1648), probably by the same (anonymous) engraver, the ship of the church is attacked by Nero, the Pope, a Turk, a Shaker, an Arminian, and so on. This is also the period in which the internationally famous engraver Wenceslaus Hollar begins to issue prints commercially and, naturally, several concern the Civil War; although the majority appear to support the parliamentarian cause (Parliamentary Mercies (1642), and Solemn League and Covenant (1644)), his comparison of the Bohemian and English wars of 1642/3 has a more neutral, elegiac tone. Similarly non-partisan is his etching for a broadside entitled The World is Ruled and Governed by Opinion (1642), with verses by the emblematist Henry Peacham. Another impressive and not overtly partisan broadside is Syon’s Calamity or England’s Misery Hieroglyphically Delineated (1643), which includes satire of the many radical sects which sprang up during the Civil War period, while another engraved broadside, These Tradesmen are Preachers (1647), is headed by twelve images of tradesmen plying their trades in order for the text to scoff at the presumption of mere artisans in daring to preach. From the same year comes The Picture of an English Persecutor or a Fool-Ridden Anti-Presbyterian Sectary. Clearly partisan sheets include The Sound-Head, Rattle-Head, and Round-Head (1642) in which the parliamentarian is the Sound-Head and rejects the epithet Round-Head by applying it here to the tonsured crown of a royalist Jesuit priest, and A Picture of the Malignants’ Treacherous and Bloody Plot (1643), which takes the form of a large sheet, divided into three picture-strips of four frames each, detailing the discovery and prevention of a plot against the parliamentarians. A comparable pro-royalist sheet is The Royal Oak of Britain, in which the Incertum vulgus chops and pulls down the symbolic royal tree overseen by Cromwell. Prints satirising individuals before the Civil War period are not as common as might have been expected, though The Description of Giles Mompesson late Knight censured by Parliament the 17th of March Anno 1620 (?Amsterdam, 1621) is one such, and the three frames depict the hated monopolist first persecuting the landlady of the Bell Inn, then fleeing to France, and finally rueing his folly as a lame and penniless exile. The effects of such pictorial attacks on prominent individuals may be exemplified by the case of Archbishop Laud, who complained of libels and ballads sung up and down the streets … as full of falsehood as gall, [and of] base pictures of me, putting me into a cage and fastening me to a post by a chain at my shoulder and the like. And divers of these libels made men sport in taverns and ale-houses.

He was committed to the Tower on 1 March 1641, and the former caged picture alludes to one of the woodcuts illustrating A New Play called Canterbury His Change of Diet (another shows his nose being literally held to the grindstone), while the latter picture was in the form of a small half-length portrait engraved by Marshall and used as the frontispiece to Fuller’s The Argument, both published that year. A full-size

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engraved print of Laud vomiting books, his head held by Henry Burton, whom he had imprisoned and whose ears he had had cut off, also exists. The state of international politics in the early Jacobean era was summarised in an undated, cartoon-like print engraved by Thomas Cockson, entitled The Revels of Christendom. It represents an English view of the settlement between Spain and the States General of Holland, at a time when England and France were negotiating peace between the two parties. Stephens, who first suggested the plausible date 1609 for the print, noted that ‘This Peace [i.e. The Twelve Years Truce] was a severe blow to the Pope, and Maurice [of Nassau, Prince of Orange]17 was watching the game which promised so much benefit to his country.’ The original model for Cockson’s print can now be identified as one bearing the monogram of the Netherlandish engraver Petrus a Merica with text in Dutch, which opens Hola ghy roouers. Comparison with his source shows that Cockson has retained the likenesses on the Catholic side (except that he has replaced a Merica’s cardinal’s hat with a Jesuit’s bonnet), but substituted clearly recognisable portraits on the Protestant side: James I of England, Henri IV of France (d. 1610), Christian IV of Denmark, and Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange. They are depicted seated round a table, playing various games of chance (backgammon, cards, and dice) against three Catholic monks who have staked – and lost – a monstrance, a chalice, and much coin. In a picturesque aside – not in his original – Cockson has added a dog urinating on the foot of one of the monks. The bonneted figure behind the Pope is problematic: Stephens implies he is the Cardinal Infante Ferdinand, i.e. the younger son of Philip III of Spain and Margaret of Austria – and he would be an excellent fit – having Austrian, Spanish, and Netherlandish connections – but is, sadly, ruled out of court by chronology, being born in 1609! The verses, however, describe the standing figure beside the Pope as both a cardinal and an Austrian who has not yet been identified. The accompanying verse text styles the monstrance on the table a pax, for the benefit, I suggest, of the pun on the Peace or Truce, which is the real subject of the conference at the table. The verse writer has done his best to wring several such puns out of the composition: for example in their card game, ‘the Monk could show France nothing but the Knave’. The verses explicitly state that Henri is playing maw, a game we are no longer familiar with (and was perhaps only known in the British Isles?), but close comparison with the cards of his source shows that Cockson has made some subtle alterations to his original – for the card shown face-up on the top of the deck on the table is not a Merica’s ten of hearts, but the five of that suit, and as hearts are trumps, it is the five of trumps, a special card in the game of maw known by the term ‘five finger’. Furthermore, in Cockson’s version, the two uppermost cards in the monk’s hand, as if he is about to play one of them, are the knaves of diamonds and hearts (in Merica’s original, they are seven of diamonds and king of (?)hearts), while his opponent, Henri IV, is already flourishing the ace of hearts. Not all the rules of maw have come down to us, though we do have a single sheet of The Groom-porters Laws at Maw, to be Observed in Fulfilling the Due Orders of the Game (c.1600), which prints sixteen rules, though – there being no mention of the ‘five

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finger’, for instance – there must surely have been further sheets which have not survived. Two of the extant sixteen ‘laws’, however, concern the ace of hearts, which clearly played a significant role in the game – whichever suit was trumps – compare ‘Like the Ace of Hearts at Maw [History of Pope Joan (1599)]’ (OED ‘heart’). By good fortune, however, we learn from Greene’s News from Heaven and Hell (1593) that ‘although the knave of trumps be the second card at Maw, yet the five finger may command both him and all the rest of the pack’. If I understand – or, rather, infer – the rules of the game correctly, the three highest-value cards in the game were thus – in descending order – five of trump suit, knave of trump suit, ace of trump suit, and thus – in the present context – five of hearts, knave of hearts, ace of hearts. France has cut the pack and ‘shown’ the five of hearts and, as hearts are trumps, this is the unbeatable ‘five finger’ – horribly frustrating for the monk, who has what is the second-highest card possible, the knave of trumps (hearts) in his hand! Henri also holds (and shows) the third-highest card, the ace of trumps (hearts). In a reversed copy of the present sheet, dated conjecturally 1626 (by Stephens), and which bears no engraver’s signature nor other imprint information, but keeps the urinating dog and the verses (except for necessary changes in the names of the participants as noted below), the cardinal – wearing the characteristic broad-brimmed hat now, not the bonnet – may represent Richelieu (despite the verses, which remain unchanged and still mention Austria), the English king James I (d. 1625) is replaced by Charles I, Henri IV of France (d. 1610) by Christian IV of Denmark, and Christian IV of Denmark of the earlier version by Gustavus Adolphus, king of Sweden (1611–32), while the Transylvanian war leader Bethlen Gabor replaces Maurice of Nassau, Prince of Orange (d. 1625). What can we say for certain about the date of this later version? The unmistakable likeness of the youthful crowned Charles I replacing James provides a terminus post quem of 1625, and if the distinctive profile head of Bethlem Gabor is correctly identified this provides the terminus ante quem, as he died in 1629. The breakdown of the 1609 settlement, the Twelve Years Truce, was satirised by a print entitled Treves endt. The funeral of the Netherlands peace. Anno 1621, depicting a mock-funeral, a copy of the original Dutch Testament van’t Bestand, Treves Endt, an etching by Claes Jansz.Visscher, printed in the Netherlands with English letterpress verses in the same year. Great Britain’s Noble and worthy Council of War is an anonymous engraving issued in 1624, portraying ten of the country’s top soldiers and seamen around a table clearly showing Britain’s preparedness for war. Throughout the Jacobean era broadsheets of notable battles and sieges were issued, for example of the Isle of Rhé in 1627, or John Droeshout’s Siege of Magdeburg by Tilly (1631) copied in reverse from a contemporary German sheet, or his father Michael Droeshout’s Plan of the Battle of Leipzig, 1631 (1632), similarly copied. Capitalising on more recent political realities, Vaughan engraved The Portraitures at large of Nine Modern Worthies of the World (1622), among which the most modern are Charles V, Henri IV, Scanderberg, and William of Orange.

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Even before the Armada, the Spanish were perhaps the favourite target for English xenophobia, pictorial no less than literary. One of the retrospective print-licensing lists of 1656 records The Nature and Condition of the Spanish Senor with Verses, which does not survive, but must be intimately related to A Pageant of Spanish Humours, wherein are naturally described and lively portrayed, the kinds and qualities of a senor of Spain Translated out of Dutch by H. W. (1599), with its prefatory list of ‘The natural kinds of a señor of Spain’ enumerating the same sixteen derogatory qualities in the same order as are attributed to the Spaniard in the early seventeenth-century German and French broadsides that have two rows of eight small engraved cuts at the head of the sheet keyed to explanatory verses below. During the winter of 1637/8 there appeared in English print-shops at least five large and important allegorical sheets, with such alarming titles as The Order of the Universe, A Laurel of Metaphysic, and An Artificial Table of Moral Philosophy. The last has not come down to us as such,18 but the first is a diagram of text arranged around the ‘Philosopher’s Head’ (its alternative title), and the second is an elaborately pictorial scene, of the same type as An Artificial Description of Logic, while a further related sheet entitled The Theatre of Nature would have been somewhere in between – perhaps we might term it a pictorialised schema. What unites all five, however – and in addition, the splendidly pictorial Tree of Mans Life, engraved by Goddard the following year – is that a certain Richard Dey is credited with authorship of the texts. The original texts of both An Artificial Description of Logic and A Laurel of Metaphysic were composed by Martin Meurisse (1584–1644) of the Paris convent of Friars Minor, author of Rerum metaphysicarum libri tres (1623), and the sheets originally published by Messager in Paris, the former as Artificiosa Totivs Logices Descriptio, issued in 1614, and the latter as Laurus Metaphysica two years later (both being engraved by Léonard Gaultier). An Artificial Description of Logic, while a close copy of the French sheet, has of course been adapted for Protestant eyes. God the Father, who wears the papal triple crown in the French version, has been replaced by the tetragrammaton; the group of young tonsured Friars Minor who stand before the impressive portal to the garden at the bottom of the sheet, have been replaced by a group of English schoolboys, and the French novice master by a soberly dressed English schoolmaster. Duns Scotus, credited here with making Aristotle plainer, no longer appears garbed as a medieval monk as correctly in the original, but anachronistically as a Protestant divine, as if in the act of penning the weekly sermon. Interestingly, the anonymous English engraver – William Marshall, I would suggest – has made a number of other subtler changes to his French original, removing what he probably considered an inappropriate eroticism. The all but bare-breasted Argumentation seated at the base of the largest fruit-tree at the head of the composition is retained, though given a somewhat hermaphrodite appearance, with breasts decidedly less opulent, and the suggestion of facial hair, but the other two bare-breasted allegorical females have certainly been turned into men! In similar fashion, the young woman – one of the complete things – whose nipple is visible beneath her diaphanous French blouse, is less revealingly attired in the English version.

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A Laurel of Metaphysic is a close copy, signed by William Marshall, of Laurus Metaphysica, originally, like the previous, engraved by Gaultier and published by Messager in Paris in 1616.19 The composition takes the form of a laurel tree whose roots plunge into a river and are transformed into the different paths taken by believers to arrive at knowledge of God. From either side twelve named theologians20 are shown walking towards the base of the trunk and looking up towards the crown of the tree, where the proofs of the existence of God blossom. In the foreground allegorical figures representing Physics, Ethics, and Logic are watering symbolic flowers: sunflowers, irises, and roses, respectively. The Order of the Universe has a complex ancestry (Saffrey 1994). It is, in fact, closely modelled on a print entitled Ordo Universi issued in Antwerp by Theodoor Galle (1571–1633) dated 1632,21 but this is itself the second state of a sheet first issued in Antwerp in 1585 by Gerard de Jode and engraved by Adrian Huybrechts.22 This, however, was a copy of the original Italian edition engraved by Natale Bonifacio with text by Andrea Bacci and issued in Rome in 1581.23 Those contemporary reminders of the inevitability of our death, memento mori sheets, are found throughout our period. The Dance and Song of Death (1569), for example, and a most striking broadsheet (c.1580?), really a version of the popular Five Alls motif, the actors here being identified as bishop, king, harlot, lawyer, country clown [i.e. peasant], and, of course, Death, who ‘kill[s] you all’. A fascinating detail of the background to this latter print is the trellised arbour within which a banquet is taking place, the table quite literally supported by the back of a peasant kneeling on all fours. Stylistically, this sheet is clearly of French origin. What must have been a most impressive memento mori sheet, which would have been 52 × 44 cm when complete, appears in Stent’s 1653 advertisement as Death his Anatomy, but survives now only in fragments, minus the skeleton, the ‘anatomy’ of the title. Sheets of a neutral Christian content are in a minority, but such are The Broad and Narrow Way, or, St Bernard’s Ladder to Heaven and Hell (c.1616), another European type. In the same year that Martin Droeshout engraved his celebrated portrait of Shakespeare for the first folio edition of the poet’s works, he also engraved a broadside entitled Spiritual Warfare (1623), depicting the massed armies of the Devil besieging a Fort of Stone, in the middle of which we see the ‘Christian Soldier Bold’ with Faith (symbolised by the Cross) and God’s Word (symbolised by an open Bible) before him, flanked by sixteen Christian virtues, and with Good Works guarding his rear ( Jones 2001a). Two other such ‘godly tables’ from the 1620s are The Christian’s Jewel Fit to Adorn the Heart And Deck the House of Every Protestant (1624), and Come Ye Blessed, etc. Go Y Cursed, etc. (1628?). A broadside with a large woodcut of the Nativity, entitled Christus natus est, was issued in 1631 and reprinted throughout the seventeenth century; the Pepys Collection, however, possesses what looks like the original cut signed with the initials I.B., which may perhaps be those of the Elizabethan woodcutengraver John Bettes. Simple but striking, is An Emblem called Sin’s Discovery by the Emblem of a Toad (1638), with its fashionably dressed ‘Reprobate’ and outsize but somehow benevolent toad.

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Figure 25 Behold Rome’s Monster on his Monstrous Beast (?London, 1643). A Dutch engraving (with Dutch labels and evidently secondary English translations beneath them) heading a broadside with verses signed by John Vicars. The Pope is mounted on the barrel-bodied, scorpion-tailed Beast of the Apocalypse, its seven heads labelled as the Seven Deadly Sins but all wearing the headgear of the Roman clergy. It excretes skulls and bones (saints’ relics) into vessels held by other clergy who offer them to kneeling kings, but the Pope has been shot by one of Death’s skeletons and he and the beast are about to plunge into the abyss of Hell. British Library, London

In this post-Reformation era, however, the print is more often the vehicle of denominational polemic than piety, in the form of attacks on the Pope and the Catholic clergy, especially the friars. The Pope came under attack as early as the lost Picture of the Devil and the Pope (early 1560s), in the iconic Protestant composition which confronted Christ on an ass with the Pope on his steed (1620s), and in Behold Rome’s Monster, a broadside issued in 1643 with a dramatically apocalyptic engraving depicting the Pope mounted on a barrel-bellied beast (Figure 25), above a verse description of the scene by John Vicars. A broadside ballad, A New-Year’s-Gift for the Pope (1624), is headed by a woodcut of the popular image, found also in the third, 1576, edition of Foxe’s Acts and Monuments, which depicts a blindfold Justice weighing a Bible in one scale-pan labelled Verbum Dei, attended by Christ and the disciples, against the Papal decretals, decrees, cucifixes, rosaries, coins, etc., attended by the Pope, cardinals, bishops, and friars, and a devil who clings bodily to the lighter scale-pan – all to no avail, of course. The same image but minus Christ and the Protestants on the heavier

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side, and the Pope and his clergy on the lighter side (but including the (useless) friar), was used as the device of a Civil War banner by the parliamentary party in 1642 (Young 1995: 60, no. 0111.0). The Marian martyrs, of course, were to be memorialised for all time in the woodcut images illustrating what is still popularly known as Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’. The two-volume 1570 second edition includes an elaborate and gruesome three-page foldout cut, suitable for pasting up on the wall, entitled, A Table of the Ten first Persecutions of the Primitive Church; the same cutter was responsible for the large Spanish Inquisition woodcut (27 × 36 cm) bound at the end of a book published the previous year. Another anti-Catholic woodcut in the form of a branching tree, formerly thought to have been issued independently, has recently been identified as made as a foldout (53 × 35.5 cm) inserted at the end of Barthlet’s The Pedigree of Heretics (1566), and is of evidently foreign (German?) workmanship. It is similarly satisfying to learn that the extraordinarily violent The Lamb Speaketh (Figure 26) was originally inserted as a foldout into William Turner’s The Hunting of the Romish Wolf (Emden, 1555?), the Bodleian copy uniquely preserving the original Latin texts, traces of which may still be discerned in the English copies. A panel painting closely copying the engraving but with the Devil’s scroll bearing the inscription, Yon Are my Victims: Anno 155[6?] turned up at auction some twenty years ago ( Jones 2001b). We are afforded a rare glimpse into late Elizabethan attitudes to this war of images (‘counter-picturing’) in the form of a letter written in 1597 by the radical Yorkshire preacher Giles Wigginton to Lord Burghley, in which he enclosed ‘two homely emblems’ of his own invention entitled A Pair of Riddles Against the Philistines of Rome. Yet another unique print, a woodcut sheet issued in 1623 portrays four such emblematic riddles, four animal and human encounters of a literal or metaphorically predatory nature, for example the goose between two foxes, and the maid between two friars (Figure 27).24 As the riddle-sheet hints, the friars were perhaps the most popular target of Protestant attack, from as early as c.1580 in A New Sect of Friars Called Capichini. Of course, one of the vices most frequently alleged against the mendicant orders in particular was that they made sexual advances to laywomen, and the lost The Shepherd in Distress portrays the dilemma of the eponymous shepherd who must decide whether to abandon his flock to the ravening wolf in order to rescue his wife (or, rather, his honour) from the amorous friar who presses his attentions on her, or to save his flock from the wolf and resign himself to the name of cuckold. Fortunately it was faithfully copied by the extraordinary Thomas Trevilian into his Great Book compiled in 1616. A Nest of Nun’s Eggs, Strangely Hatched … (c.1626) is a most curious broadside headed by a piece of engraved grotesquery of probable late sixteenth-century German origin. The central motif depicts a monk and nun sitting on a vast basket of eggs from which further tiny monks and nuns are hatching – the scene is observed by a pope who shines a lantern on them and wears the tiara and a pair of spectacles.25 Above the central hatching scene a burlesque joust is depicted: on one side ‘Bacchus on his tun in state doth sit, / Armed with a roasted goose, upon a spit: / Drawn by two

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Figure 26 The Lamb Speaketh. A dramatic attack on the Marian Catholic persecutions, bound into William Turner’s The Hunting of the Romish Wolf, printed in Emden in 1555. Archbishop Stephen Gardiner, identified here as the ‘Winchester wolf ’, quite literally ‘leads by the nose’ several of the simple laity while a group of older men seek to pull him back, and devours the Lamb of God while the Devil looks on approvingly. He is supported by the wolf-headed bishops Boner and Tunstall ‘in sheep’s clothing’, with six dead sheep bearing the names of the Protestant martyrs at his feet. A contemporary painting of the subject was sold at Christie’s on 11 April 1980 as lot 135. Thomas Trevilian copied various elements from this sheet into his Great Book in 1616. British Museum, London

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Figure 27 Which of These Four … (London, 1623). The viewer is asked, ‘Which of these four that here you see, / In greatest danger you think to be?’, and shown four animal and human encounters of a literally or metaphorically predatory nature: the goose between two foxes, the rat between two cats, the client between two lawyers, and the maid between two friars. It is a description of a traditional riddle (found in two late sixteenth-century Scots manuscripts), but in an English Jacobean context, it is clear that it is part of anti-mendicant, anti-Catholic polemic. Francis Leach was granted a retrospective licence to reprint the sheet in 1656. Society of Antiquaries, London

clowns’, while on the other a cleric seated on a wickerwork construction is drawn by the nun and friar – another version apparently of the Battle of Shrovetide/Carnival (on the secular left-hand side) and Lent (represented by the Catholic religious on the right-hand side). As often as not, however, Protestant image-makers could not resist the spectacle of monks and nuns engaged in mutual sexual activity. Stent’s 1662 advertisement included a Friar Whipping a Nun, a Friar and Nun, a Friar Teaching Cats to Sing, and Cornelius of Dort brings Parsons to Confession, but can we know what any of these would

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have looked like? It seems to have been the idea of corporal chastisement by friar confessors that afforded Protestant controversialists a particular frisson. While giving directions, the speaker in Heywood’s If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody Part II (1605) names two inn-signs to be seen in the street: ‘there’s “The Dog’s Head in the Pot”, and here’s “The Friar Whipping the Nun’s Arse” ’. The original of a lost print, which survives only as a photocopy but may be dated 1618–23, depicts two naked female penitents with switches in their hands, while a seated confessor, the notorious Brother Cornelius of Dort, names the penance to be undergone by a third, clothed, woman who squats before him. Cornelius’ notoriety had prompted earlier images, but it was presumably the important Synod of Dort held in 1619 that accounts for this topical publication. In Histriomastix (1633) William Prynne inveighed against ‘obscene pictures’, as well as many other evils, including lascivious songs, bonfires, grand Christmases, long hair, and laughter (Thompson 1979: 176–7). It is certain that Prynne would have considered Marcantonio Raimondi’s notorious engraved I Modi (Postures) to Aretino’s sonnets ‘obscene pictures’, as had Goodman the previous year, in the preface to his Holland’s Leaguer (1632): ‘Virtue is seldom found to spring from Lacedaemonian tables, and Chastity much less from Aretine’s pictures’. Puritans like Prynne had time (and censorship) on their side; in a twenty-first-century sense, not a single piece of visual pornography from this period, at least, of native manufacture, is known to survive. Trying to account for the resort of so many people to the Alchemist’s house in the opening scene of Act 5 of Jonson’s play, Lovewit opines … Sure he has got Some bawdy pictures to call all this ging [crowd, company]: ‘The Friar and the Nun’, or ‘The New Motion [Puppet-Play] Of the Knight’s Courser Covering the Parson’s Mare’; ‘The Boy of Six Year Old, With the Great Thing’ … (The Alchemist (1610), 5.120ff.)

We do not know much about print erotica in England at this period (though we can assume that Aretino’s Postures circulated clandestinely in some form), but it is interesting that the suspicion of ‘bawdy pictures’ immediately suggests The Friar and the Nun to Lovewit – perhaps the very Friar and Nun sheet that Stent was still selling fifty years later. What might well be Stent’s Friar Whipping a Nun (issued 1654–62) – though if so, to judge from the costume, first issued in the Jacobean era – survives uniquely among Francis Douce’s prints now in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (W.1.2 (412)). It depicts a friar seated backwards on a nun on all fours, whose bared buttocks he is beating with what looks like a foxtail switch. To the right of this scene a man with a broadside ballad in his hand – the two woodcut illustrations heading it are just visible – looks on. The accompanying verses identify him as a ballad-seller named ‘Harry Plott’ – should we attribute any significance to his surname? Is there some

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reference to, for example, the Gunpowder Plot? Is this a secret chapel in some recusant house? But the accompanying verse text signally fails to refer to the fact that the image depicts a friar beating a nun! Indeed, the text can hardly be that originally accompanying the image, which is surely anti-Catholic propaganda. Such chastisement was not ostensibly for offences against the confessor, of course, but for punishment of the sins confessed to – although the text as it stands turns the image into a general complaint on behalf of women at being chastised in this demeaning manner by men, but not without a certain suggestiveness: Help me, good women, as you love your lives, Or else I wish that all you wanton wives May be so served. Shall men thus on us trample? Oh give not way to such a foul example. Seize on him then and pull him from my back, I was not made to carry such a pack [(1) burden; (2) knave]: ’Tis contra bonos mores [against good manners], yet I tell ye, I can bear twice as much upon my belly. Suppose I have offended him: what then? Must I be punished like a child again And my posteriors to the world laid ope? ’Tis base, ’tis base, you’ll help me then, I hope

But the voyeuristic Harry Plott just looks on, ‘singing a ballad framed of taunting speeches, called “Up Tails All, Women Beware Your Breeches [(1) bottoms; (2) trousers]” ’. No such ballad is known, sadly, though OED notes s.v., that ‘Up tails all’ is ‘the name of an old song and its tune’. Perhaps it is merely coincidence, but two tunes entitled Up Tails All and The Friar and the Nun occur as ‘toys’ on folio 34 of Jane Pickeringe’s seventeenth-century lute-book (British Library MS Egerton 2046, c.1616–50), and again, within a few pages of each other, in the 1651 edition of Playford’s Dancing Master.26 While appreciating the inevitable sexual innuendo, of course, the alternative title of the ballad, Women Beware Your Breeches, perhaps also glances at the controversy regarding the Jacobean fashion of women adopting (male) breeches. Though attested earlier in Germany and Flanders, being so chastised with a foxtail can hardly be considered to be a punishment that is physically painful, though it may have been considered particularly demeaning or dishonourable, but additionally, one suspects – especially given the decidedly erotic connotations of the foxtail, which I have discussed elsewhere ( Jones 1991: 196–203) – a suggestive element cannot be entirely absent. While the earliest such ‘monastic’ foxtail whipping known to me is one of a number of ‘grotesque’ motifs painted on the ceiling of a house in Nürnberg c.1550, a late sixteenth-century German print issued by Matthaus Greuter in Strasbourg and captioned Im Kloster Garten wirdt verricht Solch disciplin wie man hie sicht (In the monastery garden is dispensed such discipline as is seen here) would appear to lie behind that element of the English print, at least. Again a monk sits backwards astride a nun on all fours, and beats her bare buttocks with a foxtail switch.

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Figure 28 A Pass for the Romish Rabble (Amsterdam, 1624). The central image (deriving immediately from a German sheet of 1621) is a horned devil wearing a mitre devouring Jesuit priests and excreting them as soldiers. The Pope and priests kneel (?)imploringly before it. At the right edge another priest reads a copy of James I’s Proclamation of 6 May 1614 attached to a broken column (the conventional attribute of Fortitudo, here symbolising strong rule), charging all Catholic priests to leave England by 14 June. Behind him real ‘pastors’ look on in bewilderment. Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris

The Friar Teaching Cats to Sing that Stent was advertising in 1662 is known only from a nineteenth-century collector’s description: ‘A monk stands in the centre of the engraving with one cat on either shoulder, another on his head, and three on a table in front of him, their front paws on sheets of music whereon are inscribed their familiar cries: below are the lines: That organs are disliked, I’m wondrous sorry, For music is our Romish Church’s glory. And ere that it shall music want, I’ll try To make these cats sing and that want supply.

A Pass for the Romish Rabble to the Pope of Rome through the Devil’s Arse of Peak (c.1624) (Figure 28), an incidentally scatological broadside exulting in the (repeated) banish-

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ment of Jesuits from England, engraved and published by another Dutch artist, Claes Jansz. Visscher, survives uniquely in Paris. With the famous Peak District cavern (traditionally so named) in the background, the central image shows a large horned devil ingesting priests and excreting them as mercenaries for the forcible conversion of England to Catholicism. A Picture Called the Man of Sin Revealed, or A Map of the Kingdom of Antichrist and the Ruins Thereof is an impressive panoramic engraving issued in 1622. From early in the Reformation the Pope had been identified with the ‘man of sin’ spoken of by St Paul in his 2 Thessalonians 2:3–4, and thus regularly identified in Protestant polemic with the Antichrist. According to Paul, on the Last Day will be revealed that man of sin … the son of perdition; Who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called God, or that is worshipped; so that he as God sitteth in the temple of God, showing himself that he is God.

In the year following publication of the present Picture, one I.P. composed a tract against the Anabaptists entitled Anabaptismes mysterie of iniquity unmasked … also wisedomes bountie unmasking the man of sinne (1623), but use of the phrase was a commonplace of Protestant rhetoric, as seen, for instance, in John Rainolds’s earlier sermon, The discovery of the man of sinne: wherein is set forth the changes of Gods church, in her afflictions by his raigne. Consolations by his ruine (1614). Subsequently, in the magnificent engraved frontispiece to ‘The Second Tome’ of William Prynne’s Exact Chronological Vindication … (1665), St Paul himself identifies the Pope (depicted here with triple crown falling from his head) as the Man of Sin. As we have seen, from 1563, Foxe’s Acts and Monuments kept images of the martyrs burned by Mary ever before the eyes of English Protestants and included large pullout woodcuts clearly intended for wall display. A similarly commemorative and impressive broadside, engraved anonymously and depicting the martyrs amid flames, was issued in 1630 entitled Faith’s Victory in Rome’s Cruelty. Nor should it be forgotten, of course, that throughout the first quarter of the century the occasional prints issued referring to the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 (see above), added more fuel to anti-Catholic sentiment. Extant from c.1640 is another image which became iconic for the whole of Protestant Europe, and probably originated in England early in the century, in the form of a painting of fourteen Reformers with Luther at their centre gathered round a table on which a burning candle is set; this was soon turned into a more explicitly anti-Catholic image by the addition of the Devil, the Pope, a cardinal, and a monk, all trying unsuccessfully to blow the candle out, accompanied in England by the inscription, The Candle is Lighted, We Cannot Blow [It] Out, recalling the apocryphal Esdras 24:25, but more directly for an English audience, Latimer’s echoing of that verse addressed to Ridley at their burning on 16 October 1555: ‘We shall this day light such a candle by God’s grace in England, as I trust shall never be put out.’ A

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Dutch version is significantly labelled, ‘na de copy van Londe’ (after the copy in London), and for once, reverses the direction of influence in a medium in which, it would seem, almost all new graphic ideas were imported from the continent. In closing, we should at least mention two kinds of printed image which there has not been space to discuss here. The woodcuts adorning broadside ballads were probably the most popular kinds of printed image, carried into the very heart of the countryside by many an Autolycus, and evidently valued as much for their pictures as their texts: ‘Prithee give me three-pence in ballads, pick me out those with the best pictures’, Sim commands his servant in Randolph’s unpublished play The Drinking Academy, unpublished but probably composed in the 1620s (Tannenbaum and Rollins 1930: 22, 459–60). We have similarly passed over the huge number of small engraved portraits of monarchs and other notables which, in fact, constitute the greater part of all the engravings catalogued in Hind’s three volumes, but perhaps the following notice will serve as a reminder of how very precarious and new is our knowledge of the prints of this era. It is not surprising that there should have been considerable interest in any foreign suitor for the hand of the Virgin Queen, and in his Annals under the year 1581, John Stowe recorded how By this time his picture, state, and titles were advanced in every stationer’s shop and many other public places, by the name of Frauncis of Valois, Duke of Alençon, Heir Apparent of France, and brother to the French King; but he was better known by the name of Monsieur unto all sorts of people than by all his other titles.

Here we learn both of the popularity of the portrait print and of the ready and prompt availability of topical likenesses at stationers’ shops – all the more chastening, then, to reflect that not a single English print of the suitor Elizabeth called her ‘little frog’ has come down to us. In 1596, however, in his provocative work which takes as its ostensible subject a flush-toilet (a ‘jakes’), punningly entitled The Metamorphosis of Ajax, John Harington recalled a famous political cartoon, the Flanders Cow, which must have enjoyed considerable popularity throughout Europe c.1583, and which depicted the Netherlands as a cow being fed, ridden, milked, and squabbled over by representatives of several European countries, including the same ‘Monsieur d’Alençon who … would have pulled her back by the tail, and she [de]filed his fingers …’. With slight variants in the personnel, so as to include Leicester (who had been forced to abandon his ill-fated expedition to the Netherlands in December 1587) milking the animal, it was issued as an engraving, probably in Cologne, in 1588, and was surely known in England too, for two contemporary paintings of this scene survive – one with accompanying English verses, beginning ‘Not long time since I saw a cow / Did Flanders represent’, and ending, ‘The cow did shit in Monsieur’s hand / While he did hold her tail’ (Bath and Jones 1997).

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It is doubtless not how the duc d’Alençon would have chosen to be remembered by history, but we in England, have been shamefully careless of our visual history, and ‘Monsieur’ is fortunate that any likeness of him has come down to us at all. It is to be hoped that there is now a new awareness of the importance of the visual heritage of the English Renaissance abroad, and a realisation, on the part of younger students of the period, at least, however well read, that a proper understanding of the culture of the period is not possible so long as culture is understood to be coterminous with literature.

Notes 1 2

3

4 5

6 7 8 9

10

11

12

Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, Douce Prints W.1.2. (27). Pliego de 5 de hombres vestidos; but despite the literal meaning – ‘five clothed men’ – this is precisely how the Columbus taxonomy would describe FOUR clothed men and one naked woman! ‘An arrangement or disposition of five objects so placed that four occupy the corners, and the fifth the centre, of a square or other rectangle; a set of five things arranged in this manner’ (OED). Whythorne 1961. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Cabinet des Estampes, Collection Hennin, 2453. British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings, 1937, 9–15, 353. OED s.v. ‘prefer’ I.1.c – a considerable postdating of this sense, last citation dated 1605. See . They survive uniquely as British Library, 669.f.26 [65] and 669.f.26 [64], respectively (BM Sat Cat 980 and 982). I know them only as found in the Cassiano album entitled (quite misleadingly) Dutch Drolls in the Royal Collection at Windsor (thanks to Mark McDonald of the British Museum). I am grateful to Simon Turner for drawing this sheet to my attention, which survives uniquely in the Kunstsammlungen der Fürsten zu Waldburg-Wolfegg. Oxford, Ashmolean Museum, Douce Prints W.1.2 21. An impression of the bottom two

ovals only survives in the British Museum, i.e. Department of Prints and Drawings 1866,0623.37 = Pennington 1982: 1747. I am grateful to Simon Turner for drawing my attention to this fragment, which he believes, may have been engraved by Barlow. 13 Reappearing at the time of the Popish Plot, the heads may be seen, for example, illustrated in Bateman’s The Doom Warning All Men to the Judgement (1582), sig. S1v. 14 See ‘Puzzle of the Month’ at , and the item for May 2001 – an oval box (there dated c.1660), in and on which all four of the present prints are pasted – clearly the original function of such sheets. 15 A very rare word, defined in OED as ‘the preceding context of a passage’ and first cited from 1641; if my conclusions as to the date of this print can be accepted, this thus constitutes an antedating of the word. 16 See OED s.v., sense 3, ‘a person of devouring or destructive propensities’, citing Bale, English Votaries, i (1546), 5b, Theyr Byshoppes, Priestes, and Monkes, with other disguised Locustes of the same generation, and Fleming, Continuation of Holinshed’s Chronicle, III (1587), 1323/2, Certeine locusts of the popes seminaries arriuing in England, and dispersing themselues into such places [etc.]; see also Pierce 2009. 17 In 1613 the duke of Saxe-Weimar noted in his journal a large number of the pictures and other artworks to be seen in the English royal palaces, including Whitehall, where he recorded the Exploits of Count Maurice Engraven on Copper (Rye 1865: 165).

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18

Thanks to the kindness of Susanna Berger I am now able to say that this was a third print designed by Meurisse and engraved by Gaultier. The bottom half (only) survives in a Latin version entitled Artificiosa totius Moralis Philosophiae tabella in the British Library (shelfmark 1750.c.1.(3)). Additionally, the Museo Francescano di Roma holds an impression of the French version with the title Tableau industrieux de toute la philosophie morale (MF Stampe I-N-1/7, e altra copia stampata su seta MF inv. nr. 674/1b). 19 It was reissued six years later by the same publisher in a two-sheet version re-engraved by a different artist, i.e. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Cabinet des Estampes, Collection Hennin no. 1307; see The French Renaissance in Prints from the Bibliothèque nationale de France, exhibition catalogue, Los Angeles (1994), cat. no. 174. 20 Including Roger Bacon, William of Ockham, Alexander of Hales, St Bonaventure, Jacob de Bassolis, and Francisco Suárez. 21 An impression in the British Museum, Department of Prints and Drawings, reg. no. T.15.60; an undated state in the National

22 23 24

25

26

Library of Medecine, Bethesda, Maryland, USA. Impression in the Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich. Uniquely in London, British Library, 1856.g.16(4). Earlier texts of the riddle alone may be found in a manuscript jotting datable to 1581 made in a Scots Register of Signatures – cit. Sanderson 1987: 89 – and in the famous (and also Scots) Bannatyne manuscript (1568). Harms 1980: IV, 19, 34. Harms was evidently unaware that there is a closely related panel painting dating from the second quarter of the seventeenth century in the Rijksmuseum Het Catharijneconvent, Utrecht, reproduced and discussed by P.D. in Geloof en satire anno 1600 [ex. cat.] (Utrecht, 1981), 43–7. I am grateful to John H. Robinson and other members of an internet chat group for answering my query so fully. I should add that Up Tails All is referred to as a dance-tune in Jonson’s Every Man out of his Humour (1600). Simpson 1966: 727–8, notes two post-1660 ballads sung to this tune.

References and Further Reading Aston, M. (1993). The King’s Bedpost: Reformation and Iconography in a Tudor Group Portrait. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bath, M. 1994. Speaking Pictures. London: Longman. Bath, M. and M. Jones (1997). ‘Dirtie Devises: Thomas Combe and the Metamorphosis of Ajax (with an appendix on The Flanders Cow)’. In P. M. Daly and D. S. Russell (eds.), Emblematic Perceptions: Essays in Honor of William S. Heckscher (pp. 7–32). Baden-Baden: Valentin Koerner. Brückner, W. (1969). Populäre Druckgraphik Europas: Deutschland vom 15. bis zum 20. Jahrhundert. Munich: Georg D. W. Callwey. Capp, B. (1994). The World of John Taylor the WaterPoet, 1578–1653. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Daly, P. and M. Silcox (1989). ‘William Marshall’s Emblems (1650) rediscovered’. English Literary Renaissance, 19, 346–74.

Davies, M. H. (1979). La Gravure dans les brochures anglaises illustrées de la Renaissance anglaise 1535– 1646. Lille: Université de Lille III. Globe, A. (1985). Peter Stent: London Printseller, circa 1642–1665. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Gowing, L. (1993). ‘Gender and the language of insult in early modern London’. History Workshop, 35, 1–21. Griffiths, A. (1998). The Print in Stuart Britain 1603–1689. London: British Museum Press. Harms, Wolfgang (1980). Deutsche illustrierte Flugblätter des 16. und 17. Jahrhunderts. Munich: Kraus International Publications. Hind, A. M. (1952–64). Engraving in England. Part I The Tudor Period; Part 2 James I; Part III Charles I, 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

The English Broadside Print Hodnett, A. E. (1973). English Woodcuts 1480– 1535: Oxford: Oxford University Press. Johnson, G. D. (1986). ‘John Trundle and the book-trade 1603–26’. Studies in Bibliography, 39, 177–99. Jonassen, F. B. (1991). ‘The meaning of Falstaff ’s allusion to the Jack-a-Lent in The Merry Wives of Windsor’. Studies in Philology, 88, 46–68. Jones, Malcolm (1991). ‘Folklore motifs in late medieval art III: erotic animal imagery’. Folklore, 102, 192–219. Jones, Malcolm (1999). ‘The horn of suretyship’. Print Quarterly, 16, 219–28. Jones, Malcolm (2001a). ‘English broadsides – I’, Print Quarterly, 18, 149–63. Jones, Malcolm (2001b). ‘The Lambe speaketh … an addendum’. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 63, 287–94. Jones, Malcolm (2002a). ‘Engraved works recorded in the Stationers’ Registers, 1562–1656: a listing and commentary’. Journal of the Walpole Society, 64, 1–68. Jones, Malcolm (2002b). The Secret Middle Ages. Stroud: Sutton Publishing. Jones, Malcolm (2004). ‘Fiddlers on the roof and friars with foxtails’. In W. Mieder (ed.), The Netherlandish Proverbs. An International Symposium on the Pieter Brueg(h)els (pp. 163–94). Burlington: University of Vermont. Jones, Malcolm (2009). ‘ “The Common Weales Canker Wormes”, or the “Locusts Both of Chvrch and States”: emblematic identities in a late Jacobean print’. In M. Hunter (ed.), Printed Images in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Interpretation. Burlington, VT. Larwood, Jacob and John Camden Hotten (1866). The History of Signboards. London: John Camden Hotten. Lillywhite, B (1972). London Signs. London: George Allen & Unwin. Luborsky, R. S. and E. M. Ingram (1998). A Guide to English Illustrated Books 1536–1603. Tempe, AZ: Arizona State University. McDonald, M. (ed.) (2004). The Print Collection of Ferdinand Columbus, London: British Museum Press. Marotti, A. F. (1968–9). ‘Donne’s Love’s Progress, ll. 37–8, and Renaissance bawdry’, English Language Notes, 6, 24–5.

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O’Connell, Sheila (1998). ‘The Peel Collection in New York’. Print Quarterly, 15 66–7. O’Connell, Sheila (1999a). The Popular Print in England 1550–1850. London: British Museum Press. O’Connell, Sheila, with D. Paisey (1999b). ‘This Horryble Monster … an Anglo-German broadside of 1531’. Print Quarterly, 16, 57–63. Pennington, R. (1982). A Descriptive Catalogue of the Etched Work of Wenceslaus Hollar 1607– 1677. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pierce, Helen (2009). Unseemly Pictures: Graphic Satire and Politics in Early Modern England. New Haven: Yale University Press. Plomer, H. R. (1916). ‘Some Elizabethan book sales’. The Library, 3rd ser., 7, 318–29. Rye, W. B. (1865). England as seen by foreigners in the days of Elizabeth and James the First. London. Saffrey, H. D. (1994). ‘L’Homme microcosme dans une estampe médico-philosophique du seizième siècle’. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 57, 89–122. Sanderson, M. H. B. (1987). Mary Stewart’s People: Life in Mary Stewart’s Scotland. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press. Schuckman, C., and D. de Hoop Scheffer (eds.) (1990). Adriaen van de Venne to Johannes Verkolje I [New Dutch Hollstein XXXV]. Amsterdam: M. Hertzberger. Shesgreen, S. (1990). The Criers and Hawkers of London, Aldershot: Scolar. Shesgreen, S. (1992). ‘The cries of London in the seventeenth century’. Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, 86, 269–94. Simpson, Claude M. (1966). British Broadside Ballad and its Music. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Smith, Rowena J. (1998). ‘The Lambe Speaketh … an English Protestant satire’. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 61, 261–7. Stephens, F. G. (1870). Catalogue of Personal and Political Satires in the British Museum, vol. 1. London: British Museum. Tannenbaum, S. A. and H. E. Rollins (1930). T. Randolph: The Drinking Academy, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Thompson, R. (1979). Unfit for Modest Ears, London: Macmillan. Tilley, Morris Palmer (1950). A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth

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Centuries. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Trevilian, Thomas (2000). The Great Book of Thomas Trevilian, ed. N. Barker, 2 vols. London: Roxburghe Club. Watt, T. (1991). Cheap Print and Popular Piety 1550–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wells-Cole, A. (1997). Art and Decoration in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Whythorne, Thomas (1961). The Autobiography of Thomas Whythorne, ed. J. M. Osborn. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wilson, F. P. (1959). ‘Illustrations of social life II: a butcher and some social pests’. Shakespeare Survey, 12, 107–8. Young, A. (1995). Emblematic Flag Devices of the English Civil Wars 1642–1660. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

34

The Writing of Travel Peter Womack

I ran it through, even from my boyish days To th’ very moment that he bade me tell it; Wherein I spoke of most disastrous chances: Of moving accidents by flood and field, Of hair-breadth scapes i’th’ imminent deadly breach, Of being taken by the insolent foe And sold to slavery, of my redemption thence And portance in my travel’s history; Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle, Rough quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touch heaven, It was my hint to speak – such was my process – And of the Cannibals that each other eat, The Anthropophagi, and men whose heads Do grow beneath their shoulders. These things to hear Would Desdemona seriously incline; But still the house affairs would draw her thence, Which ever as she could with haste despatch, She’d come again, and with a greedy ear Devour up my discourse. Which I observing, Took once a pliant hour, and found good means To draw from her a prayer of earnest heart That I would all my pilgrimage dilate, Whereof by parcels she had something heard, But not intentively … My story being done, She gave me for my pains a world of sighs; She swore, in faith ’twas strange, ’twas passing strange; ’Twas pitiful, ’twas wondrous pitiful … She loved me for the dangers I had passed, And I loved her that she did pity them. This only is the witchcraft I have used. (Othello, 1.3.126–67)

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Othello’s speech is not directly about travel, but about the discourse of travel. Comfortably arrived, at leisure in a domestic scene, the traveller describes his exposure to the perils and chances of the big world. As he tells this story about the telling of his story, it turns out that he told it twice, once to Brabantio, and then again to Desdemona, who had only caught bits of it the first time. Explaining this entails a sketchy third account, evoking yet again, this time for the Venetian senators, the exotic adventures that are the origin of the series of narrations. The traveller’s story, then, is a repeatable performance; it is as the exponent of a distinctive discourse that Othello acquires his dramatic substance and allure. Shakespeare constructs this performance by assembling an anthology of conventional tropes: the commonplaces, you could say, of the representation of travel. Most obviously, the traveller tells of wonders: ‘’twas strange, ’twas passing strange’. He has been to places that are strange in the simple early modern sense of the word – foreign – but then that sense has others attached to it – bizarre, other, contrary to expectation. As the bearer of strange news, he has an obscure magic: the allusion to witchcraft is not only a sideswipe at Brabantio’s accusation, but also a reflection on the narrative’s capacity to enchant Desdemona. Drawn repeatedly to the discourse, greedily devouring it, moved by it to sighs and incoherent responses, she seems in a more than casual sense to be under its spell. The traveller appears as someone who has seen not only other countries but also other worlds, and returns with some of their power to fascinate and disturb. That was Desdemona’s response to the performance, but there is also Iago’s: ‘Mark me with what violence she first loved the Moor, but for bragging and telling her fantastical lies’ (2.1.225). Precisely because the traveller has been so far away, his story is uncheckable; so the sense of him as a carrier of numinous intimations is close to the rougher proverbial sense of him as a liar. This suspicion, crudely voiced by Othello’s enemy, infiltrates his own speech too. The opening encodes the traveller’s insistence on his own truthfulness. Giving Brabantio the story of his life ‘to th’ very moment that he bade me tell it’, he offers himself as his own authentication: the man to whom all these wonderful things happened stands before you. But the Anthropophagi and the misplaced heads are bywords for the implausibility of travellers’ tales, and in the curious phrases with which he introduces them – ‘it was my hint to speak – such was my process’ – Othello refers them not so much to experience as to genre (this is the kind of thing one says when telling this kind of story). The ideas of authenticity and fabrication go together: the writing of travel in the period makes particular truth claims and is open to particular accusations of falsehood. Besides this doubt about whether the traveller is to be believed or not, there is also uncertainty about whether he is to be admired or pitied. Iago thinks that Othello was bragging, and his story does suggest that his having been so far and seen so much makes him a man to love. Travel confers superiority; Desdemona’s Venetian suitors seem rather feeble by comparison. But the conclusion insists on the idea of pity. In conformity with an assumption that goes back to the Odyssey, travelling appears

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as exposure to the ‘disastrous chances’ of the world. The traveller is a victim of misfortune; the happy man stays at home and enjoys his inheritance in peace. The traveller is thus hero, victim, and, in a further image which contains elements of both, pilgrim: when Othello saw that Desdemona was drawn to his tales, he ‘found good means / To draw from her a prayer of earnest heart / That I would all my pilgrimage dilate’. Any Christian life is a pilgrimage in the sense that the soul wanders the earth in search of grace, an overtone strengthened here by the casual proximity of the word ‘prayer’. And the idea is yet more pointed when the life in question is literally one of travel and vicissitude. Protestant English travellers were of course not literally pilgrims, but the metaphor hangs around their differently motivated journeys, inconclusively suggesting that travelling brings one closer to God. Characteristically, then, Shakespeare provides us with an abstract and brief chronicle of the figure of the traveller: bearer of strange news; truth-teller; liar; victim of misfortune; object of admiration; servant of God. By taking up some of these contradictory ‘hints to speak’, we can find our way around the genre.

Bearer of Strange News The appetite for foreign marvels shown by Desdemona is a conventional object of mockery: The brainsick youth that feeds his tickled ear With sweat-sauced lies of some false traveller, Who hath the Spanish Decades red a while; Or whetstone leasings [fabrications] of old Mandeville …1

The satirist Joseph Hall is here, as often, better at bibliography than at rhyme. The ‘Spanish Decades’ are the De Novo Orbe of Pietro Martire d’Anghiera, partially translated by Richard Eden in 1555 as The Decades of the New World. And Sir John Mandeville’s Travels, a fabulous compilation originally written in the fourteenth century, was still being excerpted and reprinted at the end of the sixteenth, and mentions many of the phenomena Hall goes contemptuously on to itemise: the bird that can carry off large animals, the nation of people with no heads, and the inevitable cannibals. The humanist contempt is partly a matter of class: travellers’ tales are part of the gaudy repertoire of vulgar credulity. But there is also a more sophisticated way of reading ‘old Mandeville’, which is to note that in his day the theory of a nation beyond the western ocean was no less fantastical than the men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders – and yet it has turned out to be the case. There are no good grounds, then, for dogmatism about what can and cannot possibly exist: Who ever heard of th’Indian Peru? Or who in venturous vessell measured

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This is Spenser arguing the conceivability of ‘the happy land of Faery’, and although the argument is logical, it moves in a surprising direction. After all, the allegorical terrain of The Faerie Queene does not exist in the same way as America, and a reader who thought it did would be misunderstanding the poem. The point is Platonic rather than topographical: the fact that the Americas were there all the time when no one had seen them is an emblem of invisible reality, of a realm that exists for the mind as opposed to the senses. But then to affiliate the newly discovered parts of the world to this counter-empirical logic is to apprehend them as, precisely, intellectual entities. Spenser’s argument speaks a formation in which the distinction between real and imaginary places is not as decisive as it would become. An encyclopedia of the kingdoms and republics of the world, published in Paris in 1585, included a section about Utopia.2 As Mary Campbell shows in pointing this out, the compiler is not naive: he knows that Utopia is a fiction, but includes it because he thinks its description offers his readers something new and beneficial. The objects of geographical and philosophical knowledge are not necessarily being placed in separate compartments (Campbell 1988). Thus Montaigne, in his famous essay ‘On Cannibals’, is contemplating both. His Indians form a critique of European civilisation in the noble simplicity of their lives, their incomprehension of social inequality, and so on. ‘Surely in respect of us these are very savage men: for either they must be so in good sooth, or we must be so indeed: There is a wondrous distance between their form and ours’ (Montaigne 1908: I, 268). The comparison constitutes the image: it is as the opposite of us, or as our reprovingly purified reflection, that the ‘cannibals’ impress themselves upon us. Our brazen age makes theirs golden, and a series of classical quotations confirms that Montaigne perfectly understands the literary trope he is working. But then the essay is also sprinkled with earnests of empirical enquiry – Montaigne stresses the trustworthy character of his informant, or mentions that one or two objects from the culture he describes are in front of him as he writes. Apparently he is concerned, after all, to show that his details are not merely speculative. Two modes of writing the exotic – fictional reflection and factual report – remain in tension, set playfully against one another by the essay form. Even in more utilitarian contexts, strange places still resolve into strange messages about familiar places. Take for instance the work of Giles Fletcher, who served on an embassy to Russia in 1588, and later published the tract Of the Russe Common Wealth

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(1591). Its purpose is informative: based on direct observation, it describes an empire of some political and mercantile importance to Elizabethan England. What it also becomes, however, as Fletcher develops his analysis, is a contrast with the state of things at home: this ‘true and strange face of a tyrannical state’ will, Fletcher hopes, increase Elizabeth’s happiness ‘in that you are a Prince of subjects, not of slaves, that are kept within duty by love, not by fear’ (Fletcher 1964: 169–70). Governed by these antitheses, Fletcher’s account of the Russian polity, for all its empirical detail, develops an internal logic. The unrestrained power of the emperor leads to an absence of public justice; consequently, no one has any security for their property; consequently, the people have no incentive to enrich themselves, and arts and manufactures decay. Again, the oppression of the people causes their oppressors to look on them as potential enemies, and therefore to desire their weakness, so education is almost non-existent, and organised religion corrupt and superstitious. These pervasive themes of slavery and fear produce the image of a systematic opposite of the good commonwealth. Fletcher’s casual pairing, ‘true and strange’, starts to seem distinctly charged. ‘Strange’ because it is the reverse of what is right and natural, but then also ‘true’ because every place name and anecdotal instance insists that this is not, as it increasingly appears to be, a hypothetical worst case in political theory, but an actual country. As in Montaigne, idea and information come together, and it is that coincidence that renders the image wonderful. The shaping power of the idea is felt most in the chapter about the Tartars, the nomadic tribes who are the Russian empire’s main adversaries. Although they appear to Fletcher as barbarous and Islamic, whereas the Russian commonwealth is civilised and Christian, his account of them takes on the outlines of a paradoxical idealisation: their poverty can be read as a disdain for riches, their violence as a form of directness in contrast with Russian deviousness, their fierce exclusiveness as an admirable fidelity amongst themselves. The source of this surprising romance of the steppes is the demonisation of Moscow: that the Russian centre embodies political vice fashions the otherwise unpromising material of its barbaric margin into an exemplar of virtue. These utopian and dystopian projections inform a great deal of early modern travel writing, but they have most free play in the texts whose relation to their materials is most disinterested. However, much of the news that reached England from foreign lands came with readily identifiable interests attached. This had a complex bearing on another of the categories suggested by Othello: that of truth.

Truth-Teller The most significant single figure in Elizabethan travel writing is Richard Hakluyt, who devoted some twenty years to collecting about 200 accounts of global travel by Englishmen. Many of these appeared in what are effectively successive editions of a steadily expanding book, from the single-volume Divers Voyages to America in 1582 to the immense Principal Navigations, Voyages, Traffics, and Discoveries of the English Nation,

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published in three volumes in 1598–1600. Even this did not use up all Hakluyt’s material: more was published in 1625 by his disciple and successor Samuel Purchas in Hakluytus Posthumus, a still larger collection which also contains many journeys collected or described by Purchas himself.3 Hakluyt was neither a traveller nor a writer but a sort of clearing house. Expeditions consulted him for guidance before they left, and brought him further material when they returned. He therefore claims that his stories are reliable because they are personal reports: I have referred every voyage to his author, which both in person hath performed and in writing hath left the same: for I am not ignorant of Ptolemy’s assertion, that peregrinationis historia [the story of travel], and not those weary volumes bearing the titles of universal cosmography … is that which must bring us to the certain and full discovery of the world.4

Academic cosmographies lead to no certain discovery because they merely rehearse what has already been written; their ‘authorities’ are canonical authors. Hakluyt’s typical informant, on the other hand, is an ‘author’ himself, who has the authority not of erudition but of experience. This commitment to the circumstantial is inscribed on Hakluyt’s collection in the form of its miscellaneity. He accepts anything that relates to voyaging, and arranges it mechanically, grouping documents by regions of the world, and, within the regions, chronologically, so that, for example, the documents relating to Alexandria include both an exciting story about imprisonment and escape from the Turks, and a memorandum setting out the conditions that govern trading in the port (Hakluyt 1903–5: V, 153–67, 272–4). Or again, Sir Walter Ralegh’s description of Guyana, one of the few Hakluyt texts with any literary reputation, comes immediately after a collection of accounts of the Caribbean which are essentially ‘rutters’ – that is, verbal route-checks written down as aids to navigation: texts which are not designed to be read at home, but to be used on the spot (Hakluyt 1903–5: X, 280–337, 338–431). Victorian ideologists sought to establish Hakluyt as ‘the prose epic of the English nation’, but the structure of his book resists expressive and narrative readings.5 It is not so much an epic as a database. Of course, that does not mean that the Voyages form an ideologically innocent text. But it does mean that its purposes are felt not so much rhetorically or poetically as functionally. Hakluyt was a lobbyist, pressing for investment in exploratory and colonial enterprises and for better teaching of the art of navigation. These themes were nationalistic: nearly all Hakluyt’s work was done during the Anglo-Spanish War (1585–1605), and its repeated implication is that England has the resources, the opportunity, and the right to acquire overseas possessions that would match Spain’s American empire.6 Publishing accounts of voyages furthers this project, honouring the voyagers of the past, and offering encouragement and information to those of the future.

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This function tends to force the distinction between actual and imaginary places, which the philosophical writing of travel could defer. This is partly because some of the readers will follow in the author’s footsteps, rendering his story checkable in detail, and so depriving him of the traveller’s traditional licence to embroider his tale. But also, underlying this possibility, there is the economic context. Voyages could not be based on geographical curiosity alone: they presupposed investors, who needed to estimate probable returns. Hakluyt’s information guides such judgements; embroidering the tale therefore becomes commercially problematic. A writer might rearrange events to improve their narrative coherence, or to bring out a classical parallel, or to enforce a moral lesson, and any of these effects might be regarded as encompassing higher kinds of truth than mere circumstantial accuracy. But such felicities might mislead readers who have a practical interest in the detail. Thus Hakluyt’s colonial project imposes on his material a newly powerful demand for the factual. But the same pressures generated distortions. After all, most of the expeditions Hakluyt commemorates ended in failure. Repeated searches for the Northwest Passage failed to find it; hopes of gold and silver mines were not realised; attempts to hurt Spanish sea-power were inconclusive. Under these circumstances, the need for accurate information was at odds with colonial and mercantile promotion; the record of a voyage was often designed not only to brief future travellers, but also to pacify past investors and arouse the interest of new ones. These tensions, which run through the compilation as a whole, find readable form in Sir Walter Ralegh’s pamphlet, The Discovery of the Large, Rich, and Beautiful Empire of Guyana.7 Ralegh explored the Orinoco in search of gold and returned empty-handed: the text is an apologia. Its most obvious strategy is the idea that El Dorado was just out of reach. A few days up river, beyond the limits of what the expedition could safely undertake, was ‘the first town of apparelled and rich people’ (Ralegh 1997: 182), where the ‘discovery’ would have really begun. The whole narrative is shaped by this threshold imagery; with whatever enterprise Ralegh presses on into the interior, he remains on the fringes of his true object; the people he actually meets are borderers of a golden empire. Moreover, the prospect of possessing this empire is presented as the very reason for the empty hands. For example, Ralegh hears about a cacique (native prince) who recently died and was buried with a finely wrought gold chair. Clearly if this had been excavated and brought home, it would have helped to substantiate Ralegh’s account; ‘but if we should have grieved them in their religion at the first, before they had been taught better, and have digged up their graves, we had lost them all’ (Ralegh 1997: 194). Similar considerations interdict an immediate attack: I thought it very evil counsel to have attempted it at that time, although the desire of gold will answer many objections; but it would have been in mine opinion an utter overthrow to the enterprise, if the same should be hereafter by her Majesty attempted: for then (whereas now they have heard we were enemies to the Spaniards and were sent by her Majesty to relieve them) they would as good cheap have joined with the Spaniards at our return as to have yielded unto us, when they had proved that we came both for

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one errand, and that both sought but to sack and spoil them. But as yet our desire of gold or our purpose of invasion is not known unto those of the empire. (Ralegh 1997: 184)

The conditional constructions hold a tortuous pathos. Ralegh has described his courteous dealings with the people he met: they offered him hospitality, and he assured them that he served a powerful empress who wished only their good. Now he admits that he was lying to them: actually, we are just like the rapacious Spaniards, except that we are concealing our purpose until the time is ripe, so as to extract as much advantage as possible from the Guyanans’ friendship before betraying it. It could be thought a shameful admission. But in practice nobody in England is likely to reproach Ralegh for lying to his American contacts. The real suspicion is that he is lying to his readers – that the reason he has returned with no gold is that there is none, or even that he was never there. It is to buttress his credibility as a narrator that he presents himself as a ruthless machiavellian. And even as he develops this persona, he makes clear the exposure of his party to the vastness of the territory he speaks so easily of controlling: lost, dirty, frequently dependent on their future subject peoples for enough food to stay alive, the Englishmen appear as the manipulators of the situation only by a huge leap of imagination. So the ostensible brutality of Ralegh’s waiting game reads ultimately like a rationalisation: is he really as vicious and powerful as he wishes us to believe? A further possibility appears within this ambiguous suspension. What is being deferred, Ralegh says, is the satisfaction of the ‘desire of gold’. Not that he holds himself superior to this desire: on the contrary, he evokes it with relish: The common soldier shall here fight for gold, and pay himself instead of pence, with plates of half a foot broad, whereas he breaketh his bones in other wars for provant and penury. Those commanders and chieftains that shoot at honour and abundance shall find there more rich and beautiful cities, more temples adorned with golden images, more sepulchres filled with treasure, than either Cortez found in Mexico, or Pizarro in Peru; and the shining glory of this conquest will eclipse all those so far extended beams of the Spanish nation. (Ralegh 1997: 194)

What this vision both intimates and obscures is that the deferred moment – the time and place when the ‘shining glory’ will be realised – is one of catastrophic violence. The commoners will earn their gold by fighting, and the ambitious commanders will find the temples and sepulchres and sack them. ‘Guyana’, Ralegh famously concludes, ‘is a country that hath yet her maidenhead’ (Ralegh 1997: 196): unquestionably his plan is that the English rape her before the Spaniards get the chance. Then the large, rich, and beautiful empire of Guyana will be pillaged, but for the moment it is still intact: the beauty of its abundant promise can still be enjoyed, the dignified natives one meets can still be treated honourably. The attempt to conquer the world is saved by its failure from the gross criminality that would constitute its success. The utopian possibility, then, is that we could somehow really prove to be different from the

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Spaniards: that the deceitful words addressed to the Indians could magically turn out to be true. Thus, despite its densely worked observations of people and places, Ralegh’s account ends up more counter-factual than empirical. Bragging and telling fantastical lies, he both substantiates and protects the golden world, which he has not truly discovered, but intensely imagined.

Liar This reading of Ralegh as a utopian fantasist is of course not inevitable: one could return to the simpler view that he is a liar. I have noted the traditionally sceptical attitude to travellers’ tales; this is ingeniously enlarged and exploited in Joseph Hall’s parodic travel book Mundus Alter et Idem, which appeared in Latin in 1605–6, and in English, as The Discovery of a New World, in 1609. The narrator, Mercurius Britannicus (Mercury as both messenger and liar), travels to a great southern continent and finds it divided into four regions: Crapulia, where everyone is a glutton, Moronia, where everyone is a fool, Lavernia, where everyone is a thief, and Viraginia, which is governed by women. Of these, he explains with characteristic mock-informativeness, Moronia is the largest, the most uncultivated, and the most populous (Hall 1981: 69). Thus the world he discovers is ‘alter et idem’ – both other and the same – because its implausible strangeness is a transparent device for representing the follies and abuses of the world we know already. Much of the detail, then, is allegorical and has only an opportunistic relationship with travel writing proper. But Hall does keep neatly in touch with his alibi. The duke of Courroux, who is ‘the chief and exemplar of all tyrants’, for example, governs part of Moronia. His capital is ‘a vast city but completely made of wood, for the tyrant would permit it to be constructed from no other material, lest it be impossible to have it burned at his whim when the citizens have offended’ (Hall 1981: 84). The combustible city is a literary metaphor (Moronia is divided up according to the theory of humours, and everything in the tyrant’s province is aligned with choler, which is hot and dry), but it is also a parody of travel writing, not only in the unperturbed tone in which incredible atrocities are related,8 but also in the sense that it is directly taken from Fletcher, who reports that Ivan the Terrible was the exemplar of all tyrants, and also that Moscow is largely made of wood, and was indeed burned to the ground in a Tartar raid (Fletcher 1964). Moreover, Mercurius concludes his account of the choleric capital: But take heed, Reader, lest you be deceived. I learned these things only by hearsay, not daring to observe them in my own person … I remained at Pazzivilla, safe and taking good care of my skin, resolving that it was better in this circumstance for me to believe rather than experience. (Hall 1981: 86)

The cautious distinction between experience and belief, ostensibly a guarantor of reliability, actually works backwards: Mercurius both draws attention to his own cow-

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ardice and reminds the reader that the whole city is a fabrication. True to its upside-down logic, the narrative is at pains to seek disbelief. But then the specifically parodic point is to discredit, also, the truth-effects of real travel narratives. Mercurius fails to visit, not only the duke, but also the good places which lie beyond the dystopian lands he describes: Frugonia, the land of temperate enjoyment, has a claim to govern Crapulia but is unable to enforce it; Viraginia has a province called Eugynia, the land of good women, which is unfortunately very remote. These places, which would be worth visiting because they are clearly not ‘idem’, are the ones no one ever reaches. Ralegh’s threshold trope is cruelly caricatured. Underlying this Swiftian gesture is a suspicion, not just of the veracity of this or that traveller, but of the kind of truth that travellers offer. Whether travelling is a wise use of time is a live question within humanist education. A well-established rhetoric represents travel as a nursery of virtue, an education in men and manners, an instrument of civility.9 In a separate tract, Quo Vadis?, Hall dissents: And what if that man’s fancy shall call him to the stables of the great Mogul, or to the solemnities of Mecca, or to the Library of the Mountain of the Moon, will he be so far the drudge or lackey of his own imagination as to undertake this pilgrimage? (cit. McCabe 1982: 96)

Travelling around to see things is a perversion of the hierarchy of faculties: the mind and will, which should command, become the servants of the fancy and the eye. Everything of human importance can be learned at home. Mundus alter et Idem is consonant with this view: Mercurius sails to Crapulia on a ship called the Phantasia, and the fact that the ‘other’ world is so recognisable is itself part of the argument – there are no new worlds, only the same one with different costumes. Voyaging is childish at best, and at worst the impious search for an earthly paradise. In that sense, travellers are purveyors of falsehood even when they happen to be telling the truth.

Fool In the winter of 1609/10, the Scots traveller William Lithgow was wandering the Aegean in a Greek boat that was chased into a creek by two Turkish ships. Until the Turks went away, Lithgow was prevailed upon to stand sentinel each night on a promontory above the bay, an experience ‘which did invite my Muse to bewail the tossing of my toilsome life’ (Lithgow 1906: 99). The lengthy result begins: I wander in exile, As though my pilgrimage Were sweet comedian scenes of love Upon a golden stage. Ah I, poor I, distressed, Oft changing to and fro,

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Am forced to sing sad obsequies Of this my swan-like woe. A vagabonding guest, Transported here and there, Led with the mercy-wanting winds Of fear, grief, and despair.

This is a tableau of the traveller’s life considered as ‘wondrous pitiful’: Lithgow’s accidental situation – alone on a wintry headland at the behest of strangers – becomes a metaphor for an essential homelessness. The waves in front of him signify the tossing of his toilsome life, the winds the turbulence of his feelings. His journey is, like Othello’s, his ‘pilgrimage’, but this does not imply a sacred destination. Rather, the word gestures vaguely towards the conventional allegory of life itself as a pilgrimage, in which the soul will ‘wander in exile’ until it returns at last to its home in God. The unfortunate traveller, ‘a vagabonding guest’, offers himself as an emblem of the human condition in general. It is hard to take the offer altogether seriously. Lithgow was not literally an exile, but travelled by choice: although he hints darkly at injustices that drove him away from his native land, he also admits to an insatiable appetite for seeing the world. And although he does seem eventually to have met with disaster, being imprisoned and tortured in Malaga in 1620, his career before that was not marked by anything worse than the usual vicissitudes of early modern travel. His misery seems more like a literary convention: the traveller, like the lover, is a generic figure of woe, and like the lover’s, his woe is an identity he chooses as much as a misfortune that befalls him. In other words, he is striking a pose, a perception that is confirmed by the theatricality of the incident: the promontory is a stage, and Lithgow a character soliloquising upon it. The poem is in this respect the literary equivalent of the woodcuts that adorn his book, many of which depict him in striking costumes and circumstances: ‘The Author in the Libyan desert’, ‘The Author beset with six murderers in Moldavia’ (Lithgow 1906: 328, 364). For Lithgow as for Othello, the narrating of travel is among other things a dramatisation of himself. This theatricality affiliates Lithgow to a curious genre in which a journey is a kind of performance. Sometimes this was literally a matter of show business, like Will Kemp’s famous dance from London to Norwich in 1600. But it also includes two of the most self-conscious eccentrics of Jacobean society: Thomas Coryate and John Taylor. Coryate was a self-promoting and self-parodying figure on the fringes of Prince Henry’s household who in 1608 undertook a journey to Venice and back, largely on foot. His account appeared in 1611 as Coryate’s Crudities, a volume inflated by the commendatory verses which preface the text – well over a hundred pages of them, since he had become such a well-known character that writing mocking encomia on him was briefly very fashionable. Mostly devoid of geographical interest, the book works to construct a public character – loquacious, clownish, and pretentious: a poor learned fool. Travel is here the occasion of a bizarre process of self-making.

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John Taylor, the ‘Water Poet’, is a different but equally intriguing figure. He was a Thames boatman turned miscellaneous writer, whose large and often carnivalesque output included a series of unorthodox journeys. For example, for The Penniless Pilgrimage (1618) he walked to Scotland with no money, relying on the charity of people he met. This adventure was followed by ‘A Voyage in a Paper-boat from London to Quinborough’ (1619) and A very Merry Wherry-Ferry Voyage (1622) from London to York. Each trip was something between a public show and a bet: Taylor collected promises of subscription beforehand, to be paid when the journey appeared in print. The material fact of travelling was itself central to the deal: when Coryate got home he hung his much-resoled boots up in his village church, and Taylor, in ironic homage to Coryate, persuaded a citizen of York to buy the wherry as a memento. The journey in these cases is a stunt: it is a scheme for making money, it generates and depends on publicity, and its public appeal rests on the view of travel as a species of folly. Travelling any distance was after all a risky business, given the seventeenthcentury state of navigation, medicine, and law enforcement. When the journey is necessary, a reasonable person accepts the risks; but the man who travels pointlessly is doing something conspicuously and, as it were, festively daft. This pattern can be understood via something else that Lithgow has in common with Coryate and Taylor: all three write in two sharply distinct styles, one flatly informative – plain, itemising, fairly dull – and the other floridly and inorganically rhetorical, a sort of verbal fancy dress. The distinction to which this rather absurd alternation corresponds is between travelling as a practical activity and travelling as a performance. The traveller in the latter sense is literally making an exhibition of himself, and the powerful ethical categories for doing that – foolishness, vainglory, affectation – find their linguistic form in oratorical display. But just because these travellers are fools, they participate in the ambiguities that surround Renaissance folly, familiar from Erasmus and Shakespeare. They are fools because they lack the worldly wisdom that consists of staying at home and looking after one’s interests; so, in gratuitously incurring toil and danger, they appear as, precisely, disinterested and unworldly. At this point the echo of medieval pilgrimage is more than verbal: collective memory retains the suspicion that the wandering fool may find a blessing that is denied to those whose behaviour serves a rational purpose.

Servant of God Returning from these playful constructions of travel to Hakluyt’s planters and privateers reveals a transitional moment. On the eve of the globalisation of English interests, there is both a traditional ethos that constructs travel as folly, or sanctity, and a ‘venturing’ ethos, which picks it out as a route to profit and glory. In the past are the pilgrimages of medieval Christendom; in the future is the British empire. Travelling as a kind of turning away from the world is in tension with travelling as a way of accumulating knowledge of the world with a view to its ultimate domination.

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However, if the older paradigm is religious in its implicit contemptus mundi, the aggressive worldliness that beats against it cannot be described as secular. In Protestant terms, after all, to subjugate the inhabitants of newly discovered lands is to save them at once from their own heathen darkness and from the Catholicism of England’s principal rival. Accordingly, many of Hakluyt’s informants express their highly material concerns in religious language. The effect is to connect religion and the rise of capitalism with an unembarrassed directness that can startle even a modern reader schooled by Marx and Weber. In 1592, for example, during the Anglo-Spanish War, English ships captured the Madre de Dios, a Portuguese carrack returning from the East Indies with a fabulously rich cargo. The loot included valuable commercial information, and Hakluyt’s anonymous reporter remarks: And here I cannot but enter into the consideration and acknowledgement of God’s great favour towards our nation, who by putting this purchase into our hands hath manifestly discovered those secret trades and Indian riches, which hitherto lay strangely hidden, and cunningly concealed from us; whereof there was among some few of us some small and unperfect glimpse only, which now is turned into the broad light of full and perfect knowledge. Whereby it should seem that the will of God for our good is (if our weakness could apprehend it) to have us communicate with them in those East Indian treasures, and by the erection of a lawful traffic to better our means to advance true religion and his holy service. (Hakluyt 1903–5: VII, 116)

The obscure echo of Corinthians is only the finest touch in this suave benediction of piracy. But writing of this kind is not simply hypocritical. Rather, it records a habit of regarding political and economic imperatives as coded messages from God. Divine providence shepherds us in the right direction by opening up appropriate investment opportunities; it follows that one way of apprehending ‘the will of God for our good’ is to read it off the bottom line. That was a moment of unusual success. The congruence of piety and profit was harder to sustain in failure, as can be seen in one of Hakluyt’s most famous passages: the death of Sir Humphrey Gilbert. A tireless colonial promoter, Gilbert sailed to Newfoundland in June 1583 with a commission authorising him to claim any territory in North America not already in the possession of a Christian prince. Even before the expedition left port, internal dissensions reduced it to five ships, and further losses en route opened an unbridgeable gap between Gilbert’s aspirations and his resources. At the end of August he admitted defeat and turned for home with the two ships he had left, one of them a tiny and overloaded frigate in which he travelled himself. It was lost in a storm north of the Azores, and the last survivor limped into Falmouth a fortnight later. Its captain, Edward Hayes, supplied Hakluyt with an interestingly conflicted narrative. Writing both to honour the dead commander and to promote the project for which he gave his life, how should he interpret his failure? Albeit he had consumed much substance and lost his life at last, yet the mystery thereof we must leave unto God, and judge charitably both of the cause (which was just in all

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pretence) and of the person, who was very zealous in prosecuting the same, deserving honourable remembrance for his good mind, and expense of life in so virtuous an enterprise. (Quinn 1940: II, 389)

The trouble with this respectful attitude, for Hayes, is that if Gilbert’s virtue deserved divine endorsement, his failure suggests that ‘God doth resist all attempts’ to settle America, even well-intentioned ones. Reluctantly, therefore, he has to complicate Gilbert’s ‘honourable remembrance’ with an anatomy of his errors (that is, the particular considerations which may have caused God to withdraw his support). Accordingly, he starts to construct a sort of tragic protagonist, pre-eminent and honourable but flawed by rashness and prodigality. In the last act of the tragedy, failure becomes purgatorial. We see Gilbert sailing home, defeated, sitting on the deck with a book in his hand, and calling out, when Hayes’ ship is within earshot, ‘We are as near to Heaven by sea as by land’, a speech ‘well beseeming a soldier, resolute in Jesus Christ’. The memory of his imprudence is transcended by this ultimate piety and courage: For such is the infinite bounty of God, who from every evil deriveth good … For besides that fruit may grow in time of our travelling into these north-west lands, the crosses, turmoils, and afflictions, both in the preparation and execution of this voyage, did correct the intemperate humours, which before we noted to be in this gentleman … Then as he was refined, and made nearer drawing unto the image of God, so it pleased the divine will to resume him unto himself … (Quinn 1940: II, 423)

Gilbert is a soldier of Christ because of the daring and grandeur of his attempt to colonise the world; and yet his valedictory word is eloquent because of its gallant indifference to the whole enterprise: it does not finally matter where we go, because we can reach Heaven from anywhere. Thanks to disaster, the accents of the entrepreneur merge, after all, with those of the pilgrim. The uncertainty of voice is typical. For post-colonial readers it can be surprising; we expect colonial writing to sound more confident than this, to sit more surely in its racial and cultural superiorities. But that sort of ideological consistency still lay in the future, the companion of an imperial success that Ralegh and Gilbert could only promise. Renaissance English travel writing is if anything a pre-colonial discourse, enlivened by what it cannot yet master. Notes 1 2

Joseph Hall, Virgidemiarum, Lib. IV, Sat. vi, ll. 58–61, in Hall 1949. Gabriel Chappuys, L’Estat, description et gouvernement des royaumes et républiques du monde, tant anciennes que modernes (Paris, 1585), cit Campbell 1988: 213.

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The complicated bibliography of Hakluyt’s work is indispensably charted in Quinn 1974 and Pennington 1997. Hakluyt 1903–5: I, xxiv. This Edwardian edition is still the best way to get Hakluyt complete; a project to produce a new scholarly

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edition was launched in 2008. Hakluyt 1972 is a generous selection. The phrase is J. A. Froude’s, from an essay published in 1852. See Pennington 1974. Hakluyt’s own position is set out in the ‘Discourse of western planting’, written for the Privy Council in 1584, and not published until the nineteenth century. Available in Hakluyt 1935: I, 211–326. Ralegh’s account appears in Hakluyt, but is more accessible in two modern editions, Neil Whitehead’s for Manchester University Press (1997), and Joyce Lorimer’s for the Hakluyt Society (2006). Whitehead’s is an edition of the first printed text, Lorimer’s of the (autograph) manuscript. Both are richly introduced and annotated.

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For example, at random: ‘Though the king has a large increase of issue, the firstborn only rules. And to avoid all kind of civil dissension, the rest are not inhumanly murdered, according to the use of the Turkish government, but made blind with burning basins: and have otherwise all sort of contentment and regard fit for princes’ children’ (Anthony Sherley on Persia, in Parker 1999: 65). 9 An oration on this theme is printed in Coryate 1905: I, 122–48. For an application of it, see Profitable Instructions, describing what observations are to be taken by travellers in all nations (London, 1633), a book in handily tiny format which prints letters of advice to a young aristocratic traveller from Essex, Sidney and Davison.

References and Further Reading Brennan, Michael G. (2002). ‘The literature of travel’. In J. Barnard, and D. F. McKenzie (eds.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain (vol. 4, pp. 246–74). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Campbell, Mary C. (1988). The Witness and the Other World. Exotic European Travel Writing 400– 1600. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Capp, Bernard (1994). The World of John Taylor the Water-Poet 1578–1653. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Coryate, Thomas (1905). Coryate’s Crudities, 2 vols. Glasgow: James MacLehose & Sons. Ellison, James (2002). George Sandys: Travel, Colonialism and Tolerance in the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Fletcher, Giles (1964). The English Works of Giles Fletcher, the Elder, ed. Lloyd E. Berry. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Fuller, Mary C. (1995). Voyages in Print: English Travel to America, 1576–1624. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grafton, Anthony (1992). New Worlds, Ancient Texts: The Power of Tradition and the Shock of Discovery. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Greenblatt, Stephen J. (1991). Marvelous Possessions: The Wonder of the New World. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Greenblatt, Stephen J. (ed.) (1993). New World Encounters. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hadfield, Andrew (1998). Literature, Travel, and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance 1545– 1625. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hadfield, Andrew (ed.) (2001). Amazons, Savages & Machiavels: Travel and Colonial Writing in English, 1550–1630: An Anthology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hakluyt, Richard (1903–5). The Principal Navigations Voyages Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation, 12 vols. Glasgow: James MacLehose. Hakluyt, Richard (1935). The Original Writings and Correspondence of the Two Richard Hakluyts, ed. E. G. R. Taylor, 2 vols. London: Hakluyt Society. Hakluyt, Richard (1972). Voyages and Discoveries, ed., introd., and abridged Jack Beeching. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Hall, Joseph (1949). Collected Poems, ed. A. Davenport. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Hall, Joseph (1981). Another World and Yet the Same: Bishop Joseph Hall’s ‘Mundus Alter et Idem’, trans. and ed. John Millar Wands. New Haven: Yale University Press. Hulme, Peter (1986). Colonial Encounters: Europe and the Native Caribbean, 1492–1797. London: Methuen.

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Korte, Barbara (2000). English Travel Writing from Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations, trans. Catherine Matthias. London: Macmillan. Lithgow, William (1906). The Totall Discourse of the Rare Adventures and Painefull Peregrinations of long Nineteene Years Travayles. Glasgow: James MacLehose. McCabe, Richard A. (1982). Joseph Hall: A Study in Satire and Meditation. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Maczak, Antoni (1995). Travel in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Polity Press. Maquerlot, Jean-Pierre and Michèle Willems (eds). (1996). Travel and Drama in Shakespeare’s Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Montaigne, Michel de (1908). The Essays of Michael Lord of Montaigne, done into English by John Florio, ed. Thomas Seccombe, 4 vols. London: Grant Richards. Montrose, Louis (1991). ‘The work of gender in the discourse of discovery’. Representations, 33, 1–41. Nicholl, Charles (1995). The Creature in the Map: A Journey to El Dorado. London: Cape. Nicholl, Charles (1999). ‘Field of bones’. London Review of Books, 21/17, 3–7. Parker, Kenneth (1999). Early Modern Tales of Orient: A Critical Anthology. London: Routledge. Parr, Anthony (ed.) (1995). Three Renaissance Travel Plays: The Travels of the Three English Brothers, The Sea Voyage, The Antipodes. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Pennington, L. E. (1974). ‘Secondary works on Hakluyt and his circle’. In D. B. Quinn (ed.),

The Hakluyt Handbook (vol. 2, pp. 576–610). London: Hakluyt Society. Pennington, L. E. (ed.) (1997). The Purchas Handbook, 2 vols. London: Hakluyt Society. Quinn, D. B. (ed.) (1940). The Voyages and Colonising Enterprises of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, 2 vols. London: Hakluyt Society. Quinn, D. B. (1974). The Hakluyt Handbook, 2 vols. London: Hakluyt Society. Ralegh, Walter (1997). The Discovery of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana, ed. Neil L. Whitehead. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ralegh, Walter (2006). Sir Walter Ralegh’s ‘Discovery of Guiana’, ed. Joyce Lorimer. Aldershot: Ashgate, for the Hakluyt Society. Rubies, Joan-Paul (2000). Travel and Ethnology in the Renaissance: South India through European Eyes, 1250–1625. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Scanlan, Thomas (1999). Colonial Writing and the New World, 1583–1671: Allegories of Desire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sell, Jonathan P. (2006). Rhetoric and Wonder in English Travel Writing, 1560–1613. Aldershot: Ashgate. Strachan, Michael (1962). The Life and Adventures of Thomas Coryat. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Taylor, John (1973). All the Workes of John Taylor the Water Poet (London, 1630), facsimile reprint. Aldershot: Scolar Press. Todorov, Tzvetan (1984). The Conquest of America: the Question of the Other, trans. Richard Howard. New York: Harper and Row.

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England’s Experiences of Islam Stephan Schmuck

The Ottoman Sultan Mehmed III is said to have noticed England’s great distance from ‘Turkey’ and its forces on a map and remarked that ‘the Turks could expect neither good nor ill’ from England. According to Fynes Moryson’s account, the Sultan ‘wondered that the King of Spain did not dig it [England] with mattocks, and cast it into the sea’. By contrast, the ‘heroic virtues of Queen Elizabeth, her great actions in Christendom, and especially her prevailing against the Pope and King of Spain, her professed enemies made her much admired of the Emperor, [and] of his mother’, which they expressed in a series of ‘letters and gifts sent to her majesty from thence’ (Moryson 1903: 31). On the surface and considered in isolation, Moryson’s report reads as merely an encomium on Elizabeth. Yet this endorsement was by a powerful Muslim ruler whose empire was only matched by, and stood in fierce competition with, that of Spain. Barbara Fuchs has discussed the significance of this complex constellation of Islam, Spain, and England: she examines the intricate ways in which Islam’s role as an ‘external and internal threat’ challenged both Spain’s and England’s identity as empires in a context of nascent imperialism (Fuchs 2001: 3). Similarly here, it is with a closer inspection of the circumstances and contexts in which Moryson noted the sultan’s praise for Elizabeth, especially her ‘great actions in Christendom’, that this essay indicates the complex dynamic of the ways in which England interacted with and perceived Islam. By the end of the sixteenth century, the English were encountering the Islamic world at an unprecedented level. At home, translations of continental texts concerned with the Muslim world conveyed increasingly detailed information about the world beyond the eastern boundaries of Christendom, exotic goods ranging from spices to Turkish carpets arrived in London, and fictitious Muslim characters began to inhabit the English stage and imagination with greater frequency. Abroad, too, Englishmen and women encountered Muslims in their capacity as diplomats, merchants, travellers, or captives who returned home with news and goods from their journeys. As Nabil Matar has suggested, the inhabitants of England, Wales, Scotland, or Ireland were far

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more likely to meet a Muslim than a Native American (Matar 1998). One reason for this increased contact was that English merchants had begun to foster sustained commercial links with the Sublime Porte in the late 1570s. As a result there was an upsurge of interest in Muslim culture. By the time Moryson visited the empire – sometime between 1595 and 1597 – Elizabeth had been engaged in diplomatic correspondence with Muslim sovereigns, including the Ottoman Queen Mother, Safiye (1595–1603) (Andrea 2007a). When Moryson finally published the better part of his Itinerary in 1617, James I was on the throne. James, while not abandoning AngloOttoman commerce, had sought to distance his regime from Elizabeth’s close alliance in order to advance his reconciliation with Spain. Considered against this backdrop, Moryson’s earlier comment suggests a great deal more than simple praise for the queen from a Muslim ruler. The sultan’s appreciation of Elizabeth indicates some of the political, economical, and cultural investments that bridged the physical gap between England and the Ottoman empire. But what did sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Englishmen and women understand by Islam? By and large, Islam would have meant very little to them. In his History of the Turks (1603), the historian and translator Richard Knolles glosses the word Islami with ‘men of one mind, or at peace among themselves’ by virtue of their keeping ‘unity and agreement amongst them’ in matters of religion and state (Knolles: 1603: sig A5r). Much more familiar, however, would have been variations of the term ‘Mohammedan’ or ‘Mussulman’. In 1615 William Bedwell glosses the term ‘MUSLIM, or Mussliman’ with a reference to the prophet Muhammad, whom Bedwell describes as the ‘impostor and seducer of the Arabians or Saracens, the first author I mean and inventor of the Alkoran [Qur’an]’. More widely applied, however, was the term ‘Turk’, which could refer to Muslims and the inhabitants of the Ottoman empire alike, although the real Ottomans would not have referred to one another as ‘Turks’. ‘Saracens’ also denoted the people of Islam, but stemmed from an earlier moment in Christian–Muslim encounters and overlapped in its use with that of the ‘Turk’ in this period. Finally, the phrase ‘to turn Turk’ is important. The phrase indicates commensurability between Christians and Muslims, since to ‘turn’ could either mean to convert to Islam, or for a Christian to behave in certain ways, or to exhibit characteristics, closely associated with Muslim people. In Protestant England these could include aggression, lust, cruelty, sodomy, merciless violence, heresy (Vitkus 2000: 2). Nevertheless, England’s first encounters with Islam date from before the second half of the sixteenth century. Information on the Islamic world had reached England from the time of the Crusades. Largely limited to homilies and papal indulgences, the information conveyed owed more to the clergy’s and crusaders’ hostility towards Muslims than to any real desire to report correctly what they had observed. More extensive narratives by English pilgrims who had visited the Holy Land, such as Margery Kempe or Richard Torkington, complemented the already existing materials. But pilgrims’ reports often viewed their experiences in the Holy Land through the landscape of the New Testament, in which encounters with Muslims often van-

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ished. This is not to suggest that there was no interest in Islam and its people at all; on the contrary. A corpus of polemical texts on Islam was compiled by Peter the Venerable, abbot of Cluny, in the 1140s and 1150s, which also included a Latin translation of the Qur’an by the Englishman Robert Ketton (Tolan 2002: 155–65). However, these texts were limited to a literate, largely clerical readership. Indeed, it is important to note that a wider circulation of information on the Islamic world became possible only with the introduction of the printing press. Jonathan Riley-Smith described the Crusades as ‘penitential war pilgrimages’ that were fought not only in the Levant but also within western Europe (RileySmith 2008: 9). The idea of undertaking war against Muslims as an act of penance retained much of its power in the sixteenth century, and echoes in literary texts of the period. In Shakespeare’s 1 Henry IV, for instance, the king seeks absolution for his guilt of having usurped the throne of Richard II by going to crusade, ‘to chase these pagans in those holy fields’ (1.1.l.24). By the time the play was performed, the idea of crusade may have been still alive, but by then a realistic recovery of the Holy Land had itself become a fiction. Since England’s break with Rome under Henry VIII, and the continuing Reformation under Elizabeth, pilgrimage was abandoned. English travellers, like Henry Timberlake, might still refer to themselves as ‘pilgrims’ when they visited Jerusalem, but did so by emphasising their Protestant identity. Notably, the idea of crusade retained its currency and the rhetoric of Protestant monarchs such as Elizabeth, who would continue to pay lip service to war against Islam. Ironically, then, an officially Protestant England itself became the target of Catholic crusades several times in the sixteenth century (Tyerman 1988: 353, 359–62). For the earlier, pre-Elizabethan period, Gregory O’Malley has argued that English contacts with Muslims were ‘more varied, imaginative and discerning’ than has previously been acknowledged (O’Malley 2004: 155). One important medieval text that falls into this category was the Travels of Sir John Mandeville (c.1356). The account was extremely popular across Europe and was printed in English translation in 1496 and reprinted throughout the sixteenth century and included in the 1589 edition of Richard Hakluyt’s compendious travel-writing collection The Principal Navigations. By and large the author of the narrative offers a favourable representation of the Muslim faith. Despite varied and often positive representations, hostile portrayals of Islam also remained widespread, but they did not remain uncontested. In a revealing move the lawyer and historian John Selden addressed this point. He reminds his readers that ‘when our country-men came home from fighting with the Saracens’, they portrayed them as having ‘huge, big, terrible faces’ familiar to everyone from ‘the [inn-]sign of the Saracen’s Head’. But they did this, because they wanted to save ‘their own credits’ after a lost battle (Selden 1696: 182). Simultaneously Selden both reveals his countrymen’s hypocrisy and discloses their representational strategies. His gloss is significant also because it characterises another important dimension in England’s experiences of Islam: England encountered Islam not from a position of relative power, but from a position of relative weakness.

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Daniel Vitkus has suggested that the perception of Islam as a threat can explain the ongoing process of the demonisation of Muslims despite an increasing availability of new and accurate information on the Islamic world (Vitkus 1999: 208). Moryson’s account is a case in point. While his descriptions denigrate the Ottomans he encountered, he could not but acknowledge the empire’s relative position of power, exemplified by his observation of Sultan Mehmed III. On the other hand, Moryson’s brief note suggests the prestige and opportunities that could be gained from an association with this Islamic power. England’s experiences with Islam, therefore, do not simply follow a teleological route from crusade to commerce: they constitute a variety of views reflecting not one, but multiple and complex notions of Islam. These experiences are informed and shaped by (often contradictory) processes of restructuring and by renegotiating interests in and knowledge of the Islamic world that are accompanied and influenced by cultural and political changes at home. Gerald MacLean has termed this complex process of engagement by which England’s views of the Ottomans took shape as ‘imperial envy’ (Maclean 2007: 20). From this perspective, English experiences of Islam are never simply records of what English writers knew about or how they viewed the Islamic world. They are also always records of what English writers perceived as a lack in their own culture, including a regard for the Ottoman empire as a potential model for nascent British imperialism.

A Topography of Anxiety and Admiration Looking east, for English men and women in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, meant to acknowledge the presence of a powerful, expanding Islamic empire. Since the capture of Constantinople in 1453, Mehmed II and his successors had led successful campaigns against Christian territories, culminating in Suleyman’s siege of Vienna in 1529. Although England’s distance from the Ottoman empire made it an unlikely target for conquest, for many in England the threat was perceived as real. Initially these fears were reinforced by what little knowledge on Islam was available, usually a mix of romances about the Crusades, general folk memory, and public propaganda. By the end of the sixteenth century, and with the availability of more informed knowledge of the Muslim world, fears about Islamic expansion continued to be invoked with some immediacy, especially in the wake of recurring Ottoman incursions into south-eastern Europe. In a sermon given to Elizabeth in 1575, for example, the bishop of Chichester even plotted a potential trajectory for an Ottoman invasion of England via ‘Goleta to Spain’, reminding his audience how close England was to Spain. English translations of continental historiographies such as Antoine Geuffroy’s The Order of the Great Turk’s Court (1542) or Paolo Giovio’s A Short Treatise upon the Turkes Chronicles (1546) helped to reinforce a largely hostile view of Islam. In their prefaces, English translators customarily urged their Christian readership to unite and overlook their differences in the face of a common enemy. In so doing, they sought to admonish

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Christian readers to consider and, ideally, to repent their own behaviour and transgressions, because, it was argued, Christian depravity had angered God. In turn, the ‘Turk’ was sent to scourge Christianity and would continue to do so until Christians acted in unison to overcome the enemy. A typical example for this polemic is Richard Grafton’s preface to his translation of Geuffroy’s text, in which he reminds his readers: how far and how wide Antichrist hath dilated his kingdom by other his instruments, and namely by Mahumet, that pestiferous false prophet. For not only castles, towns, and cities have been blasted with the deadly breath of this poisoned serpent, but also whole and sundry provinces, realms and nations, have so drunken in his cankered venom, that it hath been hard for the very chosen to escape his terrible stings. (sig. *2r)

Such sentiments were current throughout the period, but are hardly the whole story. Individual narratives, where available, could offer different views, as in the case of Nicholas Roberts. After the fall of Rhodes in the summer of 1522 Roberts was sent as a hostage to the Ottoman camp, and had the opportunity to observe Sultan Suleyman at close quarters. Writing to the earl of Surrey, he described the sultan’s entourage, and showed himself impressed by his dignity and composure (O’Malley 2004: 167). It is unlikely that such personal views would have reached a wider audience beyond the circle of the addressee, yet it is important to recognise them since they are evidence for the absence of any monolithic view of Islam at the time. In 1605 Edwin Sandys, in his Europae Speculum, assessed the state of Christendom and its ability to stand united against an external military threat, such as the Ottomans. He concluded that it was unlikely that Christians would act together as long as personal interests and the conflicts between Catholics and Protestants prevailed. Nonetheless, there had been moments in which Christians undertook successfully a united effort against the ‘Turks’, most notably the Battle of Lepanto in 1571, in which the Catholic Holy League achieved victory over an Ottoman armada. Despite the fact that the Pope had excommunicated Elizabeth a year before, this victory was celebrated in England with bonfires, sermons, and bellringing (Vaughan 1954: 162). Over a decade later, in 1585, the event would still inspire a young James VI of Scotland to write an allegorical poem The Lepanto. Another moment of Christian solidarity was the siege of Malta in 1565, when Ottoman forces besieged the fort of St Elmo, but were repelled by the Catholic order of the Knights of St John. The news of the siege spread quickly across Western Christendom and prompted a flurry of writings, including the issuing of prayers in England for the relief of those Christians who were being invaded by the ‘Turks’. Customarily seen as a moment of rapprochement between Protestants and Catholics, Bernadette Andrea has questioned such a straightforward view: in her analysis of these prayers she detects ‘an uncanny dynamic of identification and disavowal’ (Andrea 2007b: 250), particularly the widely disseminated Short Form of Thanksgiving to God for the Delivery of the Isle of Malta, where she exposes the rift between Anglican Protestants and continental Catholics. To the new generation of English Protestants growing up in the wake of the Act of Uniformity, Andrea argues,

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the siege of Malta demonstrated the extent of God’s wrath against both ‘Turks’ and Catholics, with the latter referred to as ‘infidel’ in the prayer. Arguably the most comprehensive English text to address the history and culture of the Ottomans was Knolles’s History of the Turks (1603). Written over a period of twelve years, the text offered a range of information on the Ottoman empire, including its origins and progress, the habits and customs of the people as well as a vague, but, to Christians, edifying prophecy of the empire’s apparently impending demise. The scope of Knolles’s work was considerable, and included material relating to Muslim–Christian conflict as well as the Ottoman empire’s tension with Safavid Persia. The book was duly updated over the years, and superseded only by Paul Rycaut’s Present State of the Ottoman Empire (1666). It also proved influential on English playwrights, including Shakespeare, who mined Knolles’s text for his Othello. Lodowick Carlell’s Osmond, the Great Turk (1622 and c.1638) based most of its plot on Knolles’s description of events following the conquest of Constantinople in 1453. Notably, Knolles reproduces here the widely known myth of a Greek maiden Irene with whom the conqueror Mehmed II fell in love, but, neglecting the affairs of his state, killed her in an act of reasserting his authority over court and empire. The story had inspired English dramas before, such as George Peele’s now lost play The Turkish Mahomet and Hyrin the fair Greek (1588). In England, William Painter’s The Palace of Pleasure (1566) had introduced the story to a wider readership and, according to Samuel Chew, influenced Knolles, who follows Painter almost verbatim (Chew 1937: 478–90). Like other contemporary accounts, Knolles’s text shares the blend of fear and admiration in its descriptions of the Ottomans, but it is a complex book that reflects more than simply the extent of England’s interest in the Muslim world at the beginning of the seventeenth century. It marked an important moment in the assimilation of different forms of knowledge on Islam. For one, the material was not simply compiled or translated, but collated with other sources including Ottoman histories and, as Linda McJannet has shown, corrected where possible (McJannet 2006: 132–8). Knolles’s analysis of the Ottoman military corps is particularly shrewd, and reveals not only admiration but also a thinly veiled envy for the social opportunities available in the Islamic world. He recognises that Ottoman success relates primarily to an ability to act in a united fashion and to ‘their straight observing of their ancient military discipline, their cheerful and almost incredible obedience unto their princes and Sultans’. In other words, he identifies ideological cohesion as the empire’s principal strength; a quality Christendom had been lacking even before the Reformation. This system is further strengthened by the empire’s meritocratic outlook: ‘every common person, be he never so meanly born’ can aspire to the greatest honours and receive ‘preferment both of the court and the field, yea even unto the nearest affinity of the great sultan himself, if his valour or other worth shall so deserve’ (sig. A5r). Admiration for Ottoman military efficiency was widespread, while Christian social frameworks, based on hierarchy of birth, accommodated less easily other aspects such as social mobility by virtue of merit alone. What disturbed not only Knolles but also

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his contemporaries was the absence of nobility in the Ottoman state, and the fact that merit alone could overcome social barriers that were insurmountable in England.

‘New Turks’, Old Antichrists Anxieties surrounding Islamic expansionism, as already indicated, were often related to alleged Christian depravity and disunity. This sentiment was not unique in England, but was widespread throughout Christendom well before the sixteenth century. For humanists like Erasmus, who had written on the subject in 1530 against the backdrop of recent Ottoman invasions, notably the siege of Vienna in 1529, failure to succeed against the Ottomans was caused by Christians who had ‘conducted themselves like Turks’ and whose ‘Turkish vices: avarice, ambition, power-lust’ had turned them against their own people (cit. Dimmock 2005: 20). Here, the notion of the ‘Turk’, or the allegation of behaving like a ‘Turk’, signalled a failure to adhere to a perceived ‘Christian’ way of acting. In engaging with these anxieties, Erasmus was not so much interested in waging war against the ‘Turks’, but in maintaining the philosophia Christi – the teachings of Christ – as the formative ideal for orthodox Christians. However, in the context of a twofold threat to the universal Catholic Church in the shape of Ottoman imperialism and Lutheran insurgence against orthodox Christendom, ‘Turkishness’ became a staple trope in the rhetoric of Reformation debates. In his discussion of early Reformation England, Matthew Dimmock has traced the ways in which Catholics and Protestants conducted their debates in a rhetoric that employed the ‘Turk’ as a satirical metaphor. Following Erasmus’ use of ‘Turkishness’, Dimmock describes the ways in which the dispute between the defender of the orthodox church, Thomas More, and the self-exiled translator of the English Bible, William Tyndale, was carried out not only in print but also, significantly, in English. In their respective texts, More’s Dialogue Concerning Heresies (1529), Tyndale’s Answer Unto Sir Thomas More (1531), and More’s Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer (1532), both writers sought to confute the other’s theological position by characterising their opponent’s doctrine through a set of associations closely linked to the ‘Turk’ (Dimmock 2005: 26–33). To illustrate: More argued that the Lutheran ‘sect is yet in manner worse’ than ‘the great Turk’, posing a threat from within Christendom and thus preventing Christians from uniting against the external threat of Islam. Luther is marked as a heretic whom More equates with Muhammad, and suggests that Luther too, like the alleged pseudo-prophet Muhammad, will give people ‘liberty’ and ‘lewdness’ (cit. Dimmock 2005: 27). Tyndale refutes these allegations, inverting the association to promote an alternative to More’s philosophia Christi. Stressing the Protestant tenet of justification by faith alone, Tyndale mocks More’s faith because he is willing to ‘kill a Turk for his [God’s] sake’ while the ‘Turk’ ‘believeth better in God’ than More (cit. Dimmock 2005: 31). Here the ‘Turk’ is compared favourably to orthodox Christianity, which, in this equation, is seen as worse than the religion of the ‘Turks’.

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This kind of rhetoric enjoyed unabated currency throughout Elizabeth’s reign on both sides of the denominational divide. Shortly after Elizabeth’s accession to the throne in 1558, a Protestant pamphlet, The Seditious and Blasphemous Oration of Cardinal Pole (1560), appeared, one that exploits strategically an earlier moment in the Catholic–Protestant conflict. The pamphlet reproduced the translation of a Latin letter that was sent from the former cardinal of Canterbury and cousin of Henry VIII, Reginald Pole, to Charles V. Pole, who condemns what he considers the irreligious behaviour of Henry, alerts Charles to ‘a greater danger … imminent unto our commonwealth’ than that of the ‘Turk’. This danger arises from the Protestants in England, the ‘new turkeys’ who have ‘risen and sprung up amongst us at home’. In the pamphlet Pole is condemned as a traitor to England. Instead the pamphlet’s author holds that it is a common approach for Catholics to count ‘all them [who] have professed the gospel for turkeys’, because they are anxious that the Pope’s power diminishes (Pole 1560: sigs. A1v, A2v–A3r, C1r). In the immediate context of Elizabeth’s accession and the passing of the Act of Uniformity, such rhetoric undoubtedly contributed to attempts to consolidate Elizabeth’s regime and the Protestant faith in England. Arguably the period’s most elaborate English Protestant exploration of this equation of ‘Turk’ and Catholicism is articulated in the second edition of John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments (1570). For Foxe the danger to Protestantism lies in the dual threat of Catholicism and the ‘Turk’. By including a newly compiled history of the ‘Turks’ – The Turkes Story – Foxe attempts to show how both Catholicism and the rise of the Ottomans relate to one another and, more importantly, offers a chronicle of the oppression and persecution of the godly (Schmuck 2005). In so doing, he subscribes to the Protestant view, prominently articulated by Luther earlier in the century, which identifies both the Pope and the ‘Turk’ with Antichrist. Located within an apocalyptic framework, Foxe lists precedents for earlier figures associated with Antichrist, such as the Syrians in the Old Testament, and connects, in his reading, their actions, circumstances, and demise with his own church’s current conflict. While he believes that the fate of earlier Antichrists prefigures that of the current ones, he cannot be sure, and eventually does not settle on either the ‘Turk’ or the Pope as the ‘greater Antichrist’. English Catholics also vigorously applied the damning equation of one’s enemy with the ‘Turk’. The comprehensive and widely influential Calvino-Turcismus (1597), written by William Rainolds, makes this discrediting link between Protestantism and the ‘Turks’ evident even in its title. Matthew Sutcliffe answered the tract’s thousandodd pages, in a similar fashion only two years later, in his equally telling, but shorter, De Turcopapismo (1599), in which Catholicism was coupled with the ‘Turk’. Notably on the Catholic side the arguments made use of rudimentary knowledge of Islam. Christopher Highley has illustrated the ways in which Catholics exploited the iconoclasm shared by ‘Turks’ and Protestants as a polemical analogy, suggesting that this link, at least to Catholics, was indicative of a more profound linkage between heretics and infidels. According to the Catholic Church, Islam was essentially a Christian heresy, because, it was maintained, the law of Muhammad was originally ‘compiled

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by one Sergius of Arrian, and John, a Nestorian, both ancient heretics’ (Highley 2008: 62). The origins of this belief can be located in the already mentioned Cluniac corpus of medieval polemic on Islamic law. It is perhaps ironic that these documents also formed the basis of the first Latin edition of the Qur’an to be printed under the auspices of Protestants in 1543. An initial attempt at its publication a year before had been prevented by the authorities of Basel, but the project was rescued by Martin Luther. He had written in its support, explaining that the publication of the Islamic law was not only useful in injuring the ‘Turks’, but also for Protestants to comprehend Islam and to engage in polemics against it (Tolan 2002: 275).

Staged Conversions and Converted Stages While writers at home invoked the spectre of an Islamic threat and Catholics and Protestants attacked each other with allegations of ‘Turkishness’, elsewhere English merchants had been trading in the Islamic dominions for some time. Initially, this English traffic was conducted under the protection of other Christian nations that had obtained either a formal safe-conduct or a formal capitulation from the Ottomans, notably Venice and France. This was to change, however, after William Harborne, on behalf of two London merchants, Edward Osborne and Richard Staper, and later under the auspices of Elizabeth I, negotiated the ratification of the first formal trade capitulation between England and the Porte (the Ottoman court) in May 1580 (Skilliter 1977: 86–104). With the subsequent foundation of the Levant Company in 1581, a lucrative trading business ensued, which yielded a rich export of woollen cloths and the import of exotic goods: spices, currants, wine, dyed textiles, and Turkish carpets. Moreover, Elizabeth’s excommunication by Pius V in 1570, had released English merchants from papal restrictions upon the provision of munitions for the ‘Turk’. Tin and other prohibited goods that could be used as war materials, including scrap metal resulting from the upheavals of the Reformation such as lead from old bells and ecclesiastical buildings, were shipped to the Porte as well as Morocco (Skilliter 1977: 22–4). While it is difficult to assess the extent to which the English population would have been familiar with the details of this exchange, documents charting England’s dealing with the Islamic world began to circulate more widely as Richard Hakluyt reproduced many of them in his two editions of The Principal Navigations (1589 and 1598–1600). Among the correspondence included in Hakluyt’s compilation is a letter from Elizabeth addressed to Murad III, in which she encourages the sultan to view her as a ‘most mighty defender of the Christian faith against all kind of idolatries’ (Skilliter 1977: 69). This strategy of muting religious difference and emphasising similarities between Protestantism and Islam was crucial for successful co-operation, notably in England’s attempts to win over the Ottomans as military allies during the conflict between Spain and England. In 1587 Elizabeth’s appointed ambassador to the Porte, William Harborne, had tried to persuade Murad III to muster a military

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force against Spain. Harborne declared to the sultan that he should not miss this opportunity, since God, ‘who has created you [the sultan] a valiant man and the most powerful of all worldly princes for the destruction of idol-worshippers’ may otherwise turn his wrath against the Ottoman ruler for disregarding God’s will (cit. Maclean 2007: 46). However, aid did not come to divert the Spanish Armada of 1588, and Murad excused himself in a letter to Elizabeth, arguing that his wars with Persia had depleted his resources. Elizabeth’s rapprochement with Islamic rulers also allowed her to mediate ‘on the behalf of certain of our subjects, who are detained as slaves and captives in your [the Sultan’s] galleys’ (Skilliter 1977: 71). Captivity was an inevitable risk for anyone willing to undertake the arduous journey to the Mediterranean either by sea or land. Perhaps of graver concern than the loss of goods were the consequences of living among Muslims: the daily threat or temptation of conversion to Islam. Those who were captured by Muslim pirates were often sold in the slave markets of North Africa, either to serve their Muslim masters or to be ransomed. This constituted a recurring problem throughout the period. A topical allusion in Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queen not only suggests the significance of the problem, but also how people responded to it. In Book 1, Redcrosse enters the ‘house of holiness’ where he finds ‘seven beadmen’ who serve God and of whom ‘the fourth appointed by his office was / Poore prisoners to relieue with gratious ayd, / And captiues to redeeme with price of bras, / From Turkes and Sarazins, which them had stayed’ (1.10.40). Both the practice of almsgiving and collections of money for captives were regularly undertaken in parishes and hospices in England. Richard Hasleton, for instance, had been a captive in Algiers for nine years when his wife gathered alms for his ransom at St Botolph’s, Aldgate, in July 1592. His captors demanded the staggering sum of £100 because Hasleton was adamant not to forsake ‘his faith in Christ’ (Knutson 1996: 88). Yet not all English captives returned home; some decided to convert, and continued to live among Muslims. Nabil Matar has suggested that ‘thousands of European Christians converted to Islam in the Renaissance and the seventeenth century’. The renegades or apostates, as converts were known in England, had different reasons for their decision to ‘turn Turk’: some converted because they wanted to escape England’s poor social conditions, while others were attracted by a powerful empire which offered a degree of social mobility impossible in England (Matar 1998: 15). Whatever the reasons, for many at home, conversion was the reminder of Islam’s allure and proximity. Furthermore, and perhaps equally worrying to many, outward looks easily concealed inward faith, since apostasy was not immediately recognisable. Following the return of an English convert to his parish in Somerset in 1627, the preacher Henry Byam deplored that many of these men alternated between the two worlds, claiming that some Christians ‘are Musselmans in Turkey, and Christians at home; doffing their religion, as they do their clothes, and keeping a conscience for every harbour where they shall put in’ (Byam 1628: 74). English anxieties surrounding captivity and conversion also preoccupied writers of the commercial stage. The first part of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine (1587–8)

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envisages a martial overreacher, the Scythian shepherd Tamburlaine, who promises to ‘subdue the Turk, and enlarge [set free] / Those Christian captives, which you [the Turks] keep as slaves’ (3.3.46–7). Other playwrights were perhaps less optimistic on the issue; yet all used the stage to explore and showcase to their audience anxieties related to England’s encounters with Islam. Robert Wilson’s Three Ladies of London (1581), Thomas Kyd’s The Tragedy of Solyman and Perseda (1592), William Shakespeare’s Othello (1603–4), Thomas Heywood’s The Fair Maid of the West Part One (1596–1603), Robert Daborne’s A Christian Turned Turk (1612), and Philip Massinger’s The Renegado (1624) all feature characters who potentially undergo, are threatened by, or have undergone conversion of some kind related to Islam. Arguably, the most explicit treatment of the theme of conversion to Islam unfolds in Daborne’s A Christian Turned Turk (1612). Set largely in Tunis, the play stages many of the anxieties rehearsed before, such as the selling of Christians into slavery, but it also presents a fictitious ceremony of a Christian’s – the English pirate captain John Ward – conversion to Islam. The play explores the destabilising proximity of a ‘Turkish’ woman’s sexual allure and the danger of conversion to Islam.1 Roughly halfway through the play the pirate Ward is visited by three Muslims, the governor of Tunis, Benwash, a wealthy Jewish merchant, and Crosman, the captain of the janissaries in Tunis. Each of them tries to convince Ward to convert by rationalising apostasy, yet Ward proves surprisingly resilient in resisting their attempts. In turn, he offers each of them an articulate Christian refutation of their own arguments. For instance, when Benwash taunts Ward as to why Islam should be ‘so damnable / As others make it, that God which owes the right … would soon destroy it’ (7.38–40), Ward is not convinced. Instead he responds that ‘heaven is merciful’ – because, if Muslims are destroyed by God, any possibility of their conversion is forestalled. It is only when Crosman employs his sister Voada to seduce Ward into apostasy that the latter yields. On seeing Voada, Ward immediately falls in love. She, feigning love for him, soon raises the question of religious difference, urging him to ‘turn Turk’. In his moral confusion, Ward succumbs to Voada and subsequently embraces an unholy trinity of ‘beauty, command, and riches’ (7.193). The conversion is presented in a dumb-show. Here Ward is presented in Christian habit on ‘an ass’ as part of a ceremonial procession that also includes ‘Mahomet’s head’ – a stage prop of the London companies. Ward, after subscribing to Islamic law, puts on a turban and a robe and swears on ‘Mahomet’s head’, rejects the offer of a cup of wine by the hands of a Christian, and then, mounted on an ass, exits the stage. The circumcision itself takes place offstage, but it is subsequently revealed that Ward did not actually convert. Instead, he was seen to ‘Turk to the circumcision [where] he played the Jew [and] Made ’em come to the cutting of an ape’s tail’ (9.2–4); ‘Turk’, as Gerald Maclean observes, here is used as a verb similarly to ‘played the Jew’ (Maclean 2007: 140). With his Christianity intact, Ward’s discovery of Voada’s duplicity prompts him to kill her, and, in turn, himself. While he does not swap religions, Ward’s duplicity (a connotation of ‘turning Turk’), his behaviour, and his

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dress nonetheless mark him as an apostate. More importantly, the play accentuates Ward’s misguided response to his desires for Voada. Her ‘Turkish’ sensual allure as a cause for Ward’s apostasy owes more to English anxieties than to a culturally accurate portrayal of Muslim women. The implication is, of course, that such temptation to English masculine desires extends to all those in the audience who may potentially face a similar situation. The play closes on the moralising note that suggests as much: ‘Ward sold his country, turned Turk, and died a slave’ (16.326). Jonathan Burton has identified over sixty English dramatic works featuring Islamic themes, characters, or settings for the period between 1579 and 1624 (Burton 2005: 11, 257–8). Not all of these plays engaged with anxieties surrounding conversion to Islam, nor did they offer accurate insights into Muslim culture. Rather, they temporarily converted the stages of English playhouses into venues where English desires and anxieties could be played out as controlled spectacles. Here imperialist ambitions were explored alongside issues of identity, gender, religion, and politics. However, while the stage relied heavily on the vision of a ‘Turkish’ threat, it did not produce exclusively unmovable stereotypes of ‘Turkishness’ as had been suggested in earlier depictions. For instance, Marlowe’ two-part Tamburlaine challenges directly the Turkish threat epitomised, in the first part, by the Sultan Bajazeth. By the end of the play, however, the audience will have witnessed a transformation in the ‘Turk’ that arouses pity rather than fear. To illustrate: Bajazeth’s first appearance immediately invokes anti-Islamic sentiments as the erstwhile ‘Scythian shepherd’ describes his ‘Turkish’ military power in terms of ‘circumcisèd Turks’ and ‘warlike bands of Christian reined [apostates]’ (1 Tam. 3.1.7–11). Following Bajazeth’s defeat by the selfproclaimed ‘scourge and wrath of God’ (1 Tam. 3.3.44) Tamburlaine may initially appear just to a Christian audience. However, his increasingly savage behaviour, the killing of the virgins before the walls of Damascus, and the cruelty he exhibits in the treatment of Bajazeth all undermine such certainties. What is made explicit in 2 Tamburlaine, Tamburlaine’s Muslim identity, is by no means clear in the first part, though it is suggested by his ‘Turkish’ behaviour. Indeed, Part 2 of the play can be seen to rehabilitate the ‘Turks’ even further as their actions are contrasted benevolently with the hypocrisy of Christians. The signposting of England’s experiences of Islam in this essay has been, necessarily, selective. However, what the themes and examples illustrate is the pervasiveness and significance of Islam for English culture in this period. More specifically, they suggest some of the complex ways in which these experiences influenced not only how England defined itself in relation to the world of Islam, but also how it conceived of its position in, or in relation to, Christendom at large. Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta (1589) in many ways embodies many of these issues and problems. The play’s setting echoes the promise of England’s pursuit of wealth in the Mediterranean, while simultaneously invoking anxieties associated with this multicultural region. Notably, the play’s anachronistic portrayal of a Malta tributary to the Ottomans and inhabited by an ensemble of Jewish, Turkish, and (Catholic) Christian characters presents a place in which ‘keeping faith versus keeping the Faith’ is presented as a continual challenge

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(Fuchs 2001: 135). It is here that an English audience encountered two Turkish characters, Ithamore and Selim-Calymath, whose stage existence testifies to the reality of multiple notions of Islam in the period: Selim-Calymath’s complaisance towards the knights of Malta in collecting the tribute makes him a sympathetic character vis-à-vis the demonised ‘Turk’ Ithamore (2.3.204–14). As the play accommodates polarised experiences of England of Islam, it also serves as a reminder for the extent to which English culture experienced the Islamic world in ways that were pliable, interested, and never simply static.

Notes 1

Robert Darborne, ‘A Christian Turn’d Turk’, cit. Vitkus 2000: 23–39. All subsequent refer-

ences are to scene and line numbers in this edition.

References and Further Reading Andrea, B. (2007a). Women and Islam in Early Modern English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Andrea, B. (2007b). From Invasion to Inquisition: Mapping Malta in Early Modern England. In G. V. Stanivukovic (Ed). Remapping the Mediterranean World in Early Modern English Writings (pp. 245–71) Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Birchwood, M. (2007). Staging Islam in England Drama and Culture, 1640–1685. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Burton, J. (2005). Traffic and Turning: Islam and English Drama, 1579–1624. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Byam, H. (1628). A Returne from Argier A Sermon Preached at Minhead in the County of Somerset the 16th of March, 1627. London. Chew, S. (1937). The Crescent and the Rose: Islam and England during the Renaissance. Oxford: Clarendon. Daniel, N. (1960). Islam and the West: The Making of an Image. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Dimmock, M. (2005). New Turkes: Dramatizing Islam and the Ottomans in Early Modern England. Aldershot: Ashgate. Fuchs, B. (2001). Mimesis and Empire: The New World, Islam, and European Identities Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Highley, C. (2008). Catholic Writing the Nation in Early Modern Britain and Ireland Oxford. Oxford University Press. Knolles, R. (1603). The Generall Historie of the Turkes. London. Knutson, R. L. (1996). ‘Elizabethan documents, captivity narratives, and the market for foreign history plays’. English Literary Renaissance, 26/1, 75–110. MacLean, G. (2004). The Rise of Oriental Travel, 1580–1720. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. MacLean, G. (2007). Looking East: English Writing and the Ottoman Empire before 1800, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Matar, N. (1998). Islam in Britain 1558–1685. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Matar, N. (1999). Turks, Moors and Englishmen in the Age of Discovery. New York: Columbia University Press. McJannet, L. (2006). The Sultan Speaks: Dialogue in English Plays and Histories about Ottoman Turks Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Moryson, F. (1903). Shakespeare’s Europe: Unpublished Chapters of Fynes Moryson’s Itinerary, Being a Survey of the Conditions Of Europe at the End of the 16th Century, ed. Charles Hughes. London: Sherratt & Hughes. O’Malley, G. (2004). ‘Pilgrimage, crusades, trade and embassy: pre-Elizabethan English contacts

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with the Ottoman Turks.’ Crusades, 3, 153– 70 Patrides, C. A. (1963). ‘ “The bloody and cruel Turke”: the background of a Renaissance commonplace’. Studies in the Renaissance, 10, 126–35. Pole, R. (1560). The Seditious and Blasphemous Oration of Cardinal Pole Both Against God [and] His Country, trans. Fabyane Wythers. London. Riley-Smith, J. (2008). The Crusades, Christianity and Islam. New York: Columbia University Press. Robinson, Benedict Scott (2007). Islam and Early Modern English Literature: The Politics of Romance from Spenser to Milton, 1st edn. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Schmuck, S. (2005). ‘The “Turk” as Antichrist in John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments’. Reformation’. 10, 21–44. Schwoebel, R. (1967). The Shadow of the Crescent: The Renaissance Image of the Turk (1453–1517). Nieuwkoop: B. De Graaf. Selden, J. (1696). Table-talk, Being Discourses of John Seldon, Esq. Or His Sense of Various Matters of Weight and High Consequence, Relating Especially to Religion and State. London. Singh, Jyotsna G. (ed.) (2009). A Companion to the Global Renaissance: English Literature and

Culture in the Era of Expansion. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Skilliter, S. A. (1977). William Harborne and the Trade with Turkey, 1578–1582. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tolan, J. (2002). Saracens: Islam in the Medieval European Imagination. New York: Columbia University Press. Tyerman, C. (1988). England and the Crusades, 1095–1588. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Vaughan, D. M. (1954). Europe and the Turk: A Pattern of Alliances, 1350–1700. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Vitkus, D. (1999). ‘Early modern Orientalism: representations of Islam in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe. In D. R. Blanks and M. Frassetto (eds.), Western Views of Islam in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Perception of Other (pp. 207–30). New York: St Martin’s Press. Vitkus, D. (2000). Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England. New York: Columbia University Press. Vitkus, D. (2003). Turning Turk: English Theater and the Multicultural Mediterranean, 1570–1630. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Reading the Body Jennifer Waldron

Although the biological foundations for bodily life have changed little since the time of Shakespeare, many of the socio-political structures that govern the body and inform embodied experience have changed radically. Some early modern ways of interpreting, regulating, and inhabiting bodies now seem so foreign as to be almost fantastical: the practice of testing whether a woman was a witch by throwing her into water; the sumptuary laws dictating who could and who could not wear certain kinds of fur, velvet, or silk; or the notion that man was a microcosm, or ‘little world’, which contained (in one way or another) all things. Yet side by side with these unfamiliar practices we can also find striking parallels with contemporary interests in the body. Particularly significant are moments when early modern writers scrutinise the ways in which systems of cultural intelligibility influence how we ‘read’ bodies, and how bodies themselves might be like books. In Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing, many of the characters’ bodily experiences and perceptions become inextricably entwined with the conventions used to read texts. The main plot concerns a young lover, Claudio, who hears false rumours that the woman he loves has been unfaithful to him. In a moment of dramatic irony, he asks, ‘Are our eyes are own?’ (4.1.71). Shakespeare’s offstage audience knows that his eyes are not in fact his own here: his sense of sight has been taken over by the pernicious rumours he has heard about Hero’s infidelity. Claudio then goes on to misread Hero’s bodily signs as a text that confirms her guilt. He asserts that she cannot possibly ‘deny / The story that is printed in her blood’ (4.1.121–2). Joining the chorus of condemnation, her father similarly laments that Hero has fallen into a ‘pit of ink’ (4.1.140). When these male characters apply textual metaphors to Hero’s body, Shakespeare stages a profound conflict between the conventions of reading that control their eyes and the live body they claim to describe. With stories and pens controlling the eyes, linguistic discourse seems alien to and perhaps even deadly to the body. Many such moments in early modern writings display a seemingly modern self-awareness about the power of cultural constructions to frame what is seen and

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experienced. However, another element in early modern thinking moved in the opposite direction. Rather than suggesting that acts of reading the body applied an abstract system of representation onto a material entity, these approaches sought to decode the language in which the body was already imagined to be written. The reader’s task was merely to discover these meanings. According to this line of thought, bodies were simultaneously material and meaningful, organically unified and at the same time part of a larger cosmic ‘language’. A system of complex analogies and cross-references governed both the body’s internal structures and its relations to larger social, religious, and cosmic bodies (Foucault 1970: 33). The social, scientific, and religious upheavals of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries tended to disenchant the material world. Protestant reformers rejected the previously sacred bones, relics, or images of Catholic saints as powerless, ‘dead’ objects, while Copernican astronomy displaced the earth (and the human being) from the centre of the universe. Yet in post-Reformation England a lingering sense of enchantment was nowhere more apparent than in early modern texts – anatomical, dramatic, political, or religious – that claimed the human body as a special category of ‘thing’.

Humoral Bodies Theories of the four humours and of man a microcosm are a familiar part of Renaissance study, but it is easy to underestimate the flexibility of these systems and the variety of ways in which they allowed people to read the body and to negotiate its relations to natural and social environments. According to the second-century treatises of the Roman physician Galen, which were influential through the seventeenth century, one’s health depended on a precarious balance of the four humoral fluids that composed the body (black bile, phlegm, blood, yellow bile). These in turn correlated with the four elements that made up the cosmos (earth, water, air, and fire). As in Thomas Walkington’s The Optic Glass of Humours (Figure 29), each ‘complexion’ or ‘humour’ corresponded with one element – blood (sanguinity) with air, black bile (melancholy) with earth, and so on. So, far from forming a deterministic system, these sets of correspondences were the basis for dynamic interchanges between the body and its environment. They influenced behaviour and perception not only as abstract schemes but also as they were anchored in everyday labours, remedies, rituals, and punishments. When people sought to control the balance of humours, their acts of ingestion and excretion could be seen as ‘very literal acts of self-fashioning’ (Schoenfeldt 1999: 11). Significantly, as we will see below, the sumptuary laws and royal proclamations that governed what one could wear on the outside of the body (clothing, jewels, ornaments) also directed what one put into the body – the consumption of food and drink. In the early modern period, these external and internal acts of self-fashioning were often governed by the same kinds of ‘laws’, whether these laws were conceived of as ‘natural’, socio-political, or divine (or at times all three at once).

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Image not available in the electronic edition

Figure 29 On the title page to Thomas Walkington’s The Optic Glass of Humours (London, 1607) each ‘complexion’ or ‘humour’ corresponds with one element – blood (sanguinity) with air, black bile (melancholy) with earth, and so on. British Library, London

Scholars such as Gail Kern Paster and Michael Schoenfeldt have proposed that humoral models of the body offered a flexible approach to selfhood, one that closely connected physiological, affective, and psychological states. Controlling the humours not only promoted bodily health but also offered a way of managing emotional and psychological wellness. The title of one important treatise – Thomas Wright’s The Passions of the Mind in General (1604) – suggests how physical, emotional, and mental states overlapped in categories such as ‘passions of the mind’. As Paster puts it, ‘In an important sense, the passions actually were liquid forces of nature, because, in this cosmology, the stuff of the outside world and the stuff of the body were composed of the same elemental materials’ (Paster 2004: 4). Rather than being a rigid taxonomy of ‘types’ – with the melancholic governed by black bile, for instance – the Galenic system emerges here as a way of showing the openness of the body and the self both to deliberate manipulation and to outside influence. On a broader socio-political scale, theories of the humours helped to codify differences of gender, race, class, and nation. They were used to justify various policies and structures of governance both in the state and in the family. In his preface to The Passions of the Mind, Wright comments on the link between climate and moral char-

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acter: a ‘natural inclination to virtue and honesty’, he claims, is ‘much more palpable and easy to be perceived in these colder countries, than in those hotter climates’ (Wright 1604). Mary Floyd-Wilson (2003) describes such theories as ‘geohumoralism’, and shows how they were used to negotiate the contact zones between cultures in an age of increasing colonialist expansion. In the domain of gender difference, when women’s bodies are represented as leaky and uncontrollable, the task of controlling the female body seems naturally to fall to men; it is the ‘self-imposed responsibility of the patriarchal order’ (Paster 1993: 63). Masculinity, too, becomes partly a function of body chemistry: women’s bodies were thought to be colder and moister than men’s, so the qualities of melancholy and phlegm were considered less ‘manly’ than those of blood and choler (Smith 2000: 16). Thomas Laqueur took this humoral model of gender to mean that in the early modern period there was really only one sex, not two: the female organs were simply an inverted version of those visible on the outside of a man’s body. Whether a person was male or female therefore depended on a spectrum of characteristics, all grounded in a single model of the human body (Laqueur 1990). Scholars have since challenged this view on various grounds ( Johnston 2001: 78–82). However, it is safe to say that, unlike a fully dimorphic (or two-sex) model of gender, the humoral model was not focused on a biological essence imagined as static but on ideas of balance and imbalance, which stressed temperance and moderation. Tempering the humours and the passions was vital not only for the individual but also for humankind. In his influential anatomical treatise, Microcosmographia (1615), barber-surgeon Helkiah Crooke prizes the most temperate body – the one that brings together all the rest in ‘concord’ – as rightfully occupying the centre of the whole system: If you require in man an example of a body perfectly mixed, behold and consider the whole body, in which there is that concord and agreement of the four disagreeing qualities, and so just and equal a mixture of the elements as that it is the very middle and mean amongst all living and animated things. (Crooke 1615: 8)

Crooke asserts that because man’s body contains a perfect mixture of the elements, it is properly located at the centre of all living things. The act of maintaining this ‘concord and agreement’ through proper regulation thus potentially had cosmic significance. For the same reason, although blood and choler were considered to be ‘manly’ humours, in excess amounts they could potentially dislodge man from his privileged position at the centre of the universe. Finally, as Crooke suggests, the four humours were an important component of ideas about man’s place in the cosmos, although the connection between microcosmic bodily humours and the macrocosmic elements shifted over time (Barkan 1975: 19–20). Individual writers also differed significantly in how they described these connections, which ranged from fully organic accounts in which the cosmos was an anthropomorphic body to analogies such as Crooke’s, in which it was like a body in

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its capacity to yoke together unlike things in harmony, or discordia concors (discord in harmony). Often the material and analogical mixed with the admittedly fictional, making the exact way in which the man was thought to be ‘every thing’ difficult to unravel. For instance, In the passage from the Induction to Every Man Out of His Humour where Jonson explains this schema, Asper, an on-stage critic, insists that this humoral theory can be applied only ‘by metaphor’ to an individual’s ‘general disposition’. Somewhat differently, Crooke claims that man contains all things not in ‘matter and substance’ but by ‘participation and reception’: The divines call him omnem creaturam (every creature), because he is in power (in a manner) all things; not for matter and substance, as Empedocles would have it, but analogically, by participation or reception of the several species or kinds of things. Others call him, ‘the royal temple or image of God’. For as in coin the picture of Caesar, so in Man the image of God is apparently discerned. (Crooke 1615: 3)

Like Jonson’s insistence that humoral theory must be applied ‘by metaphor’, Crooke’s idea that the relationship between man and cosmos is not material but ‘analogical’ seems fairly clear. Yet Crooke’s analogies cannot be reduced to a figurative connection in which a concrete body stands in for a more abstract idea. Man is ‘a magazine or storehouse of all the virtues and efficacies of all bodies, and in his soul is the power and force of all living and sensible things’ (Crooke 1615: 3). As a storehouse for the ‘virtues and efficacies’ of all other bodies, he does in some sense contain all things. Yet as with a paradigm of gender in which the balance of the humours is paramount, this ‘storehouse’ model of human perfection is very different from one in which negative or ‘baser’ elements are rejected entirely. While anatomists such as Crooke were surprisingly eager to establish the divine origins of the body, writers in London’s market for cheap print drew on similar tropes of the body’s cosmic and providential significance. In his pamphlet, The Bellman of London (1608), Thomas Dekker promises to expose the London underworld and reveal to the concerned public the ‘most notable villainies now in the Kingdom’ (for more on the London underworld, see Chapter 23, The Literature of the Metropolis). Yet Dekker begins his treatment of this seemingly small slice of life by linking it to the entire divinely ordered frame of the cosmos. He starts with the creation of the world itself, then moves to the creation of the ‘little world’ (man) and the four elements. His description follows in its main points the illustrations of the humours in Figure 29 and of the microcosm in Figure 30. Yet rather than likening the world to an organic body, Dekker figures the whole system as a divinely created engine: In this great world did he place a little world (and as the lesser wheels in a clock being set a going, give motion to the greatest, and serve them as guides) So that little world (called man) doth by his art, office and power, control the greater: yet is there such a harmony in both their motions, that though in quantity they differ far, they agree in quality: and though the one was made somewhat before the other, yet are they so like, that they seem to be instruments belonging to one engine. For man is made up by the

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Figure 30 Title page to Robert Fludd, Utriusque Cosmi … Historia (2 vols., Frankfurt, 1617). At the centre of the illustration is a figure of ‘Vitruvian Man’: Leonardo da Vinci had demonstrated that the proportions of the human body corresponded with the forms of the circle and the square, a cosmografia del minor mondo. The circles around the figure represented the heavenly and cosmic forces to which he was believed to be subject. The domains of the four humours occupy the central circles. British Library, London

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mixture of four complexions, blood, phlegm, choler, and melancholy. The world is a ball made up of four elements, water, air, earth, and fire, yea these very elements have likewise parts in him. The world is circular, so is man, for let him stand upright and extend forth his arms to the length, a line drawn from his navel to all the utmost limits of his body, makes his body orbicular. And as man has four ages, infancy, childhood, youth and old age: so hath the world, in which four measures of time are filled out. (Dekker 1608: sig. A3r–v)

In Dekker’s mechanical model of man and world as ‘instruments belonging to one engine’, the smaller wheels give motion to the larger, outer wheels. Similarities of ‘quality’ link the very elements that made up the circular world to the ‘complexions’ that make up ‘orbicular’ man. This model is similar to organic or chemical models of the body as microcosm in that the links between individual and cosmos are figured as more material than analogical. Yet Dekker departs from earlier models by emphasising the artifice of the system and the importance of human agency: man controls the greater world by virtue of his ‘art, office, and power’. As with Thomas Hobbes’s later image of the body politic in his Leviathan (1651), Dekker preserves the older connections between the human body and the larger systems that surround it not by making these links entirely figurative but by imagining them as mechanistic. Hobbes writes, ‘For by art is created that great Leviathan called a “commonwealth”, or “state”, in Latin civitas, which is but an artificial man’ (Hobbes 1651: sig. A4r). Despite the artificiality of this ‘body’, these connections between man and commonwealth are not purely figurative: Hobbes’s body is an ‘actual working machine, and his commonwealth is an actual political machine’ (Barkan 1975: 114). Rather than dying out, then, these kinds of attempts to define the relation of microcosm to macrocosm continued to influence the discourses of medicine, theology, and politics well into the seventeenth century.

Sacred and Demonic Anatomies Developments in the ‘new science’ often conflicted with older models of the human body as a microcosm of the world. On the macro level, Copernican astronomy unsettled the Ptolemaic universe, replacing a closed system centred on the earth with a heliocentric universe of infinite space. On the micro level, anatomists revealed no less jarring discoveries when they explored the ‘minute interstices of post-Vesalian dissection’ (Sawday 1995: 91). John Donne summarises the sense of displacement in his Anatomy of the World (1611), lamenting that the ‘new philosophy calls all in doubt’ (205). With the advent of new philosophy, the place of the individual in the social world becomes as insecure as the place of the earth in the cosmos: The element of fire is quite put out, The sun is lost, and th’earth, and no man’s wit

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Instead of confirming correspondences based on similarities of quality, shape, or number, as in Dekker’s account of the microcosm, Donne proposes that the new science has revealed a world composed of smaller and smaller dissimilar fragments. In this disjointed cosmos, the roles that define an individual in the social world have been forgotten: instead of being a prince, subject, father, or son, every man thinks that he is unique. Yet even as Donne insists that all coherence is gone, part of the wit of this anatomy is that it continues to describe the microcosm and macrocosm as intimately linked, even if their resemblance is based on mutual dissolution. Despite the apparent incompatibility of new science with older models of man as microcosm, early modern anatomists and theologians were for a time able to work in concert (Sawday 1995: 106). As did Crooke, many anatomists continued to insist that they had found divine marks and correspondences embedded in the body; they were as keen to establish the divine origins of the body as they were to trace its systems of musculature or nerves. Pierre de la Primaudaye takes this approach in the second part of his encyclopedic work, The French Academy (London, 1605). The author touts the wonders of the body as God’s creation, reading its marvellousness as a rebuke to ‘atheists’ (such as they were at this time): For the Lord having set in his visible creatures evident marks of himself and of his eternity, power, goodness, wisdom, and providence, as the Apostle teaches [Rom. 1:20], what remains but that man … should thereby acknowledge his sovereign Lord. (1605: sig. A6r)

La Primaudaye here pursues a logic in which material structures of the body reveal divinely ordained meanings. These meanings are not only figurative, in the sense of being available only to the mind as interpreted by human intelligence; they are also imagined as physically present. In a particularly telling example, La Primaudaye discusses the necessary connection between outward speech and inward intention, suggesting that the physiological proximity of the heart and lungs signals the importance of speaking the truth:

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When we consider the lungs, which are the bellows of the voice, are placed so near the heart that they compass it round about, are not all men thereby admonished that their speech is but the interpreter of the heart and the messenger thereof? That the mouth must, like a good servant, attend upon the heart and utter nothing but that which it receives first from the same? (1605: sig. A3r)

This description is partly metaphorical: the ‘heart’ stands in for the inward intentions, while the ‘mouth’ stands for the speech that the organ produces. However, by turning to the material means through which speech is produced – the lungs as ‘the bellows of the voice’ – La Primaudaye leans towards a causal relationship. Suggesting that speech must emerge from the region of the heart, he attempts to ground the truth of spoken language in the divinely created structures of the body. La Primaudaye’s way of reading the body shows how ‘rationalist’ and ‘participatory’ views of signs coexisted side by side in this period (Shuger 1990: 19). While some of his extrapolations are admittedly figurative, others rely on a sense that the body is a divinely written ‘book’, one that contains meanings that are materially present. Older ways of locating significance in material things hold on with particular tenacity at moments such as these, when the ‘sign’ to be read is the human body itself. In a similar way, the Protestant Reformation is often taken as a sharp break from the ‘incarnational’ theology and ritual practices of Catholicism (O’Connell 2000). Yet many mainstream Protestants invested symbolic power in the body as a ‘lively image of God’ as opposed to the ‘dead’ images worshipped by Catholics.1 Reformers such as Calvin, Luther, and their followers in England sought to establish ways through which the living body might act as a legitimate channel of communication between the human and divine realms. Calvin carefully distinguishes between living and dead images of God in the first book of the Institution of Christian Religion, ‘Of the knowledge of God the Creator’. Reminding readers that man is made in the image of God, he proposes that the proper seat for this image is the soul. Yet he goes on to insist that it includes the body as well: because man’s body is superior to those of beasts (set upright for contemplation of the heavens, etc.), ‘the image of God extends to the whole excellency’ of human beings. Even the body has some ‘sparks’ of the divine image (Calvin 1561b: fo. 53v). Perhaps surprisingly, Calvin also makes that case that the Protestant sacraments help to unite worshippers and Christ in both body and soul. In a tract published in England under the title of Four Godly Sermons (1561), he condemns those who suggest that the truth of the Protestant sacraments is merely a function of mental intention: For when it is said on this wise that we are bone of His bones and flesh of His flesh, we ought to understand that we be joined with Him both in body and soul. Therefore no man can defile his own body with any manner of superstition, but he doth separate himself from that conjunction and union whereby we are made the members of the Son of God … But now let these witty and subtle doctors answer me whether they have received baptism only in their souls, or whether God hath commanded rather

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and instituted that this sign should be imprinted in our flesh. Shall the body, then, wherein the mark of Jesus Christ is printed, be polluted and defiled with so contrary, repugnant, and so wicked abominations? Also the Lord’s Supper, is it received in the mind only, and not also in the hands and mouth? Has God engraved in our bodies the arms and badges of his son that we afterward should pollute our selves. (Calvin 1561a: B2r)

Calvin explicitly refutes those who argue that either baptism or the Lord’s Supper is ‘received in the mind only, and not also in the hands and mouth’. In both his attack on idolatrous forms of worship and his positive endeavour to establish outward means to salvation within the reformed church, Calvin contends that the human body plays an important role. False forms of bodily worship can pollute the sacred bonds among God, Christ, and man. Conversely, divinely ordained forms – such as the Protestant sacraments or public prayers – can strengthen them. Because it is divinely created and wears the ‘arms and badges’ of Christ, the human body allows for some forms of commerce between physical acts and divine truths. Writers of popular pamphlets and spiritual guides also looked to the body for signs of God’s providential intervention in the material world: a victim’s body would bleed in the presence of the murderer, while a witch’s body would reveal the proof of her misdeeds. Popular providentialism helps complicate the view that Protestant doctrine required a total disenchantment of the material world. The idea of providence allowed for the affirmation of divine intervention even in an age when miracles had ceased (Walsham 1999: 9).2 King James’s Demonology (1597), published six years before he assumed the throne of England, nicely illustrates the way the body became a focus for popular providential beliefs. In this tract, James sought to demonstrate the existence of witches, define their powers clearly, and offer a sound basis for their prosecution. At the end of the third book, James compares the methods for discovering witches to those used for revealing murderers, tying both to God’s providential governance of bodies: As in a secret murder, if the dead carcass be at any time thereafter handled by the murderer, it will gush out of blood, as if the blood were crying to the heaven for revenge of the murderer. God having appointed that secret super-natural sign for trial of that secret unnatural crime, so it appears that God has appointed (for a super-natural sign of the monstrous impiety of the witches) that the water shall refuse to receive them in her bosom, that have shaken off them the sacred water of baptism and wilfully refused the benefit thereof. (James 1597: 80–1)

God here creates an opportunity for human observers to discern the witch’s crime by writing a ‘secret super-natural sign’ into the natural world: because the witches reject the sacred water of baptism, bodies of water anthropomorphically ‘refuse to receive’ the witches in their ‘bosom’. In this divinely governed world, God’s secret supernatural signs are thus imagined to counter and ultimately to conquer the secret unnatural crimes of the witches.

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From a modern perspective, these beliefs can be dismissed as mere superstition. Yet these writings about witches often involved sophisticated debates that sought to distinguish between true and false forms of causation, or what we might call ‘scientific and occult knowledge’ (Clark 1997: 187). Demonic pathologies were also common in academic medicine, not only in popular lore (1997: 188). James’s account follows many of these quasi-scientific or pseudo-scientific procedures, especially in the way it distinguishes between human and divine agency. James insists that while the witches can commit ‘unnatural crimes’, divine governance of the material world strictly circumscribes their powers. They can only manipulate appearances, while God controls the material structures of bodies and how they can interact with elements such as water. James’s tract offers a particularly good example of how early modern belief systems and power structures governed how the body was read. There was much debate across Europe during this period about whether witchcraft was real or not and whether witches could and should be prosecuted (Clark 1997: 195–213; see also Chapter 78, The Debate on Witchcraft). King James explicitly denied the view of sceptics such as Reginald Scot, who pointed out the suspiciously convenient way in which those accused of witchcraft were most commonly old and poor. Instead, James recommended ‘good helps’ for the trial of witches. In addition to the witch’s providentially governed reaction to water, James also focused on the witch’s mark. The search for this mark often involved bodily humiliation and even physical torture as the accused witch was shaved, searched, and pricked to test her reactions. James explains the importance of testing whether the mark is sensitive to pain, since insensitivity was a sign that the mark was unnatural ( James 1597: 80). As with writers such as La Primaudaye, who deployed anatomy as material ‘proof ’ of various divine truths, this version of empirical investigation was still very much tied to beliefs about divine governance of the material world. King James’s discussion of the prosecution of witches also shows how socioeconomic hierarchies can tend to reinforce a certain version of ‘common sense’, making the discovery of a witch seem to have an empirical basis in the world. This can work at the level of explicit codification: laws and public punishments channelled cultural habits of perception by marking the bodies of traitors or vagabonds with signs of their own guilt. In 1547 a statute required that beggars be branded on the chest with a ‘V’ for ‘vagabond’ (Hunt 1996: 66). While the power of the magistrate is of course on display at these moments, many of these early modern forms of justice sought to pin the crime to the body of the accused, thereby showing that justice was embedded in the nature of things. In Figure 31, the thief ’s body betrays him when he is providentially strangled with his own illgotten gains. As when water refuses to receive a witch, justice here seems to reside in the natural order, which legal codes merely enhance or support. Perhaps even more important than explicit attempts to codify public perception may be the way in which habits of reading the body (and reading with the body) become so ingrained that they seem like common sense. These patterns of embodied

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Figure 31 Poena sequens from Geoffrey Whitney’s Choice of Emblems (Leyden, 1586). The engraving shows a thief strangled by gold and the body as a site of poetic justice. The man has filled a sack with what he has robbed from a shop and run away with its corners tied around his neck. When he fell asleep at an alehouse the heavy load strangled him (see p. 567). British Library, London

perception and action become self-reinforcing without any conscious reference to a norm (Bourdieu 1977: 113).

Fashioning Bodies In the wake of the Reformation in England, when it became particularly important to maintain the distinction between human and divine agency, the body became an important focus for questions about the limits of human creativity. Hamlet voices a

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cultural commonplace when he rails against women’s cosmetics: ‘God hath given you one face and you make yourselves another’ (3.1.148–9). To pervert a God-given body by artificial human means could be construed as a monstrous form of impiety. Protestant polemicist Philip Stubbes makes the argument in more pointed terms: ‘Think you (oh woman!) to escape the judgement of God, who has fashioned you to his glory, when your great and more than presumptuous audacity dares to alter and change his workmanship in you?’ (Stubbes 1583: sig. E8r–v). By these lights, a happy blend of human and divine creations was not possible. Putting on cosmetics was not an enhancement of the face but the construction of what Hamlet calls ‘another’ face – a monstrously artificial creation that threatened to supplant God’s workmanship. Hamlet here draws on a conceptual structure that governed attacks on a wide array of bodily practices, including theatrical disguises, fashions of dress, investigations of witchcraft, and condemnations of ‘idolatrous’ forms of worship. It might be tempting to dismiss these views as the marginal rants of moralising extremists (and some no doubt were), yet they also encapsulate several important dimensions of early modern culture. Given that the very materials of the body were imagined to connect in various ways to larger bodies such as the body politic, the Christian body of the faithful, and the macrocosmic body of the world, these acts of fashioning were particularly potent. They were not always understood as instrumental manipulations of external appearances, which might generate falsehoods but could ultimately be stripped away to get back to the truth. Rather, they had somewhat the character of alterations in the binary (or genetic) code of the universe, an interconnected system in which causes and effects could be highly unpredictable and could cross easily from one domain to another, flowing through the biological, the familial, the socio-political, and the theological. The antitheatrical writings of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries illustrate the ambivalence of early modern thinking about the body. The writer of A Second and Third Blast of Retreat from Plays and Theatres (1580), thought to be Anthony Munday, claims that theatre is dangerous because the ‘eloquence of the body’ is uniquely capable of moving the viewer to commit immoral acts. With the term ‘eloquence’, he substitutes ideas about rhetoric for ideas about the body’s visual signs (following Cicero’s comments on oratory), suggesting that bodily signs are fully manipulable and conventional. Yet he renders sinister this ‘eloquence of the body’ when he asserts that these bodily representations do not in fact require interpretation in the way that conventional signs such as words do: It is marvellous to consider how the gesturing of a player, which Tully [Cicero] terms the eloquence of the body, is of force to move and prepare a man to that which is ill … Nothing enters in more effectually into the memory than that which comes by seeing; things heard do lightly pass away, but the tokens of that which we have seen, says Petrarch, stick fast in us whether we will or no. ([Munday?] and Salvianus 1972: 95)

Munday fears that this ‘eloquence of the body’ has a special transformative power: bodily signs are more effective because they ‘speak’ a natural language that enters at

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the eye and bypasses even the will of the viewer. Munday’s passage thus sums up one of the central anxieties expressed in the antitheatrical writings: dramatists and actors seem to mould and turn the body at will, making it into an instrument of communication. Yet having transferred their conceits into bodily form, these artists make a conventional language look natural, as if it needed no interpretation. Some antitheatrical writers even suggested that dangerous changes might take place at the bodily level: men who wore women’s clothing and put on women’s gestures might take on a more permanent mark of these ‘habits’ and become ‘effeminised’ (Levine 1994: 14–15). Further, theatrical shape-shifting might transform not only the gender identity but also the religious identity of the actor. As William Rankins puts it in A Mirror for Monsters (1587), players ‘transform that glorious image of Christ, into the brutish shape of a rude beast, when the temple of our bodies which should be consecrate unto him, is made a stage of stinking stuff, a den for thieves, and an habitation for insatiate monsters’ (Rankins 1587: sig. B2v). As with Munday’s ‘eloquence of the body’, there is a double assertion here: on the one hand, God has stamped the human body with the image of Christ, a seemingly irrevocable act of divine artistry. Yet the paltry players are able to ‘transform’ it into the shape of a beast and ultimately ‘deface’ this divine image. Although these accusations are no doubt exaggerated for rhetorical effect, they had affiliations with orthodox Protestant thinking of the time. Calvin himself made a similar point, discussed above, when he argued that idolatrous bodily worship had effects that were not entirely governed by the intentions of the worshipper: committing his body to an idol, the worshipper might sever his bond with Christ. Popular broadsheets and pamphlets often registered similar contradictions in their descriptions of monstrous births. Mothers were imagined to imprint their children not only through diet and exercise but also through what they thought about or what they wore: a woman who looked on a painting of a black man too intently might produce a black child.3 Several monstrous birth pamphlets show the dire effects that follow when mothers are too preoccupied with fashion. In The True Description of a Child with Ruffs (London, 1566), the child is born with ruffled ‘collar’ of flesh on her neck that mirrors the ruffs worn by fashionable women (Figure 32). These images were often associated with divine justice: the temporary fashions that women wore voluntarily became permanently imprinted in the flesh of their children (Crawford 2005: 41–61). Through divine fashioning, the child becomes the living image of his mother’s fashion excess. Along with the antitheatrical attacks, these monstrous birth pamphlets thus offer a glimpse of the differences between early modern and contemporary uses of the word ‘fashion’. Whereas fashions now seem disposable, not affecting the essence of the wearer, in the early modern period the word also carried connotations of deeper changes ( Jones and Stallybrass 2000: 6). Far from representing a sense of full individual control over acts of self-fashioning, the many uses of the word ‘fashion’ highlight both the ability to shape one’s own identity and the ‘experience of being moulded by forces outside one’s control’ (Greenblatt 1980: 3).

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Figure 32 The True Description of a Child with Ruffs (London, 1566). Nature has endowed the body of the child with the curled hair and the ruffs worn by women of fashion. British Museum, London

Shakespeare’s Much Ado about Nothing offers a compendium of early modern debates about fashion and fashioning. The word ‘fashion’ appears in the play more than twenty times, suggesting the manipulation of both external appearances and internal perceptions (as well as the intersections of the two). As with the moment when Claudio fears that his eyes are not his own, many of the characters’ bodily senses, experiences, and actions become subject to the twin ‘fashions’ of clothing and language. Benedick complains that his friend Claudio has been changed by love, describing this transformation as a change of clothing and a change of linguistic convention: I have known when he would have walked ten mile afoot to see a good armour, and now will he lie ten nights awake carving the fashion of a new doublet. He was wont to speak plain and to the purpose, like an honest man and a soldier, and now is he turned orthography; his words are a very fantastical banquet, just so many strange dishes. May I be so converted and see with these eyes? (2.3.15–22)

The answer of course is ‘yes’: Benedick is ‘so converted’ by the end of this very scene. Fooled into thinking that Beatrice loves him, he comments of her thoroughly dismissive demeanour, ‘I do spy some marks of love upon her’ (2.3.236–7).

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Beatrice is similarly determined not to follow the social script of marriage: her family members complain that she is ‘so odd and from all fashions’ (3.1.72). Her uncle describes a husband as a kind of garment, which will both fit Beatrice and presumably help to shape her up: ‘I hope to see you one day fitted with a husband’ (2.1.50). She replies that she will not marry till God make men of some other metal than earth. Would it not grieve a woman to be over-mastered with a piece of valiant dust? To make an account of her life to a clod of wayward marl? No, uncle, I’ll none. Adam’s sons are my brethren, and truly, I hold it a sin to match in my kindred. (2.1.50–5)

Beatrice’s jest suggests the absurdity of a social hierarchy in which the husband is her symbolic ‘head’ even though his body is made of ‘the dust of the ground’ (Genesis 2:7). In a way that parallels Mikhail Bakhtin’s conception of the carnivalesque, Beatrice here uses the common currency of the body to mock the absurdity of man’s ‘mastery’ of woman. Yet ultimately both she and Benedick are ‘fitted’ with the marital garments that they have resisted. This process comically transforms them inside and out, altering their outward appearance, speaking and writing styles, and even their bodily senses. As Beatrice’s uncle Leonato points out, the lovers’ eyes have been given to them second-hand: benedick: leonato: benedick: leonato:

Your niece regards me with an eye of favour. That eye my daughter lent her? ’Tis most true. And I do with an eye of love requite her. The sight whereof I think, you had from me, From Claudio, and the Prince. (5.4.22–6)

While the ‘eyes’ that Beatrice and Benedick borrow seem relatively benign, the parallel plot of Hero and Claudio’s courtship highlights the deadly effects of masculine misreading. The verbal constructions that the villain Don John imposes on Hero almost kill her, and the scene of her fake death points to how gender and class hierarchies govern whose scripts will be believed. On the night before his wedding day, the young Claudio believes he sees his beloved at her chamber window, talking with another man who details the ‘vile encounters’ they have had in secret (4.1.97). The scene (which is never shown to Shakespeare’s audience) is in fact an elaborate deception staged by the play’s villain, Don John: the woman Claudio sees is not his beloved Hero but her waiting-woman, Margaret. Yet Claudio is certain of Hero’s guilt and proceeds publicly to shame his bride at the altar the next day. In an exchange that points to the way her bodily signs are misread, Claudio denounces her to the assembled company of family and friends: She’s but a sign and semblance of her honour. Behold how like a maid she blushes here! …

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Comes not that blood as modest evidence To witness simple virtue? Would you not swear, All you that see her, that she were a maid, By these exterior shows? But she is none; She knows the heat of a luxurious bed. Her blush is guiltiness, not modesty. (4.1.31–40)

Even as he fears that Hero manipulates these ‘exterior shows’ in order to trick him, Claudio does not consider the volatility that is introduced by his own role as the reader of these signs. He asserts that he can read her blush as ‘guiltiness’ even as he acknowledges that it looks like evidence of ‘simple virtue’. Like the body of the witch on trial, or that of the vagabond imprinted with the letter ‘V’, Hero’s body is in danger of becoming permanently marked by the codes through which it is interpreted. Given Claudio’s social status and the fact that he makes his charges at the altar, bolstered by the ritual apparatus of a public marriage ceremony, his false reading threatens to produce the guilt it claims to uncover.4 With the sceptical eye that is lacking in James’s account of the witch trials, Shakespeare here explores the potentially tragic consequences of the power imbalances involved in reading and misreading the female body. In this comedy, however, Hero is finally revealed to have ‘died’ only while ‘her slander lived’ (5.4.66).

Consuming Bodies Sumptuary laws might seem absurdly controlling from the modern perspective in which ‘fashion’ is a matter of personal choice: why would a government micromanage matters of individual dress? In the changing socio-economic landscape of the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, especially in urban environments with increasingly broad and complex social networks, these laws mandated ‘social recognisability’ by attempting to make status legible (Hunt 1996: 45). These efforts to tie external markers of class to the person underneath served to reinforce a feudal system in which class status was tied to one’s birth. Yet European governments tended to be most active in pursuing sumptuary regulation not when feudal structures were at their most powerful but at moments of transition between feudalistic and capitalistic modes of economic production (Hunt 1996: 28). The transitional role of these laws is particularly evident when Elizabethan sumptuary debates take up broader economic contexts such as the domestic production of wool and the erosion of aristocratic power. In England, the first sumptuary statute of 1336 dealt only with food, while regulation of dress was not far behind in 1337 (Hunt 1996: 298). In the sixteenth century, three statutes formed the basis for sumptuary laws: two from the reign of Henry VIII (1533 and 1542) and one from the reign of Philip and Mary (1555). Elizabeth issued nine proclamations attempting to ensure compliance with these statutes, and writers of homilies and popular pamphlets also weighed in on the abuse of apparel.

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Preoccupied not only with the task of preventing individuals from counterfeiting their social class, they also link individual habits of consumption to the fate of the body politic in at least three different ways. First, sumptuary regulation attempted to check the wasteful expenditure of landed wealth on disposable goods such as clothing and food for fear that it would erode aristocratic power, a point taken up in the city comedies of the early sixteenth century. Second, these writers objected to the ‘digestion’ of foreign clothing and other luxury objects because this pattern of consumption conveyed English wealth abroad and led to the loss of business by domestic wool merchants, among other local producers. Third, they expressed more general fears about national identity as it was linked to both gender and religion: intemperance itself, from this perspective, would ‘effeminate’ the nation, weaken its moral fibre, and thus possibly lead to its destruction through the loss of England’s providential protection as a Protestant state. Queen Elizabeth’s 1574 proclamation on apparel summarises the first and second of these fears. She links excess of apparel and the ‘superfluities’ of wares not to the dissimulation of social class but to national dissolution, the ‘wasting and undoing’ of young gentlemen: The excess of apparel and the superfluity of unnecessary foreign wares thereto belonging now of late years is grown by sufferance to such an extremity that the manifest decay not only of a great part of the wealth of the whole realm generally is like to follow (by bringing into the realm such superfluities of silks, cloths of gold, silver, and other most vain devices of so great cost for the quantity thereof as of necessity the moneys and treasure of the realm is and must be yearly conveyed out of the same to answer the said excess) but also particularly the wasting and undoing of a great number of young gentlemen, otherwise serviceable, and others seeking by show of apparel to be esteemed as gentlemen, who allured by the vain show of those things, do not only consume themselves, their goods, and lands which their parents have left unto them, but also run into such debts and shifts as they cannot live out of danger of laws without attempting of unlawful acts. (Hughes and Larkin 1969: 381)

The queen’s rhetoric centres not so much on the legibility of class status as on the fear of the debilitating effects of consumption itself: she rebukes those who ‘seek by show of apparel to be esteemed as gentlemen’ for draining the resources of the nation and eventually breaking the law. In their focus on broader economic forces, proclamations such as this one begin to explain why sumptuary regulations often determined social class according to income, not birth. In her 1566 proclamation, for instance, Elizabeth stipulates that no serving-man, yeoman, or other person who ‘may not dispend of freehold forty shillings by year’ may wear any shirt, shirt-band, cap, bonnet or hat garnished with silk, gold, or silver. The proclamation also measures class by income for the higher reaches of the social hierarchy, offering a monetary equivalent even for the category of knights. In order to have the privilege of wearing silk upon hats, scabbards, and spur-leathers, among other places, one must be either ‘a knight, or such as may of yearly revenues during

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life expend £20 above all charges or be worth in goods £200’ (Hughes and Larkin 1969: 280). If the sumptuary laws are taken to be a pre-modern holdover that seeks to tie social class to birth, these economic definitions of class are contradictory. However, taken as an effort to negotiate the transition from pre-modern forms of social organisation towards those based on mercantile capitalism, sumptuary legislation can be understood as an attempt to regulate the economy itself. Tellingly, Elizabeth asks her magistrates not only to restrain individuals who might be violating the statutes of apparel but also to investigate the tailors and hosiers themselves. They must be prevented from using excessive amounts of cloth to produce the ‘monstrous and outrageous greatness of hose’ that has ‘crept of late into the realm to the great slander thereof ’ (Hughes and Larkin 1969: 189). In his pamphlet, The Seven Deadly Sins of London, Thomas Dekker takes up the second fear, that excessive consumption of foreign goods will dissolve England’s national identity. He denounces ‘apishness’ by comparing an Englishman’s suit to a traitor’s body that has been hanged, drawn, quartered, and set up for public view in several places: his codpiece is in Denmark, the collar of his doublet and the belly in France, the wing and narrow sleeve in Italy, the short waist hangs over a Dutch botcher’s [tailor’s] stall in Utrecht, his huge slops speaks Spanish. (Dekker 1606: 32)

Dekker’s comparison between fashion excess and treason is a rhetorical move, designed to get the reader’s attention and sell copies of the pamphlet. Nevertheless, it also exposes the analogical thinking that runs through body politic metaphors and that cannot always be classed as figurative in the modern, rationalist sense. It is not only that these arguments express fears of the ‘slippery slope’ or ‘domino theory’ of sin, with small ones leading on to big ones (Hunt 1996: 82–3). Individual actions also had wider resonance because the analogical links between small and large, or between the microcosmic and the macrocosmic scales, were so various and so multidirectional in this period. Even under a mechanistic model of the cosmos such as Dekker’s ‘clock’, the smaller gears could end up turning the bigger ones, and not always in the right direction. The genre of city comedy emerges in England at the end of the sixteenth century, just at the moment when sumptuary laws were losing their force. (They were abolished under James in 1604.) Plays such as Ben Jonson’s Epicoene and Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton’s Roaring Girl address themselves to many of the same problems that sumptuary legislation was designed to solve. These plays prominently feature cross-gender and cross-class dressing as emblems of shifting socio-economic conditions in London. Yet along with their exploration of how class or gender status might be counterfeited at the individual level, these plays also negotiate anxieties about broader socioeconomic changes (see also Chapter 24, Tales of the City). The Roaring Girl (1611), based on the life of cross-dresser Mary Frith (‘Moll Cutpurse’), pits the corrosive influence of money against the bodily and sexual integrity

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Image not available in the electronic edition

Figure 33 The Roaring Girl or Moll Cut-Purse, title page to the play of the same name (London, 1566). The engraving’s motto reads, riddlingly: ‘My case [situation, attire] is altered, I must work for my living.’ British Library, London

of the heroine (Figure 33). One ‘gallant’ who tries to woo Moll describes his plan to use the power of money to break down the body’s organic structures. Laxton boasts: I’ll lay hard siege to her – money is that aquafortis [nitric acid] that eats into many a maidenhead: where the walls are flesh and blood, I’ll ever pierce though with a golden auger (2.1.195–7).5

The golden auger (or carpenter’s tool for boring holes in wood) figures as a phallic instrument of sexual conquest that is simultaneously mechanical and economic; it steadily breaks down the body’s resistance without any appeals for consent or emotional engagement. The destructiveness of nitric acid, which ‘eats into many a maidenhead’, similarly suggests a process of commodification in which bodies are destroyed in the process of being purchased. These images of bodily dissolution model an economic system in which, as Peter Stallybrass puts it, ‘the triumph of the commodity betokens the death of the object’ (1996: 290). It is not only the ‘objectification’ of

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bodies that is the problem here but also the process of abstraction to which they are subjected. In this play, the very procedure that makes the body available for exchange as a cash equivalent tends to destroy its material integrity. Outcries against prostitution were widespread in this period, and ‘whoredom’ stood in for all kinds of social and spiritual ills. Yet in The Roaring Girl Dekker and Middleton take a rather sober look at the economic conditions that might cause a woman to sell her body. For instance, when the gallant Laxton targets Moll he is unaware that she is in the habit not only of dressing in men’s clothes but also of carrying a sword and using it. He goes to meet her, thinking the meeting is a sexual assignation, but finds her with her sword drawn, ready to fight for her honour. She boldly challenges him: In thee I defy all men, their worst hates And their best flatteries, all their golden witchcrafts With which they entangle the poor spirits of fools Distressed needlewomen and trade-fallen wives – Fish that must needs bite, or themselves be bitten – Such hungry things as these may soon be took With a worm fastened on a golden hook … I scorn to prostitute myself to a man, I that can prostitute a man to me! (3.1.92–112)

Rather than taking a moralising stand against the evils of the prostitute herself, Moll targets the conditions of need that lead women to be captured with a ‘golden hook’ – an instrument similar to the ‘golden auger’ in its destructiveness to the body. Perhaps paradoxically, the play presents Moll’s act of dressing in men’s clothes as far less of a threat to the social order than is prostitution – the sale of the body and the monetisation of identity. Further, the figure of economic witchcraft in this passage highlights the distance between this play’s approach to the body and that of witchhunters such as King James. James focuses on the witch’s body as the site through which the natural order is transgressed and then restabilised through God’s ‘supernatural sign’. This play, written not long afterwards, focus on an entirely different kind of witchcraft, one practised by those with economic power. Dekker and Middleton stage the fragmentation and dissolution of the body as it becomes subject to the ‘golden witchcrafts’ of the cash nexus. Perhaps most striking are those moments when bodies are not merely disguised or covered by false ‘shows’, in Hamlet’s term, but imagined as actually transformed into the objects they consume. Like Donne’s Anatomy of the World, which uses the conceit of bodily anatomy to expresses the loss of all coherence in the cosmos, Jonson’s Epicoene renders socio-economic changes as satirical alterations in the bodies of his characters. In what looks like a theatrical adaptation of an anatomy lecture, Jonson’s Captain Otter dissects the inner workings of his wife’s face and body for the amusement of his drinking companions:

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All her teeth were made in the Blackfriars, both her eyebrows in the Strand, and her hair in Silver Street. Every part of the town owns a piece of her … She takes herself asunder [apart] still when she goes to bed, into some twenty boxes, and about next day noon is put together again, like a great German clock (4.2.83–90).6

Mistress Otter’s body here becomes as a function of the areas of London where she has purchased various cosmetics and prosthetic devices to improve her appearance. Subject and object, consumer and consumed, are satirically reversed: it is not she who now owns a piece of the town but every part of the town that now ‘owns a piece of her’. A grammatical shift at the end of this passage also suggests Mistress Otter’s loss of agency: whereas she actively ‘takes herself asunder’ each night upon going to bed, the next day she loses even this modicum of will and is passively ‘put together again, like a great German clock’. In the same way that her act of buying these commodities seems to transfer her agency to the object purchased, this process of disassembling and reassembling herself robs her of self-mastery rather than reaffirming her ability to fashion her own identity. While women’s bodies often stand in (whether satirically or tragically) for the dissolution of the centred subject in an expanding culture of commodification, men’s bodies are also strikingly shaped, deformed, and fragmented by these same socioeconomic forces. In Epicoene, one pretender, John Daw, brags of sexual conquests he has not in fact made and of education he does not possess. He is ‘anatomised’ toward the end of the play when he unwittingly reveals his bodily cowardice to an onstage audience. He fears for his life when he is duped into believing that he must fight a supposed rival (in an argument that has in fact been manufactured as part of the plot to expose his cowardice). He offers to avoid the fight by giving his aggressor two of his teeth. This trade is part of a comic bargaining process in which losing only two teeth comes to seem like a good deal. Previously his tormentors had made greater demands: ‘Your upper lip, and six o’ your fore-teeth’ (4.5.240). Daw’s attempt to purchase his own safety by trading away his own teeth undermines the very bodily integrity he is so keen to salvage. How can he protect his body by trading a piece of it away? The satirical logic of this scene is therefore similar to Mistress Otter’s efforts at self-fashioning, which eat away at her control of her own body. Both characters traitorously ‘sell’ their bodies in the process of trying to care for them: she figuratively sells hers to various shops, while he agrees to trade his teeth to the men who threaten him. The men ultimately settle for giving Daw ‘six kicks’ instead of taking his teeth, but Jonson has made his the satirical point. Like the traitorous body that Dekker describes, with its codpiece in Denmark and its narrow sleeve in Italy, these scenes of bodily dissolution register macro-economic forces at the level of the microcosmic body. They satirise but ultimately provide no real alternative to the cognitive dissonance of life in early modern London, where new forms of exchange seemed to assemble personhood from far-flung locations. Well into the seventeenth century, anatomists, homilists, and pamphleteers continued to claim that the divine currency was visible even in the body of man. For

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Crooke, ‘as in coin the picture of Caesar, so in man the image of God is apparently discerned’. Yet even as Crooke sought to harmonise the new techniques of dissection with older models of man as microcosm and divine image, playwrights such as Shakespeare, Dekker, Middleton, and Jonson invited their audiences to discern the many other kinds of currency that were gaining purchase on early modern bodies. These ranged from the powerful words controlling Claudio’s eyes to the economic witchcrafts that could make bodies traitors to themselves, bought and sold in pieces from Blackfriars to the Strand. Notes 1

See The Second Tome of Homilies (London, 1570), 156–7. 2 For another challenge to the model of the Reformation as a disenchantment of the world, see Strier 2007. 3 In A thousand notable things, of sundry sortes (1579), Thomas Lupton cites the tale of a Spanish woman who, upon producing a black baby and being charged with adultery with a Moor, was exonerated when it was found that a picture of a black man hung in

her bedchamber (see Loomba and Burton 2007: 4). 4 On the ways in which discussions of the body as a pre-discursive entity can become complicit in forming the bodies they describe, see Butler 1993. 5 Quotations are from Paul Mulholland’s edition of The Roaring Girl (Dekker and Middleton 1987). 6 Quotations are from R. V. Holdsworth’s edition of Epicoene (Jonson 1990).

References and Further Reading Bakhtin, M. (1984). Rabelais and his World, trans. H. Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Barkan, L. (1975). Nature’s Work of Art: The Human Body as Image of the World. New Haven: Yale University Press. Bourdieu, P. (1977). Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. R. Nice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Butler, J. (1993). Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of ‘Sex’. New York: Routledge. Calvin, John (1561a). Four Godly Sermons against the Pollution of Idolatries. London; repr. 1579 as Four Sermons of Master John Calvin. Calvin, John, (1561b). The Institution of Christian Religion. London. Carlino, A. (1999). Books of the Body: Anatomical Ritual and Renaissance Learning, trans. J. Tedeschi and A. C. Tedeschi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Clark, S. (1997). Thinking With Demons: The Idea of Witchcraft in Early Modern Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Crawford, J. (2005). Marvelous Protestantism: Monstrous Births in Post-Reformation England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Crooke, Helkiah (1615). Mikrokosmographia: A Description of the Body of Man. London. Dekker, Thomas (1606). The Seven Deadly Sins of London. London. Dekker, Thomas (1608). The Bellman of London. London. Dekker, Thomas and Thomas Middleton (1987). The Roaring Girl, ed. Paul Mulholland. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Donne, John (1611). Anatomy of the World. London. Floyd-Wilson, M. (2003). English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Foucault, M. (1970). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage. Foucault, M. (1978). History of Sexuality, trans. R. Hurley. New York: Pantheon. Greenblatt, S. (1980). Renaissance Self-Fashioning from More to Shakespeare. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Harris, J. G. (1998). Foreign Bodies and the Body Politic: Discourses of Social Pathology in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hillman, D. (2007). Shakespeare’s Entrails: Belief, Scepticism and the Interior of the Body. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hillman, D. and C. Mazzio (eds.) (1997). The Body in Parts: Fantasies of Corporeality in Early Modern Europe. New York: Routledge. Hobbes, Thomas (1651). Leviathan. London. Hughes, P. L. and J. F. Larkin (eds.) (1969). Tudor Royal Proclamations, vol. 2. New Haven: Yale University Press. Hunt, A. (1996). Governance of the Consuming Passions: A History of Sumptuary Law. New York: St Martin’s Press. James VI, King of Scotland, and James I, King of England (1597), Daemonologie. Edinburgh. Johnson, M. (2007). The Meaning of the Body: Aesthetics of Human Understanding. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Johnston, B. (2001). ‘Renaissance body matters: Judith Butler and the sex that is one’. International Journal of Sexuality and Gender Studies, 6, 77–94. Jones, A. R. and P. Stallybrass (2000). Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jonson, Ben (1990). Epicoene or The Silent Woman, ed. R. V. Holdsworth. London: A. & C. Black. Kuriyama, S. (1977). The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine. New York: Zone Books. Lake, P. and M. Questier (2002). The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in PostReformation England. New Haven: Yale University Press. Laqueur, T. (1990). Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Levine, L. (1994). Men in Women’s Clothing: Antitheatricality and Effeminization, 1579–1642. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Loomba, A. and J. Burton (2007). Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Maus, K. (1996). Inwardness and Theater in the Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mauss, M. (2006). ‘Techniques of the body’ (original essay published 1935). In N. Schlanger (ed.), Techniques, Technology and Civilisation (pp. 77– 96). New York: Durkheim/Berghahn. Mazzio, C. (2007). The Inarticulate Renaissance: Language Trouble in an Age of Eloquence. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Mazzio, C. and R. Strier (2005). ‘Two responses to Shakespeare and embodiment: an econversation’. Literature Compass, 3, 15–31. [Munday, Anthony] and Salvianus (1972). A Second and Third Blast of Retreat from Plays and Theaters. New York: Johnson Reprint Corporation. Newman, K. (1991). Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. O’Connell, M. (2000). The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in Early Modern England. New York: Oxford University Press. Paster, G. K. (1993). The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Paster, G. K. (2004). Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Paster, G. K., K. Rowe, and M. Floyd-Wilson (eds.) (2004). Reading the Early Modern Passions: Essays in the Cultural History of Emotion. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Primaudaye, Peter de la (1605). The Second Part of the French Academie. London. Rankins, William (1587). A Mirror for Monsters. London. Sawday, J. (1990). ‘The fate of Marsyas: dissecting the Renaissance body’. In L. Gent and N. Llewellyn (eds.), Renaissance Bodies: The Human Figure in English Culture 1540–1660 (pp. 111– 35). London: Reaktion. Sawday, J. (1995). The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture. London: Routledge.

Reading the Body Scarry, E. (1988). ‘Donne: “But yet the body is his booke” ’. In E. Scarry (ed.), Literature and the Body: Essays on Populations and Persons (pp. 70– 105). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Scarry, E. (1997). The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schoenfeldt, M. (1999). Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shuger, D. K. (1990). Habits of Thought in the English Renaissance: Religion, Politics, and the Dominant Culture. Berkeley: University of California Press. Siraisi, N. G. (1990). Medieval and Early Renaissance Medicine: An Introduction to Theory and Practice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Smith, B. (2000), Shakespeare and Masculinity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stallybrass, P. (1996). ‘Worn worlds: clothes and identity on the English stage’. In M. De Grazia, M. Quilligan, and P. Stallybrass (eds.), Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (pp. 289–320). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strier, R. (2007). ‘Martin Luther and the real presence in nature’. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 37, 271–303. Stubbes, Philip (1583). The Anatomy of Abuses. London. Toulalan, Sarah (2007). Imagining Sex: Pornography and Bodies in Seventeenth-Century England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Walsham, A. (1999). Providence in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wright, Thomas (1604). The Passions of the Mind in General. London.

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Physiognomy Sibylle Baumbach

There’s no art To find the mind’s construction in the face. (Macbeth 1.4.11–12)

The Art of Physiognomy When Shakespeare’s Duncan rejects the possibility of inferring the mind’s design from the features of the face, he challenges the basic assumption of physiognomic reasoning. According to physiognomy, which is concerned with the ‘interpretation’, ‘rule’, or ‘essence’ (gnomon) of ‘nature’ (physis), there is an intrinsic relation between form and content, exterior and interior, physis and psyche. The body is perceived as a legible ‘text’, which openly communicates a person’s character and provides an insight into the disposition of man, provided that all signifiers that become visible on the bodily surface are given careful consideration. As suggested by the title of Thomas Hill’s The Contemplation of Mankind (1571), a popular physiognomic companion of the time, ‘all the members and parts of man, as from the headed to the footed’ have to be taken into account in the judgement of a particular character, including, ‘movements, gestures of the body, colour, characteristic facial expression, the growth of the hair, the smoothness of the skin, the voice, [and the] condition of the body as a whole’ (PseudoAristotle 1936: i806a25). The physiognomic catalogue sketched in the PseudoAristotelian Physiognomonica (fourth century BC), which is regarded the first physiognomic treatise, already indicates that from a physiognomist’s point of view, there is virtually nothing in the human body that does not communicate. On the contrary, the nature of the soul seems to gush out of every pore. Of all bodily parts, the face emerges as the most ‘telling’, yet at the same time most complex physiognomic text. Even though it openly reveals itself to its beholders, the physiognomic data displayed are highly unstable and essentially ambivalent.

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Frequently churned up by passions of the mind, the face appears as perpetuum mobile, accommodating multiple, sometimes even conflicting expressions, which invite but, at the same time, obstruct physiognomic reading. While most expressions of emotions are translated onto the human countenance with an immediacy that precludes their control or regulation, some facial features are liable to manipulation and skilfully applied rhetoric. However, even if Duncan’s statement, which echoes the dictum of the Roman satirist Juvenal, fronti nulla fides (‘there is no trusting appearances’), suggests otherwise, physiognomy, its potentials and limits, plays a seminal part not only in Macbeth, but also in early modern literature and society, where it became a most lauded albeit highly controversial and often disputed method for deciphering man. Thus, while there is an art to find the mind’s construction in the face, it is the ‘art of physiognomy’ (Hill 1571, emphasis added) that dominates early modern physiognomic discourse, i.e. the contemplation of the ‘skill’ and talent required to enact readings of the body and face, on the one hand, and the careful consideration of the artifice of physiognomic data, the construction of a persona, and the artificiality which can be attached to certain bodily signifiers on the other. The focus on physiognomic artistry both in the appliance and recognition of non-verbal rhetoric pays tribute to the paradoxical notion of the self which permeated early modern culture: ‘one, that selves are obscure, hidden, ineffable; the other, that they are fully manifest or capable of being made fully manifest’ (Maus 1995: 28). In so far as physiognomy offers the tools for disclosing both what is hidden and for interpreting what becomes visible, it stands at the crossroads of an almost obsolete world order in the medieval tradition wherein man’s position and character were determined and thus essentially legible, on the one hand, and the increasing desire for obtaining signifying power to constitute and authorise one’s self, on the other. Duncan’s anti-physiognomic dictum is situated at this seemingly paradoxical interface of legibility and illegibility in so far as it refutes the widespread belief in physiognomic inference in a context wherein faces by definition are essentially readable, and thus takes us to the core of early modern discourse about the ‘art of physiognomy’, whose linchpin is performance.

Physiognomy in the Theatrum Mundi The ambivalence arising from the contemplation of the body as index of the mind is nowhere more obvious than in the context of theatrical play. And yet, even though the observation that an actor can embody a certain character that does not necessarily comply with his own supports Duncan’s statement, non-verbal signifiers remain a key feature of theatrical communication: they not only help establish and identify a character but also support the invisible strings between actors and audience. Basic physiognomic understanding as well as a certain confidence in the indexicality of the body become prerequisites for understanding performance, both in the theatre and in everyday communication. Thus, countering Duncan’s claim, we are inclined to believe in physiognomic inference while, at the same time, we are aware of its deceptive

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quality and inherent ambivalence, which is stressed by the notion that expressions are ‘actions that a man might play’ (Hamlet 1.2.84). Considering the architecture of the Globe, it seems indisputable that non-verbal communication and physiognomic ‘readings’ took centre stage in early modern theatre. Exposed on all three sides, the stage gave the audience full view of the actors and allowed for intense face- and body-readings. Not only could actors convey certain passions of the mind through facial expressions but they could also gather immediate feedback on their play from the faces of the groundlings: ‘There would be many moments when the Elizabethan actor would be working as if under a microscope’ (Styan 1967: 16). While critics rightly argue for the prevalence of the ‘ear’ over the ‘eye’, especially with regard to Shakespeare’s theatre, rhetorical manuals of the time (for no handbooks on the art of acting survived) suggest that orators and actors did not rely solely on the power of words but also carefully studied ‘the speech of [the] body’ (Wilson 1533: fo. 119) and acquired a skill to ‘to keep a decorum in his countenance, neither to frown when he should smile, nor to make unseemly and disguised faces in the delivery of his words, not to stare with his eyes, draw awry his mouth, confound his voice in the hollow of his throat … nor stand in his place like a lifeless image, demurely plodding and without any smooth and formal motion’ (Heywood 1612: unpaginated). As indicated, in Thomas Heywood’s Apology for Actors (1612), actio, the fifth element of rhetoric, is predicated on the effect of non-verbal communication. It would go too far too assume that actors were typecast – as is suggested in The Return from Parnassus (1606), where Richard Burbage recruits the student Philomusus according to physiognomic criteria (‘I like your face, and the proportion of your body for Richard the Third’, 2.1.1835f.). Critical consideration, especially of facial signifiers, points to a heightened physiognomic awareness in the early modern theatrum mundi – not only onstage where the pseudo-science becomes a means for characterisation and meta-theatrical reflections, but also in everyday life. Confirming and challenging the notion of a synthetic relation between body and mind, theatrical performance held up a mirror to social role-playing and adequately reflected the conflicting views on the art of physiognomy in early modern society. For whereas in playhouses like the Globe, the language of the body can ultimately be identified as performance, in the theatrum mundi seeming and being can no longer be easily separated. As indicated by the increased interest in rhetoric and by the proliferation of conduct books such as Giovanni della Casa’s Galateo (1576), Erasmus’ De Civilitate Morum Puerilium (1554), Baldassare Castiglione’s Il Cortegiano (1528), and Niccolò Machiavelli’s Il Principe (1513), concepts of simulation and dissimulation became prominent in the sixteenth century, promoting ‘technologies of the self ’ (Foucault 1988; see also Chapter 22, Bacon’ s ‘Of Simulation and Dissimulation’), which allow a sober government of the body and made performance fashionable. With the dissemination of techniques for performing one’s self and the increasing desire for self-fashioning, however, physiognomic thought and theory did not fade. On the contrary: in the theatre of the world, the art of face- and body-reading becomes indispensable. As

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Thomas Hill argues, physiognomy becomes an essential tool in everyday life: ‘without this art a man cannot so well detect their falsehood and doings … If ever this were in any age a necessary science, then no doubt in this our time’ (Hill 1571: fo. iii). Thomas Wright supports this view, and takes the knowledge of non-verbal rhetoric and the manipulation of bodily language as incentives to provide an insight into the Passions of the Mind (1601) and their expressions through the body to sensitise his countrymen for the dichotomy between homo interior and homo exterior. Whereas the English people, Wright laments, still present themselves as open books, others already possess a refined talent for covering their true characters: Our people for most part reveal and disclose themselves very familiarly and easily … Wherefore I thought good to try if a little direction would help our countrymen to counterpoise their native wariness, and open the way not to become crafty and deceitful, which is vicious, but how to discover other men’s passions, and how to behave ourselves when such affections extraordinarily possess us. (Wright 1620: 84ff.)

Even though in his captatio benevolentiae, Wright refrains from promoting dissimulation in his countrymen, the fifth and largest book of his treatise is concerned with ‘means to move passions’ and offers tools for generating scorn or fear, or for love or joy ‘by the wit and will’ (1620: 149). Physiognomy emerges as a double-edged sword. For by providing the knowledge of how to ‘read’ people’s appearances, it does not only enable the progression from the exterior to the interior of man: it also offers the instruments for successful and effective self-fashioning. It is not surprising therefore, that physiognomy should have its first great renaissance in a society that put a greater emphasis on the individual ( Jacob Burckhardt even refers to the ‘discovery of the individual’) and where man’s faculties for constructing and performing his self are both (re-)discovered and discussed (see Chapter 74, Identity).

The Renaissance of Physiognomy in Early Modern Culture The revival of physiognomic thought and theory in literature and culture towards the end of the sixteenth century was supported by the rise of portraiture and autobiographical writings, the advent of the anatomy theatre, and the confrontation with foreign physiognomies, as well as by a profound awareness of the body’s humoral disposition and the power of human passions,1 which directed attention to the body. Instead of dissecting the latter to disclose its content, physiognomy provided the means for scrutinising the cover and inferring the interior from signs on the bodily surface without breaking into the ‘house of the soul’. Humoral-pathological treatises such as Levinus Lemnius’ The Touchstone of Complexions (1581), Timothy Bright’s A Treatise of Melancholy (1586), and Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy (1621) refer to physiognomic features in so far as they allow conclusions to be drawn regarding the distribution and proportion of the four humours, blood, phlegm, black bile,

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and yellow bile, which determine a character as sanguine, phlegmatic, melancholic, or choleric. Amongst the numerous companions which were dedicated explicitly to the art of physiognomy, Pierre de la Primaudaye’s The French Academy (1586), Juan Huarte’s Examen de Ingenios (1594), Thomas Wright’s The Passions of the Mind (1601), and, especially, Thomas Hill’s The Contemplation of Mankind (1571) and Giambattista della Porta’s De Humana Physiognomonia (1586) became popular manuals providing an elaborate study of facial and bodily features as well as a comprehensive overview of the classical and medieval tradition of physiognomic thought. Della Porta’s treatise, for instance, which is regarded as the trailblazer for physiognomy in the early modern era, not only draws heavily on the Pseudo-Aristotelian Physiognomonia but pays tribute to further ancient and medieval authors, who stood in the Aristotelian tradition, such as Galen, Polemon, Adamantius, Rhazes, Avicenna, Averroes, Michael Scot, Albertus Magnus, and Pietro d’Abano, who all have their share in della Porta’s meticulous analyses of individual features. For physiognomic theory did not hibernate for the 2,000 years that lie between the Physiognomonia and della Porta’s seminal work. As early as in the thirteenth century, the Pseudo-Aristotelian Physiognomonia and Secreta Secretorum, a letter to Alexander that contains directions of how to use the art of physiognomy at court, circulated in English translations and were widely read (see Clarke 1987: 173ff.). And yet the full potential of this pseudo-science was not identified until Thomas Hill and Giambattista della Porta, as well as numerous literary writers and playwrights such as Michel de Montaigne, John Davies, Francis Bacon, and, above all, William Shakespeare, restored it to the attention of the public and provided a tool that paid tribute both to the (nostalgic) belief in a decipherable world, wherein the liber corporis as microcosm complements the divine book of nature, whose signatures are essentially readable, and also to the intervention into the traditional ordo by the ascendant individual, who starts creating and imitating characters and thus attains co-authorship in the liber naturalis.

Physiognomic Methods Relying on common sense and stereotyping, physiognomic reading is a most basic human activity. It provides the fundamental tools for constructing social relations and offers a universal language, which is accessible to the literate and the illiterate, academics and commoners alike, who join forces in deciphering the world. Even if often referred to as ‘pseudo-science’, physiognomic treatises such as Della Porta’s aim at establishing a thoroughly scientific approach to the human body, which demarcated physiognomy from the occult and prophetic arts. Substantiated by classical and medieval sources, della Porta’s analyses closely follow the Physiognomonica where Pseudo-Aristotle offers three modes for the interpretation of bodily signifiers: the ethnological, the zoomorphic, and the expression method. Two of these are discarded almost immediately: the first is deemed

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unsuccessful as it accounts merely for the effect of ambient environmental conditions on the body (dark hair and skin, for instance, indicate an origin in southern hemisphere); the third is also dismissed since temporary expressions are regarded as providing little insight into a man’s character but merely denote volatile passions. Instead, Pseudo-Aristotle, like Della Porta after him, follows the zoomorphic approach, and correlates the physiognomies of men and animals to conceive similarities in character. His zoomorphic typology, a precursor to Charles Darwin’s studies on evolution and human expressions, is in many cases reinforced by allusions to the allegorical significance ascribed to certain animals in contemporary handbooks of iconology. This method, however, is not unproblematic: while some animals appear rather unambiguous with regard to their ‘character’ (the lion is generally regarded as symbol of strength, the owl represents wisdom, the fox cunning), others appear to carry polyvalent meanings, which change with their regional and cultural contexts. The raven, for instance, was considered a symbol of prudence in antiquity, but serves as harbinger of mischief in Shakespeare’s Macbeth (see 1.6.37). To avoid misreadings, PseudoAristotle suggests listing all animals that have the same feature to preclude the possibility that this feature could have opposing characterological implications. Thus he comes to the conclusion that rough hair, for instance indicates courage (lions and boars) while hair that is soft suggests cowardice (sheep and deer). Della Porta even goes one step further when he includes zoomorphic portraits, some of which show renowned personae next to their animal counterparts: in twenty-nine woodcuts he offers illustrative examples of the similarities between human and animal physiognomies, showing a dull, languid face with a flat and bulky nose next to an ox head, which complement each other in imbecility and brazenness, and sides the wise emperor Vitellius with an owl, and mighty Zeus with a lion. These analogies are accompanied by thorough analyses of individual bodily and facial features that are spelt out in so little detail that a common reader will hardly be able to retrieve their full semantic spectrum when interpreting a physiognomic ‘text’ himself. Della Porta, for instance, devotes a whole book of his treatise on the examination of the eyes, which as speculum animi (mirror of the soul), are unrivalled in both characterological expressiveness and complexity in meaning. Whether they are protruding up- or downwards, retreating and dry, of grey-white, grey, or redyellow colour, whether they have little, multicoloured spots, which can be regular or irregular, almost every imaginable detail of the eyes is accounted for. However, physiognomists are aware of the great potentiality for misreadings and call for caution in the examination of the human body. Like Thomas Hill, they stress the importance of considering ‘all parts of man, and not [judging] rashly by any member alone’ (Della Porta 1586: preface) and underline that ‘bodily notes … procure and cause a great probableness, although no necessity’ (1586: fo. 4) before letting the readers embark on the physiognomic catalogue provided. This admonition is often accompanied by an illustrative example of a fatal misreading – and what could be more adequate for this purpose than the highly ambiguous physiognomy of Socrates? Having been scrutinised by a renowned physiognomist, usually

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identified as Zopyros, it seems that Socrates received a highly unfavourable assessment and was pronounced to be ‘a lecherous person, subtle, a deceiver, covetous, and given to wickedness’.2 It was no other than the subject himself, however, who saved the physiognomist’s reputation by confessing to this unfavourable disposition. Socrates added, however, that he had learned to control his passions by philosophy, which altered his mind yet not his body. While being grist to the critics’ mills, exceptions to the rule such as the paradoxical appearance of Socrates do not impede physiognomic readings. Johann Caspar Lavater, for instance, saw the philosopher as a single unfortunate ‘misprint’ in the great book of nature, and thus does not annihilate the legibility of the human face any more than ten or twenty misspellings could make a text unreadable (see Lavater 1775: I, 65), a claim, which resembles Michel de Montaigne’s observation that ‘nature did him wrong’ (Montaigne 1910: III, 314).

Physiognomy and the Occult Despite its influential advocates, physiognomy continued to be subject to debate particularly because of its deterministic aspects. ‘[T]hose fatal brands of physiognomy’, Thomas Nashe argues, ‘which condemn men for fools and for idiots and, on the other side, for treacherous circumventers and false brothers, have in a hundred men I know been verified in the contrary’ (Nashe 1594: sig. F). The proximity to divination and the occult sciences gave physiognomy a bad press: it was even accused of having been ‘invented of the devil’, professing ‘those things, which god hath reserved unto himself alone, that is to say, the knowledge of things to come’.3 Disregarding its origins in medicine, physiognomy was often coupled with astrology4 and reduced to its ancillary disciplines: chiromancy or palmistry (hand-reading), and metoposcopy, which judges man’s destiny from the lineaments of the forehead. Ben Jonson alludes to this trend in The Alchemist, when Subtle discovers Drugger’s fortune in the wrinkles of his forehead. Face directs attention to this physiognomic reading when he reveals his surprise at the swift characterisation: ‘Slid, doctor, how canst thou know this so soon?’, to which Subtle replies: ‘By a rule, captain, / In metoposcopy, which I do work by; /A certain star i’the forehead, which you see not’ (1.4.42–5). Because of its association with the arts of prophecy, physiognomic writings were temporarily put on the Index auctorum et librorum prohibitorum. In 1559 a decree issued by Paul IV forbade libri omnes et scripta [all books and writings containing] chiromantiae, physionomiae, aeromantiae, geomantiae, hydromantiae, onomantiae, pyromantiae, and necromantiae. Sixtus V reinforced this interdict in 1590. The revised degree, however, no longer listed physiognomy amongst the forbidden arts, even though certain particular treatises were still banned and the art of body-reading continued to be associated with witchcraft and declared an invention of the Devil. As is claimed in the First Daemonologie:

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For he [Satan] will oblige [pledge] himself to teach them arts and sciences … the thought none knows but GOD; except so far as ye may guess by their countenance, as one who is doubtlessly learned enough in the physiognomy. Yea, he will make his scholars to creep in credit with princes, by fore-telling them many great things … And yet are all these things but deluding of the senses, and no ways true in substance. ( James 1597: 21–2)

The attack was directed first and foremost to vagabonds, mainly Egyptians who were connected with soothsaying and practised prophetic arts in early modern England (see Porter 2005: 130–51). In the same year in which the Daemonologie was published, the ‘Act for punishment of rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars’ was passed, which prohibited the practice of all divinatory arts, including physiognomy: all idle persons going about in any country [region] either begging or using any subtle craft or unlawful games and plays, or feigning themselves to have knowledge in physiognomy, palmistry, or other like crafty science, or pretending that they can tell destinies, fortunes, or such other like fantastical imaginations … shall be taken, adjudged, and deemed rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars, and … be stripped naked from the middle upward and shall be openly whipped until his or her body be bloody. (39 Elizabeth c.3.4., 1597)

Notwithstanding the queen’s decree, however, a strong interest in physiognomy persisted – as various treatises circulating at the time attest. Its ‘scientific’ approach, as promoted by della Porta and Hill, supported an ongoing physiognomic discourse and maintained a certain distance from the occult arts. Furthermore, the bad press physiognomy received could have sparked a novel enthusiasm for face-readings, and it was especially the theatre that discovered the controversial discipline for itself. Condemned as witchcraft, defended as natural science, but often applied as a valued tool for self-fashioning, not least by the queen, who monitored portraits of herself and dug deep into the paint-pot to make her face appear youthful, spotless, and unwrinkled until old age, providing the ocular proof for her motto semper eadem (see Cerasano and Wynne-Davies 1992). Physiognomy was therefore a subject that was particularly likely to be discussed, applied, and possibly re-established in playhouses. The dialogic space of the theatre provided an apt foundation for the critical contemplation of physiognomy in early modern society, which challenges, yet never fully rejects ‘the art to find the mind’s construction in the face’. This holds true particularly for Macbeth and its highly meta-theatrical physiognomic subtext.

The Physiognomy of the Face With reference to the scene in which Duncan speaks out against physiognomy, the strong rejection of the synthesis of mind and body must be put into perspective. The face under scrutiny belongs to the Thane of Cawdor, a confidant of the king, who

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emerges as devious traitor. Significantly, however, the treacherous ‘document’ remains out of sight. Lacking a facial ‘text’ to support his claim, Duncan’s statement does not deny physiognomic inference but rather appears as an attempt to justify his fatal misconception of a traitor as loyalist. For it is particularly in the obscure and corrupted world of Macbeth that faces become legible. Both a physiognomic knowledge and a certain awareness of the deceptive quality of facial and bodily signifiers are indispensable for the successful ‘reading’ of Macbeth or Macbeth. The protagonist is a case in point as he experiences the power of the passions that work on his body: he is eventually rebuked by his wife as his face ‘is as a book where men / May read strange matters’ (1.5.60–1), a book which according to Lady Macbeth requires a cover to conceal its content and to show the world an ‘innocent flower’ that hides the ‘serpent under’t’ (1.5.63). Duncan’s profound scepticism towards the knowledge derived from the visage merely points to the complexity of the facial ‘text’, whose legibility greatly depends not only on the acting skill of its owner but also on the reading proficiency of its beholder. Highly flexible in its features, the human facies is extremely receptive to the workings of the mind. Each trait, each line, and each movement is semantically charged. This explains why physiognomic companions such as della Porta, for instance, dedicate two-thirds of their treatises to the analysis of facial signifiers. Due to its unstable and transient nature, the face presents the most significant but also the most elusive object of investigation. As a silent paratext, which either accompanies or replaces speech by providing an additional, possibly even conflicting, ‘text’ and non-verbal commentary to the spoken message, and which continues to communicate even when words fail, it presents an exceptionally challenging and highly ambivalent document. While some facial reactions, such as blushing or turning pale, for instance, are regarded as being somatic (and, as Charles Darwin later claimed, universal) and thus beyond man’s control, others are liable to manipulation and can be generated by ‘wit and will’. Again it is Shakespeare who provides an illustrative example for a deceiving rhetoric of the face when he lets Richard Gloucester take pride in the fact that he ‘can smile and murder whiles I smile’ (3 Henry VI 3.2.182). Smiling belongs to those ambiguous gestures that can be purposefully applied. Not surprisingly, therefore, the face in particular became a battlefield for conflicting responses to the art of physiognomy, as indicated by proverbs of the time. Expressions such as fronti nulla fides and fronti multa fides (‘fair face foul heart’ and ‘fair face fair heart’) emerged almost simultaneously and attested the ambivalence in the reception of physiognomic inference. Beauty and ugliness, however, continued to be regarded as reliable signifiers. As Thomas Wright asserts, ‘the heart of man changeth his countenance, whether it be in good or evil’ (1620: 27). The common association of an attractive exterior with a virtuous character follows the ancient concept of kalokagathia, the interdependence of the good and the beautiful, while, similarly, outward ugliness was seen as an unequivocal sign of inner corruption. Unlike Wright, who regards the heart as determining force, Francis Bacon argues for psychological rather than physical causality in his

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essay on deformity: ‘Deformed persons are commonly even with nature; for as nature hath done ill by them, so do they by nature’ (Bacon 1861: VI, 480). The notion of predestination by the bodily form is taken up by Shakespeare in his characterisation of Richard Gloucester, who regards himself as being ‘determinèd to prove a villain’ (Richard III 1.1.30) because of his misshapen body. According to physiognomic reasoning and communis opinio, deformity and beauty are reliable signifiers for identifying a wicked or virtuous soul at first sight and taking them at face value. Also Castiglione subscribes to the consent of form and content: Therefore it may be said that beauty is a face pleasant, merry, comely, and to be desired for goodness; and foulness a face dark, uglisome [horrible], unpleasant and to be shunned for ill. And in case you will consider all things, ye shall find that what so ever is good and profitable hath also evermore the comeliness of beauty. (Castiglione 1561: 349)

While physical deformity is often identified immediately, beauty cannot that easily be pinned down to certain features. As the proverb goes, it lies in the eye of the beholder, wherefore the physiognomist would engage in a more complex analysis of individual features before passing judgement on a character.

Physiognomic vs Pathognomic Features In a physiognomic reading, some features turn out to be more reliable than others. While the shape, colour, and design of the face, the eyes, hair, or skin, for instance, cannot be altered but come in their innate form, facial expressions that are linked to emotional reactions, such as frowning, smiling, blushing, or turning pale, are, to a certain extent, liable to manipulation: they might be imitated or wilfully generated. Consequently, as Francis Bacon suggests, a differentiation should be made between constant and moveable traits, owing to their different semantic implications: The lineaments of the body do disclose the disposition and inclination of the mind in general; but the motions of the countenance and parts do not only so, but do further disclose the present humour and state of the mind and will. (Bacon 1857: III, 367ff.)

Bacon here offers a distinction between physiognomic and pathognomic features avant la lettre. It was not until the eighteenth century that physiognomy was divided into the analysis of static, constant, and invariable, physiognomic features, on the one hand, and the consideration of dynamic, flexible, and variable movements, or pathognomic features, on the other. Even though these two branches of physiognomy, which were established by Johann Caspar Lavater’s definition, were not yet accounted for in early modern terminology, their different quality was already taken into consideration whenever the semiotics of the body were examined. As Bacon, long before Lavater, indicates, physiognomic features, such as the shape and colour of eyes and eyebrows, the form of the nose and mouth, the diameter of the forehead, or the overall shape of the

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face, denote a person’s disposition and natural character, while pathognomic features, such as blushing, turning pale, frowning, smiling, etc., communicate temporary passions of the mind, and it is these feature, which are predominantly facial and which can, to a certain extent, be imitated. Since pathognomy, however, was not yet separated from physiognomy in early modern terminology, this essay will continue to refer to the latter as comprising both constant and temporary features.

Characterological Imprints The conception of the body as a textual construct goes back to a Paracelsian concept that assumes that ‘there is nothing external which is not a sign of the internal’,5 and is based on the assumption that the liber corporis [the book of the body], just like its macrocosm, the book of the world, is designed to be essentially legible: there are mystically in our faces certain characters which carry in them the motto of our souls, wherein he that cannot read A.B.C. may read our natures. I hold moreover that there is a phytognomy, or physiognomy, not only of men but of plants and vegetables; and in every one of them some outward figures, which hang as signs or bushes of their inward forms. (Browne 1990: 98)

As suggested by Thomas Browne, every being bears a divine signature that denotes its individual character and determines its place in the liber mundi. Consequently, knowledge of the world can be attained through self-knowledge or self-reading, that is through scrutinising the document of one’s soul, which is the body. The connection between human and written characters, which further explains the contested yet important role of physiognomy in the early modern era, was expanded by figurative initials in medieval manuscripts and by illustrations of human alphabets: Giovanni de Grassi, for instance, animated letters by filling their forms with human beings and animals in motion. Later depictions go one step further, in presenting anthropomorphised letters, which are constructed by human bodies that bend and twist, stretching and angling their extremities to imitate the shape of an A, B, or C. The idea of the human alphabet resonates in early modern literature as, for instance, in King Lear when Kent degrades his opponent Oswald by spelling out his ‘character’: ‘Thou whoreson Z, thou unnecessary letter’ (2.2.58). Considering that this particular consonant was, even though ‘much heard amongst us … seldom seen’ (Mulcaster 1582: 123) and furthermore often replaced by an ‘s’, the ‘z’ might indeed be deemed superfluous. The animation of letters and man’s attainment of signifying power suggests a shift of authority and authorship that comes full turn with the invention of Gutenberg’s printing press, when the individual emerges not only as bearer but also as creator of (his) visual signifiers: Gutenberg’s letters were conceived as characters whereby the literal merges with the metaphorical:

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The letters … do look astonishingly humanoid, with human anatomies: a body (stem of metal) standing on ‘feet’ with ‘shoulders’ supporting a face whose physiognomy is literally its character, a legible face. (De Grazia 1996: 86; emphasis added)

As suggested by the anthropomorphism of Gutenberg’s metal types, man is both the characterised and the characterising agent within a greater scheme of creation. Similar to the raised image that was inked for printing, human characters are authorised to participate in the signifying system from which they emerge and become creative. Thus it is not surprising that the image of the printing press recurs especially in the context of genealogy. Attributing the inscriptive power exclusively to male characters, however, it serves a highly gendered perspective: The female body becomes merely an interface, a passive receptor that is involved in the creative process only in so far as it nourishes the offspring before reproducing the male script. And again it is Shakespeare who alludes to this greater physiognomic scope in Sonnet 11, which reminds its addressee of the duty to participate in the construction of the liber naturae: ‘She carved thee for her seal, and meant thereby / Thou shouldst print more, not let that copy die’ (13–14.). Physiognomy becomes a means not only to identify a certain character but also to trace its evolution: thus, on beholding his son’s countenance, Aaron discovers his ‘seal … stampèd in his face’ (Titus Andronicus 4.2.126), and in All’s Well That Ends Well, the King of France recognises familiar features in young Bertram’s visage: ‘Youth, thou bear’st thy father’s face’ (1.2.19). While man is likened to the metal types in the printing press, woman forms the soft surface, which is easily imprinted and essentially mouldable, like a block of wax, formed by patriarchal authority and authorship: To you your father should be as a god, One that composed your beauties, yea, and one To whom you are but as a form in wax, By him imprinted, and within his power To leave the figure or disfigure it. (A Midsummer Night’s Dream 1.1.47–51)

In early modern discourse, the image of wax, which goes back to Plato’s Theaitetos, where it is used to visualise the process of impressing experiences and memories into the waxen surface of one’s mind, not only became a popular metaphor to illustrate the cognitive and mnemonic faculties of man (Carruthers 1990: 180ff.), but also kindled a new interest in the arts of reading and producing character. The memory of the soul and the memory of the body, the house of the soul, are interwoven in so far as impressions on the inner being eventually translate onto the bodily surface and vice versa. Thus, age leaves its marks on the human document, as is suggested in Thomas Kyd’s Soliman and Perseda, where the Prince of Cyprus remarks, ‘what warlike wrinkles time has charactered / With ages print upon thy warlike face’ (1.4.6–7). As indicated by genealogical metaphors, nature’s power of inscription is transferred onto man, who can not only create novel characters by means of reproduction but also alter

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Image not available in the electronic edition

Figure 34 Giuseppe Arcimboldo, The Librarian (1566). Other pictures by this Italian mannerist fashioned portraits out of vegetables, fruit, and animals. Sko monastery near Uppsala, Collection Baron R. von Essen

existing ones by erasing or rewriting the script imposed by nature. Thus Hamlet, for instance, performs a precognitive stage by clearing his memory to restore the initial tabula rasa, a white paper ‘unscribled with observation of the world’ in order to set down his father’s commandment and note an observation which challenges the legibility of the world: ‘meet is it I set it down / That one may smile and smile and be a villain’ (Hamlet 1.5.108–9). Like human memory, the conscious is perceived as ‘a great ledger-book wherein are written all our offences’ (Burton 1621: 776). Self-knowledge therefore is ultimately attained by reading, by considering the multiple volumes of (self-) edited man, whom Giuseppe Arcimboldo in his famous painting conceives as The Librarian (c.1566; Figure 34), as a compilation of books. Significantly, the only book that is opened up in Arcimboldo’s painting to allow a glimpse into the interior of man and inviting a close reading is placed on the top of the head, suggesting an entrance to the mind. Conceiving people as books was a popular structural metaphor at the time, which motivated a progression from superficial to closer readings, from cover to content. As suggested in Christopher Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, the face is generally regarded

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as ‘index of the mind’: ‘even as an index to a book / So to his mind was young Leander’s look’ (137–8). As well as promoting self-knowledge and self-fashioning, physiognomy supported the popularisation of a reading culture, which is accessible to the illiterate and the literate in so far as it does not involve printed books or handwritten documents but rather the perusal of physiognomic inscriptions. The face was, and in a way continues to be, the most frequently read (auto-)biography. Whereas physiognomic readings promote the progression from the page to the face, literature takes the reverse approach in the attempt to reconstruct facial characters on the page. The conflation of written and facial characters is reflected in Sir John Davies’s ‘A Sonnet sent with a book’, which evokes the connection in order to animate the letters inscribed on the paper and enacts the progression from characters on the page to characters on the face: In this sweet book, the treasury of wit, All virtues, beauties, passions written be; And with such life they are sett forth in it As still methinks that which I read, I see. But this book’s mistress is a living book, Which hath indeed those virtues in her mind; And in whose face, though envy’s self do look, Even envy’s eye shall all those beauties find.

As the interconnection of written and facial characters suggests, the concept of ‘text’ in early modern culture is closely linked to the concept of physiognomy, which points to a multi-layered and complex notion of ‘reading’, transcending the contemplation of written texts while maintaining an intimate connection. Thus, the famous inscription beneath Shakespeare’s monument in the Holy Trinity Church at Stratfordupon-Avon, with its mocking invitation ‘Read if thou canst’, refers to both the literal and the physiognomic ‘text’, and thus to Shakespeare’s ‘characters’, both his complete works and his physiognomy. The latter, however, with its retreating forehead, prominent eyes, and oversized upper lip, similar to the Droeshout image, which introduces the reader to the first folio edition, seems to fall short of his ‘true’ character. Hence, Ben Jonson’s demands, ‘Reader look, / Not on his picture but his book’. And yet it is this book, Shakespeare’s oeuvre, which ultimately challenges the preference of the written to the facial character, not only as it explores the ‘art of physiognomy’ (Lucrece 1394–5), but also as it is written for performance and suggests ways of how to do things with physiognomy. Notes 1 2

See Enenkel 1998, Paster 2004, Porter 2005: 120–71, and Sawday 1995. Hill 1571: preface. See also the first edition of Saunders, Physiognomy and Chiromancy, Metopos-

copy (1653: 144); this encounter was first reported by Cicero, De Fato 10. 3 Vives 1540: sig D3v. Cf. Howard 1620: fo. 25r.

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See the second edition of Saunders, Physiognomy (1671: 180). Cf. Arcandam 1592.

5

Paracelsus, Oper (Strasburg: Lazari Zekners, 1603), I, 763, cit. Porter 2005: 202.

References and Further Reading Arcandam (1592). The Most Excellent Profitable, and Pleasant Book of the Famous Doctor and expert Astrologian Arcandam … With an Addition of Physiognomy, trans. William Worde. London. Bacon, Francis (1857; 1861). The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding et al., vol. 3 (1857), vol. 6 (1861). London: Longman. Baumbach, Sibylle (2008). Shakespeare and the Art of Physiognomy. Leicester: Troubador. Browne, Thomas (1990). Sir Thomas Browne’s Religio Medici, Letter to a Friend and Christian Morals, ed. William A. Greenhill. Peru: Sherwood Sugden. Burton, Robert (1621). The Anatomy of Melancholy. Oxford. Carruthers, Mary J. (1990). The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Castiglione, Baldassare. (1561; repr. 1900). The Book of the Courtier, from the Italian of Count Baldassare Castiglione: Done in English by Sir Thomas Hoby. London: David Nutt. Cerasano, Susan P. and Marion Wynne-Davies (eds.) (1992). Gloriana’s Face: Women, Public and Private, in the English Renaissance. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Clarke, Angus G. (1987). ‘Metoposcopy: an art to find the mind’s construction in the forehead’. In Patrick Curry (ed.), Astrology, Science, and Society: Historical Essays (pp. 171–95). Woodbridge: Boydell Press. Cocles, Bartolommeo della Rocca Cocles (1556). A Brief and Most Pleasant Epitome of the Whole Art of Physiognomy, trans. Thomas Hill. London. De Grazia, Margreta (1996). ‘Imprints: Shakespeare, Gutenberg and Descartes’. In Terence Hawkes (ed.), Alternative Shakespeares (vol. 2, pp. 63–94). London: Routledge. Della Porta, Giambattista (1586). De Humana Physiognomonia. Vico Equense: G. Cacchi. Enenkel, Karl et al. (eds.) (1998). Modelling the Individual: Biography and Portrait in the Renaissance. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Foucault, Michel (1988). ‘Technologies of the self ’. In L. H. Martin et al. (eds.), Technologies of the Self (pp. 16–49). Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Greenblatt, Stephen (1980). Renaissance SelfFashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Heywood, Thomas (1612; repr.1972). An Apology for Actors. New York: Johnson Reprint. Hill, Thomas (1571). The Contemplation of Mankind, Containing a Singular Discourse after the Art of Physiognomy. London. Howard, Henry (1620). A Defensative against the Poison of Supposed Prophecies. London. James VI and I (1597; repr. 1966). The first Daemonologie, ed. George B. Harrison, repr. New York: Barnes & Noble. Kiefer, Frederick (1996). Writing on the Renaissance Stage: Written Words, Printed Pages, Metaphoric Books. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Lavater, Johann Caspar (1775). Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe, vol. 1. Leipzig: Weidmanns. Maus, Katherine Eisaman (1995). Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Montaigne, Michel de (1910). Montaigne’s Essayes, trans. John Florio, 3 vols. Repr. London: Dent. Mulcaster, Richard (1582). The first Part of the Elementary which Entreateth Chiefly of the Right Writing of our English Tongue. London. Nashe, Thomas (1594). The Terrors of the Night, or, A Discourse of Apparitions. London. Paster, Gail K. (2004). Humoring the Body: Emotions and the Shakespearean Stage. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Porter, Martin (2005). Windows on the Soul: Physiognomy in European Culture, 1470–1780. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pseudo-Aristotle (1936). Physiognomonica. In Aristotle: Minor Works, ed. and trans. W. S. Hett. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Physiognomy Reusch, Franz Heinrich (ed.) (1886; repr. 1970). Die Indices librorum prohibitorum des sechzehnten Jahrhunderts. Nieuwkoop: de Graaf. Saunders, Richard (1653; 2nd edn. 1671). Physiognomy and Chiromancy, Metoposcopy. London. Sawday, Jonathan (1995). The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture. London: Routledge. Stimilli, Davide (2005). The Face of Immortality: Physiognomy and Criticism. Albany: State University of New York Press.

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Styan, J. L. (1967). Shakespeare’s Stagecraft. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thorndike, Lynn (1958). A History of Magic and Experimental Science, vol. 8. New York: Macmillan. Vives, Ludovico (1540). An Introduction to Wisdom. London. Wilson, Thomas (1553; repr. 1969). The Arte of Rhetorique. Amsterdam: Da Capo. Wright, Thomas (1620). The Passions of the Mind in General.

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In the England of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, people took their dreams very seriously. Many saw their dream life as significant and individual. The Puritan minister Philip Goodwin stated that, while awake, people live in a common world, but once asleep ‘each man goes into a single world by himself ’ (Goodwin 1658: 292). The seventeenth-century apothecary Nicholas Culpeper suggested that people’s imaginations were always working, awake or asleep. When someone was asleep, this imagination caused dreams. Thomas Wright in The Passions of the Mined argued that ‘dreams are caused by the spirits which ascend into the imagination’ (Wright 1601: 111). But dreams could also simply be a nightly repetition of what had been done during the day. Thus a fisherman would dream of fishing, a cobbler of shoes, a butcher of blood, or a soldier of war. Also, what went on in earshot of the sleeper could affect the dream they had. Thus, argued Thomas Nashe in Terrors of the Night, if in the middle of the night there was a loud knocking or disturbance then ‘we straight dream of wars, or of thunder. If a dog howls, we suppose we are transported into hell, where we hear the complaint of damned ghosts’ (Nashe 1594: Cv4). But Nashe went on to argue that dreams could also reflect the guilt people feel. ‘As touching the terrors of the night, they are as many as our sins’ (1594: B1). He added that the most fearful dreams are those caused by ‘accusing private guilt’ (1594: D1). The Anglican minister Thomas Cooper argued that through certain dreams ‘may we conjecture of the sins of the heart’ (Cooper 1617: 146). A number of early modern medical doctors believed that the human body was made up of four different fluids, known as humours. They were blood, phlegm, yellow bile (also known as choler), and black choler. One’s personality was determined by the dominant humour: one was sanguine, phlegmatic, choleric, or melancholy, and these personality types also influenced the dreams one had. Those who had choleric disposition did not sleep well: they dreamed of fireworks, exhalations, comets, streaking and blazing meteors, fury, anger, stabbing, and battles, ‘fighting, blood, and wounds’ (Wright 1601: 111). The sanguine, however, had no trouble sleeping, and their

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dreams were of beautiful women, gardens, flowing streams of blood, or of pure purple colours. The phlegmatic, however, dreamed of seas, rains, snow, rivers, and drowning. While the dreams of the phlegmatic may sound unpleasant, the melancholic’s dreams were far more disturbing. Melancholics dreamed of dark places, of graves and cells, of falls from high turrets, of living in caves in the earth, and of black, furious beasts. They would dream of ‘profound darkness’ (Gonzalo 1641: B2). There were clearly many different ways in which dreams were understood. Marc Vulson in The Court of Curiosity noted that the rules about dreaming were not general, ‘and cannot satisfy all persons one way; but sometimes according to times and persons, they admit of various interpretations’ (Vulson 1669: 5). This essay explores the variety of ways in which dreams were explained and interpreted in early modern England.

Dreams from God, Jesus Christ, and Angels For some, dreams were messages from God or angels. Many believed that good angels were sent by God to speak to people in their dreams. Vulson assured his readers that ‘when we dream of seeing an angel, that signifies revelation, or good news’ (Vulson 1669: 4). John Cook was the solicitor-general for the Commonwealth who read the charges against Charles I at his 1649 trial. The year before the trial Cook was on board ship when there was a terrible storm. He was convinced that he and his wife and servants would all die. As the storm increased he grew sleepier and sleepier. Though his wife begged him not to sleep, as he was sitting in his chair he fell into the deepest sleep he had ever experienced. He dreamed that he was in a large room and there was ‘my sweet Redeemer Christ Jesus’. Christ asked Cook what he wanted, and he begged for the lives of all who were on the ship. Jesus asked him ‘why I was not willing to die’. In the dream Cook found himself impatient with his Lord, ‘that the Lord should surprise us, getting us into a ship at his call for his Service, and then drown us, as if we were patricides or heinous malefactors’ (Cook 1650: 9). Cook saw Jesus withdraw with displeasure at his answer. Realising what he had done, he fell down on the floor and ‘cried for mercy’ (1650: 10), whereupon Jesus promised him that the ship would not miscarry. Upon hearing this reassurance, Cook awoke. He told his wife, ‘peace, my dear heart, be quiet, we shall be safe: Jesus Christ hath promised me our lives: be not afraid’, and told her all his dream (1650: 11). The Puritan minister Ralph Josselin not only recorded his own dreams but also those of his children. He was especially close to his three eldest, Tom, Mary, and Jane, and the whole family was devastated by the death of Mary in 1650. In 1651 his 5-year-old daughter Jane dreamed ‘that Jesus Christ was in our church, and went up into my pulpit’. After being there for a while Christ came into bed with her, saying ‘that he should come and reign upon the earth ten thousand years’ (McFarlane 1976: 185). Three years later, on 8 December, 1654, soon before his eleventh birthday, Josselin’s son Tom told his father that he had had a wonderful dream. In the dream,

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Tom was listening to his father preach, when Jesus, clad in a white robe, as in Jane’s dream, came into the pulpit and hugged Josselin. Christ then went to Tom asked him what he wanted. Tom replied that he wanted was Christ’s blessing. Christ not only gave the boy his blessing, but also took Tom to heaven, where everyone was wearing white and singing beautifully and praying. Christ told Tom that he had to bring Tom back to earth – but by then Tom had found his sister Mary, and she ‘would not let him come away’. Tom saw Jesus ‘sit at the father’s right hand, which was wonderful, then while in heaven he thought there was terrible thunder, but he was not afraid’ (McFarlane 1976: 335). Then Christ told Tom he could stay in heaven no longer but must return to earth. Josselin was deeply impressed by his son’s dream, and possibly he was comforted as well that Tom saw his dead sister in heaven. Angels as well as Jesus visited people in their dreams. Joseph Hall, the seventeenthcentury bishop of Norwich, argued that if a man learned a remedy in a dream when he was ill and physicians could not cure him, it must have come from angelic suggestion. Hall gave the specific example of a crippled man from Cornwall named John Tresille, who ‘for sixteen years together was fain to walk upon his hands, by reason of the close contraction of the sinews of his legs’. He dreamed that an angelic presence told him that if he went to a specific well and washed in it, he would be cured. Hall reported that Tresille followed the dream’s advice and as a result was suddenly restored. Hall testified that he himself saw Tresille able to walk with ease. Hall testified that ‘I found here was neither art nor collusion’ (Hall 1652: 169, 170). Others also found healing through advice from perhaps angelic creatures in their dreams. The architect Sir Christopher Wren was visiting Paris when he started to feel ill and feverish, particularly in his kidneys. Wren consulted a physician, who advised that he be bled, but Wren had tried that in the past and found it only made him feel worse. He decided he would wait a day to see if he felt better. That night he dreamed that he was in a strange country – he surmised from the palm trees might be Egypt. ‘A woman in a romantic [elaborate] habit reached him dates’ (Aubrey 1669: 53). When he awoke, Wren sent for dates, and eating them cured him. This was not Wren’s first significant dream. Twenty years earlier, in 1651, he had dreamed about Oliver Cromwell’s victory over the Scots and Prince Charles two days before he was informed of it. Some believed that dreams were the way that God communicated with mortals, perhaps by sending back to earth in a dream a dead person who was deeply trusted. Sometimes, in addition, a dream could give the authority to do something one wanted but was scared to engage in, or a promise of something much wanted. In the early seventeenth century Sir William Wentworth wanted to buy the Harwood estate but feared he could not afford it. ‘So going to bed and on my first sleep, I dreamed and thought that my father appeared unto me.’ His father asked him, ‘ “Son, what do you for Harwood?” Methought I answered, “By my troth, sir, nothing, for the price is so excessive … I may not adventure upon it” ’. Wentworth’s dead father assured his son that he should ‘go forwards with it in the name of God’ (Wentworth 1883: 34–5).

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It is possible that Wentworth was particularly prone to believe that his father came from God with his message, since a part of the family history was that an angel had come to his father when he was very ill and thought to be dying. At that point Wentworth’s father had sired four daughters and no sons. The angel, who appeared as a middle-aged woman in good apparel, came to the elder Wentworth when he was lying in bed, and told him her name was ‘God’s Pity’ (Wentworth 1883: 28). She informed Wentworth’s father that not only would he recover but also have a son and heir. Many were convinced that angels would in this way take human shape when they appeared to people. Ludwig Lavater, in his 1572 text, Of Ghosts and Spirits Walking by Night, does assure his readers that ‘angels for the most part take upon them the shapes of men, wherein they appear’ (Lavater 1572: 161). Many believed that the souls of dead people and angels would advise people of what they needed to know, often in their dreams. Angels appear in dreams in Renaissance drama as well. In Thomas Heywood’s 1605 play about the dangers Elizabeth faced before she became queen, If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody, contained a dumb-show that showed a highly significant dream Elizabeth had. While she is a prisoner at Woodstock Elizabeth tells her servant Clarentia, ‘My heart is heavy and my heart doth close, / I am wearing of writing, sleepy on the sudden (Heywood 1935: 1042–3). As Elizabeth sleeps, there is a dumb-show presented on stage, according to these directions: ‘Enter Winchester, Constable, Barwick, and Friars; at the other door two Angels; the Friars step to her, offering to kill her; the Angels drive them back. Exeunt. The Angels open the Bible, and puts it in her hand as she sleeps. Exeunt Angels. She wakes.’ Once Elizabeth awakens she comments on ‘how pleasant was this sleep to me’. The princess, however, is not altogether sure whether what has occurred was a dream or not. She asks Clarentia, ‘Saw thou nothing?’ Clarentia assures the princess that she neither saw nor heard anything. Elizabeth realises that she is holding her English Bible. ‘Didst not thou put this book into my hand?’ But Clarentia did not do that either. Elizabeth becomes convinced that this dream was miraculous: ‘’twas by inspiration’. Her belief is strengthened even more when she looks to read where is it opened and sees ‘Whoso puts his trust in the Lord / Shall not be confounded’ (Heywood 1935: 1054–65). Angels were powerful forces for good in dreams both in drama and in early modern culture.

Demonic Dreams There was great fear that the Devil and his demons could cause people to have false dreams that might lead them greatly astray. But Philip Goodwin warned people should not believe that the dreams God sent were always pleasant and those from the Devil upsetting. ‘Some divine dreams do disturb sleep, and may molest the mind, and interrupt men’s rest … Yet be it so, ’tis better in sleep to be somewhat troubled with molesting dreams from God than sinfully tickled with enticing and seducing

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dreams from the Devil’ (Goodwin 1658: 350). Goodwin was convinced that it was easy for the Devil to send deluding and defiling dreams since ‘he that can appear as a roaring lion to affright a waking Christian [may also] present himself as an enticing Damsel, to affect a sleeping man, and affect these filthy Dreams’ (Goodwin 1658: 97). Goodwin argued that there was one way someone could tell if the dream came from God or the Devil: a dream from the Devil would cause men to become arrogant and cruel, but God’s dreams would not. Yet we might doubt that anyone who had become arrogant because of what he dreamed would have the self-knowledge to admit it. But even knowing that a dream was demonic would not allow someone to simply dismiss it. ‘Defilement in dreams does not fasten upon the body barely’, Thomas Cooper explained, ‘but settles upon the soul also. And this adds much to the mischief of such filthy dreams, that the soul or mind, man’s most precious part is by this means polluted.’ He also argued that Satan used the weaknesses of someone when he placed ‘devilish dreams … in the brain’ since he made them ‘answerable to our desires’ (Cooper 1617: 146). But even the best, most virtuous people, ‘God’s saints’, are subject in sleep to defiling dreams. Goodwin warns ‘there are no persons Satan seeks more to make them sinful, than God’s saints’, and good people are most vulnerable in their sleep, when Satan can put sinful thoughts into their minds. Not only, warned Goodwin, do such dreams take ‘our minds off from good, but take good out of our minds’ (Goodwin 1658: 128). Another minister, Oliver Heywood, wrote in his diary about a terrible dream that he had about his son John that made him fear that the Devil was luring his son. He dreamed that his son had ‘fallen to the study of magic or the black art and that he had books of that sort’. Heywood woke up before midnight terrified by the dream. ‘I lay tossing with that dreadful apprehension till almost two o’clock, and was ready to faint under it – oh, what a night had I!’ (Heywood 1882: I, 340). Some were convinced that witches, with demons’ aid, could cause their victims to have terrible dreams, often with dreadful consequences. Philip Goodwin had suggested that people ought to pray every evening that the Devil, by using bad dreams, should not come near. In 1640 the physician Jacques Ferrand published a book on the causes, symptoms, and cures of love, or what he termed ‘erotic melancholy’. Ferrand described instances of men, but more often women, who believed that they had been forced to have sex with the Devil in their sleep, but Ferrand argued that ‘in truth they were only troubled with the nightmare’ (Ferrand 1640: 210). But if Ferrand believed that there were not actually demons who coupled with people in their sleep, others were convinced that the Devil could also tempt those weak in faith to practise witchcraft, leading to dreams that could be equally dangerous, deceiving, and destructive. Just as religious texts warned of the dangers of demons invading dreams, so too was it strongly believed that witches could communicate with the Devil through dreams, and also cast spells that caused their victims to have dreadful nightmares. Some women and men who practised witchcraft apparently

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believed their experiences took place in some alternative reality while their bodies were at home asleep.

A Nightmare Believed to be Caused by a Witch In the town of Warboys in the early 1590s, the five Throckmorton children acted very strangely. Their parents and physicians were convinced the children were bewitched, and soon centred on a very poor neighbour, known as Mother Alice Samuel. Mother Samuel denied that she had ever done anything to harm the children. The wealthiest landowner in the area was Sir Henry Cromwell. His wife Lady Cromwell came over from Ramsay, where she lived, to pay a condolence visit with the Throckmorton family. While there, Lady Cromwell insisted that Mother Samuel be sent for, and when she came Lady Cromwell harangued Mother Samuel about her behaviour. While Mother Samuel was insisting that she had done nothing wrong, Lady Cromwell suddenly tore off her cap. She then grabbed Mother Samuel’s head and cut off a lock of her hair. Lady Cromwell handed the lock of hair to Mrs Throckmorton, instructing her to cast it in the fire. Cutting off hair and burning it was considered a way to counter a witch’s evil spell. This visit had dreadful consequences for Mother Samuel and, at least by contemporary reckoning, for Lady Cromwell as well.1 After Lady Cromwell had attempted to get Mother Samuel to confess and after she had cut off a lock of the woman’s hair to burn, Mother Samuel had muttered something. Later it was said to be: ‘Madam, why do you use me thus? I never did you any harm as yet.’ Those last words, if indeed said, were a threat and ‘were afterwards remembered’. According to the 1593 pamphlet, the very same night of that confrontation, Lady Cromwell returned home and ‘suffered many things in her dream concerning Mother Samuel’. Lady Cromwell shared her bed with her daughter-in-law, who testified that Lady Cromwell ‘was very strangely tormented in her sleep by a cat (as she imagined) which Mother Samuel had sent unto her, which cat offered to pluck off all the skin and flesh from her arms and body’. Lady Cromwell was ‘struggling and striving’ to defend herself against the demonic cat. She also made such a ‘mournful noise’ that her daughter-in-law woke her up. Lady Cromwell told her that in her dream she had been beseeching the cat and Mother Samuel to leave her alone and thanked her daughter-in-law for ending the dream. But she was so afraid that she could not sleep again that night or even have quiet rest. ‘Not long after’, Lady Cromwell ‘fell very strangely sick’. Fifteen months later she was dead. The dream was alleged to have led to her death, and Mother Samuel was executed. Some so feared being bewitched through dreams, as Lady Cromwell was convinced she had been, that they tried a variety of deterrents. One was to grind lapis into a powder and mix it into ‘some convenient liquor’: this would prohibit ‘lustful dreams and witchcrafts’ (Nicols 1653: 202). While Mother Samuel denied that she had bewitched Lady Cromwell through a dream, some women believed that they had a range of magical powers, which they

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often experienced at night. In The Discovery of Witchcraft Reginald Scot was convinced, however, that when old women confessed to magical crimes they were actually suffering from melancholy: they took dreams of Satan, visits to the underworld, murder, and mayhem to be reality, when in fact they were simply at home and fast asleep. There were others who also doubted that bad dreams came from the work of the Devil or witchcraft. Using more physiological explanations, they argued that consuming certain foods or drinks would cause or cure strange or disturbing dreams.

Nightmares: Causes and Cures There was a variety of beliefs about what caused nightmares. Some believed they were caused by incubi or succubi who would settle upon sleeping people and cause them to feel they were being suffocated. Ludwig Lavatar argued that incubi and succubi are ‘night spirits, or rather devils, which leap upon men in their sleep’ (Lavatar 1572: 6). Many thought that the succubus would have carnal intercourse with a man while he slept; once in possession of a man’s seed, the demon could turn into an incubus and impregnate a woman in her sleep. People whispered that these demons would sit on the chest of the sleeping person and cause nightmares and feelings of not being able to breathe. Others spoke of being in a terrifying dream and not being able to scream. There were descriptions of nightmares where people thought they were caught in a fire, or drowning, or falling from a high distance, ‘and the dread of being dashed to pieces suddenly awakes [them]’ (Culpeper 1807: II, 177). While some were convinced that these dreams were caused by demons, Nicholas Culpeper described the dream of someone who, while asleep, ‘feels an uncommon oppression or weight about his breast or stomach, which he can by no means shake off ’ as being caused by indigestion brought on by heavy suppers eaten soon before bed (Culpeper 1807: II, 178). For example, heavy meats such as boar, rabbit, venison, and beef could cause disturbing dreams. Not only meat but also vegetables could be problematic. Gonzalo in The Divine Dreamer warned that beans, peas, cabbages, garlic, onions, leeks, and chestnuts could cause sorrowful dreams, as could ‘all water fowl, as duck, goose, and the like’ (Gonzalo 1641: B). One wonders what was left to eat. But it was not only eating the wrong foods that could provoke bad dreams; they could also be caused by not eating at all. Fasting was said to bring on very strange dreams. Culpeper had a number of suggestions of ways to avoid such nightmares. The patient should avoid heavy meals late at night. He also commended ‘exercise throughout the day’ (Culpeper 1807: II, 178), and encouraged a cheerful attitude. Peony made into a syrup and taken both before bedtime and again in the morning was effective against nightmares and melancholy dreams. The small herb polypody that grew near the roots of oak trees was also effective ‘if taken for several days altogether; as also against melancholy, or fearful or troublesome sleeps or dreams’ (Culpeper 1807: II, 297–8). While some argued for drinking some brandy before bed as a way to avoid nightmares, Culpeper thought that was a bad idea, and considered a glass of pepper-

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mint-water much safer. In A Treatise of Dreams and Visions Thomas Tryon also sensibly argued that the cure for the nightmare was to follow ‘a regular diet, and such as may generate good spirits and prevent the increase of melancholy and phlegm; avoid full suppers and excess in liquors’ (Tryon 1700: 25). There were more magical ways to avoid bad dreams. One method ‘to hinder the night mare’ was to take a piece of flint with a hole in it and wear around the neck when going to sleep (Aubrey 1669: 112). Many wore a variety of gemstones because of the qualities they were said to have. Thomas Nicols’s lapidary gives many examples. Wearing diamonds helped ‘drive away the vanity of dreams and the terrors of the night’ (Nicols 1653: 51). Emeralds were especially helpful to children who suffered night terrors. The topaz also would rid people of ‘nocturnal fears’ (Nicols 1653: 106). Opals not only helped people fall asleep but also made sure that the sleeper did not have troublesome dreams. The ruby had many valuable properties, including the ability ‘to drive away sadness, evil thoughts, terrible dreams’ (Nicols 1653: 58). Wearing the ‘gagate’, or stone-coal, helped people to avoid nocturnal fears that were caused by incubi or succubi (Nicols 1653: 171). Another way for men to be ‘delivered from the spirits of the night, called Incubi and Succubi, or else nightmares’, was offered by Edward Topsell in his History of Serpents. He suggested that the cure was to eat the tongue or gall-bladder of a dragon boiled in wine (Topsell 1608: 173). Topsell did not, however, give any suggestions on where one might find these ingredients. Another recipe with a bizarre ingredient came from The Secrets of Alexis. ‘Take the heart of an ape, and lay it under your head when you go to bed, so that it touch your head, and you shall see marvellous things, and all kinds of beasts, as lions, bears, wolves, apes, tigers, and other such like’ (Ruscelli 1615: 132). But there was also food and herbal remedies that many medical practitioners were convinced could promote agreeable dreams. The herb hypoglossum, commonly called horse-tongue, could be distilled into water, and this would procure pleasant dreams if drunk before going to bed. The juice of poplar leaves would not only lead to sleep but also cause delightful dreams. Poplar leaves, made into an ointment, could be placed on either one’s temples or the soles of one’s feet, and this could lead to highly amusing dreams.

Learning the Future from Dreams There was clearly a wide range of beliefs about dreams. For many people, the most significant aspect of dreams was their power of prognostication: if one could only understand the symbolism, one would know the future foretold by the dream. But people had a variety of beliefs about which dreams were true and which were not. Some were convinced that dreams in the autumn and spring, when the weather was changeable, were false dreams, but dreams in the summer and winter would accurately predict what would happen. Others thought dreams on a Friday night were especially significant. A persistent belief was that dreams in the early morning were especially

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likely to tell the dreamer what would occur in the future. William Vaughan argued, in his very popular Directions for Health, Natural and Artificial, that ‘dreams are either tokens of things past, or significance of things to come. And surely if a man’s mind be free from cares, and he dream in the morning, there is no doubt but the affaires then dreamed of will truly come to pass’ (Vaughan 1633: 163). Reginald Scot warned that dreams had in the dead of night were ‘commonly preposterous and monstrous’. But by morning, when the blood was more pure than at other times, ‘there happen more pleasant and certain dreams’ (Scot 1584: 104). Some believed that the way to interpret dreams differed depending on the month in which someone had been born. Some people had more magical ways to procure prophetic dreams. One recipe involved putting bay leaves under a pillow before bed: the subsequent dreams would come true. If someone wanted to dream of a dead friend they could put onyx under their pillow. In some dreams, the message, whether wonderful or terrible, was obvious. For others, one had to interpret what the image in the dream signified. Dreaming that one climbed to the top of a tree and picked two or three green apples could mean one would gain great advancement. Dreaming of artichokes also meant good fortune: one would soon receive a favour from a totally unexpected source. A clear bright light from a candle on a table meant health to the sick, or marriage to the unmarried. But some dream books warned that dreaming of eating lettuce meant trouble, or even that death was imminent. Even worse, if someone dreamed that he drank thinned mustard he would soon be accused of murder. Dreamers in early modern England had a variety of dream-interpretation texts they could consult, such as those by Thomas Hill, Marc Vulson, and Thomas Tryon; they could also visit one of the many physicians or astrologers who also interpreted dreams. (Part of Hill’s book is based on the Oneirocritica by Artemidorus, who lived in Asia Minor in the second century BC: his text was translated into Arabic in the ninth century, and was regularly reprinted, in many European vernacular languages, during the next nine centuries; see, for example, Artemidorus 1606.) People from the highest to the lowest ranks of society thought about their dreams. Marguerite, daughter of Henri II of France and his wife Catherine de Medici, believed that every important incident in her own life and her family’s was foretold in a dream. Her mother had a dream that she strongly believed was a forewarning. Her father’s refusal to listen to his wife, according to Marguerite, led to his death. Though this dream occurred in France it was well known in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. In 1559, at the age of 40, Henri was accidentally killed in a tournament. According to his daughter Marguerite, ‘The very night before that inauspicious tournament, [Catherine] dreamed that she saw the king my father wounded in the eye, as the next day he was, and being awake, she often times besought him that he would not tilt that day’ (de Valois 1892: 49). Henry did indeed fight in the tournament, forgot to put his visor down, and was killed. Thomas Hill, in his dream-book, reported the queen’s dream, but he called the queen Margaret instead of Catherine, perhaps mistaking the daughter and the mother. In the seventeenth century Gonzalo described

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the dream more elaborately than Hill. In Gonzalo’s version Catherine dreams of a dead Henry who ‘walked down the streets of Paris, being followed by an infinite company of his people that lamented for him’ (Gonzalo 1661: B4). Even though the warning dream is presented by Catherine’s own daughter we cannot know if it actually took place, but it does suggest how seriously dreams were taken, and the need to make some kind of sense of such a horrifying accident. If only Henry had listened to wife’s dream he would have survived. According to John Aubrey, when many men in the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V’s army were suffering from the plague, Charles dreamed that a decoction of the root known either as dwarf thistle or Caroline thistle would cure them. Charles tried it with, it was claimed, good results (Aubrey 1669: 49).

Did King James I Believe in Prophetic Dreams? But not all rulers stated that they believed in prophetic dreams. James I, especially in his younger years when he was James VI of Scotland, was concerned with the bizarre and the uncanny. One might suppose, then, that James would believe in supernatural, prognostic dreams. But he claimed that dreams had no such significance. In his various published works, James appears to have had no belief in the ability of dreams to predict the future or to be used in magic. In the 1599 book he wrote to give his eldest son advice on how to be a good ruler, Basilikon Doron, or His Majesty’s Instructions to his Dearest Son, Henry the Prince, James warned Prince Henry to ‘take no heed to any of your dreams’. Prophetic dreams, like prophecies and visions, James argued, had ceased in the time of Christ, so Henry should ‘therefore take no heed to fret either in dreams, or any other things; for that error proceeds of ignorance, and is unworthy of a Christian’ ( James 1918: 45). While still king of Scotland, James had believed strongly in the supernatural, particularly in the power of witches. A strand that runs through witchcraft trials and pamphlets is the belief in the power that witches have from their own dreams as well as the belief in their ability to bewitch others through the dreams they cause their victims to have. But while James’s 1597 text, Demonology, expressed his beliefs about the power of witches, he denied the supernatural nature of dreams. He did not believe that a demon or succubus could actually come and disturb or threaten a sleeper. He argued, in a manner resembling that of Nicholas Culpeper, that while some felt they had this visitation, it was actually natural, caused by a thick phlegm that takes over the vital organs, and makes people think there is some unnatural spirit lying on top of them and holding them down. Just as James dismissed the significance of dreams in his writings, he was equally contemptuous when in 1617, as he was preparing to return to Scotland for a visit, his wife Anne dreamed that if he made this trip he would die there. Anne begged him to cancel his voyage, but James refused. As it turned out, he was right to do so; his trip was successful, with no danger to him. Anne’s dream, fortunately for them

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all, did not correctly predict the future. But James was much less sanguine when it was his own dream that suggested that death was waiting to claim him. In 1622 his old boyhood tutor, George Buchanan, came to James in a dream to warn the king that he would experience both fire and ice, feeling great pain, and would die after two years. Though James told only his most intimate companions about his dream and begged them to keep it confidential, people at his court spoke about how upset the king was because of it.

Dreams that Predicted Death James was distressed by this dream foretelling his own death. For others, the distress came from a dream that predicted the loss of someone deeply loved, especially if it did indeed come true. Often, however, some of these dreams were recorded only much after the fact: we cannot know how memory has distorted events. Much later in her life, Lady Anne Clifford described a dream that she claimed her mother had frequently recounted to her in her childhood. This dream occurred in 1590, when Margaret Russell Clifford, countess of Cumberland, already the mother of two sons, was pregnant with the child who would turn out to be Anne. She dreamed that a presence came to her, informing her that ‘she should be delivered a little while after of a daughter which should be the only child to her parents, and live to inherit the ancient lands of her father’s ancestors’ (Herbert 1916: 23–4) The reason Anne’s mother was so vehement in repeating the dream to Anne as a child was that the first part of the prophecy had already tragically come to pass. Only a month after her dream she lost her elder son; the younger one died when Anne was sixteen months old. For Anne, the recounting of this dream was important as evidence that she, not a male cousin, should have the family estates. Gervase Holles’s dream came true far more quickly, and equally tragically. In 1630, when he was 23 years old, he married Dorothy Kirketon, whom he loved deeply. He described it later as an extremely happy marriage. The following year they had a daughter, whom they named Elizabeth, for Gervase’s mother, who had died in childbirth before Gervase turned 2. Two years later their son George followed. In January 1635 Elizabeth was about to give birth to their third child. The family was staying with Elizabeth’s parents. On 16 January Holles had a horrifying dream, which connected his fears for his wife with the long-ago loss of his mother: Elizabeth gave birth to a daughter, but mother and child both died. Still in the dream, Holles, feeling great despair, was walking by a wall near the house where he was born. On the other side of the wall was his mother, and she held his hand on the top of the wall. At that moment, he awoke, ‘my heart beating violently within me’ (Holles 1937: 230). Holles did not tell his wife about his dream, but her parents saw that he was feeling distressed and asked what was wrong, so he confided in them. Holles wrote later that they, ‘being rigid Puritans, made slight of it’ (Holles 1937: 231). The following day, however, Holles’s dream came true: his wife gave birth to a daughter, but both she

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and the child died. Gervase was not only devastated, but, he recorded later, struck by the parallel between his mother and his wife: both had three children, each died giving birth to a daughter who also did not survive, and George was almost exactly the same age as Gervase was when he lost his mother.

Dreams and Dreamers As we have seen, people in early modern England had many beliefs about what caused dreams. There was also a wide range of attitudes towards how to cope with nightmares. And for some, dreams were especially significant because of what they might foretell. Dreams could often cause great pain or anxiety. But they could also cause great joy. Lady Wentworth wrote to her son that ‘these three nights I have been much happier then in the days, for I have dreamt I have been with you’ (Wentworth 1883: 148). Dreams obviously played an important role in the lives of people of the Renaissance. See also Chapter 32, Sectarian Writing.

Notes 1

The Most Strange and Admirable Discoverie of the Three Witches of Warboys (London: Widdowe

Orwin, 1593). This text does not have page numbers.

References and Further Reading Artemidorus, Daldianus (1606). [Oneirocritica] The Judgment or Exposition of Dreams, written by Artemidorus, an Ancient and Famous Author, First in Greek, then Translated into Latin, after into French, and Now into English. London. Aubrey, John (1669). Miscellanies. London. Cook, John (1650). A True Relation of Mr. John Cook’s Passage by Sea from Wexford to Kinsale in that Great Storm January 5. London. Cooper, Thomas (1617). The Mystery of Witchcraft. London. Culpeper, Nicholas (1807). Nicholas Culpeper’s English Physician and Complete Herbal, ed. E. Sibly. London: Lewis & Hamblin. Ferrand, Jacques (1640). Erotomania or a Treatise Discoursing of the Essence, Causes, Symptoms, Prognostics, and Cure of Love, or Erotic Melancholy, trans. Edmund Chilmead. Oxford.

Garber, Marjorie (1974). Dream in Shakespeare: From Metaphor to Metamorphosis. New Haven: Yale University Press. Gonzalo (1641). The Divine Dreamer: or, A Short Treatise Discovering the True Effect and Power of Dreams. London. Goodwin, Philip (1658). The Mystery of Dreams, Historically Discoursed. London. Hall, Joseph (1652). The Invisible World. London. Herbert, Anne Clifford, Countess of Pembroke, (1916). Lives of Lady Anne Clifford Countess of Dorset, Pembroke and Montgomery (1590–1676) and of her parents, ed. J. P. Gibson. London: Roxburgh Club. Heywood, Oliver (1882). The Rev. Oliver Heywood, B.A., 1630–1702; his autobiography, diaries, anecdote and event books; illustrating the general and family history of Yorkshire and Lancashire,

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ed. J. Horsfall Turner. Brighouse, UK: A. B. Bayes. Heywood, Thomas (1935). If You Know Not Me, You Know Nobody. London: Oxford University Press. Hill, Thomas (1576). The Most Pleasant Art of the Interpretation of Dreams. London. Hodgkin, Katharine, Michelle O’Callaghan, and Susan Wiseman (eds.) (2008). Reading the Early Modern Dream: The Terrors of the Night. New York: Routledge. Holland, Peter (1994). ‘Dreams’. In P. Holland (ed.), William Shakespeare: A Midsummer Night’s Dream (pp. 1–21). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Holles, Gervase (1937). Memorials of the Holles Family, 1493–1656, ed. A. C. Wood. London: Offices of the Royal Historical Society. James I (1918). The Political Works of James I, repr. from the edition of 1616, ed. Charles Howard McIlwain. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lavater, Ludwig (1572). Of Ghosts and Spirits Walking by Night, trans. Robert Harrison. London. Levin, Carole (2008). Dreaming the English Renaissance: Politics and Desire in Court and Culture. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. MacFarlane, Alan, ed. (1976). The Diary of Ralph Josselin, 1616–1683. London: Oxford University Press for the British Academy.

Nashe, Thomas (1594). The Terrors of the Night or, A Discourse of Apparitions. London. Nicols, Thomas (1653). Arcula gemme. London. Ruscelli, Girolamo (1615). The Secrets of Alexis. London. Scot, Reginald (1584). The Discovery of Witchcraft. London. Topsell, Edward (1608). The History of Serpents. London. Tryon, Thomas (1700). A Treatise of Dreams and Visions, wherein the Causes, Natures, and Uses of Nocturnal Representations and the Communications both of Good and Evil Angels as also Departed Souls to Mankind. London. Vaughan, William (1633). Directions for Health, Natural and Artificial, 7th edn. London. Valois, Marguerite de [Queen Marguerite, consort of Henry IV of France] (1892). Memoirs of Marguerite de Valois, Queen of Navarre, trans. Violet Fane. London: J. C. Nimmo. Vulson, Marc (1669). The Court Of Curiosity, trans. J. G. London. Wentworth, Thomas (1883). The Wentworth Papers, 1705–1739, ed. James Joel Cartwright. London: Wyman. Wright, Thomas (1601). The Passions of the Mind. London.

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EDITED BY MICHAEL HATTAWAY

A John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., Publication

A New Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture Volume Two

Blackwell Companions to Literature and Culture This series offers comprehensive, newly written surveys of key periods and movements and certain major authors, in English literary culture and history. Extensive volumes provide new perspectives and positions on contexts and on canonical and post-canonical texts, orientating the beginning student in new fields of study and providing the experienced undergraduate and new graduate with current and new directions, as pioneered and developed by leading scholars in the field. Published Recently 49. A Companion to Emily Dickinson 50. A Companion to Digital Literary Studies 51. 52. 53. 54.

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55. A Companion to Henry James 56. A Companion to the British and Irish Short Story 57. A Companion to Jane Austen 58. A Companion to the Arthurian Literature 59. A Companion to the Modern American Novel: 1900–1950 60. A Companion to the Global Renaissance 61. A Companion to Thomas Hardy 62.A Companion to T. S. Eliot 63. A Companion to Samuel Beckett 64. A Companion to Twentieth-Century United States Fiction 65. A Companion to Tudor Literature 66. A Companion to Crime Fiction 67. A Companion to Medieval Poetry 68. A New Companion to English Renaissance Literature and Culture

Edited by Martha Nell Smith and Mary Loeffelholz Edited by Ray Siemens and Susan Schreibman Edited by David Paroissien Edited by Richard Brown Edited by Sara Castro-Klaren Edited by Haruko Momma and Michael Matto Edited by Greg Zacharias Edited by Cheryl Alexander Malcolm and David Malcolm Edited by Claudia L. Johnson and Clara Tuite Edited by Helen Fulton Edited by John T. Matthews Edited by Jyotsna G. Singh Edited by Keith Wilson Edited by David E. Chinitz Edited by S. E. Gontarski Edited by David Seed Edited by Kent Cartwright Edited by Charles Rzepka and Lee Horsley Edited by Corinne Saunders Edited by Michael Hattaway

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EDITED BY MICHAEL HATTAWAY

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This edition first published 2010 © 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd except for editorial material and organization © 2010 Michael Hattaway Edition history: Blackwell Publishers Ltd (1e, 2000) Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form Wiley-Blackwell. Registered Office John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, United Kingdom Editorial Offices 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley. com/wiley-blackwell. The right of Michael Hattaway to be identified as the author of the editorial material in this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher. Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A new companion to English Renaissance literature and culture / edited by Michael Hattaway. p. cm. – (Blackwell companions to literature and culture) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4051-8762-6 (alk. paper) 1. English literature–Early modern, 1500-1700–History and criticism–Handbooks, manuals, etc. 2. England–Civilization–16th century–Handbooks, manuals, etc. 3. England–Civilization– 17th century–Handbooks, manuals, etc. 4. Renaissance–England–Handbooks, manuals, etc. I. Hattaway, Michael. PR411.C663 2010 820.9′003–dc22 2009033117 A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Set in 11 on 13 pt Garamond by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited Printed in Singapore 1

2010

Contents

VOLUME I List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Contributors

xi xiii xv

Asterisked items are essays that offer focused readings of particular texts 1

Introduction Michael Hattaway

Part One: Contexts, Readings, and Perspectives c.1500–c.1650

1

13

2

The English Language of the Early Modern Period Arja Nurmi

15

3

Literacy and Education Jean R. Brink

27

4

Rhetoric Gavin Alexander

38

5

History Patrick Collinson

55

6

Metaphor and Culture in Renaissance England Judith H. Anderson

74

7

Early Tudor Humanism Mary Thomas Crane

91

8

Platonism, Stoicism, Scepticism, and Classical Imitation Sarah Hutton

106

9

Translation Liz Oakley-Brown

120

vi

Contents

10

Mythology Jane Kingsley-Smith

134

11

Scientific Writing David Colclough

150

12 Publication: Print and Manuscript Michelle O’Callaghan

160

13

177

Early Modern Handwriting Grace Ioppolo

14 The Manuscript Transmission of Poetry Arthur F. Marotti

190

15 Poets, Friends, and Patrons: Donne and his Circle; Ben and his Tribe Robin Robbins

221

16 Law: Poetry and Jurisdiction Bradin Cormack

248

17

263

*Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Book 5: Poetry, Politics, and Justice Judith H. Anderson

18 *‘Law Makes the King’: Richard Hooker on Law and Princely Rule Torrance Kirby

274

19 Donne, Milton, and the Two Traditions of Religious Liberty Feisal G. Mohamed

289

20 Court and Coterie Culture Curtis Perry

304

21 *Courtship and Counsel: John Lyly’s Campaspe Greg Walker

320

22

329

*Bacon’s ‘Of Simulation and Dissimulation’ Martin Dzelzainis

23 The Literature of the Metropolis John A. Twyning

337

24

352

*Tales of the City: The Plays of Ben Jonson and Thomas Middleton Peter J. Smith

25 ‘An Emblem of Themselves’: Early Renaissance Country House Poetry Nicole Pohl

367

26 Literary Gardens, from More to Marvell Hester Lees-Jeffries

379

Contents

vii

27

English Reformations Patrick Collinson

396

28

*Translations of the Bible Gerald Hammond

419

29

*Lancelot Andrewes’ Good Friday 1604 Sermon Richard Harries

430

30 Theological Writings and Religious Polemic Donna B. Hamilton

438

31

Catholic Writings Robert S. Miola

449

32

Sectarian Writing Hilary Hinds

464

33 The English Broadside Print, c.1550–c.1650 Malcolm Jones

478

34

The Writing of Travel Peter Womack

527

35

England’s Experiences of Islam Stephan Schmuck

543

36

Reading the Body Jennifer Waldron

557

37

Physiognomy Sibylle Baumbach

582

38

Dreams and Dreamers Carole Levin

598

VOLUME II List of Illustrations

xi

Part Two: Genres and Modes

1

39 Theories of Literary Kinds John Roe

3

40 The Position of Poetry: Making and Defending Renaissance Poetics Arthur F. Kinney

15

41

28

Epic Rachel Falconer

42 Playhouses, Performances, and the Role of Drama Michael Hattaway

42

viii

Contents

43 Continuities between ‘Medieval’ and ‘Early Modern’ Drama Michael O’Connell

60

44

*Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy A. J. Piesse

70

45

Boys’ Plays Edel Lamb

80

46 Drama of the Inns of Court Alan H. Nelson and Jessica Winston

94

47

‘Tied to rules of flattery’? Court Drama and the Masque James Knowles

105

48

Women and Drama Alison Findlay

123

49

Political Plays Stephen Longstaffe

141

50

Jacobean Tragedy Rowland Wymer

154

51

Caroline Theatre Roy Booth

166

52 *John Ford, Mary Wroth, and the Final Scene of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore Robyn Bolam

176

53 Local Drama and Custom Thomas Pettitt

184

54

*The Critical Elegy John Lyon

204

55

Allegory Clara Mucci

214

56

Pastoral Michelle O’Callaghan

225

57

Romance Helen Moore

238

58

Love Poetry Diana E. Henderson

249

59

Music and Poetry David Lindley

264

Contents 60

*Wyatt’s ‘Who so list to hunt’ Rachel Falconer

ix 278

61 *The Heart of the Labyrinth: Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus Robyn Bolam

288

62

Ovidian Erotic Poems Boika Sokolova

299

63

*John Donne’s Nineteenth Elegy Germaine Greer

317

64

Traditions of Complaint and Satire John N. King

326

65 Folk Legends and Wonder Tales Thomas Pettitt

341

66 ‘Such pretty things would soon be gone’: The Neglected Genres of Popular Verse, 1480–1650 Malcolm Jones

359

67

Religious Verse Elizabeth Clarke

382

68

*Herbert’s ‘The Elixir’ Judith Weil

398

69 *Conversion and Poetry in Early Modern England Molly Murray

407

70

423

Prose Fiction Andrew Hadfield

71 The English Renaissance Essay: Churchyard, Cornwallis, Florio’s Montaigne, and Bacon John Lee

437

72

Diaries and Journals Elizabeth Clarke

447

73

Letters Jonathan Gibson

453

Part Three: Issues and Debates

461

74

463

Identity A. J. Piesse

75 Sexuality: A Renaissance Category? James Knowles

474

x 76

Contents Was There a Renaissance Feminism? Jean E. Howard

492

77 Drama as Text and Performance Andrea Stevens

502

78 The Debate on Witchcraft James Sharpe

513

79 Reconstructing the Past: History, Historicism, Histories James R. Siemon

523

80

Race: A Renaissance Category? Margo Hendricks

535

81

Writing the Nations Nicola Royan

545

82

Early Modern Ecology Ken Hiltner

555

Index of Names, Topics, and Institutions

569

List of Illustrations

35 36

Title page to George Chapman, The Crown of All Homer’s Works (London, 1624)

32

Title page to William Rowley, Thomas Dekker, and John Ford, The Witch of Edmonton (London, 1658)

519

Part Two

Genres and Modes

39

Theories of Literary Kinds John Roe

As in most periods, literary performance in the Renaissance tends to outrun the theories constructed for and around it. The reasons for this differ from age to age, but at this time most statements about literature reveal two limiting approaches: critics either look for contemporary literature to fulfil the tenets established by ancient, mainly Aristotelian, principle (which is to concentrate on questions of form) or they restrict literature to what is morally acceptable (a concern originating with Plato in The Republic, and renewing itself through contemporary religious scruple). The disadvantage of applying Aristotle is that he restricts himself to certain genres, concentrating his remarks on epic and, in particular, tragedy, while making only passing references to comedy and saying virtually nothing about the lyric.1 But even were Aristotle to have given a fuller account of literary kinds, the case of the Renaissance theorist would not have been helped very much, as developments within genre still required a corresponding evolution of descriptive and definitive terms. For their part, the guardians of public morality, inevitably opposed to the free expression of art in virtually all its forms, habitually tried to restrict activity to only the most carefully regulated performance or production. In the Renaissance the question was further complicated by the fact that some of the chief theorists of style, including practising poets, were themselves instinctive moralists. What I aim to do here is to examine reasons for critics offering the advice they did about literary forms, to assess their value in understanding and ‘placing’ the literary work, and to establish the degree to which their discussion is either helpful or negative. Since my subject is the ‘theory of kinds’ I shall try to avoid saying much about contemporary criticism (for which, see Chapter 40, The Position of Poetry), but inevitably the question of criticism coincides with discussions of genre, as almost any Renaissance statement about poetry makes clear. What I shall not undertake is to attempt to devise a theory of genres that will retrospectively make sense of Renaissance practice. Apart from sinking into the mire of endless subdivision along with Polonius,2 there seems little point in our attempting to arrive at definitions that would

4

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have mystified contemporary practitioners or theorists. Besides, it is more illuminating to dwell on the aperçus or shortcomings of Elizabethan commentators than to supplement their comparatively meagre findings with a more sweeping, systematic analysis.3 Anyone who reads even a little Elizabethan commentary on literary forms will be struck by the degree to which considerations of eloquence and style predominate over other concerns. Many commentators explore literary texts almost exclusively for examples of speaking well and eloquently, and in particular they find their models in the works of Sir Philip Sidney, himself a supreme theorist. Hence, Abraham Fraunce, in the Arcadian Rhetoric (1587), takes many of his examples from the poetry and prose of Sidney, recently dead and receiving special posthumous celebrity as a hero of English military and literary life. Similarly, John Hoskins, in Directions for Speech and Style (1599?), treats the reader as an aspiring gentleman who could do no better than to consult Sidney’s literary works as a manual that teaches the art of deportment in words. Spenser, for his part, assumes ‘gentilnesse’ in his reader, and recommends the right sort of poem as a means of strengthening his virtue, rather in the manner of the humanist education-of-princes tradition: The general end therefore of all the book is to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline: Which for that I conceived should be most plausible and pleasing, being coloured with an historical fiction, the which the most part of men delight to read, rather for variety of matter, then for profit of the ensample. (‘A Letter of the Authors’, Spenser 1977: 737)

The question of how best a gentleman should speak and behave brings together two issues that invariably occur in any discussion of Renaissance literary theory, the social and the moral. A significant word here is the Horatian one, ‘decorum’, which signifies the kind of speech or description appropriate to a fictive character or situation. Sidney gives English equivalents, when he cautions strongly against such things as the ‘mongrel tragi-comedy’: ‘But besides these gross absurdities, how all their plays … thrust in clowns by head and shoulders, to play a part in majestical matters, with neither decency nor discretion.’4 Sidney himself shows the correct way, as his admirer Hoskins eagerly declares to the reader: What personages and affections are set forth in Arcadia. For men: pleasant idle retiredness in King Basilius, and the dangerous end of it; unfortunate valour in Amphialus; proud valour in Anaxius; hospitality in Kalander; the mirror of true courage and friendship in Pirocles and Musidorus; fear and fatal subtlety in Clinias; fear and rudeness, with ill-affected civility, in Dametas. (Hoskins 1935: 41)

On the one hand, Hoskins cites his examples with Horatian aesthetic precepts in mind: each character should be drawn according to clear stylistic principle with no messy confusion of attributes. For example, it would be inappropriate for Clinias suddenly to show courage. On the other hand he makes use of that aspect of Horace

Theories of Literary Kinds

5

which helped Renaissance poets through the thicket of moral watchfulness: the examples should be capable of instructing as well as delighting: aut prodesse volunt aut delectare poetae (Horace, Art of Poetry, 333). Renaissance theory bound these two aspects more closely to each other, as Sidney himself testifies eloquently when describing the pleasing yet cautionary tale of Ajax: Anger, the stoics say, was a short madness: let but Sophocles bring you Ajax on a stage, killing and whipping sheep and oxen, thinking them the army of the Greeks, with their chieftains Agamemnon and Menelaus, and tell me if you have not a more familiar insight into anger than finding in the schoolmen his genus and difference. (Sidney 2002: 91)

However, this justification, though well enough expressed, sells poetry a bit short. To emphasise the instructive nature of such examples understates the emotive power they exert on an audience. Though acknowledging Aristotle’s authority and his powerful analysis of drama in The Poetics, Sidney shies away from discussing the cathartic function of tragedy, and emphasises rather its ideal nature. He notes approvingly Aristotle’s observation that even ugly things may be beautified in artistic representation (Sidney 2002: 95), a comment that implies a preference for a genre that more decisively extols the noble over the base. Consequently Sidney parts company with Aristotle by promoting the epic, or heroic, form over the tragic: all concurreth to the maintaining the Heroical, which is not only a kind, but the best and most accomplished kind of Poetry. For as the image of each action stirreth and instructeth the mind, so the lofty image of such worthies most inflameth the mind with the desire to be worthy. (Sidney 2002: 99)

Sidney gives the example of Aeneas bearing his aged father from the ruins of Troy, and he even commends his abandonment of Dido (conduct regarded by many Renaissance readers as unworthy) as an act of self-government and religious obedience (Sidney 2002: 99–100). In Sidney’s own works self-discipline does not always determine the behaviour of his heroes, most controversially perhaps in the Old Arcadia, where according to strict morality Pyrocles may be accused of having seduced the princess Philoclea, while contributing by his self-indulgence to the problems of her father Duke Basilius (see the events of the third book in Sidney 1973). But if the plot grows subtle, and the authority of the princes seems undermined by the ironies of their situation, the narrative exonerates them. As the princes appear before the public on the day of their trial, Sidney describes them in terms that reflect his commendation of the epic mode’s representation of virtue in the Apology. Their physical presence compels the gaze of everyone around them, Musidorus ‘promising a mind much given to thinking’ and Pyrocles’ ‘look gentle and bashful, which bred more admiration having showed such notable proofs of courage’. The effect is such that the more they should have fallen down in an abject semblance, the more, instead of compassion, they should have gotten contempt; but therefore were to use (as I may term

6

John Roe it) the more violence of magnanimity, and so to conquer the expectation of the onlookers with an extraordinary virtue. (Sidney 1973: 377)

The power of epic to redeem its heroes, even late in the day, and to inspire its audience with attractive descriptions of virtue incarnate – what Sidney, invoking the precepts of Plato and Cicero, calls ‘virtue in her holiday apparel’ (Sidney 2002: 99), persuades him and other Renaissance theorists (as we have seen) to elevate the heroic form over tragedy. Tragedy suffers in the comparison because it inspires mainly by negative example, showing what not to do (as in the case of Ajax’s misguided anger). Moreover, the medieval de casibus (or fall of great ones) tradition still persists in conceptions of tragedy, and the Old Arcadia evokes it in the description of the threat hanging over Gynecia: a lady of known great estate and greatly esteemed, the more miserable representation was made of her sudden ruin, the more men’s hearts were forced to bewail such an evident witness of weak humanity. (Sidney 1973: 377)

This brings together both the de casibus motif and the principle of teaching by admonition. Epic, by contrast, was a genre that enjoyed more freedom, being capable not only of fulfilling the precepts laid down by morally concerned humanist commentators but also of exploring the possibilities of the imagination in a larger sense than the partly old-fashioned terms describing tragedy allowed. In some respects epic was the characteristic Renaissance literary mode in that it advanced ideals on all fronts, not only those of moral inspiration, as we have already observed, but also ones of national achievement. The development of humanism throughout western Europe led to national ambitions within the sphere of poetry (the acme of linguistic performance), and nothing suited this better than the epic genre, established by Virgil as the poetry of national destiny, and imitated as such during the whole course of the Renaissance (see Chapter 41, Epic). While Italian commentators such as J. C. Scaliger argued for the superiority of the epic for its comprehensiveness (Poetices 1.3, Sidney 2002: 192), others, such as Antonio Minturno, furthered the idea (De Poeta, 1559, 1563) that all poetry moved its audience towards acts of virtue. The later Italian postTridentine theorists5 developed arguments for the moral value of poetry that greatly helped their Protestant and Puritan counterparts in both France and England. Sidney especially drew on Minturno for his defence of the moral character of the poet, and seems to have derived his ideas of admiring poetic example, and wishing to emulate the virtuous actions it describes, both from him and from the Neoplatonist commentator Benedetto Varchi (Lezzioni della poesia, 1549; see Sidney 2002: 175). Nothing contributes more towards the moral credentials of a genre than demonstrating its use of allegory (see Chapter 55, Allegory) Spenser, in the letter to Ralegh, speaks famously of his poem as a ‘continued Allegory, or darke conceit’, by which he means that whatever occasional delight the images offer there should be no doubting their underlying seriousness. As well as satisfying moralists (including the

Theories of Literary Kinds

7

Lord Chancellor) who might have raised an eyebrow at some of the ideas treated in the poem,6 to emphasise its allegorical intention and nature helped resolve some tricky questions of form, or at least made them subordinate to the main purpose. The Faerie Queene rambles, and demonstrates that mixing of epic and romance that had caused some classically minded Italian critics, worrying about the confusion of genres, to condemn the work that so inspired Spenser, the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto. The debate was largely settled by the time of Spenser’s epic, and questions regarding shape and proportion (which, as we will see below, continued to exercise Sidney) mattered less than whether the content and purpose of a work appeared serious. The use of allegory to interpret form once again reveals the likely influence of Scaliger, who more than anyone insisted on decorum, emphasising that subject matter defines kind. In turn, this leads to the domination of mode over genre, so that style influences form rather than the reverse (see Colie 1973: 28). Pastoral, for example, while it is a genre, also functions as a mode, and as such finds expression in other genres, notably the epic and the comic. Sidney, though disdaining ‘mongrel’ forms elsewhere, follows Scaliger in this respect: Some have mingled matters heroical and pastoral. But that cometh all to one in this question, for, if severed they be good, the conjunction cannot be hurtful. (Sidney 2002: 97)

Allegory is exclusively a mode, but derives its importance in this period from its ability, as we have observed, to strengthen the moral hand of poetry. When Bacon, in The Advancement of Learning, argued for the primacy of the ‘fable’, and dismissed poetry’s allegorical exposition as something simply added by concerned moralists, he both liberated the poetic imagination from the constraints of ethical purpose and yet inevitably reduced its claim for serious consideration – a situation that prevailed until the Romantic period.7 Notwithstanding, the habit of allegory trained readers, for better or worse, in the subtleties of imaginative response and interpretation. Lyric poetry is similarly a mode without a definite form. Sidney, Puttenham, and other theorists treat it fairly slightly, partly because Aristotle did not bother with it, and was therefore unable to provide the Renaissance humanists with a helpful classification, and partly because they were nervous of discussing it. Lyric poetry is the mode of the erotic, but Sidney felt that as with all modes of writing it should have a fitter subject. Consequently he introduces the lyric principally as a suitable mode for the praise of God, and only secondarily as a means of lauding one’s mistress (Sidney 2002: 113). His own poetic practice in Astrophil and Stella differs notably from his precept. Yet the lyric produces distinct forms, some of which Elizabethan poets inherit from a Roman model, and some of which evolve more recently on the European continent. The elegy and verse epistle both have Latin antecedents: the first of these carries an impressive legacy, though as a form it acquired more status in the later English period than it had originally. The Romans placed the elegy very much at a sub-heroic level,

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the reason being that it was associated with love poetry. The sonnet, on the other hand, has no ancient equivalent and acquires its definition through the activity of a number of late Duecento and Trecento Italian poets, culminating in the fourteen-line octave-sestet pattern which Petrarch made famous (see Chapter 58, Love Poetry). The elegy itself carries particular generic interest in that it divides into two kinds of lament, that of the imploring lover (‘Elegy weeps the want of his mistress’, as Sidney puts it (2002: 104)), and that of a figure in mourning (again very often over the death of a lover – as the Sidney quotation might imply). Mourning is itself a mode and therefore may inhabit different forms, including pastoral, epitaph naturally, epigram, the sonnet, and so on, but the elegy, with its capacity for extended meditation, is particularly suited to the exercise (see Chapter 54, The Critical Elegy). Sidney points to elegy’s ability to express sorrow when he commends the ‘lamenting Elegiac’ (Sidney 2002: 97). Following the ancient example of the hexameter/pentameter distich, the Elizabethan elegy predominantly resolved itself into iambic pentameter couplets, often written or printed with an indentation at the beginning of the second or rhyming line in order to resemble the Roman pattern. What makes the elegy a difficult form to sum up or account for is that it has the means of accommodating different kinds of voice and emphasis. The poetry of praise can lend itself to dispraise, or satire. Elegiac distich approximates to the hexameter of satire, especially Horace’s, and this is even more the case in Elizabethan poetic forms, where satire and elegy both use iambic pentameter. Correspondingly, a satirical voice may turn up in and even dominate a love elegy. Donne’s self-castigating invective in his first satire (‘Away thou fondling, motley humorist’) barely distinguishes itself from the mockery of the lady (and by extension the lover himself ) in his seventh elegy, ‘Nature’s lay idiot’. Ovid’s elegies (all translated by Christopher Marlowe) frequently adopt a waspish, angry tone in response not to public immorality, in its usual manifestation as political corruption, but to the more private sphere of human misconduct in love. The elegy’s emphasis on praise, no matter how beseechingly expressed, brings it into conjunction with another kind of extended encomium, which developed with remarkable complexity in the Renaissance: the verse epistle. Again we look to Jonson and Donne for the best examples of this kind. Horace wrote his epistles to friends or patrons, but these do not dwell on the particular character or qualities of the addressee. Rather they assume a shared viewpoint regarding a question of moral opprobrium, which is about to be addressed, and as such they constitute another form of satire. This occurs similarly within Elizabethan examples, Jonson’s ‘Epistle to a friend to persuade him to the wars’ being an obvious case. However, a significant number of verse epistles appeal to the reader by the warmth of feeling that they suggest exists between the speaker and his addressee, usually his patron or, more significantly, patroness. The poems addressed to noblewomen such as the countess of Bedford or Katherine, Lady Aubigny appropriately express a desire for friendship and protection rather than love (in the Petrarchan sense), and if they include a satirical or misogynistic touch this falls on other, lesser women to whom the poet may refer in passing. Such

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poems are a far cry from ‘Nature’s lay idiot’, while they operate none the less along the axis of praise–blame that demarcates the form of the elegy in this period. The verse epistle invariably attracts accusations of flattery, and no poetry involving patronage can ever fully extricate itself from such a charge; but in placing emphasis on the personal humanity of their subjects and, in the case of women especially, their intellectual discrimination (as in Jonson’s epistle to Aubigny), such poems do much to defuse the scepticism of critics. Furthermore they extend the range of the elegy in a novel way, and one that finds itself unaccounted for in contemporary literary theory. John Donne’s elegy ‘The Autumnal’, which compliments its addressee (presumed to be Magdalen Herbert) on the maturity and dignity with which she redeems incipient physical deterioration, could easily be read as a verse epistle. As for tragedy, Sidney, it is well known, made his pronouncements before the great age of drama in England. We now smile to think of his testing his prescription on such works as Gorboduc (1561), and expressing concern that, excellent in so many ways, the play fails to observe Aristotle’s requirements for unity: yet in truth it is very defectious in the circumstances, which grieveth me, because it might not remain as an exact model of all tragedies. For it is faulty both in place and time, the two necessary companions of all corporal actions. (Sidney 2002: 110)

What, then, would Sidney have made of those many dramas of Shakespeare that violate the ‘laws’ of time and place? Think of Antony and Cleopatra, which has thirteen scene changes in the third act and fifteen in the fourth, or a late play such as The Winter’s Tale, with its interval of sixteen years between significant actions. Cymbeline seems to have been written partly, and perversely, to demonstrate that Polonius’ ‘tragicalcomical-historical-pastoral’ need not be an absurdity. Sidney, however, would probably have been more disturbed by what goes on in some of the plays. King Lear shows us a king reduced to penury, and even physically stripping himself in humility; it is a lame conclusion that finds only a moral caution here. The play’s own ending expresses the idea of avoiding an unhappy example, but assumes that we shall do this not through the exercise of our discretion but because, by the nature of things, we are unlikely to experience the repetition of such large-scale misery: The oldest hath borne most; we that are young Shall never see so much nor live so long. (King Lear 5.3.325–6)

The persistent ill-treatment of the king from the middle of the first act onwards would cause concern to anybody expecting to find in a work of literature the comforting endorsement of the social and political order, as would the desperate intimacy the king shares, first with his own fool and then with an apparent madman whose language is largely gibberish. Contemporary theoretical applications of Aristotle reveal

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an emphasis on tragedy not as cathartic or questioning but as more straightforwardly normative and edifying. Aristotle assumed a king to be a serious, elevated character; but Renaissance theorists’ further insistence that the king should maintain dignity throughout the enactment of his tragedy collapses under the example of Lear.8 The humanist aspiration, reflected in the dramas of the academy in Italy, and in the court in England, to apply Aristotelian principles of unity in order to regulate creativity in a dignified, socially useful manner, contrasts vividly with the practice of the professional stage. This is true of comedy as much as tragedy, perhaps even more so, especially given comedy’s natural tendency towards the unbridled (see Horace, Art of Poetry, 281–3). In the Blackfriars Prologue to Campaspe (1580–1; printed 1584) John Lyly congratulates himself on achieving balance and proportion in his play: howsoever we finish our work we crave pardon if we offend in the matter and patience if we transgress in the manners. We have mixed mirth with counsel, and discipline with delight, thinking it not amiss in the same garden to sow pot-herbs that we set flowers. (Lyly 1902: II, 315)

This blends perfectly Aristotelian and Horatian precept according to the recommendations of humanist education, which saw play-acting (practised by schoolboys) as useful for elocution and deportment. On the professional stage, however, such civilising aspirations invariably gave way to a more vigorous kind of comedy, which interacted with an audience that wanted its humour to mix the rough with the delicate. Exactly the same thing had taken place in Italy, but there a more rigorous division was observed between theatres: the academy, heedful of Counter-Reformation strictures, practised a thoughtful, reflective drama, whereas the commedia dell’arte performed a kind of street theatre, which traded in irreverent assaults on pretensions to dignity and respectability. In the earlier preTridentine part of the century, the plays of Machiavelli, Aretino, and Bibbiena had been freely scurrilous, but later humanists, under the urgings of the church, tended to favour a theatre in which laughter was oddly selective, the poorer classes being fair game, while gentlemen and clerics were not admitted as subjects into the circle of ridicule. Such restrictions strained the Italian comic theatre to the point of collapse (Andrews 1993: 204–26). One of the key spokesmen on comedy in Italy was Gian Giorgio Trissino, who developed a one-sided but influential theory in his Poetica (1549; published 1561); in the course of his argument – which draws partly on Cicero’s De Oratore – he contends that the objects of laughter deserve mockery because of their moral shortcomings. He makes no allowance for sympathetic or approving laughter (at witticisms, for instance), or simply laughter as release (Andrews 1993: 208–11). Trissino partly revives and intensifies ancient theories of comedy, notably comedy as satire, and his arguments show up most in English stage satire or in comedies that include strong satirical elements. As we might expect, Sidney responds to the gravity of Trissino’s argument,

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finding in it an endorsement of the principles of decorum he advocates in his own treatise. However, he modifies Trissino in an important way, distinguishing much more than his Italian source between a malicious, essentially misanthropic laughter and a more generous kind: But our comedians think there is no delight without laughter; which is very wrong, for though laughter may come with delight, yet cometh it not of delight, as though delight should be the cause of laughter; but well may one thing breed both together. (Sidney 2002: 136)

The subtlety of Sidney’s argument would do justice to that balance of effects Shakespeare achieves in his greatest comedies; and in commenting on the cross-dressing of Hercules, which the hero lends himself to out of love for Omphale, Sidney shows himself capable of accounting for the complexity of feeling engendered by the predicament of Viola in Twelfth Night when she disguises herself as a boy: ‘For the representing of so strange a power in love procureth delight: and the scornfulness of the action stirreth laughter’ (Sidney 2002: 112). While Sidney (characteristically for his age) inclines towards the conservative and restrictive in his discussion of literary kinds, at moments such as these he is ahead of his time. As Geoffrey Shepherd observes, Sidney seems on the brink of identifying that aesthetic sense that only properly came to be discussed a couple of centuries later (Sidney 2002: 237–8). There is no knowing how well acquainted Shakespeare was with Trissino’s writings, but it is likely that Jonson knew of him (perhaps through Sidney’s mediation), if only because aggressive, reproving laughter distinguishes so much of his comedy. Volpone fits Trissino’s theory of laughter very well up to a point: the avaricious figures, Corvino, Corbaccio, etc., receive the comic punishment they deserve; but what of the rogues who gull them, and who indeed take the play’s principal roles, Volpone and Mosca? Next to Corvino’s miserably obsessive greed, Volpone’s acquisitiveness cannot but seem quite palatable. Though exploitative themselves, the fox and his parasite prey upon the others only in so far as the play chooses to exploit the laughter rising from their victims’ vicious folly: their function is determined by the drama’s function. Volpone and Mosca are not new, for they derive from such rascally figures as Arlecchino and Zani in the commedia dell’arte. Yet there was nothing in theory, ancient or modern, that was able to account for an audience’s delight in their kind of villainy, in its ability to find therapeutic release in the depiction of behaviour that in life would be morally and socially unacceptable.9 In dismissing that ‘mongrel tragi-comedy’ Sidney confirms the impression that in England such drama grew up in a shapeless, uncontrolled manner without any theoretical underpinning. He acknowledges ancient authority for the form (Apuleius, Plautus) but sees no continuity between then and the present times. However, again within Italy, a serious plea for tragicomedy was to be advanced by such practitioners as Battista Guarini, author of the influential pastoral play Il Pastor Fido. In his prefaces, where he debates the ever-worrying topic of decorum,10 Guarini asserts:

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Responding to the kind of prescriptive pressure exerted by Trissino, Guarini is keen to demonstrate that the virtue of tragicomedy lies in its avoiding anything that might offend a cultivated sensibility. The advantage of this appeal was not lost on John Fletcher, who adapted Guarini’s play as The Faithful Shepherdess; in his preface (the play had a disappointing reception when first performed) Fletcher offers this definition – and justification – of the genre: A tragicomedy is not so called in respect of mirth and killing, but in respect it wants deaths, which is enough to make it no tragedy, yet brings some near it, which is enough to make it no comedy. (Beaumont and Fletcher 1906–7, II, 522)

John Lyly, using a more colourful, more disarming, idiom, seems to have in mind Sidney’s objection to those that ‘have mingled matters heroical and pastoral’, when he declares: ‘If we present a mingle-mangle, our fault is to be excused, because the whole world is become an hodge-podge’ (Prologue to Midas in Lyly 1902: III, 115). Such descriptions, proceeding by negatives and disclaimers, offer a narrow rather than expansive sense of the possibilities of the form. Arthur C. Kirsch comments aptly that the effect on Fletcher is that he cultivates virtuosity at the expense of substance. For his part, Guarini, while making cautious claims for his theatrical practice, in execution reveals something more: a belief in art’s capacity to trace a providential pattern with the dramatist acting as its agent (Kirsch 1972: 39). Despite the lack of evidence that he drew on Guarini, and despite the absence of any theoretical statement from him, Shakespeare more than Fletcher resembles the Italian dramatist, particularly in a late work such as The Winter’s Tale, in the large matter of representing providence.11 Renaissance humanist theoreticians of genre were often in thrall to Aristotle, or more accurately to their interpretation of Aristotle, who by naming and categorising genres offered the security of a workable system, one that included the possibility of applying social and moral norms. Some humanist commentators on style (Hoskins, Fraunce) welcomed this for particular reasons, seeing in it the triumph of eloquence – often regarded as a mere attribute of rhetoric – and its determining influence on the mode of heroic poems or romances, notably Sidney’s Arcadia. Gentlemanliness, social cohesion, and literary purpose all combined well together. Nonetheless, many works, including those of Sidney himself, point to a discontinuity between their instinctive tendency and what may be claimed for them morally. Purely in the matter of form, a good many Elizabethan poems or dramas observe the precepts of Aristotle or Horace quite naturally. After all, ancient theory developed from either the

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experience or practice of art, unencumbered by moral or social legislation. All that came later. Rosalie L. Colie puts the proper case for the value of genre: ‘significant pieces of literature are worth more than their kind, but they are what they are in part by their inevitable kind-ness’ (Colie 1973: 128). Sidney understands the importance of this, but errs as a critic in attempting to construct a hierarchy of kinds in accordance with a moral sense of hierarchy. Renaissance example shows that any good formulation of genre depends more on observing what is practised than on insisting what it must be.

Notes 1

2

3

4

5 6

Renaissance commentary on Aristotle, which is mainly Italian, infers his views on comedy from his discussion of tragedy (Clubb 1989: 40–1). ‘The best actors in the world, either for tragedy, comedy, history, pastoral, pastoralcomical, historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-comical-historical-pastoral, scene undividable, or poem unlimited’ (Hamlet 2.2.392–6). But see also Pearson 1965. This is not to detract from the celebrated achievements of grand synthesisers such as Northrop Frye in his magisterial, innovatory system of categorisation, Anatomy of Criticism. However, the difficulties of trying to be comprehensive are set out clearly by Earl Miner (Lewalski 1986: 15–44). Sidney 2002: 112. However, elsewhere Sidney argues in favour of mixed modes (Sidney 2002: 97; and see below). The Council of Trent met intermittently between 1545 and 1563. Lord Burghley is thought to have obliged Spenser to change the lascivious-seeming

7 8

9

10

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ending to the third book, as it was published in 1590; see the proem to Book 4. See Bacon, Advancement of Learning, in Spingarn 1908: 276. See also Horace, Art of Poetry, 228–9. Clubb argues for Shakespeare’s sophisticated experiments in the tragic genre in Hamlet (Clubb 1989: 191–203). Andrews 1993: 211. In Discoveries, Jonson somewhat resembles Trissino in his comments on audience and comedy – see Wimsatt, 1969: 34–7. Andrews remarks that ‘the distinction between decorum as appropriate style and as moral and social orthodoxy was … constantly being blurred’ (Andrews 1993: 216). See Clubb for links between The Winter’s Tale and Italian pastoral (‘Pastoral Nature and the Happy Ending’ in Clubb 1989). Kirsch approaches this play as well as the complexities of All’s Well That Ends Well – especially their providential resolution – through an analysis of Guarini (Kirsch 1972: 57–64).

References and Further Reading Andrews, Richard (1993). Scripts and Scenarios: The Performance of Comedy in Renaissance Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beaumont, Francis and John Fletcher (1906–7). The Works of Beaumont and Fletcher, ed. A. Glover and A. R. Waller, 10 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Borris, Kenneth (2000). Allegory and Epic in English Renaissance Literature: Heroic Form in Sidney, Spenser, and Milton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clubb, Louise George (1989). Italian Drama in Shakespeare’s Time. New Haven: Yale University Press.

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Colie, Rosalie L. (1973). The Resources of Kind: Genre-Theory in the Renaissance, ed. Barbara K. Lewalski. Berkeley: University of California Press. Cousins, A. D. and Damian Grace (eds.) (2002). Donne and the Resources of Kind. London: Associated University Presses. Cousins, A. D. and Alison Scott (eds.) (2009). Ben Jonson and the Politics of Genre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Danson, Lawrence (2000). Shakespeare’s Dramatic Genres. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Doran, Madeline (1954). Endeavors of Art: A Study of Form in Elizabethan Drama. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Dubrow, Heather (1982). Genre. London: Methuen. Estrin, Barbara L. (1994). Laura: Uncovering Gender and Genre in Wyatt, Donne, and Marvell. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fowler, Alastair (1982). Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Fowler, Alastair (1987). A History of English Literature: Forms and Kinds from the Middle Ages to the Present. Oxford: Blackwell. Frye, Northrop (1957). Anatomy of Criticism. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Grossman, Marshall (1998). Aemilia Lanier: Gender, Genre, and the Canon. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Hall, Vernon (1945). Renaissance Literary Criticism: A Study of its Social Content. New York: Columbia University Press. Hoskins, John (1935). Directions for Speech and Style, ed. H. H. Hudson. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Husain, Adrian A. (2006). Politics and Genre in ‘Hamlet’. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kirsch, Arthur C. (1972). Jacobean Dramatic Perspectives. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer (ed.) (1986). Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Lyly, John (1902). The Works of John Lyly, ed. R. W. Bond, 3 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Miner, Earl (1986). ‘Some issues of literary “species, or distinct kind” ’. In Barbara Kiefer Lewalski (ed.), Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation (pp. 15–44). Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Minturno, Antonio (1549, 1563). De Poeta. Venice. Orgel, Stephen (1979). ‘Shakespeare and the kinds of drama’. Critical Inquiry, 6, 107–23. Pearson, Norman Holmes (1965). ‘Literary forms and types; or, a defence of Polonius’. English Institute Annual 1940. New York: AMS. Reichert, John (1978). ‘More than kin and less than kind: the limits of genre theory’. In Joseph P. Strelka (ed.), Theories of Literary Genre [Yearbook of Comparative Criticism, vol. 8] (pp. 57–79). University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Sidney, Philip (1973). The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The Old Arcadia), ed. J. Robertson. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sidney, Philip (2002). An Apology for Poetry (or The Defence of Poesy), ed. Geoffrey Shepherd, rev. and expanded R. W. Maslen for the 3rd edn. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Spenser, Edmund (1977). The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton. London: Longman. Spingarn, Joel E. (1908). A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance, 2nd edn. New York: Columbia. Strelka, Joseph P. (ed.) (1978). Theories of Literary Genre [Yearbook of Comparative Criticism, vol. 8]. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Todorov, Tzvetan (1976). ‘The origin of genres’. New Literary History, 8, 159–70. Weinberg, Bernard (1961, 1974). A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance, 2 vols. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Wimsatt, W. K. (1969). The Idea of Comedy. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall.

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The Position of Poetry: Making and Defending Renaissance Poetics Arthur F. Kinney

‘The profession and use of poesie is most ancient from the beginning, and not, as many erroneously suppose, after, but before, any civil society was among men’, George Puttenham claims in The Art of English Poesie (1589). His narrative history of poetry became commonplace in the Renaissance. He goes on: For it is written that poesie was th’original cause and occasion of their first assemblies, when before the people remained in the woods and mountains, vagrant and dispersed like the wild beasts, lawless and naked, or very ill clad, and of all good and necessary provision for harbour or sustenance utterly unfurnished, so as they little differed for their manner of life from the very brute beasts of the field. Whereupon it is feigned that Amphion and Orpheus, two poets of the first ages, one of them, to wit Amphion, builded up cities, and reared walls with the stones that came in heaps to the sound of his harp, figuring thereby the mollifying of hard and stony hearts by his sweet and eloquent persuasion. And Orpheus assembled the wild beasts to come in herds to hearken to his music, and by that means made them tame, implying thereby how, by his discreet and wholesome lessons uttered in harmony and with melodious instruments, he brought the rude and savage people to a more civil and orderly life, nothing, as it seemeth, more prevailing or fit to redress and edify the cruel and sturdy courage of man than it. (Smith 1904: II, 6–7)

Puttenham echoes Thomas Lodge who, in 1579, noted in an untitled pamphlet that ‘poets were the first raisers of cities, prescribers of good laws, maintainers of religion, disturbers of the wicked, advancers of the well-disposed, inventors of laws, and lastly the very footpaths to knowledge and understanding’ (Smith 1904: I, 75). The argument is deliberately forceful: civilisation began with and depends on – poetry. A few pages later Puttenham underscores his position: ‘for that they were aged and grave men, and of much wisdom and experience in th’affairs of the world, they were the first lawmakers to the people, and the first politicians, devising all expedient means for th’establishment of common wealth, to hold and contain the people in order

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and duty by force and virtue of good and wholesome laws, made for the preservation of the public peace and tranquillity’ (Smith 1904: II, 7–8). To us, phrases like ‘all expedient means’ and ‘hold and contain’ are troubling. But so is their method: ‘Poets were also from the beginning the best persuaders, and their eloquence the first rhetoric of the world’ (Smith 1904: II, 9). Rhetoric of the period, writes Gavin Alexander, ‘is a contingent art, ready to adapt its resources to changing discourses and occasions’ (Alexander 2004: xxxix). But Puttenham has been slippery all along: poets and poetical history began, he says, with the ‘feigning’ of Amphion and Orpheus. Traced to its historical roots, Puttenham says, poetry is sui generis. Later poets made earlier poets who made poetry. What causes Puttenham to walk his own rhetorical tightrope – and what permits later critics to take up the same narrative – is the need to dodge and mend the questionable practices of any kind of language. For it is at precisely this moment in history – the moment of Sidney and Spenser and Shakespeare – that battles raged over not merely the function but the foundation of language itself. We have come to call the two warring camps naturalism and conventionalism. The locus classicus for the first of these was found in a text recently revived by Renaissance humanists, Plato’s Cratylus. Plato argues that words and names must be ‘as much as possible like the things which they are to represent’ (Plato 1970: 433D–E). Such a position resonated in the sixteenth century with Ficino’s translation of Hermetic texts (those philosophical and occult texts attributed to Hermes Trismegistus), with Pico’s pioneering syncretism, with scriptural tradition, and with the traditions of Zoroaster and Neoplatonism. Cabbalistic formations of natural language, in fact, drew on biblical sources; the three most common practices were gematria (the interchange of words on the basis of the numerical equivalence of their letters), notarikon (an acrostic system of creating new words from old ones), and temurah (employing anagrams of Hebraic words). Denying such essentialism, conventionalism was derived from Books 1–3 of Aristotle’s De Interpretatione, which argues the arbitrariness of language. Whereas naturalism posited a vertical narrative of language, Aristotle defended scientific empiricism, an investigation cutting through horizontal time. His scepticism was dramatically advanced in the sixteenth century by Sextus Empiricus, whose work would deeply influence both Bacon and Montaigne. For Sextus, poetry, like any language practice, was necessarily rhetorical, and ‘Rhetoric declares this to be its main task: how, for instance, we are to make small things great and great things small’ (Sextus 1971: 46). Plato’s reply comes in the Gorgias (463A–C), where he aligns rhetoric with sophistry, comparing them not with art and poetry but with such trades as cookery, face painting, fawning, and bewitching – that is, trades that employ trickery, deceit, immorality, and superficiality. Throughout the sixteenth century, such matters of language could be momentous, charged in part by Reformation polemic and the swiftly widening use of the printing press. In the schoolroom Latin was slowly being displaced by English; in the pulpit, the Mass was superseded by English sermons and services. Statutes, proclamations, and the Acts and debates of Parliament all relied on a linguistic precision that could

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guarantee widespread understanding and compliance; in a time of expanding international trade and imperialistic colonisation, of international conflicts over religion and territory, an emerging nation-state such as England had to have a usable means of communication. In such a climate, an increasingly literate public saw poetry – that is, imaginative writing – as neither elitist nor marginal. ‘Among the innumerable sorts of English books, and infinite fardles of printed pamphlets, wherewith this Country is pestered, all shops stuffed, and every study furnished’, William Webbe remarks at the outset of his Discourse of English Poetry (1586), ‘the greatest part I think, in any one kind, are such as are either mere Poetical, or which tend in some respect (as either in matter or form) to Poetry’ (Smith 1904: I, 226–7). Poets sustained such production and influence because, defending themselves as others too defended them, language was simply neither natural nor conventional (socially constituted) but always both. Such a line of argument is explicit or implicit in all the defences (or apologies) of the period, but arguably the best statement, growing out of a descriptive human psychology, is Juan Huarte’s pioneering Examen de Ingenios, Englished by Richard Carew as The Examination of Men’s Wits in 1594. Huarte combines a general anatomy of the intellect with the faculty of speech. He cannot therefore subscribe to a single original but instead sees language as the product of an agreement among members of a community. According to Huarte, the one saith that there are proper names, which by their nature carry signification of things, and that much wit is requisite to devise them. And this opinion is favoured by the divine scripture, which affirmeth that Adam gave every of those things which God set before him the proper name that was best fitting for them. But Aristotle will not grant that in any tongue there can be found any name, or manner of speech, which can signify ought of its own nature, for that all names are devised and shaped after the conceit of men. Whence we see by experience, that wine hath above sixty names, and bread as many, in every language his, and of none we can avouch that the same is natural and agreeable thereunto, for them all in the world would use but that. (Carew 1959: 118)

To this accumulative power of language, widely subscribed to by the poets of Shakespeare’s age, the poets themselves widened the act of making poetry to employ either of two variant approaches. As Puttenham has it, In some cases we say art is an aid and coadjutor to nature, and a furtherer of her actions to good effect, or peradventure a mean to supply her wants, by reinforcing the causes wherein she is impotent and defective, as doth the art of physic … In another respect art is … a surmounter of her skill, so as by means of it her own effects shall appear more beautiful or strange and miraculous, as in both cases before remembered. (Smith 1904: II, 187–8)

From such a perspective as this, ‘feigning’ Amphion and Orpheus is not making them by making them up but rather remembering them, recalling and recollecting them,

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as names (or images) of shared historical constructs that make sense through conventional appeal to essentialist names. Puttenham is not really writing history; he is positing concepts through images. Puttenham is a critic, to be sure – his book, he says, is ‘for the learning of ladies and young gentlewomen, or idle courtiers, desirous to become skilful of their own mother tongue’ – but his criticism relies on his seizing the poet’s recognised special medium in the Renaissance – that of the feigned example as meaningful image (embodying a concept, whether literally true or not).1 It appeals to the mind’s eye; it is what the poet envisions so that the reader can envision it too. A little later, Puttenham adds to this: ‘Poesie is a pleasant manner of utterance, varying from the ordinary of purpose to refresh the mind by the ears delight’ (Smith 1904: II, 24): both the mental eye and the physical ear reinforce each other to allow the poet to produce ‘pleasant’ and ‘purposeful’ meaning. What the poet proposes may improve or perfect nature or may alter it to convey its significance. Actually, this is Puttenham’s more sophisticated development of ideas already expressed in George Gascoigne’s Certain Notes of Instruction (1575). Although Gascoigne really concentrates on rhyme and tropes in his brief statement, he too begins by remarking that ‘The first and most necessary point that ever I found meet to be considered in making of a delectable poem is this, to ground it upon some fine invention’ or initial idea, and then to add ‘some good and fine device, showing the quick capacity of a writer’ (Smith 1904: I, 47). Puttenham continues to expand on Gascoigne by adding an entire second book to his treatise on proportion or sound and an entire third book on ornament or figures drawing on the Epitome troporum ac schematum (Outline of Schemes and Tropes) of Susenbrotus (c.1541). Puttenham expands the list and gives such practices creative (because familiar and mnemonic) names, such as hyperbaton or the trespasser and parenthesis or the insertor (chapter 13), or anaphora or report, antistrophe or the counterturn, ploche or the double, and epizeuxis or the underlay or cuckoo-spell (chapter 19). Gascoigne, Webbe, and Puttenham are important stages in the institution and criticism of a Renaissance poetics, in part because they represent and expand on currents of thought among their contemporaries, thoughts that address directly the various crucial issues concerning language – and the place of poetry in such a context – that we have been identifying. But none of them has the stature nor has had the effect of Sir Philip Sidney’s treatise, composed in 1579 but not published until 1595 and then in two versions, as the Defence of Poesie (for the printer William Ponsonby) and as the Apology for Poetry (for the printer Henry Olney). S. K. Heninger Jr.’s estimate of Sidney is now universal: ‘since its composition … it has remained, without abatement, a potent force in determining the course of English letters’ (Heninger 1989: 225). This is due not only to the wit and high spirits of Sidney’s treatise but to Sidney’s very special talent for synthesis, finding ways to make poesis (theory) and praxis (application) relatively seamless. Within the shape of a formal oration, Sidney proposes that poetry rests

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in that idea or fore-conceit of the work, and not in the work itself. And that the poet hath that idea is manifest, by delivering them forth also is not wholly imaginative, as we are wont to say by them that build castles in the air; but so far substantially it worketh, not only to make a Cyrus, which had been but a particular excellency as nature might have done, but to bestow a Cyrus upon the world to make many Cyruses, if they will learn aright why and how that maker made him. (Sidney 1973: 79)

The Platonic idea, conceived with an imagined ‘excellency’ that surpasses any earthly (and thus partial or imperfect) embodiment, is nevertheless so powerfully and substantially conceived (not simply castles in the air) that it stands as exemplary, inviting others to pattern behaviour on the superiority of that image. At first it would seem that such behaviour is, like its source, ideational and imagined and thus excellent. It functions metaphorically – in the words of Thomas Swynnerton ‘a godly trope … when a word is translated from his proper signification to another, not proper to him, but yet resemblant’ (Swynnerton 1999: 116), ‘improper’ meaning here uncustomary. Conceptually, readers ‘will learn aright why and how that maker made him’. But only a few lines later, Sidney pointedly adds that ‘Poesie therefore [also] is an art of imita(mimesis) – that is to say, a tion, for so Aristotle termeth it in the word representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth – to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture – with this end, to teach and delight’ (Sidney 1973: 79–80).2 Another key common term is representation: the re-presentation of a mental image of the poet will induce a re-presentation in the quotidian behaviour of his audience. This representation rests on a recognisable ‘verisimilitude rather than fact’, Alexander writes: ‘the test is credibility and not accuracy; the artist imitates possibilities’ in his mind’s eye (Alexander 2004: xxxi). In remaking the poet’s image or fore-conceit, the reader both counters with his own creation (counterfeits) and extends the poet’s image (figures it forth). That he does so successfully is judged by the result: it will both teach (that is, train and educate, instruct) and delight (give pleasure in that very instruction). Sidney’s poet is thus both the creator of an idea or fore-conceit and mediator of it. To prepare his reader properly for such a definition of poetry as word and object, idea and act, he has noted that ‘There is no art delivered to mankind that hath not the works of nature for his principal object, without which they could not consist, and on which they so depend, as they become actors and players, as it were, of what nature will have set forth’ (Sidney 1973: 78). Yet at the same time, for Sidney, the poet, disdaining to be tied to any such subjection [to the ‘depth of nature’], lifteth up with the vigour of his own invention, doth grow in effect another nature, in making things either better than nature bringeth forth, or, quite anew, forms such as never were in nature, as the heroes, demigods, cyclops, chimeras, furies, and such like: so as he goeth hand in hand with nature, not enclosed within the narrow warrant of her gifts, but freely ranging only within the zodiac of his own wit. Nature never set forth the earth in so rich tapestry as divers poets have done; neither with so pleasant rivers, fruitful trees, sweet-smelling flowers, nor whatsoever else may make the too much loved earth more lovely. Her world is brazen, the poets only deliver a golden. (Sidney 1973: 78)

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What at first may seem a hopelessly confused amalgam of the essentialist and conventional definitions of language finds its common element where Puttenham too places it- – in the feigning of the invention which pulls together both idea and (concrete) image that figures forth a creating, created nature. The golden world grows out of the brazen one (or it would be so personal and bizarre it would not communicate). It elevates, but it does not deny and it does not contract the brazen world that suggests it and which, in the end, must convey and test it. Poetry for Sidney is not an individual’s mere fancy – not castles in the air – nor exacting realism – which lacks the distance to inspire and instruct. Put the other way, Sidney’s golden world contains the brazen world; it does not ignore it. It is as macrocosm to microcosm, vehicle to tenor. The poet mimetically recovers the idea that relates to but is never limited to realism (as history is). Nor does the poet wish to convey the idea without transforming it (philosophy deals with untranslated ideas). Rather, poetry bridges idea and reality; Platonic concepts and Aristotelian representation are irrevocably merged through the poetic act of choosing right images. As Sidney comments, poets are at once makers and seers (although such ideas had once separated Greek thought from Roman) because the poet is a visionary in order to make something (the poem, or work of art), and the maker, to make anything, must be a visionary (to ‘see’ the concept or fore-conceit). Poetry thus becomes a joint action of poet and reader. ‘Imitation as mimesis and imitation as readerly emulation are bridged by the power of the authorial idea’ or fore-conceit (Alexander 2004: lx). ‘Imagination bodies forth / The forms of things unknown’, Shakespeare’s Theseus remarks in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, ‘and gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name’ (5.1.14–17). But this is Theseus speaking – not Shakespeare, and surely not Sidney. For them the poet’s imagination is not called forth by ‘airy nothing’ but by a golden world incorporating a brazen one, discovering a play-world that touches the lives of play-goers at the Globe. Both Shakespeare and Sidney gain licence to do this – sharing their pedigree with all other poets – because the analogous worlds they create only mimic God’s First Creation. Etymology then as now links ‘imagination’ with ‘image’ and ‘imitation’, sharing the same root, and as the biblical God creates his world ex nihilo according to Ideas within himself, so the right poet ‘with the force of a divine breath’, as Sidney has it, ‘bringeth things forth’ (Sidney 1973: 79). As God breathes life into man and into man’s world, so the poet is ‘lifted up with the vigour of his own invention’ (Sidney 1979: 78). Limited in intellect and in possibility to God’s known world, the poet finds limitless possibilities, making what is brazen golden, yet allowing the traffic of this bridging to go both ways, without end. The power, then, centres on the image or fore-conceit that is that bridge, an image readily extended into interpretation and meaning. This is Sidney’s idea of poetry, but it is also a more widespread phenomenon: images of Elizabeth I, for instance, could show a virgin, a monarch, or a soldier; portray her as Diana, Astraea, Venus, Minerva, or Cynthia. For John Foxe, opening his Acts and Monuments to martyrs, Elizabeth was Constantine (representing authority over the Pope); for Edmund Spenser, she was Gloriana, inviting an entire faery landscape analogous in its golden presentation to

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the brazen world of his readers and susceptible to all of the brazen world’s shortcomings, so that Ruddymane’s pledging with bloody hands in The Faerie Queene represents the fall, sacrifice, and the possibility of redemption (2.1.37.6–9), and Sidney’s Arcadia, in the resurrection of Basilius to those of faith and innocence (Book 5), finds its model in the gospels. Sidney, then, sees no difference in didactic force between the verity and the verisimilar; a feigned example has as much (and as much power) to teach as a true example and is not as limited. Human making and divine creating, human creating and divine making, are understood in light of each other. For all his praise of the poet’s golden world, Sidney’s poetics, like those of others in his time, is stubbornly anti-mystical, severely practical as A. C. Hamilton commented (Hamilton 1977: 120). Thus ‘the highest-flying wit [must] have a Daedalus to guide him. That Daedalus’, moreover, ‘hath three wings to bear itself up into the air of due commendation: that is, art, imitation, and exercise’ (Hamilton 1977: 111–12). Poetry may inspire and create, but it must also be corrective, curative, and educational. The Cyruses of the poet’s foreconceit are what Aristotle calls paradeigma (Rhetoric 1.2.8), behavioural models. They draw on classical rhetorical practices such as prosopopeai (representations of real or imagined people), and topographia (real or imagined places), enhanced by Aristotelian practices of ethos (the created credibility of the narrator or narrative perspective) and pathos (the arousal of the reader’s emotions). Such images employ what Sidney calls enargia, a certain vividness and force, an awakening and impression on the imagination, that leads to ‘the knowledge of a man’s self, in the ethic and politic consideration, with the end of well-doing and not of well-knowing only’. This may be done through instructive narratives, such as that of Menenius Agrippa’s story of ‘mutinous conspiracy’ later used by Shakespeare in Coriolanus, or by the story of Nathan’s tale of David’s lust for Bathsheba (Sidney 1973: 82–3, 93, 103–4). Genres, with their own conventions, also suggest and regulate the lessons which poetry teaches: the sixteenth century drew on medieval as well as classical sources for three basic genres of epic, drama, and lyric. Puttenham himself identifies the purpose of comedy and tragedy as ‘the good amendment of man by discipline and example’, and yet such conventions can also liberate, as when the eclogue is used ‘not … to counterfeit or represent the rustical manner of loves and communication, but under the veil of homely persons and in rude speeches to insinuate and glance at greater matters, and such as perchance had not been safe to have been disclosed in any other sort’ (Smith 1904: II, 33, 40). In addition they imitated the three styles of classical rhetoric – grand, middle, and plain – following Demetrius’ On Style, which in turn added a fourth style, forceful. Here, too the liberating zodiac of the poet’s wit is restricted through conventions that guarantee the performance of poetry: Sidney is quick to insist on the rules of genres, and criticises works like Gorboduc, that break the rules (Sidney 1973: 113). The conventions that regulate poets also guide readers and help them to measure the models they are to follow. This sense also lies behind Webbe’s simpler and sunnier conclusion that ‘The end of Poetry is to write pleasant things, and profitable’ (Smith 1904: I, 295).3

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But Thomas Nashe took a dimmer view. ‘I account of poetry’, he warns in The Anatomy of Absurdity (1589), ‘as of a more hidden and divine kind of philosophy, enwrapped in blind fables and dark stories’ (Smith 1904: I, 328), where fallen man obscures the poet’s golden world, perhaps through limited insight or misunderstanding, perhaps wilfully. Puttenham shares Nashe’s concern when he speaks of allegory: ‘allegory [works] by a duplicity of meaning or dissimulation under covert and dark intendments’; working with ‘a certain doubleness’, allegory and other obscure writing ‘is the more guileful and abusing’ (Smith 1904: II, 160, III, 18). Loosened from true poetic purpose and convention, the fallen poet Henry Peacham claims, ‘may set forth any matter with a goodly perspicuity, and paint out any person, deed, or thing, so cunningly with these colours [of rhetoric], that it shall seem rather a lively Image painted in tables, than a report expressed with the tongue’ (cit. Heninger 1989: 225). Sight had more power than sound, and sound could more easily deceive. ‘Filed speech’, ‘elegancy of phrase’, ‘vain affection of eloquence’ (cit. Javitch 1978: 112), when unmoored from a poet’s true purpose, could lead to the kind of dissimulation and manipulation Sextus saw as inherent in any rhetorical practice, practice which came, for Elizabethan critics generally, to represent false art because it deliberately sought dishonest ends. Such fallen acts were, for them, likewise condemned by Scripture. ‘Thou shalt destroy them that speak lies’, the Psalmist writes; ‘The Lord will abhor the bloody man and deceitful’ (Geneva Bible, Ps. 5:6); ‘Keep thy tongue from evil, and thy lips, that they speak no guile’ (Ps. 101:7). Proverbs echoes Psalms: ‘Lying lips are an abomination to the Lord, but they that deal truly are his delight’ (12:22); ‘The bread of deceit is sweet to a man: but afterwards his mouth shall be filled with gravel’ (20:17). It is a tangled problem, one which appears insoluble because it arises from degree, perhaps, and not necessarily from kind. Of all the major critics writing in the Renaissance, it is Sidney who faces this problem head on. He acknowledges that poetic abstraction leads to an autonomous world of exemplary discourse, where Pylades stands for constancy or Orlando for valour (Sidney 1973: 79), but just because it is autonomous it fails to join with the brazen world and thus resorts, finally, to something analogous to castles in the air. In its autonomy, it fails to make connections with the reality of its fore-conceit to its audience; it retreats instead into the obscurity that Nashe also condemns. But the function of the poet is to build bridges through images and fore-conceits; the job of poetry is to attract through feigned examples that have practical outcomes. The poet’s idea and the reader’s discretion and application must join. True poetry binds. There is never a breach between the world of the poem and the world of the reader (see Heninger 1989: 249). In his understanding of poets as legislators of human behaviour, Sidney prefigures Shelley; in this, he prefigures Wordsworth’s understanding of poetry as ‘Reason in her most exalted mood’ (cit. Kimbrough 1971: 45). Sidney’s lively treatise – his widely acknowledged and admired sprezzatura of casual sophistication – never sacrifices moral commitment or an earnest sense of reality; the Defence concludes, in fact, by warning readers that those who dismiss poetry and its power of immortality dismiss their own epitaphs and therefore their own immortality.

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Sidney is decisively inclusive in seeing poetry as the Aristotelian mimesis of Platonic Idea; he is equally inclusive over versification: Now of versifying there are two sorts, the one ancient, the other modern: the ancient marked the quantity of each syllable, and according to that framed his verse; the modern, observing only number (with some regard of the accent), the chief life of it standeth in that like sounding of the words, which we call rhyme. Whether of these be the more excellent, would bear many speeches: the ancient (no doubt) more fit for music, both words and time observing quantity, and more fit lively to express diverse passions by the low or lofty sound of the well-weighed syllable; the latter likewise, with his rhyme, striketh a certain music to the ear, and, in fine, since it doth delight, though by another way, it obtains the same purpose: there being in either sweetness, and wanting in neither majesty. Truly the English, before any vulgar [i.e. vernacular] language I know, is fit for both sorts. (Sidney 1973: 119–20)

His admiration of the capacity and dexterity of English picks up William Harrison’s observation, in his Description of England, that ‘ours is a mean language and neither too rough nor too smooth’ (Harrison 1994: 416). But Sidney embraces both sides of a debate, as Harrison does, that essentially begins with Gascoigne, ‘the acknowledged master of English poetry for his generation’ (Woods 1984: 110) and is keenly fought at least through Samuel Daniel’s Defence of Rhyme (?1603). For Gascoigne, poetry depends on syllabic regularity and the maintenance of strophic patterns whether or not they rhyme. Perhaps he was recalling the humanist leader Roger Ascham’s sharp comment in The Schoolmaster (1570) uopn ‘our rude beggarly rhyming, brought first into Italy by Goths and Huns’ (cit. Alexander 2004: xlviii). For Puttenham, who devotes Book 2 of his Art to metre (or proportion), the subject is divided into five topics: ‘staff, measure, concord, situation and figure’ (68). Both Gascoigne and Puttenham are, then, apparently as tolerant as Sidney. For the musician Thomas Campion, however, in his Observations in the Art of English Poesie (1602), poetry must be quantitative since his lyrics are set to music: ‘he gives to a supple rhythm which avoids the monotony of some accentual-syllabic lines’, writes Alexander, adding: ‘His ear for verbal melody is matched only by Tennyson’ (Alexander 2004: lxix). Campion revives an interest in the metre of the ancients that the Areopagus circle of poets – Spenser, Harvey, Dyer, and Greville – had proposed and briefly pursued in the 1580s. In a sense, Richard Helgerson notes, this could be viewed, in a time when England was emerging as a self-conscious nation, as part of a larger rivalry ‘between active selfmaking … and passive acceptance of time and custom’ (Helgerson 1988: 281). For Daniel, however, who had the last word in the battle over quantitative versus qualitative verse, rhyme was essential. Rhyme (which is an excellency added to this work of measure, and a harmony far happier than any proportion antiquity could ever show us) doth add more grace, and hath more of delight than ever bare numbers, howsoever they can be forced to run in our slow language, can possibly yield. (Smith 1904: II, 360)

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Such an understanding of English poetry confronts Campion’s advocacy of classical quantitative metre directly. For as the Greek and Latin verse consists of the number and quantity of syllables, so doth the English verse of measure and accent. And though it doth not strictly observe long and short syllables, yet it most religiously respects the accent; and as the short and the long make number, so the acute and the grave accent yield harmony. And harmony is likewise number; so that English verse then has number, measure, and harmony in the best proportion of music. (Smith 1904: II, 360)

In time, Daniel’s viewpoint would triumph, but for Sidney, friend to Spenser, the English language could supply both quantitative and qualitative poetry. One master in this older form, after all, was Chaucer about whom Michael Drayton writes, in ‘To Henry Reynolds, of Poets and Poetry’ (1627): That noble Chaucer, in those former times, The first enriched our English with his rhymes, And was the first of ours that ever brake Into the Muses’ treasure, and first spake In weighty numbers, delving in the mine Of perfect knowledge, which he could refine And coin for current, and as much as then The English language could express to men He made it do, and by his wondrous skill Gave us so much light from his abundant quill (lines 47–56)

Yet for all Sidney’s desire to be inclusive – of Plato and Aristotle, of two kinds of metre, of profit and pleasure as the ends of poetry – his own wit characterising moral philosophers ‘with a sullen gravity, as though they could not abide vice by daylight’ and historians ‘laden with old mouse-eaten records’, sees poetry as that which by its very nature ‘cometh unto you, with a tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney corner’ (Sidney 1973: 83, 92). Poetry is inseparable from delight. Puttenham, too, allows poetry to be ‘used for recreation only’: ‘Poesie is a pleasant manner of utterance, varying from the ordinary of purpose to refresh the mind by the ears delight’ (Smith 1904: II, 25, 24). But that physical, immediate pleasure is not all poetry offers for Sidney, Puttenham, Webbe, or even Gascoigne. There is also the deeper, more thoughtful pleasure that informs the moral understanding. Sir John Harington sees this too in allegory in his ‘Brief and summary allegory’ preceding his translation of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1591): ‘Thus much I thought good to note of the general allegory of the whole work to give you occasion to ruminate, as it were, and better to digest that which you before in reading did perhaps swallow down whole without chewing’ (cit. Kintgen 1996: 95–6). Perhaps the most famous formulation

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of the period for thoughtful reading as the truest and highest end of poetry is in Bacon’s essay on books: ‘Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider’ (cit. Kintgen 186). For many today, however, the most famous definition of poetry in this period comes not from a poet or a critic but from a playwright, from the Hamlet of Shakespeare. Poetry, he tells the players, is what holds ‘the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of time his form and pressure’ (3.2.23–5). The Renaissance mirror was, however, dioptric and prismatic; it opened images to a range of interpretations. But in all of them it bound together the poet and the reader, freeing their imaginations to converse with each other, holding the brazen world within the golden one while freeing them from the vicissitudes and tyrannies of actuality. At the same time it brought both together into meaning, it awakened them to the liberty of new comprehension, and it did so, always, with pleasure and profit, with instruction towards a new response to life itself.

Notes 1

As late as Discoveries (?1603–35; published during the Interregnum), Ben Jonson still defines the poet as ‘a maker, or a fainer; his art, an art of imitation, or faining; expressing the life of man in fit measure, numbers, and harmony, according to Aristotle’ and continues, ‘Now, the poesie is the habit or the art: nay, rather the queen of arts, which had her original from heaven … And whereas they entitle philosophy to be a rigid and austere poesie, they have (on the contrary) styled poesie a dulcet and gentle philosophy, which leads on and guides us by the hand to action with a ravishing delight, and incredible sweetness … And do not think he can leap forth suddenly a poet by dreaming he hath been in Parnassus … For to nature, exercise, imitation, and study, art must be added, to make all these perfect … For … without art, nature can ne’er be perfect; and without nature, art can claim no being’ (Jonson 1925–52: VIII, 635–8). 2 Kant goes further in The Critique of Judgment: ‘Where fine art evidences its superiority is in the beautiful descriptions it gives of things that in nature would be ugly or displeasing. The Furies, diseases, devastations of war, and the like, can (as evils) be very beautifully described, nay even represented in pictures.

One kind of ugliness alone is incapable of being represented conformably to nature without destroying all aesthetic delight, and consequently artistic beauty, namely, that which excites disgust. For, as in this strange sensation, which depends purely on the imagination, the object is represented as insisting, as it were, upon our enjoying it, while we will set our face against it, the artificial representation of the object is no longer distinguishable from the nature of the object itself in our sensation, and so it cannot possibly be regarded as beautiful’ (cit. Grossman 2007: 9). 3 ‘For [the ancients]’, Ben Edwin Perry claims, ‘the world was primarily a world of ideas, which could be put to practical use in the instruction and edification of living men, rather than a world of facts valued only as such, and thereby useless. What moral or spiritual good is there in a mere fact? On some occasions the ancients became antiquarians and were at pains to distinguish what was probably true in the distant past from what was mythical and false; but this was not their habitual way of looking at traditional data, and least of all when they were concerned with belles lettres. With all his critical zeal, not even Thucydides challenges the historical reality of Deucalion

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Arthur F. Kinney and the patently eponymous Helen; and from the Greek poetical point of view (which was that of drama and romance) Inachus, Candaules, Xerxes, Alcibiades, Ninus, Nireus, and Daphnis are alike historical and belong in the same category’ (cit. Nelson 1973: 2–3). It is instructive to remember that Cicero classified fabula, historia, and argumentum all as narratio, although fabula meant something neither true

nor verifiable; historia an account of actions in a remote past; and argumentum a fictional action that was nonetheless possible (see De Inventione 1.27ff.; Ad Herennium 1.8.13; as well as the Institutes of Quintilian, 2.4.2). The humanists were citing such definitions as a basis for poetics as early as the 1510s; the Elizabethan critics all knew this legacy.

References and Further Reading Alexander, Gavin (2004). Sidney’s Defence of Poesie’ and Selected Literary Criticism. London: Penguin. Bennett, Lyn (2004). Women Writing of Divinest Things: Rhetoric and Poetry of Pembroke, Wroth, and Lanyer. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Berger, Harry Jr. (1988). Second World and Green World: Studies in Renaissance Fiction-Making, ed. John Patrick Lynch. Berkeley: University of California Press. Carew, Richard (1959). The Examination of Men’s Wits (1594), trans. from Juan Huarte’s Examen de ingenios. Gainesville, FL: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints. Connell, Dorothy (1977). Sir Philip Sidney: The Maker’s Mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eden, Kathy (1986). Poetic and Legal Fiction in the Aristotelian Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ferguson, Margaret W. (1983). Trials of Desire: Renaissance Poetry. New Haven: Yale University Press. Grossman, Marshall (2007). Reading Renaissance Texts. London: Routledge. Hager, Alan (1991). Dazzling Images: The Masks of Sir Philip Sidney. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Hamilton, A. C. (1977). Sir Philip Sidney: A Study of his Life and Works. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harrison, W. (1994). The Description of England, ed. G. Edelen. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Helgerson, Richard (1988). ‘Barbarous tongues: the ideology of poetic form in Renaissance England’. In Heather Dubrow and Richard Strier (eds.), The Historical Renaissance (pp. 273– 92). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Heninger, S. K. Jr. (1989). Sidney and Spenser: The Poet as Maker. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press. Javitch, Daniel (1978). Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Jonson, Ben (1925–52). The Works, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson, and E. Simpson. 11 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Jost, Walter and Wendy Olmsted (eds.) (2004). A Companion to Rhetoric and Rhetorical Criticism. Oxford: Blackwell. Kimbrough, Robert (1971). Sir Philip Sidney. New York: Twayne. Kinney, Arthur F. (1972). ‘Parody and its implications in Sidney’s Defense of Poesie’. Studies in English Literature, 12, 1–19. Kinney, Arthur F. (1987). Humanist Poetics: Thought, Rhetoric, and Fiction in Sixteenth-Century England. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Kintgen, Eugene R. (1996). Reading Tudor England. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Levao, Ronald (1987). ‘Sidney’s feigned Apology’. In Dennis Kay (ed.), Sir Philip Sidney: An Anthology of Modern Criticism (pp. 127–46). Oxford: Oxford University Press. McDonald, Russ (2006). Shakespeare’s Late Style. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mack, Michael (2005). Sidney’s Poetics: Imitating Creation. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. Matheson, Peter (1998). The Rhetoric of the Reformation. Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark. Menon, Madhavi (2004). Wanton Words: Rhetoric and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

The Position of Poetry Miller, Jacqueline T. (1986). Poetic Licence: Authority and Authorship in Medieval and Renaissance Contexts. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Myrick, Kenneth O. (1938; repr. 1965). Sir Philip Sidney as Literary Craftsman. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. Nelson, William (1973). Fact or Fiction: The Dilemma of the Renaissance Storyteller. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Patterson, Annabel (1984). Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Plato (1970). Cratylus. Parmenides. Greater Hippias. Lesser Hippias, trans. H. N. Fowler. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Puttenham, George (2007). The Art of English Poesie: A Critical Edition, ed. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Rebhorn, Wayne A. (ed. and trans.) (2000). Renaissance Debates on Rhetoric. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Sell, Jonathan P. A. (2006). Rhetoric and Wonder in English Travel Writing, 1560–1613. Aldershot: Ashgate. Sextus, Empiricus (1971). Against the Professors, trans. R. G. Bury. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Sidney, Philip (1973). Miscellaneous Prose of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. K. Duncan-Jones, and J. van Dorsten: Oxford: Clarendon Press. Smith, G. Gregory (1904; repr. 1964). Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stillman, Robert E. (2008). Philip Sidney and the Poetics of Renaissance Cosmopolitanism. Aldershot: Ashgate. Swynnerton, Thomas (1999). A Reformation Rhetoric, ed. Richard Rex. Cambridge: Cambridge RTM Publications. Taylor, Barry (1991). Vagrant Writing: Social and Semiotic Disorders in the English Renaissance. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf. Tribble, Elizabeth B. (1996). ‘The partial sign: Spenser and the sixteenth-century crisis of semiotics’. In Douglas F. Routledge (ed.), Ceremony and Text in the Renaissance (pp. 23–34). Newark: University of Delaware Press. Ulreich, John C. Jr. (1986). ‘ “The poets only deliver”: Sidney’s conception of form’. In Arthur F. Kinney (ed.), Essential Articles for the Study of Sir Philip Sidney (pp. 135–54). Hamden, CT: Archon Books. Woods, Susanne (1984). Natural Emphasis: English Versification from Chaucer to Dryden. San Marino: Huntington Library.

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In the Renaissance, epic was widely regarded as the highest of poetic genres, to be attempted only after the lower forms of pastoral and georgic had been successfully mastered (see Chapter 56, Pastoral). Earlier Renaissance epicists, such as Spenser, Fairfax, and Harington, all dedicated their works to the queen and expected them to be read by statesmen and the nobility. Modern students of epic may therefore have some justification for thinking of this genre as ‘dead white male’ territory: patriarchal, aesthetically mainstream, and politically conservative. Even though epic thinking has dominated our era from the 1970s to the present day (in fiction as well as real life: from Star Wars to the new millennial crusade against an ‘axis of evil’), there is still a tendency to dismiss epic poetry as an outmoded genre, suited to more rigidly hierarchical societies than our own. In literary criticism, this view of epic has derived support from Mikhail Bakhtin’s influential essay, ‘Epic and Novel’, in which Bakhtin argues that, in contrast to the vital, liberating, future-oriented genre of the novel, the epic deals only in stultifying absolutes, measuring the present by the values of the distant past (Bakhtin 1981). David Quint’s masterly study, Epic and Empire (1993), complicates the picture by distinguishing two traditions and types of epic: those epics which sing the praises of political and military leaders, history’s winners, and those which sing elegies for defeated and silenced peoples, history’s losers. But even if the lines of opposition are drawn within epic rather than between two rival genres, Quint’s approach still represents epic poetry in terms of binary oppositions, where one term in the binary is morally weighted at expense of the other. In Writing the English Renaissance (1999), David Norbrook argues that allusions to classical epic in early modern heroic verse can be similarly grouped into political binaries. To simplify his nuanced argument: epicists who imitate Virgil are monarchal and tradition-bound, while those who imitate Lucan are republican and stylistically innovative or subversive. In my view, this makes it difficult to assess classical allusion in an epic poet such as Milton, who imitated both and may have sometimes admired the one for his politics, and the other for his poetic style. In this essay I

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would like to take a more microscopic view, to examine how three translators of foreign-language epics, Chapman, Fairfax, and Harington, all set about consciously ‘Englishing’ this highest and most ambitious of genres in the Renaissance period. In observing how they translate a Greek, Latin, or Italian text, one learns what they think epics should do, what faiths and ideologies their works should express, and in what manner (whether seductively or virtuously) their noble readers should be engaged. My aim is to demonstrate that Renaissance epic, no less than the novel, sets in motion centrifugal, dialogic energies as well as centripetal, monologic ones; so one cannot read epic solely in terms of binary oppositions, whether simple or complex (cf. Bakhtin 1981: 272). Epic narrative does often offer its readers a morally hierarchised world, where good wages an eternal war against evil. But as one proceeds further in these fictional worlds, the oppositions blur and break down; readers and heroes find themselves challenged to discover what constitutes the good in each instance. The challenge is always twofold: both to know virtue, and to act upon that knowledge once acquired.

Epic in Theory Before turning to individual texts, it may be helpful to discuss epic in theory, and to contrast modern and Renaissance approaches to the genre. In Susanne Wofford’s useful definition, ‘epic aims at a largeness of cultural summation, a sense that all the different sides of a culture will be brought to life in the course of the poem’ (Wofford 2001: 112). She cites a number of characteristic formal features: frequent use of extended similes; invocations (to the Muses, for example); emphatic descriptions of armour and places; a descent to the underworld; reference to gods and mythical figures as causes of action; dynastic prophecy; and realist, as opposed to magic, plot development (2001: 112–13). More significant than this list of formal features, though, is Wofford’s recognition that epic provides a ‘model for a process of thought’ (2001: 112). In other words, it is a means of thinking about one’s experience through a particular narrative filter, or if you like, camera lens. If each literary genre codifies a distinct world-view, as Bakhtin (1981: 85) argues, how would one describe a world according to epic? Bakhtin further argues that world-views are determined by chronotopes, by the way literary texts situate their human subjects in time and space. As predominantly realist narratives, epic poems stress their characters’ mortality, and even semi-divine heroes are burdened with a sense of human limit (Wofford 2001: 113). But this sense of mortal limit is paradoxically combined with soaring ambition. Epic narrators invoke their Muses to help restore the glory and heroic virtue of past times. Renaissance theorists defended poetry in general on the grounds that it could teach virtue more effectively than theology, history, or philosophy. Poetry’s method of imitation was more pleasurable, and therefore more persuasive, than abstract reasoning or unmediated didacticism (Sidney 1984: 25; Russell and Winterbottom 1989). But because epic poetry imitated only the most noble and heroic actions from the past,

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it was the most easily defended of all the literary genres, at least on moral grounds. Philip Sidney argues that the very name of ‘heroical’ poetry ‘should daunt all backbiters: for by what conceit can a tongue be directed to speak evil of [the epic poet] … who doth not only teach and move to a truth, but teacheth and moveth to the most high and excellent truth; who maketh magnanimity and justice shine through all misty fearfulness and foggy desires’ (Sidney 1984: 47). John Harington no less ambitiously declares that ‘heroical poesie … with her sweet stateliness doth erect the mind and lift it up to the consideration of the highest matters, and allureth them that of themselves would otherwise loath them to take and swallow and digest the wholesome precepts of philosophy, and many times even of the true divinity’ (Gregory Smith 1904: 2, 198). Renaissance theorists defend their views by citing the authority of the classics, frequently quoting Latin and Italian commentaries on Aristotle’s Poetics and Horace’s Ars Poetica. To illustrate their arguments, they habitually cite passages from Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil’s Aeneid, Statius’ Thebaid, and Lucan’s Pharsalia (Spingarn 1954). In their emphasis on the capacity of epic to instruct the present age in the higher virtues of the ancient past, Renaissance theorists share many of the views expressed in Bakhtin’s ‘Epic and Novel’. In 1941, Bakhtin argued that epic concerns itself exclusively with ‘beginnings’ and ‘peak times’ in a nation’s history; this is a world of fathers and dynastic founders, a world of ‘firsts’ and ‘bests’ (see Bakhtin 1981: 13). For Bakhtin, the negative aspect of an orientation to the past is that it empties the present of any real value: epic ‘[transfers the] … represented world into the past’ while the epic narratorial voice is that of ‘a man speaking about a past that is to him inaccessible, the reverent point of view of a descendant’ (Bakhtin 1981: 13). In this passage Bakhtin characterises the relation of the epic narrator and reader to the represented world as one of passive reverence. By contrast, in Renaissance Protestant epic we find a much more dynamic exchange between the narrator and the epic material, and between the text and its reader. Spenser’s aim in the Prefatory Letter to The Faerie Queene is ‘to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline’ (Spenser 1984: 15). Heroic virtue is something to which both characters and noble readers must laboriously aspire. At the same time, Spenser does not describe virtue ‘plainly in way of precepts’; instead he allows it to drift into the narrative like a ghost, ‘cloudily enwrapped in allegorical devises’ (1984: 16). In order to instruct, one must simultaneously delight; this is epic poetry’s via negativa, working through ‘misty fearfulness and foggy desires’ to reach virtue, in contradistinction to the more direct paths taken by theologians, philosophers, and historians. Harington’s view that epic should ‘lift up’ the mind of its readers to ‘consideration of the highest matters’ sounds deceptively similar to Bakhtin’s negative description of monologic discourse, which aims to unify and idealise experience, suppressing the ordinary messiness and diversity of daily life. As mentioned above, Renaissance poets adopted the classical view that poetry could be ranked high (epic), middle (georgic), and low (pastoral). Tasso approvingly borrows this three-tier classification from Cicero

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(Tasso 1973: 129). Renaissance editions of Virgil’s Aeneid were commonly prefaced with four lines referring to the Roman poet’s progression from pastoral to georgic to epic verse. In the opening lines of the Faerie Queene, Spenser’s narrator describes his own poetic career in terms of the Virgilian cursus honorum: Lo I the man, whose Muse whilome did maske, As time her taught in lowly Shepheards weeds, Am now enforst a far vnfitter taske, For trumpets sterne to chaunge mine Oaten reeds (Spenser 1984: 1.1.1–4)

Here the poet is setting aside the oaten reeds of pastoral in order to soar higher with the trumpet voice of epic. But if monologically transcending the ‘lower’ orders of poetry was the theory, in practice epic poetry tended rather towards heteroglossic inclusivity, embracing all the other available literary genres, including not only pastoral and georgic, but also comedy, tragedy, and, above all, romance (see Chapter 57, Romance). This is conspicuously true of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, but it is also evident in other, less consciously hybrid, texts. Moreover, while in theory epic poetry was meant to convey in elevated language the ‘sweet stateliness’ of heroic acts, in practice epic narrators plunge themselves and their readers into polemical arguments over contemporary politics, by means of narrative strategies so devious that they call into question the very efficacy of epic as a vehicle for inculcating heroic virtue.

Chapman’s Homer The dynamic interplay between the idealised image of epic and its concrete realisation is nowhere more evident than in the business of translation (see Chapter 9, Translation). George Chapman prefaces the 1611 edition of his Homer’s Iliads with a letter to the reader, which begins, ‘Of all books extant in all kinds, Homer is the first and best’ (Chapman 1967: 1, 14). Chapman elevates his beloved Homer far above his own work; his ‘silly endeavours’ can never hope to match ‘mine own earnest and ingenious love of him’ (Chapman 1967: 18). In a second preface, ‘Of Homer’, Chapman suggests that the very name Homer stands metonymically for the first and greatest work in the European literary tradition. Chapman’s own readers will be unhappily twice removed from this heroic source: by distance in time and place, and by language (Figure 35). But, contrary to Bakhtin’s thesis, Chapman’s elevated opinion of Homer does not produce ‘the reverent point of view of a descendant’ in the English translator, nor does he lead his readers to expect a slavish imitation of the Greek text. Quite the reverse. Chapman borrows the authority of Homer to defend his own text against anticipated criticism from his contemporaries:

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Image not available in the electronic edition

Figure 35 Title page to George Chapman, The Crown of All Homer’s Works (London, 1624). This engraving was used in a volume dedicated to the earl of Somerset – earlier versions of the translation had been dedicated to Prince Henry. The volume did not immediately win the kind of glory signified in the iconic illustration. British Library, London

let my best detractor examine how the Greek word warrants [justifies] me. For my other fresh fry, let them fry in their foolish galls – nothing so much weighed as the barkings of puppies or foisting hounds, too vile to think of our Homer or set their profane feet within their lives’ lengths of his thresholds. (Chapman 1967: 15)

These lines illustrate Bakhtin’s notion of inner polemic, the ‘word with the sideways glance’, which responds defensively to an internalised or imaginary critical respondent (Bakhtin 1981: 349). Thus, in this case, mediating between a revered ancestral text and a contemporary audience produces double-voiced or dialogic, rather than monologic, discourse. Chapman is also, more surprisingly, double-voiced in his attitude to Homer’s text. Not only does he borrow Homer’s authority to set his own text above his contemporaries’ potential criticism; he also briskly asserts his right to re-author Homer’s text: ‘how pedantical and absurd an affectation it is in the interpretation of any author (much more of Homer) to turn him word for word, when … it is the part

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of every knowing and judicial interpreter not to follow the number and order of words but the material things themselves’ (Chapman 1967: 17). The freedom of the translator to adapt his original lies at the heart of the Renaissance conception of imitation as emulation. The translator’s poetic authority in the present derives from the sacredness of his source-text; but at the same time, the sacred text must be refashioned for the needs of the present age. In terms of its address in time, the translated text occupies an unstable position, fully embedded in neither the present nor the mythic past. This is particularly true of the multi-layered and heteroglossic business of translation in the Renaissance period. Greek epics such as Homer’s were often translated into English through the filter of Latin, French, and Italian versions. Chapman himself defensively denies the allegations of ‘a certain envious windfucker [kestrel], that hovers up and down … affirming I turn Homer out of the Latin only’ (Chapman 1967: 17). Unfiltered through other foreign-language translations, Chapman nevertheless develops a marvellously flexible and open-minded stance towards his source-text. The 1611 edition announces that the first two books of Chapman’s original edition (Seven Books of the Iliads, published in 1598) have been systematically revised, while owing to lack of time, the other five have been reproduced without further revision. Books 3 to 6 and Book 12 are reproduced from the 1608 edition, and the whole second half of the Iliad, Books 13 to 24, has been newly translated for the 1611 edition. Many translations evolve over time, but Chapman is unusually frank in underlining the inconsistencies amongst various parts of his work. He even insists that some passages are better than others; the last books, he argues, are the best, least ‘paraphrastical’ and most ‘Greek’ passages in the entire work. With such extensive notation about the text’s genesis, it is difficult to see how readers could experience Chapman’s Homer as a monologic text. He himself points out its double-voiced qualities; the unrevised books are, in his view, distant from the Greek language and hence, world-view, while the first two and the final twelve books are deliberately estranged from idiomatic English. Bakhtin argues that epic heroes are situated in the distant past, at a remove from the lives of their readers. But Chapman’s Homeric heroes sometimes sound distinctly contemporary, and at other times archaic. In the first book of the Iliad, Achilles takes offence at the way Agamemnon, king of the Greeks, demands recompense from his own soldiers when he is forced to give up a slave he has won in battle: King of us all, in ambition Most covetous of all that breathe, why should the great-souled Greeks Supply thy lost prize out of theirs? (Iliads 1.120–2)

Incensed, Agamemnon replies that he will have what slave he likes from any captain he chooses. Achilles chides him to be more grateful, reminding him that the Greeks came to war for the sake of the Atrides:

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This heated exchange would have had particular resonance for Chapman’s readers, in the context of the earl of Essex’s rebellion against Queen Elizabeth (Burrow 1993: 215). Essex suffered insult from the queen in 1598, and attempted a coup against her in 1601. Chapman’s Seven Books had been dedicated to Essex in 1598. But his complete Iliads, published in 1611, was dedicated instead to Prince Henry. It would seem clear that Chapman was dissociating himself from the disgraced Essex, and from the eminently Homeric theme of ‘injured merit’ which the rebellion came to represent. But, as Burrow argues, Chapman actually exaggerates Achilles’ resentment in the 1611 edition, lengthening and sharpening his speeches in contrast to the earlier translation. In 1598, Chapman’s Achilles had been a comparatively mild-mannered critic of the king: ‘our kind arms are lifted to release / (Thou senseless of all Royalty) thine and thy brother’s fame’. By comparison with Samuel Daniel and Michael Drayton, then writing original epics in English, Chapman was able to voice a much sharper criticism of ungrateful royalty through the medium of Greek translation. Hence his Homeric heroes sound, on occasion, more contemporary than English heroes situated in the readers’ own times. At other times, though, Chapman aims for an estranging archaism. In such passages, he drives home his didactic point that contemporary times lack the magnificence and heroic glory of the Greek past. This becomes particularly evident in the last book, where Chapman translates the aristeia of Achilles. This passage concludes starkly and without evident free interpretation by Chapman. To be magnified, or achieve glory, ‘His most inaccessible hands in human blood he dyed’ (Iliads 20.449– 50). Like his hands, Achilles becomes ‘inaccessible’ in the depth of his bloodthirsty rage. Chapman makes no attempt to understand this Greek martial ethos from within; he presents it here as the otherness of the classical hero at war. Perhaps he means to suggest that such brutality has no place in his own, modern world; but, on the other hand, his translation does not hint at any criticism of Achilles. Indeed, the more Chapman revised his work, the more he appears to have been captivated by the strangeness, the sheer otherness, of ancient Greek culture. And yet, as seen in the example above, his revisions also sharpened the allusions to contemporary political disputes. The result is that Chapman’s Homer is not only double-voiced, but heterochronous: situated in both his own time and the archaic past.

Continental Epic Romance Chapman’s translation of Homer’s Odyssey, printed in 1614 and 1615, reads almost like a work by a different hand. In place of the weighty fourteener (fourteen-syllable

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lines), Chapman substitutes the sprightly decasyllabic couplet. The opening lines announce a different kind of project: The man, O Muse, inform, that many a way Wound with his wisdom to his wished stay; That wandered wondrous far when he the town Of sacred Troy had sacked and shivered down. (Odysseys 1.1–4)

The description of Odysseus as the man who ‘wandered wondrous far’ immediately places Chapman’s translation within the generic tradition of romance rather than epic. ‘Wonder’ was the characteristic affect used to describe the ideal reader’s response to the ‘marvels’ of romance narrative. Chapman’s marginal gloss about Odysseus’ ‘necessary (or fatal) passage’ in this ‘miraculous poem’ likewise demonstrates his awareness of the difference between an epic hero, whose actions are causally and teleologically driven, and a romance hero, who is buffeted hither and thither by arbitrary fate or chance. Reflecting this view of the human subject in relation to time, epic narratives tend to be mostly linear, while romances are episodically structured, with multiple, interleaved plots. The Italian commentators Giovanni Pigna, in I Romanzi (1554), and Iovambatista Giraldi Cinzi, in Discorsi (1564), had helped to popularise the notion of Homer’s Odyssey as romance, in contrast to his epic Iliad, and Chapman’s careful choice of words here shows his consciousness and approval of this critical tradition (see Parker 1979: 42–3; Fichter 1982; Quint 1993: 376 n.1) . But on the continent the practice is much less clear-cut than the theory. For a start, Homer’s poems share the generic features of both epic and romance, as defined by Renaissance theorists. In epic fashion, The Odyssey follows the fate of a single hero, while the Iliad celebrates many different heroes – Achilles, Hector, Agamemnon, Ajax, Odysseus, Diomedes, Patroclus, and others – in the manner of romance. Aristotle had argued that epic as a genre was ‘tolerant of the prime source of surprise, the irrational [to alogon]’ (Russell and Winterbottom 1989: 83), which Italian Renaissance commentators took to be the distinguishing feature of romance. In Italy, the publication of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso in 1516 sparked a furious debate about the relationship between epic and romance. Interlacing the adventures of Orlando and Angelica (a Carolingian knight and an Eastern princess) with those of Ruggiero and Bradamante (legendary ancestors of the Ferraran house of Este, the poet’s patrons), Ariosto created a new kind of work that threatened to upstage epic in its claim to be the sole genre capable of ‘cultural summation’. Orlando Furioso came out several decades before the first Italian commentaries on Aristotle’s Poetics were published, and Ariosto might have broken fewer epic rules if he had been aware of the cultural upheaval his work would cause (Steadman 1996: 130). Following Ariosto, Torquato Tasso painstakingly attempted to curb the cen-

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trifugal energies Ariosto had unleashed. In Discorsi (1587), Tasso redefines epic to take into account Ariosto’s flouting of existing rules, while in Gerusalemma Liberata (1575) he put his newly forged conception of epic into practice. In Discorsi, Tasso admits that all poetry should profit and delight, but that epic poetry should do it by moving the reader to wonder; and here the term ‘wonder’ is a concession to romance (Tasso 1973: 15). He admits further that Aristotle’s austere description of epic will no longer suffice for the degraded tastes of the sixteenth-century reader, who now expects to be entertained by the constant stimulus of a stream of marvellous incidents, such as one finds in ‘Orlando Furioso and the like’ (1973: 68, 76). One finds very similar arguments over cultural infantilisation and ‘dumbing down’ circulating in twentieth- and twenty-first-century criticism. Seeing a moral as well as an aesthetic principle at stake, Tasso firmly denies ‘that multiplicity of action is more apt to delight than unity’ (1973: 76). Variety is acceptable, even ‘laudable up to a point’, but a true epic poem should express an ideal of unity, and its moral and aesthetic objectives should be clear (1973: 77). Thus Tasso recasts romance as the centrifugal energy within epic which seduces the reader to read on, but which, in the end, must be reined in to serve the higher, teleological, aims of epic. One finds in Tasso’s definition of epic, then, the seeds of Bakhtin’s view of language as a whole: as a never-ending struggle between unifying and diversifying forces. The crucial difference is, of course, that Tasso praises unity, while Bakhtin celebrates diversification. Tasso’s argument has been restated and refined by many twentieth- and twentyfirst-century theorists of Renaissance epic. The modern consensus characterises epic as riven by an introjection of the marvellous, although critics differ in their judgement over which genre predominates in the ensuing struggle between genres dramatised in each individual work. Douglas Biaow argues that romance enters epic in the episode of the golden bough in Virgil’s Aeneid, and that its subversive energies are reined in by Ariosto (Biaow 1996). Similarly, Andrew Fichter argues that Ariosto consummates Virgil’s ‘tragically incomplete’ work, and reasserts the sternness of Greek epic (Fichter 1982: 4–5, 12). Conversely, Patrick Cook writes that injecting romance ‘revitalises epic’ in Orlando Furioso (Cook 1999). Most influentially, Colin Burrow has argued that Ariosto liberated the heroically repressed remorse in Virgil’s Aeneid, while Spenser, in turn, repressed and contained the dangerous errancy of Ariosto (Burrow 1993). Along similar lines, David Quint characterises Tasso and Virgil as the imperial ‘winners’ in epic’s war with romance (Quint 1993). While Tasso and modern theorists usefully nuance the conception of epic as a monologic genre of ‘firsts and bests’, of mythic time and moral absolutes, they do still perpetuate the idea of a clash of binary opposites, in which one term in the binary is morally and aesthetically superior to the other. No less than the novel, epic incorporates historical realities into mythic frames, and the pressure of history changes and modifies its generic narrative structures. Again, this is most clearly demonstrated in works of translation and imitation. When the conflict over epicised romance and romanticised epic is translated from continental Europe to England, we find epic

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emerging as a hybridised form, adapted to speak to a particular moment in English history.

English Hybrid Epics: Fairfax, Harington, and Spenser The debate over the conflict between romance errancy and epic high seriousness carries over into the English context in both Renaissance and modern criticism. Spenserian scholars commonly cite the Tasso-like (linear epic) structure of the second book of the Faerie Queene as opposed to the Ariostan (multi-plotted) structure of the central books, 3 and 4, although here too there is disagreement about how or whether Spenser resolved these conflicting generic energies. But when imported from the continent, English epic significantly restructures the terms of opposition, to resonate in the immediate political context. In translating Tasso’s Gerusalemma Liberata into Godfrey of Bulloigne (1600), Edward Fairfax is heavily influenced by his reading of Spenser’s Faerie Queene. Thanks to Spenser’s influence, Fairfax’s Godfrey is subject to a much greater and more intense range of emotions than Tasso’s careful, duty-conscious hero. At the death of a fellow-knight, Tasso’s Goffredo shows the restraint of Aeneas: ‘he reined in his emotion, the dutiful Bulloigne, and was silent’ (Tasso 1963: 3.67.5–7; my translation). But Fairfax shows the reader Godfrey’s inner grief: ‘his rueful looks upon the corse he cast / Awhile, and thus bespake …’ (Fairfax 1981). Fairfax does not simply romanticise Tasso’s epic, making it more ‘Ariostan’; he also develops Spenser’s theme that courtly virtue must be learned and practised. In Rinaldo’s shield, which might, in the Italian tradition, be taken as a symbol of empire, Fairfax finds an apt symbol of ancestral virtue. Where Tasso writes, ‘let what I paint here be a goad and spur to your valour’ (Tasso 1963: 17.64– 5), Fairfax’s Godfrey is urged to follow ‘this true course of honour, fame, and praise’. Honour, fame, and praise are the trio of English civic virtues to which Fairfax’s heroes aspire. Rather than having these virtues bestowed by birth, as in traditional romance, they have to be earned as the reward of a laborious epic journey (see also Burrow 1993: 175). When Sir John Harington translated Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso into English (1591) he may not have known the Faerie Queene (Burrow 1993: 152). But, like Spenser, he adapts continental epic to English idiom in order to address national political concerns. Ariosto’s female characters are figured as objects of desire, endlessly out of reach. As such, they embody the centrifugal energies of traditional romance, in which closure is endlessly deferred. When incorporated into epic, the romance heroine becomes symbolic of the disorder that must be contained by epic teleology. The gender dichotomy was further associated with an imperialist and colonialist ideology. As Quint explains, the subordination of romance to epic is enacted as ‘Western mastery – achieved by the Western male’s self-mastery – of a feminised East whose disorder tends toward self-destruction’ (Quint 1993: 40). But this gendered conflict is significantly modified in Harington’s

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translation of Ariosto. In the English epic, virtuous female characters (as opposed to their demonised counterparts) are desired for their concrete and attainable social attributes: their rank, good name, and fortune. The difference between the gender dynamics in the Italian and English epics is evident, for example, in the iconic scene in which Bradamante takes off her helmet after battle and reveals her gender identity. Guido Waldman’s modern prose translation of Ariosto reads: Now Bradamant started to disarm. She set down her shield and drew off her helmet, but a golden band with which she concealed and contained her long tresses came off with the helmet, so that her hair fell loosely over her shoulders, all at once revealing her for a maiden no less beautiful than fierce in battle. As when the curtains part to reveal the scene – arcades, sumptuous buildings, statues, painting, gilding everywhere, all lit with a thousand lamps; or when the sun shows his face, clear and serene, through the clouds: so the damsel, lifting the helmet from her face, showed as it were a glimpse of paradise. (Ariosto 1974: 392)

In Harington’s translation, by contrast, the act of taking off her helmet not only reveals Bradamante’s beauty but, more importantly, publishes her aristocratic name: Now when the lady did disarm her head, Off with her helmet came her little call, And all her hair her shoulders overspread, And both her sex and name was known withal And wonder great and admiration bred In them that saw her make three princes fall; For why, she showed to be in all their sight As fair in face as she was fierce in fight. (Harington 1972: 32.74)

Ariosto’s heroine is figured as a morally ambiguous palace, with doors open to seduce the reader, with a ‘glimpse of paradise’ beyond. By contrast, Britomart’s beauty in Harington’s translation is sealed shut with a very forbidding antithesis: ‘as fair in face as she was fierce in fight’. The English courtiers are stirred to wonder not only by the half-revealed female body, but also by the show of strength and rank in the heroine, which has made ‘three princes fall’. Bradamante comes to embody high nobility (alta gentilezza) in the final cantos of Ariosto’s poem (for example, Ariosto 1966: 26.2.4). But in Harington’s translation, Bradamante possesses this aristocratic virtue from the start. Female errancy and heroic feminine virtue are more subtly balanced in Spenser’s imitation of Ariosto in the Faerie Queene. Spenser thus describes his Ariostan heroine Britomart in the corresponding scene, at rest after a battle:

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… the braue Mayd would not diasarmed bee, But onely vented vp her vmbriere, And so did let her goodly visage to appere. As when faire Cynthia, in darkesome night, Is in a noyous cloud enueloped, Where she may find the substaunce thin and light, Breakes forth her siluer beames, and her bright hed Discouers to the world discomfited; Of the poore traueller, that went astray, With thousand blessings she is heried; Such was the beautie and the shining ray, With which faire Britomart gaue light vnto the day. (Spenser 1984: 3.1.42–3)

Spenser’s heroine is strikingly beautiful and, like Harington’s, she is beyond the reach of the reader. But her beauty radiates not only from her noble status but also from her inward moral virtue. In contrast to both Bradamantes discussed above, Britomart declines to remove her helmet, which heroic restraint refers the reader to a very famous, and much-imitated scene at the end of the Iliad, where Hector kisses his wife and child goodbye through his visor. But if in her restraint Britomart resembles this most epic of heroes, in her elusive beauty she also calls to mind Virgil’s Dido, romantically (if improbably) compared to a half-obscured moon in the underworld. Britomart is driven by a romance longing for her absent lover Artegall, but here, as in many other passages, she disguises and reins in her emotions. Unlike other veiled female figures in the Faerie Queene, Britomart’s disguise does not function as a temptation to errancy (for the implicitly male reader); it is rather symbolic of her virtue and heroic deferral of desire. One might read such imitations of Ariosto as Spenser’s containment of romance within an epic narrative frame. But it would be more historically specific, and arguably truer to the text to argue that Spenser is attempting a complex synthesis, in which romance desire is transformed into a longing for consummation of love and epic virtue. In the middle of the Faerie Queene, Spenser directly addresses Elizabeth I as the ‘Queene of loue, & Prince of peace’. His ideal is a monarch who would embody the fully revealed virtues of Britomart, which combine epic valour and romance passion. In the context of the 1590s, restraint was regarded as a quality as desirable in a monarch as mercy, a quality more often admired in the traditional romance heroine. As Burrow argues, Spenser aims obliquely to ‘persuade a queen … that there are times to follow the law and not the clement instincts of the monarch’ (Burrow 1993: 102). When Chapman sides with Achilles over King Agamemnon in his Iliads of 1611, he is expressing a similar view, that monarchs should recognise merit and reward it. But Spenser’s Faerie Queene is also, as Wofford argues, ‘a religious symbol of the unrepresentational nature of the divine’ (Wofford 2001: 109). Spenser’s Protestant

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poetics led him to create a hybrid epic which is not so much a containment of romance as an open, ceaselessly questioning, experimental work: ‘unfinished, unperfected; non-perfect, fragmentary, ongoing’ (2001: 109). Described in these dialogic terms, Renaissance epic reveals a close kinship with the novel, so vividly characterised by Bakhtin.

References and Further Reading Ariosto, L. (1966). Orlando Furioso. Turin: Giulio Einaudi. Ariosto, L. (1974). Orlando Furioso, trans. G. Waldman. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson. Austin: University of Texas Press. Beissinger, M., J. Tylus, and S. Wofford (1999). Epic Traditions in the Contemporary World: The Politics of Community. Berkeley: University of California Press. Bellamy, Elizabeth J. (1992). Translations of Power: Narcissism and the Unconscious in Epic History. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Biaow, D. (1996). ‘Mirabile dictu’: Representations of the Marvelous in Medieval and Renaissance Epic. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Borris, K. (2000). Allegory and Epic in English Renaissance Literature: Heroic Form in Sidney, Spenser, and Milton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Burrow, Colin (1993). Epic Romance: Homer to Milton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chapman, G. (1967). Chapman’s Homer: The Iliad, the Odyssey and the Lesser Homerica, ed. A. Nicoll, 2 vols. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cook, P. (1999). Milton, Spenser and the Epic Tradition. Farnham: Ashgate. Fairfax, E. (1981). Godfrey of Bulloigne: The Fairfax Translation of Tasso’s Gerusalemme Liberata. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Fichter, A. (1982). Poets Historical: Dynastic Epic in the Renaissance. New Haven: Yale University Press. Gregerson, L. (1995). The Reformation of the Subject: Spenser, Milton, and the English Protestant Epic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gregory Smith, G. (ed.) (1904). Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hadfield, A. (1994). Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hadfield, A. (ed.) (2001). The Cambridge Companion to Spenser. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hägin, P. (1964). The Epic Hero and the Decline of Epic Poetry. Bern: Francke. Hardison, O. B., Jr. (1989). Prosody and Purpose in the English Renaissance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Harington, Sir J. (1972). Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso Translated into English Heroical Verse by Sir John Harington, ed. R. McNulty. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Johns-Putra, A. (2006). The History of the Epic. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Looney, D. (1996). Compromising the Classics: Romance Epic Narrative in the Italian Renaissance. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Norbrook, D. (1999). Writing the English Renaissance: Poetry, Rhetoric and Politics, 1627– 1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Parker, P. (1979). Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Quint, D. (1993). Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Russell, D. A. and M. Winterbottom (eds.) (1989). Classical Literary Criticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sidney, P. (1984). A Defence of Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Spenser, E. (1984). The Faerie Queene, ed. Thomas Roche, Jr. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Epic Spingarn, J. E. (1954). A History of Literary Criticism in the Renaissance. New York: Columbia University Press. Steadman, J. (1996). ‘Principles of epic: problems of definition, Renaissance and modern’. Ben Jonson Journal, 3, 127–46. Tasso, T. (1963). Gerusalemme Liberata. Milan: Rizzoli Editore. Tasso, T. (1973). Discourses on the Heroic Poem, trans. Mariella Cavalchini and Irene Samuel. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Thompson, J. (2001). The Character of Britomart in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene. Lewiston, NY and Lampeter: E. Mellen Press.

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Warner, J. C. (2005). The Augustinian Epic, Petrarch to Milton. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Wilkie, B. (1965). Romantic Poets and Epic Tradition. Madison and Milwaukee: University of Wisconsin Press. Wofford, S. L. (2001). ‘The Faerie Queene, Books I–III’. In A. Hadfield (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Spenser (pp. 106–23). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Playhouses, Performances, and the Role of Drama Michael Hattaway

The building and location of playhouses may be less important than we think in understanding the development of dramatic representation in early modern England. A narrative of English theatre predicated entirely upon ‘Renaissance’ might single out one event: the year 1576 when James Burbage, a joiner turned player, constructed in Shoreditch, just to the north of the City of London, the most significant permanent construction dedicated to dramatic performance in England since Roman times, a twenty-sided polygonal building with three levels of galleries and a covered stage.1 Its name, ‘the Theatre’, proclaimed both commercial enterprise and classical emulation. The next year another playhouse, the Curtain, was erected close by. But records abound for performances well before this. Not only does it now seem that there was an earlier playhouse, the Red Lion in Whitechapel from about 1567, but we know of a myriad of earlier performances: at court and at inns (Wickham 2000: 291–306), in the halls of Oxford and Cambridge colleges (Boas 1914) and the Inns of Court (see Chapter 46, Drama of the Inns of Court), as well as in great houses of the gentry and aristocracy (Palmer 2005). Groups of boys from schools or choirs had also provided dramatic entertainment: around 1600 they were to become fashionable enough for their masters to house them in their own theatres (see Chapter 45, Boys’ Plays). Plays not performed on the stages of theatres were often designated as ‘interludes’: groups of entertainers might comprise tumblers and minstrels as well as actors, and their songs, mummings, farces, and allegorical plays or ‘morals’ were performed in halls as part of banquets and feasts (Grantley 2004). The drama was always associated with – and often incorporated – music, dance, and non-mimetic entertainment: one of the London theatres, the Hope, doubled as a bear-baiting pit. In some contexts, the dates not only of the constructions of playhouses but of the first performances of plays may not be of special significance. ‘Occasional’ plays commissioned for professional companies for private performances could be and were revived for further monetary reward, whether in London amphitheatres (‘public’ playhouses) or indoor theatres (‘private’ playhouses), in the halls of royal palaces

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(Richmond, Greenwich, Whitehall, Windsor, and Hampton Court – see Astington 1999), in halls adapted from ecclesiastical use, on temporary stages in fairgrounds, in parish churches or the ‘common’ or guildhalls of provincial towns (Palmer 2005), in the halls of great houses, or in the Caroline period, in theatres that catered to London’s elites. Love’s Labour’s Lost may have been written for a coterie around 1594, revived at court at Christmas 1597, and performed at a public playhouse in 1598. This is a play of great verbal intricacy: its revival in a popular playhouse may suggest that Hamlet’s opinion of the groundlings, ‘for the most part … capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise’ (3.2.11–12) may have been patronising. Although many may have been illiterate, habits of listening, to sermons as well as plays may have given them a serviceable kind of education. In 1610 King Lear was performed in Gowthwaite Hall in Yorkshire: given that this performance took place in the house of a recusant family, it may be that this revival, like many revivals, for a student of cultural history is as significant as the occasion of its first performance (1605–6) (Murphy 1984: 106). Some players formed companies of ‘sharers’ under the patronage of wealthy aristocrats, and it was such a group, Leicester’s Men (1559–88; Gurr 1996: 185–95), who first occupied the Theatre, while further companies were housed in the other playhouses that entrepreneurs like Philip Henslowe built soon afterwards. Sharers owned their companies and paid a proportion of their takings to the syndicates that owned the playhouses. The status of players as ‘servants’ to the nobility was a legal fiction that protected them from being whipped out of the parish by unfriendly justices of the peace as ‘rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars’, as a statute of 1598 categorised the unlicensed members of their profession. It was the sharers who commissioned plays from playwrights and, when these were delivered, owned them outright. Despite many complaints from the godly and industrious – which the players could counter by making contributions to parish relief (Rutter 1984: 39) – large profits were to be made, and there was a huge demand for new plays which was often met by pairs or teams of playwrights working collaboratively. Henslowe’s Diary reveals that, for example, from February to June 1592 Lord Strange’s Men (1564–1620) ‘in nineteen weeks [in 1592] … gave 105 performances of twenty-three plays’ (Rutter 1984: 57). The playhouses were situated on the thresholds of London, in ‘liberties’ that were outside the jurisdiction of the City, their geographic marginality suggesting to some interpreters a cultural marginality that, it has been assumed, might be inscribed upon our readings of the texts performed in them (Mullaney 1995). The Corporation of London considered that the crowds that frequented plays not only generated frays but also drew workers from their trades and diminished congregations at Evensong (Wickham 2000: 86). Sir Nicholas Woodrofe, Lord Mayor in 1580, in a letter to the Lord Chancellor, designated the players ‘a very superfluous sort of men’ (Rutter 1984: 12). Such complaints were only partially taken up. In 1582 we learn one of the reasons why: the Privy Council requested the Lord Mayor to allow ‘certain companies of players to exercise their playing in London … [that] they might attain to

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the more dexterity and perfection in their profession, the better to content Her Majesty’ (Chambers 1923: IV, 287). Other troupes toured the provinces (Ceresano 2005), performing when appropriate on the scaffolds of portable theatres of the sort we see illustrated in engravings from the Low Countries (no illustration of such an English occasion has survived). When the London playhouses were closed, notably by outbreaks of plague, the London professionals were also forced into the provinces on tour (Wickham 2000: 243–58). The text of Marlowe‘s Doctor Faustus exists in two forms, both published long after Marlowe’s death in 1593. The former, dated 1604 (the A text) derives from provincial performance. Stage directions reveal that no actors appeared above the stage or aloft in the playhouse ‘Heavens’. The B text, however, printed in 1616, derives from performances in a fully equipped London playhouse. There the Devils ‘aloft’ watch Faustus on the stage below as he conjures and later prepares for death. A (spectacular?) dragon seems to appear in the middle of Faustus’ conjuring. Their presence ironises those parts of the stage action, generates a different effect for the play, taking away from the hero’s stature and revealing the depth of his self-deception. The Induction to Marston’s Malcontent (1603), originally written for boys at the Blackfriars, reveals that the play was appropriated by the King’s Men, who were taking revenge on boy players who had ‘stolen’ from them a play called ‘Jeronimo’, probably The Spanish Tragedy (Gurr 1996: 294). From these we may deduce two things: the theatre of Renaissance England was not simply a metropolitan theatre but a national theatre, and the ‘meaning’ of any playtext must have been shaped in part by particular conditions of theatrical performances. London, however, was undoubtedly the centre for theatrical production. A few years after the building of the Theatre, William Shakespeare wrote a three-part sequence concerning the reign of Henry VI (1589–92?) that ambitiously and daringly presents the politics and struggles of the Wars of the Roses as well some of the battles of the Hundred Years War. It must have been a reminder to Elizabethan audiences not only of the perils of aristocratic factionalism and the horrors of civil war but also of the precariousness of civil order. There is evidence of censorship of the sequence involving Jack Cade in 2 Henry VI: Shakespeare in fact used for this episode the chroniclers’ accounts of the Wat Tyler rebellion that had taken place earlier, in the reign of Richard II, to show how rebels might penetrate to the heart of the city. Such plays, in the words of one describing Fletcher and Shakespeare’s Henry VIII (1613), made ‘greatness seem familiar’. That was at the end of Shakespeare’s career; at the beginning, at the time of the Henry VI plays, his endeavour may also have appeared ‘oppositional’: on 12 November 1589 the Privy Council had written to the archbishop of Canterbury, the Lord Mayor of London, and the Master of the Revels asking them each to appoint someone to scrutinise all plays performed in and about the City of London because the players had taken upon themselves ‘without judgement or decorum to handle in their plays certain matters of divinity and state’ (Chambers 1923: 4, 306). The fact that such orders were often repeated is yet another example of how the reach of the Tudor state exceeded its grasp. Thirty-five years later, Mid-

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dleton‘s A Game at Chess (1624) notoriously satirised James’s attempts to broker a match between his son and the Spanish Infanta (Dutton 2000: 132–61; Chapter 24, Tales of the City). Those Henry VI plays were performed in one of Henslowe‘s theatres, the Rose, which was in use from 1587 to 1603, one of the first theatres to be built south of the Thames, in the Liberty of the Clink, conveniently just across the river from the Inns of Court, students from which were playhouse habitués. (Quarto versions of the second and third parts indicate provincial performances as well.) From 1599 the Rose was to be eclipsed by the first Globe, built out of the timbers of the Theatre on the Bankside just to its east, and home to the Lord Chamberlain’s Men (1594–1603), later to become ‘servants’ of James himself and known as the King’s Men (1603–42). In 1600 Henslowe built a new theatre, the Fortune (Wickham 2000: 533–46), for another of his companies, the Lord Admiral’s Men (1576–1603), whose star player, Edward Alleyn, had taken the principal roles in the plays of Marlowe. From 1603 the company was known as the Prince’s Men, and from 1613 to 1624 as Palatine’s or Palsgrave’s Men. In the 1590s some members of the company toured in Germany. The repertory of the company was often innovative – they launched the fashion for humours comedy, for example, and staged versions of biblical stories and of academic and learned texts as well as the so-called ‘Elect Nation’ plays that, in the reign of King James, exalted the glories of the Tudor epoch and seem to have been designed to appeal to a citizen audience (Gurr 1996: 234, 241, 244–5; Gurr 2009). When the foundations of the Rose were laid bare in 1989, the tapered stage seemed small (25 feet across the yard at its front, 37 feet at the rear, and about 18 feet deep), yet experience in replica spaces indicates that epic effects that seem to be demanded by plays like those that comprise the Henry VI sequence do not depend upon illusion – large theatrical spaces or trompe l’oeil scenery to hold ‘the vasty fields of France’ – but can be generated by processions and duels, costumes, drums, and trumpets. The generic word in the period for a theatre is ‘playhouse’ (the first recorded use of the word in OED is from about 1000), and for an actor, a ‘player’, and it is useful to remember the similarity between games and Renaissance plays (Clopper 2001). We do not ‘believe in’ games, and yet there is a widespread assumption that we should ‘believe in’ the action of a play. Near the beginning of the nineteenth century Samuel Taylor Coleridge put into circulation a formula that has been endlessly repeated but which is seriously misleading. He wrote of the need for a poet, writing about the supernatural or the ‘romantic’, to ‘transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment, which constitutes poetic faith’ (Biographia Literaria (1817), 2.14; emphasis added). Coleridge was writing about poetry not drama, and focusing on the problems of rendering the supernatural. If his formulation creates an implicit analogy between reading a poem and seeing a play, we must remember that he was drawing upon dramatic experience in theatres equipped for bourgeois realism where ‘fourth wall’ sets were made as far as was possible to resemble the realities of rooms, but

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where the experience of being in a theatre easily created that ‘suspension of disbelief ’. Nothing in a Renaissance playhouse was ever designed to persuade a spectator to ‘believe in’ a place or a character; everything on stage proclaimed its status as a sign. Plays were enacted in distinctive fictive worlds that were created within the frames of specifically theatrical architecture. These frames were always visible, essential signs of those conventions for game and revelry that govern the action. Although they traded in spectacle, Renaissance playhouses had no mechanism for illusion. Indeed dramatists encouraged their audiences to join in a collaborative endeavour of imaginative play, proclaiming the impossibility of a literal ‘representation’: The scene is now transported, gentles, to Southampton, There is the playhouse now, there must you sit. (Henry V 2, Chorus, 35–6)

The spectators know that the ‘scene’ (or representation) can no more be ‘changed’ than the playhouse itself can be transported to Southampton. When moveable scenery was eventually used, notably in Jacobean court masques, the art of the scene painters’ perspective would have drawn attention to itself – what was depicted was neither drawn from ‘nature’ nor did it represent an actual city location, but was a timeless place out of literature or mythology, akin to what Mikhail Bakhtin (1981) termed a ‘chronotope’. Moreover, it was a feature of such entertainment for the scenes to be changed before the spectator’s eyes, kindling not an illusion of change of place but of admiration for the mechanical art that could substitute one kind of mythic space for another. In the amphitheatre playhouses performances took place in the afternoons. If torches were brought on, they were not functional but signs of darkness. (In the indoor private playhouses performances could take place at night: there were pauses between the acts so that candles could be replaced or trimmed, and these were filled by music and perhaps dancing.) However, there is some evidence that lighting might have been used in amphitheatre playhouses: on 11 April 1582 the Privy Council wrote to the Lord Mayor asking him to revoke his ‘inhibition’ against the players performing on ‘holy days after evening prayer, only forbearing the Sabbath day’ (Chambers 1923: IV, 287–8). And on 8 October 1594 the Lord Chamberlain wrote to the Lord Mayor assuring him that ‘where heretofore they began not their plays till towards four o’clock, they will now begin at two and have done between four and five, and will not use any drums and trumpets at all for the calling of people together, and shall be contributories to the poor of the parish where they play according to their abilities’ (Chambers 1923: IV, 316). These letters indicate not only support from the court for ‘honest recreation’ (Chambers 1923: IV, 287) but that on dark evenings the torches that are brought on stage at the end of Othello, for example, have been a theatrical necessity rather than contributing to dramatic effect. Chambers noted a suggestive definition from Randal Cotgrave’s A Dictionary of the

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French and English Tongues of 1611: ‘Falot. A cresset light (such as they use in playhouses) made of ropes wreathed, pitched, and put into small and open cages of iron’ (Chambers 1923: II, 543n.). In MS 126 in the Bibliothèque Municipale in Cambrai there is a sketch of a booth theatre that shows cressets being used for functional lighting. This absence of illusion made it possible for playwrights to deploy a wide variety of registers. The opening of Titus Andronicus is a very emblematic pageant using the two basic assets of the stage, its width and the height of the tiring-house gallery situated above the tiring-house doors. This offered a playing space ‘aloft’ that could signify the walls of a besieged city, be used as a ‘music room’, or simply be a place from which those in authority, like the new emperor Saturninus, might survey the scene. (When appropriate, it might have been occupied by spectators.) Other scenes contain on-stage violence which, given the excess, it is tempting to place in a loose category of ‘naturalism’ – although the more spectacular the violence the more spectators must have been made aware of its artfulness. Yet other scenes are allegorical: in 5.2 Tamora, entering in a chariot, designates herself as ‘Revenge’ and her two sons ‘Rape’ and ‘Murder’. Absence of illusion generated freedom of allusion: Shakespeare’s ‘Rome’, here a ‘wilderness of tigers’ (3.1.53), was a displacement of other Renaissance concepts of ‘Rome’ and possibly referred to myths of court politics that could be applied to the moments of the play’s productions. The mode of representation politicised the historical action: it was neither locked up in a historical time isolated from the audience by signs of the past nor located in a place separated from them by anything serving the function of a proscenium arch. A drawing survives that may record a stage production of this play: intriguingly the actors are garbed both in togas and Elizabethan dress (Hattaway 1982: 193–4 and pl. 10). Plays themselves were classed not only according to hierarchies of literary decorum but, as we have seen, within the categories of sports and games. An example: Robin Hood and the Friar, printed between 1553 and 1569 (see Chapter 53, Local Drama and Custom), which notes ‘Here beginneth the play of Robin Hood, very proper to be played in May Games’. Playhouses were cheek by jowl with the bear-baiting arenas and brothels of Bankside, and texts were often prepared for or featured among the calendrical games of popular culture: sly: bartholomew: sly: bartholomew:

… Is not a comonty a Christmas gambold or a tumbling trick? No, my good lord, it is more pleasing stuff. What, household stuff? It is a kind of history. (The Taming of the Shrew, Ind., 2.132–6)

Sports, one category of games, take place on playing fields. It is best to think of Renaissance stages as spaces rather than places, as fields of play, places for supposing, spaces where ideas might be explored: of the tyranny of the senses in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, of the relationship between authority and power in King Lear. The

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‘forest’ of As You Like It signifies a condition – or state of mind – rather than a location. Like sports, plays have ‘rules’ or conventions. There were conventions for battles, and conventions of language (Petrarchism and euphuism, for example) for the celebration of love. Texts that entail play create an implicit contract between players and spectators to enjoy not only, on occasion, physical knockabout, but sets of wit and virtuoso flourishes of verbal artistry – the display of recognised theatrical styles. Ben Jonson made the contract explicit in the Induction to his Bartholomew Fair (1614). He also usefully likened dramatic personages to heraldic figures, iconic rather than life-like: he offers ‘a Justice of the Peace meditant … a civil cutpurse searchant … and as fresh an hypocrite as ever was broached rampant’ (Bartholomew Fair, Ind., 125–8). There are often invisible inverted commas around each speech act in the theatre, and its style is as important as the sentiments it evokes. Speeches can veer towards pastiche, and are sometimes so obviously ‘theatrical’ that they become metatheatrical. Lots of games involve ‘dressing up’: so does theatre. Some of the most memorable moments of Renaissance drama are based around on-stage investiture – Tamburlaine’s famous substitution of his shepherd’s weeds with the cutlass and armour of the warlord (1 Tamburlaine 1.2) – or disinvestiture – as when King Lear strips himself of his ‘lendings’, the vestments of authority (Lear 3.4). Both moments have something to say about the theatricality of politics. As Donne wrote in his verse epistle to Sir Henry Wotton: ‘Courts are theatres where some men play / Princes, some slaves, all to one end and of one clay’. Tamburlaine’s is an image not just of bravado but also of political challenge: by his self-fashioning the shepherd Tamburlaine defies the sumptuary laws that maintained what Shakespeare called ‘degree’ and we would call a status-system – that was the theory. The fact that these laws existed at all suggests how far from absolute was the Elizabethan state. Tudor attempts to control the dress of their subjects suggest some degree of phobia on the part of the political elite. Well might they fear: some of the most notorious transgressors of the sumptuary code were the players themselves, their own licensed servants. Tamburlaine’s dressing up draws attention to the ease and dangers of self-fashioning and social climbing, the instability of political hierarchies, for all of which the theatre provided a model. ‘Puritan’ detractors of the playhouses took exception not only to the immoral content of plays but also to any form of recreation that could not be deemed to be godly. The fact that certain playhouses were sited among brothels and bear-baitings on the Bankside, south of the Thames and opposite the City, meant that they were readily lumped together with these other dens of iniquity and temples of Satan (Pollard 2004). It is significant that the same courtier responsible for providing recreation at court, the Master of the Revels, was responsible for ‘seeing and allowing’ the play-books of the companies, licensing plays for performance, in effect acting as censor (Dutton 1991). Cuts were made of scenes or sequences deemed seditious, as of the deposition scene (4.1) of Shakespeare‘s Richard II, a revival of which was staged at the request of

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followers of the earl of Essex the day before he staged his fatal uprising. Richard II is an encouraging play for a would-be usurper in that it enacts a rebellion against a partially corrupt regime and shows no sign of divine displeasure being visited upon the successful rebels. The presence of ritual moments like these does not mean that many parts of the action of these plays were not localised. The wrestling in As You Like It takes place ‘at’ Duke Frederick’s court, and Rosalind opens the forest sequence with a proclamation ‘Well, this is the forest of Arden’ (2.4.13) – which encouraged generations of theatre directors to stage the play amid painted forests. (‘Forest’ in the period, in fact, designates a domain for hunting.) Yet this instance is more complex that we may imagine. Shakespeare‘s source, Thomas Lodge’s prose romance Rosalind (1590), set the action in ‘Ardenne’, uncertainly situated near either Bordeaux or Belgium. This green world could be in Warwickshire or in France. Shakespeare gave some of his characters French names, others English ones, and the text evokes yet another kind of space, the ‘pleasance’ (locus amoenus) of classical literature, as well as a mythic world with lions and hermits out of medieval romance. ‘Arden’ thus becomes a mythic forest world. One thing, however, is certain: the playhouses and those who were associated with them were not just part of an ‘entertainment industry’. Certainly going to the theatre provided a form of recreation, but it is notable that the players were regarded equally as chroniclers of the time, anatomisers of the age, fulfilling some of the functions of journalists or political commentators. In 1592 Thomas Nashe boasted of ‘our representations … not consisting like [those of foreigners] of a pantaloon, a whore, and a zany [comedian attending upon a clown], but of emperors, kings, and princes’ (cit. Chambers 1923: IV, 239). Plays addressed public issues – indeed from about the 1580s theatres took forward the cause of ‘reform’ at about the time that the very moment that church reformers ceased to deploy godly plays, ballads, and images, and turned from iconoclasm to iconophobia.2 Theatre is re-presentation: kings become ‘subjects’ – the monarchy and many other institutions become the subjects of the playwrights‘ analytic endeavours. If we remember that the stages were not illusionistic we can recognise the plays performed on them not as ‘historical’ but as ‘political’, demanding to be ‘read’ and not just seen. Dramatists traded not just in ideas but also in ideology. St Paul had proclaimed that ‘All power is of God’ (Rom.13:1): Marlowe may be remarkable for making explicit the way that authority may derive from secular power rather than from divine ordination. Player kings strutted and fretted in the very centre of the playhouse, on a scaffold raised above the yard to about head height, around three sides of which groundlings might stand. Around the yard ran tiered galleries where sat spectators who had paid a supplement to enter the galleries from the yard, admission to which seems to have cost a penny. From the galleries, the audience below must have been part of the spectacle: later, in the indoor theatres, it was possible for gallants to pay for stools to sit on the stage itself, thus presenting themselves as part of the show. This is important: there was no physical separation between players and spectators, no suggestion of two separate worlds. Sometimes the relationship must have resembled that between

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spectators and players in modern vaudeville or pantomime. When appropriate, actors would have exchanged lines with spectators – there are tales of the great Elizabethan clown Richard Tarlton (1530–88), a well-known London figure and a favourite jester of the queen (Gurr 1996: 175). He was known for his skills at improvisation. At the Bull in Bishopsgate Street where the Queen’s Players oftentimes played, Tarlton coming on the stage, one from the gallery threw a pippin at him. Tarlton took up the pip and, looking on it, made this sudden jest: Pip in, or nose in, choose you whether, Put yours in, ere I put in the other. Pippin you would have put in: then, for my grace, Would I might put your nose in another place. (Tarlton 1884: 13–14)

In a bourgeois theatre players who spoke more than was set down for them would have broken the illusion: in the Renaissance there was no illusion to break. Plays in performance may have been based on texts very different from those with which we are familiar. In the ‘bad quarto’ of Hamlet the following abbreviated version of the flyting match between Hamlet and Corambis (the name mysteriously given in that text to the Polonius figure) appears. Hamlet has just vilified Ophelia, bidding her betake herself to a nunnery (probably a brothel): in the good quarto and folio versions this sequence comes much later. The way this version runs suggests a style of playing with Hamlet sharing his jests at Corambis’ expense with spectators, perhaps on one side of the stage, while Corambis who, pace Nashe, seems here to play the role of Pantaloon, the stock old man from the commedia dell’arte, may have given as good as he got by inviting support from spectators on the other: corambis: hamlet: corambis: hamlet:

corambis: hamlet: corambis: hamlet: corambis: hamlet:

Enter Hamlet … Now, my good lord, do you know me? Yea, very well, y’are a fishmonger. Not I, my lord. Then, sir, I would you were so honest a man, For to be honest, as this age goes, Is one man to be picked out of ten thousand. What do you read, my lord? Words, words. What’s the matter, my lord? Between who? I mean the matter you read, my lord. Marry, most vile heresy: For here the satirical satyr writes That old men have hollow eyes, weak backs, Grey beards, pitiful weak hams, gouty legs, All which, sir, I most potently believe not:

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hamlet: corambis:

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For, sir, yourself shall be old as I am, If, like a crab, you could go backward. How pregnant his replies are, and full of wit! Yet at first he took me for a fishmonger: All this comes by love, the vehemency of love, And when I was young, I was very idle And suffered much ecstasy in love, very near this – Will you walk out of the air, my lord? Into my grave. By the mass, that’s out of the air indeed – Very shrewd answers – My lord, I will take my leave of you. (sigs. E1v–E2r)

This reads like a rehearsed clowns’ cross-talk routine; the characters are both ‘on’ and ‘off ’ stage, within the ‘scene’ and outside it. Moreover it is notable that Corambis’ oath ‘By the mass’ appears in neither of the other texts, being the sort of language that the ‘Act to Restrain Abuses of Players’ of 1606 (3 Jac. I, c.21) was supposed to extinguish. Literary and generic decorum was subject to a particular kind of theatrical decorum.3 If such a (provincial?) version of Hamlet is a consequence of popularisation, other performances were graced by grand surroundings. Visitors to London and those who execrated the playhouses on religious or commercial grounds, are practically unanimous in describing their opulence. ‘The gorgeous playing place erected in the fields … as they please to have it called a “Theatre” ’ (Wickham 2000: 339) is a typical description, and it is indeed the splendour of the structures surrounding the stage that impresses first-time visitors to the replica Globe built in the 1990s on London’s South Bank (Carson and Karim-Cooper 2008). Above the stage was a canopy, the underside of which was painted with the signs of the zodiac, and behind the stage was the facade of the tiring-house, which must have matched in elaborateness the stage pillars which, according to an early visitor to the Swan, ‘were painted in such excellent imitation of marble that it is able to deceive even the most cunning’ (Hattaway 1982: 26). Early historians of Renaissance playhouses were under the impression that the space behind the hangings at the back of the stage, now generally termed ‘the discovery space’, served as an ‘inner stage’, becoming more prominent as the seventeenth century progressed, its frame serving as a prototype for proscenium-arch theatres, which emerged as men of the theatre adopted Renaissance principles of perspective for scenic design. This ‘inner stage’, it was surmised, served to represent interiors, rooms that lacked their fourth wall, prototypes of the stage rooms in which were set over 200 years of bourgeois drama. However, no player would want to confine himself within the place behind the stage with an empty space gaping before him. He would want to come out onto the platform to share with the audience the pleasures of discharging his part. Editors of play-texts who suggest to their readers that the action

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of a scene ‘takes place’ ‘in Macbeth’s castle’, ‘in Rosillion at the Count’s Palace’, or, desperately, ‘in another part of the forest’, are misleading them, even encouraging them to create in their mind’s eye characters of the same sort that inhabit ‘classic realist texts’ of the nineteenth century – or real people. Actors in plays of the period were called upon to play roles that may not equate with individuals. A character could indeed impersonate an individual, but could also, as we have seen, figure in an allegory, moral or psychological, or could, in particular parts of a play, take on the role of a chorus. Actors had to sing, to dance, to play the fool, to fight. In order to understand a sequence from a Renaissance play it is not necessary to localise it: the action takes place on the stage. The playhouses did, however, contain mechanical devices for spectacle. The ‘hut’ above the stage seems to have housed, in some of the larger playhouses, a crane that could have been used for spectacular descents like that of Jupiter in Cymbeline 5.4 (1610): Ben Jonson had disparaged the use of ‘creaking thrones let down the boys to please’ (Every Man in his Humour, Prologue). Players could be flown on wires: it is conceivable that in public playhouse performances the Weird Sisters in Macbeth appeared in this manner. Fireworks, attached to wires, were used to accompany thunder effects for scenes of tempest. Where appropriate, scenic properties were used, three-dimensional devices similar to those allegorical devices that were used for processions. Thrones and beds provide obvious examples, but Henslowe‘s Diary gives examples of emblematic devices such as ‘one hell mouth’, ‘the city of Rome’. More functional ones include rocks, cages, tombs, stairs, trees, altars, ‘the cauldron for The Jew [of Malta]’, and a ‘frame for the [be]heading in Black Joan’ (Rutter 1984: 136–7). Such scenic devices as were used served to establish genre rather than place – the ‘mossy banks’ (Rutter 1984: 136) of the sort that may have been later used in As You Like It presumably signalled not ‘forest’ but ‘pastoral’. It is difficult to believe that scenic devices were ever meant to deceive: they were designed to be read. Portable objects included musical instruments, armour and weaponry, regalia – an example would be the ‘warder’, the staff used to signal the beginning of a tournament, carried by Richard II in Act 1, scene 3, as well as devices that served as a kind of theatrical shorthand. A character entering bearing a riding-crop had obviously just got off a horse (Dessen 1984: 30–4). If Renaissance playwrights treated of illusion, they were concerned to treat of the effects of illusion upon characters rather than creating chimeras for the audience. Costumes were an important element in theatrical languages. Henslowe‘s Diary reveals that costumes could be the most expensive part of productions: ‘Henry the Fifth’s velvet gown’, ‘Tamburlaine’s coat with copper lace’, ‘six green coats for Robin Hood’, a ‘fool’s coat, cap, and bauble [a stick surmounted with a head with the ears of an ass]’, a ‘yellow leather doublet for a clown’, ‘Eve’s bodice’, ‘a little doublet for [a] boy’, ‘four torch-bearers’ suits’, and a ‘robe for to go invisible’ are among those listed, along with devices such as ‘Cerberus’ three heads’, lions’ and bears’ skins, and that ‘dragon in [Doctor] Faustus’. In 1598 Henslowe paid out to his company the huge sum of £19 to buy ‘a rich cloak’ (Rutter 1984: 154). Thomas Platter, a Swiss traveller

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to London, also narrates that it was a custom for the rich to bequeath costumes to their servants, who then would sell them to the players. This meant that a rich cloak that had served to fashion the image of an important courtier before the monarch one week could have appeared on stage the next – and it is conceivable that such practice could have been part of a system of political reference. But if some costumes evoked the historically specific, others evoked the allegorical: Henslowe had a group of what he listed as ‘antic’ suits, including ‘two leather antics’ coats with bosses [possibly humped backs]’, a category which presumably also included the costume to be worn by Rumour, prologue to Shakespeare’s 2 Henry IV, which was ‘painted full of tongues’ (Rutter 1984: 133–7; Stallybrass 1996). All of these devices, with modification, could have been adapted for the ‘private’ (indoor) playhouses that became very popular, the habitats of Hamlet’s ‘little eyases’ (2.2.337), among them the short-lived Whitefriars Playhouse, then the Blackfriars, where coterie audiences were prepared to pay more to be admitted (Lamb 2008; Chapter 45, Boys’ Plays). Later the Blackfriars was taken over by the King’s Men. There is no evidence that private theatres offered scenes that were more spectacular than those in the public playhouses. There, however, as in other indoor performance spaces, artificial lighting was used, instrumental music may have been more prominent, and, as is revealed in a Blackfriars play, Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607), there was music and dancing between the acts. As with so many institutions of early modern England an understanding of hierarchy may be one of the best ways of understanding the nature of the playing companies. Some actors began their careers by becoming, in effect, apprentices under the tutelage of the company. They might then progress to become the equivalent of ‘journeymen’, qualified to work for a day’s wages, but occupying a rank below that of ‘master’, the equivalent of which was a ‘sharer’. Famously, males took female parts, but it may be erroneous to imagine in all performances pre-pubertal youths with unbroken voices boying the greatness of the great female roles. A boy’s apprenticeship might extend until he was about 20, so that women’s parts could be in effect taken by young men (Kathman 2005). It is difficult to know how much this aspect of representational form was an important constituent of the meaning of performances. There are accounts of spectators on the prowl for ‘ingles’ (male lovers),4 ogling the ‘boys’, which may have given a homoerotic effect to certain performances. The boys dressed lavishly and wore gorgeous wigs – the letting down of hair was a sign of female madness. But it may have been the case that cross-dressing, although in theory a species of deviancy, was by and large an invisible convention: it was present in many of the sports of Tudor and Stuart England. Ben Jonson in Bartholomew Fair enjoyed his mockery of Zeal-of-the-Land Busy who, because he believed that actors were of no lawful calling and that the puppets were violating a biblical injunction against cross-dressing, would pluck down the profanity of their stall, only to have it revealed to him that the puppets had no genitals (5.5). Only fools or the obsessed took shadow for the substance. (Recently evidence has come to light of some acting by women, although not in playhouses: see Thompson 1996.)

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In addition to their representational skills exhibiting fictive others, players used the skills of presentation exhibiting themselves. First were their skills of speaking, which would have derived in part from their rhetorical study of classical texts and patterns of discourse (see Chapter 4, Rhetoric). This was an aural culture: audiences would have been used to listening – and enjoyed listening to verbal art, as is nicely suggested by the reactions of audiences to performance in John Madden’s 1998 film Shakespeare in Love (which also gives a good idea of the nature of the Rose playhouse). Some playhouses had resident troupes of musicians; professional groups of wind instrumentalists (‘waits’) also played at some performances. Surviving play-texts often provide very little evidence of the amount of music that was required: significant affective moments may be signalled only by the direction ‘song’ with no words specified; ‘flourishes’ and ‘sennets’ were probably used more than is recorded to magnify entrances and exits. On occasion music was used in the manner of imagery in verse – an example would be the music that is played during Richard II’s soliloquy in prison (Lindley 2006). Presentational parts of the plays, songs, dances, and fights must have been fully rehearsed, probably under the under the tutelage of the an important member of the company: ‘He that telleth the players their part when they are out [have ‘dried’] and have forgotten, the book-holder’5 – who, among other duties, functioned as a prompter. The ‘book’ of the play was an important and precious document: like a modern stage-manager’s script it could be marked up to record the need for properties or to complete stage directions, which were often missing from authorial manuscripts. A second document was the ‘plot’, a paper, sometimes stiffened so it could be hung up, presumably in the tiring-house, which recorded the players required for each scene (Kathman 2004b). Players, as we remember from the rehearsal of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (3.1), were not given copies of the whole play but only their ‘parts’, long strips of paper containing their own lines with necessary cues. It is notable that throughout the period performances derived from manuscript rather than printed material: theatrical texts, so resistant to print, could not have the stability that we associate with modern play-texts although authors were increasingly concerned to have their works take their place in the new print culture of the Renaissance (Peters 2000). New plays were added to the repertory on average every three weeks, and it took about the same time for the text to be prepared for performance. Companies were comparatively small: there seem to have been between six and eleven sharers in each, which means that, even with about four hired men, boy apprentices, and the possible use of stage-keepers for bit parts, doubling must have been extensive. Sixteen players for Doctor Faustus would have had to play forty-five named parts (Rutter 1984: 22). With regard to particular plays, it is possible to work out patterns for this (King 1992), but we do not know whether companies deployed their members as Peter Brook did in his much-imitated production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream of 1970 when he doubled Theseus and Hippolyta with Oberon and Titania to make a point about the dark side of a marriage union. Players were trained to have good memories,

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but there was no time for the kind of intensive rehearsal we expect to lie behind modern productions, and there was no one to research accurate costumes, control the whole production, moderate its pace, make sure the Bottoms among the players did not hog the space, or quieten any player who thought it rich ‘To hear the wooden dialogue and sound / ’Twixt his stretched footing and the scaffoldage’ (Troilus and Cressida 1.3.156). On the other hand, authors like Shakespeare were also sharers in the companies with which they were associated and would have been on hand on occasion to clarify intention or see to necessary revisions to their texts. Much of the effect, as in all good theatre, must have been generated by interaction with the audience, and depended on the players’ capacity to exploit their own appearance or personality, and their ability to improvise themselves out of a situation when things went wrong, as Tarlton did when a player missed his entrance during a performance of The Famous Victories of Henry V (Hattaway 1982: 89), or, as in Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle, when a spectator, witty or otherwise, interrupted the play. Clowns could be notorious for speaking more than was set down for them and presumably had distinctive catch-phrases and patter: it came to be known as ‘gag’. It is difficult to generalise about acting styles. Some parts, declamatory passages in Marlowe, for example, were probably delivered with a formality of gesture to match the sententiousness of the verse. Certain players (Tarlton provides a famous example) would have been taken on for their distinctive appearance or skills at repartee – like stand-up comics today. Clowns and fools must have had verbal and physical skills like the lazzi or stock comic routines of the Italian commedia dell’arte. In the coterie theatres boys may have gained effect by emphasising discrepancies between their size and youth and outsize roles or aged roles, creating a kind of pastiche. But there is praise for personations to the life, and when Shakespeare in his prime was writing roles that suggest characters thinking aloud as they speak, the role of his star player, Richard Burbage, was probably to play down the gestures and extremes of modulation in order to have the crowd within the wooden O share in his concentration. It is probably wrong to conceive of spectators ‘identifying’ with characters. The concept is anachronistic, and in many plays characters gain their ‘identity’ from representativeness rather than individuality. Soliloquies, which we tend to think of as being a revelation of inwardness, were probably directed for the most part at the audience. Certainly Richard III begins his play with a sophistical attempt to justify his actions to the spectators that is analogous to the way that, in love poems of the period, male figures reason with the women they address to get them to capitulate to desire. In some texts one ‘personality’ could be shared among several players: the Good and Bad Angels in Doctor Faustus may be read as projections of the hero’s consciousness; the Weird Sisters are both interior and exterior to Macbeth. Then as now spectators would have come to see actor X as character Y, taking pleasure or satisfaction from the ‘two distincts, division none’ of the personation. Audiences could be large. The Globe may have held up to 3,000 spectators, and there is evidence that people of all ranks attended plays, the higher prices of admission

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to the indoor playhouses deterring the poorest. Women, not only prostitutes but also many from leisured groups, formed a significant segment of the audience, a topic of comment by travellers from countries where women had less freedom. It is difficult not to believe that the sight on stage of women rebuking kings, debating with magistrates, or tutoring green young men in the arts of love did not make many think that Renaissance injunctions against female transgressions were indeed cages of rushes. Then as now playhouses were among the main attractions for travellers to London. Few detailed accounts survive, but here is Thomas Platter, a Swiss traveller: And … every day at two o’clock in the afternoon in the city of London sometimes two sometimes three plays are given in different places, which compete with each other and those which perform best have the largest number of listeners. The places [i.e. playhouses] are so constructed that [the actors] play on a raised scaffold, and everyone can see everything.

Platter reminds us of the variety of entertainment available, and interestingly designates what we would call ‘spectators’ as ‘listeners’: contemporaries often speak of going to ‘hear’ a play, suggesting perhaps a desire to be instructed as much as entertained (Gurr 2004a). He also describes a performance on 21 September 1599 of what may have been Shakespeare‘s Julius Caesar at the Globe: After dinner … about two o’clock, I went with my companions over the water [i.e. the Thames] and in the straw-thatched house saw the tragedy of the first Emperor Julius with at least fifteen characters very well acted. At the end … they danced according to their custom with extreme elegance, two in each group dressed in men’s and two in women’s apparel. (Hattaway 1982: 68)

Modern editions seldom record the possibility of terminal jig – more evidence of the convention is provided by the Bergamask at the end of ‘Pyramus and Thisbe’ in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Baskervill 1929). Perhaps, at the Globe, at the end of King Lear, the actor who played the broken old man got up and danced. In private venues, particularly early in the period, performances seem to have ended with a prayer for Queen and Council – an example is to be found at the end of Dekker’s Old Fortunatus (Hattaway 2009). Notes 1

A useful survey of London playhouses is given in Gurr 1999. 2 See Patrick Collinson’s 1985 Stenton Lecture (Collinson 1986). 3 I am indebted to my students at Sheffield, whose practical work on this sequence illuminated it for me.

4

5

See Jonson’s Poetaster: ‘What? Shall I have my son a stager [actor] now? An ingle for players?’ (1.2). Higgins 1585: 501 (cit. OED); Long 1999.

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References and Further Reading Astington, John (1999). English Court Theatre, 1558–1642. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination, trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist. Austin, University of Texas Press. Baskervill, Charles Read (1929). The Elizabethan Jig and Related Song Drama. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bentley, G. E. (1941–68). The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 7 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Blayney, Peter (1997). ‘The publication of playbooks’. In John Cox and David Scott Kastan (eds.), A New History of Early English Drama (pp. 383–422). New York: Columbia University Press. Boas, Frederick Samuel (1914). University Drama in the Tudor Age. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Carson, Christie and Farah Karim-Cooper (2008). Shakespeare’s Globe: A Theatrical Experiment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cerasano, S. P. (2005). ‘Theatrical movements’. Shakespeare Quarterly, 56, iii–x. Chambers, E. K. (1923). The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Clopper, Lawrence M. et al. (1979– ). Records of Early English Drama. Toronto: Toronto University Press. Clopper, Lawrence M. et al. (2001). Drama, Play and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Collinson, Patrick. (1986). From Iconoclasm to Iconophobia: the Cultural Impact of the Second English Reformation. Reading: University of Reading. Dessen, Alan C. (1984). Elizabethan Stage Conventions and Modern Interpreters, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dessen, A. C. and L. Thomson (1999). A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580–1642. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dillon, Janette (2000). Theatre, Court and City 1595–1610: Drama and Social Space in London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dollimore, Jonathan (1984). Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries. Brighton: Harvester Press.

Dutton, Richard (1991). Mastering the Revels: The Regulation and Censorship of English Renaissance Drama. London: Macmillan. Dutton, R. (2000). Licensing, Censorship and Authorship in Early Modern England. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Foakes, R. A. (1985). Illustrations of the English Stage, 1580–1642. London: Scolar Press. Foakes, R. A. (ed.) (2002). Henslowe’s Diary, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grantley, Darryll (2004). English Dramatic Interludes, 1300–1580: A Reference Guide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gurr, Andrew (1992). The Shakespearean Stage: 1574–1642, 3rd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gurr, Andrew (1996). The Shakespearian Playing Companies. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gurr, Andrew (1999). ‘Shakespeare’s playhouses’. In David Scott Kastan (ed.), A Companion to Shakespeare (pp. 362–76). Oxford: Blackwell. Gurr, Andrew (2004a). Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, 3rd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gurr, Andrew (2004b). The Shakespeare Company, 1594–1642. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gurr, Andrew (2009). Shakespeare’s Opposites: The Admiral’s Company 1594–1625. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gurr, Andrew and Mariko Ichikawa (eds.) (2000). Staging in Shakespeare’s Theatres. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harris, Jonathan Gil and Natasha Korda (eds.) (2002). Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harte, N. B. (1976). ‘State control of dress and social change in pre-industrial England’. In D. C. Coleman and A. H. John (eds.), Trade, Government and Economy in Pre-Industrial England (pp. 132–65). London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Hattaway, Michael (1982). Elizabethan Popular Theatre: Plays in Performance. London: Routledge. Hattaway, Michael (2009). ‘Dating As You Like It, epilogues and prayers, and the problems of “As

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the dial hand tells o’er” ’. Shakespeare Quarterly, 60, 152–65. Higgins, John (1585). The Nomenclator. London. Hodges, C. Walter (1968). The Globe Restored: A Study of the Elizabethan Theatre, 2nd edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Holland, Peter and Stephen Orgel (eds.) (2004). From Script to Stage in Early Modern England. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Holland, Peter and Stephen Orgel (eds.) (2006). From Performance to Print in Shakespeare’s England. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Howard, Jean E. (1994). The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England. London: Routledge. Hunter, G. K. (1997). English Drama 1586–1642: The Age of Shakespeare. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ioppolo, Grace (2006). Dramatists and their Manuscripts in the Age of Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton and Heywood: Authorship, Authority and the Playhouse. London: Routledge. Karim-Cooper, Farah (2006). Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Kastan, David Scott (ed.) (1999). A Companion to Shakespeare. Oxford: Blackwell. Kathman, David (2004a). ‘Grocers, goldsmiths, and drapers: freemen and apprentices in the Elizabethan theater’. Shakespeare Quarterly, 55, 1–49. Kathman, David (2004b). ‘Reconsidering the Seven Deadly Sins’. Early Theatre, 7, 13–44. Kathman, David (2005). ‘How old were Shakespeare’s boy actors?’ Shakespeare Survey, 58, 220–46. Keenan, Siobhan (2002). Travelling Players in Shakespeare’s England. Houndmills: Palgrave. Kermode, Lloyd Edward, Jason Scott-Warren, and Martine Van Elk (eds.) (2004). Tudor Drama before Shakespeare, 1485–1590: New Directions for Research, Criticism, and Pedagogy. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. King, T. J. (1992). Casting Shakespeare’s Plays: London Actors and their Roles, 1590–1642. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kinney, Arthur F. (2003). Shakespeare by Stages: An Historical Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell. Klein, David (1963). The Elizabethan Dramatists as Critics. London: Peter Owen. Lamb, Edel (2008). Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre: The Children’s Playing Companies (1599–1613). London: Palgrave.

Lindley, David (2006). Shakespeare and Music. London: Thomson Learning. Long, William B. (1999).‘ “Precious few”: English manuscript playbooks’. In David Scott Kastan (ed.), A Companion to Shakespeare (pp. 414–33). Oxford: Blackwell. Lopez, Jeremy (2003). Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. MacLean, Sally-Beth (1988). ‘Players on tour: new evidence from “Records of Early English Drama” ’. Elizabethan Theatre, 10, 155–72. Mann, David (1991). The Elizabethan Player: Contemporary Stage Representation. London: Routledge. McMillin, Scott and Sally-Beth MacLean (1998). The Queen’s Men and their Plays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Milling, Jane and Peter Thomson (eds.) (2004). The Cambridge History of British Theatre: Origins to 1660, vol. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Montrose, Louis (1996). The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Mullaney, Steven (1995). The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Murphy, J. L. (1984). Darkness and Devils: Exorcism and ‘King Lear’. Athens: Ohio University Press. Palmer, Barbara D. (2005). ‘Early modern mobility: players, payments, and patrons’. Shakespeare Quarterly, 56, 259–305. Peters, Julie Stone (2000). Theatre of the Book, 1480–1880: Print, Text, and Performance in Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pollard, Tanya (ed.) (2004). Shakespeare’s Theater: A Sourcebook. Oxford: Blackwell. Rowan, D. F. (1986). ‘Inns, inn-yards, and other playing places’. In G. R. Hibbard, and J. L. Levenson (eds.), The Elizabethan Theatre (vol. 9, pp. 1–20). Port Credit, Ontario: P. D. Meany. Rutter, Carol Chillington (ed.) (1984). Documents of the Rose Playhouse. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Shapiro, Michael (1994). Gender in Play on the Shakespearean Stage: Boy Heroines and Female Pages. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Stallybrass, Peter (1996). ‘Worn worlds: clothes and identity on the Renaissance stage’. In M. de Grazia, M. Quilligan, and P. Stallybrass (eds.),

Playhouses, Performances, and the Role of Drama Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (pp. 289– 320). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stern, Tiffany (2000). Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Stern, Tiffany (2004). Making Shakespeare: From Stage to Page. London: Routledge. Sturgess, Keith (1987). Jacobean Private Theatre. London: Routledge. Tarlton, R. (1884). Tarlton’s Jests, ed. J. O. Halliwell. London. Thompson, Ann (1996). ‘Women/“women” and the stage’. In Helen Wilcox (ed.), Women and Literature in Britain 1500–1700 (pp. 100–16). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weimann, Robert (1978). Shakespeare and the Popular Dramatic Tradition in the Theater, trans. R. Schwartz. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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White, Paul Whitfield and Suzanne R. Westfall (2002). Shakespeare and Theatrical Patronage in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whitney, Charles (2006). Early Responses to Renaissance Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wickham, Glynne (1959–72). Early English Stages 1300 to 1660, 3 vols. in 2. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Wickham, Glynne, H. Berry, and W. Ingram (eds.) (2000). English Professional Theatre, 1530– 1660 Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wiles, David (1987). Shakespeare’s Clown: Actor and Text in the Elizabethan Playhouse. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Continuities between ‘Medieval’ and ‘Early Modern’ Drama Michael O’Connell

The Elizabethan drama has generally been characterised as something new in the history of European theatre, the beginning of a theatrical tradition that, while interrupted by the closing of the public theatres in 1642 (and their subsequent destruction in the following years), continued on in the performing of Shakespeare and his contemporaries in the Restoration and beyond, down to the present day. This beginning is generally marked with the opening of the Theatre, James Burbage’s purpose-built playhouse in Shoreditch in 1576 – though the Red Lion (1567), a converted inn, may contest its claim as the first actual public theatre. It is doubtless true that the establishment of fixed playing spaces in London enabled an extraordinary expansion in the writing and production of new plays. The subsequent opening of the Curtain, the Rose, the Swan, the Globe, the Fortune, the Boar’s Head, and the Red Bull certainly indicates the economic advance prompted by Burbage’s enterprise. But the emphasis on newness and beginnings has obscured the fact that the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre was heir to vibrant theatrical and performance traditions reaching back more than 200 years, traditions that playwrights, companies, and audiences were well aware of. An understanding of these traditions allows modern interpreters a richer sense of how this ‘new’ theatre was transmuting and transposing formal and ideological structures from those previous two centuries. The present essay aims briefly to describe those traditions and to suggest their relationship to some representative dramatic texts of the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre. One theatrical moment in particular points up the awareness the playwrights themselves had of being part of a tradition. Sir Thomas More, a play written initially, it appears, by Anthony Munday, then revised by a committee of playwrights that included Shakespeare, has at its centre a scene in which a play is performed before More and his guests by ‘My Lord Cardinal’s Players’. The play is called The Marriage of Wit and Wisdom, which exists in several versions, but goes back to John Redford’s Wit and Science in the 1530s. Like Hamlet when he is confronted by a travelling troupe,

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More questions the players about their company, then queries their repertory: ‘I prithee tell me, what plays have ye?’ The player responds: Diverse, my lord: The Cradle of Security, Hit the Nail o’ th’ Head, Impatient Poverty, The Play of the Four P’s, Dives and Lazarus, Lusty Juventus, and The Marriage of Wit and Wisdom. (3.2.59–62)

All but Hit the Nail o’ th’ Head are plays known from other sources, and Impatient Poverty, The Play of the Four PP (by John Heywood, who was associated with the More circle), Lusty Juventus, and The Marriage of Wit and Wisdom survive as playtexts. Except for The Four PP, these were not plays that the historical Thomas More could have known, but they were all works known to the Elizabethan playwrights, and probably to their audiences as well, as representing an earlier theatrical generation. Printed some forty to fifty years earlier, the play titles evoke the repertory of a small troupe, like the ones that travelled through the country but also played in London. More enthusiastically chooses The Marriage of Wit and Wisdom and, again like Hamlet, shows himself knowledgeable about theatre and playing – so knowledgeable in fact that he steps in and plays the part of Good Counsel when one of the players misses his entrance, an act that recalls what William Roper tells of More’s actual practice as an adolescent in the house of Cardinal Morton a century before. What the company plays is in fact a pastiche of several plays that Munday had available to him in print, mostly Lusty Juventus but with a prologue taken in part from Thomas Ingelond’s The Disobedient Child and elements of a couple of other midTudor plays. Of the scene David Bevington says, ‘The impression is one of a playwright in the 1590s looking back on his professional ancestors with a certain amount of humorous condescension, portraying an average troupe of the early or middle century’ (1962: 19). This is not, of course, the only moment of self-consciousness about earlier theatrical traditions in late Elizabethan and Jacobean plays. When in 1 Henry IV Falstaff offers to take on the role of King Henry so Prince Hal may practise the answer he must give the king about his escapades, he says he will play the part ‘in King Cambyses’ vein’ (2.4.390); that is, he will perform in the manner of Thomas Preston’s ‘lamentable tragedy mixed full of pleasant mirth’ from some thirty or forty years earlier. And so he does in the creaking verse of the old play. Part of the fun rests in the fact that in Shakespeare’s play Falstaff himself has the role of the morality Vice in relation to Hal, something both he and Falstaff are aware of. A similarly amused, though less specific, homage to earlier theatre comes in the play that Bottom and the mechanicals perform in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. While the subject matter of their Pyramus and Thisbe may seem Ovidian and classical, the description of Pyramus as ‘a wandering knight’ would have tipped off an Elizabethan audience that Bottom and his troupe are performing a romance of the previous theatrical generation. Here

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the reference is to the more recent vogue of the romances from the 1570s, works like Clyomon and Clamydes, Common Conditions, and The Rare Triumphs of Love and Fortune, plays whose dominant verse form is also, like that of Cambyses, the creaking fourteener. Also with a similar lack of specificity, Edmund in King Lear jokes about the opportune entrance of Edgar just as he mentions his name: ‘Pat! he comes like the catastrophe in the old comedy’ (1.2.137). Here in fact the reference to the morality tradition may signal a more profound connection. Similarly, in Macbeth the drunken gatekeeper of Macbeth’s castle plays at being ‘porter of hell gate’ (2.3.1), and as Macduff knocks vigorously at the gate the porter ends up replicating the role of the devil who kept the gate of Hell in the mystery-cycle pageant of the Harrowing of Hell. Macbeth’s castle, the site of a murder that is like a ‘breach in nature’, has in effect become a version of Hell. Clearly the playwrights were conscious of their inheritance of a long theatrical tradition, and while they might sometimes gently mock outdated fashions, they were as aware as any modern film director that their art had a history that could be invoked and exploited for a variety of effects and meanings. In these examples of plays in the consciousness of Elizabethan playwrights, at least two types of earlier theatre can be identified. The morality interludes and the romances were a public theatre that was performed by professional troupes that may have been based in London but also maintained travelling itineraries, the immediate predecessors of the later Elizabethan companies. Such troupes may initially have been small, ‘four men and a boy’, but later grew in size, playing in inn-yards and other public spaces in towns and villages as well as in private venues, such as the hall of a nobleman’s household or at the universities (Palmer 2005). The other type of theatre was the large-scale civic production that was performed at religious festivals, typically the feast of Corpus Christi, in cathedral cities and regional centres. These were amateur productions, frequently performed under the auspices of the craft guilds, but this should not be taken to suggest amateurism or naivety in performance; in fact production values were high and performances elaborate. A third type of theatre, not alluded to in the above examples but more important than has frequently been recognised to the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre, is drama that might be understood as a small-scale version of the civic cycles, plays performed by towns and parishes that were part of local festivities and, in conjunction with ‘church ales’, often used for local fundraising. These were frequently termed ‘miracles’, plays centring on a saint’s life or concerned, like the fifteenth-century Croxton Play of the Sacrament, with some miraculous event. Folk drama was part of this local tradition, and references to Robin Hood are found in parish records, though no contemporary play-texts survive that could give a firm sense of what exactly this was (see Chapter 53, Local Drama and Custom). Each of these types of theatre might be understood to have a particular dramatic genre associated with it. The professional companies were associated with interludes, the allegorical morality plays that the troupe in Sir Thomas More had in its repertory. The civic theatre performed a kind of epic drama centred, in the surviving examples,

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on biblical history from creation to doomsday (though Coventry’s Corpus Christi play appears to have focused solely on the events of Christ’s life). And the parish drama has been identified with the careers of saints and the miraculous deeds associated with them. But this impression comes mainly from the texts that survive, and here it should be emphasised that the surviving texts of drama preceding that of the Elizabethan public playhouses represent merely the tip of an iceberg. Drama flourished at the local level, and from the late fifteenth century touring companies performed widely. Together they represent a vast tradition of performance throughout England and indeed throughout Britain. But the corpus of surviving dramatic texts has not increased in tandem with our knowledge of performance, so we are left to imagine the kinds of theatre from a comparatively small number of texts. It appears, for example, that many saints’ plays, enactments of the lives and miracles of saints who were the patrons of parishes and guilds, were performed at the local level. But only three saints’ plays survive from the fifteenth century: the elaborate St Mary Magdalen and, from the same Digby manuscript, St Paul, and St Meriasek in Cornish. (Lewis Wager’s mid-sixteenth-century Mary Magdalen, represents a rather pale survival of the tradition, grafted onto a morality structure.) Similarly Mankind is the sole text surviving from the fifteenth century that indicates performance by a travelling troupe of players, but many more such texts must have existed. Because this play and later plays associated with travelling companies are morality interludes, we may be tempted to assume that their repertories were exclusively such plays. But it is possible that they also performed saints’ lives or even biblical narratives. Similarly, it is also known that a ‘Creed Play’ was performed at York, as an apparent alternative to the biblical play, but its character and subject matter are not known. We are left, then, with a sense of a large and various tradition of performance in the period before the public theatres, but with only a comparatively small number of texts to stand for the whole. Part of the reason for the small number of texts has to do with the nature of theatre: texts were scripts to be performed, sub-literary and only subject to the preservation of print after the early decades of the sixteenth century. Many such plays as survive frequently do so in unique manuscripts or single surviving copies of printed books. The major winnowing force in the period is the Reformation – a far more significant demarcation than the constructions of ‘late medieval’ and ‘Renaissance’ or ‘early modern’ by modern cultural historians. While very little of the theatre was performed under specifically religious auspices – it is important to realise that the mystery cycles were sponsored by the craft guilds and lay oligarchies of the towns – a large part of it was religious in sentiment and purpose. In fact, in the two centuries before the public theatres, theatre as an institution can be understood as serving religious ends. Saints’ plays, of course, served the cult of saints, and the civic theatre was centred, initially at least, on the feast of Corpus Christi. Both became targets of the Reformation, like the visual art that also served devotional ends. At the same time it is important to note that traditional period divisions between ‘late medieval’ and ‘early modern’ may not be entirely useful in the understanding of

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this theatre. Humanist ideas and a sophisticated dramaturgy appear in some late fifteenth-century texts; for example, the two plays of Henry Medwall, and the experimental drama of John Heywood in the 1520s can appear more interesting and sophisticated than Elizabethan morality drama written in the 1560s and 1570s. But just as importantly, some dramatic genres generally assumed to be ‘late medieval’, like the mystery cycles, were in fact performed well into Elizabeth’s reign. The York cycle, the earliest cycle text (in its surviving form dating from 1463–77) was performed until 1569, after which it was suppressed; the Chester cycle, whose surviving text certainly dates from the sixteenth century, was given for the last time in 1575; and the most famous cycle of all, Coventry, whose two surviving pageants were also written, or rewritten, in the sixteenth century, was last performed in 1579. Coventry, in its proximity to Stratford-upon-Avon, is the cycle that Shakespeare certainly saw during his boyhood and adolescence. Parish drama, which doubtless included many saints’ plays, was still being performed in the 1560s, though no texts survive. And because the cycle drama, and no doubt the parish drama too, was subject to constant revision during these last decades of its performance, the distinction between ‘late medieval’ and ‘early modern’ theatre can become both hard to fix and misleading. As the episode in Sir Thomas More suggests, the dominant tradition behind the public theatres was the allegorical and quasi-allegorical morality play, or ‘interlude’ as it was termed. This is the tradition that has been most thoroughly explored by recent scholarship on the roots of the late Elizabethan drama. The result of this exploration has been an understanding of its pervasiveness in the drama of the late Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights. ‘But that your royalty / Holds idleness your subject’, Shakespeare’s Antony says to Cleopatra, ‘I should take you / For Idleness itself ’ (1.3.91–3). Antony thus constructs Cleopatra momentarily as the Vice figure Idleness, who led Youth astray on the morality stage. If this could be ironic in view of Antony’s age, it accords rather precisely with what the audience understands of his captivation by the queen and his dereliction of active, Roman duty. If not Youth, he is Middle Age drawn off by Idleness. Morality structures are to be found in large and small elements of the mature Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre. Since Bevington’s classic study (Bevington 1962), Christopher Marlowe’s structural use of the morality has been well known. Barabas in The Jew of Malta is an evident Vice character in both dramaturgy – his confident relationship with the audience established in soliloquies and asides – and the tenor of his character. As a Vice, Barabas’ role descends most immediately from mid-century homiletic tragedy, plays like William Wager’s The Longer Thou Livest the More Fool Thou Art, that displayed a vicious character whose dramatic progress is to become hardened in villainy until he is carried off by Satan at the end. Marlowe’s accomplishment is not only to meld this pattern with a non-allegorical narrative but to introduce a pervasive moral irony into the apparent triumph of good in the final destruction of the Vice; it is not evident that the supposed forces of good represent significant moral advance over the corruption centred in Barabas. In plot Doctor Faustus may also replicate

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homiletic tragedy, but here the morality structure is if anything even more evident. In part a psychomachia – it introduces good and evil angels vying for the attention of the protagonist – the play’s potent verse internalises the struggle within Faustus’ soul. Modern experience of the play has frequently found the comic scenes – servants imitating Faustus’ conjuring, Faustus himself snatching the Pope’s dinner and boxing him on the ear, or tricking a horse dealer – unworthy of the play’s best moments. These scenes are the ones most directly related to the interludes earlier in the century and, on the evidence of Mankind, to the moralities of the fifteenth century. Shakespeare’s use of morality structures, while perhaps less pervasive than Marlowe’s, is no less purposeful. A clear example of a local structure occurs in Othello 2.3, when Cassio is turned from a sober officer of the watch to a drunken fool by the Vice-like temptation of Iago. The scene is like a miniature morality interlude in which the Vice tempts the protagonist, first to lechery, and, when that is not successful, to drunkenness. In the larger play as well, Iago’s role shares much with the morality Vice: his wit, his intimate relation to the audience, and his overall purpose of corrupting and ruining the central figure. The fact that the temptation is transposed to a psychologically persuasive mode does not obscure its relation to the essential pattern stemming from the allegorical interlude. A different kind of morality can be seen to inhere in the basic structure of King Lear. As Freud recognised in his essay ‘The Theme of the Three Caskets’, a summons of death seems implicit in Cordelia’s refusal to flatter the aged king in the play’s opening scene. In structural terms the scene is strikingly like the opening of a fragmentary fifteenthcentury morality, Pride of Life (which Shakespeare is unlikely to have known), where a king is similarly confronted with a choice of listening to flattery or a truthful statement of his human mortality. Lear soon banishes his Good Counsel in the person of the truth-telling Kent. The best-known example of this type of morality is Everyman, a summons-of-death allegorical play, originally Dutch, which illustrated the stripping away of all that is inessential in human life before the grim fact of death. John Skelton’s Magnificence, while not a summons-of-death morality, similarly portrays a king who ‘hath ever but slenderly known himself ’ (Lear 1.1.292) and who must suffer physical and mental torments. While the dramatic mode of King Lear is not allegorical, the tragedy follows a pattern similar both to Everyman and Magnificence as the king is successively stripped of all the social supports of his existence until he discovers ‘unaccommodated man’ in the mad beggar that Edgar plays. Lear then turns himself into ‘such a poor, bare, forked animal’ as he sees in Poor Tom – and in so doing embarks on the discovery of basic human values. But the issue of dramatic antecedents to Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre is broadened and complicated by another analogue to King Lear. King Robert of Sicily, lost as a play but known through prose narratives, tells of a king who is converted from self-absorbed indifference to the plight of the poor by being cast out of his court and made to endure the life of a beggar. Generically different from a morality,

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King Robert is a blend of saint’s life and romance, narrating the protagonist’s conversion. Shakespeare’s tragedy may be more directly related to Thomas Lodge’s prose romance Robert the Devil, but plays on the subject were known in England. Such plays on the lives of saints may indeed have been the most commonly performed dramatic genre before the Reformation, but because of the attack on the cult of the saints, far fewer texts would survive than in any other genre. From performance records alone it is known that at least 66 plays on 38 different saints existed and that 44 towns and villages in England produced such plays (Wasson 1986: 241–2). And this may be just the tip of the iceberg. The Conversion of St Paul and Mary Magdalen, both in the Digby manuscript, and the Cornish Life of Meriasek, are the only extant texts from this tradition that flourished in the previous century. But mid-sixteenth-century plays like Bale’s King Johan and William Wager’s Conversion of Mary Magdalen, and, later, The Comedy of Virtuous Susanna represent Protestant transformations of the saint’s play. The early seventeenth-century play by Thomas Heywood on the life of Queen Elizabeth, If You Know Not Me You Know Nobody, and the anonymous Thomas Lord Cromwell and Sir John Oldcastle are further developments of the Protestant saint’s play. But the most extraordinary survival of the genre is Thomas Dekker and Philip Massinger’s The Virgin Martyr (1620), which in its portrayal of the torture and martyrdom of St Dorothea of Caesarea seems strikingly Catholic in its Baroque dramaturgy. If nothing else, The Virgin Martyr suggests that the genre of the saint’s life had not been erased from consciousness, but remained a possibility for dramatic exploitation. The dramatic genre on which the saint’s life exerted the greatest influence was the romance, which had never been absent from the longer and more elaborate late medieval saints’ plays. The self-conscious archaism of Shakespeare’s Pericles perhaps constitutes a direct acknowledgement of that influence, and its miraculous preservation of the queen and the heroic virtue of Marina surely suggest its affinities with hagiographic dramatic conventions. If Cymbeline too presents a heroically persevering woman, certainly The Winter’s Tale shows the most powerful secular elaboration of a saint’s life in Hermione’s endurance, her apparent death, and seeming resurrection. Perdita’s veneration of her as a seeming statue in the final scene even momentarily heightens the sense that Hermione’s heroism represents a transmuted response to the cult of the saints. The Tempest may seem less evidently tied to this tradition, but from such a perspective on romance it might be called ‘The Conversion of Prospero’ in its enactment of a turn from embittered memory and the renunciation of Faustus-like power. The influence of the mystery cycles is perhaps the most difficult to gauge – and it has been the least discussed among the ‘medieval’ influences on the Elizabethan drama. The medieval character of the cycles, while real, must remain bracketed because, although the origins of the genre go back to the late fourteenth century, the texts of Chester and what survives of the Coventry play are clearly sixteenth century. The Wakefield text too derives from early in the century, and the fifteenthcentury text of York was subject to revision down to the final performance of 1569.

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These are medieval plays that continued to be written, revised, and played into the period we identify as ‘early modern’, and clearly they were part of Elizabethan consciousness. Shakespeare is the only Elizabethan playwright who appears to have been deeply touched by the cycles, no doubt because of his origins in the Midlands, where the Coventry play was still performed as late as 1579. If some portion of his ‘lost years’ was spent in Lancashire, as has recently been argued, he may also have known the ‘Corpus Christi Play’ that John Weever (Ancient Funeral Monuments, 1631) records having seen played at Preston. Playwrights bred in London or southern England would not have known any local cycles in the latter half of the sixteenth century. But Shakespeare’s references to elements of the plays suggest that they remained a general cultural memory some two or three decades after they ceased being performed. The best-known allusion to the cycle drama occurs in Hamlet’s advice to the players: a player who overacts a passionate role offends him greatly: ‘I would have such a fellow whipped for o’erdoing Termagant, it out-Herods Herod’ (Hamlet 3.2.13–14). The audience is clearly expected to understand this reference to the over-the-top ranting of the mystery cycle role; it is not a private allusion, but shared even among those geographically and chronologically removed from direct contact with the performances. Macbeth may contain the most obviously purposeful uses of the mystery play tradition. As noted above, the drunken Porter plays comically at being the doorkeeper of Hell, transposing a scene in the Harrowing of Hell pageant. Other elements of the play ground Macbeth’s tyranny in the character of Herod. Here as elsewhere Shakespeare appears to allude to the biblical theatre to adumbrate relations that lie in and beneath narrative and character patterns. With an openendedness that does not coerce meaning or demand theological reading, these allusions can, momentarily and transiently, open a scene to larger ways of understanding or constructing it. Male sexual jealousy is another frequently occurring thematic motif in Shakespeare that can be understood as linked to cycle traditions. Male protagonists in both comic and tragic plots accuse their innocent wives of betrayal – thereby re-enacting Joseph’s confrontation of Mary in the nativity sequences. Coventry’s pageant of the Shearmen and the Taylors contains a particularly vivid enactment of the scene. In all Shakespearean cases, as in the cycle narratives, it is the innocence of the wife and the futility of the jealousy that become a central thematic focus. One of the future projects of criticism will be to query the boundaries of ‘medieval’ and ‘early modern’ drama and to explore the significance of their interpenetration in the late sixteenth century. The Records of Early English Drama project has been systematically amassing detailed records of theatre and festivity for the regions of England. One result is that the topography of performance now appears a good deal more complex and diffuse, less centred on London. Scholars are less inclined to evolutionary and teleological models that see theatre developing inevitably towards Elizabethan glories. What are needed are new theatre histories that will acknowledge both continuities and discontinuities in the complex traditions that extend from the late fourteenth century.

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Michael O’Connell References and Further Reading

Beadle, Richard (ed.) (1994). The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bevington, David (1962; repr. 1968). From Mankind to Marlowe: Growth of Structure in the Popular Drama of Tudor England. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Billington, Sandra (1991). Mock Kings in Medieval Society and Renaissance Drama. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bishop, T. G. (1996). Shakespeare and the Theatre of Wonder. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cerasano, S. P. (2005). ‘Theatrical movements’. Shakespeare Quarterly, 56, iii–x. Clopper, Lawrence M. (2001). Drama, Play and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Cox, John D. (1989). Shakespeare and the Dramaturgy of Power. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cox, John D. and David Scott Kastan (eds.) (1997). A New History of Early English Drama. New York: Columbia University Press. Davidson, Clifford (2002). Religion, History and Violence: Cultural Contexts for Medieval and Renaissance Drama. Aldershot: Ashgate Variorum. Dillon, Janette (1998). Language and Stage in Medieval and Renaissance England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dillon, Janette (2000). Theatre, Court and City 1595–1610: Drama and Social Space in London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dillon, Janette (2006). The Cambridge Introduction to Early English Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eisenbichler, Konrad and Wim N. M. Hüsken (1999). Carnival and the Carnivalesque: The Fool, the Reformer, the Wildman, and others in Early Modern Theatre. Amsterdam; Rodopi. Emmerson, Richard (1998), ‘Eliding the “medieval”: Renaissance “New Historicism” and sixteenth-century drama’. In James J. Paxton, Lawrence Clopper, and Sylvia Tomasch (eds.), The Performance of Middle English Culture (pp. 25-41). Cambridge: D. S. Brewer.

Freud, Sigmund (1958). ‘The theme of the three caskets’ (1913). In James Strachey (ed.), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works (vol. 12). London: Hogarth Press. Gardiner, Harold C. (1946). Mysteries End: An Investigation of the Last Days of the Medieval Religious Stage. New Haven: Yale University Press. Hamilton, Donna B. (1974). ‘Some romance sources for King Lear: Robert of Sicily and Robert the Devil’. Studies in Philology, 71, 173–91. Jones, Emrys (1977). The Origins of Shakespeare. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Norland, Howard B. (1995). Drama in Early Tudor Britain 1485–1558. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press. O’Connell, Michael (1999). ‘Vital cultural practices: Shakespeare and the mysteries’. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 29, 149–68. O’Connell, Michael (2000). The Idolatrous Eye: Iconoclasm and Theater in Early Modern England. New York: Oxford University Press. Palmer, Barbara D. (2005). ‘Early modern mobility: players, payments, and patrons’. Shakespeare Quarterly, 56, 259–305. Perry, Curtis and John Watkins (eds.) (2009). Shakespeare and the Middle Ages. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Postlewate, Laurie and Wim N. M. Hüsken (2007). Acts and Texts: Performance and Ritual in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Potter, Robert (1975). The English Morality Play: Origins, History, and Influence of a Dramatic Tradition. London: Routledge. Records of Early English Drama (1979– ). Toronto: University of Toronto Press. This invaluable series is based on the records for particular counties and is ongoing. Twycross, Meg and Sarah Carpenter (2001). Masks and Masking in Medieval and Early Tudor England. Aldershot: Ashgate. Wasson, John (1986). ‘The secular saint play of the Elizabethan era.’ In Clifford Davidson (ed.), The Saint Play in Medieval Europe (pp. 241–60). Kalamazoo: Medieval Institute Publications. White, Paul Whitfield (1993). Theatre and Reformation: Protestantism, Patronage, and Playing in

‘Medieval’ and ‘Early Modern’ Drama Tudor England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wickham, Glynne (1969). Shakespeare’s Dramatic Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Wickham, Glynne, Herbert Berry, and William Ingram (eds.) (2000). English Professional Theatre, 1530-1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Womack, Peter (1992). ‘Imagining communities: theatres and the English nation in the sixteenth

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century’. In David Aers (ed.), Culture and History, 1300–1600: Essays on English Communities, Identities, and Writing (pp. 91–146). Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Womack, Peter (1997). ‘Medieval drama’. In Simon Shepherd and Peter Womack (eds.), English Drama: A Cultural History. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Womack, Peter (1999). ‘Shakespeare and the sea of stories’. Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 29, 169–87.

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Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy A. J. Piesse

Theatre conveys meaning through language, through display, and through the interaction of language and display. Like any other literary text, the dramatic text also creates meaning referentially, by assuming shared sets of knowledge about the way a literary text works. Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy is important in the chronological canon because of the degree to which it draws attention to its own meaning (in terms of both text and action), and the ways in which that meaning is constructed. Dieter Mehl comments on this ‘first attempt to combine rhetorical and popular drama’ (Mehl 1982: 64) and suggests that characters’ awareness of the significance of the play’s internal dumb show instigates a new dramatic form (1982: 70–1). Wolfgang Clemen agrees that, within the play as a whole, ‘many diverse influences contribute to the creation of a new kind of drama’ (Clemen 1980: 63), and E. D. Hill was among the first to announce the play as ‘a deeply self-conscious work’ (Hill 1985: 164). It was a hugely popular play in its own time, being performed twenty-nine times between 1592 and 1597, and running to ten editions in various forms before 1633 (Rowan 1975: 112–13; Smith 1997: viii). Michael Hattaway has pointed out how ‘the number of references to the play or affectionately parodic quotations from it show that it occupied the collective consciousness of the Elizabethans’ (Hattaway 1982: 101), while Rebekah Owens suggests that references are ‘employed to express emotion, to provide a shorthand for stage practice, eventually becoming proverbial for the genre of Tragedy itself ’ (Owens 2007: vi). Written in a period where the robustness of the English language is in question (see Chapter 2, The English Language of the Early Modern Period), the play is also a timely interrogation of the nature of language and the relationship between the signifier and the signified. Criticism of the play during the last thirty years of the twentieth century suggested an increasing predisposition to view it in these terms. Broude develops a formulaic representation of ‘the Time, Truth and Right topos’ (Broude 1971: 132) in his historical alignment of the play’s preoccupations with the relationship between England and Spain, concluding that, ‘Viewed in this way, The Spanish Tragedy must have

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offered welcome comfort to Englishmen of the ’80s, reassuring them that no matter how precarious their situation might seem, Divine Providence would punish their enemies’ wickedness and Time would vindicate the truth and justice of the English cause’ (Broude 1971: 145). Late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century critical interest in The Spanish Tragedy is particularly attentive to its influence on generic development and its resonance with particular social and theological phenomena. Katharine Goodland draws particular attention to Kyd’s manipulation of what she sees as a long English tradition associating female lament with revenge (Goodland 2005: 1–28) and points out that ‘the male revenger’s actions are often connected in a significant way to a mourning woman’ (Goodland 2005: 155–6), while Sandra Clark and Christopher Crosbie both see a clear class element to the revenge plot, Clark identifying a ‘theme of broken heritage’ (Clark 2007: 136) and Crosbie suggesting that ‘Kyd’s play transforms revenge into an understandable outgrowth of thwarted ambition, a type of reproduction by absence, when all lawful means of material advancement become foreclosed’ (Crosbie 2008: 3). In parallel with this interest in the social drivers of the play, theological factors have come under intense scrutiny, with Andrew Sofer arguing for symbols of Catholic remembrance in the play (Sofer 2000) and Thomas Rist suggesting that Bel-Imperia and Hieronimo’s anguish over diminished funeral rites in the play lend it an anti-Reformist flavour that has previously gone unremarked (Rist 2007: viii). Kyd writes out of the Senecan tradition, where the plays are characterised by a plot pivoting around revenge, with a supernatural presence of some kind or another, usually in the form of a ghost, a tragic protagonist, and a great deal of blood and violence. In Renaissance rewritings a markedly formal style and the interspersing of classical quotations signal the antiquity of the medium. But Kyd signals his intention to problematise at least some of these givens from the outset of the play by setting up a double supernatural presence, in the form of the allegorical figure of Revenge and the liminal figure of the ghost of Andrea, and by introducing BelImperia’s plans for revenge early in the play. This could be interpreted as an acknowledgement of the mixed origins of the play; it is quite plainly coming out of the Senecan tradition, but the invocation of the allegorical moral protagonist, and, as we have seen, the invocation of the mourning woman as a spur to revenge, also connects it with the still extant traditions of the English morality play and moral interludes. By juxtaposing a purely allegorical figure of Revenge with the classical go-between between the living and the dead, Kyd creates a complex series of frameworks for the play. The audience watches allegory informing a character who inhabits a half-life between the living and the dead; watches a doubly effective figure instructing both reflection and action. The audience is invited to consider which of these protagonists is most likely to construct an accurate representation of meaning. Is meaning conveyed by that which is abstract and notional, or does that which is active and effective convey it? Are we as audience supposed to associate ourselves with these characters forced to sit outside the action? Peter Womack observes, ‘The dead are like us; they “sit down

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to see the mystery”; they may rejoice or rage at it, but they are powerless to affect it because they are not truly present’ (Womack 2006: 90). I think it’s a little more complicated than that. The allegorical figure signals the dislocation between the figure and the meaning of language. That is, Revenge functions as a physically real operator in connection with Andrea’s ghost, in that particular layer of the drama, but as a motivating word – if you like, a word that has not been made flesh – within the main action of the play. By constructing the choric figure, the truth-teller, in this way, Kyd indicates the liminal nature of meaning and the complex relationship between signified and signifier in this play. Simultaneously, he complicates the role of the ghost to load it with teleological meaning. Andrea has been real, has been able to operate physically within the main action, but is now an impotent observer. The audience thus watches a play being introduced by a once functional character who is now impotent to act. This character must rely on a purely notional figure, which is either an allegory or just a lexical unit, to affect the action of the play in a way that the supposedly ‘real’ character cannot. In this way, Kyd sets up a whole series of questions about meaning, action, and ability to act, questions that are at least as important to the final moments of the play as the resolution of the action itself. Once this framework is established – and it is set up visibly too, since Andrea and Revenge must inhabit a playing space that is clearly at a tangent, quite literally, to the main action – the relationship between word and action is elaborated upon in a far more explicit fashion as the play begins to reveal its meaning. The General’s description of battle at 1.2, a rhetorical set-piece, is a mechanism by which the broad principles of the execution of the Senecan tradition become localised. The physical battle is evoked at a distance through a sanitised formal rhetoric: There met our armies in their proud array: Both furnished well, both full of hope and fear, Both menacing alike with daring shows, Both vaunting sundry colours of device, Both cheerly sounding trumpets, drums, and fifes, Both raising dreadful clamours to the sky … While they maintain hot skirmish to and fro, Both battles join and fall to handy blows, Their violent shot resembling th’ocean’s rage, When, roaring loud, and with a swelling tide, It beats upon the rampiers of huge rocks, And gapes to swallow neighbour-bounding lands. And while Bellona rageth here and there, Thick storms of bullets rain like winter’s hail, And shivered lances dark the troubled air. Pede pes et cuspide cuspis; Arma sonant armis, vir petiturque viro. (1.2.24–9, 46–56)

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The repetitive structure suggests the even match, and moves from sight to sound, where voicing of the battle cry suggests imminent action. The extended metaphor of the ocean suggests that such violence is natural, but cannot prepare the audience for the gory detail of the next twenty or so lines (‘Here lies a body scindered from his head, / There arms and legs lie bleeding on the grass, / Mingled with weapons and unbowellèd steeds’, 59–61). The Latin tagging, as carefully balanced as the opening quotation, at once authorises the English account and reminds the audience of the form’s origins. Kyd continually draws attention to the fact that this is something new being made out of something traditional. This specific report of the battle is pulled into a still sharper focus when the battle between the two sides becomes a localised and individual battle of words between Lorenzo and Horatio over the capture of Balthazar. Even as the form of the play follows a particular progression – the movement from the universal to the particular – Kyd problematises his material, suggesting that truth depends on point of view: king: lorenzo: horatio: lorenzo: horatio: lorenzo: horatio: king: balthazar:

But tell me, for their holding makes me doubt, To which of these twain art thou prisoner? To me, my liege. To me, my sovereign. This hand first took his courser by the reins. But first my lance did put him from his horse. I seized his weapon and enjoyed it first. But first I forced him lay his weapons down. Let go his arm upon our privilege. Say, worthy prince, to whether didst thou yield? To him in courtesy, to his perforce: He spake me fair, this other gave me strokes: He promised life, this other threatened death; He wan my love, this other conquered me; And truth to say, I yield myself to both. (1.2.152–65)

The stichomythic exchanges – where one line immediately follows another, turn about, between or among two or more characters – mimic the closeness of the argument. But expectations are undermined, roles are reversed. The prisoner is called upon to be judge. He is also the character who will be revealed as simultaneously both at the mercy of a rote-bound rhetoric and the least rhetorically able. His language will be seen to be empty, lacking a connection with reality, but here, in the early stages of the play, he is being treated as a referent for the truth. So far in this play, then, the truth-tellers are tangential (as in the case of Andrea and Revenge), or they are in a position of inferiority, by dint of being prisoners or through their ineptitude with language. On a broader scale, the movement of the structure of the play is also deliberately destabilising. The reported battle is believed to be real, but now exists only

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as a report. It also functions as a signifier of the adherence to Senecan rules, by which violence, no matter how graphically described, happens only offstage. The report is replaced by the march-past of the troops, a present action that signifies – physically – the past triumph. The march-past in its turn is superseded by the argument over Balthazar, a specific, immediate dispute between two individuals. This is an early instance of the kind of experiment with representation that will characterise the play – in this case a movement from the historical (but reported) to the representative (but present) to the immediate, individual, and specific. Each attempt at accurate representation is qualified by its circumstances. It is the same kind of deliberate uncertainty that we have already seen between Revenge as an allegorical, tangential character and revenge as an effective, consequence-provoking lexical unit, where paradoxically a word has more power to effect physical action than a figure that is at once a character and a moral imperative. Kyd explores the relationship of words to action in far more explicit ways. Stichomythic exchange can be used, as we have seen, to mimic the closeness of debate. In Balthazar’s exchanges with Bel-Imperia, Kyd uses the accepted form to demonstrate the distance between the thinking of the two, and to imply that although the formal situation suggests they might be suited, the inner persona of each could not be more different. Bel-Imperia’s impatience with the outward form increases as the play progresses. In 1.4, she is gently mocking, exposing his shallowness by deliberately refusing the particular mindset that allows metaphor to operate: balthazar: bel-Imperia: balthazar: bel-Imperia:

What if conceit hath laid my heart to gage? Pay that you borrowed and recover it. I die if it return from whence it lies. A heartless man, and live? A miracle! (1.4.85–8)

And ending the exchange finally, wearily, by stating the obvious: bel-imperia:

Alas my lord, these are but words of course. (1.4.98)

By the end of the third act, by which time revenge for Horatio’s death is being planned, Kyd writes her as distracted and far more impatient: balthazar:

bel-imperia:

Come, Bel-Imperia, Balthazar’s content, My sorrow’s ease and sovereign of my bliss, Sith heaven hath ordained thee to be mine; Disperse those clouds and melancholy looks, And clear them up with those thy sun-bright eyes, Wherein my hope and heaven’s fair beauty lies. My looks, my lord, are fitting for my love, Which new-begun can show no brighter yet.

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New kindled flames should burn as morning sun. But not too fast lest heat and all be done. I see my lord my father. (3.16.95–105)

Dismissing him, she replaces the word-play with a real entrance. In some cases in the play the relationship between word and action is more pointed. When Lorenzo forces Pedringano to swear fidelity on the cross-shaped hilt of his sword, the metaphor of language into action is made plain, suggesting that fidelity is to be demonstrated by action rather than by words: lorenzo: pedringano: lorenzo:

Swear on this cross that what thou sayest is true, And that thou wilt conceal what thou hast told. I swear to both by him that made us all. In hope thine oath is true, here’s thy reward, But if I prove thee perjured and unjust, This very sword on which thou took’st thine oath, Shall be the worker of thy tragedy. (2.1.87–93)

This metatheatrical recognition of the interaction of language and action is so fully integrated as part of the scene that it does not really draw attention to itself. But when Kyd works with the emblem of the bower at 2.2, 2.4, 3.5, and 4.2, he is anxious that the audience should recognise the stylised games that are being played. The manipulation of the emblem is a pointed marker that the outward form is being wrenched out of shape in order to accommodate the disjuncture of the times. The exchange between Bel-Imperia and Horatio at 2.2 is heavily charged, both emotively, as the stichomythia featly reveals their intimacy, and prophetically, in terms of the motifs they use, of war and love. The juxtaposition of the motifs mimics the dangerous proximity of the two sets of observers, Andrea and Revenge, and Lorenzo’s group. There is a sense of Horatio taking on the mantle of Andrea, and the presence of the two liminal figures is far from comforting. Balthazar’s echoings rapidly become annoying and are a confirmation of what Kyd has already more gently demonstrated, that Horatio’s silences and thoughtfulness make him clearly more fit for Bel-Imperia. The underlying mutuality of understanding that drives the exchanges reveals more about the relationship than the words themselves. The momentary alignment of Lorenzo’s group with Andrea and Revenge (they are both observers) signals that a dangerous degree of power will be available to Horatio’s enemies. The continued motif of a loving battle at 2.4 augurs ill for Horatio, recalling as it does the ominous presences in the previous scene. The dramatic irony reaches an almost unbearable crescendo as Horatio arrives at the obvious Renaissance pun on le petit mort: O stay a while and I will die with thee, So shalt thou yield and yet have conquered me.

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and the metaphorical dying is made literal not in the act of procreation but conversely at the hands of murderers. Hieronimo’s generalised head-shaking over the inappropriate setting for an act of murder (‘This place was made for pleasure, not for death’) is similarly oxymoronic, similarly coloured by dramatic irony. In this brilliantly written and justly famous scene the audience experiences with Hieronimo the space between spoken puzzlement and active discovery. Beginning ‘What outcries pluck me from my naked bed?’, Hieronimo’s words and actions are exactly consonant throughout his soliloquy, describing his journey from bewilderment (‘I did not slumber, therefore ’twas no dream’) through fear (‘A man hanged up and all the murderers gone, / And in my bower to lay the guilt on me’) to the slow dawning of realisation (‘Those garments that he wears I oft have seen …’) betokening a man whose innermost thoughts and outward behaviour are utterly integral with each other. Given this steady consequentiality, Hieronimo’s subsequent tendency to remake himself emblematically (as when he appears as a suicide), referentially (Vindicta mihi!), or to slide into metaphor or apparent madness, simultaneously creates a self-referential theatre that draws attention to its own ways of constructing meaning, and a selfconscious audience, aware that meaning is being made for it. The embedded metaphorical understanding of the bower, and of these subsequent appearances by Hieronimo, suggest that Kyd relies in no small measure upon a shared understanding of emblem and literary meaning, using these tools to create a depth of mutuality between playwright and audience both within and across the confines of the text. (We need to remember, in this context, Andrew Sofer’s argument for a communal understanding of the bloody handkerchief as a theologically loaded object of remembrance). The slide into allegorical mode is especially spectacular, not least because it is entirely unexpected. Having been asked for physical directions to the court, Hieronimo begins to reply, but the two theatrical conventions of assumed realism and allegorical representation suddenly elide: O, forbear, For other talk for us far fitter were, But if you be importunate to know The way to him, and where to find him out, Then list to me, and I will find him out. There is a path upon your left-hand side, That leadeth from a guilty conscience Unto a forest of distrust and fear, A darksome place, and dangerous to pass: There shall you meet with melancholy thoughts, Whose baleful humours if you but uphold, It will conduct you to despair and death; Whose rocky cliffs when you have once beheld, Within a hugy dale of lasting night, That, kindled with the world’s infirmities,

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Doth cast up filthy and detested fumes, Not far from thence, where murderers have built A habitation for their cursed souls, There, in a brazen cauldron, fixed by Jove In his fell wrath upon a sulphur flame, Yourselves shall find Lorenzo bathing him In boiling lead and blood of innocents. (3.11.9–29)

It appears that the only appropriate response to such an astonishing shift in register is an inarticulate one: 1 portingale: hieronimo:

Ha, ha, ha! Ha, ha, ha! Why, ha, ha, ha! Farewell, good, ha, ha, ha! (3.11.30–1)

Hieronimo is closely aligned with the playwright from this moment onwards. By aligning him with different kinds of expression – assimilation, allegorisation – Kyd prepares the way for Hieronimo to become provider of the theatrical creation that will reveal truth through manipulation of different kinds of texts. When the final scene reveals that, within the context of the play, language is finally useless to a nation intent on being bound by convention rather than meaning, Hieronimo’s pilgrimage through the various forms of representation reveals itself for what it is. In setting up the play within the play, he completes a significant trio of entertainments, each of which has been in keeping with his position at the moment at which it takes place. In this final, astonishing invocation of self-conscious, analytical observation, Kyd sets up his audience to watch an audience that believes it is participating in an illusory convention. The ‘sundry languages’ demonstrate that where language is meaningless – as it has been proven to be throughout the play – action must tell the story; and action, in this case, does not lie. The onstage audience is informed only by the action, and cannot therefore profit from the multiplicity of meanings that language can offer; the audience beyond the notional proscenium arch is privileged with the text in a recognisable language and so is allowed the convention of stage deaths. Hieronimo goes on to make his meaning dramatically plain as he bites out his tongue, signifying an end to spoken language, and stabs himself with a penknife, killing himself with the very instrument by which his revelatory inventions were transcribed into an accessible life. But, as Frank Ardolino (1995) has argued, this final scene reveals its universal will to meaning by its invocation of Babel. In a play where the investigation of mediums for meaning has been at least as important as internal meaning itself, Kyd shows us that the state Hieronimo inhabits has no clear system of signs, either verbal or visual, for the exposition of justice. Justice must be performed through a language alien to the state and an illusion of illusion. This final exposition of truth through the medium

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of incomprehensibility and the double take on suspension of disbelief renders up the notion of language and symbol as obfuscatory in their unredeemed state. In Ardolino’s reading, Catholic Spain cannot access revealed New Testament meaning, because it seeks its meaning in words rather than the Word. Hieronimo’s movement from acquiescence to the workings of the state, to a painful coherence of language and action, through a retracing and recasting of meaning through allegory and the assimilation of ancient texts, finally arrives at the representation of truth by rejecting language in all its forms and allowing the action, the thing itself, to represent itself without a linguistic medium. Ardolino’s thesis seems particularly apposite to its time, apocalyptic revision being a favourite occupation of the late 1990s. It is particularly seductive as a reading encompassing many of the essential investigations that went before it, and opening up the way for work such as Hillman’s on the revised scenes that were added to the play at a later stage (Hillman 1997). This point has been addressed in recent productions of the play. Emma Smith provides an interesting overview in her introduction to the Penguin edition (1997) drawing attention to the 1978 Glasgow production directed by Robert David Macdonald, where ‘the final tragedy of “Soliman and Perseda” was staged in English as a shadow-play behind a bloody sheet’ (Smith 1997: xxvi), suggesting, it seems to me, that Hieronimo’s articulation of things is finally clear, but his vision is obscured – or at least on another plane – and this is particularly interesting to consider in the light of Sofer’s notion that the bloody handkerchief suggests a remembrance of, even a reverence for, Catholic obscurantism. In 1997, with the RSC at Stratford under Michael Boyd, Andrea observed throughout, sometimes seated, ‘at other points moving unseen among the characters’ (Smith 1997: xxviii), and Revenge was finally revealed to be Hieronimo, as the play was made to end by beginning its first scene again, the words being drowned in increasingly loud music (Smith 1997: xxix). Early, essential interrogations of form, emblem, and intertextual reference, however, highlight steadily and clearly each of the mechanisms by which the play might be seen to be, at this moment in history, a synecdochic signifier of the Protestant desire for clear communication of theological truth. References and Further Reading Ardolino, F. (1995). Apocalypse and Armada in Kyd’s Spanish Tragedy. Kirksville: Sixteenth Century Essays and Studies, vol. 29. Broude, R. (1971). ‘Time, truth and right in The Spanish Tragedy’. Studies in Philology, 68, 130–45. Clark, S. (2007). Renaissance Drama. Cambridge: Polity Press. Clemen, W. (1980). English Tragedy Before Shakespeare, trans. T. S. Dorsch. London: Methuen (original work published 1961).

Crosbie, C. (2008). ‘Oeconomia and the vegetative soul: rethinking revenge in The Spanish Tragedy.’ English Literary Renaissance, 38/1, 3–33. Erne, Lukas (2001). Beyond ‘The Spanish Tragedy’: A Study of the Works of Thomas Kyd. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Goodland, K. (2005). Female Mourning and Tragedy in Medieval and Renaissance English Drama. Aldershot: Ashgate. Hattaway, M. (1982). Elizabethan Popular Theatre. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy Hill, E. D. (1985). ‘Senecan and Vergilian perspectives in The Spanish Tragedy’. English Literary Renaissance, 15, 143–65. Hillman, R. (1997). Self-Speaking in Medieval and Early Modern English Drama. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Kerrigan, J. (1996). Revenge Tragedy: From Aeschylus to Armageddon. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kyd, T. (1984 [?1597, 1970]). The Spanish Tragedy, ed. J. R. Mulryne. New Mermaids. London: A. & C. Black. McGinnis Kay, C. (1977). ‘Deception through words: a reading of The Spanish Tragedy’. Studies in Philology, 74, 20–38. Mehl, D. (1982). The Elizabethan Dumbshow: The History of a Dramatic Convention. London: Methuen (original work published 1965). Mulryne, J. R. (1996). ‘Nationality and language in Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy’. In Jean-

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Pierre Maquerlot and Michele Willems (eds.), Travel and Drama in Shakespeare’s Time (pp. 87– 105). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Owens, R. (2007). ‘Parody and The Spanish Tragedy’. Cahiers Élisabéthains: Late Medieval and Renaissance English Studies, 71, 27–36. Rist, T. (2007). ‘Memorial revenge and the Reformation(s): Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy’. Cahiers Élisabéthains: Late Medieval and Renaissance English Studies, 71, 15–25. Rowan, D. F. (1975). ‘The staging of The Spanish Tragedy’. The Elizabethan Theatre, 5, 112–23. Smith, E. (1997). Introduction. In Thomas Kyd, The Spanish Tragedie. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Sofer, A. (2000). ‘Absorbing interests: Kyd’s bloody handkerchief as palimpsest’. Comparative Drama, 34, 127–53. Womack, P. (2006). English Renaissance Drama. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Boys’ Plays Edel Lamb

At the beginning of the seventeenth century, two playing companies of ‘children’, initially composed of young pre-pubescent and teenage boys, were performing in London’s theatres. The Children of Paul’s, revived in 1599, and the Children of the Chapel, revived in 1600, and known subsequently as the Children of the Queen’s Revels, the Children of the Revels, the Children of Blackfriars, and the Children of Whitefriars, had developed from sixteenth-century chorister troupes of the same names, who had performed commercially for a brief period in the 1570s and 1580s. While this later formation of the Children of Paul’s performed only until 1606, the Queen’s Revels, despite a short suspension between 1608 and 1609, performed until 1613 and was described at the time as ‘the best company in London’ (Chambers 1923: II, 269). A third children’s company, the Children of the King’s Revels, was established in 1607, but lasted only nine months. The success of these early seventeenth-century boys’ companies was, therefore, short-lived. Yet during this period the boys performed a range of generically diverse and innovative plays. For the most part they staged new drama written specifically for them by over fifteen well-known playwrights, including Ben Jonson, George Chapman, John Marston, Thomas Middleton, Francis Beaumont, and John Fletcher. Although Shakespeare did not write for the boy players, his description of the Queen’s Revels in Hamlet is one of the most frequently cited accounts of these companies. When Rosencrantz refers to the ‘eyrie of children, little eyases [young hawks], that cry out on the top of question and are most tyrannically clapped for’t’, and are ‘now the fashion’ (2.2.326–8), Hamlet questions the future of such companies, asking: Will they pursue the quality no longer than they can sing? Will they not say afterwards, if they should grow themselves to common players – as it is like most will, if their means are not better – their writers do them wrong to make them exclaim against their own succession? (2.2.331–6)

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Emphasising the company’s novel status dependent on the boys’ youth, particularly their singing voices, this exchange implies that its favourable position is only temporary and will not continue as the boys get older. Furthermore, by suggesting that the boys’ appeal lies in their differences from the adult or public playing companies, it outlines rigid distinctions between the two types of early modern playing company. This passage has frequently been invoked both as an explanation for the short durations of the boys’ companies and as evidence of rivalry between the theatre companies (see Knutson 2001). Recent work, however, has challenged interpretations of the companies dominated by issues of age and theatrical rivalry by analysing their shifting dramatic and commercial practices (Lamb 2008; Munro 2005). By reading the boys’ companies and their plays in the wider contexts of the history of children’s performance and the early modern theatre, this essay will reconsider the distinguishing characteristics of the boys’ repertories and demonstrate their significant role in the period’s performance culture. Troupes of children from chorister groups and grammar schools, including the choristers of St Paul’s Cathedral and of the Chapel Royal, performed privately and at court from the early sixteenth century. These companies performed primarily for educational benefit and to entertain the court. However, in the 1570s two groups known as the Children of Paul’s and the Children of the Chapel Royal began staging their plays for commercial gain, allegedly as rehearsals for their court performances, at playhouses in the precincts of St Paul’s Cathedral and in the Blackfriars. In 1584 these companies merged and performed until the late 1580s at the cathedral playhouse under the patronage of the earl of Oxford. John Lyly was the main playwright for these early companies, writing plays such as Campaspe and Gallathea for the boy players, and becoming master of the joint company in the 1580s (see Gair 1982; Hillebrand 1964; Shapiro 1977). Performing once a week at indoor playhouses at Paul’s and the Blackfriars and reviving some earlier boys’ plays such as Lyly’s Love’s Metamorphosis, the playing companies established in 1599 as the Children of Paul’s and in 1600 as the Children of the Chapel have clear links with these earlier groups of boy players. This is particularly true of the Paul’s company, which continued to function as a chorister group and playing company under the management of multiple sharers, including the master of the choristers, Edward Pearce. By supplementing the chorister group with boy players from other sources, this company performed plays by, amongst others, its major playwrights, John Marston and Thomas Middleton, Their personal repertory was supplemented by plays from other companies, including George Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois brought from the Queen’s Revels when the company manager Edward Kirkham moved from one boys’ company to the other in 1605/6. Initially, the company consisted entirely of boys between the ages of 6 or 7 to early adolescence. The Paul’s players in 1599, for example, likely included the 7-year-old Thomas Ravenscroft and the 13-year-old John Tompkins (Gair 1978: 440). However, it is possible that the company included older youths in its later years, as some of the boys may have remained with it until it ceased playing in 1606. An account of their per-

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formance of the lost play Abuses in this year hints that the boys had grown older with the company, referring to them, as it does, as the ‘youths of Paul’s, commonly called the Children of Paul’s’ (Gair 1982: 154–5). In contrast, the Queen’s Revels did not maintain close links with its chorister origins. The role of Nathaniel Giles as both master of the choristers of the Chapel Royal and joint manager of the playing company at its revival in 1600 indicates some links with the nominally similar chorister company. However, these associations were exposed to be superficial in 1601, when Henry Clifton complained that the company had exploited the chorister master’s right to impress singing boys for the Chapel Royal to take up boys as players, including his son, who were in ‘no way able or fit for singing’ (Wickham, Berry, and Ingram 2000: 265). Clifton’s legal complaint also provides evidence of the players’ ages, as it mentions the 13-year-old Nathan Field, the 10-year-old Salomon Pavy, and other grammar school students and apprentices who were impressed as players in a similar manner to Clifton’s 13-year-old son. This implies that in its early years this company, like Paul’s, consisted of boys aged up to the early teenage years. Field, however, remained with the company until 1613, when he was 26, demonstrating that although these companies continued to refer to themselves as groups of children, their players were not necessarily young in years. Instead the boys’ companies defined their players as children or boys through their hierarchical structure. In the adult companies, boy players were often apprenticed to the companies’ adult players, and these masters and apprentices appeared on stage together. In the playing companies known as groups of ‘children’, the players did not become sharers or masters within the companies. Therefore, even when the Queen’s Revels adopted a model of apprenticing boys as players by 1606, following the earlier controversy surrounding its impressment practices, it apprenticed the boys to the company’s managers or sharers who were not players in the company. In this way, the boys’ companies remained distinct from the adult companies of the period, and although their players may not necessarily have been children or boys in terms of their age, they remained equal in terms of their social status. The Queen’s Revels thus adapted new structures and continued to operate under various managers and sharers despite Clifton’s complaint. Performing diverse plays by George Chapman, Ben Jonson, John Marston, Francis Beaumont, John Fletcher, Nathan Field, Samuel Daniel, Edward Sharpham, John Day, and Robert Daborne as well as Thomas Middleton’s A Trick to Catch the Old One, brought from Paul’s to the Queen’s Revels by Kirkham on his second move between the boys’ companies between 1606 and 1608, the company transformed significantly during its thirteen-year existence. Following the accession of James I to the English throne it became the Children of the Queen’s Revels under the patronage of his wife, Queen Anne of Denmark, in 1604. However, it lost this patronage following a number of controversial performances, and after its production of Day’s Isle of Gulls in 1606 it was known as the Children of the Revels or the Children of the Blackfriars. This version of the company did not survive for long: in 1608 it was dissolved at the king’s command for continued satire directed at the court and king. At this point, the company’s costumes and

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properties were divided, and its lease to the Blackfriars theatre surrendered. Yet, around 1609, a new version of the company naming itself the Children of the Whitefriars, after the indoor playhouse at which it was now based, and partly managed by Robert Keysar, a goldsmith who had been involved in the earlier Queen’s Revels company and who claimed to have maintained the players who had ‘trained up in that service, in the reign of the late Queen Elizabeth for ten years together’, began performing again (Wallace 1910: 90). In 1610 the company regained the patronage of the queen and the title of the Children of the Queen’s Revels, which it retained until it merged with an adult playing company, the Lady Elizabeth’s Men, in 1613. The third London-based boys’ company of this period, the Children of the King’s Revels, differed from its counterparts in that it did not evolve from a chorister group but was established as a commercial enterprise with an apprenticeship structure, similar to that of the Queen’s Revels, at the Whitefriars playhouse in 1607 by the playwrights Michael Drayton and Lording Barry, who were soon joined by John Mason (Bly 2000: 1–27). The company performed plays by its shareholders, alongside other new pieces and Thomas Middleton’s The Family of Love, previously performed by Paul’s, and John Day’s Law Tricks, formerly owned by the Queen’s Revels. Although this company ceased playing after only nine months, some of its actors, including the 20-year-old William Barksted, became members of the post-1609 version of the Queen’s Revels. The brief success of this company suggests that the concept of a children’s playing company was perceived to be a marketable commodity based on the examples of Paul’s and the Queen’s Revels. The plays performed by these companies vary widely in content, tone, and genre. As Lucy Munro points out, the Queen’s Revels’ repertory alone encompassed every significant Jacobean narrative mode with the exception of the chronicle history play (Munro 2005: 3). Yet twentieth-century criticism of the boys’ plays tended to overlook this diversity. Alfred Harbage’s description of their repertories as consisting largely of ‘satirical comedies’ in his study of the rivalry between boys’ companies of the indoor ‘private’ playhouses and the adult players at the outdoor or ‘public’ playhouses is typical of early investigations into the boys’ drama and acting styles that assumed that these young players could only offer a mimicry of adult behaviour and adult acting styles (Harbage 1952: 71). More recent studies of the boys’ companies have challenged theories of a parodic acting style to argue that these boys were skilled actors who participated capably in the competitive world of commercial theatre (for example, Lamb 2008; Munro 2005; Shapiro 1977). Trained in this professional institution, the boys of the children’s troupes would have been able to perform characters of various ages, genders, and social roles, in a similar manner to the boys and men of the adult companies, and without the constant awareness of the audience that these roles were performed by boys. Nevertheless, the boys’ dramatists frequently exploited the fact that they were writing for the youths of this unique category of company, but not necessarily for parodic effect. Instead these companies utilised the distinctive aspects of their all-boy troupe to produce exciting and innovative plays that display the companies’ ‘special

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characteristics’ (McMillin and MacLean 1998: xii). One example of this is the use of music in the early drama of Paul’s and the Queen’s Revels. Many of the early modern playing companies incorporated songs and instrumental music into their plays or added musical interludes. However, the amount of music and song included in the boys’ plays is noteworthy as it exceeds that used by any of the contemporary adult companies and makes use of the companies’ associations with the chorister troupes and the unbroken singing voices of many of the young boy players (Austern 1992; Shapiro 1977: 232–55). New plays such as Marston’s Jack Drum’s Entertainment, performed by the combined choristers and players of Paul’s in 1600, unsurprisingly incorporate numerous songs, and combined with the company’s revival of earlier sixteenth-century boys’ plays, such as the anonymous The Wisdom of Doctor Dodypoll and John Lyly’s The Maid’s Metamorphosis, which included singing choruses of fairies, demonstrate the continuous use of music throughout the various manifestations of this company. Similarly, even though the links between the Queen’s Revels and the choristers were more tenuous, it also took advantage of the musical abilities of the young boys. In 1602, the diarist of Duke Philip Julius of Stettin-Pomerania, Prussia, commented on the exceptional musical performance given by them at the Blackfriars: For a whole hour preceding the play one listens to a delightful musical entertainment on organs, lutes, pandorins, mandolins, violins, and flutes, as on the present occasion, indeed, when a boy cum voce tremula sang so charmingly to the accompaniment of a bassviol that unless possibly the nuns at Milan may have excelled him, we had not heard his equal on our journey. (Wallace 1908: 107)

According to this foreign visitor, the musical elements of the boys’ performances surpassed those of other comparable European events. Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle, a later Queen’s Revels’ play performed in 1607, also includes extensive musical components as music is played between each act; during these pauses a boy player comes on stage to sing or dance while the citizen and his wife, the fictional audience members, pass comment on such theatrical practices as well as on the play’s progress. In fact, Beaumont’s highly self-conscious play explores the specific practices of the boys’ theatres and the experiences of the boy players throughout. Its plot involves the citizen couple offering their apprentice, Rafe, to the company as a player, and the play reveals how Rafe performs various roles by drawing on his previous training in amateur performances at the Hall of the Company of Grocers and adapting his speech. This play thus demonstrates some of the ways in which the boy players of this company might create a range of characters. The early plays of Paul’s and the Queen’s Revels frequently make use of such metatheatrical devices to highlight the distinctive identities and experiences of the boy actors. In doing so, they invite the audience’s ‘dual consciousness’, that is, a simultaneous awareness of the character and of the player performing this role (Shapiro 1977: 103–16). One such technique is the induc-

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tion scene, during which the boy players come on stage before the fiction of the play begins, apparently as themselves, but in fact delivering scripted speeches. Ben Jonson’s Cynthia’s Revels, for example, performed by the Children of the Chapel in 1600, brings three of the boy actors on stage to discuss the play that they are about to perform and the practices of their theatre company, including the boys’ training in their roles and the habits of audience members who sat on stools on stage in the Blackfriars playhouse. As one of the boys imitates the part of an adult audience member in this induction by taking tobacco and swearing, the actual audience is offered another insight into the ways in which boys might perform the adult male roles required of them by these companies. Jonson’s induction also draws attention to the disparity between the boy players and their potential adult parts by emphasising the players’ sexuality, or lack of it, as one of the boys claims ‘I’d cry, a rape, but that you are children’ (Induction, 102–3). Yet while denying the young boys’ sexuality, this scene simultaneously outlines their potential as objects of homoerotic desire when it describes them as the author’s ‘ingles’, or sexual partners (Induction, 166). This is another recurrent theme of the boys’ drama, and plays such as Jonson’s Poetaster, performed by the Children of the Chapel in 1601, present boy players as erotic commodities. This homoerotic potential of the boy had previously been exploited in the repertoires of the sixteenth-century boys’ companies, for example, in the characterisation of Ganymede in Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Nashe’s Dido, Queen of Carthage, performed between 1585 and 1588, and is also a significant motif in the plays of the Children of the King’s Revels between 1607 and 1608, such as Edward Sharpham’s Cupid’s Whirligig. The plays of this company, Mary Bly argues, are characterised by the homoerotic puns that construct ‘the male body as a site for the sensually celebratory appetite’ and ‘cross-dressed boy actors as sexually aware and sexually available’ (Bly 2000: 2, 4). Themes thus recur across the repertories of the various boys’ companies and across their history. This is also evident in the recurring trope of cross-dressing in the boys’ plays. Cross-dressing was, of course, essential on a stage that for the most part permitted only male actors, and in the adult companies of the period it was normal practice for boy actors to play the female roles and to progress to the roles of adult men when they became adult players. Early modern drama frequently draws attention to this fact through self-conscious references to costume or the body beneath as a source of humour, especially when female characters are disguised as pageboys. This is also common in the boys’ plays in the period: however, the boys’ theatre more interestingly offers a medium for an interrogation of this motif. In John Marston’s Antonio and Mellida, for example, the first play to be performed by the revived Paul’s in 1599, the boy who is to play the character of Antonio discusses the difficulties of performing this part in an induction that again introduces the audience to the players and practices of this new company. The boy originally locates the problem in the fact that his character must disguise himself as a woman, or Amazon. He denies the possibility of transforming from the male Antonio to the female Florizell during the course of the play, crying ‘I a voice to play a lady! I shall ne’er

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do it’ (Induction, 69). The concerns raised by this boy player might, on the one hand, refer to his own breaking voice, as it possible that one of the elder players of Paul’s on the threshold between boyhood and youth, might have performed this leading role (Bloom 1998). This reading is supported by the response of another boy player, who reassures him by pointing out that the voice of an Amazon is neither feminine or masculine, but somewhere in between, ‘virago-like’ (Induction, 70). On the other hand, the boy player’s fears about his ability to perform this role highlight that this is an unusual undertaking in the early modern theatre. While boys frequently performed female characters disguised as boys, it was more unusual for male characters to disguise themselves as women – except on the stages of the boys’ companies (Freeburg 1915). Between 1599 and 1613, the motif of the cross-dressed male recurs in the boys’ drama. In addition to Antonio and Mellida, it can be found in Paul’s plays such as Marston’s What You Will (1601), Dekker and Webster’s Westward Ho (1604), and Middleton’s A Mad World, My Masters (c. 1604–6); Queen’s Revels plays such as Chapman’s May Day (c. 1601 and 1610), Day’s Law Tricks (c.1604) and The Isle of Gulls (1606), Jonson’s Epicoene (1609–10), Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Scornful Lady (c.1610), and Field’s Amends for Ladies (c.1611); and King’s Revels performances such as Day’s Law Tricks (1607) and Armin’s The Two Maids of Moreclack (1607/8). The recurrence of male cross-dressing as well as female cross-dressing within the plays of the boys’ theatres may result from practical issues. The availability of young boys to perform both male and female roles makes possible the option of using boys to play male characters dressed as females on the boys’ stage, whereas in the adult companies the few boys available may have been needed to perform the female roles. On this all-boy stage, the boy players, defined as such by the fact that they are in the status of impressed or apprenticed youths no matter what their age, might be asked to play any role – male or female, young or old. This contrasts again with the adult companies, as on their stages the distinction between the boy players who performed the female roles and the adult players and sharers who performed the male roles would have been clear. In some cases, the boys’ plays further manipulate this distinct feature of this stage to conceal various layers of disguise from the audience until the close of the play. In George Chapman’s May Day, for example, multiple layers of cross-dressed disguise are not revealed until the final act, including the male Lucretio’s disguise as the female Lucretia, and his betrothed Theagine’s disguise as the pageboy, Lionell, further complicated by the fact that when in the role of a pageboy, Theagine participates in theatricals as a boy player suited to a female role. In Ben Jonson’s Epicoene, in which a boy is hired to play the part of the woman, Epicoene, by Dauphine in order to trick his uncle Morose, the climactic revelation that Epicoene is a boy is saved until the final act. This revelation is made by the removal of the boy player’s wig by Dauphine and his explanation of his plot. The play thus tricks its audience, along with Morose, and causes it to question the representation of gender on this stage. While this plot convention demonstrates that the boy players successfully performed a range of gendered and aged roles to the extent that they were able to deceive

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their original audiences, their plays also draw attention to the performative nature of these roles in moments similar to the removal of the wig in Epicoene. The boy playing the part of Antonio further draws attention to the ways in which he creates his part through a manipulation of his voice and physical appearance in the Antonio and Mellida’s induction when, having been reassured that he can play the part of the Amazon, he continues to express his concerns, claiming: Ay, but when use hath taught me action to hit the right point of a lady’s part, I shall grow ignorant, when I must turn young prince again, how but to truss my hose. (Induction, 74–6)

The boy player here hints at the difficulties of switching between female and male roles on stage. He must remember to alter his voice, having hit the ‘right point’, and he must also change and refit his costume, particularly by tying up his breeches or ‘truss[ing] my hose’. This demonstrates the demands of the theatre, but, more interestingly, highlights that even adult masculinity is a performance on this stage. The boy’s statements suggest that, having returned to playing the part of the woman, akin to the status of many of the feminised boy actors with unbroken voices and a small stature, he will be unable to adequately portray the adult male. Of course, the boy players have been trained in these professional playing companies to perform the roles required of them, and age is performed on their stages, and on the stages of the adult playing companies, in a similar manner to gender – that is, through a manipulation of the physical body, including the voice and using costumes, cosmetics, and staging properties, especially beards or, to use Lucy Munro’s term, through a form of ‘age transvestism’ (Munro 2005: 2). In performance, therefore, moments such as the induction of Antonio and Mellida are sites of humour, hinting at a comic disparity between the players and the parts that they play and flattering the audience’s knowledge of this theatre, rather than a serious suggestion that the boys cannot play their parts. On a stage inhabited entirely by youths, moments that draw attention to the performance of age, particularly old age, can be extremely humorous, and this is another aspect manipulated in the boys’ plays by frequent references to beards, balding heads, ageing and crooked bodies, and slowing minds. Chapman’s plays for the Queen’s Revels company partake in this comic representation of age. In The Gentleman Usher, performed around 1602, the older Corteza ‘shows a great bumbasted leg’ (2.1.28 s.d.) to prove her good health in old age, presumably drawing attention to the staging properties resembling bodily parts that may have been used to represent old age. In May Day, Lorenzo’s desire for the young Francischina is satirised through the play’s representation of him as ‘old father January’ in contrast to her as May (1.1.7–8), while Gasparo, an old man who desires another young maid, is described by the younger Lodovico as ‘an old sapless trunk … bald like a blasted oak, on whose top ravens sit and croak the portents of funerals’ (2.2.17–19). This comic and degrading representation of old age is satirically charged because the youthful players of the Queen’s Revels perform it. Furthermore, these elder characters are ultimately outwit-

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ted by their younger counterparts, as are Gostanzo and Marc Antonio in Chapman’s All Fools, also performed by this company in 1604/5. Many of the boys’ plays explore this opposition between younger and older characters, frequently representing the former mocking or even outwitting the latter. The theme is established in the early repertories of the children’s companies in the 1570s and 1580s. A recurrent character in the plays written by John Lyly for the children’s companies during this period is the witty page. Often such figures aid their masters in their plots and in plays such as Mother Bombie, performed by the merged Paul’s and Chapel Royal company in 1587–90, and these boys can dominate the play. More frequently they parody their dim-witted masters in humorous displays of their own wit and through accounts of their suffering. Epiton, Dares, and Samias, the pages in Lyly’s Endymion, performed by the same company in 1588, are exemplary of such characters. The play returns to the antics of these pages every few scenes as they join together to mock and plot against their foolish elder and master, Sir Tophas. This grouping of pages or young characters to demonstrate their talents and expose the foolishness of their masters through trickery recurs in the boys’ plays of the early seventeenth century. Paul’s performance of Marston’s What You Will in 1601 presents two groups of young boys at pivotal moments: a group of schoolboys being taught Latin by their schoolmaster in 2.2, and a group of pages gathered together to form their own court, in which they judge their masters, in 3.3. These scenes mirror each other structurally and thematically as the communities of youths in both provide the opportunity to challenge the structures of authority determined by the age and class of the play’s characters. In the school scene, the boys’ bawdy puns mock school-learning, rendering it a source of amusement for the boys and empowering them to ridicule the master and escape his attempts to beat them. In the second scene, the pages, in the absence of masters and authority figures, construct their own modes of authority by appointing one to the role of judge, to whom they critically present their experiences of being servants and devise plots to get their revenge on their masters. The large number of pages and schoolboys presented on stage together in plays such as Marston’s and Lyly’s, on one level simply indicates the ways in which the dramatists for these companies availed themselves of the companies’ composition, i.e. that they had a sufficient number of boys to take on such roles. The effect of this practical use of the specifics of the theatre company, however, is a celebration of youth. By presenting the communal antics of these youthful characters, these plays present a youth culture, and revel in the temporary subversion of the hierarchies of age and status perpetrated by these groups. Furthermore, it is noteworthy that in the court scene of What You Will the newly appointed page, Holofernes Pippo (who was the also the leading schoolboy in the earlier scene), is given the task of gulling his foolish master, Simplicius Faber, and he must achieve this by dressing as a merchant’s wife and stealing his purse. The young heroes of Middleton’s drama for the boys’ companies, in plays such as A Trick to Catch the Old One, performed by Paul’s in 1604 and

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the Queen’s Revels in 1608–9, and A Mad World My Masters, performed by Paul’s c.1604–6, similarly gull their masters and elders through disguise. The ability of boys to fool their elders and temporarily disrupt authority through performance functions perhaps as a self-conscious allusion to the potential of these boy players. By bringing boys together for performance, these playing companies provide them with the opportunity to assert youth over age and service over mastery. At the very least, these plays celebrate the unruly behaviour of youths and their minor victories. The boys’ plays had a reputation for unruliness in the early modern period, but for another reason. In An Apology for Actors, Thomas Heywood claims that the companies exploited the players’ status as children and youths, or their ‘juniority to be a privilege for any railing’ (sig. G3v). Heywood implies, in other words that, as children, the players are not held accountable for their actions and are thus exploited to rail against or comment on contemporary affairs. Heywood’s comments, however, follow a series of local and national controversies provoked by the boys’ performances that demonstrate the extent to which the companies were held to account for their inflammatory, insensitive portrayals of local figures and political events. George Chapman’s lost play, The Old Joiner of Aldgate, commissioned by the Children of Paul’s and performed in 1603, presented contemporary figures from London in its dramatisation of Agnes Howe, a young heiress, who has promised herself to one suitor, is sold to two more by her father, and eventually elopes with another (Sisson 1936). The performance led to a court case being brought against Chapman and the company managers, Edward Pearce and Thomas Woodford. In his defence, however, Chapman dissociated himself from the playing company and the performance, claiming that he sold the play and did not see it acted. Defending himself against later controversy caused by the complaints of the French ambassador over the representation of the French queen in his The Conspiracy and The Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron performed by the Children of the Revels in 1608, Chapman claimed that ‘I see not my own plays; nor carry the actors’ tongues in my mouth’ (Margeson 1988: 278–9). Therefore, while Chapman may have taken advantage of the status of the boy players in order to comment on recent local and international events, he simultaneously highlighted the autonomous role of the players. The performance of Chapman’s Byron plays led to the dissolution of the Queen’s Revels company in 1608. However, this was not the first punishment given to this company’s playwrights and players for their railing repertory. Samuel Daniel’s Philotas, performed in 1605, attracted official attention, and Daniel was reprimanded for presenting an allegory of the affairs of the earl of Essex – which he denied. This was followed by the imprisonment of George Chapman and Ben Jonson for the company’s performance of Eastward Ho in 1605, which they co-authored with John Marston. This play mocks the policies of the new King James I of England and VI of Scotland, perhaps most evidently in the representation of Sir Petronel Flash, described as one of the king’s ‘thirty-pound knights’ (4.1.198). This comment on James’s traffic in knighthoods with the many Scots who followed him to England is made more personal by the fact that the Scottish gentleman who offers it actually claims that ‘I ken the

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man weel’ as he is one of ‘my’ knights (4.1.197–8). The use of ‘my’ and the mimicry of a Scottish dialect and accent offer a personalised parody of the king, in addition to critiquing his court and his policies. Mimicry of Scottish accents is also central to the Queen’s Revels’ controversial performance of John Day’s Isle of Gulls in 1606. According to a contemporary commentator, half the roles in this play were acted in English accents and the other half in Scottish (Clare 1990: 126). This play also satirises the king and his court through this representation of national identity and through its parodic representation of the duke who, like James, loves hunting and has altered the location of his kingdom. As a result of this performance some of the company’s players were imprisoned, and, as noted above, the company lost the patronage of the queen. Many critics have suggested that it was the unique system of patronage and licensing created by the support of the queen that enabled the Queen’s Revels to stage these satirical representations of the king and his court (e.g. Dutton 1991: 164–93). Yet even after losing this patronage, the company continued to stage controversial plays. In addition to Chapman’s Byron plays, it performed another play, now lost, which, according to the French ambassador, slandered their King, his mine in Scotland and all his favourites in a most pointed fashion; for having made him rail against heaven over the flight of a bird and have a gentleman beaten for calling off his dogs, they portrayed him as drunk at least once a day. (Margeson 1988: 276)

These plays, however, are only a few examples of a number of plays performed by the boys’ companies that examined the nature of authority and the state of the nation following the accession of the Scottish king to the English throne. Thomas Dekker and John Webster’s Westward Ho and Northward Ho, performed by Paul’s in 1604 and 1605, and John Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan and Edward Sharpham’s The Fleer, performed by the Queen’s Revels in 1604 and 1606, interrogate a variety of national identities gathered in London and address the question of what it means to be English in a changing nation. Comments in The Fleer on social practices that have changed as a result of the influx of Scots to the city are combined with another theatrical motif common to plays written at the time of James’s accession. This play is one of a group known as ‘disguised ruler plays’ in which a ruler adopts a disguise and spies on his subjects as a means of commenting on social affairs and the nature of authority, and examining the relationship between court and city. In this case, the protagonist, the deposed Italian duke, Antifront, adopts the disguise of Fleer to spy on his daughters who are working as prostitutes in London. Other examples of this motif in the boys’ repertories are Marston’s plays The Malcontent and The Fawn, both performed by the Queen’s Revels between 1603 and 1605. Of course, this motif is similarly used in early Jacobean adult company drama, such as Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, performed by the King’s Men in 1603/4, in order to examine concepts of authority.

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The boys’ performances of plays such as these, ranging from city comedies to disguised ruler plays to tragedies based on international affairs, indicate the diversity of their repertories, but also point to their parity with the contemporary adult companies. The boys’ plays do offer distinctive representations of gender, age, crossdressing, authority, and nationality as the companies’ playwrights and managers manipulate the unique aspects of this type of playing troupe; but they do this as part of a wider theatrical culture and achieve it through engaging with issues and experimenting with genres common to the early modern adult companies. Moreover, as R. A. Foakes and, more recently, Lucy Munro have argued, the connections between the types of drama performed by the boys’ and adult companies are in fact more substantial. Munro proposes that the boys’ innovative treatment of theme and genre had a shaping influence on the plays of the adult theatres, noting in particular their representation of masculinity in tragedies such as Chapman’s Byron and Bussy plays and the impact of this on Shakespeare’s representation of his hero in Coriolanus (Munro 2007; see also Foakes 1970). In addition, some plays actually moved between the boys’ and adult companies, further demonstrating the fundamental networks them and suggesting that the differences between the types of company have been overstated (Knutson 2001: 74). The title page of the 1602 quarto of Thomas Dekker’s Satiromastix, for example, proclaims simultaneous performances by both Paul’s and the Lord Chamberlain’s Servants. John Marston’s The Malcontent was also performed by both categories of company, first by the Children of the Chapel in 1603 and then by the King’s Men at the Globe in 1604. Although music was cut and some parts extended by John Webster before the performance of this play by the adult company – reminding us of some of the distinct characteristics of the boys’ drama – the ease with which this play could be transferred implies that the differences between the performance styles and plays of the boys’ and adult companies were minimal. When the last remaining boys’ company closed in 1613, the players and their plays did not disappear. Instead the Queen’s Revels’ merger with the adult company, the Lady Elizabeth’s Men, meant that a number of players progressed to the roles of adult players and sharers in this new company. Nathan Field, for example, became a leading player with this company before moving to the King’s Men in 1615/16. Some of the boys’ plays also moved into the repertory of this company, and plays such as Eastward Ho and The Dutch Courtesan were performed alongside new drama. Other plays ultimately found their way into the repertories of other companies, such as Epicoene, The Scornful Lady, Bussy D’Ambois, and The Faithful Shepherdess, which were later revived by the King’s Men. In the decade following the flourishing of the three children’s companies in London, touring companies in the provinces frequently claimed to be versions of these groups. Furthermore, in the 1620s a company called the Children of the Revels, which revived some earlier children’s plays, such as Chapman’s Sir Giles Goosecap, was set up as a training company for the King’s Men. Additional companies for training boy actors, or nurseries, also existed in the early 1660s (Bentley 1981). None of these companies

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survived long, yet their existence, alongside the continued performances of the boys’ plays in the adult theatres, exemplifies the central role and sustained influence of the boys’ playing companies and their drama on seventeenth-century theatrical culture.

References and Further Reading Austern, L. (1992). Music in English Children’s Drama of the Later Renaissance. New York: Gordon & Breach. Bentley, G. (1981). ‘The theatres and the actors’. In G. Bentley, K. McLuskie, and L. Potter (eds.), The Revels History of Drama in English IV (pp. 69–124). London: Routledge. Bloom, G. (1998). ‘ “Thy voice squeaks”: listening for masculinity on the early modern stage’. Renaissance Drama, 29, 39–71. Bly, M. (2000). Queer Virgins and Virgin Queans on the Early Modern Stage. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Chambers, E. (1923). The Elizabethan Stage. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Chapman, G. (1970a). The Gentleman Usher. In A. Holaday (ed.), The Plays of George Chapman (pp. 311–96). Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Chapman, G. (1970b). May Day. In The Plays of George Chapman, ed. A. Holaday (pp. 131–225). Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Chapman, G., B. Jonson, and J. Marston (1999). Eastward Ho, ed. R. Van Fossen. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Clare, Janet (1990). ‘Art Made Tongue-Tied by Authority’: Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic Censorship. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Dutton, R. (1991). Mastering the Revels: Regulation and Censorship of English Renaissance Drama. London: Macmillan. Foakes, R. A. (1970). ‘Tragedy of the children’s theatres after 1600: a challenge to the adult stage’. In D. Galloway (ed.), The Elizabethan Theatre II (pp. 37–59). London: Macmillan. Freeburg, V. (1915). Disguise Plots in Elizabethan Drama. New York: Columbia University Press. Gair, W. R. (1978). ‘Chorister-actors at Paul’s’. Notes and Queries, 25, 440–1.

Gair, W. R. (1982). The Children of Paul’s: The Story of a Theatre Company, 1553–1608. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harbage, A. (1952). Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Heywood, T. (1612). An Apology for Actors. London: Nicholas Okes. Hillebrand, H. (1964). The Child Actors: A Chapter in Elizabethan Stage History. New York: Russell & Russell. Jonson, B. (1932). Cynthia’s Revels. In The Works, ed. C. Herford, P. Simpson, and E. Simpson (vol. 4, pp. 1–184). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Knutson, R. (2001). Playing Companies and Commerce in Shakespeare’s Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lamb, E. (2008). Performing Childhood in the Early Modern Theatre: The Children’s Playing Companies (1599–1613). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Margeson, J. (ed.) (1988). The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles, Duke of Byron. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Marston, J. (1997). Antonio and Mellida. In ‘The Malcontent’ and Other Plays, ed. K. Sturgess. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McMillin, S, and S. B. MacLean (1998). The Queen’s Men and their Plays. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Munro, L. (2005). Children of the Queen’s Revels: A Jacobean Theatre Repertory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Munro, L. (2007). ‘Coriolanus and the little eyases: the boyhood of Shakespeare’s hero’. In K. Chedgzoy, S. Greenhalgh, and R. Shaughnessy (eds.), Shakespeare and Childhood (pp. 80–95). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shakespeare, W. (1997). Hamlet. In The Norton Shakespeare, ed. S. Greenblatt et al. (pp. 1659– 1759). New York: W. W. Norton.

Boys’ Plays Shapiro, M. (1977). Children of the Revels: The Boy Companies of Shakespeare’s Time and their Plays. New York: Columbia University Press. Sisson, C. (1936). Lost Plays of Shakespeare’s Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wallace, C. (1908). The Children of the Chapel at Blackfriars, 1597–1603. New York: AMS Press.

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Wallace, C. (1910). ‘Shakespeare and his London associates as revealed in recently discovered documents’. University Studies, 10/4, 76–100. Wickham, G., H. Berry, and W. Ingram (eds.) (2000). English Professional Theatre, 1530–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Witmore, M. (2007). Pretty Creatures: Children and Fiction in the English Renaissance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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Drama of the Inns of Court Alan H. Nelson and Jessica Winston

The Inns of Court are voluntary legal societies that grew up on the western edge of early modern London, apparently beginning in the fourteenth century. Two of the four Inns lie side by side just within the official bounds of the City, and within the precincts of the Temple, between Fleet Street and the Thames: these are the Inner Temple to the east, and the Middle Temple to the west. North of these, within the historical bounds of the county of Middlesex, lie Lincoln’s Inn and Gray’s Inn. The four Inns developed more or less in parallel: while they varied somewhat in membership and amenities, they were more or less equal in power and prestige.1 All four Inns have enjoyed a long association with secular entertainment, including drama. Academic studies of this tradition have generally explored specific playwrights, especially John Marston (Finkelpearl 1969), or specific plays, especially Gorboduc (discussed below; see Winston 2005). Relatively little attention has been paid to the overall tradition of drama at the Inns (Green’s 1931 study is the only significant survey and is now somewhat out of date, though still worth consulting). A systematic survey conducted under the auspices of the Records of Early English Drama project based at the University of Toronto is finally bearing fruit (Nelson and Elliott, forthcoming). This and other current projects fill in many gaps, and shed light not only on entertainment sponsored by the Inns but also on their broader literary culture and on the tone and subject matter of plays written for the popular stage (Butler 1988; Corrigan 2004: 25–50; Finkelpearl 1966). This chapter surveys some notable aspects of these records, including important productions, accounts of revels, and the involvement of professional companies in dramatic entertainments. It confirms an important breakpoint in about 1587–8, distinguishing an earlier era devoted mostly to plays from a later era devoted mostly to masques. Early archival records, essentially unbroken for Lincoln’s Inn from 1422 but less complete for the other three, show that the four Inns not only permitted but sponsored secular entertainment, especially over the Christmas holidays. In emulation of activities at court, a Master of the Revels was appointed annually, along with other

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quasi-dramatic characters called variously the King of Cockneys, Jack Straw, or the Christmas Prince. Ceremonies tended to commence with All Souls’ Day (1 November) and conclude with Candlemas (2 February) or Shrove-Tide (the days immediately prior to Ash Wednesday). Entertainment was often supplied by professionals, including minstrels, fools, and keepers of lions and apes. But junior members of the Inns also performed, whether in ‘disguisings’ (Lincoln’s Inn, 1589–90) or in plays. For the most part the nature of these activities prior to 1561–2 can only be inferred, but there is a burst of detail for the year 1526–7, when a play involving John Roo of Gray’s Inn was deemed to have cast Cardinal Wolsey in a satiric light. A report by a royal commission in the declining days of Henry VIII (about 1540, but printed in 1663) explains that ‘some interlude or tragedy [was traditionally] played by the gentlemen of the … house, the ground, and manner whereof is devised by some of the gentlemen of the house’ (Waterhouse 1663: 546). The year 1561–2 triggered the publication of two particularly informative printed texts, the Inner Temple tragedy Gorboduc alias Ferrex and Porrex (1565), composed by Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton, and a somewhat fictionalised account of entertainment activities at the Inner Temple by Gerard Legh, appended to his Accedens of Armory (1562). Gorboduc owes its subsequent fame in large part to Sir Philip Sidney’s posthumous Apology for Poetry (1595), where he dispensed praise and blame in roughly equal portions: Our tragedies, and comedies, not without cause cried out against, observing rules, neither of honest civility nor of skilful poetry, excepting Gorboduc, (again, I say, of those that I have seen,) which notwithstanding, as it is full of stately speeches, and well sounding phrases, climbing to the height of Seneca his style [punning on ‘stile’], and as full of notable morality, which it doth most delightfully teach; and so obtain the very end of poesie: yet in troth it is very defectious in the circumstances; which grieveth me, because it might not remain as an exact model of all tragedies. For it is faulty both in place, and time, the two necessary companions of all corporal actions. For where the stage should always represent but one place, and the uttermost time presupposed in it should be, both by Aristotle’s precept and common reason, but one day: there is both many days and places, inartificially imagined. But if it be so in Gorboduc, how much more in all the rest, where you shall have Asia of the one side and Afric of the other, and so many other under-kingdoms that the player, when he cometh in, must ever begin with telling where he is: or else the tale will not be conceived. (Sidney 1595: sigs. I4v–K1r)

As Sidney’s comments indicate, Gorboduc (like other plays of the 1560s) is indebted to the classical tradition, especially Seneca, the first-century Roman philosopher, playwright, and political adviser, whose tragedies were translated into English in the same decade. Gorboduc indeed merges Senecan tragedy with English history. Analogous to Shakespeare’s King Lear, Gorboduc is the story of a king of that name who divides his realm between his offspring (in this case two sons, Ferrex and Porrex) with tragic consequences. The play is divided into five acts, written in blank verse, and

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contains many set speeches. For Sackville and Norton (as for some modern critics) the story chiefly exemplifies bad political choices, not only by King Gorboduc, but also by his sons. The play is notable for the dumb-shows that begin each act. Typical of surviving Inns of Court tragedies, the dumb-show convention was similarly employed by the (somewhat old-fashioned) travelling players in Hamlet. Thomas Sackville and Thomas Norton were both members of the Inner Temple. The former was a nobleman, the future Lord Buckhurst, who gained a reputation as a narrative poet, while the latter was a professional politician as well as a writer. The title page of the first edition of Gorboduc explains that ‘[the first] three acts were written by Thomas Norton, and the two last by Thomas Sackville’ (Norton and Sackville 1565). Norton writes a blank verse that is serviceable and forward-looking, as in the first words spoken by King Gorboduc: My lords, whose grave advice and faithful aid Have long upheld my honour and my realm And brought me [to] this age from tender years, Guiding so great estate with great renown: Now more importeth me the erst [immediately] to use Your faith and wisdom whereby yet I reign, That when by death my life and rule shall cease, The kingdom yet may, with unbroken course, Have certain prince … (Norton and Sackville 1565: sig. A4v)

We might notice here the balance of ‘great estate’ and ‘great renown’, and the construction of the whole speech to balance a description of past and with a discussion of the future. Sackville, by contrast, can seem antique and mechanical, as in the repetition of ‘beloved son’, ‘sweet child’, and ‘life’s delight’ in the Queen’s speech from Act 4: O my belovèd son, O my sweet child, My dear Ferrex, my joy, my life’s delight! Is my well-belovèd son, is my sweet child, My dear Ferrex, my joy, my life’s delight Murdered with cruel death? (sigs. C5v–C6r)

Despite Sidney’s praise, Gorboduc, though widely read, was probably never acted after its first two performances in January 1562, first in the hall of the Inner Temple, and then at court before Queen Elizabeth I. Fortunately for posterity, Elizabeth ignored Sackville and Norton’s more or less open plea to establish an orderly succession; similarly, most professional playwrights – including Shakespeare – flatly ignored Sidney’s demand for the ‘three unities’ of time, place, and action. While Gorboduc would seem to have set the four Inns on a firm dramatic foundation, plays composed and performed by gentleman members ran for no more than a

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quarter of a century longer. In the mid-1560s George Gascoigne translated two plays for Gray’s Inn, the comedy Supposes and (with the help of Francis Kinwelmershe) the tragedy Jocasta.2 The latter, indirectly translated from Euripides, is seldom read today and (apparently) never performed, but Supposes was repeated several times at Oxford (Elliott 2004: see index) and has found a distinguished place in modern anthologies (Boas 1934; Fraser and Rabkin 1976). Translated from Ariosto’s Italian, and the sole surviving Inns of Court comedy, Supposes anticipates Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, and lies behind the Bianca–Tranio subplot in his Taming of the Shrew. A young man leaves his home town to attend the University of Ferrara. To expedite a love-affair, he swaps places with his servant and enlists a stranger to enact the role of his father. As is typical for such a play, the beloved’s own father wants to marry her off to an old man. The denouement is triggered by the unanticipated arrival of the young man’s real father, whose incredible complaisance and offer of a large inheritance brings the play to a happy close. Composed in lively and confident prose, Supposes regularly achieves a literary standard that generally surpasses Gorboduc, as in an explanatory soliloquy from 1.3. The speaker is the romantic protagonist: Two years are now past since (under the colour of Damon’s service) I have been a sworn servant to Cupid, of whom I have received as much favour and grace as ever man found in his service. I have free liberty at all times to behold my desired, to talk with her, to embrace here, yea, be it spoken in secret, to lie with her. I reap the fruits of my desire, yet as my joys abound, even so my pains increase. I fare like the covetous man that, having all the world at will, is never yet content: the more I have the more I desire. Alas what wretched estate have I brought my self unto if, in the end of all my far-fetches, she be given up by her father to this old doting doctor, this buzzard, this bribing villain that by so many means seeketh to obtain her at her fathers hands? (Gascoigne 1573: 10–11)

So strong is the comic atmosphere that the audience can scarcely share the protagonist’s fear that the lady will end up with ‘this old doting doctor’: indeed, the audience (and the reader) has enough to do merely to keep the disguised (and misnamed) characters straight!3 When he published the play a second time (1575), Gascoigne tried to assist readers through these confusions, marking in the margins a ‘suppose’, when characters mistake the master or servant (or the stand-in father) for someone he is not. Two more Inns of Court tragedies are extant: Gismond of Salerne, performed at the Inner Temple in the mid-1560s but revised for publication as Tancred and Gismund in 1591, and The Misfortunes of Arthur, performed by members of Gray’s Inn in 1587–8. A few more plays are known but do not survive as texts, including a second Gray’s Inn play from 1587–8, a Roman comedy probably written in English. Gerard Legh’s Accedens of Armory (1562) alludes to Gorboduc briefly if at all, but describes the activities of an Inner Temple Christmas Prince in some detail. Unusually, the Christmas Prince for 1561–2 was a real nobleman, Robert Dudley, subsequently earl of Leicester. More typically the Prince, in all four Inns and by whatever name, was a young gentleman expected to dig deep into his own pocket to

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support his mock-court. From All Souls’ Day to Candlemas he presided over entertainment which included mock-serious give-and-take, more or less formal orations, and, in the seventeenth century, lists of comic paradoxes (see also Chapter 53, Local Drama and Custom). The programmatic activities of two Christmas Princes, the Prince of Purpoole of Gray’s Inn (1594–5) and the Prince d’Amours of Middle Temple (1597–8), survive in two Restoration imprints, Gesta Grayorum (1688) and Le Prince d’ Amour; or the Prince of Love (1660). These printed sources, along with various manuscript fragments, preserve the texts or at least the substance of impromptu speeches as well as set-pieces including, from the pen of Francis Bacon of Gray’s Inn, six position statements on the proper conduct of a Prince.4 Typically, Bacon reveals more the prospective statesman than the poet, though the prose is of a high standard indeed. A mock-essay on grammar composed by Francis Beaumont of the Middle Temple during the first decade of the seventeenth century is both more literary and better exemplifies Christmas Prince activities.5 An oft-cited passage from the 1688 text of Gesta Grayorum gives a good taste of the proceedings, which incorporated mock-officers holding mock-titles, and a performance of Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors (on 28 December 1594): when the ambassador was placed, as aforesaid, and that there was something to be performed for the delight of the beholders, there arose such a disordered tumult and crowd upon the stage, that there was no opportunity to effect that which was intended: there came so great a number of worshipful personages upon the stage, that might not be displaced; and gentlewomen, whose sex did privilege them from violence, that when the prince and his officers had in vain, a good while, expected and endeavoured a reformation, at length there was no hope of redress for that present. … it was thought good not to offer any thing of account, saving dancing and revelling with gentlewomen; and after such sports, a comedy of errors (like to Plautus his Menechmus) was played by the players. So that night was begun and continued to the end in nothing but confusion and Errors; whereupon, it was ever afterwards called, the ‘Night of Errors’ … The next night upon this occasion, we preferred judgments thick and threefold, which were read publicly by the clerk of the crown, being all against a sorcerer or conjurer that was supposed to be the cause of that confused inconvenience. Therein was contained, how he had caused the stage to be built, and scaffolds to be reared to the top of the house, to increase expectation; also how he had caused divers ladies and gentlewomen, and others of good condition, to be invited to our sports; also our dearest friend, the state of Templaria [the Inner Temple], to be disgraced and disappointed of their kind entertainment, deserved and intended. Also that he caused throngs and tumults, crowds and outrages, to disturb our whole proceedings. And, lastly, that he had foisted a company of base and common fellows to make up our disorders with a play of errors and confusions; and that that night had gained to us discredit and itself a nick-name of ‘Errors’. All which were against the crown and dignity of our Sovereign Lord, the Prince of Purpoole. (Gesta Grayorum 21–2)

This passage speaks volumes about the Inns of Court revels, which (as the records show) frequently descended into chaos and a promiscuous mixing of the sexes; about

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the staging of plays (note the stage itself, and high scaffolds for the audience); and about attitudes towards professional players, including Shakespeare’s company, here characterised as ‘base and common fellows’. Plays were only a minor part of Inns of Court Christmas Prince revels. Much ink was spilled in devising pompous speeches, for example heralding the approach of Gray’s Inn’s Prince of Purpoole, here enacted by a young gentleman named Henry Helmes. (Gray’s Inn was established on the grounds of the manor of Portpool, whose name also survives in Portpool Lane, which branches off from the modern Gray’s Inn Road. Similar references occur to Staple Inn and Bernard’s Inn, both inns of Chancery. These are only a few of many geographical allusions that remain current.) The most mighty and puissant Prince, Sir Henry, my gracious Lord and Sovereign, Prince of Purpoole, Arch-Duke of Stapulia and Bernardia, Duke of High and Nether Holborn, Marquis of St Giles’s and Tottenham, Count Palatine of Bloomsbury and Clerkenwell, great Lord of the Cantons of Islington, Kentish Town, Paddington and Knightsbridge, hath heretofore, for the special gracing of the nobility of his realm, and honouring the deserts of strangers, his favourites, instituted a most honourable order of Knighthood of the Helmet, whereof His Honour is Sovereign, in memory of the arms he beareth, worthily given to one of his noble ancestors many years past for saving the life of his then sovereign; in regard that as the helmet defendeth the chiefest part of the body, the head; so did he guard and defend the sacred person of the prince, the head of the state. His Highness at this time had made choice of a number of virtuous and noble personages, to admit them into his honourable society; whose good example may be a spur and encouragement to the young nobility of his dominions to cause them to aspire to the height of all honourable deserts. (Gesta Grayorum 27)

Other staples of the Christmas Prince ceremony were sexist witticisms, and references to youthful male high jinks: Item, every knight of this order is bound to perform all requisite and manly service, be it night-service, or otherwise, as the case requireth, to all ladies and gentlewomen, beautiful by nature, or by art; ever offering his aid, without any demand thereof: and if in case he fail so to do, he shall be deemed a match of disparagement to any His Highness’s widows, or wards-female; and His Excellency shall in justice forbear to make any tender of him to any such ward or widow. (Gesta Grayorum 28) Item, no knight of this order shall put out any money upon strange returns or performances to be made by his own person; as, to hop up the stairs to the top of St Pauls, without intermission; or any other such like agilities or endurances, except it may appear that the same performances or practices do enable him to some service or employment; as, if he do undertake to go a journey backward, the same shall be thought to enable him to be an ambassador into Turkey. (Gesta Grayorum 29)

Would we have known, without this allusion, that young men showed off by hopping non-stop to the top of what was still the medieval incarnation of St Paul’s Cathedral?

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While Inns of Court entertainment issuing from the pens of gentleman ‘playwrights’ runs the gamut from prose oratory and literary verse to the quasi-martial ‘barriers’ of November 1616 (for the installation of Henry as Prince of Wales), the major formal entertainment activity supplied by the gentlemen of the Inns of Court after 1587–8 was not the play but the ‘masque’. Masques were elaborate conglomerations of instrumental music, song, acting, and spectacle, sometimes supported by elaborate ‘ridings’ with as many as a hundred richly dressed gentlemen processing through the streets of London on horseback, or mounted on ‘chariots’ (see Chapter 47, ‘Tied to rules of flattery’?: Court Drama and the Masque). Inns of Court masques, or at least masque-like activities, can be traced back at least as far as 1489–90, when a ‘disguising’ (already mentioned) from the Inner Temple ‘went to Grays Inn after ye guise afore times used’; in turn, a Gray’s Inn disguising went to the Inner Temple. Gerhard Legh records a masque of ‘Beauty and Desire’ at the Inner Temple in 1561–2, while a masque of ‘Diana’ can be detected at the same Inn in 1565–6. A masque of ‘Proteus’ constituted part of the Gesta Grayorum activities of 1594–5, while something of the same sort occurred at Middle Temple in 1597–8, and Francis Bacon made an offer (apparently rejected) to bring a Gray’s Inn masque to court c.1596. But the heyday of the Inns of Court masque ran from 1612–13 to 1635–6, initiated by two joint masques offered for the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Elector Frederick in February 1613. First came George Chapman’s Memorable Masque of the Two Honourable Houses or Inns of Court; the Middle Temple, and Lincoln’s Inn; then came Francis Beaumont’s Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn (both were published in the same year, 1613). Most Inns of Court masque texts from this ‘heyday’ follow a similar format: they combine elaborate technical descriptions (rather like extended stage directions) with song lyrics and just enough dialogue to hold the various elements together. A somewhat high-literary and formal sequence alternated with a more raucous antimasque. While nothing in these texts rises to the literary splendour of the masque of Ceres in Shakespeare’s Tempest, some songs are nevertheless of a high order. (A 2008 recreation of Beaumont’s 1613 masque in Toronto was a notable success.6) The gentlemen of the Inns had every right to expect quality, given how much they were prepared to pay for professional playwrights, composers of music, set designers (notably Inigo Jones), musicians, and actors. Detailed receipts survive in abundance from the masques of 1612–13 and 1633–4; expenses for the latter, James Shirley’s Triumph of Peace, performed by all four Inns in concert, amounted to more than £20,000. Professional playwrights hired by the Inns of Court to compose masques during this same period (1612–13 to 1635–6) include George Chapman, Thomas Middleton, James Shirley, and William Davenant. (Shirley was made a member of the Middle Temple for his efforts, but his admission was honorary.) A fifth, ‘crossover’ playwright was Francis Beaumont, who (as noted) composed and delivered a mock-oration as a member of the Middle Temple c.1605, and in 1613 composed his Masque of the Inner Temple and Gray’s Inn. In the interval between these events he had become a playwright for the professional stage, remembered nowadays for his Knight of the Burning Pestle

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(1606–7; originally a flop and not published until 1611), and for his collaborations with John Fletcher under the familiar appellation ‘Beaumont and Fletcher’. At his premature death in 1616 Beaumont was accorded burial in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey. After 1587–8 far more plays were furnished to the Inns of Court by outside professionals than by inside amateurs. Even earlier, in 1561–2, Arthur Brooke (or Broke), author of the prose Romeus and Juliet (1562), supplied the Inner Temple with a dramatic text (and was rewarded for his pains with an honorary membership). Lincoln’s Inn hired the Children of the Chapel to perform under the leadership of Richard Edwards in 1564–5 and 1565–6, and Richard Farrant in 1579–80. Gray’s Inn famously procured Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors on 28 December 1594, as recorded in Gesta Grayorum; and his Twelfth Night was performed at the Middle Temple on 2 February 1602, as recorded in the contemporary diary of John Manningham (Manningham 1976). Granted the contemporary importance of Inns of Court play-texts from 1561–2 to 1587–8, and masques from 1612–13 to 1635–6, the concept of ‘Inns of Court playwrights’ conjures up serried ranks of gentlemen issuing from the Inns of Court to make their mark by writing for the professional stage. But apart from Beaumont only one Inns of Court gentleman made this transition with any substantial success. This was John Marston of the Middle Temple, a few years older than Beaumont (Marston was born in 1576, Beaumont in 1584.) Both Marston and Beaumont had restricted careers as professional playwrights. Beaumont’s career was cut short by his premature death on 6 March 1616. He is remembered in William Basse’s elegy on the death of Shakespeare (written between 1616 and 1623): On Mr Wm Shakespeare / he dyed in Aprill 1616. Renowned Spencer, lye a thought more nye To learned Chaucer, & rare Beaumont lye A little neerer Spenser to make roome For Shakespeare in your threefold fowerfold Tombe To lodge all fowre in one bed make a shift Untill Doomesdaye, for hardly will a fift Betwixt this day & that by Fate be slayne ffor whom your Curtaines may be drawn again. If your precedency in death doth barre A fourth place in your sacred sepulcher, Under this carved marble of thine owne Sleepe rare Tragœdian, Shakespeare sleep alone Thy unmolested peace, unshared Cave Possesse as Lord not Tenant of thy Grave That unto us and others it may be Honor hereafter to be layde by thee. (British Library MS Lansdowne 777, fo. 67v)

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Having had a reputation for vanity, ‘rare Beaumont’ would doubtless have been pleased to think himself in the company of Chaucer, Spenser, and Shakespeare. John Marston is not known to have written anything directly for performance at his own Inn, the Middle Temple, although it has been suggested – unfortunately without incontrovertible evidence – that Histriomastix (1610) was written by Marston for initial performance at the Inns of Court (Finkelpearl 1966). Marston is, however, an ‘Inns of Court playwright’ at least in the same sense that Christopher Marlowe of Cambridge and John Lyly of Oxford have been called ‘University Wits’. In the early 1590s, probably by the intervention of his father, Marston was simultaneously a member of Brasenose College, Oxford, and of the Middle Temple. Even his father soon recognised, however, that Marston was devoted less to the law than to ‘plays and vain studies and fooleries’ (DNB 36:895; Finkelpearl 1969). By 1601 he had composed and published Ovidian and Juvenalian verse, as well as a number of plays, including Jack Drum’s Entertainment (1600), Antonio and Mellida (1600), and Antonio’s Revenge (1601). Marston’s playwriting career lasted less than a decade, cut short about 1607 not by death but by a kind of voluntary retirement. New research conducted under the auspices of the Records of Early English Drama project establishes that professional performances of plays within the Inns of Court like those of Comedy of Errors in December 1594 and Twelfth Night in February 1602 were not the exception but – at least in the seventeenth century – the rule (Nelson and Elliott, forthcoming). With few exceptions, the King’s Men brought two plays to the Inner Temple each year, one on All Souls’ Day (1 November), the other on Candlemas (2 February). Evidence of professional performances on these dates becomes more and more abundant up to 1679 (with a break from 1642 to 1660). A rival company brought two plays annually – on the very same occasions – to the Middle Temple. Unfortunately, in addition to the two Shakespeare plays, Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night, the titles of only four more such plays have survived from before the closing of the London theatres in 1642: The Oxford Tragedy, performed at the Inner Temple, 2 February 1608; The Bridegroom and the Madman, performed at the Middle Temple, 2 February 1619; Hyde Park, by James Shirley, performed at the Middle Temple, 1 November 1632 (the text of this play survives, printed in 1637); and The City Shuffler, performed at the Middle Temple, 1 November 1633. Still more titles survive from the time of the Restoration (1660) to 1687 (Green 1931: 154–6). Inns of Court gentlemen were also notorious for attending plays at the public theatres, which lay not far distant, whether in Shoreditch or Bankside, and were accused (rightly or wrongly) of spending more time at plays than studying. For instance, Thomas Nashe ridiculed Inns of Court men who ‘do wholly bestow themselves upon pleasure, and that pleasure they divide … either into gaming, following of harlots, drinking, or seeing a play’ (Nashe 1592: sig. F3r). Thomas Overbury satirised the ‘Inns of Court man’ who ‘hath heard one mooting [instructional discussion of a hypothetical case] and seen two plays’ (1616: sig. H1r). Francis Lenton shows the pattern persisted, observing more than a decade later that the Inns of Court man ‘reades not Littleton, / But Don Quix Zot, or els The Knight o’th’ Sun’; ‘Instead of Perkins pedlers

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French [thieves’ slang], he sayes / he better loves Ben: Johnsons booke of Playes’ (1629: sig. B2v). John Perkins was the author of a popular book on land law, which was first printed in law French in 1528 and remained in print for centuries, as a companion to Littleton’s Tenures (DNB 43:776). The diaries of four Inns of Court gentlemen approximately contemporary with Lenton confirm the habit of attending plays at public theatres (Elliott 1993). The Inns of Court thus supplied the notable Gorboduc and Supposes to the sum of important dramatic texts of early modern England, as well as two notable playwrights, John Marston and Francis Beaumont. Perhaps even more important was the support and encouragement provided to professional playwrights and playing companies, whether by direct institutional support for plays performed in Inns of Court halls, or by visits to public theatres by individual gentlemen of the law – a habit attested to by the number of references to the Inns of Court and Inns of Court men in contemporary satires and contemporary plays (Corrigan 2004: 25–50). Notes 1

2

3

Alan H. Nelson mainly composed this article, with the accompanying ‘References and Further Reading’ supplied by Jessica Winston. Each, however, has also contributed to the other’s work. Unless noted otherwise, information in this essay is from Nelson and Elliott (forthcoming). Biographical information is from the Dictionary of National Biography (DNB; Matthew and Harrison 2004). Neither Supposes nor Jocasta was published on its own by Gascoigne; rather, both appear in his A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres (1573) and the Posies (1575). The romantic protagonist, Erostrato, is called by the name of his servant, Dulippo, through-

out most of the play. To avoid confusion I have avoided the use of proper names in my discussion of this play. 4 Separately published as ‘A Device for the Gray’s Inn Revels’ (Bacon 1996: 52–60). 5 Published in appendix 1 of Nelson and Elliott (forthcoming). 6 Performed twice, as ‘A Royal Wedding Masque’, 24 June 2008, by the Toronto Masque Theatre, a production in partnership with the Records of Early English Drama (coproducer Sally-Beth MacLean and dramaturge Dimitry Senyshyn) and the Poculi Ludique Societas (director Peter Cockett).

References and Further Reading Archer, J., E. Goldring, and S. Knight (eds.) (forthcoming). The Intellectual and Cultural World of the Early Modern Inns of Court. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Arlidge, A. (2000). Shakespeare and the Prince of Love: The Feast of Misrule in the Middle Temple. London: Giles de la Mare. Bland, D. S. (1952). ‘Interludes in fifteenthcentury revels at Furnivall’s Inn’. Review of English Studies, 2, 263–8.

Boas, F. A. (ed.) (1934). Five Pre-Shakespearean Comedies. London: Oxford University Press. Burkhart, R. E. (1991). ‘The playing space in the halls of the Inns of Court’. South Atlantic Review, 56, 1–5. Burkhart, R. E. (1992). ‘The surviving Shakespearean playhouses: the halls of the Inns of Court and the excavation of the Rose’. Theatre History Studies, 12, 173–96.

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Butler, M. (1987). ‘Politics and the masque: The Triumph of Peace’. Seventeenth Century, 2, 117–41. Butler, M. (1988). ‘Love’s Sacrifice: Ford’s metatheatrical tragedy’. In M. Neill (ed.), John Ford: Critical Re-Visions (pp. 201–31). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Corrigan, B. J. (2004). ‘A must then to the Inns o’ Court shortly’. In N. J. Corrigan, Playhouse Law in Shakespeare’s World (pp. 25–50). Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson Press. Elliott, John R. Jr. (1993) ‘Four Caroline playgoers’. Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 6, 179–96. Elliott, John R. Jr. et al. (eds.) (2004) Oxford, 2 vols. Records of Early English Drama. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Elton, W. R. (2000). Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and the Inns of Court Revels. Aldershot: Ashgate. Finkelpearl, P. J. (1966). ‘John Marston’s HistrioMastix as an Inns of Court play: a hypothesis’. Huntington Library Quarterly, 29, 223–34. Finkelpearl, P. J. (1969). John Marston of the Middle Temple: An Elizabethan Dramatist in his Social Setting. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Francis Bacon (1996). The Major Works, ed. Brian Vickers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fraser, Russell A. and Norman Rabkin (eds.) (1976). Drama of the English Renaissance, vol. 1: The Tudor Period. New York and London: Prentice Hall. Gascoigne, G. (1573). A Hundreth Sundrie Flowers Bounde Up In One Small Poesie. London. Gesta Grayorum: Or, The History of the High and Mighty Prince, Henry of Purpoole (1688). London. Green, A. W. (1931). The Inns of Court and Early English Drama. New Haven: Yale University Press. Hutson, L. (2007). ‘From intrigue to detection: transformations of classical comedy, 1566– 1594’. In L. Hutson, The Invention of Suspicion: Law and Mimesis in Shakespeare and Renaissance Drama (pp. 146–216). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Knapp, M. and M. Kobialka (1984; repr. 1997). ‘Shakespeare and the Prince of Purpoole: the 1594 production of The Comedy of Errors at Gray’s Inn Hall’. In Robert Miola (ed.), The

Comedy of Errors: Critical Essays (pp. 431–45). New York: Routledge. Lenton, F. (1629). The Young Gallants Whirligigg: Or Youths Reakes. London. Manley, L. (1995; repr. 2005). ‘Essential difference: the projects of satire’. In L. Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (pp. 272–430). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Manningham, John (1976). The Diary of John Manningham, ed. R. P. Sorlien. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England. Matthew, H. C. G. and Brian Harrison (eds.) (2004). Dictionary of National Biography, 60 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nashe, T. (1592). Pierce Penilesse His Supplication to the Diuell. London. Nelson, A. H. and J. R. Elliott, Jr. (eds.) (forthcoming). Inns of Court: Records of Early English Drama (REED). Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Norland, H. B. (2009). ‘Inns of Court tragedy’. In H. B. Norland, Neoclassical Tragedy in Elizabethan England (pp. 69–123). Newark: University of Delaware Press. Norton, T. and T. Sackville (1565). The Tragedie of Gorboduc. London. O’Callaghan, M. (2007). ‘Gentleman lawyers at the Inns of Court’. In The English Wits: Literature and Sociability in Early Modern England (pp. 10–34). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Overbury, Thomas. (1616). Sir Thomas Ouerburie His Wife…Whereunto are Annexed, New Newes and Characters. London. Pizzorno, P. Grimaldi (2007). Part two of Pizzorno, The Ways of Paradox from Lando to Donne (pp. 67–127). Florence: L. S. Olschki. Sidney, P. (1595). An Apologie for Poetry. London. Waterhouse, E. (1663). Fortescutus Illustratus. London. Whitted, B. (1999). ‘Transforming the (common) place: the performance of William Browne’s Ulysses and Circe in the Inner Temple Hall’. Theatre History Studies, 19, 151–66. Winston, J. (2005). ‘Expanding the political nation: Gorboduc at the Inns of Court and succession revisited’. Early Theatre: A Journal Associated with the Records of Early English Drama, 8, 11–34.

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‘Tied to rules of flattery’? Court Drama and the Masque James Knowles

The Myth of Court and Coterie Theatre To the special fountain of manners: the court. Thou art a beautiful and brave spring and waterest all the noble plants of this island. In thee the whole kingdom dresseth itself and is ambitious to use thee as her glass. Beware, then, thou render men’s figures truly and teach them no less to hate their deformities than to love their forms – for to grace there should come reverence, and no man can call that lovely which is not also venerable. It is not powdering, perfuming and every each day smelling of the tailor that converteth to a beautiful object, but a mind shining through any suit which needs no false light either of riches or honours to help it … (Cynthia’s Revels, or the Fountain of Self-Love, dedicatory epistle (1616): Jonson 1925–52: IV, 3)

Jonson’s dedicatory epistle to Cynthia’s Revels (1600), added to the text for his Works (1616), illustrates the centrality of the court within early modern culture: it represents the ‘special fountain’ and ‘glass’ (mirror) of the nation. This dedication comes from a volume that opens with Every Man In His Humour (1599, revised 1608–9 and c.1611), a play that resolves the disorder of urban culture through the intervention of a royally appointed magistrate. Jonson’s Works also include poems dedicated to many members of the court, and closes with the quintessential royal form, the masque The Golden Age Restored (1616), which celebrates the Jacobean regime’s legality and pacifism. It is perhaps unsurprising, then, that many critics have seen the court as the central institution in determining cultural policy, and especially theatrical taste. Yet the crucial incorporation in 1603 of the theatre companies under royal patronage remains a controversial event (Gurr 1996).1 For some critics the accession of James VI of Scotland as James I of England signals the start of a long-term decline in the drama. Thus, theatre companies, seeking to please the developing elite audience of London and the court, began to shift away from the broad, ‘popular’ and ‘democratic’

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traditions of Elizabethan theatre into a more socially and culturally divisive repertoire, responsive to the cultural climate of the court. The strongest proponent of this view, Glynne Wickham, comments: The decadence in Jacobean and Caroline dramatic writing which has so frequently been remarked and debated by literary critics is thus, in my view, due in far greater measure to the censorship (in the widest sense of that word) as exercised by Stuart governments than to any particular failing in the writers themselves. (Wickham 1959–81: II.1, 4)

This view of the ‘decadence’ of Jacobean culture and Caroline culture has been surprisingly persistent, and the accompanying ‘repressive’ assumption of a censorship system akin to that of modern states still surfaces in many critical texts.2 This tacit assumption, that often interweaves stylistic features (perceived as ‘decadence’) with political structures, is often supported by a plethora of economic and demographic arguments highlighting the opening of the Blackfriars and other, ‘exclusive’, ‘private’ theatres, or the impact of court commissions on the wealth of the playing companies (Gurr 1987, 1993: 7–20; Cook 1997: 316–17). In return for prosperity, it is argued, the players surrendered their liberty to increasing court control, not only through repertoire but, directly, through censorship mechanisms which were administered by a court official, the Master of the Revels. Other factors are cited, such as the growing use of masques and spectacular devices in plays, said to derive from the court masque, or the gradual emergence of a new generation of dramatists, notably Beaumont and Fletcher, whose tragedies and tragi-comedies are supposed to appeal to elite tastes. In many ways this narrative looks forward to another key event, the 1642 closure of the theatres by Parliament, and suggests that Puritan hostility to drama stemmed from its close association with the court. In this version of history, the gradual separation of the two traditions, elite and popular, contributes to a far more pervasive divide in the nation between the court and the country, a fissure which eventually helped precipitate the English civil wars. Accordingly, as the theatre gained more from court performances, it was drawn into the ideology of the court, seeking to appeal to courtly aesthetics (gradually losing touch with the popular and democratic tradition) and, thus, becoming the tool of the monarchy. Many of the individual elements of this narrative, however, have been questioned by historians and scholars, in particular the sense of an inevitable progression towards civil war, and the corresponding division of culture into court/Cavalier versus country/ Parliament, and (Anglo-)Catholic, against Protestant, and even Puritan (Adams 1993: 29–56; Hutton 2004: 6–31). Scepticism needs to be exercised towards even the basic assumptions of this argument, since much recent research has shown a much more complex pattern of cultural politics in which Protestants – and even Puritans – have much more accommodating and interested attitudes towards culture and even theatre, and has also illuminated how apparently pivotal moments, such as the closure of the theatres, are rooted in more contingent political considerations than any cultural warfare (Wiseman 1998).

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Several key points need to be stressed in assessing how politics, political culture, and aesthetics interacted in this period. First, to define the court (or, indeed, a courtier) is not straightforward as it consisted of a number of overlapping groups (Elton 1976: 211–28, esp. 215–17; May 1991: 11–21).3 Many of the court were, merely, members of the royal household – the plethora of bodily and domestic servants, tradesfolk and artificers, who had little or no privileged access to the monarch or royal family. The important figures were members of the respective retinues, ranging from the main state officeholders, through the political classes and major aristocrats, and including some of the more intimate chamber offices and servants, such as those employed in the Privy Chamber and Bedchamber. Second, the interconnections between drama and the court are more attenuated, with little or no evidence that there was a royal ‘policy’ towards the arts. Masques, which are often regarded as the main theatrical vehicle for the royal image, can be shown to be more various than has been suggested (see below), while the connections between the court and theatre are even more circumscribed. Nothing in early modern English court culture suggests a programmatic use of theatre for propaganda and, indeed, drama was very much the poor relation of the masque in court entertainments, lacking even a permanent playing place until 1629–30 and the construction of the Cockpit at court (Astington 1999; Bentley 1941–68: VI, 267–88). Beyond the patenting of companies, which offered a measure of legal protection, mainly against vagabondage laws, and also support in negotiating the administrative maze of Jacobean bureaucracy, drama represents an insignificant element within royal patronage. Indeed, looking more widely at the whole aristocratic culture, most nobles who might have sponsored theatre companies focused upon other patronage interests, notably art and architecture, using theatre companies only for irregular, normally seasonal, entertainment (Finkelpearl 1982: 138–58). Thus, although court performances obviously benefited the London companies, there is very little evidence that such involvements resulted in increased royal control nor that companies responded to a ‘court’ taste. In this respect Dudley Carleton’s description of royal attitudes to theatre is especially revealing: he reports how James took ‘no extraordinary pleasure’ in the players, while Queen Anne and Prince Henry ‘were more the players’ friends’ eventually bringing the players under ‘their protection’ (Lee 1972: 53). So what were the connections between the court and cultural production in the Jacobean period? Jonson’s early Jacobean text, the Panegyre, published in 1604 as part of a composite volume of dramatic (and quasi-dramatic) texts, Ben Jonson: His Part of King James His Royal and Magnificent Entertainment, illustrates the complexity of court politics, the submerged artistic competition behind texts, and, the dominant ideal in Jonson’s relations with the court, panegyric. Jonson’s text responded to his rival Samuel Daniel’s Panegyric Congratulatory (1603), part of James’s entertainment during his progress south which, while praising James as a ‘prototype’ (stanza 23) of kings, encourages him to ‘seek only the corruptions to reform’ (stanza 30, alternative version) of the court, making it a place of ‘plain zeal and truth, free from base following’ (stanza 23: see Daniel 1885: I, 150, 153). In contrast to Daniel’s Panegyric, which

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participated in the reformist climate which greeted the new monarch’s accession, Jonson’s Panegyre celebrates London’s acclamation of the monarch (‘men’s hearts had crowned him’, 143) and associates ‘zeal’ with the people and the nobles (38, 70) acceptance of is divinely ordained and sanctioned monarchy rather than in a religious vigilance for reform as in Daniel’s poem.4 Themis (supported by Dice, Eunomia, and Irene) steers the monarch away from these acclamations towards the ‘better pomp’ (77) of the soul rather than the body, arguing rather That kings by their example more do sway, Than by their power, and men do more obey When they are led than when they are compelled. (Panegyre 125–7)

Yet although the poem offers images of tyranny and licence, the predominant image is of a king who already understands both his duties and the rule of law. Both poems, rooted in the classical idea of panegyric where praise was used not simply to flatter but to encourage the recipient to virtue (‘laudando praecipere’, teaching by praising), reveal distinct conceptions of the court and the nature and efficacy of critical praise (Bacon 2000: 160). Thus, Daniel clearly implies the need for reform, even if the suggestion is carefully moderated by the generous praise that softens any criticism, while in Jonson’s text any doubts are almost entirely muted by the praise. The context of Ben Jonson: His Part of King James His Royal and Magnificent Entertainment is also revealing. In addition to the Panegyre, the volume contained a partial text of the entertainment that marked the coronation (a royal triumphal entry), in which Jonson carefully excluded the sections by other rivals, Dekker and Middleton, and A Particular Entertainment of the Queen and Prince to Althorp. This text, which had been staged during Queen Anne and Prince Henry’s progress to London, completes the volume. This was Jonson’s first attempt to gain royal patronage, which appealed to the three most important figures at court, presenting himself, as it were, at their service, and showing his ability to provide the kinds of occasional texts (ceremonial entry, panegyric speech, and entertainment or masque) which might attract court patronage. Just as the Panegyre responds directly to Daniel, so the Royal and Magnificent Entertainment advances Jonson’s superior handling of the entry, while the Particular Entertainment promotes Jonson as a masque writer and alternative to Daniel, who had been commissioned to produce Anne’s first masque, The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses (Lowenstein 1991: 168–91). As a text written at the outset of the reign, much of the troubling balance between criticism and compliment is subsumed into the celebratory mood, but what Jonson is clearly offering to the new monarchy is a distinctive style rooted in Roman imperial imagery. Thus, all the texts borrow from classical sources and gesture towards Jonson’s self-presentation as the Jacobean Horace, while also situating the monarchy in an imperial discourse. The Royal and Magnificent Entertainment describes a royal entry in the manner of a Roman triumph, the most famous of the arches, the Fenchurch arch,

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depicting London as Londinium. Here James was greeted by the ‘Genius urbis’ and Thamesis (the spirit of the Thames) who welcomed James to his ‘empire’s seat’ (Jonson 1925–52: VII, 93, line 335). The occasion was also memorialised in Stephen Harrison’s Arches of Triumph (1604) with engravings by William Kip, which conveys the scale of the entertainment and its classical and pan-European aspirations. Both Jonson’s speeches and Harrison’s engravings figure James as a new Augustus, ushering in an age of peace and renewal. It is important to recognise that this volume embodies a bid to become Poet Laureate rather than a previously established Stuart style. Moreover, as a strenuously selfadvertising text, it seeks to efface Jonson’s competitors and establish his poetic style as the natural, royal style. The Panegyre concludes with the Latin tag Solus Rex et poeta non quotannis nascitur (‘Only the poet and king are born not made’), making the links between monarchy and poetry explicit. Yet despite the ‘classical’ rhetoric and typography Jonson’s volume was only part of King James His Royal and Magnificent Entertainment, and offered only two arches and pageants. In fact, the event was not a royal event: rather it was organised by the City of London and its institutions and subgroups, such as the Dutch and Italian communities. The City had also entrusted the overall organisation to Jonson’s rival playwright Thomas Dekker, and his narrative of events, The Magnificent Entertainment (1604), yields a less serenely imperial picture of the occasion, showing how the triumph was less a product of royal propaganda than the accumulation of arches from different sections of the London community, each with different agendas, and each designed to persuade James to follow its views. Thus the Dutch arch, built by a committee of the London Dutch Church, depicted the Low Countries, while the Latin speeches exhorted James to exercise ‘heroic action’ to support religion and justice, a thinly disguised plea to continue his predecessor’s encouragement of the United Provinces against Spanish incursions (Dekker 1953–70: II, 231–309, line 686; Jansen 1604/5; Rosser 1991: 67–82). This was a controversial issue in 1604 with negotiations for the Treaty of London (a peace treaty between England and Spain) about to commence: James simply rode past and ignored the arch and its Latin orations. So, although the Jonsonian text may imply an unruffled Roman and imperial image for the opening years of the Stuart monarchy, the survival of multiple versions, each with different inflections, suggests a far greater contest as to who should counsel the monarch and in which direction policy might tend. Moreover, as James’s reaction reveals, such propagandist or hortatory gestures were liable to the vagaries of royal mood. It may, thus, be no accident that Jonson’s partial account of the Entertainment forms only part of a volume which appeals to all the main royal targets (the king, Queen Anne, and Prince Henry), especially since, as Carleton’s dispatch reveals, the most likely source of court patronage in the immediate future was Anne rather than James I. Moreover, the appeal to multiple figures embodies the major difference between the Jacobean and Elizabethan courts. In contrast to Elizabeth’s reign where one power centre dominated, the Jacobean court boasted three royal households or courts, each with its own structures and policies. To complicate the situation further

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the major favourites (Carr, Hay, Villiers) each exercised a degree of political and cultural power; other factions such as the Pembrokes (Protestant) and the Howards (Catholic) were balanced against each other by the monarch; James also imported a number of Scottish advisers and courtiers, such as the duke of Lennox, along with a predominantly Scots Bedchamber staff as his intimate servants (Cuddy 1987: 173– 225; Wormald 1983: 202). The result was a far less homogenous and monolithic court with considerable factional competition structured into the political and cultural ethos. One historian, Malcolm Smuts, has argued that the Jacobean court should be seen as peculiarly ‘poly-centric’ in comparison to both the Elizabethan court and Caroline courts, showing a much more dispersed power structure (Smuts 1991: 99–112). These political structures had important cultural ramifications. Many of the features of the absolutist state, notably a centralised monarchy with a strong administration, were simply not present, and thus any programme of control or cultural propaganda, in so far as they existed, remained far more open to contradictory influences – censorship practices illustrate this amply.5 The term most commonly used at this time for censorship, licensing, suggests the possibility of protection afforded by the Master of the Revels to the players once their plays had been allowed, and also the broad degree of licence that was allowed. Importantly, licence and licensing imply a system that is not proleptic but normally retrospective and ad hoc, in contrast to the kinds of censorship practice more commonly seen in the totalitarian states of the twentieth century. Although some critics still repeat the repressive assumption, claiming that dramatic censorship functioned as an adjunct of the developing Stuart despotism, more recent studies have shown that censorship operated in very complex ways, involving not simply direct prohibition but the pressures of ‘law, licensing, and patronage’ and even good old-fashioned administrative confusion. Richard Dutton has argued that the relationship between the court officials and the players was less ‘adversarial than collegial’, helping to steer players through the uncertain areas of what was permissible and what not (Dutton 1997: 301, 304). Even where transgressions occurred, as apparently, in the case of Massinger’s The King and No Subject (1638, lost), the king, who was shown the play by the Master of the Revels, found it ‘insolent’ and insisted on changes but without any punishment inflicted upon writer or players (Dutton 1997: 300). Charles I’s direct involvement in censorship decisions occurred relatively infrequently, but it serves to illustrate, in a system of personal monarchy, how much depended upon the temper of the monarch and simply the vagaries of personal behaviour: James’s impatience with the masque Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue (1618) is justly celebrated. Under a personal monarchy the boundaries of the licit and illicit are blurred or constantly shifting, so that the newsletter writer Howells reports one occasion when James was treated to a ‘very abusive satire in verse’ and still forgave the ‘bitter, but witty knave’ because he concluded with a protestation of loyalty (Finkelpearl 1987: 201). In contrast to the repressive hypothesis offered by some commentators, contemporaries remarked instead: ‘the players do not forbear to represent upon their stage the whole course of this present time, not sparing either King,

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state or religion, in so great an absurdity, and with such liberty, that any one would be afraid to hear them’.6 In most respects, therefore, the conception of a monolithic court culture is outdated. Aristocratic culture shared certain values and preoccupations, but courtiers often brought with them important regional, confessional, political, and intellectual differences that shaped their inflection of courtiership. Occasionally, culture might become a tool in the negotiations between different royal households and differing factions advancing divergent policies, as when the francophile faction (those supporting a French rather than a Spanish match for Prince Charles) mounted a series of ‘French’ entertainments (Knowles 2000: 79–135; Raylor 2000). Given this dispersed structure and the fact that royal control was somewhat attenuated, there is little real evidence to suggest that James deliberately propagandised himself through theatricals. Indeed, even his son Charles, who was far more attuned to European political uses of culture, used other ceremonials, such as garter celebrations, and other media, such as art and architecture, as expressions of his more rigid absolutism. At the early Stuart court what cultural policy there was appears to have stemmed from the satellite royal households of the queen and Prince Henry, so that the masque, often vaunted as the symbol of royal policy, was engineered more by Anne and her son than by the monarch, especially during the first decade of the reign (Barroll 1991: 191–208; Knowles 2003: 21–48; McManus 2002).

‘Her Majesty’s Personal Presentations’: Masques and Cultural Politics Court masques belong to the wider culture of aristocratic masquing, ceremonial, and entertainment, which punctuated early modern life, providing both amusement and a means of representation and self-presentation. Masques combined dramatic dialogue, music, dance, and spectacle (especially scenery) both to embody an idealised vision of court life and also to provide a suitable social celebration of major calendrical festivals, notably Twelfth Night, or of significant dynastic or political events, such as marriages, installations, or diplomatic missions. Court masques interact with theatre in several ways, in that their authors (predominantly, but not exclusively, Jonson) and many of their personnel were drawn from London’s theatrical community, mainly to supply the technical expertise or take the speaking parts that formed the first part of the masque (known as the antimasque). Masques in the Jacobean period were not, however, simply a direct expression of a royal policy. Writing in 1608 of The Masque of Beauty, the Venetian ambassador stated, ‘So well composed and ordered was it all that it is evident the mind of her Majesty, the authoress of the whole, is gifted no less highly than her person’ (Dutton 1991: 22). This central role of Anne as the inventor or authoress of the Jacobean masque has often not been recognised, but it belongs to a wider pattern whereby masques were rarely, if ever, under James I, within the direct demesne of the monarch.

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The Vision of the Twelve Goddesses (1604), The Masque of Blackness (1605), The Masque of Beauty (1608), The Masque of Queens (1609), and Love Freed (1611) were organised at Queen Anne’s behest, and the later Tethys’ Festival may have been a collaborative project between her and Prince Henry.7 Henry himself organised Oberon (1611) and his Barriers (1610), both expressions of his chivalric interests, perhaps to counter his father’s attempts to moderate this image (at Henry’s installation as Prince of Wales, James had forbidden the prince to ride in procession through London). Like the censorship practice, royal intervention tends to be retrospective and ad hoc rather than constituting anything like a programme of royal image-making. Indeed, during the first decade of the Jacobean era, any programme of court representation emerged from Anne’s interests rather than from James’s household. Anne’s court, like that of her son Prince Henry slightly later, seems to have functioned as a court within a court, and it is notable that many of her courtiers were displaced associates of the Leicester–Essex faction, with its interests in militant Protestantism, though the queen herself was a covert Catholic (Gurr 1996: 352). A good illustration of this is Jonson’s Masque of Queens. The central fiction of the masque concerns the banishment of ‘hags or witches’ representing ‘Ignorance, Suspicion, Credulity, etc., the opposites to good Fame’ (15–16) whose sabbath forms the antimasque for the main action or masque (Jonson 1969).8 This consists of the magical banishment of the hags by Fame’s trumpet and the appearance of Heroic Virtue (Perseus), who introduces images of true female virtue from the House of Fame, a sumptuous palace depicting classical heroes such as Achilles, Aeneas, and Caesar supported by the poets, Homer, Virgil, and Lucan, who have proclaimed their fame. The female virtues are, of course, represented by the Anne and her ladies, who emerge dressed as classical queens, including Penthesilea, Queen of the Amazons, Camilla, Queen of the Volscians, Tomyris, Queen of the Scythians, even Boadicea, Queen of the Iceni, culminating in the vision of Anne dressed as Bel-Anna, Queen of the Ocean (596–7). The spectacular sets and costumes for the occasion were designed to accentuate the magnificence of the Jacobean court but, in particular, the ‘dignity and person’ (597) of the queen, who regarded such shows as her ‘personal presentations’ (2). Yet Queens is highly ambiguous, and there is much debate as to whether Jonson’s ‘all-daring … poetry’ (615), whose role he constantly stresses as the creator of fame, actually praises Anne or whether Jonson suggests subtly that female fame and virtue are subordinate to male virtue. Certainly, Perseus, a figure of male heroism, introduces and defines the women, while the image of the witches dancing ‘full of preposterous change and gesticulation’, ‘dancing back to back, hip to hip’ and ‘contrary to the custom of men’ (319–21) insistently recalls the widespread derogation of women in early modern culture. Indeed, even the choice of roles for the women, such as Penthesilea, may suggest the dangers of female power, and it is interesting to note that in Jonson’s contemporary play Epicoene (c.1609/10), ‘Penthesilea’ is used to describe a controlling woman and her ‘Amazonian impudence’ (3.4.57 and 3.5.41: see Jonson 1925–52: IV, 209–10; also Orgel 1990: 119–39). Moreover, it is equally uncertain what weight should be placed on the witch-lore of the masque, some of which may

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derive from James I’s own tracts on witchcraft, as a substitute for the praise of him absent from the text: by implication it is the king who defines true female heroism by recognising the falsity of witchcraft. The emphasis upon the role of the male poet (Jonson) in the creation of female fame continues this strategy of containment. Jonson dedicated the quarto of Queens to Prince Henry, situating the masque as an exhortation to virtue and positioning himself as a counsellor and chronicler of the prince’s coming reign, ‘whether in the camp or council chamber’ (dedicatory epistle to the Masque of Queens, cited in Lindley 1995: 226). Jonson wrote two major occasional texts for Henry, the Barriers and Oberon, both of which illustrate the divergences within Stuart iconography: where James was celebrated in Roman imagery, Prince Henry required Spenserian, neo-Arthurian chivalric romance. It has often been noted that Oberon sits awkwardly between praise for Henry, ‘the high-graced Oberon’ (342), and his father, ‘the wonder … of tongues, or ears, of eyes’ (226), and its style seems to recall the Elizabethan imagery which could in some circumstances be deployed to critique James’s rule. Indeed, the tensions in the text are so palpable that one study argues that Oberon embodies a ‘legitimation crisis’ for the Stuart monarch with the pacific, classical Jacobean imagery challenged by a rhetoric of a more active kingship (Butler 1998: 31). Henry’s masques are striking in the use of chivalric material that puts the texts in tune with a socially widespread interest in romance, but also because they are far more accessible to a larger audience, eschewing the esoteric mythology that marked Anne’s entertainments. In general, Jonson’s masques stress the ‘solid learnings’ ‘grounded in antiquity’ (Hymeneai 14), which was designed to appeal to the soul rather than the body, although, more accurately, it deliberately excluded ‘porters and mechanics’ (Queens 98) and those without the necessary learning to appreciate the symbolism. Ignorance was, in fact, one of the antimasque hags banished by learned Fame in Queens. This exclusivity fostered solidarity amongst the elite much as performance in the masque also signalled insider status. Even in the more visually oriented Caroline masque the symbolism was deliberately opaque in order to promote a sense of mystery and awe, while the complex pattern of intertextual relations between masquing texts meant that meanings were withheld from those who did not regularly attend and participate. The striking feature of court masques, then, is their limited or reserved praise for the monarch and their use by the competing households and factions of the Jacobean establishment. Anne’s court, in particular, seems to have sheltered some of the groups marginalised by the Jacobean settlement and, surprisingly, this dissent was even allowed to permeate beyond the court. Thus, Anne’s dramatic patronage raises intriguing issues about the extent of public debate over politics and her dissent from her husband’s views (McLuskie 1993: 222–4). For instance, Queen Anne sponsored, to varying degrees, one of the most controversial companies of the Jacobean period: the Children of the Queen’s Revels (Gurr 1996: 347–65). This company mounted a series of controversial plays (including Philotas (1604), Eastward Ho (1605), The Fawn (c.1604–6), The Fleir (1606), The Isle of Gulls (1606) and the

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Conspiracy and Tragedy of Byron (1608)) that often depicted the Jacobean court in a less than flattering light. Moreover, the licenser for this company was Samuel Daniel, Jonson’s rival, and the author of Philotas (1604), widely suspected of glancing at the Essex rebellion and criticising the role of Robert Cecil, earl of Salisbury, the de facto first minister of the government (Gurr 1996: 350; Pitcher 1998: 113– 48). Indeed, even after Daniel had been called before the Privy Council over this play, Anne continued to sponsor him (albeit from a greater distance), and he produced The Queen’s Arcadia or Arcadia Reformed for her in Oxford in 1605. As the title suggests, although Arcadia has long been ruled by liberty and peace, it has gradually declined and now wants reform, especially of the court vices, although these range from foreign over-dressing through to enclosure (Daniel 1885: 3, esp, 1.1). The French ambassador Beaumont famously observed, in a letter of 14 June 1604, ‘what must be the state of and condition of a prince, whom the preachers publicly from the pulpit assail, whom the comedians of the metropolis bring on stage, whose wife attends these representations in order to enjoy the laugh against her husband’ (cit. Chambers 1923: I, 325). Beaumont’s image of the liberty of Jacobean England has its limits, but what can be suggested is that there was considerably more freedom of expression than under Elizabeth, under whose reign matters such as the origin of royal authority were beyond question. Doubtless some of the debate derives from and depends upon James’s image of himself as a Solomon and his training in the Scottish parliamentary system of argument, but some also develops from a more complex court, with several centres of influence (if not power) which act in competition. Moreover, especially in the dramatic field, whatever propagandist efforts there were on behalf of the court stemmed from Anne of Denmark rather than her husband. The repertoire of the companies associated with her and her masques, however, presents far more debate than untroubled absolutist images.

‘Fortune, not Reason, Rules the State of Things’: The Theatre of Counsel And for the authentical truth of either person or action, who (worth the respecting) will expect it in a poem, whose subject is not truth, but things like truth? Poor envious souls they are that cavil at truth’s want in these natural fictions; material instruction, elegant and sententious excitation to virtue, and deflection from her contrary, being the soul, limbs, and limits of an authentical tragedy …9

This potential for political debate through drama was recognised as one of the functions of theatre, what Chapman terms ‘material instruction’. Classical sources emphasised the potential of theatre to act as a form of oratory, an ‘act of deliberation’ through which moral and political issues could be debated, while contemporaries noted the potential for the ‘excitation to heroical life’ (Revenge of Bussy, epistle, 11) or to correct

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faults. Considering the classical antecedents of early modern drama, Bruce Smith has argued that ‘behind the dozens of theatrical instances and anecdotes in Cicero’s treatises, speeches, and letters is the assumption that plays are rhetorical events: occasions when speakers harangue an audience’. Smith traces in this Ciceronian position an awareness of ‘drama as a species of oratory, an act of deliberation’ designed to accentuate the ethical and political possibilities of the form (Smith 1998: 21). Indeed, the companies protected by royal patent, notably the King’s Men, and the boys’ companies, notably the Children of the Queen’s Revels, engaged in this political debate to a remarkable degree. This awareness of the deliberative function of drama was, indeed, shared across the supposed elite/popular binary: Thomas Heywood (a writer mainly associated with the popular amphitheatre, the Red Bull) argues in his Apology for Actors that if we present a tragedy, we include the fatal and abortive ends of such as commit notorious murders, which is aggravated and acted with all art that may be, and terrify men from the like abhorred practices. If we present a foreign history, the subject is so intended that in the lives of Romans, Grecians, or others, either the virtues of our countrymen are extolled or their vices reproved … (Heywood, 1612: sig. F3v)

Although Heywood and Chapman place slightly different emphases (Chapman highlighting the role of theatre in shaping individuals, Heywood stressing the social dimension), both articulate the role of theatre in fashioning the individual in social and political contexts. Indeed, these political and social dimensions are present in many of the writers who belonged to the new generation of playwrights (Beaumont and Fletcher, Chapman and Massinger) most associated with the supposed shift away from popular tastes. The problem for modern readers is that we have often failed to recognise this political dimension, or misrecognised the nature of early modern political discourse. This is especially so in the case of the main genres that came to dominate the 1610s and 1620s: romance and tragi-comedy. Often the growing interest in romance and tragi-comedy has been interpreted as a sign of decadence of taste and a desire to escape from politics (if not straightforward escapism). Yet romance, in fact, appealed across a wide spectrum of tastes and included, as in Oberon, styles which contrasted with the dominant representational modes of Jacobean and Jonsonian classicism. Romances, moreover, were performed at the whole range of early modern theatres, from the amphitheatres like the Red Bull (where Mucedorus was played) through to the hall playhouses. Texts such as Eastward Ho! (1605) and The Knight of the Burning Pestle (1607) testify to the wide dissemination of romance texts amongst the poorer and middling classes, and its emphatic openness allowed it appeal to a broad range of tastes and social classes, while its temporally and geographically vague settings provided a useful veil for political allusion (Gibbons 1990: 213). In using romance forms, dramatists were not simply allying themselves to the court but negotiating the commercial realities of theatrical life whereby they had to appeal to the widest audience

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possible, creating plays suitable for a variety of different venues and audiences, of which the court was only one among several. Plays written for companies outside the court (but sponsored to some degree from within), such as Chapman’s Bussy d’Ambois (1604) and The Revenge of Bussy d’Ambois (1613) played at the Whitefriars (but also revised for amphitheatre performance), might use French settings to present parallels with current political issues (Gurr 1996: 359). Similarly, Beaumont and Fletcher’s plays, such as Philaster (1610), use romance settings to pose political questions, though in both cases they are expressed through personal and ethical dilemmas accentuated by court settings. How to achieve a ‘heroical life’ and, a more difficult issue, how to maintain one at court, were key questions reflecting the interpenetration of personal and political values which accompany the diffuse sovereignties of early modern culture.10 Chapman’s two Bussy plays, although written almost a decade apart, use their French settings to cloak an insistent critique of court culture and its corruptions as well as exploring the dilemma of survival in such a world. From a position as an outsider, as soon as Bussy is introduced into the court he recognises in his quibbling rhetoric the constituent duplicity that courtiership requires: ‘I can sing pricksong, lady, at first sight’ (1.2.81). The pervasive and crippling doubleness of the courtier’s situation, where corruption is the inescapable means and method of the court, is symbolised in the ‘dance’ he is offered on his arrival at court (1.2.214). The dance image neatly suggests the sociability required in courtiership while also insinuating the sexual implication contained within dance (dance was often a figure for sexual intercourse), as well as the more terrifying prospect that this dance mimics movement of Fortune and even leads, eventually, to death in a literal danse macabre. Bussy is filled with images which offer either transformations or escapes, which are continually frustrated, so that metamorphosis becomes a matter of changing clothes (1.2.118), leading not to enlightenment or godhead but instead to a ‘transmigration’ into the duchess’s bed. Similarly, the pervasive animal images depict the substratum of bestiality that shadows court life, while even the images of flight are balked. Thus, Bussy, the ‘brave falcon’ (3.2.2) and ‘eagle’ (3.2.4) of the court, is ultimately constrained by royal will: ‘violence flies / The sanctuaries of princes’ eyes’ (3.2.81–2). Throughout Bussy the corruption of the court is foregrounded, rationality appealed to, satire offered, but reform and change frustrated: fortune not reason rules the court. Significantly, the central satirist of the play is not Bussy but Henri III himself, who recites the faults of his court: our French court Is a mere mirror of confusion to it: The king and subject, lord and every slave Dance a continual hay; our rooms of state Kept like our stables; no place more observed Than a rude market-place. (1.2.24–9)

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Yet his central position as monarch also renders him incapable of achieving reform, bound by the ties of alliance and kinship to his family, who are themselves the source of corruption and his own power. Thus his restriction of Bussy, and Bussy’s appeals to the idea of the monarchical man (‘let me be king myself, as man was made’, 2.1.199), free from restraint, highlight the limitations of the role of satirist and reformer, bringing out the contradictions between criticism and compliment which Jonson’s Panegyre articulated. Bussy both defines the ideal of the courtier and suggests the impossibility of its achievement. In particular, Bussy’s own death, which gestures towards the classical and heroic end, only accentuates his failure: is my body, then, But penetrable flesh? And must my mind Follow my blood? Can my divine part add No aid to th’earthly in extremity? Then these divines are but for form, not fact: Man is of two, sweet courtly friends compact – A mistress and a servant. Let my death Define life nothing but a courtier’s breath. Nothing is made of nought, of all things made Their abstract being a dream but of shade. I’ll not complain to earth yet, but to heaven, And, like a man, look upwards even in death. [Standing supported by his sword] Prop me, true sword, as thou hast ever done: The equal thought I bear of life and death Shall make me faint on no side. I am up Here like a Roman statue. I will stand Till death hath made me marble. (5.3.125–41)

The speech moves from uncertainty (‘is my?’, ‘And must my?’, ‘Can my?’) through a sense of nullity (‘nothing is made of nought’) to the final heroic gesture of dying standing and the impossible dream of becoming ‘like a Roman statue’ made marble by death. This image, which contrasts greatly with the adulterous, murderous, and satirical Bussy of the play, highlights the futility of heroism in a corrupted world, just as Bussy cannot become marble in any literal sense as he is made, as he himself recognises, of ‘but penetrable flesh’. This concern with aspiration to heroic virtue and its frustration recurs in Chapman’s Revenge of Bussy d’Ambois, where the ethics of revenge forms the central concern of the play, highlighting the dilemmas of the moral codes, such as honour and kinship, which constituted the early modern state. Revenge is constantly associated with haste (1.1.108) and ‘wreak’ (1.1.85) and ‘vicious fury’ rather than virtue (3.2.109). Indeed

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Clermont, when urged by Baligny’s wife Charlotte to immediate and, thus, manly revenge, asks: ‘Shall we revenge a villainy with a villainy?’ (3.2.89–96). It is significant here that revenge is associated with women (it is after all a ‘fury’) and that Tamyra in particular becomes a ‘votist of revenge’ (3.2.164), her blood-lust echoing Renaissance views about the instability of women and their association with the fluid and the passionate. Thus revenge in the play becomes not only a political question – Clermont asks how revenge can be taken against the monarch when it is ‘impious’ (5.5.152) – but also a gendered issue, as Clermont wrestles to find a method of rational and male revenge rather than succumbing to the passionate, hasty vengeance urged by the women. Although in some ways the issues of these plays are schematic they embody an important debate over the definition of proper behaviour, and especially the gendering of mores: what is it to be a proper man (or woman)? They give personal shape through ideas such as revenge and honour to issues that were urgent political concerns for individuals in this period (Cust 1995: 57–94). Moreover, although Chapman in particular offers his plays in a difficult, tortive language, the emphasis upon the role of women and the use of revenge motifs and satire reached out beyond the court and elite audiences. This process of debate is even more marked in the romances than in ‘historical’ texts like Chapman’s Bussy plays. Beaumont and Fletcher, in particular, use a clarified language and romance settings to render many of these debates accessible to a broader audience than might be imagined. The best example of such romances remains Beaumont and Fletcher’s Philaster (1610).11 Like Chapman’s Bussy plays, it explores issues of honour, reputation, and revenge in the context of a usurped monarchy (Philaster, the hero, has been usurped as king of Sicily by the king of Calabria). Much concerned with issues of female behaviour and female honour, the play uses the attempts of the king to marry his daughter (notably named Arethusa) to a Spanish lord, Pharamond, when she desires Philaster, and the play concludes with the hero’s marriage and his restoration. Significantly, the restoration is achieved through the intervention of the citizens, who revolt against the king and hold Pharamond hostage. The issues of civility and politics are combined in this popular revolt as the citizens are seen as ‘myrmidons’ and ‘roarers’ (5.4.1 and 79) who threaten social order and are controlled by Philaster, who rescues Pharamond even though they are opponents. Philaster, called ‘King of courtesy’ (5.4.131) by the rebels, embodies the ability of true courtiership to civilise and to unite both commons and nobles. The key role of the plebeian revolt in the play illustrates how the text could appeal beyond the elite to a broader audience, perhaps catering to the wish-fulfilment fantasies that made romance so popular. In its depiction of the court and courtiership Philaster suggests the complexity of these terms in early modern political culture (Finkelpearl 1990: ch 8, and esp. 246–7). On one hand the court and its courtiers are regarded as corrupt and debased (notably Galatea, who can be ‘courted in a shower of gold’, 2.2.47), and Philaster offers an image of the country instead as the home of virtue, instructing Dion, ‘Go

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get you home again, and make your country / A virtuous court’ (1.1.301–2). The issue, however, is not the rejection of courtly values, but rather their reformation into virtue. Thus the country functions not as opposition outside the court but as part of the proper dialectic between court and country, maintaining the health and virtue of the political centre. It is important here that Philaster’s management of the rebels is achieved through his ‘courtesy’ – a quality that they recognise in him. It is not simply courtesy that civilises but the recognition of that civility in others, here giving the citizens a role in the balancing of the state between courtly vice and country virtue. This political dialectic suggests a greater circulation between the court and noncourt, both in the idealised images of the theatre and, perhaps, in the culture within which that theatre actually operated. Philaster is not simply an elite play that criticises the court from within: the involvement of the plebeians and the use of romance motifs deliberately opens the play to a wider audience. Indeed, King’s Men plays had to move freely between the hall stage of the Blackfriars and the amphitheatre of the Globe, thus reaching the wider audience. Yet even within the more apparently exclusive theatres such as the Blackfriars the audience might be socially mixed, ranging (according to Jonson) from ‘Gamester, captain, knight, knight’s man / Lady or pucelle [whore] …’ to ‘the shop’s foreman’ (‘To the Worthy Author Mr John Fletcher’, 3–6). The inclusion of women play-goers, an important segment of the early modern audience, but also of the knight’s servant and the shopkeeper, conveys something of the variety possible even in the more expensive hall theatres. Whether it is audience demographics, staging styles, genre, or even the legal framework of dramatic production in the Jacobean period, little suggests the kind of political control that supports the absolutist arguments of Wickham or the New Historicists. What is suggested is a vigorous theatre of debate in which socially diverse audiences consider political issues, even if in veiled terms. Moreover, in the final analysis, theatre will always have the potential for radical impact because it rests between oral and literate cultures, disseminating ideas and concepts to an audience who cannot access them through written texts. The commercial basis of the London theatre industry meant that those audiences, and not the court, were the main arbiters of taste, as John Cocke argued in his Satirical Essays, Characters and Others (1615) that: ‘howsoever he [the player] pretends to have a royal master or mistress, his wages and dependence prove him to be the servant of the people’ (McLuskie 1991: 54). Very often court forms borrow from, and depend upon, the commercial theatre rather than court forms dictating commercial priorities, while many of the features that have been associated with coterie theatre, such as spectacular stagings or the use of music, are as much a feature of amphitheatre performances as Blackfriars stagings. This is not to claim that the opening of smaller, intimate, indoor theatres did not impact upon staging and dramatic practice, merely to question the class-based assumptions about taste and the direction of influence.

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Most striking of all is the complexity of the court in this period and the absence of anything that might be defined as a centrally administered programme to represent the royal image. The Jacobean court cannot be regarded as a forerunner of Versailles, and even Charles I, who may have aspired in a more absolutist direction, was thwarted in his most grandiose plans (such as the building of the massive new Whitehall Palace designed by Webb) by practicalities: the lack of money. Even within such limited artistic programmes of the court, it is striking how little theatre featured: it was simply not a vehicle for propaganda (perhaps because of its markedly interrogative nature). Above all, when examined closely, the most quintessential of all royal forms, the masque, appears to have a far more mixed parentage and even bears more various messages than simply replicating a royal ideology. Once the complex factional politics of the court, and especially the still neglected role of Anne of Denmark (and, indeed, her successor as queen consort, Henrietta Maria), are weighed, then an entirely different picture starts to emerge. Rather than looking for ‘decadence’ and decline, perhaps it is time to consider the debate which early modern theatre fostered, and to move away from our monolithic conceptions of the court and culture, allowing the voices of women, writers other than Jonson, marginalised groups, and the vibrant regional cultures of the period to sound. Perhaps it is time to stop looking at the reflection in Jonson’s courtly glass and consider who is holding the mirror.

Notes 1 Gurr typifies ‘The Changes of 1603’ as ‘consolidation’ rather than revolution. 2 It explicitly underpins Dollimore 1983, and is implicit in a more sophisticated form in Goldberg 1983. These remain two of the best studies of the interface between drama, politics, and culture in this period. 3 May makes qualifications regarding the status of poets, like Spenser, often loosely and erroneously seen as ‘courtier poets’ (1991: 33–4). 4 All references to Jonson’s poetry are taken from Ian Donaldson’s edition (Jonson 1985). 5 For an even more sceptical view of censorship, see Worden 1987: 45–62; for administrative confusion, see Finkelpearl 1987: 191–206. 6 Samuel Calvert to Ralph Winwood, 28 March 1605, cited Chambers 1923: I, 325. 7 The masques that do embody the king’s policy are the union masques, Hymenaei (1606), Lord Hay’s Masque (1607), and the Haddington Masque (1608). As with Lord Hay’s Masque, however, some of the cost and

thus the responsibility was borne by the families: see Lindley 1979: 144–5. 8 All references are to Orgel’s 1969 edition of Jonson’s masques unless otherwise stated. 9 (Chapman, The Revenge of Bussy d’Ambois (1613), epistle, 22–9, in Chapman 1987. All subsequent references are to this edition. 10 The historian of Renaissance Italy, Chittolini, has commented that ‘[The] diffuse sovereignty [of pre-absolutist states operates through] a complex web of personal relations, both horizontal and vertical, which gave life to a plurality of social bodies (based on kinship, association, and subjugation), all bound up with one another and cemented by sworn pacts … the state was … a system of institutions, of powers and practices, that had as one of its defining features a sort of programmatic permeability to extraneous (or, if one prefers, “private”) powers and purposes while retaining an overall unity of political organisation’ (Chittolini 1995: S34). 11 See Fletcher 1969. All subsequent references are to this edition.

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References and Further Reading Adams, S. (1993). ‘Early Stuart politics: revisionism and after’. In J. R. Mulryne and M. Shewring (eds.), Theatre and Government under the Early Stuarts (pp. 29–56). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Astington, J. (1999). English Court Theatre, 1558– 1642. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bacon, F. (2000). Essays, Civil and Moral, ed. M. Kiernan. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Barroll, L. (1991). ‘The court of the first Stuart queen’. In L. Peck (ed.), The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (pp. 191–208). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bentley, G. E. (1941–68). The Jacobean and Caroline Stage, 7 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Butler, M. (1998). ‘Courtly negotiations’. In D. Bevington and P. Holbrook (eds.), The Politics of the Stuart Court Masque (pp. 20–40). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Chambers, E. K. (1923). The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Chapman, G. (1987). The Plays of George Chapman: The Tragedies, ed. A. Holaday. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Chittolini, G. (1995). ‘The “private”, the “public” and the state’. Journal of Modern History, 67, S34–64. Cook, A. (1997). ‘Audiences: investigation, interpretation, invention’. In J. D. Cox and D. S. Kastan (eds.), A New History of Early English Drama (pp. 305–20). New York: Columbia University Press. Cox J. D. and Kastan, D. S. (eds.) (1997). A New History of Early English Drama. New York: Columbia University Press. Cuddy, N. (1987). ‘The revival of entourage: the bedchamber of James I’. In D. Starkey (ed.), The English Court: from the Wars of the Roses to the Civil Wars (pp. 173–225). London: Longman. Cust, R. (1995) ‘Honour and politics in early Stuart England: the case of Beaumont v. Hastings’. Past and Present, 149, 57–94. Daniel, S. (1885). The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of Samuel Daniel, ed. A. B. Grosart, 5 vols. London. Dekker, T. (1953–70). The Magnificent Entertainment. In The Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. F.

Bowers, 4 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dollimore, J. (1983). Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries. Brighton: Harvester. Dutton, R. (1991). Ben Jonson, Authority, Criticism. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Dutton, R. (1997). ‘Censorship’. In J. D. Cox and D. S. Kastan (eds.), A New History of Early English Drama (pp. 287–304). New York: Columbia University Press. Elton, G. R. (1976). ‘Tudor government: the points of contact, vol. 3: the court’. Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th ser., 26, 211–28. Finkelpearl, P. (1982). ‘The role of the court in the development of Jacobean drama’. Criticism, 24, 138–58. Finkelpearl, P. (1987). ‘ “The comedians’ liberty”: censorship of the Jacobean stage. reconsidered’. In A. Kinney (ed.), Renaissance Historicism (pp. 191–206). Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Finkelpearl, P. (1990). Court and Country in the Plays of Beaumont and Fletcher. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Fletcher, J. (1969). Philaster, or Love Lies a-bleeding, ed. A. Gurr. London: Methuen. Gibbons, B. (1990). ‘Romance and the heroic play’. In A. R. Braunmuller and M. Hattaway (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama (pp. 207–36). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goldberg, J. (1983). James I and the Politics of Literature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Gurr, A. (1987). Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gurr, A. (1993). ‘The general and the caviar: learned audience in the early theatre’. Studies in English Literature, 26, 7–20. Gurr, A. (1996). The Shakespearian Playing Companies. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Heywood, T. (1612). An Apology for Actors. London. Hutton, Ronald (2004). Debates in Stuart History. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Jansen, C. (1604 or 1605). Beschryvnge van der herlycke Arcus Triumphal. Middleburgh.

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Jonson, B. (1925–52). Works, ed. C. H. Herford, P. Simpson, and E. Simpson, 11 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Jonson, B. (1969). The Complete Masques, ed. S. Orgel. New Haven: Yale University Press. Jonson, B. (1985). Ben Jonson, ed. I. Donaldson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Knowles, J. (2000). ‘The “Running Masque” recovered? a masque for the marquess of Buckingham (c.1619–20)’. English Manuscript Studies, 8, 79–135. Knowles, J. (2003). ‘ “To enlight the darksome night, pale Cinthia doth arise”: Anna of Denmark, Elizabeth I, and the images of royalty’. In C. McManus (ed.), Women and Culture at the Courts of the Stuart Queens (pp. 21–48). Basingstoke: Palgrave. Lindley, D. (1979). ‘Who paid for Campion’s Lord Hay’s Masque?’. Notes and Queries, 224, 144–5. Lindley, D. (1995). Court Masques. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lowenstein, J. (1991). ‘Printing and the “multitudinous press”: the contentious texts of Jonson’s masques’. In J. Brady and W. Herendeen (eds.), Ben Jonson’s 1616 Folio (pp. 168–91). Newark: University of Delaware Press. May, S. (1991). The Elizabethan Courtier Poets: The Poems and their Contexts. Colombia: University of Missouri Press. McLuskie, K. (1991). ‘The poets’ royal exchange: patronage and commerce in early modern drama’. Yearbook of English Studies, 21, 53–62. McLuskie, K. (1993). ‘Politics and dramatic form in early modern tragedy’. In J. R. Mulryne and M. Shewring (eds.), Theatre and Government under the Early Stuarts (pp. 217–36). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

McManus, C. (2002). Women on the Renaissance Stage: Anna of Denmark and Female Masquing Culture in the Stuart Court, 1590–1619. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Orgel, S. (1990). ‘Jonson and the Amazons’, In E. D. Harvey and K. Maus (eds.), Soliciting Interpretation (pp. 119–39). Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pitcher, J. (1998). ‘Samuel Daniel and the authorities’. Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 10, 113–48. Raylor, T. (2000). The Essex House Masque of 1621. Pittsburgh: Dusquesne University Press. Rosser, G. (1991). ‘A Netherlandic triumphal arch for James I’. In S. Roach (ed.), Across the Narrow Seas: Studies in the History and Bibliography of Britain and the Low Countries (pp. 67–82). London: British Library. Smith, B. R. (1998). Ancient Scripts and Modern Stage Experience. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Smuts, M. (1991). ‘Cultural diversity and cultural change at the court of James I’. In L. Peck (ed.), The Mental World of the Jacobean Court (pp. 99– 112). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wickham, G. (1959–81). Early English Stages, 1300–1600, 3 vols. in 4. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Wiseman, S. J. (1998). Drama And Politics in the English Civil War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Worden, B. (1987). ‘Literature and political censorship in early modern England’. In A. C. Duke and C. A. Tamse (eds.), Too Mighty To Be Free: Censorship and the Press in Britain and the Netherlands (pp. 45–62). Zutphen: De Walberg Pers. Wormald, J. (1983). ‘James VI and I: two kings or one?’ History, 68, 187–209.

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Women and Drama Alison Findlay

In The Tragedie of Antonie (1592), Mary Sidney Herbert’s translation of Garnier’s Marc Antonie, Cleopatra tells her dead lover she is ‘most happy in this hapless case, / To die with thee, and, dying, thee embrace’ (5.171–2).1 Drawing on the Renaissance pun for death as orgasm, Cleopatra creates a paradoxical fusion of pleasure and despair, love and loss, absence and presence, a connection that Freud was to theorise later as a relationship between the two basic instincts in human life: the sex-drive (Eros) and the death-drive (Thanatos) (Freud 1950: 47–8). Women, especially female bodies, are sites on which desire and death have frequently been focused, partly because of the analogy between ‘mother’ and ‘earth’ that defines her as both womb and tomb. It is therefore not surprising to find these opposite poles linked in Renaissance plays for and about women. Sex- and death-drives point towards conception and dissolution, liminal states at the origin and end of earthly human existence, bourns from which no traveller can bring back an accurate description. The feminisation of desire and death in Renaissance drama thus attempts to give shape and form to what is beyond representation, beyond the symbolic order or social systems of signification within which we live. Cymbeline’s puzzled remark ‘Who is’t can read a woman?’ (5.6.48) suggests that women themselves are beyond representation, an idea elaborated by feminist theorists such as Luce Irigaray, who argued that male-centred systems of signification are inadequate to represent female sexuality at all (Irigaray 1981: 101). In the case of mainstream Renaissance theatre produced by all-male companies, women were literally outside representation: their parts were written and performed by men and boys. Female play-goers across the social scale, from queens, noblewomen, citizens’ wives, and tradeswomen to whores and vagrants, paid to watch male representations of themselves (Findlay 1999; Gurr 1987). The career of Nathan Field (1587–1620) selfconsciously illustrates this closed circuit. Field had been a boy player in the Blackfriars’ company (1600–8), performed in Jonson’s Cynthia’s Revels (1600) and Poetaster (1601) aged 13 or 14 (Kathman 2005: 223), and was a leading member of the

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Whitefriars company that staged Jonson’s Epicoene (1609) (Dutton 2002: 349–51). He wrote two comedies for that company before joining Lady Elizabeth’s company and eventually the King’s Men in 1616. The playwright George Chapman commended Field’s skill in representing women through both pen and performance: ‘To many forms, as well as many ways, / Thy active muse turns like thy acted woman’ (Field 1612: A4). Field’s preface to A Woman is a Weathercock teasingly dedicates his play to women, acknowledging its misrepresentation of their sex in claiming that they are all inconstant (like weathercocks), and promising to compensate in his next play: I leave a liberty to any lady or woman that dares say she hath been no weathercock, to assume the title of patroness to this my book. If she have been constant, and be so, all I will expect from her for my pains is that she will continue so, but till my next play be printed, wherein she shall see what amends I have made to her, and all the sex. (Field 1612: A3v)

This is one of many dramatic prefaces prologues and epilogues that register women as consumers of drama. In many cases, however, the plays do not seem to address women’s desires. A Woman is a Weathercock, for example, is centred on assuaging male insecurities. Scudamore’s misogynist diatribes against female infidelity leave little room for manoeuvre by the heroine Bellafront, who is trapped in an arranged marriage and motivated, finally, by a passionate death-drive. The climax of the play uses a fantasy of female self-sacrifice to flatter the sensibilities of non-elite male spectators when she vows ‘Joy dwells not in the princes’ palaces’, and draws a knife to dedicate herself to death so ‘Scudmore thou shalt see, / This false heart (in my death) most true to thee’ (Field 1612: H2). Field’s next play, Amends for Ladies (1618), stages stereotypical images of women at three life-stages to demonstrate how they are obliged to confront and overcome male expectations and prejudices. Lady Honour, a maid, battles with male fears of inconstancy and forced marriage by dressing as a page and threatening to commit suicide as Bellafront had done. Lady Bright undoes the stereotype of lustful widow in a comic plot where her suitor Bold cross-dresses as a waiting gentlewoman to gain access to her bedchamber, only to be modestly refused until a proper wedding has taken place. Lady Perfect, the wife, is the victim of a plot showing that the main threat to marriage is not women’s infidelity but homosocial bonding. Her husband binds Subtle, his ‘dear friend’ to test his wife’s chastity ‘by this, love’s masculine kiss, / By all our mutual engagements past / By all the hopes of amity to come’ (C1). Lady Perfect refuses Subtle’s advances and retaliates by explicitly challenging the dramatic misrepresentation of women: Oh men! What are you? Why is our poor sex Still made the disgracèd subjects in these plays For vices, folly, and inconstancy? When, were men looked into with such critical eyes

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Of observation, many would be found So full of gross and base corruption That none (unless the Devil himself turned writer) Could fain so badly, to express them truly. (D1–D1v)

Such lines demonstrate that male playwrights and actors were critically aware of their misrepresentations of women. The plays of John Lyly, for example, written for the boys’ companies for performance at court, offered symbolic representations of royal femininity to Queen Elizabeth (see Chapter 45, Boys’ Plays). Nevertheless, the performances of boys and young men as women were undoubtedly convincing and accepted as such by audiences (Mann 2008; Rutter 2001). In the adult theatre companies, the young men who impersonated women were able to offer complex, multifaceted characterisations as they matured. As David Kathman has shown, these boy actors ranged from the ages of 12 or 13 to 21 or 22, with a median of around 16 or 17 (Kathman 2005). Teenagers and young men working through their apprenticeships were thus trained to tackle leading female roles in comedies and tragedies. For example, Bess Bridges, the idealised romance heroine of Heywood’s Fair Maid of the West, Part I, is compared to the dominating figure of Queen Elizabeth I, ‘the only phoenix of her age’ (5.1.98–9), but goes on to argue that Elizabeth is unrepresentable, beyond ‘true description’ (5.1.102). To portray ‘a girl worth gold’ (5.2.153) required considerable skill and assurance from the boy actor. In a performance at the Caroline court, the part was played by Hugh Clarke, who was about 20 or 21 and already married, perhaps giving extra resonance to his performance of Bess’s passionate loyalty to her husband Spencer (Kathman 2005: 236–7). The recruitment and lengthy training of boys to play such demanding women’s roles were helped by the apprenticeship system of the London livery companies. Members or associates of the adult theatre companies who were also freemen of companies such as the Grocers, Goldsmiths, and Drapers bound boys as apprentices under the terms of the livery company, but were able to train them as masters in their actual profession, the theatre. This involved the master providing food, accommodation, and clothing for the boy, but not wages during the time of the apprenticeship (Kathman 2004). As Scott McMillin has proposed, much of the rehearsal of the female roles using cue lines and actors’ parts would probably have been conducted between the master and his boy or in small groups with two master actors and perhaps a second boy (McMillin 2004). This may have led to a tight emotional bonding between performers, one which was intrinsically hierarchical: the relationship between master and boy actor mimicking the conventional dominance of man over woman, although the power relationship between masters and boys must have shifted as apprentices matured. Richard Sharpe (1601–32), apprenticed as a grocer to John Heminges of the King’s Men for eight years, played the very demanding title role in the revival of Webster’s tragedy The Duchess of Malfi when he was between 17 and 21 years old (Kathman

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2005: 233). The Duchess is a focus for death and desire in the play, and the fact is that both are finally beyond the control of men, represented in the play by her powerful brothers the Cardinal and the Duke. The Duchess’s passion for her steward Antonio, whom she secretly marries and has children by, is also a death-drive, as she acknowledges in the words ‘I am making my will’ (1.1.376). Just before she is strangled, she asserts her identity ‘I am Duchess of Malfi still’ (4.1.142). She gives voice to a consciousness of death as a common ending and a beginning in a sequence that would have required remarkable skill and understanding from the teenage actor. As a mother, she advises for the care of her children (4.2.203–5); as a widow, she has no fear of death, looking forward to ‘such excellent company / In th’other world’ (4.2.211– 12). Death is a consummation that far outstrips worldly pleasures: What would it pleasure me to have my throat cut With diamonds? or to be smothered With cassia? or to be shot to death with pearls? I know death hath ten thousand several doors For men to take their exits; and ’tis found They go on such strange geometrical hinges You may open them both ways. (4.2.216–21)

The Duchess’s mysterious claim that death’s doors are reversible (may be opened both ways), suggests that she cannot be silenced as easily as her brothers think. In immediate terms, her voice returns as a ghostly echo in Act 5 of the play. In broader terms, her words invoke the inevitable return of that which has been excluded or suppressed in the male characters’ desire for self-assertion: the liminal stages of birth and death and experiences beyond representation that are so often characterised as female. In theatrical terms, the Duchess’s eerie reference to a return through the doors by which men make their exits alerts us to other possibilities for women to make their entrances on stage. In spite of their exclusion from the professional theatre, Renaissance women did write and perform in other arenas: court and household drama offered them opportunities to represent their desires and fears themselves (Findlay, Hodgson-Wright, and Williams 2000). Their scripts suggest that they often made a virtue of necessity and deliberately exploited the special characteristics of the alternative venues in which their dramatic activities were composed and possibly produced (Findlay 2006). This essay now goes on to offer a comparative analysis of several plays about desire and mortality, which were written about, for, and by women. Discussing texts by John Lyly and Thomas Heywood alongside translations and original drama by aristocratic women, I will examine how woman functions as a trope for masculine insecurities and how female dramatists rewrite the fusion of death and love to undo fixed boundaries which appear to dictate human existence. Representations of virgin sacrifice have been a classic form of aestheticising, containing, and so disempowering female sexuality, enacting in symbolic terms the connection between death and marriage. In John Lyly’s Gallathea (c.1585), the ‘fatal

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virgin’ (5.2.1) Hebe outlines the destructive nature of possessive male eroticism in terms which perhaps gave voice to women’s fears: ‘thou insatiable monster of maiden’s blood, and devourer of beauty’s bowels, glut thyself till thou surfeit, and let my life end thine’ (5.2.48–50). In Lyly’s play, however, sacrifice becomes a catalyst to alternative forms of feminine desire. The heroines Gallathea and Phillida are disguised as boys to escape the role of fairest virgin tribute to Neptune. It is their fathers who instigate the deception, out of a disturbingly possessive love, yet Gallathea and Phillida’s adoption of masculine habits and their fathers’ names enables them to claim ownership of their sexuality. The ever-present threat of sacrifice heightens their selfawareness; Phillida makes use of bawdy innuendo to remark ‘say what they will of a man’s wit [intelligence, penis], it is no second thing to be a woman’ (2.1.25–6). In a remarkably erotic scene, the heroines move through a process of metaphorical undressing to recognition of same-sex passion. Male disguise and imaginative roleplay provide a gateway to alternative forms of desire in which women can begin to find a voice. The play’s exploration of homoerotic possibilities looks forward to Shakespeare’s As You Like It (1599), another play in which women are invited to ‘like as much of this play as please you’ (Epilogue). In Gallathea, disguise spares the heroines the shame of being a maiden suitor, ‘a thing hated in that sex’ (3.2.13–14), yet ironically leads to the tentative uncovering of lesbian desire. Their physical disguises are a material representation of the difficulties of articulating such feelings within a phallocentric erotic discourse: phillida:

gallathea:

Suppose I were a virgin … and that under the habit of a boy were the person of a maid, if I should utter my affection with sighs, manifest my sweet love by my salt tears, and prove my loyalty unspotted, and my griefs intolerable, would not then that fair face pity this my true heart? Admit that I were as you would have me suppose that you are, and that I should with entreaties, prayers, oaths, bribes and what ever can be invented in love, desire your favour, would you not yield? (3.2.18–25)

Each suspects that the other is, in fact, the same – one ‘as I am’ (3.2.29), and by the end of the scene the pair seek to move beyond cultural knowledge: phillida:

Come, let us into the grove, and make much of one another, that cannot tell what to think one of another. Exeunt. (3.2.58–9)

Significantly, this will happen off stage, beyond the representation by boy actors. Gallathea and Phillida’s determination to absent themselves from the sacrifice and ‘wander into these groves’ (4.4.32) disempowers the symbolic father/husband figure, Neptune. Hebe is released and Neptune rages: ‘Do men begin to be equal with Gods, seeking by craft to over-reach them that by power over-see them?’ (5.3.10–11).

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Neptune blames the fathers, but it is the daughters who have thwarted his tyrannical control of female sexuality. When they are brought to judgment before Neptune and unmasked, they refuse to sacrifice their love: gallathea: phillida: neptune:

I will never love any but Phillida: her love is engraven in my heart, with her eyes. Nor I any but Gallathea, whose faith is imprinted in my thoughts by her words. An idle choice, strange and foolish, for one virgin to dote on another, and to imagine a constant faith where there can be no cause of affection. (5.3.124–30)

Although Venus promises to transform one of the lovers into a man, apparently reinforcing Neptune’s view of female same-sex love, this resolution is not enacted in the play. The fathers’ attempts to reclaim ownership of their daughters is thwarted; only Gallathea and Phillida can be certain of satisfaction (5.3.170–4) and, by deferring the male transformation, the play suggests that satisfaction is already within their grasp. It is not only the heroines whose love challenges the heterosexual status quo in Gallathea. Diana’s nymphs maintain a chaste independence rather than subjecting themselves to Cupid’s arrows (1.2.28–9). They are thinly disguised versions of the ladies of Queen Elizabeth’s court, for which the play was written, and Michael Pincombe has argued that its presentation of Diana is highly critical of the queen’s vehement dictation of a cult of virginity (1996: 136). The epilogue, encouraging the ladies to yield to love, certainly flies in the face of royal disapproval of sexual dalliance. Queen Elizabeth was an obvious icon for early modern women, even though her royal status made her a remarkable exception to many of the dictates concerning female behaviour. Her own desires and duties are explored in Lyly’s Sappho and Phao (1584), presented at court and then at the Blackfriars’ playhouse. In this play eroticism is combined with a less violent sense of mortality: the simple process of ageing. Bataille writes that ‘the curse of decay recoils on sexuality, which it tends to eroticise; in sexual anguish there is a sadness of death, an apprehension of death which is rather vague but which we will never be able to shake off ’ (Bataille 1997: 245). Such a cloud hangs over love in the presentation of three generations of women in the play: the young Sappho, the ageing Venus, and the ancient Sibylla. This triumvirate has much less vivacity than the maid, wife, and widow in Field’s Amends for Ladies. In Sappho and Phao it offers an oblique commentary on the queen’s sacrifice of passion in favour of duty to her country. The relationship between the rivals Venus and Sappho and the low-born ferryman Phao may contain a local allegorical meaning: it has been suggested that Phao is a portrait of the duke of Alençon, or of Robert Dudley, the earl of Leicester. Elizabeth openly displayed her affections for both but did not commit herself to marry either (Lyly 1967: 366; Reese 1942). The latter seems more likely; the play can be read as

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a melancholy retrospective commentary on Elizabeth’s troubled relationship with Leicester. The idealised ruler, Sappho, is an image of the young Elizabeth, whose unrestrained display of love for Leicester led many at court to believe he would become king in 1561–2 (Jones and White 1996). Phao’s doubts about his own ambitions – ‘can’st thou not be content to behold the sun, but thou must covet to build thy nest in the sun’ (2.4.3–5) – reiterate the suspicions surrounding Leicester’s interests in the queen. Sappho engages in a highly public, controlled flirtation with Phao. Their love scenes are stylised like graceful dances, a performance style appropriate to the boy actors but also to the court environment, where hints and allusions form a secret code of courtship. When Phao is summoned to prescribe herbs to cure Sappho’s lovesickness, for example, both princess and courtier use the word ‘yew’ with deeply flirtatious double entendre (3.4.79–89). Sappho and Phao makes the audience privy to a ladies’ world of courtly gossip, alluding to the power such women wielded behind the scenes. Ismena and Mileta and the other ladies-in-waiting point out the irony of their supposed status as the ‘weaker vessel’ (1.3.31–4). It is only by being admitted to this private feminine world, and to the royal bedchamber, that the audience can appreciate the emotional depth of Sappho’s suffering. She confesses that ‘glutting myself on the face of Phao I have made my desire more desperate’ (3.3.109), and spectators witness her struggle to suppress her passion. Her own self-penned epitaph, like that of Elizabeth, celebrates how her wisdom and honour were ‘such as love could not violate’ (3.3.121). Nevertheless, she remains physically and emotionally disturbed and ‘can take no rest’ (3.3.124–5). To soothe her passion, she asks for a lute, and ends the scene singing of a love characterised by frustration (‘prison-mates, groans, sighs and tears’, (3.3.151)), and ‘fantastic passions, vows and rhymes’ (3.3.152–3). Jean Howard has convincingly argued that playing the viol can be read as a form of female masturbation in The Roaring Girl, and in this play, where the lute performance happens on Sappho’s bed, the autoeroticism is all the more obvious (Howard 1992: 185, 189). Sappho’s song climaxes with an address to the absent Phao: ‘in thee poor Sappho lives, for thee she dies’ (3.3.161). The scene displays the pain and pleasure of a passion that must be confined behind the curtains of a lonely bed in the interests of duty. Female spectators at court or at Blackfriars may not have been bound by a queenly role or national politics, but the need to suppress one’s desires for the sake of dynastic politics was probably shared by many of them. Fantasy is the only escape route, and the prologue at court, which recommends ‘Your Highness imagine yourself to be in a deep dream’ draws explicit parallels between the dreams of Sappho and her ladies and those of the female audience (a topic discussed more fully in Chapter 38, Dreams and Dreamers). In Act 4, scene 3, Sappho’s ladies recount fantastic visions of common female experiences: passion, constancy, covetousness in marriage, and love. The dreams function as a courtly code for articulating desires and fears, simultaneously to disguise and reveal them. Sappho and Phao responds to women’s needs to release such suppressed emotions in safe narratives like the dream or like the play itself.

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Its depiction of lost love is all the more poignant in the light of what happened to the Leicester–Elizabeth relationship. Through the character of Venus, the play dramatises a bitter rivalry for Phao’s affections, which seems to comment darkly on Elizabeth’s furious reaction, in 1579, to Leicester’s clandestine marriage to Lettice Knollys. In Pliny’s Varia historia, one of Lyly’s sources, Phao is ‘hidden of Venus among lettisse [sic] which sprung up and grew very rankly’ (Lyly 1991: 154), and the jealous Venus of the play remarks ‘when I nursed thee, Sappho, with lettuce, would it had turned to hemlock’ (4.1.10–12), a poison. Venus seems to personify both Lettice, the rival who enjoys Phao, and the ageing, jealous Elizabeth, who has lost him to a ravishing beauty. The Spanish ambassador commented that Lettice was ‘one of the best-looking ladies of the court’, and Elizabeth never forgave her or allowed her to return. In 1584, the year of the play, Leicester thanked Lord Burghley for dealing ‘so friendly and honourably with my poor wife. For truly my Lord, in all reason she is hardly dealt with. God must only help it with Her Majesty’ (Perry 1990: 139, 177–8). In Sappho and Phao, jealousy dominates Venus’s comments on Sappho: Sappho forsooth, because she hath many virtues, therefore must have all the favours … Venus waxeth old … now the crow’s foot is on her eye, and the black ox hath trod on her foot. But were Sappho never so virtuous, doth she think to contend with Venus to be as amorous? Yield Phao, but yield to me, Phao. I entreat where I may command; command thou, where thou should’st entreat … Venus must play the lover and the dissembler, and therefore the dissembler because the lover. (4.2.20–30)

The ageing Venus gives voice to the fears of women governed by a culture in which physical beauty and attractiveness to the opposite sex are a measure of female selfworth. Naomi Wolf points out that women experience a double death, first of their beauty and then of their bodies. Thus, women spectators ‘in the full bloom of beauty keep a space always in mind for its diminution and loss’, and their consciousness of its fragility acts like a memento mori, keeping them subservient and maintaining in them ‘a fatalism’ more intense than that experienced by men (Wolf 1990: 80). Venus’s awareness of the death of her beauty combines with an increased sexual appetite, attesting to Bataille’s idea that the curse of decay acts as an erotic charge: ‘Venus, though she be in her latter age for years, yet is she in her nonage for affections’ (4.2.42–4). As a figure of decay and unsatisfied desire, Venus represents the nightmare of herself that Queen Elizabeth endeavoured to suppress. The aged figure of Sybilla stands as a prophetic warning that Venus’s appetites are doomed in a society where beauty, youth, and erotic magnetism are synonymous. Sibylla remembers: Gentlemen that used to sigh from their hearts for my sweet love began to point with their fingers at my withered face and laughed to see the eyes out of which fires seemed to sparkle to be succoured, being old, with spectacles. (2.1.79–83)

Powerless to recover her youth, Sibylla resembles the queen, of whom Monsieur de Maisse reported in 1597 ‘When anyone speaks of her beauty, she says that she was

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never beautiful, although she had that reputation thirty years ago. Nevertheless, she speaks of her beauty as often as she can’ (Strong and Oman 1972: 38). Sibylla can only maintain her status by remembering what is lost and by cultivating her wisdom (2.1.86–9), sharing her experiences of the ages of womanhood with the young Phao, who comes to seek her advice on courtship (2.4.61–130). Sibylla presents the third phase of life to which female spectators, among them Queen Elizabeth, all looked forward. Since women wrote from within the same language and culture, albeit from a different position, it is not surprising that connections between femininity, death, and eroticism feature in their drama. However, as Elizabeth Bronfen observed, their representations often ‘cite conventional conceptions of feminine death so as to recode these radically in such a way that death emerges as an act of autonomous self-fashioning’ (Bronfen 1992: 401). Lady Jane Lumley’s translation of Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis (c.1554), for example, rewrites virgin sacrifice as self-realisation. Iphigenia subverts the patriarchal script in which she will be sacrificed to Diana by her father (or rescued by Achilles), by actively embracing her fate. She moves out of the family into the public arena, telling her mother ‘I was not born for your sake only, but rather for the commodity [benefit] of my country’ (809). She claims subjectivity as a self-determining Greek citizen rather than as a dutiful daughter or a political pawn. Iphigenia’s choice of a sacrificial role in the public arena may have been part of the appeal of Euripides’ play to Lumley, whose own liberal Erasmian education was designed to fit her for a public sphere, an ambition she could not realise (Straznicky 2004: 23). In theatrical terms, the play’s spatial poetics likewise expand the field of legitimate female action beyond the doors of the household. Euripides’ play was innovative in demarcating the onstage, public arena and a private domestic space behind the skene or backdrop. Lumley’s translation, which continually uses an outdoor setting, highlights Iphigenia’s move into the public stage area. This may have been emphasised by its production in the outdoor banqueting house and garden of Lumley’s home, Nonsuch. Achilles, who wants to protect Iphigenia from being sacrificed, tells her mother Clytemnestra ‘it is best therefore you keep her at home’ (590–3). Iphigenia refuses to be confined, and Achilles admires the choice she makes from the position of a sovereign subject: ‘I wonder greatly at the boldness of your mind’ (840) (Findlay 2006: 74–9). A miraculous rescue by Diana allows Iphigenia to transcend the text. ‘This day your daughter hath been both alive and dead’ (954–5), the messenger tells Clytemnestra, drawing parallels with the resurrection to transform the self-sacrificing woman into a powerful, transcendent subject (Hodgson-Wright 1998). Mary Sidney’s later translation, The Tragedie of Antonie (1592), offers a gendered dramatisation of Bataille’s idea that ‘consciousness of death is essentially self-consciousness’ (Bataille 1997: 244). It explores suicide as a form of self-dissolution and self-realisation in parallel plots tracing the fates of Antonie and Cleopatra. The two lovers are never brought together on stage, so the primary dramatic confrontation is with death itself. For Sidney this was a pertinent topic. The drama is one of several

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works on mortality she produced after the deaths of her brother Philip (d. 1587), her father and mother (d. 1586), and her daughter Katherine (d.,1584). Her translation of The Tragedie of Antonie celebrates death as a maternal force. At the beginning of the play, Antonie sees desire and death as bound together destructively. He believes Cleopatra has betrayed him to Caesar and her ‘heart-killing love shall burn me last’ (1.140). Cleopatra becomes a fatally consuming power like death itself when Antonie imagines her ‘evermore / Gaping for our great empire’s government’ (3.21–2). Her love dissolves his military and heroic masculinity, as is clear when Lucilius compares the fate of Antonie and his divine ancestor Hercules, whose subjection to Omphale took the form of shameful, infantile effeminisation (3.347–68). The consuming nature of female desire and its power to dissolve masculine selfhood is linked closely to ‘the analogy between earth and mother, and with it, that of death and birth, or death-conception and birth-resurrection. Death is here conceptualised as the return to symbiotic unity, to peace before the difference and tension of life, to the protective enclosure before individuation and culturation’ (Bronfen 1992: 65). Once Antonie has resolved on suicide, death becomes a maternal embrace giving ‘healthful succour’ (3.393). The Chorus at the end of Act 3 points out: What goddess else more mild than she To bury all our pain can be, What remedy more pleasing? Our pained hearts when dolour stings, And nothing rest, or respite brings, What help have we more easing? (3.399–404)

From her first appearance, Cleopatra is indifferent to her fate, declaring she will follow Antonie both ‘Dead and alive’ (2.308). Dramatic conflict in the Egyptian scenes comes with Cleopatra’s worldly duties rather than with death. Her attendants, citing her responsibilities to the kingdom, her dynasty, and to herself as an individual, claim that complete self-abandonment to Antonie is self-abuse. However, Cleopatra shows no qualms about dissolving herself into him: charmian: cleopatra:

Our first affection to ourself is due He is my self. (2.350–1)

The strength of her passion outweighs arguments that it is ‘Ill done to lose yourself ’ (2.313), especially since Diomede’s description of Cleopatra’s beauty and the reasons for preserving it are suspicious. His admiration for ‘the alabaster covering of her face’ and ‘her fair hair, the fiery and flaming gold’ (2.477–80), objectifies Cleopatra even though she can use these attributes, like Queen Elizabeth, to communicate with kings and ‘Answer to each in his own language make’ (2.488). Since Caesar hopes his glori-

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ous triumph in Rome ‘by her presence beautified may be’ (4.366), the idea of using her beauty to win his support seems futile. The play asks pertinent questions about the relationship between self-image and the exploitation of female beauty. Cleopatra’s duties to her children present a more serious challenge to her death wish, especially since they appear on stage in Act 5. They become a focus for her betrayal of her kingdom, her dynasty, and the future in order to gratify her own desires (5.11–14). The plot’s structure gives Cleopatra and her words final authority. Since her death follows that of Antonie and takes place after he has been pulled up into her monument, the play reverses the conventional paradigm in which the male anatomist scrutinises the passive, beautiful female corpse. Cleopatra gives her final speeches over his dead body. From a dominant position, the male anatomist normally eroticises the female body as a ‘defensive reinscription of gender in the face of gender’s destruction through death’, since ‘death exposes the cultural composition of gender itself ’ (Traub 1996: 50). In Sidney’s play, however, it is the queen who triumphantly eroticises the corpse of her dead lover: To die with thee and dying thee embrace; My body joined with thine, my mouth with thine, My mouth, whose moisture-burning sighs have dried To be in one self tomb, and one self chest, And wrapped with thee in one self sheet to rest. (5.172–6)

The still living Cleopatra enacts the maternal embrace of death and pleasure, undoing the boundaries between male and female, active and passive, loss and self-fulfilment that have troubled the characters throughout the tragedy. Much more so than in Shakespeare’s play, the ambiguity of the final lines brings together the two ends of the spectrum held within the mother’s/lover’s arms: O neck, O arms, O hands, O breast where death (O mischief) comes to choke up vital breath. A thousand kisses, thousand, thousand more Let you my mouth for honour’s farewell give, That in this office weak my limbs may grow, Fainting on you, and forth my soul may flow. (5.203–8)

It is unclear which kind of death is represented here. Ecstatic physical pleasure and mortality are beautifully combined to create, for the audience, a play of imagination which ‘allows one to guess at the figure of death beneath that of love, and a desire, which allows one to misrecognise death because what is visibly figured is not death itself but its double, love’ (Bronfen 1992: 63). Sidney creates a sense of infinity that looks to future growth as well as to mortality, and these final lines carry an extra authority as Cleopatra’s ‘dying’ words. The power of female creativity grows out of

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the weak limbs, so that woman’s soul can flow forth from death, as Philip Sidney’s death had been the catalyst for Mary’s independent literary creativity. Sidney’s challenge to the conventional boundaries of life and death, male and female, has an important afterlife in her niece Lady Mary Wroth’s play Love’s Victory, which stages love’s victory over death through an unlikely combination of Diana’s chastity and Venus’s maternal passion. Like Lumley’s Iphigenia, Wroth’s play also moves beyond the boundaries of the household to outside settings (Findlay 2006: 83–94). A striking difference in representations of the liminal point between life and death is seen by comparing The Tragedie of Antonie to Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed With Kindness (1603), where a prolonged female death is central to the dramatic effect. Heywood’s text elongates the spectacle of female guilt and sacrifice enacted by Bellafront and Lady Honor in Nathan Field’s plays. While Mary Sidney presents the dead Antonie as a spectacle, Heywood sets up the adulterous Anne Frankford for anatomic scrutiny by the audience. Anne is a sacrifice to her own desires and to the power of homosocial bonding which allows Wendoll to be welcomed to her husband’s bed almost as easily as to his table (Findlay 1999: 157–9). When Frankford surprises the lovers in bed, Anne begins the process of self-erasure, which will culminate in her physical death. ‘I am no more your wife’ (13.83) she tells Frankford, already looking forward to her role as a morbid spectacle in her plea that he will not injure her body or face: For womanhood – to which I am a shame, Though once an ornament – even for His sake That hath redeemed our souls, mark not my face Nor hack me with your sword but let me go Perfect and undeformèd to my tomb … as an abject this one suit I crave, This granted I am ready for my grave. (13.96–105)

This is a far cry from Lady Perfect’s angry rejection of male behaviour and cultural misrepresentations of women in Field’s Amends for Ladies. Having polluted the identity of living wife, Anne reconstructs herself as a perfect corpse, an ornament in death. An opposition between physical mutilation and spiritual purity continues bizarrely in her wish to pay for the sins of the flesh by having her hands cut off, her breasts seared, and her body whipped and tortured (13.134–8). She imagines a martyrdom of physical suffering to restore her soul’s purity. However, at the hands of a husband determined to martyr her with kindness, she is given physical comfort and is psychologically tortured by being deprived of her identity as wife and mother. She appeals to women in the audience to ‘make me your instance’ and preserve their chastity, since ‘when you tread awry, / Your sins like mine will on your conscience lie’ (13.143–4). The only escape from her suffering is physical self-abuse, in the form of suicide by starvation. Anne martyrs herself, slowly and painfully.

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Anne Frankford’s death is a public event in which her neighbours and the audience witness her physical self-erasure. Starvation atones for her past sins since, as her neighbours testify, her illness has not left enough blood in her face to let her blush. To Anne, sickness is ‘a friend my fault would hide’ (17.59–60). Only in this abject state can she win back the names of wife and mother and the love of her husband. Frankford tells her that her honour is fatally wounded, yet by her self-induced death she will become ‘honest in heart’ (17.120). The liminal point between life and death becomes a second marriage. Anne simultaneously asserts and annihilates herself, declaring ‘Once more thy wife, dies thus embracing thee’ (17.122). Bataille declares that ‘of all the luxuries of life, human life is the most extravagantly expensive, that, finally, an increased apprehension of death, when life’s security wears thin, is the highest level of ruinous refinement’ (Bataille 1997: 246). Heywood’s A Woman Killed With Kindness stages female death as a shamefully expensive form of ruinous refinement under rigid moral and social codes. Anne’s life has literally been wasted by Frankford’s strict adherence to conventional morality and Anne’s inability to imagine herself outside the social roles of wife and mother prescribed by patriarchy. While, in Mary Sidney’s text, Cleopatra’s soul ‘flows forth’ in a tide where desire and death blend into one another, Heywood’s heroine dies as a moral spectacle, a wasted living corpse, subsumed into her husband. In contrast to this slow murder by ‘kindness’, Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam (first performed 1604/6) dramatises the impetuous and violent execution of a wife in a world haunted by ghostly presences. Elisabeth Bronfen points out that ‘death and femininity both involve the uncanny return of the repressed, the excess beyond the text which the latter aims at stabilising by having signs and images represent’ (1992: xii). In Cary’s play, the first original tragedy to be written by an Englishwoman, the repeated images of death, resurrection, and disruptive feminine power, play out the return of the repressed for male and female characters and, beyond them, the readers or spectators for whom Cary wrote.2 At the beginning of the play, Herod’s supposed death offers an escape route from destructive forms of possession. Mariam feels a revival of the love she bore him ‘when virgin freedom left me unrestrained’ (1.1.72). The sons of Baba, whom Herod sentenced to death, are secretly preserved by Constabarus and can now ‘from your living tomb depart’ to reanimate their honour (2.2.31). Salome, who had betrayed her first husband to execution, now plans to take a more humane way of disposing of her second husband, by rewriting Mosaic law and divorcing him. She determines to become a proto-feminist ‘custom breaker’ who will ‘show my sex the way to freedom’s door’ (1.4.49–50). This is an exciting moment of possibility, and ideas of female autonomy return to haunt the men in the latter part of the play. There is, however, little sense of unity between the female characters, even in the first two acts. Mariam, Alexandra, and Salome are aggressively competitive, calling on their respective forefathers to assert their rights of command in Judea and adopting patriarchal and racist attitudes to slander each other (1.3). The ghostly presence of Herod’s authority is still felt. His command to murder Mariam in the event of his

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own death ominously predicts an extension of that husbandly authority from beyond the grave. Herod’s return in Act 4 is a most striking resurrection, an uncanny return of the oppressive past. Salome can no longer divorce Constabarus and so plots his death by revealing to Herod his preservation of Baba’s sons, who have been reborn only to be re-condemned to execution. Constabarus responds with a remarkable misogynistic curse on the ‘wavering crew’ (4.6.33) of female spectators: You giddy creatures, sowers of debate, You’ll love today, and for no other cause, But for yesterday you did deeply hate. You are the wreck of order, breach of laws, Your best are foolish, froward, wanton, vain; Your worst adulterous, murderous, cunning, proud … You are with nought but wickedness imbued. (4.6.51–6, 68)

This speech is totally uncharacteristic of Constabarus, a figure whose restrained response to cuckoldry has won at least a degree of audience sympathy and respect. It is easy to understand his anger against Salome, but why Elizabeth Cary should risk giving him such a tirade against womankind is intriguing. His disgust at the sex in general is shared by Baba’s sons, and seems to be a response to death itself, rather than betrayal. The second son declares: Come let us to our death. Are we not blest? Our death will freedom from these creatures give – The trouble-quiet sowers of unrest. (4.6.73–5)

The attempt to imagine an all-male paradise betrays an underlying fear of woman’s power as the giver of life and death. Salome’s betrayal is only the shadow of a much greater threat to masculine self-assertion, the uncertainty of life and certainty of death, iconically figured as feminine, since Eve is the source of the curse of mortality seen in ‘all your sex’ through the burden of childbirth: ‘Because in paradise you did offend’ (4.6). Female sexual inconstancy, of which Salome is guilty and for which Mariam is killed, makes patrilineal identity uncertain from birth onwards, and Constabarus and the sons of Baba are heading back to a dissolution of selfhood in the womb/tomb from which they emerged. Their bonds of idealised male friendship are brittle as they move irrevocably towards the feminine embrace of death. Women are ‘trouble-quiet sowers of unrest’ whose presence constantly reminds the men of the mortal cycle that makes their dominance so fragile. By showing how misogyny erupts from the mouth of a condemned man, the play highlights and seeks to explain the traditional prejudice against which seventeenth-century women were obliged to construct themselves.

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Even blame for Herod’s murder of Mariam is displaced onto the female population. Constabarus defines women spectators or readers as a fatal presence: ‘you yourselves will Mariam’s life bereave’ (4.6.35). The immediate cause of Mariam’s death is Salome’s plotting, and Herod says, ‘hadst thou not made Herod unsecure / I had not doubted Mariam’s innocence’ (4.7.158–9). In spite of Salome’s proto-feminist declarations of autonomy (1.4.36), she is far more wedded to patriarchal authority than she admits. For Salome (and also for Alexandra), Herod’s reappearance signals the return of a repressed dedication to patriarchy in which women compete for the attentions of the most powerful men in order to exercise their influence. Salome’s villainous success offers a pessimistic message to female spectators about how to succeed. Mariam is the antithesis of Salome and Alexandra in refusing to perform Herod’s script as a means to direct it covertly. Indeed, Rosemary Kegl (1999) reads Herod’s return as an invasion of the women’s closet drama with elements of the public stage. Mariam refuses to play according to this script. She knows she could ‘enchain him with a smile / And lead him captive with a gentle word’ (3.3.45–6), but chooses to sacrifice herself for the cause of female self-integrity. By appearing in ‘dusky habits’ (4.3.4) before the reborn Herod, she dedicates herself to death as well as to the memories of her brother and grandfather. The Tragedy of Mariam rewrites the aesthetic relationship between femininity and death as female complicity with death. Mariam is not represented on stage as a beautiful corpse, a spectacle that guarantees male ownership. Instead, the text reiterates Mariam’s absence by the male reports of her death. Even these reports fail to fix her as the object of a male gaze. Herod describes her as ‘heaven’s model’ (4.7.93), an ‘inestimable jewel’ (5.1.19), but the Nuntio reports, ‘her look did seem to keep the world in awe’ (5.1.27). By returning the look of ‘the curious gazing troop’ (5.21), and picking out the Nuntio in particular (5.60–2), she fractures the framing technique that would contain her. Mariam’s prison speech shows how she has abandoned faith in her beauty, recognising that it has little power against Herod’s misguided will or the indifferent hand of death: Now Death will teach me: he can pale as well A cheek of roses, as a cheek less bright, And dim an eye whose shine doth most excel, As soon as one that casts a meaner light. (4.8.5–8)

Like her heroine, Elizabeth Cary, as author, appears to surrender to ‘Death’ in terms of erasing a subversive female voice, in favour of more traditional inscriptions of female identity. The character who chose to tell her husband ‘My lord I suit my garment to my mind’ (4.3.5) is reduced to a silence characteristic of female modesty. Mariam is given no dramatic scaffold-speech with which to challenge Herod. Her words and actions are ventriloquised through the words of the male characters who elevate her into the image of a silent saint. However, that silence is also a ‘rhetoric of death’

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(Bronfen 1992: 406) beyond representation. Mariam’s complete absence from the end of the text allows her to escape from the specular economy that would define her as the mirror image of her husband. Dod and Cleaver’s very popular conduct book A Godly Form of Household Government (1598), pointed out that ‘as the looking-glass, howsoever fair and beautifully adorned, is nothing worth if it show that countenance sad which is pleasant; or the same pleasant that is sad: so the woman deserveth no commendation that, as it were, contrarying her husband when he is merry, showeth herself sad, or in sadness uttereth her mirth’ (Aughterson 1995: 81). Herod thinks of Mariam in these terms: A precious mirror made by wondrous art, I prized it ten times dearer than my crown, And laid it up fast folded in my heart, Yet I in sudden choler cast it down And pashed it all to pieces. (5.1.125–9)

It is not just Herod but Cary who has smashed the mirror of feminine representation by removing her heroine from the end of the play. Complicity with the physical realities of death provides another important escape from a possessive male framework. When Mariam’s execution is reported by the Nuntio, Herod’s response is bizarre:

nuntio: herod:

Is’t possible my Mariam should be dead? Is there no trick to make her breathe again? Her body is divided from her head. Why yet methinks there might be found, by art, Strange ways of cure. ’Tis sure rare things are done By an inventive head, and willing heart. (5.88–93)

As well as indicating Herod’s unbalanced mind, this potentially comic moment also speaks critically to the scriptures and conduct books commanding wifely subjection. Citing Ephesians 5:22 and 1 Corinthians 11 and 14:34–5, Dod and Cleaver claimed ‘the husband is by God’s ordinance the wife’s head … so must the wife also submit and apply herself to the discretion and will of her husband, even as the government and conduct of everything resteth in the head, not in the body … she shall have no other direction or will, but what may depend upon her head’ (Aughterson 1995: 80–1). Mariam’s execution has literally and metaphorically divided her body from her head. By losing her head, she has won freedom from the discretion and will of her husband and is no longer subject to his government. Beyond death and representation, it is impossible to know what direction her ‘body’ and will may take. Herod’s macabre idea of putting the two back together is a desperate attempt to re-create her as a ‘willing heart’ who will obey the schemes of his own invention. Cary’s play conceals

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Mariam safely in the realm of death, beyond appropriation and misrepresentation. Like Lumley’s Iphigenia and Sidney’s Tragedie of Antonie, it demonstrates the skill of women dramatists in re-presenting death as a feminine form that exceeds the cultural models designed to reinforce a violent hierarchy of sexual difference.

Notes 1 2

All references are to the edition by Cerasano and Wynne-Davies (Sidney 1996). Although no records of a seventeenth-century production have survived, it is obvious that the text was written with performance in mind.

See Findlay, Hodgson-Wright, and Williams (1999a and 1999b). Good analyses of the interaction between public and private spaces in the text are offered by Karen Raber (2001).

References and Further Reading Aughterson, Kate (ed.) (1995). Renaissance Woman: Constructions of Femininity in Renaissance England, A Sourcebook. London: Routledge. Bataille, Georges (1997). The Bataille Reader, ed. Fred Botting and Scott Wilson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Bronfen, Elisabeth (1992). Over Her Dead Body: Death, Femininity and the Aesthetic. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Cary, Elizabeth Tanfield (2000). The Tragedy of Mariam (1613), ed. Stephanie J. Wright. Peterborough, Canada: Broadview Press. Dutton, Richard (2002). ‘The Revels Office and the boy companies 1600–1613: new perspectives’. English Literary Renaissance, 32, 324– 51. Field, Nathan (1612). A Woman is a Weathercock. London. Field, Nathan (1618). Amends for Ladies. London. Findlay, Alison (1999). A Feminist Perspective on Renaissance Drama. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Findlay, Alison (2006). Playing Spaces in Early Women’s Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Findlay, Alison, Stephanie Hodgson-Wright, and Gweno Williams (1999a). ‘ “The play is ready to be acted”: women and dramatic production 1570–1670’. Women’s Writing, 6/1, 129–48. Findlay, Alison, Stephanie Hodgson-Wright, and Gweno Williams (1999b). Women and Dramatic Production 1550–1670: Plays in Performance.

Video. Lancaster: Lancaster University Television Unit. Findlay, Alison, Stephanie Hodgson-Wright, and Gweno Williams (2000) Women and Dramatic Production 1550–1700. Harlow: Pearson Education. Freud, Sigmund (1950). Beyond the Pleasure Principle, ed. James Strachey. London: Hogarth Press. Gurr, Andrew (1987). Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hannay, Margaret P. (1990). Philip’s Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Heywood, Thomas (1961). A Woman Killed With Kindness, ed. R. W. Van Fossen. London: Methuen. Hodgson-Wright, Stephanie (1998). ‘Jane Lumley’s Iphigenia at Aulis: multum in parvo, or Less is More’. In S. P. Cerasano and Marion WynneDavies (eds.), Readings in Renaissance Women’s Drama: Criticism, History, and Performance 1594– 1998 (pp. 129–41). London: Routledge. Howard, Jean E. (1992), ‘Sex and social conflict: the erotics of The Roaring Girl’. In Susan Zimmerman (ed.), Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage (pp. 170–90). London: Routledge. Kathman, D. (2004), ‘Grocers, goldsmiths and drapers: freemen and apprentices in the Elizabethan theatre’. Shakespeare Quarterly, 55/1, 1–49.

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Kathman, D. (2005), ‘How old were Shakespeare’s boy actors?’ Shakespeare Survey, 59, 220–46. Kegl, Rosemary (1999). ‘Theaters, households and a “kind of history” in Elizabeth Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam’. In Viviana Comensoli and Anne Russell (eds.), Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage (pp. 135–53). Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Irigaray, Luce (1981). ‘Ce sexe qui n’est pas un’. In Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (eds.), New French Feminisms (pp. 99–106). Brighton: Harvester. Jones, Norman and Paul Whitefield White (1996). ‘Gorboduc and royal marriage politics’. English Literary Renaissance, 26, 3–16. Lumley, Jane (1998). The Tragedie of Iphigenia (c.1557–9). In Three Tragedies by Renaissance Women, ed. Diane Purkiss (pp. 1–35). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Lyly, John (1967). Gallathea. In The Complete Works of John Lyly, ed. R. Warwick Bond, vol. 2. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Lyly, John (1991). Sappho and Phao. In Campaspe and Sappho and Phao, ed. George K. Hunter and David Bevington (pp. 141–300). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mann, David (2008). Shakespeare’s Women: Performance and Conception. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McMillin, Scott (2004). ‘The sharer and his boy: rehearsing Shakespeare’s women’. In Peter Holland and Stephen Orgel (eds.), From Script to Stage in Early Modern England (pp. 231–45). Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Perry, Maria (1990). The Word of A Prince: A Life of Elizabeth I from Contemporary Documents. Woodbridge: Boydell Press.

Pincombe, Michael (1996). The Plays of John Lyly: Eros and Eliza. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Raber, Karen (2001), Dramatic Difference: Gender, Class and Genre in the Early Modern Closet Drama. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Reese, Gertrude (1942). ‘The question of succession in Elizabethan drama’. University of Texas Studies in English, 12, 75. Rutter, Carol Chillington (2001). Enter the Body: Women and Representation on Shakespeare’s Stage. London: Routledge. Sidney Herbert, Mary (1996). The Tragedy of Antonie (1595). In Renaissance Drama by Women: Texts and Documents, ed. S. P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies (pp. 13–42). London: Routledge. Straznicky, Marta (2004). Privacy, Playreading and Women’s Closet Drama 1550–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strong, Roy and Julia Trevelyan Oman (1972). Elizabeth R. London: Book Club Associates. Traub, Valerie (1996). ‘Gendering mortality in early modern anatomies’. In Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan, and Dympna Callaghan (eds.), Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects (pp. 44–92). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Webster, John (2009). The Duchess of Malfi, ed. John Russell Brown. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Wolf, Naomi (1990). The Beauty Myth. London: Chatto & Windus. Wroth, Mary (c.1614–16), Love’s Victory. In Renaissance Drama by Women: Texts and Documents, ed. S. P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies (pp. 90–126). London: Routledge.

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Political Plays Stephen Longstaffe

All Renaissance English drama is political with a small ‘p’. Each play, each performance of a play, and each understanding of a play (then and now) exists within a network of political significances: gender, nationality, sexuality, ‘race’, ‘class’ are on display even if political power itself is not. There is a politics of conventionality as well as of subversion. Some critics have claimed that the London theatre was a particularly free, and therefore significant, cultural phenomenon; situated at the capital’s unruly geographical and symbolic margins, it had a liberty ‘at once moral, ideological, and topological – a freedom to experiment with a wide range of available ideological perspectives and to realise, in dramatic form, the cultural contradictions of the age’ (Mullaney 1998: ix–x). This freedom sometimes produced subversive plays – ‘radical tragedy’ – demystifying political and power relations, interrogating providentialism and the essentialist subjectivity it entails (Dollimore 1984: 4). Demystification, in turn, was not merely Brechtian show business; after all, you cannot kill a real king without it. David Scott Kastan argues that, In setting English kings before an audience of commoners, the theater nourished the cultural conditions that eventually permitted the nation to bring its king to trial, not because the theater approvingly represented subversive acts but rather because representation itself became subversive. Whatever their overt ideological content, history plays inevitably, if unconsciously, weakened the structure of authority: on stage the king became a subject – the subject of the author’s imaginings and the subject of the attention and judgement of an audience of subjects. (Kastan 1999: 111)

Louis Montrose extends Kastan’s point to encompass a theatre whose power did not lie in the explicit advocacy of specific political positions but rather in the implicit but pervasive suggestion – inhering in the basic modalities of theatrical representation and dramatic conflict – that all such positions are relationally located and circumstantially shaped and that they are motivated by the passions and interests of

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their advocates. In this precise and limited sense, Shakespearean drama as enacted in the Elizabethan theatre formally contested the dominant ideological assertions of the Elizabethan state. (Montrose 1996: 105)

Other accounts draw very different conclusions about what the theatre’s marginality meant, and how much it contested or subverted the state or the structure of authority. Alan Somerset questions Mullaney’s assumption that the area outside London’s walls conferred a kind of transgressive marginality on both the new theatres built there and on playing itself. He argues that theatre-builders operated on the margins of London simply because taxes were less and land was cheaper there, and that the predominant associations of the environs were therefore commercial. Burbage’s and Brayne’s decision to locate the Theatre on the south bank of the Thames in 1576 was similar to decisions in any modern city, observable as one drives ‘towards the country through the inevitable ring of shopping malls, golf driving ranges, bigbox retail outlets, car dealerships, garden centers, and what have you, by which the land makes a good income, often temporarily while awaiting more intensive development’ (Somerset, 1999: 53–4). Paul Yachnin argues that producing plays we can now read as subversive was not in itself a subversive act, and that though ‘between about 1590 and 1625, the stage persistently represented the issues of the moment … these representations were usually seen to subsist in a field of discourse isolated from the real world … such representations were seen as incapable of intervening in the political arena’ (Yachnin 1997: 3). The theatre was undoubtedly free; but it was not significant. Certainly the London theatre was tolerated, in sharp contrast to the determined suppression of the great civic religious play cycles of the sixteenth century. Transgressive players or writers were sometimes punished; but these punishments were mild compared to, for example, the Privy Council’s arrest and torture of the playwright Thomas Kyd in 1593 on suspicion of stirring up anti-immigrant sentiments (Yachnin 1997: 90–1). Yachnin’s concern with actual responses (or non-responses) to plays (what was ‘usually seen’) seems incompatible with Montrose or Kastan’s downplaying of ‘overt ideological content’ or ‘explicit advocacy’ and their focus on the deep structural functions of the theatre (operating, for example, on the level of ‘formal contestation’). We have enough responses to particular plays, and to the theatre more generally, to know that contemporaries thought about both. It is possible to find some common ground between the two in the concept of genre, through which both necessarily conscious response and its not necessarily conscious conditions can be explored. Contemporary responses would have drawn a distinction, as we do, between plays that are political and plays that are about politics, and it is the latter category of political plays that this essay will explore. The broad generic distinction through which I will read political drama is that between plays with historical and those with fictional subject matter. Any play focusing strongly on a past polity is a history play, whether the polity be Old Testament, Greek, Roman, pagan, popish or Anglican, English, British, or near-contemporaneous European. In non-theatrical political dis-

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course, at one end of the spectrum is writing focusing on precedent, predominantly biblical, but secondarily European political history. Much political writing on the law, the constitution, and religion is of this nature. At the other end of the spectrum is the political writing which makes use of invented polities such as pastoral, romance, and fable. The distinction between fictional and historical subject matter is important because discourse on politics, as opposed to the polity, was predominantly historically based. Guidance on practical politics was sought in case histories rather than fiction or religious principle (Kewes 2006). The reverse was also true. Historiography, in whatever mode, was often read for its applications to, or as a comment upon, contemporary politics, that is to say the political actions of living and influential people. Elizabeth Tudor was Deborah or Richard II. The earl of Essex was Henry IV, Philotas, or Jack Cade. Of course, it was possible to interpret fiction as indirect commentary on politics but, unlike history, it was not automatically read for its political application. One sign that the history play as defined above was carefully read for such applications is the regulatory attention it attracted. Though the evidence is not always conclusive, it suggests that the history play was far more censored than any other dramatic genre, and certainly more so than other political genres such as tragedy; the only element of comparable concern to the Master of the Revels was personal satire (Hadfield 2001). Many critics of the history play continue to be misled by Thomas Nashe’s famous comment in Piers Penniless on Shakespeare’s 1 Henry VI: How it would have joyed brave Talbot, the terror of the French, to think that after he had lain two hundred years in his tomb, he should triumph again on the stage and have his bones new embalmed with the tears of ten thousand spectators at least (at several times), who, in the tragedian that represents his person, imagine they behold him fresh bleeding. (Nashe 1958: I, 212)

Nashe proposes that this kind of empathetic response to realism leads brave spirits to emulate the heroes of the past. But this is not the only response he reports. Talbot is deployed as part of a wider critique of the wrong kind of response to such a scene, and the attitudes from which it springs. What talk I to them of immortality, that are the only underminers of honour, and do envy any man that is not sprung up by base brokery like themselves? They care not if all the ancient houses were rooted out, so that … they might share the government amongst them … and be quarter-masters of our monarchy … if you tell them what a glorious thing it is to have Henry the Fifth represented upon the stage, leading the French king prisoner, and forcing both him and the Dolphin to swear fealty, ‘Aye, but,’ will they say, ‘what do we get by it?’, respecting neither the right of fame that is due to true nobility deceased, nor what hopes of eternity are to be proposed to adventurous minds, to encourage them forward, but only their execrable lucre, and filthy, unquenchable avarice. (Nashe 1958: I, 213)

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The conflict Nashe notes is played out in many history plays, in which power is contested via forms of display. In the first scene of Marlowe’s Edward II (1593), the king’s favourite, Gaveston, fantasises classical scenarios to accompany Edward’s everyday routines; these entertainments are later said by Mortimer Junior to have ‘drawn thy treasury dry and made thee weak’ (1.1.50–71, 2.2.158). Gaveston himself, according to Mortimer, ‘wears a short Italian hooded cloak / Larded with pearl, and in his Tuscan cap / A jewel of more value than the crown’ (1.4.412–14). Gaveston’s preferred forms of display are Italianate (foreign, fashionable, and implicitly effeminate). On going to war, his troops are said to have ‘marched like players, / With garish robes, not armour’ (2.2.182–3); he himself is said to have been ‘bedaubed with gold’ and covered in women’s favours (2.2.184–6). G. K. Hunter’s comment on Edward II nicely points up the conflict of styles in the plays; the King would turn ‘a feudal warriors’ hall into a Renaissance pleasure dome’ (Hunter 1997: 197). Against the court’s ‘pleasure dome’ is set a different kind of display, based in the forms of power of the ancient houses. On Gaveston’s return, the nobles express their opinion of him via their shield devices for the king’s celebratory triumph: Pliny reports there is a flying fish Which all the other fishes deadly hate, And therefore, being pursued, it takes the air; No sooner it is up, but there’s a fowl That seizeth it; this fish, my lord, I bear; The motto this: Undique mors est. [‘On all sides there is death’] (2.2.23–8)

The king, exasperated, protests ‘Can you in words make show of amity / And in your shields display your rancorous minds?’ (2.2.32–3). But the barons’ choice of this chivalric rather than courtly channel for communication in itself signifies. Even a herald is identified in a stage direction as ‘from the Barons, with his coat of arms’ (3.1.151). The play ends with a resolution of the contest between the two kinds of power-in-display. The young Edward III’s coronation begins with a ritual exchange with his Champion, whom he toasts (though the ceremony is interrupted by the haling in of his uncle Kent, prior to his execution). The play ends with another ceremony, the young king commanding, as Mortimer’s head is brought in by an attendant, ‘Go fetch my father’s hearse, where it shall lie, / And bring my funeral robes’ (5.6.3–4). These traditional ceremonies – however compromised by their context – offer some closure to the play’s visual contestations. The anonymous play Woodstock (not printed, possibly never performed), survives in a manuscript marked by the censor. The play stages the conflict between great nobles and a young Richard II, focused on Richard’s defiance, and eventual disposal, of his uncle Woodstock, in which display metonymically signifies the difference between the two sides. On his first entry, Woodstock is specified as ‘in frieze’, a plain woollen cloth. When the Duke of York chides him for ‘this country habit / For which the coarse and vulgar call your grace / By th’title of Plain Thomas’, calling for him to be

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seen ‘in bravery’, Woodstock replies ‘My heart in this plain frieze sits true and right’ (1.1.197–9, 201, 203). In the next scene before the king, dressed in ‘bravery’, Woodstock makes plain how fashionable attire is paid for: There’s honest plain dealing in my t’other hose. Should this fashion last I must raise new rents, Undo my poor tenants, turn away my servants, And guard myself with lace; nay, sell more land And lordships too, by th’ rood. Hear me, King Richard: If thus I jet in pride, I still shall lose; But I’ll build castles in my t’other hose. (1.3.103–9)

Luxury in this play is not, as in Edward II, particularly un-English; rather, it signifies a willingness to extort money from subjects in order to satisfy trivial wants. The finery of Richard and his cronies indicates their willingness to tax and tax again. One direction specifies they enter ‘very richly attired in new fashions’ (3.1.1). Whole days are spent in devising these fashions; Richard says he will ride ‘through London only to be gazed at’. Woodstock, meanwhile, is mistaken for a groom by a courtier, whose explanation of his shoe with a chain linking toe and knee mocks both the fashion and the courtier’s misplaced ingenuity: For these two parts, being in operation and quality different, as for example: the toe a disdainer, or spurner: the knee a dutiful and most humble orator; this chain doth, as it were, so toeify the knee and so kneeify the toe, that between both it makes a most methodical coherence, or coherent method. (3: 2, 217–21)

As with Edward II, the dissonant styles of clothing and attitudes towards display display indicate an underlying political division, which eventually leads to the nobles taking the field against the king. Woodstock himself is captured during a masque put on by Richard and his minions ‘like Diana’s knights, in green, with horns about their necks and boar-spears in their hands’, and carried out disguised in a masquing suit and vizard, to be murdered soon afterwards. This brief discussion shows the ways in which history plays refract aspects of late Elizabethan social contestation (here exemplified in Nashe’s comparison) through late medieval politics. This practice both historicises (by showing the specificity of late medieval forms) and universalises (because sometimes such specificity is no obstacle to posing a direct equivalence). Understanding political plays involves a kind of ‘double vision’, seeing the world of the play in its relation to your own world. The ‘Talbot effect’ Nashe describes involves mourning (which necessitates an immersion in the play-world) but also nostalgia and anger at contemporary attitudes (which require a distance from that world). The kind of comic interaction between Woodstock and the courtier analysed above is not unusual in history plays. What is unusual is the involvement of a noble, for

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comedy tends to be confined to commons characters. Most history plays present a mixed polity, in which at least the wishes of the commons are a material factor, even if only expressed through intermediaries. In addition, whether they have power or not within the world of the play, comic commoners could affect an audience as profoundly as a Talbot. Richard Helgerson splits history plays between those focusing upon the problematics of kingship and those concerned with an equally problematic subjecthood, in which, ‘caught between their loyalty to the crown and their adherence to a set of values that the crown regularly violated, the protagonists of the Henslowe history plays repeatedly find themselves forced into making choices where either alternative is equally ruinous’ (Helgerson 1992: 239). These ruinous choices are often gendered, one of the crown’s regular transgressions being the desire of the monarch for a married woman subject. Helgerson’s split between plays focused on monarch and on subjection, while subject to qualification, is a useful reminder that the stage’s concern with political agency extended to the problems posed by its lack. Not all political problems found a ready mirror in the political history of late medieval England. Roman political plays offered the example of a civilisation in which rhetoric and the arts were embedded, and whose own history – as mediated through these arts, rather than through chronicles – was a basic reference point for political action. In contrast, the history play offered a model of society in which this kind of participatory political culture was peripheral at best. Ben Jonson’s Sejanus (1603), set in Rome during Tiberius’ reign, focuses on the rise and fall of the emperor’s favourite, Sejanus. Jonson’s Rome self-consciously takes its own past for a touchstone. Even Sejanus, describing the faction and discontent in the city, says ‘Our city’s now / Divided, as in time o’th’civil war’ (2.369–70). This sense of a past ‘Rome’ as a living political presence is strongly presented in two scenes. One is the accusation of the historian Cordus in the senate, midway through the play. The other is the very first scene, in which Jonson shows how ‘Rome’ enables political action in Rome. The opposition to Tiberius is informed by a sense of a more equitable past, as Silius says: We, that (within these fourscore years) were born Free, equal lords of the triumphed world, And knew no masters but affections, To which betraying first our liberties, We since become the slaves to one man’s lusts. (1.59–63)

But given this sense of a divided political culture, publicly presenting the past by writing a history is immediately shown potentially to implicate the writer in factional politics. Cordus’ work deals with this past, and even though no character knows his own opinions – whether he is ‘or Drusian? or Germanican? / Or ours? or neutral?’ (1.80–1) – Natta comments that ‘Those times are somewhat queasy to be touched’ (1.82).

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The play is fundamentally concerned with tyranny, and Jonson’s placing of historiography as one of the first subjects mentioned is explained when Tiberius, in his first speech to the senate, refers to the historical record as the only thing that a prince cannot manipulate. ‘Fame’ (the verdict of history) is ultimately the only thing the tyrant fears; when he no longer cares about fame, there is no barrier to his actions. After praying to the gods to inspire him, Tiberius asks ‘men’ to vouchsafe us after death An honourable mention, and fair praise, T’accompany our actions, and our name. The rest of greatness princes may command, And (therefore) may neglect; only a long, A lasting, high, and happy memory They should, without being satisfied, pursue. Contempt of fame begets contempt of virtue. (1.495–502)

The stability of the historical record asserted by Tiberius is later shown to be contingent and manipulable. Cordus is accused before the senate, and his books are ordered to be burned. Though he is not linked to either faction in the state, Cordus’ subject matter is ‘queasy’ because it is appropriable by either. In the first scene, Sabinus asserts that there are no parallels between Cordus’ subject and the present (‘But these our times / Are not the same’, 1.85–6), to which Arruntius retorts that the times are, but the men are not: ‘we are base, / Poor, and degenerate from th’exalted strain / Of our great fathers’ (1.87–9). Arruntius then goes on to praise Cato, Brutus, and Cassius, and, finally, Cordus’ history, which he reads as topical commentary: ‘Tis true, that Cordus says, / “Brave Cassius was the last of all that race” ’ (1.103–4). At Cordus’ accusation, however, these same figures signify differently. Brutus is ‘a parricide, an enemy of his country’ (3.397), and in ‘comparing men, / And times, thou praisest Brutus, and affirm’st / That “Cassius was the last of all the Romans” ’, thereby insulting all subsequent Romans, including the emperor (3.390–2). Past and present are always implicitly compared or ‘brought in parallel’ (396) to each other. However much Cordus insists that he is merely repeating other historians’ judgements, the play shows that his production of a particular history at a particular time is viewed as an intervention into a polity in which historical reference is part of the discourse of public justification and critique. The fact that the performance of the play itself led to Jonson being called before the Privy Council for questioning at the request of the earl of Northampton in 1604 confirms that this was not just an antiquarian point. Jonson’s substantial revision of the play for its printing in 1605, and his supporting it against hostile interpretation by marginal references to the authorities he had consulted, is clearly a response to this, though it has not deterred scholars from interpreting the play as topical comment upon the demise of such fallen favourites as Ralegh or Essex (Perry 2006).

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Philip Massinger’s The Roman Actor (1626), also explores the interface between culture and politics. This play, based, like Sejanus, upon Tacitus’ accounts of firstcentury Rome, both stages a tyranny (Domitian’s) and contains explicit meditations upon the role of the theatre (rather than that of the historian) in such a circumstance. One of the play’s two plots concerns the actor Paris, who begins the play defending the theatre to the senate. In the course of the play he puts on three dramatic presentations, during the last of which Domitian kills him. Paris first appears defending the theatre against the accusation that the emperor’s government is ‘Depraved and scandalised by meaner men / That to his favour, and indulgence, owe / Themselves and being’ (1.3.28–30). The actors are ‘libellers against the state and Caesar’ (1.3.34). This ‘libel’ is more of a breach of (an albeit symbolically vital) decorum than a threat to the polis. The players transgress by showing ‘under feigned names on the stage … / actions not to be touched at’, and ‘traduce / Persons of rank’, satirically making ‘even the senators ridiculous / To the plebeians’ (1.3.38– 40, 42–3). Paris’s response is, first, that the theatre is a deterrent from personal vice, so that the ‘sad end’ of a ‘man sold to his lusts’ persuades ‘careless youth, by his example, / From such licentious courses’ (1.3.61–3). Politically, the theatre also encourages civic virtue. Philosophy delivers ‘cold precepts’ on ‘the active virtue’: But does that fire The blood, or swell the veins with emulation To be both good, and great, equal to that Which is presented on our theatres? (1.3.80–3)

In addition, theatrical ‘wicked undertakings’ are ‘mulcted so in the conclusion that / Even those spectators that were so inclined / Go home changed men’ (1.3.104–6). Paris’s oration concludes with a disclaimer: if audience members think they are ‘of the same mould’ as vicious characters in a play, that is conscience’s work, not the theatre’s accusation. He ends by applying the point directly to his audience: If any of this reverend assembly, Nay, e’en yourself, my lord, that are the image Of absent Caesar, feel something in your bosom That puts you in remembrance of things past, Or things intended, ’tis not in us to help it (1.3.136–40)

Paris’s accusers do not answer this defence of the theatre’s monitory and reformative functions. However, the three dramatic performances within the play undermine his arguments. In the first, the players present The Cure of Avarice to try and change a miserly father. Significantly, Paris’s claims to the son beforehand are expressed much more equivocally than those before the senate:

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Nor can it appear Like an impossibility, but that Your father, looking on a covetous man Presented on the stage, as in a mirror May see his own deformity, and loathe it. (2.1.95–9)

The miser remains unrepentant, even after an epilogue directly pointing the moral of the play in his own case. In the second presentation, far from being encouraged towards virtue, Domitia falls in love with Paris (who is acting a lover’s part) and pursues him outside the performance. It is for this that a jealous Domitian himself later kills Paris onstage, as he plays The False Servant at the emperor’s request. Massinger’s play shows both a notorious tyranny and a relationship between this tyranny and the theatre. The three examples of playing which follow Paris’s oration contradict its claims for the theatre’s role to such a degree that, as Martin Butler comments, ‘it is hard to understand the plays-in-the-play in any other way than as a demonstration of the speciousness, danger even, of the arguments of I.iii’ (Butler 1985: 159). The key to this contradiction is the problematic concept of emulation, which Paris presents as one of the main hortatory effects of showing honourable deeds. The English history play, which staged few tyrants and fewer tyrannicides, did not have to confront the possibility that tyrannicide was one of these honourable deeds. Roman history plays, however, could not avoid the issue, for (as Sejanus indicates) the examples of Brutus and Cassius as honoured killers placed the issue of ‘emulation’ in a very different light. Paris’s list of the deeds that the theatre might present to fire emulation includes only uncontroversial examples of martial virtue, but the early foregrounding of the relationship between theatrical ‘example’ and act, in a play that ends with the death of a tyrant, raises the possibility that Massinger’s theatre might itself be seen to incite tyrannicidal desire in its audience. The working of actual performances, however, almost immediately disrupts this model of the political functions of the theatre. Despite what are carefully shown to be the actors’ best intentions, those watching persistently miss the point. The theatre does not incite to virtue – including, implicitly, the particularly Roman virtue of tyrannicide. This ‘theatre of incitement’ was most clearly produced in topical and satirical plays, the most famous of which – Thomas Middleton’s A Game at Chess – ran for nine consecutive days at the Globe in the summer of 1624, and would have run longer but for the intervention of the Spanish ambassador, who prevailed on the king to order the closure of the theatre. A Game’s success was largely due to its satirical representation of unpopular Spaniards, within an allegorical format concerning the manoeuvring of black (Spanish) and white (English) chess pieces. The main targets of the play’s anti-Spanish and anti-Jesuit animus were Gondomar, the Spanish ambassador to James’s court between 1613 and 1622, who appears as the Black Knight, and De Dominis, a Spanish archbishop who spent some time at the court in the years up to 1622, who is the Fat Bishop. As with the earlier morality plays, upon whose

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dramaturgy it draws, the play’s choice of villain exploited rather than challenged the political commonplaces of its time (Howard-Hill 1995: 108). Tragi-comedy, the major political genre after about 1610, though it sometimes shared the history play’s focus on tyranny and tyrants, was free to redefine them. Unburdened either by uncomfortably unavoidable examples of successful – even honourable – tyrannicide or usurpation, or by the immediate assumption that it was taking a place in a tradition of commentary on historical politics, the genre explored both the limits of stageable political disruption and the regenerative, compensatory power of non-tragic closure. Beaumont and Fletcher’s tragi-comedy Philaster (1609) begins with a political injustice: Philaster, the rightful heir of Sicily, has been dispossessed by the usurping king of Calabria, who plans to marry his daughter Arethusa, who loves Philaster, to the Spanish prince Pharamond. For much of the plot, the focus is Pharamond’s unchaste behaviour with a lady-in-waiting, and Philaster and Arethusa’s constancy. Philaster is an unruly presence at court, taunting Pharamond, but does little but railrail, refusing to claim his right because it would mean challenging Arethusa’s father, even though, in the words of another noble, The gentry do await it, and the people Against their nature are all bent for him And, like a field of standing corn that’s moved With a stiff gale, their heads bow all one way (3.1.18–21)

This virtuous stasis is eventually disturbed by Philaster’s growing and unfounded conviction that Arethusa is cuckolding him with his servant. All three flee to the woods, and Philaster wounds Arethusa and his servant, and is himself wounded by a ‘country fellow’ (‘Hold, dastard, strike a woman?’). Philaster is condemned to death, and marries Arethusa in prison. The king sentences her to death as well. But the city rises in support of Philaster; Pharamond returns to Spain; and the troublesome servant turns out to be a woman. The king resigns his throne to Philaster, blesses his union with Arethusa, and concludes the play with the words Let princes learn By this to rule the passions of their blood, For what heaven wills can never be withstood. (5.5.223–5)

The play’s focus on romantic love clearly offers a vision of the polity and political action different from that of the history play, where lust is more likely to be the focus. Even though the decisive political action is a rising in support of Philaster by citizens of the city at the point of his execution, Philaster himself remains committed to virtuous inaction, dispersing them with assurances that he will be all right, as indeed he is.

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Though tragedy might seem to be better suited to portraying political disruption and its consequences, this is not necessarily the case. Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Maid’s Tragedy (c.1611) explores tyranny as it impinges upon the private life of the subject, rather than the public life of the polis. Its tyrannical (and unnamed) king of Rhodes breaks the engagement of Amintor (‘a noble Gentleman’) to Aspatia, and forces him to marry the royal mistress Evadne, in order to avoid scandal should she become pregnant. This private tyranny is revenged not by Amintor but by Evadne, who, half-persuaded, half-intimidated by her brother Amintor’s friend Melantius, kills the king, and then herself when Amintor rejects her. Amintor himself kills Aspatia, who picks a fight with him while disguised as a man, and then commits suicide. In this play, court stands for polis. This court is powerfully inclined towards equilibrium, the only threat to which is initiated by the monarch himself. In its commitment to an absolutist, king-centred perspective, The Maid’s Tragedy breaks with the polities of the Roman and the English historical political plays. In these plays, supreme political power (if such a thing exists at all) is provisional, to be negotiated, to be produced and reproduced, often in the shadow of the past. The world of The Maid’s Tragedy has no past. Political power is non-negotiable, in several senses of the word. The sexual honour of individuals and families replaces the various reflexive ‘honour communities’ of the medieval and Roman worlds as the testing ground of royal power. It is a scaled-down world, in which personal revenge is what civil war or large-scale rebellion are to the English history play, the decisive indicator of a polity broken down. In a world without history, conclusive closure is easier to imagine (though not, modern critics insist, to achieve). At the play’s end, king and king-killer are dead. So too are Amintor and Aspatia. Melantius, whose provocation of Evadne to regicide and securing control of the fort to safeguard himself in anticipation of the king’s death argued some Machiavellian virtù, is restrained from suicide upon seeing Amintor’s corpse, but makes it clear that he is now interested only in willing himself to die. King-killing is presented as the seventeenth-century version of taking the nuclear option during a battle, indirectly (providentially?) ensuring the destruction of deployer, victim, and innocent bystanders. But the equilibrium of the court/polis is not itself disturbed, because the deaths will lead no faction or family to further action. The dead king’s brother smoothly takes over, having earlier issued a blanket pardon, pausing over the last-scene corpses only to point a ‘just say no’ moral similar to that of Philaster: May this a fair example be to me To rule with temper, for on lustful kings Unlooked-for sudden deaths from God are sent; But cursed is he that is their instrument. (5.292–5)

The plays of Beaumont and Fletcher discussed here are not fully representative even of these dramatists’ output of political plays, let alone the genres of tragi-comedy or

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tragedy. Rather, they are examples of political plays which, freed from the constraints of historical plots, imagine a static polity in which the monarch has absolute power, and explore how that power can be both abused and compensated for. In this, they engage optimistically with emergent forms of absolutist-tending royal power. Their divergence from the political plays covering Roman, medieval British, or other histories can be seen not as a refusal to face the essential, ahistorical truths of politics, but an engagement with a modernity seemingly breaking with old patterns, issuing in a radically discontinuous polity and politics for which ‘history’ (as embodied in the forms of politics embodied in the historical play) was at an end. Absolutist monarchy turned out not to be the future of Britain; but the civil war was not a replay of the Wars of the Roses. Roman plays and tragi-comedies were written, if not performed, during the 1642–60 closure of the London theatres; the late medieval history play as Shakespeare knew it was not. British history was being made; but whatever it was repeating, it was not repeating itself.

References and Further Reading Bevington, D. (1968). Tudor Drama and Politics. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Butler, M. (1984). Theatre and Crisis 1632–1642. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Butler, M. (1985). ‘Romans in Britain: The Roman Actor and the early Stuart classical play’. In D. Howard (ed.), Philip Massinger: A Critical Reassessment (pp. 139–70). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dollimore, J. (1984). Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries. Brighton: Harvester Press. Dutton, R and J. Howard (eds.) (2003). A Companion to Shakespeare’s Works, vol. 2: The Histories. Oxford: Blackwell. Griffiths, B. (2001). Playing the Past: Approaches to English Historical Drama 1385–1600. Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer. Hadfield, A. (ed.) (2001). Literature and Censorship in Renaissance England. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Heinemann, M. (1980). Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama under the Early Stuarts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heinemann, M. (1990). ‘Political drama’. In A. R. Braunmuller and M. Hattaway (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama. (pp. 161–205). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Helgerson, R. (1992). Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Howard-Hill, T. H. (1995). Middleton’s ‘Vulgar Pasquin’: Essays on A Game at Chess. London and Toronto: Associated University Presses. Hunter, G. K. (1997). English Drama 1586–1642: The Age of Shakespeare. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kastan, David Scott (1999). Shakespeare After Theory. London: Routledge. Kerrigan, J. (2008). Archipelagic English: Literature, History, and Politics 1603–1707. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kewes, P. (ed.) (2006). The Uses of History in Early Modern England. San Marino: Huntington Library. Lake, P. with M. Questier (2002). The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in PostReformation England. New Haven: Yale University Press. Limon, Jerzy. (1986). Dangerous Matter: English Drama and Politics 1623/4. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Montrose, L. (1996). The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Mullaney, S. (1998). The Place of the Stage: License, Play and Power in Renaissance England. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

Political Plays Nashe, Thomas (1958). The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow and F. P. Wilson, 5 vols. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Neill, Michael (2000). Putting History to the Question: Power, Politics, and Society in English Renaissance Drama. New York: Columbia University Press. Orgel, Stephen (1975). The Illusion of Power: Political Theater in the English Renaissance. Berkeley: University of California Press. Perry, C. (2006). Literature and Favoritism in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Randall, D. (1995). Winter Fruit: English Drama 1642–1660. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Robinson, Marsha S. (2002). Writing the Reformation: ‘Actes and Monuments’ and the Jacobean History Play. Aldershot: Ashgate.

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Somerset, A. (1999). ‘Cultural poetics, or historical prose? The places of the stage’. Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England, 11, 34–59. Walker, G. (1991). Plays of Persuasion: Drama and Politics at the Court of Henry VIII. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wells, Robin Headlam (2009). Shakespeare’s Politics. London: Continuum. Wiseman, S. (1998). Drama and Politics in the English Civil War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yachnin, P. (1997). Stage-Wrights: Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton and the Making of Theatrical Value. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

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Angelo, then, evil Duke of Squamuglia, has perhaps ten years before the play’s opening murdered the good Duke of adjoining Faggio, by poisoning the feet on an image of Saint Narcissus, Bishop of Jerusalem, in the court chapel, which feet the Duke was in the habit of kissing every Sunday Mass.

Thus Thomas Pynchon in The Crying of Lot 49 (1966) begins his description of The Courier’s Tragedy, his loving parody of some of the excesses of Jacobean tragic plotting. Pynchon’s own excesses – the scene-by-scene synopsis of the fictitious play takes up eight pages of a short novel – only seem justifiable on the assumption that his readers already had a very strong mental image of what is a ‘typical’ Jacobean tragedy; as no doubt they did and still do. A generation later, the central character of Donna Tartt’s Secret History (1992) finds himself irresistibly drawn to ‘the candlelit and treacherous universe’ of Jacobean tragedy. He feels the plays ‘cut right to the heart of the matter, to the essential rottenness of the world’. The unchanged readerly expectation is of a violent story of lust and revenge, set in an Italian dukedom riddled with Machiavellian intrigue and religious hypocrisy, in which great men and women meet bizarre and terrible deaths while disaffected cynics rail against court life and meditate gloomily on the frailty of the human condition. In fact, however, the strong brand image of the genre can be maintained only by concentrating on a very small group of plays (primarily The Revenger’s Tragedy, The White Devil, and The Duchess of Malfi) and arbitrarily excluding many others. ‘Jacobean’ is a problematic label because it suggests that plays first performed between 1603 and 1625 share special characteristics which mark them off from Elizabethan and Caroline drama, and that these characteristics are directly related to the nature of James I’s rule. Literary periodisation in terms of kings and queens is a dubious procedure, and the adjective ‘Jacobean’ masks the fact that the characteristic preoccupations and tones of early seventeenth-century tragedy had already been anticipated in the work of Kyd and Marlowe and were definitively established by five

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plays first performed between 1599 and 1604, only one of which is certainly Jacobean. From Hamlet (c.1600) comes the revenge plot, the cynical quips, the disturbed sexuality, and death consciousness, all within a court where ‘rank corruption, mining all within, / Infects unseen’ (3.4.139–40).1 From Marston’s Antonio’s Revenge, contemporaneous with Shakespeare’s play and sharing its debt to the older Hamlet play of the 1580s, comes the Italian setting and the self-parodying excesses of rhetoric and plotting which Pynchon sought to reproduce (‘Poison the father, butcher the son, and marry the mother – ha!’).2 Jonson’s Sejanus (1603) provides later dramatists with an austere and historically authentic picture of a court filled with spies, sycophants, factional intrigue, perverted desires, and secret murders. In this unrelievedly grim play the restoration of ‘freedom’ and ‘order’ in the last act (‘And praise to Macro, that hath savèd Rome! / Liberty, liberty, liberty!’)3 is accompanied by the strangling of the fallen royal favourite’s children, the girl first being raped by the public hangman because Roman law did not permit the execution of young virgins. In Othello (1602–4) we find the charismatic but fatally flawed soldier-hero who features in several early Jacobean tragedies, and also the obsessional eroticism (‘Lie with her? lie on her? … Pish! Noses, ears, and lips! Is’t possible?’, 4.1.34–40) which will gradually supplant political themes in importance and help to make Othello the most admired tragedy of the later seventeenth century. Chapman’s Bussy D’Ambois (1604) gives us another heroic martial figure brought down by his own weaknesses and also includes eloquent outbursts against the emptiness of court life (‘let my death / Define life nothing but a courtier’s breath’),4 despairing reflections on the random workings of the universe, passionate illicit sex, the onstage torture of a woman, the summoning of spirits from the underworld, and the appearance of a ghost. Not surprisingly, it was ‘often acted with great applause’. Two of these plays (Antonio’s Revenge and Bussy D’Ambois) were performed by the children’s companies, which had resumed commercial playing in 1599 after a ten-year hiatus. The cross-influence between these and the adult companies was crucial to the increased tonal range and sophistication that we see as characteristically Jacobean. The poisonous court worlds ‘embroiled with hate and faction’ and the selfdestructive martial protagonists we find in these plays are theatrical responses to the crisis of the last years of Elizabeth’s reign, when her ability to manage the vicious rivalries at court deserted her and her refusal to name a successor greatly increased political anxieties, helping to provoke the failed rebellion of her former favourite and ‘matchless general’, the earl of Essex. It matters little whether Sejanus happens to date from just before or just after the death of Elizabeth on 24 March 1603. ‘What matters is the mental world which Sejanus evoked, and this was the mental world of the final years of Elizabeth I, because Jonson had been writing the play for two years before its first performance’ (Guy 1995: 16–17). All these five plays were immensely influential in forming the ‘mental world’ of Jacobean tragedy. Even Sejanus, which was a failure at the Globe when first performed, carried enough literary prestige to make a crucial impact on both Chapman and Webster and on later Caroline plays such as Massinger’s The Roman Actor (1626). Once certain attitudes have been imaginatively

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and powerfully realised in art they continue to be reproduced, whether or not they remain an appropriate response to new social and political circumstances. However, the lack of any necessary and direct relationship between the cynical mood of Jacobean tragedy and actual feelings about the new king and his court has been obscured by the long tradition of anti-Stuart historiography which dates back to the 1650s and which underpins both Whig and Marxist narratives of British history. Despite the efforts of modern historians to provide a more accurate picture, the story of a strong and popular monarch, ‘good Queen Bess’, being succeeded by an incompetent, corrupt, and unpopular one in 1603 remains firmly lodged in many people’s minds. The anticourt satire found in many Jacobean tragedies may have a direct and topical reference but it may also simply represent the continued exploitation of a tried and tested mode of dramatic writing which initially arose in a rather different political context (Wymer 2000). Certainly, as both Mario DiGangi and Curtis Perry have made clear, there were many important historical and cultural continuities in the way writers approached a topic like royal favouritism (DiGangi 1999; Perry 2006). The dramatist whose plays are most obviously affected by the transition from Elizabeth to James is probably Shakespeare, but the changes in his work do not support the supposition of any new and sudden disillusion with the monarchy and the court – rather the reverse in fact. If one begins to construct an outline map of Jacobean tragedy by setting aside plays not written for performance, such as those by Fulke Greville, William Alexander, and Elizabeth Cary, and plays by dramatists such as Ford and Massinger whose major work was after 1625, then the most important figures will be Shakespeare, Chapman, Middleton, and Webster, with interesting contributions – in addition to those plays already named – from Marston (Sophonisba and The Insatiate Countess),5 Fletcher and his collaborators (The Maid’s Tragedy, Bonduca, Valentinian, and Sir John van Olden Barnavelt), Jonson (Catiline), Daniel (Philotas), and Tourneur (The Atheist’s Tragedy). It is obviously not possible to address Shakespeare’s work adequately within the scope of this essay, but it must be emphasised that generalisations about Jacobean tragedy that implicitly ignore Shakespeare are of little value. There was a continuous artistic dialogue between him and his fellow playwrights, and we must not listen to only one side of the exchange. Moreover, Shakespeare’s political and religious perspectives were quite different from those of, say, Middleton, and there are no very good grounds for claiming that The Revenger’s Tragedy is more ‘typical’ of Jacobean tragedy than Macbeth. Beginning with Chapman (and Shakespeare), as well as being chronologically appropriate, has the advantage of requiring an immediate consideration of a large number of major tragedies that do not fit the ‘evil Duke of Squamuglia’ stereotype. Both playwrights were, in their different ways, fascinated with martial heroes who are ‘impossible mixtures’ of vice and virtue, men ‘broken loose from human limits’. Such are the protagonists of Othello, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus, Bussy D’Ambois, and the two Byron plays. In epic poetry men like these can be celebrated, but in tragedy their fiery souls come up against political and ethical limits, which destroy them. The historical reasons why such figures appear particularly ‘tragic’ to Shakespeare and Chapman relate to the growing irrelevance of traditional heroic

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attributes in modern warfare and the erosion of aristocratic power by the centralising monarchies that had emerged in Europe during the sixteenth century. The fall of Essex in 1601 epitomised both processes and was the single most important political event to have left its mark on Jacobean tragedy, partly because the traitor’s death suffered by Essex did not put an end to his influence; the chivalric values which he championed were taken up by James’s son Prince Henry, and the ‘Essex legacy’ continued to divide the court. Elizabeth’s glamorous but unstable general, aggressively placing his aristocratic honour above the law, conformed very well to the description by the great neoclassical critic Castelvetro of the type of character that is proper to tragedy: Tragic characters are regal and have exalted spirits and are haughty, and what they want, they want excessively, and if an injury is done to them, or if they are led to understand it might be done to them, they do not run off to the magistracy to complain of the aggressor, nor suffer the injury patiently, but take the law into their own hands according as their will dictates.6

This is a more Nietzschean view of the tragic hero than we are accustomed to finding in Aristotle or Sidney, and it helps explain why Essex was the model for a number of protagonists in Jacobean plays. Daniel, in the ‘Apology’ he prefixed to Philotas (1605), was anxious to deny that he had Essex in mind when dramatising the fall of one of Alexander’s generals, while Shakespeare’s allusions to Essex are, with one exception, a matter of inference rather than fact. Chapman, however, in his two-part play The Conspiracy and Tragedy of Charles Duke of Byron (1607–8) was happy to make explicit the resemblance between Henry of Navarre’s great general who was executed for treason in 1602 and ‘The matchless Earl of Essex who some make … A parallel with me in life and fortune’ (The Tragedy 4.1.133–5). Byron has an absolute conception of his own heroic virtues that puts him in conflict with the equally absolute claims of the king and the law, and ‘It is the nature of things absolute, / One to destroy another’ (The Conspiracy 1.2.102–3). The two plays seem to mark Chapman’s gradual rethinking of the place that self-consciously heroic figures might occupy in a modern state. In his earlier Bussy D’Ambois, the protagonist is accused by his enemies of being capable of every kind of villainy ‘but killing of the King’, yet the play leaves a strong impression that Bussy’s disdain for laws and manners springs from a primal generosity of spirit. In emphasising the very real danger to society, which such heroic individualism represents, Chapman also moved towards a more austere dramatic style. The Byron plays are purged of the melodramatic excesses which made Bussy popular in the theatre, and their considerable intellectual and emotional excitements are of a more purely literary kind, conveyed in lengthy, highly wrought speeches, rather than in repartee or action. Chapman wrote two further tragedies set in the recent French court, The Revenge of Bussy D’Ambois (1610–11) and The Tragedy of Chabot, Admiral of France (1611–21, revised 1635), as well as a Roman play, Caesar and Pompey (c.1604–13) concerning the

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last days of the republic, which culminates in the noble suicide of Cato following Caesar’s victory in the civil wars. All three plays feature Stoic heroes whose commitment is to rational self-control rather than heroic self-assertion, and it is customary to draw a sharp distinction between Bussy and Byron on the one hand, and Clermont, Cato, and Chabot on the other. Yet Chapman’s Stoics are as much in pursuit of a dream of absolute selfhood as are his passionate aspirers. Although Stoicism encouraged an ideal of submission to a universal rational order, its psychological appeal both to Seneca and the Renaissance lay in its posture of total intransigence in the face of political and social pressures. As Gordon Braden points out, ‘there is considerable justification for taking Stoicism as less a philosophy of its announced themes of reason or virtue than a philosophy of the will – even, as Arendt has it, of “the omnipotence of the will” ’ (Braden 1985: 130). The Stoic emphasis on ‘the mind’s inward, constant and unconquered empire’ is not just a retreat from the world but a claim to absolute power (‘empire’) over it.7 Much of the passionate Bussy’s assertive individualism is expressed in a rhetoric that is at least partly Stoic: ‘Who to himself is law, no law doth need, / Offends no king, and is a king indeed’ (2.1.203–4). Clermont, Cato, and Chabot are also laws to themselves, and Bussy’s Stoical brother is referred to as ‘this absolute Clermont’, a choice of adjective that reminds one that ‘the plain and passive fortitude to suffer’ can be as great a challenge to the power of princes as the ambitions of an unstable martial hero. When Chabot is unjustly convicted, his king tries to exercise his absolute prerogative of pardon (as James did in a carefully staged way with some of the 1603 plotters against him), but is told quietly, ‘You cannot pardon me, sir’ (4.1.234). As Chabot’s wife says earlier, ‘each soul has a prerogative / And privilege royal that was signed by heaven’ (3.1.144–5). Within a Stoic philosophical framework royal pretensions to absolutism are confounded. If the Byron plays acknowledge the rights of the state as well as those of the individual, the Stoic tragedies revert to a Tacitean suspicion of the workings of power. The conventional dating of Chabot is around 1612, but it is possibly later, and it actually makes more sense to see it in relation to the fall of James’s favourite Robert Carr, who was convicted in 1616, along with his wife Frances Howard, of involvement in the murder of Sir Thomas Overbury. Chapman, having sought patronage first from Essex and then from Prince Henry, was unlucky a third time when he dedicated his translation of the Odyssey to Carr shortly before his trial and conviction. Chapman, however, remained loyal to his new patron and saw him as an innocent victim of court intrigue and royal inconstancy. The reference in Chabot to the former favourite being supplanted by ‘a newly entered minion’ looks suspiciously like a glance at the sexual allure of Robert Villiers, the new apple of James’s eye. All Chapman’s heroes are spiritual, if not literal, aristocrats, who see themselves as above and apart from the rules and practices that make up ordinary life. He is an unashamedly elitist writer, whose tragedies (with the exception of Bussy D’Ambois) make few concessions to popular taste and who has relatively little interest in female characters. Yet there is a highly distinctive intellectual and poetic energy and excitement in his work, which is even more striking if one sees him, as Richard Ide has

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done, in constant dramatic dialogue with Shakespeare (Ide 1980). Shakespeare had already exposed some of the limitations of Stoic philosophy in Julius Caesar, and in Coriolanus he concluded his great sequence of tragedies with a devastatingly ‘objective’ representation of Chapman’s favourite kind of hero, the man who stands alone, ‘One against all the world’. A much more famous tragedy than Chabot, Middleton’s and Rowley’s The Changeling (1622) also alludes to the Overbury murder case, but from a very different perspective. This story of an aristocratic young woman who hires a servant to carry out a murder and then finds that the social ‘distance’ between them now means nothing, that she is now his ‘equal’ and will be his partner forever ‘in death and shame’, powerfully but obliquely expresses moral disgust that Carr and Howard, the aristocratic instigators of Overbury’s murder, should escape with a few years’ confinement in the Tower while the servants who carried out the deed were executed. This drama of inexorable criminal and sexual entanglement is not a court tragedy but it is still ‘political’, and its topical edge resides in the fact that it was in early 1622 that Carr and Howard were released from imprisonment. That this much-admired and frequently revived play should be the outcome of collaboration is a reminder that the individual scriptwriter’s role in Elizabethan and Jacobean drama was, as in modern cinema, only a part of the collective process that generated something pleasing and saleable. Paradoxically, however, the most important revision of the map of Jacobean tragedy in recent years has been the assigning of a number of previously anonymous plays to Middleton and the increased sense of his importance as a tragic dramatist, which this has brought. Forty years ago, an orthodox account of Middleton’s career would have described the first two decades of his output as dominated by comedy and tragi-comedy. Apart from some lost plays (such as Randall, Earl of Chester and The Viper and Her Brood) and the quirky Hengist, King of Kent, there was little to suggest that he would crown his career with two major tragedies, The Changeling and Women Beware Women (1621), a complex study of insidious sexual corruption culminating in a spectacularly lethal masque. Thanks to the efforts of scholars like David J. Lake, MacDonald P. Jackson, and Roger Holdsworth (Lake 1975; Jackson 1979; Holdsworth 1982), there is a new orthodoxy, made fully manifest in the monumental edition of The Collected Works (Middleton 2007) and its associated Companion (Taylor and Lavagnino 2007) that Middleton was active in tragedy throughout his career. He is now credited with A Yorkshire Tragedy (1605), a brief and brutal real-life story of domestic violence, in which hints of the husband’s demonic possession are accompanied by the Calvinist insistence on inevitable sinfulness which we find everywhere in Middleton’s work (‘for ’tis our blood to love what we’re forbidden’, 4.62);8 and the play previously known as The Second Maiden’s Tragedy (1611), now retitled The Lady’s Tragedy, a powerful allegorical court tragedy in which a tyrant’s lust outlives the death of its object, a grotesque plot twist which was later repeated by Massinger in The Duke of Milan (1621). He also wrote (with Dekker) part of The Bloody Banquet (1608–9), contributed a substantial share to that oddity of the Shakespearean canon Timon of Athens (1605–6) and, after Shakespeare’s death in 1616,

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revised Macbeth (probably cutting at least a quarter of it as well as introducing the Hecate material). Most importantly, he is now firmly established as the author of The Revenger’s Tragedy (1606), previously often attributed to Cyril Tourneur. Part of the difficulty in assigning an author to this play has been that it is filled with echoes of earlier plays. One of these, obviously, is Hamlet, and Vindice, clad in black and carrying a skull, tells us in the first scene that his life has become ‘unnatural’ to him, following his ‘worthy father’s funeral’ (1.1.119–20). This motif is not developed, however, and Vindice, disguised as the pander Piato, is not prevented by grief from carrying out his terrible revenge on the Duke who, nine years before, murdered his mistress. In what has become perhaps the definitive popular image of Jacobean tragedy, he induces the old man to kiss her costumed and poisoned skull under the mistaken impression that she is a compliant ‘country girl’, albeit one who has ‘somewhat a grave look’ about her. Within the confines of what is actually staged, Vindice appears to move swiftly enough towards this revenge, achieving his major objective as early as Act 3, with the result that his ruthless celerity has often been contrasted with Hamlet’s more protracted deliberations. So it remains a hitherto unexplained puzzle why he has waited as long as nine years to enact his vengeance. The probable answer is to be found in Hamlet and takes us to the heart of Middleton’s emblematic imagination. In the graveyard scene, Hamlet enquires ‘How long will a man lie i’th’ earth ere he rot?’ (5.1.151) and is told by the gravedigger that the maximum period is eight or nine years. ‘A tanner will last you nine year’ (5.1.154–5). The emphasis here is on a process of decay, but the figure of nine years seems to have lodged in Middleton’s mind as signifying the culmination of the process, a culmination crucial to the particular symbolism of The Revenger’s Tragedy. After nine years the flesh will unquestionably have rotted away from Gloriana’s skull, enabling it to function not just as a traditional memento mori but also as a stark emblem of ultimate moral purity. The clothing of flesh must be stripped away to reveal the only true object in a world of false appearance. The play is obsessed with the sins of the flesh, which are seen as inevitable as long as there is any flesh to cover the bones. When asked what moved him to rape, the Duchess’s youngest son replies, ‘Why, flesh and blood, my lord. / What should move men unto a woman else?’ (1.2.47–8). Free from its flesh, the skull is now free of sin. It can appear as something cold and white and chaste to set against the hot desires of the flesh. ‘Thou mayst lie chaste now’, Vindice tells it (3.5.90). After nine years in the ground it has reached a state of incorruptible purity, which allows it to join forces with Castiza and the dead wife of Antonio as the main symbols of opposition to the life of the court. The nine years Vindice has waited have nothing to do with any doubts about the ethics of revenge but were the natural period of time necessary to produce the play’s chief moral symbol. The skull, like truth itself, is filia temporis, the daughter of time. Ironically, of course, when Vindice turns from his role of moralist and preacher in the opening speech to become an active revenger, he perverts the elemental purity of the skull by dressing it up, masking it, and smearing it with poison. The natural process by which a compelling emblem of unadorned truth and purity was generated is put into rapid

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reverse, and the nine years of patient waiting are succeeded by a frenetic flurry of violence. Middleton’s tragedies are all very different from one another. There seems little to connect the nightmarish cartoon figures of The Revenger’s Tragedy with the psychologically realistic characters of The Changeling and Women Beware Women. Yet there is an inner consistency derived from his strong Calvinist Protestantism and what Margot Heinemann in Puritanism and Theatre called his ‘citizen’ values. The idea, popularised by T. S. Eliot, that ‘he has no point of view’ (1951: 162) is quite wrong. All his plays, even the most ‘realistic’ of them, have tendencies towards the allegorical, the didactic, and the topical. His famous political allegory A Game at Chess (1624) is only the most striking example of his habit of seeing things in black and white. A number of previous literary histories have expressed an unambiguous preference for Middleton and The Revenger’s Tragedy over Webster,9 and the full range of Middleton’s achievement is now magnificently displayed in the new Collected Works which, according to Gary Taylor, ‘invites readers to think of our language as the home of two world champion playwrights, not just one’, establishing Middleton as ‘our other Shakespeare’ (Middleton 2007: 58). Two major professional revivals of The Revenger’s Tragedy in 2008 (at the National Theatre and the Manchester Royal Exchange) and a very lively film adaptation by Alex Cox in 2002 are further evidence that Middleton’s standing relative to his contemporaries has never been higher. Nevertheless, as far as the specific genre of tragedy is concerned, I feel it appropriate to record here a dissenting view. The ‘moral coherence’ for which Middleton is frequently praised at Webster’s expense is grounded in a grim predestinarian theology which, while it might in some circumstances be politically progressive, has many repellent features, including strong tendencies towards misogyny (‘That Heaven should say we must not sin, and yet made women!’, A Yorkshire Tragedy 4.56–8). It was a significant critique of both 2008 productions of The Revenger’s Tragedy that they seemed unable or unwilling to swim against the misogynist rhetorical tide that flows through the play (see Smith 2008: 17). Middleton was incapable of imagining a woman as both sexual and good, as Webster does so triumphantly in The Duchess of Malfi. Webster is the more ‘romantic’, ambiguous, and elusive writer and, despite Middleton’s much larger body of first-class work, to prefer him to Webster is like preferring Shaw and Brecht to Shakespeare on the grounds of their greater political ‘coherence’. Webster’s reputation for tragedy is based on only two plays, The White Devil (1612) and The Duchess of Malfi (1613–14), though a third play, the lost Guise (c.1614–18), might have equalled them. Both surviving plays are intricately plotted Italianate revenge tragedies, which take great artistic risks but are capable of overwhelming an audience’s critical defences, compelling responses of horror and pity in certain scenes and shocked laughter in others. The language is rich and forever hinting at barely suppressed violence and dangerous desires. The characters frequently surprise us, with sudden glimpses of something previously unsuspected in them, whether heroism, brutality, lust, or compassion. The picture of court life combines an authentic Tacitean

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grimness with a certain melodramatic excess. To say that Webster fuses the different styles of Shakespeare, Marston, Chapman, and Jonson is perfectly accurate but it does not entirely explain his distinctive appeal. Although his tragedies are strongly influenced by Shakespeare, they represent an interesting revision of the Shakespearean norm. Rather than concentrating on the experience and sufferings of ‘great men’ he gives equal importance to the lesser men and the women who are dragged down with them. In many Elizabethan and Jacobean plays, ruthless princes ‘use men like wedges, one strike out another’, but Webster is special in the degree of attention and sympathy he gives to these ‘wedges’. The dependence of Flamineo and Bosola on ‘courtly reward and punishment’ causes them to behave brutally, but they feel ‘the maze of conscience’ in their breasts and we can infer that, away from the ‘rank pasture’ of the court, their lives would have been less of a ‘black charnel’. Webster’s major female characters, Vittoria and the Duchess of Malfi, have been constructed by redistributing and recombining the various antithetical qualities found in previous theatrical representations of women. In earlier tragedies, women tend to be either noble, brave, and chaste like Marston’s Sophonisba, or lustful and devious like his ‘insatiate countess’, Isabella. Webster’s revisions of these well-established types to produce a brave and emotional ‘bad’ woman in Vittoria and a passionate and secretive ‘good’ one in the Duchess are fine examples of how, for all his dependence on earlier plays, he represents something new in Jacobean theatre. And as his women and his discarded spies and go-betweens struggle to achieve and maintain a stable identity in the face of the ‘hideous storm of terror’ of their approaching death, Webster is like no other dramatist in the way he takes his characters beyond the comforting commonplaces of their culture (whether Christian or Stoic) and sends them on a lonely, personal voyage of discovery. Both on the Jacobean and the modern stage, The Duchess of Malfi has been the more successful play in performance, and there are understandable reasons for this. Both plays are disturbing and violent, in language as well as action, but The Duchess has a greater emotional range, including scenes of romantic and domestic intimacy, which give the play, from time to time, a deeply affecting elegiac tone. For modern audiences, The Duchess touches a particularly raw nerve because, at the centre of the play, is the massacre of a family. In Daniel Goldhagen’s controversial book about the participation of ‘ordinary’ Germans in the Holocaust, Hitler’s Willing Executioners (1996), there is a reproduction of a little-known photograph, which will surely become iconic, of a German soldier on the point of firing at a woman with a child in her arms. The death of innocents has not always been seen as a proper subject for tragedy, and a good deal of tragic theory, taking its cue from Greek religious thinking, has preferred to emphasise the mysterious logic which underpins the inevitable catastrophe. It is Webster’s distinction to confront the moral and philosophical implications of such ‘useless’ suffering and to explore the psychology of the murderer acting under orders as well as that of his victim. In Macbeth we learn little about Lady Macduff and nothing about the men who murder her and her family. King Lear, of course, is Shakespeare’s

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great tragedy of victims rather than heroes, standing interestingly apart from his line of plays with martial protagonists, and provoking his audience to reflect on the meaning of ‘God’s silence’ at the murder of Cordelia. It is only since 1945 that Lear has been regarded as Shakespeare’s most important play, and it is only since 1945 that Webster’s tragedies have been revived with real conviction. Fletcher and his collaborators concentrated on comedy and tragi-comedy, but it would be wrong not to make brief mention here of the tragedies. In theme and tone, they are often virtually indistinguishable from the more numerous tragi-comedies, a single twist of the plot in the last act sometimes being sufficient to determine into which category the play falls. There is usually a strong sexual interest and some complicated variations on themes of male and female honour that serve to expose the tension between Christian and classical values present in all Renaissance formulations of noble conduct (‘The thing that we call honour bears us all / Headlong unto sin and yet itself is nothing’, Maid’s Tragedy 4.2.318–19).10 The Maid’s Tragedy, written with Beaumont in 1611, is particularly successful in making these arguments about honour seem urgent and meaningful, rather than just a set of debating points. A much less typical Fletcher tragedy is Sir John van Olden Barnavelt, written with Massinger in 1619, and dealing with the trial and execution of one of the leaders of the Dutch republic, which had taken place only months before. This play survived in a single manuscript copy and did not appear in any of the folio editions of ‘Beaumont and Fletcher’. In consequence it has been rather neglected until recently, but it is a fine piece of work, recalling Chapman’s Byron plays in its ambivalent treatment of a great man’s recent fall. The range and variety of Jacobean tragedy are fully acknowledged in scholarly monographs and learned journals. In the classroom and in the theatre, however, the tendency is to stay conservatively with a ‘canon’ of little more than three or four nonShakespearean plays. The main exception to this in recent years has been the frequent appearance of Elizabeth Cary’s closet drama The Tragedy of Mariam (c.1604) on undergraduate syllabuses, though this has had little to do with any strong sense of its literary or theatrical merit. It is arguable that the most important method of critical investigation in drama is always through performance, and many of these tragedies are still waiting for their first modern professional production. When good actors attempt a Jacobean play in an appropriate playing space such as the Swan at Stratford, the results are usually very exciting. Tourneur’s The Atheist’s Tragedy (1611) used to be seen as disappointingly flat and sententious compared with the sardonic wit of his supposed masterpiece, The Revenger’s Tragedy. Yet the two modern revivals to date – at the Belgrade Theatre, Coventry, in 1979, and the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in 1994 – revealed a wonderfully entertaining mixture of farce, horror, bawdry, intrigue, and philosophising. Even the supposedly unperformable Sejanus proved to be a compelling piece of theatre in the energetic, often surprisingly humorous, judiciously pruned version which was directed by Greg Doran at the Swan in 2005. Beyond the corrupt court of Squamuglia, there is a rich theatrical world still waiting to be explored.

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1 Shakespeare’s plays are quoted from The Norton Shakespeare (Shakespeare 1997). 2 Antonio’s Revenge 1.1.104 (Marston 1978). 3 Sejanus His Fall 5.757–8 (Jonson 1990). 4 Bussy D’Ambois, Quarto 1, 5.3.131–2. Chapman’s plays are quoted from The Plays of George Chapman: The Tragedies, gen. ed. A. Holaday (Chapman 1987). 5 The latter play was revised by William Barksted and Lewis Machin. 6 Poetica d’Aristotele (1570). Quoted (in his own translation) by David Farley-Hills (1996: 208).

7

8 9

10

The phrase occurs in Chapman’s dedicatory preface to his translation of The Odyssey as part of his characterisation of Odysseus in Stoic terms. Middleton’s plays are quoted from Taylor and Lavagnino’s edition (Middleton 2007). I am thinking in particular of the essays by L. G. Salingar (1955) and by Christopher Ricks (1971). Cited from Craik’s edition (Beaumont and Fletcher 1988).

References and Further Reading Beaumont, F. and J. Fletcher (1988)., The Maid’s Tragedy, ed. T. W. Craik. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Braden, G. (1985). Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition: Anger’s Privilege. New Haven: Yale University Press. Braunmuller, A. R. (1992). Natural Fictions: George Chapman’s Major Tragedies. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Brooke, N. (1979). Horrid Laughter in Jacobean Tragedy. London: Open Books. Burgess, G., R. Wymer, and J. Lawrence (eds.) (2006). The Accession of James I: Historical and Cultural Consequences. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Bushnell, R. (1990). Tragedies of Tyrants: Political Thought and Theater in the English Renaissance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Callaghan, D. (1989). Woman and Gender in Renaissance Tragedy. Hemel Hempstead: Harvester. Chapman, G. (1987). The Plays of George Chapman: The Tragedies, gen. ed. Alan Holaday. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Clare, J. (1990). ‘Art Made Tongue-tied by Authority’: Elizabethan and Jacobean Dramatic Censorship. Manchester: Manchester University Press. DiGangi, M. (1999). The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dollimore, J. (1984). Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries. Brighton: Harvester. Dutton, R. (1991). Mastering the Revels: The Regulation and Censorship of English Renaissance Drama. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Dutton, R. (2000). Licensing, Censorship and Authorship in Early Modern England. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Eliot, T. S. (1951). ‘Thomas Middleton’. In Selected Essays, 3rd edn. London: Faber & Faber. Ellis-Fermor, U. (1958). The Jacobean Drama, 4th, rev., edn. London: Methuen. Farley-Hills, D. (1996). ‘Coriolanus and the tragic use of history’. In H. Klein and R. Wymer (eds.), Shakespeare and History (pp.195–214). Shakespeare Yearbook 6. Lampeter: Edward Mellen Press. Friedenreich, K. (ed.) (1983). ‘Accompaninge the Players’: Essays Celebrating Thomas Middleton, 1580–1980. New York: AMS Press. Guy, J. (ed.) (1995). The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heinemann, M. (1980). Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama under the Early Stuarts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Holdsworth, R. V. (1982). ‘Middleton and Shakespeare: the case for Middleton’s hand in Timon

Jacobean Tragedy of Athens’. Unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Manchester. Holdsworth, R. V. (ed.) (1990). Three Jacobean Revenge Tragedies. Casebook Series. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Ide, R. (1980). Possessed with Greatness: The Heroic Tragedies of Shakespeare and Chapman. Durham: University of North Carolina Press. Jackson, M. P. (1979). Studies in Attribution: Middleton and Shakespeare. Salzburg: Salzburg University Press. Jonson, B. (1990). Sejanus His Fall, ed. Philip Ayres. The Revels Plays. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kastan, D. S. and P. Stallybrass (eds.) (1991). Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama. London: Routledge. Lake, D. J. (1975). The Canon of Thomas Middleton’s Plays: Internal Evidence for the Major Problems of Dramatic Authorship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lever, J. W. (1971). The Tragedy of State. London: Methuen. Marston, J. (1978). Antonio’s Revenge, ed. W. Reavley Gair. Manchester: Manchester University Press. McAlindon, T. (1986). English Renaissance Tragedy. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Middleton, T. (2007). Thomas Middleton: The Collected Works, ed. G. Taylor and J. Lavagnino. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Morris, B. (ed.) (1970). John Webster. London: Benn. Neill, M. (1997). Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ornstein, R. (1960). The Moral Vision of Jacobean Tragedy. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Perry, C. (2006). Literature and Favoritism in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ricks, C. (1971). ‘The tragedies of Webster, Tourneur, and Middleton: symbols, imagery and convention’. In C. Ricks (ed.), English

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Drama to 1610 (vol. 3, pp. 306–53). London: Sphere Books. Rist, T. (2008). Revenge Tragedy and the Drama of Commemoration in Reforming England. Aldershot: Ashgate. Salingar, L. G. (1955). ‘Tourneur and the tragedy of revenge’. In B. Ford (ed.), The Age of Shakespeare (pp. 334–54). London: Penguin. Shakespeare, W. (1997). The Norton Shakespeare, gen. ed. S. Greenblatt et al. New York, W. W. Norton. Shell, A. (1999). Catholicism, Controversy and the English Literary Imagination, 1558–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Simkin, S. (ed.) (2001). Revenge Tragedy. New Casebooks. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Smith, E. (2008). ‘Our perverse Shakespeare’. Times Literary Supplement, 13 June. Sturgess, K. (1986). Jacobean Private Theatre. London: Routledge. Taylor, G. and J. Lavagnino (2007). Thomas Middleton and Early Modern Textual Culture: A Companion to the Collected Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tricomi, A. H. (1989). Anticourt Drama in England 1603–1642. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Webster, J. (1995–2007). The Works of John Webster, ed. D. Gunby, D, Carnegie, A. Hammond, and M. P. Jackson, 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whigham, F. (1996). ‘Sexual and social mobility in The Duchess of Malfi’. In F. Whigham, Seizures of the Will in Early Modern English Drama (pp. 188–224). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wymer, R. (1995). Webster and Ford. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Wymer, R. (2000). ‘Jacobean pageant or Elizabethan fin de siècle? The political context of early seventeenth-century tragedy’. In R. H. Wells, G. Burgess, and R. Wymer (eds.), NeoHistoricism: Studies in Renaissance Literature, History and Politics (pp. 138–51). Cambridge: D. S. Brewer.

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Caroline drama is crossed by long shadows. From the past, literary shades fall across the dramatists: Sir John Suckling, gambler, poet, and court dramatist, chose to have himself painted by Van Dyck with a folio Shakespeare open at Hamlet in his hands. The influence of earlier dramatists is everywhere apparent. Other, political, shadows are cast retrospectively by the English Civil War and the execution of Charles I. It is almost impossible to read the plays without applauding a dramatist for his perspicuity or slating a text for its obliviousness. Despite the brilliant advocacy of Martin Butler, Caroline drama continued to suffer an editorial and theatrical neglect that is only just being remedied. The ‘Richard Brome project’ will provide an online text of his plays and collaborations, while Eugene Giddens, Teresa Grant, and Barbara Ravelhofer as general editors have James Shirley’s complete works in progress. A team working under the general editorship of Brian Vickers has an old-spelling complete John Ford in hand. It will be interesting to see how accessible a text (financially speaking) of Shirley and Ford the projects will produce: whether the large amounts of public money funding these editorial labours will also produce print editions from Oxford University Press that all interested institutions can readily afford.1 But for readers in the immediate future the only available library text of Brome will remain the 1873 three-volume edition (reprinted in 1966), the very dated Gifford–Dyce six-volume edition of Shirley (1833), Davenant in five volumes from 1872–4, or Killigrew in a facsimile of the 1664 edition. Where edited single texts do exist, the theatre sometimes follows close behind, with notable RSC revivals of Shirley’s Hyde Park and Jonson’s The New Inn (both 1987), Ford’s The Broken Heart (1994), and an adaptation of Brome’s The Jovial Crew (1992). Regrettably, the reconstructed playhouse, ‘Shakespeare’s Globe’, on London’s Bankside has not explored this part of the historical repertory, even though the play discussed towards the end of this essay, The Late Lancashire Witches, sits prominently in its own online list of original Globe plays, and was a great summer season success in 1634. Scholars who make an accessible text available online can sometimes have the

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gratification of seeing an amateur or student production follow from their work. This happened, for instance, with Katherine Wilkinson’s edition of Richard Brome’s psychologically sharp city comedy, The City Wit.2 One possible reason for earlier critical disregard of Caroline drama lies in the relative rarity of tragedy in the period: Ford is the major exception, but among the productive professionals, Massinger and Shirley wrote tragedies only intermittently: social comedy and romantic tragicomedy were the preferred modes. Brome, on whom Butler bases his main case for attention, eschewed tragedy completely. Brome’s prologues tell the story of his refusal to be considered a poet, and parade ‘his wonted modesty’ (Prologue, The Sparagus Garden). James Bulman suggests that Caroline drama gets measured to its detriment against the ‘moral fervour’ of Jacobean tragedy (Bulman 2003: 345). The transition from Webster to a Caroline tragedy like Massinger’s The Roman Actor (1626), a self-subverting defence of the stage, with its actor protagonist failing to reform a miser when he performs a moral play, and exciting the sexual appetite of the empress when performing a lover, can indeed suggest a loss of artistic conviction. There may be more to this: if Caroline theatre offered higher generic seriousness, it might seem adequate to our perception of the age. Perhaps there is a latter-day perception of the Caroline era as a great tragic age manqué, collectively engaged in a production of ‘The Famous Tragedie of King Charles I’. The type of gentlemen who attended the tragicomedies of honour, who assimilated that ethos, became tragic figures in reality: the self-divided loyalists like Falkland, depressed beyond endurance, riding with slow deliberation to his death at Newbury, or Sir Edmund Verney, the king’s standard-bearer – a conspicuous target – at Edgehill, taking the field without any armour. John Ford was, as mentioned, the specialist in tragedy. His first surviving solo work, The Lover’s Melancholy (1628), opens with an adaptation of Claudian’s eclogue about the contest between a nightingale and a human performer. Shakespeare was Ford’s inimitable nightingale. Ford revived the Shakespearean form, the English history play. Shakespeare had left out one reign from his long sequence of kings, that of Henry VII. Ford didn’t fashion, however, a chronicle history centred on the king, but Perkin Warbeck (1625–34), the tragedy of a deluded pretender to the crown. In a sense, Ford is Perkin Warbeck, a pretender so possessed by his own rhetoric that he believes himself to be the real thing. One curious effect in Ford is the impression we get of the immaturity of his tragic personages. They make us feel, as we do with Romeo and Juliet, that they wouldn’t suffer such heartbreak if they weren’t so inexperienced and bound up in the passions of their private worlds. The remarkable catastrophe of The Broken Heart (1630–3), in which Calantha dances on through multiplied tidings of personal disaster before expiring heartbroken, was possibly written by Ford with one eye on the demeanour of Charles when news of Buckingham’s assassination reached him: regal self-control in public, followed by private heartbreak. Ford’s plays often cannot be dated precisely, so it is difficult to get a sense of his career’s trajectory: particularly ‘Caroline’ in

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character was The Queen, or the Excellency of her Sex (staged somewhere between 1621 and 1642), with its bizarre royal marriage and happy outcome.

‘The Two Royal Luminaries’3 In the 1630s the nation was confronted by the disconcerting spectacle of an ostentatiously happy royal marriage. James I and Anne of Denmark had inhabited separate courts after 1606; his successor’s emotional history seems to have been of dependence on Buckingham until the 1628 assassination, when Charles turned to his wife, and fell in love with her. The royal couple were recommended as models for a reformed drama: ‘whose lives have brought / Virtue in fashion, and the world have taught, / That chaste innocuous sports become the stage’.4 Celebration of ‘Hymen’s twin, the Mary-Charles’ (as Aurelian Townshend put it in his Albion’s Triumph of 1631) became material for court masques, but, predictably, a more robust response to Charles’s devotion to his wife appeared elsewhere. One remarkable commentary occurs in Killigrew’s The Parson’s Wedding (1641). Act 2, scene 7 is talk for its own sake, between libertine men and ‘honnête’ women. Jolly, ‘An humorous gentleman, and a courtier’ in the dramatis personae, protests that the king’s example encourages women not to be ‘kind’. The Captain wishes that Charles would really make himself a father to his people by cuckolding husbands and siring bastards: ‘These were the ways that made [Edward IV and Henry VIII] powerful at home’. The Cavaliers create a fantasy Charles in their own image, a Charles leading the city by the horns. Jolly goes on to tell a tall story about Elizabeth I, mounted on the Lord Mayor of London while travelling to give her rallying speech against the Spanish Armada at Tilbury (Knowland 1962: 484). This extraordinary critique of Charles, implying that if he were as masculine a monarch as Elizabeth he might spare the nation all its troubles, involves a mental leap from the notion that the monarch’s chastity encourages women to be intractable, to the political recalcitrance of the unsubmissive citizenry at large, which a more manly king would not suffer: ‘all this mischief comes of love and constancy’ (Knowland 1962: 484–5). Massinger’s The Picture (1629) exemplifies the Caroline marriage play, its double plot contrasting a slavishly devoted king with a husband who distrusts his highly moral wife simply because of her sex. An outspoken critic of the uxorious king features strongly, a counsellor who would rather see his king be a ‘libidinous Caesar’ than watch him ‘slave [himself] to th’imperious humour / Of a proud beauty’ (Massinger 1976: III, 3.4.45). The main plot has Mathias demonstrate mistrust of his wife Sophia by commissioning a magical portrait that will turn yellow if she is tempted in his absence, and black if she is unfaithful. The queen is piqued by Mathias’s boasts, and she resolves to seduce him and corrupt his wife by means of two courtiers. Mathias is tempted, but avoids yielding: Sophia gets an elaborated account of her husband’s adulteries at court. She briefly sees herself as a ‘servant to voluptuousness’ (3.6.158), but is repelled by the courtiers’ mutual denigration. Her wavering makes the magical portrait turn yellow with some black: Mathias weakens in his second scene with the

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queen (4.1), but is saved because a look of triumphant scorn escapes her. Learning fast, when they meet again (4.4) Mathias rebukes the queen, forestalling her triumph, and making her genuinely repentant: the king, to whom she submits herself, observes their whole encounter. Finally, the exonerated Sophia surprises Mathias by demanding a divorce. All the characters beg her to forgive him, and the king concludes the action with the admonition: ‘to all married men be this a caution / Which they should duly tender as their life / Neither to dote too much nor doubt a wife’. A feature which seems characteristic of Caroline drama is that the king’s matrimonial behaviour, and new modes of thinking about sexual relationships, caused the personnel of domestic plays to change: the married lives of kings and dukes supplant the more obviously representative types of earlier marriage plays. Companionate marriage, mutually negotiated, was the emergent trend, but the dramatists couldn’t reconcile in their stage kings the new ideal of partnership with a deep-rooted cultural insistence upon male dominance within marriage, and a preference for strong male monarchs. Butler’s book highlights every form of overt or implied political dissent in Caroline drama. Despite all his evidence, the Caroline actors believed themselves to be royalists, most of them enlisting for the king in 1642 (see Randall 1995: 43). But they had also participated in a discourse that played a part in undermining Charles’s stature, a corrective commentary upon infatuated husbands, which Caroline theatre applied to royalty in particular. (Other infatuated monarch plays include Davenant’s Albovine (1628), Massinger’s The Emperor of the East (c.1631), Brome’s The Queen and Concubine (1635), and Heywood’s A Challenge for Beauty (1635).) After Naseby, Parliament was able to publish Charles’s captured letters in The Kings Cabinet Opened (July 1645): the final exposure of an ‘effeminate and uxorious magistrate’, as Milton put it in Eikonoklastes (Milton 1932: V, 139). Infatuated monarch plays, with their strands of political and social criticism, were topical, yet a more general fascination with dominant women could be imputed to Stuart dramatists: Shirley and Brome are prime examples.

James Shirley: ‘The Beneficial and Cleanly Way of Poetry’5 At his most interesting, James Shirley allows female characters independence of action and sometimes unexpected freedom from moral condemnation. Celestina, the young widow of The Lady of Pleasure (1635), relishes her freedom; she is that rare thing in drama, a female misogamist who claims she will not ‘Court myself new marriage fetters’ (2.2.47) and stays constant to her opinion. Equally striking is the career of Aretina, wife to Bornwell: she runs with a fast set, carefully arranges an untraceable liaison with another man, and is made repentant only by her well-rewarded chosen lover’s account of earning his new finery through the nocturnal labour of pleasuring an old witch. ‘My soul is miserable’, the mortified Aretina concludes (5.2.179). Her husband never learns about the adultery. Aphra Behn did a lively reworking of this plot for the Julia–Gayman intrigue in her play The Lucky Chance (1686) – the leading

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female dramatist of the Restoration stage finding in Shirley an anticipation of effects she needed. The young widow Celestina is a prominent type in Caroline drama. Of the ninety ‘widows’ listed by the Index of Characters in Early Modern English Drama in plays published between 1576 and 1642, forty-one appear in Caroline plays (i.e., in seventeen of the sixty-six years). If marriage began as ‘the supreme rule of the gift’, as LéviStrauss claims, marriage to a widow is very different negotiation: the widow is independent, and marries if and when she chooses to, rather than being given away by her father or brother in a male-to-male transaction. The ubiquitous figure of the Caroline widow indicates something about all women, in a new and alarming dispensation; on stage, the type would often have been performed as a Puritan citizen. The widow, or her unmarried daughters, should be the conduit of city wealth to ‘decayed houses’ (Shackerley Marmion, cit. Wedgwood 1960: 203).without having too much volition – in this courtier’s view of their proper function. Shirley is interested in manipulators. Occasionally this appears at a political level, with hyper-scheming villains like Lorenzo in The Traitor (1631) or the title character in The Cardinal (1641). More often he offers social comedies, where moral characters manoeuvre a member of the opposite sex into conformity with their ideas. The moral education of a male character by a female is a classic Caroline pattern, and registers the impact of précieux or Platonising ideas. Penelope, the main character in The Witty Fair One (1628) straightens out Fowler, a libertine. In The Gamester (1633), Mistress Wilding’s plot to reform her husband is luckily augmented when, deeply involved in dice-play, he sends his friend Hazard in his place to fulfil a nocturnal tryst with his wife’s relative. The two women have conspired ‘to have made you blush, and chide you into honesty’ (Shirley 1833: III, 277), so the arrival of Hazard increases her power, by enabling her to represent the night’s events as leading to her innocently cuckolding her husband. If men in Shirley are brought to virtue by female manipulators, his male manipulators are more concerned to bring women to heel. Fairfield conquers Mistress Carol’s aversion to marriage in Hyde Park by a psychological masterstroke: ‘I bind you never to desire my company / Hereafter, for no reason to affect me’ (2.4). Shirley’s men are often being unscrupulous and are correspondingly unsuccessful. In a rare passage of Jonsonian satirical strength in The Humorous Courtier Contarino tries to persuade his wife that, as the duchess loves him (as he believes), and he can therefore become duke, she really ought to kill herself for her husband’s benefit. He fails, of course. Only a couple of Shirley’s plays have been lost, while the surviving works of Massinger represent about half of his known solo output. It might be remarked that both dramatists would probably enjoy higher reputations if these proportions had been reversed.

‘I’ll be Utopia’:6 Brome’s Antipodean Women Reviewing the revival of Hyde Park at the Swan theatre in 1987, Lois Potter asserted that ‘for a genuinely critical view of Caroline social and dramaturgical conventions,

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you have to go to Brome. How about reviving him next year?’7 The RSC took until 1992, when Stephen Jeffrey’s adapted text of A Jovial Crew was performed. Whether Brome is Donaldson’s engaging but minor talent, or Butler’s ‘political playwright of major significance’ remains to be seen : a revival by a major company would help (Donaldson 1970: 81). The drama school students who took on Brome’s The City Wit after the online edition appeared were responding to a play with many acute socio-sexual aspects.8 Crazy, the citizen ruined by honest dealing and misplaced trust, opens the play at a table covered in empty money bags. As Brome pursues a comic action in which Crazy restores his fortunes by turning ‘crafty merchant’ (3.2), he also makes us experience Crazy’s proximity to sexual ignominy. The empty money bags explain something about why Josina Crazy is still childless after three years of marriage: Crazy is a depleted man in more senses than one. Already talked about as a fool, as ‘he made [his purse] a common hole, every Gallant had his fingers in it’ (4.1), Crazy might simply put his wife on the market, allow her to turn his brows into gold (5.1). ‘What is not my sin shall never be my shame’, he had said, very temperately, after learning of his wife’s wild lunge at his apprentice Jeremy (1.2). Aided by the same Jeremy, unrecognised by him in the role of the widow ‘Jane Tryman of Knockers Hole’, Crazy diverts gold and silver back to his money bags, recovers enough virility to avoid becoming a cuckold, and routs his mother-in-law, the raucous Madam Pyannet (the name means jackdaw), subject of some of the play’s most deplorably recognisable satire. Brome’s plays show his recurrent interest in inverted worlds. In Butler’s view, ‘Brome converts the festival notion of turning the world upside-down from a gay but transient fantasy into a radical and enduring criticism of his society’ (Butler 1984: 228). While comic levelling and inversion have always allowed women characters freedom to voice opinions, Brome’s plays, which recurrently exploit comic inversion, have a remarkable array of activist females. Rachel and Muriel initiate the impersonation of beggars in A Jovial Crew (1641), and hold out against the rigours of sleeping rough rather better than the men they oblige to accompany them. Brome even allows some of his female characters to express physical desires. Dorcas in Covent-Garden Weeded (1632) seeks the sexual freedom of the courtesans of Italy: ‘I fly out in brave rebellion; / And offer at the least to break these shackles / That holds our legs together’ (1.1).9 In The English Moor (1637), Millicent fights back sexually after being married off to the elderly usurer Quicksands, singing of how ‘We’ll make the new bed cry Jiggy Joggy’ (I.3),10 and other immodesties, until he quails and agrees to postpone the consummation that she makes so intimidating. The Sparagus Garden offers another of Brome’s remarkable portraits of male sexual evasiveness in Sir Arnold Cautious, who ‘defies wedlock, because he thinks there is not a maiden-head in any marriageable beauty’ (3.4; Brome 1873: III, 159), but is reduced to voyeuristic drivelling whenever sees ‘a delicate leg’ emerging from a coach. The gratuitous elaboration of the only scene (2.1) featuring Sir Raphael, who has ‘vowed virginity’ and is ‘a lay-gospeller among the married sort and an especial pedant to the youth o’ court’ in The Court Beggar (1640), also reveals Brome’s interest in the type (Brome 1873: I, 201–2).

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In The Antipodes (1638) Peregrine Joyless’ fear of sex has left his wife Martha a virgin after three years of marriage. The play within a play about the Antipodes, which their therapist Dr Hughball puts on, offers Martha a fantasy world of female sexual dominance: ‘there the maids do woo / The bachelors, and ’tis most probable / The wives lie uppermost’ (Brome 1967: 1.6.140–2) – where men beg to be made cuckolds. Act 4, scene 2 shows the Antipodean girl’s brusque advances on the ludicrously coy Gentleman. Brome’s collaboration with Heywood, The Late Lancashire Witches (1634), is a more worrying play (see Chapter 78, The Debate on Witchcraft). It was one of the rare late commissions by a company playing in an open-air amphitheatre, which, as Gurr points out, usually depended on revivals during these decades (Gurr 1996: 101). The actual case was effectively still sub judice: the jury had convicted seventeen women and men, but the judges referred the case to the king in council. Four of the accused women were brought up to London, and could be seen (for money) in the Fleet prison. All four are repeatedly named in the play (Mary ‘Mal’ Spencer, Margaret ‘Granny’ Johnson, Alice ‘Naunt’ Hargreaves, and Frances ‘Goody’ Dickinson): thus the curious could compare the prisoners with their stage versions. The boy accuser, Edmund Robinson, separated from his harsh father, had withdrawn his story, but the play intervened, cheerfully dramatising and improving upon the accusations he had made, without any compunction or evident fear of a defamation case. King Charles, to his credit, pardoned the accused, but not all survived imprisonment. In assembling a multi-stranded plot around these wild reports, the ageing Heywood handled the one tragic action. His prose writings include his Gynaikeion (1624), a hastily compiled encyclopaedia about women, in which the eighth book is ‘Of Witches’: it reveals Heywood as a keen and all too credulous reader of the Malleus Maleficarum and Jean Bodin. Good husbands in Heywood’s plays might discover that their wives have committed adultery, but the experience of Master Generous surpasses that horror – Mistress Generous turns out to be a witch, who has promised her soul to Satan. Nor will she repent. In a moment of horror, Generous realises that, through years in which he has been trying to be chary about his soul, he has spent nights in bed with a demon in the shape of his wife (while she was off attending sabbaths). For the main comic plot, Brome handled the bewitched household of Old Seely, where relations of master and servant, parent and child, have been inverted. Brome did not here extend the local inversion of power relations to showing Old Seely being domineered over by his wife: the promotion of women to dangerous power is the witchcraft subject of the play at large. A central scene dramatises Robinson’s wild story: the servant Robin peeps through a cranny in a barn, and sees the ‘satanical sisterhood’ (4.1; Heywood 1874: IV, 219), who make appear a wedding feast (which has been spirited away), either by descending to them or by having it delivered to a table by spirits. Such scenes of collective female depravity and appetite prepare for the misogynistic masque in Act 4, when the bastard Whetstone is empowered by his diabolic aunt to manifest to each of the gentlemen present what purports to be his actual, biological, father. Whetstone’s

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father was at least a gallant, whereas this satanic antimasque makes it appear that the others were sired by a schoolteacher, a nimble tailor, and a servant respectively: a form of witchcraft is potentially present in all women, it seems. While it is hard to separate the play from our misgivings about the way it exploited the wretched prisoners, an eyewitness account of the play in performance allows us to glimpse an instance of collective theatre experience, maybe one of the last, coming as it did in a decade where elite and public theatres had largely differentiated themselves. Nathaniel Tompkins’s testimony is added to the online text of the play on Gabriel Egan’s website.11 We learn that the play was, exceptionally, performed on three consecutive days because it drew such crowds, and that when the spirits transform the wedding feast into mushrooms and cows’ turds, live kittens and birds also emerged from the magically inedible wedding pies. Any coherent view of the ‘state or tenet of witches’ Tompkins says he expected (he perhaps means a firm opinion about the reality of pact witchcraft and what witches believed) is indeed absent. However, even if it was not a play for intellectuals, he ‘found a greater appearance of fine folk, gentlemen and gentlewomen than I thought had been in town in the vacation’ at this public theatre play. But in that socially diverse but unified crowd, how many actually experienced the same play? Gentlemen like Tompkins may have expected a more demonological play (there is no appearance by the Devil himself), but did ordinary theatre-goers enjoy the social disorder the witches induce? It is possible that some men in the audience might have been disturbed by the male neuroses most accounts of witches seem to trigger: fears about virility and social status. Others might simply have been amused. Did the gentlewomen in the audience find Mistress Generous’s reckless adventures and long-term cozening of her husband secretly appealing, or was Mal Spencer, with her self-propelling broom and pail and her active sex life, a source of secret identification? Morally irresponsible though the play may be (as an intervention in a case where lives were in jeopardy), it surely addressed the inward fantasies and anxieties of an age of change in social and genderrelated expectations. A link between The Late Lancashire Witches and Milton’s Comus might seem unlikely, but it too was performed in the late summer or autumn of 1634, and both texts concern supernatural evil. Collocating the two makes it possible to draw together some of the typical concerns this essay has suggested. The Lady in Comus resists magic and seduction, and, though reluctant to speak, she has much to say. Rescue delivers her back to the silence normal to her gender, age, and breeding – after line 798 she says nothing. She expresses her triumph over ‘sensual folly’ only via the language of ‘victorious dance’. Comus contains by far the best stage poetry of the period, and Alice Egerton also displayed her accomplishment in Lawes’s exquisite and difficult setting of ‘Sweet echo’. Yet it does seem true to say that the focus of anxiety in the masque is really the Lady rather than the enchanter. Comus is a theatrical being, a libertine seducer performed by a male professional actor. The Lady is an intruder upon performance; the dramatisation of her resistance to seduction really involves our seduction by her, focused through song, poetry, and dance.

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Much ‘Caroline drama’ might really be called ‘Henriettan drama’: the queen was the enthusiast, the royal actor. All the important innovations in theatre were made at court – women performers, scenery, lighting, elaboration of costume and make-up. The theatre’s power of illusion was placed at the queen’s disposal, and her muchresented hold over Charles, a king ‘overpowered with the enchantments of a woman’,12 was connected to theatre and performance. There were those in the ordinary theatre ready to see more, who knew that women abroad were ‘the best actors, they play their own parts, a thing much desired in England by some ladies, inns o’ court gentlemen, and others’ (The Ball 5.1; Shirley 1833: III, 79). But the nation, in what Comus would have called a ‘pet of temperance’, opted to ‘feed on pulse’ rather than be feasted. On 2 September 1642 the theatres were closed; the second Globe was demolished in 1644, on 11 February 1648 the ‘Ordinance for the utter suppression and abolishing of all stage-plays and interludes’ was passed, and the interiors of the surviving city playhouses were demolished. July 1645 had also seen the Masquing House (Gurr 1992: 166–7) at Whitehall taken down: ‘the Queen’s dancing barn’, the Puritans called it, as if it had been the barn where Edmund Robinson peeped in on witchcraft.

Notes < http://www.rhul.ac.uk/Drama/Research/ BromeProject/index.html>; ; . 2 . 3 Shirley, The Lady of Pleasure 4.3.180. In them, Celestina says, truth and love of innocence shine so brightly that ‘At court, you cannot lose your way to chastity’. 4 Joseph Rutter, epilogue to The Shepherd’s Holiday (1633–5), cit. Veevers 1989: 55. 1

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Sir Henry Herbert’s commendation of Shirley’s The Young Admiral (1633; Bawcutt 1996: item 259). 6 Brome, A Jovial Crew 4.2. 7 Times Literary Supplement, 1 May 1987. 8 See the website cited in n. 2 above. 9 Brome 1873: II, 9 (second pagination). 10 Brome 1873: II, 13 (first pagination). 11 . 12 The Life and Death of King Charles, or, the Pseudo-Martyr Discovered (London, 1650), 214.

References and Further Reading The journal SEL, Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900 runs a regular ‘Recent Studies in Tudor and Stuart Drama’ survey (see e.g. Platt 2008). Bawcutt, Nina (1996). The Control and Censorship of Caroline Drama: The Records of Sir Henry Herbert, Master of the Revels 1623–73. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Berger, Thomas L., William C. Bradford, and Sidney L. Sondergard (1998). An Index of Characters in Early Modern English Drama, Printed Plays 1500–1660. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brome, Richard (1873). The Dramatic Works of Richard Brome, ed. A. C. Swinburne, 3 vols. London: J. Pearson.

Caroline Theatre Brome, Richard (1967). The Antipodes, ed. A. Haaker. London: Edward Arnold. Bulman, James (2003). ‘Caroline theatre’. In A. R. Braunmuller and Michael Hattaway (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to English Renaissance Drama (pp. 344–71). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Butler, Martin (1984). Theatre and Crisis 1632– 1642. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Clark, Ira (1992). Professional Playwrights: Massinger, Ford, Shirley, and Brome. Lexington: University of Kentucky Press. Davenant, William (1872). The Dramatic Works of Sir William D’Avenant, 5 vols. Edinburgh: William Paterson. Donaldson, Ian (1970). The World Upside Down. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Edmond, Mary (1987). Rare Sir William Davenant. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Farr, Dorothy (1989). John Ford and the Caroline Theatre. London: Macmillan. Gurr, Andrew (1992). The Shakespearean Stage: 1574–1642, 3rd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gurr, Andrew (1996). The Shakespearean Playing Companies. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Heywood, Thomas (1874). The Dramatic Works of Thomas Heywood, ed. J. Pearson, P. A. Daniel, and R. H. Shepherd, 6 vols. London: J. Pearson. Hopkins, Lisa (1994). John Ford’s Political Theatre. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Kaufmann, R. J. (1961). Richard Brome, Caroline Playwright. New York: Columbia University Press. Killigrew, Thomas (1664). Comedies and Tragedies. London. Facsimile edn. New York: Benjamin Blom, 1967. Knowland, A. S. (1962). Six Caroline Plays. World’s Classics Oxford: Oxford University Press. Logan, Terence P. and Denzell S. Smith (1978). The Later Jacobean and Caroline Dramatists: A Survey and Bibliography of Recent Studies in English Renaissance Drama. Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press. Massinger, Philip (1976). The Plays and Poems of Philip Massinger, ed. P. Edwards and C. Gibson, 5 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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McLuskie, Kathleen (1988). ‘The plays and playwrights: 1613–42’. In Lois Potter et al. (eds.), The Revels History of Drama in English, vol. 4: 1613–1660 (pp. 127–257). London: Methuen. Milton, John (1932). The Works of John Milton, 18 vols. New York: Columbia University Press. Parry, Graham (1981). The Golden Age Restor’d: The Culture of the Stuart Court, 1603–42. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Platt, Peter G. (2008). ‘Recent studies in Tudor and Stuart drama’. SEL Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 48/2, 443–517 Randall, Dale B. J. (1995). Winter Fruit: English Drama 1642–1660. Kentucky: University Press of Kentucky. Sanders, Julie (1999). Caroline Drama: The Plays of Massinger, Ford, Shirley and Brome British Council Writers and their Work. London: Northcote House. Shifflett, Andrew and Ronald E. Miller Jr. (2006). ‘Recent studies in Sir William Davenant’. English Literary Renaissance, 36/3, 466–81. Shirley, James (1833). The Dramatic Works and Poems of James Shirley, ed. W. Gifford and A. Dyce, 6 vols. London: J. Murray. Steggle, Matthew (2004). Richard Brome: Place and Politics on the Caroline Stage. The Revels Plays Companion Library. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Tomlinson, Sophie (2005). Women on Stage in Stuart Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tricomi, Albert (1989). Anticourt Drama, 1603– 42. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press. Veevers, Erica (1989). Images of Love and Religion: Queen Henrietta Maria and Court Entertainments. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wedgwood, C. V. (1960). ‘Social comedy in the reign of Charles I’. In C. V. Wedgwood, Truth and Opinion (pp.191–221). London: Collins. Wiseman, Susan (1998). Drama and Politics in the English Civil War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zucker, Adam and Alan B. Farmer (2006). Localizing Caroline Drama: Politics and Economics of the Early Modern, 1625–1642. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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John Ford, Mary Wroth, and the Final Scene of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore Robyn Bolam

The most sensational piece of staging in John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, and perhaps in the whole of Caroline drama, is Giovanni’s entrance in Act 5, scene 6 with his sister’s heart upon his dagger.1 His brother-in-law, Soranzo, having discovered his wife’s incestuous affair with Giovanni, impatiently awaits the opportunity to murder him at a banquet in the presence of the ‘good’ citizens of Parma and their cardinal.2 Giovanni’s triumphant confession of incest and murder is swiftly followed by his father’s death (apparently from a heart seizure), by Soranzo’s murder (‘see this heart which was thy wife’s; / Thus I exchange it royally for thine’, 5.6.72–3), and by Giovanni’s death at the hands of the banditti and Soranzo’s servant, Vasques. Giovanni welcomes death because, after the killing of his lover and their unborn child, as he passionately declares to the assembly when he shows them Annabella’s heart, he believes that his own is already ‘entombed’ inside hers (5.6.27). As Giovanni’s extravagant actions mount, an audience may well find its sympathy for the sacrificed and censured sister increasing. In her stimulating essay, ‘’Tis Pity She’s a Whore: Representing the Incestuous Body’, Susan Wiseman notes that until 1650, when it was declared a felony, incest, like adultery and fornication, was dealt with by the church rather than the state, and she quotes Lawrence Stone’s view that the penalties were ‘surprisingly lenient’ (Wiseman 1990: 184). The Cardinal glosses over the exact nature of the crime in his final words: ‘Of one so young, so rich in Nature’s store, / Who could not say, ’Tis pity she’s a whore?’ This puts Annabella in the ‘dangerous (but less dangerous) general category for the desirous female’ and indicates that, as Wiseman suggests, the point ‘at which the irreconcilable nature of the conflicting claims of church, state, family and economics on the body – particularly the reproductive body – fail to be resolvable and fail to verify and stabilise the meaning of incest’ has been reached (Wiseman 1990: 195). Understanding the problem is not the church’s concern, as the Friar demonstrates throughout. It is clear where the Cardinal’s priorities lie: ‘Take up these slaughtered bodies; see them buried; / And all the gold and jewels, or whatsoever, / Confiscate by the canons of the Church,

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/ We seize upon to the Pope’s proper use’ (5.6.144–7). A whole family line has been wiped out and, once the dead have been plundered, a cardinal who harbours murderers at his pleasure will ‘talk at large of all’ with Richardetto, whose only answer to the dangers of bodily passion is to place his niece permanently in a convent. The status quo has been resumed but this tragedy shows how shakily it is maintained. Our final image of Annabella is not necessarily the Cardinal’s. Ford’s sympathetic treatment of her plight leaves us, like Giovanni, with an image of her face (5.6.106) superimposed on the mutilated body we are left to imagine: there is no direction to indicate that her remains are brought on stage, and Vasques’ return within seconds of being dispatched to verify her state would support this. As a victim she is a star-crossed lover, represented on stage at this point only by a bleeding heart, which has the additional parodic resonance of a biblical sacrifice. But what happens to Annabella’s heart once it has served its shocking purpose at the beginning of the scene? Giovanni taunts Soranzo with it at line 10 before the latter realises that it is a heart, and more, that of his wife. It is possible that, because he is covered in blood and brandishing a dagger, Soranzo suspects Giovanni has already wounded himself and may deprive him of his revenge: ‘Shall I be forestalled?’ (5.6.15). The opening stage direction clearly states that the scene is a banquet, that the Cardinal, Florio, Donado, Soranzo, Richardetto, Vasques, and attendants ‘take their places’. Soranzo, presumably, is standing to welcome his last guest, but the others may be already seated and eating. Soranzo invites the Cardinal: ‘Pleaseth your grace / To taste these coarse confections?’ (5.6.4) just before Giovanni enters to thrust the heart before the assembly with: ‘’Tis a heart, / A heart, my lords, in which is mine entombed. / Look well upon’t; d’ee know’t?’ (5.6.25–7). The most likely place for Annabella’s heart to rest is on the banqueting table, as performances testify. Donald K. Anderson pronounced: In the climactic fifth act … Ford’s heart and banquet imagery are literal: Giovanni tears out Annabella’s heart and brings it to Soranzo’s feast. This spectacular action is foreshadowed throughout the play, for the heart and the banquet often appear figuratively. With the final scene in mind, one finds in the earlier imagery irony and unity. (Anderson 1962: 209)

Since this article almost fifty years ago, critics have debated the ‘heart’s riddle’, as Michael Neill terms it, at length. The best summary of their progress can be found in Neill’s essay, ‘ “What strange riddle’s this?”: deciphering ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore’, where he argues persuasively that explaining the spectacle as ‘a way of representing Giovanni’s diseased inner condition’, ‘as an emblem of the hidden corruption beneath the surface of Parmesan social order’, or as ‘a piece of self-conscious symbolisation contrived by the hero himself ’ in a grotesque biblical parody, does not provide the full picture (Neill 1988: 155–6). Picking up Giovanni’s description of himself as ‘a most glorious executioner’ (5.6.32), Neill draws attention to the custom, at public executions, of cutting out

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the victim’s heart to be exhibited ‘for the execration of the crowd’ (Neill 1988: 157). In a striking reversal, the assembly in the last scene of ’Tis Pity reserves curses and abhorrence for the executioner rather than the trophy he brings. Neill also links Giovanni’s action to scenes involving impaled, entombed, or apparently extracted hearts in Robert Wilmot’s The Tragedy of Tancred and Gismund and John Fletcher’s The Mad Lover, which might have been known to a contemporary audience. He views Ford’s play as a complex ‘startling re-vision of his predecessors’ and in teasing out its meanings draws attention to the close links between the ‘iconography of Love’s Cruelty’ (Neill 1988: 161), and that of religious devotion – an approach also followed by Alison Findlay, who suggests: ‘The bringing of Annabella’s heart into the play’s last supper completes her progress through the key icons in the biblical story of creation, fall, virgin birth and sacrifice’ (Findlay 1999: 31). The Petrarchan conceits which are both mocked and revered in plays which Ford reworks, such as Romeo and Juliet and The Duchess of Malfi, also provide him with a fusion of the erotic and the divine here. In Act 5, scene 5, Giovanni describes his frequent tears as the tribute which his ‘heart / Hath paid to Annabella’s sacred love’ and, as he tearfully prepares to murder her, bids: ‘Pray, Annabella, pray. Since we must part, / Go thou, white in thy soul, to fill a throne / Of innocence and sanctity in Heaven. / Pray, pray, my sister’ (5.5.63– 6), before begging successfully for first one, then a second kiss. His last request is accompanied by a plea for forgiveness which Annabella grants, believing it to be for things past, when it is for the killing yet to come. At this point, although she does not realise it, Giovanni has become ‘a most glorious executioner’ (5.6.33), whose request for his victim’s forgiveness is a matter of course just before the event takes place. Despite its final twist, parallels and contrasts between this scene and the sonnet Romeo and Juliet create at their first meeting (in 1.5) are several. Annabella, like Juliet, is elevated to saintly status by her lover, but Romeo takes his two kisses in a playful bartering: first sinning with a kiss, then having that sin purged by taking the sin back in the second embrace. Ford’s character, however, moves beyond the Petrarchan metaphors, which are literalised so safely in Shakespeare’s play by way of touching palms and lips in loving devotion. Annabella repents prior to Giovanni’s last visit and her strict treatment of herself – writing her letter to him in her own blood and tears, as the Friar directed – puts her in the role of repentant fallen woman rather than saint. However, her newly found religious devotion is saintly and her sacrificial death casts her as an unsuspecting martyr for the cause of forbidden love. Annabella’s abrupt repentance in 5.1, which many find implausible and a betrayal of her earlier spirited encounter with Soranzo (Strout 1990: 167), is necessary to fulfil the Friar’s wish: ‘My blessing ever rest / With thee, my daughter; live to die more blessed!’ (5.1.55–6) and to enable Ford to bring her closer, at her end, to a liberalisation of the adored passive beloved, whose love is considered sacred. When Giovanni leaves his sister’s body in 5.5, he takes from it the organ which, in metaphor, bears witness to the truth of its owner’s feelings: ‘Here I swear / By all that you call sacred, by the love / I bore my Annabella whilst she lived, / These hands

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have from her bosom ripped this heart’ (5.5.56–9). To Giovanni, Annabella’s heart is a physical token of their love, reassuring him of her forgiveness: giovanni: annabella:

Kiss me again – forgive me. With my heart. (5.6.78)

To the banqueting assembly, it is an unwelcome addition to their table, a bloody piece of human meat amongst the ‘confections’ or sweetmeats they were invited to enjoy. It offends, horrifies, and reproaches them: they cannot be blind to it.3 When Annabella predicted, ‘Brother … know that now there’s but a dining time / ’Twixt us and our confusion’ (5.5.16–17) she did not know that her forgiving heart would be the feast, though she rightly saw the banquet as ‘an harbinger of death’. In 1997 Michael Neill returned to analysing this scene, arguing that Giovanni’s ‘display … gives hallucinatory life to the recurrent imagery of the human heart as the repository of tormenting secrets’, and that it ‘carries to its frenzied extreme the anatomical willto-knowledge that informs the bodily dismemberments of the Renaissance stage; but what it discovers is only an impenetrable enigma’ (Neill 1997: 373). Packed with ‘the welter of competing definitions and explanations it invites’ (Neill 1988: 155–6), this heart carries too much, rather than too little, meaning. As an object on the stage it is used to show that none of the characters, not even Giovanni himself, is able to appreciate its full significance. It has symbolic value but this, significantly, does not register in the horror of the moment. This noticeable failure on the part of the characters’ understanding causes the object to have a strong impact on an audience in the final scene because, as Terri Clerico argues, ‘the heart has served so capably as the central referent in a struggle intended to remind us of the ineffable and mysterious contiguity of body and speech – of nature and culture – and of our equally mysterious desire to force the two apart’ (Clerico 1992: 433–4). The heart’s literary and philosophical associations conflict with its physical presence, but the exposure of the latter leads to a re-examination of the former. Nathaniel Strout noticed that, although Annabella speaks fewer lines than Giovanni, she speaks more often than any other character in the play, usually in response to conversation addressed to her. Unlike Giovanni, she rarely has the opportunity to talk at will, but is the recipient of wooing or interrogation throughout: ‘For most of the play, Annabella is a woman more spoken to than speaking’ (Strout 1990: 163). The heroine who ‘enters the play quietly “above” the action rather than as immediately part of it’ in 1.2 (Strout 1990: 170), also goes out quietly, being the centre of attention in the final scene, yet tantalisingly absent from it. When Vasques tells the Cardinal about Putana, ‘an old woman, sometimes guardian to this murdered lady’ (5.6.122), Annabella’s body is, apparently, elsewhere, so does he gesture at her heart, physically small and silent but, nevertheless, a powerful reminder of both her and her fate? Strout reminds us that Romeo was willing to give up his freedom to Juliet, but Giovanni has always considered himself in control

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of Annabella and here his literal possession of her heart emphasises the extent to which she was subject to his will. If Ford had wanted a fitting epigraph for this scene, the sonnet from which the following lines are taken expresses the absent Annabella’s predicament perfectly: I am the soul that feels the greatest smart; I am that heartless trunk of heart’s depart; And I, that one, by love and grief oppressed; None ever felt the truth of love’s great miss Of eyes, till I deprivèd was of bliss; For had he seen, he must have pity showed; I should not have been made this stage of woe Where sad disasters have their open show O no, more pity he had sure bestowed. (Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, Sonnet 42)

When Mary Wroth wrote this as part of a much longer Petrarchan sonnet sequence (probably sometime between 1614 and its publication in 1621), she and John Ford were almost the same age. (Ford was christened in April 1586 and Wroth was born in either October 1586 or, more probably, 1587.) Ford has been criticised for looking back to the Elizabethans, but he does so in order to differ from them in important ways, and it should be remembered that he was not alone in this practice. A Sidney by birth, Wroth had her own reasons for continuing and adapting the Petrarchan tradition. In writing ’Tis Pity, Ford reworked Romeo and Juliet, not only in his transformation of characters and plot, but also in his treatment of the Petrarchan elements of Shakespeare’s play. This was only a few years after Wroth had, herself, re-examined and transformed the Petrarchan sonnet. Ford’s connections with the Sidney family have been perceptively detailed by Lisa Hopkins (1994: 7–34), but links with Wroth have so far escaped attention. In 1606 Ford published Honour Triumphant, a prose pamphlet on love and beauty, dedicated to the countesses of Pembroke and Montgomery: the first was Wroth’s aunt and the second her close friend, to whom the volume in which her sonnet sequence appeared was dedicated. In 1613 a long poem, Christ’s Bloody Sweat, was published by ‘I.F.’, believed by many to be John Ford: the poem was dedicated to the earl of Pembroke, Wroth’s cousin and lover. Some suspect that her liaison with William Herbert predated the death of her husband in 1614, and he also had a wife whom, according to Gary Waller, he married ‘to acquire money and lands’ (Waller 1991: 50). Wroth bore him two children after her husband’s death, although they never married, and her position at court was adversely affected by both the relationship and the scandal caused by the publication of her romance, Urania (1621), to which her sonnet sequence was appended. She agreed to cease its distribution and recall existing copies, but the work was already well known and there is no evidence that the recall actually took place (Smith 2000: 411). Pembroke’s mother was Wroth’s godmother as well as her aunt and, as Waller explains:

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To complicate it further, Mary Wroth was in a sense Pembroke’s sister, since when his own father died, William transferred much of his battle against his father for independence to Mary’s father. A sister is frequently the focus of an adolescent boy’s voyeuristic sexual experiences – and both William and Mary grew up in an atmosphere permeated by the voyeuristic gaze of the court, epitomised in that most scopophiliac of poetic forms, the sonnet, which both wrote to and about each other. In the classic Freudian pattern, the son is beaten back by the father from the mother, so transfers his desire from the mother to some other woman, and thereafter the incestuous desires for the mother are projected upon her replacement – in this case, a cousin who is not, legally, a forbidden blood relative, but one who stands in for the forbidden sister and mother. (Waller 1991: 51)

Pembroke died in 1630, the approximate date at which Ford began to write ’Tis Pity (see Neill 1988: 159, 176 n.20; McCabe 2006: 310). Her sonnets show that Wroth could write feelingly about the pains of secret love: whether or not her relationship with Pembroke was a subliminal influence in the writing of ’Tis Pity (much as the story of her uncle’s first love, Penelope Devereux, has been cited as a possible source for his play The Broken Heart, which was published the same year) cannot be verified. However, a mutual concern with revising the use of the Petrarchan tradition and challenging its assumptions, a preoccupation with the ‘truth’ of love and a knowledge of its nature (Neill 1988: 174), along with a feminising of ‘tragic heroism’, can be demonstrated in the work of both writers (see Chapter 61, The Heart of the Labyrinth: Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus; Hopkins 1998). The sonnet quoted above, with its graphic reference to a female body (‘trunk’) whose heart has been removed, love’s blind irresponsibility and lack of concern for her plight, and the repetition of the word ‘pity’, juxtaposed with her complaint that she ‘should not have been made this stage of woe / Where sad disasters have their open show’, have strong associations with ’Tis Pity. Of a fifteenth-century German woodcut representing the ‘Tortures of Love’, Michael Neill comments: ‘that print may also serve to highlight one striking difference between conventional representations of Love’s Cruelty and Ford’s climactic tableau: in the iconographic tradition the victim is almost invariably male’. Such was the case in the English poetic tradition until the work of Mary Wroth. Neill continues, ‘In Ford’s version of the motif … the roles are strikingly reversed’ (Neill 1988: 173–4). Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus and Ford’s ’Tis Pity are surprisingly alike in their unconventionality. Notes 1 2

All act, scene, and line references to ’Tis Pity are taken from Lomax 1995. See Hopkins 2005: 63 on Parma, the Hapsburgs, and incestuous marriages.

3

See Banfield 2000: 106–7 on the difficulties of conveying this in a naturalistic performance.

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Anderson, Donald K. (1962). ‘The heart and the banquet: imagery in Ford’s ’Tis Pity and The Broken Heart’. Studies in English Literature, 1500– 1900, 2, 209–17. Anderson, Donald K. (ed.). (1986). ‘Concord in Discord’: The Plays of John Ford 1586–1986. New York: AMS Press. Banfield, Chris (2000). ‘Framing Ford: an alternative to pizza in Act V of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore’. Studies in Theatre and Performance, 20, 105–13. Barker, Simon (ed.) (1997). ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore. London: Routledge. Boehrer, Bruce Thomas (1992). Monarchy and Incest in Renaissance England: Literature, Culture, Kinship, and Kingship. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Clerico, Terri (1992). ‘The politics of blood: John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore’. English Literary Renaissance, 22, 405–34. Dente, Carla (1999). ‘Reading symptoms of decadence in Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore’. In Michael St John (ed.), Romancing Decay: Ideas of Decline in European Culture (pp. 27–38). Studies in European Culture Transition 3. Aldershot: Ashgate. Findlay, Alison (1999). A Feminist Perspective on Renaissance Drama. Oxford: Blackwell. Hopkins, Lisa (1994a). John Ford’s Political Theatre. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hopkins, Lisa (1994b). ‘A source for John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore’. Notes and Queries, 41, 520–1. Hopkins, Lisa (1995). ‘ “Speaking sweat”: emblems in the plays of John Ford’. Comparative Drama, 29, 133–46. Hopkins, Lisa (1998). ‘Knowing their loves: knowledge, ignorance, and blindness in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore’. Renaissance Forum, 3/1, 1–14. < http://www.hull.ac.uk/renforum/v3no1/ hopkins.htm>. Hopkins, Lisa (2002). ‘Incest and class: ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore and the Borgias’. In Elizabeth Barnes (ed.), Incest and the Literary Imagination (pp. 94–113). Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Hopkins, Lisa (2005). Screening the Gothic. Austin: University of Texas Press.

Lomax, Marion (1987). Stage Images and Traditions: Shakespeare to Ford. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lomax, Marion (ed.) (1995). ‘’Tis Pity She’s a Whore’ and Other Plays. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McCabe, Richard A. (1993). Incest, Drama and Nature’s Law 1550–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McCabe, Richard A. (2006). ‘’Tis Pity She’s a Whore and incest’. In Garrett A. Sullivan, Patrick Cheney and Andrew Hadfield (eds.), Early Modern English Drama: a Critical Companion (pp. 309–20). New York: Oxford University Press. Miller, Naomi J. and Naomi Yavneh (eds.) (2006). Sibling Relations and Gender in the Early Modern World: Sisters, Brothers and Others. Aldershot: Ashgate. Neill, Michael (ed.) (1988). John Ford: Critical Re-Visions. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Neill, Michael (1997). Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Quilligan, Maureen (2005). Incest and Agency in Elizabeth’s England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Rosen, Carol (1974). ‘The language of cruelty in Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore’. Comparative Drama, 8, 356–68. Sanders, Julie (1999). Caroline Drama: The Plays of Massinger, Ford, Shirley and Brome. Plymouth: Northcote. Sawday, Jonathan (1995). The Body Emblazoned. London: Routledge. Smith, Molly (1998). Breaking Boundaries: Politics and Play in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries. Aldershot: Ashgate. Smith, Rosalind (2000). ‘Lady Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus: the politics of withdrawal’. English Literary Renaissance, 30, 408–31. Strout, Nathaniel (1990). ‘The tragedy of Annabella in ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore’. In David G. Allen and Robert A. White (eds.), Traditions and Innovations: Essays on British Literature of the Middle Ages and the Renaissance (pp. 163–76).

The Final Scene of ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore Newark: University of Delaware Press and Associated University Presses. Sullivan, Garrett A., Patrick Cheney, and Andrew Hadfield (eds.) (2006). Early Modern English Drama: A Critical Companion. New York: Oxford University Press. Waller, Gary (1991). ‘Mary Wroth and the Sidney family romance: gender construction in early modern England’. In Naomi J. Miller and Gary Waller (eds.), Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Waller, Gary (1993). The Sidney Family Romance: Mary Wroth, William Herbert and the Early

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Modern Construction of Gender. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Wiseman, Susan J. (1990). ‘’Tis Pity She’s a Whore: representing the incestuous body’. In Lucy Gent and Nigel Llewellyn (eds.), Renaissance Bodies (pp. 180–97). London: Reaktion Books. Wroth, Mary (1977). Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, ed. G. F. Waller. Salzburg: Institut für Englische Sprache und Literatur, Universität Salzburg. Wymer, Rowland (1995). Webster and Ford. Basingstoke: Macmillan.

53

Local Drama and Custom Thomas Pettitt

The national, ‘popular’, theatre of Marlowe and Shakespeare emerged through the commercialisation of practices and the professionalisation of skills hitherto associated with local, customary traditions of dramatic and semi-dramatic ceremony, pastime, and entertainment (Hayes 1992; Weimann 1978). But Renaissance England did not see the culmination of this process in the complete detachment of theatre from custom, and in 1591 we find Samuel Cox, secretary to Sir Christopher Hatton, wishing that the trend could be reversed: that players would use themselves nowadays, as in ancient former times they have done, which was only to exercise their interludes in the time of Christmas, beginning to play in the holidays and continuing until twelfth tide, or at the furthest until Ash Wednesday.

Alongside ‘such as were in wages with the king’, who were perhaps already on the threshold of full-time professionalism, Cox’s historical reconstruction correctly identifies the two major classes of performer under the old dispensation and the local, customary auspices of their respective performances. The first were household players: such as pertained to noblemen, and were ordinary servants in their house, and only for Christmas times used such plays, without making any profession to be players to go abroad for gain …

The second had community affiliations: certain artisans in good towns and great parishes, as shoemakers, tailors, and such like, that used to play either in their town halls, or some time in churches, to make the people merry … (Chambers 1965: IV, 237)

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The story of the professional players and their national theatre is told elsewhere in this volume: here it is those antecedent but still persisting traditions of household and community theatre which are the focus of attention, together with the equally customary performances which occurred when households and communities met. Their significance for the culture and literature of the Renaissance period resides not merely in that persistence, but also in their elaboration into characteristic forms of Elizabethan and Jacobean performance culture such as the court masque, the royal ‘entry’, and the London Lord Mayor’s show (Kipling 1977a, 1977b), further enhanced by the alacrity with which dramatists inserted such customary material, simple or elaborate, into stage-plays (see Laroque 1991 for Shakespeare), in pursuit of festive celebration (Barber 1972; Jensen 2009; Marcus 1986, 2006) or carnivalesque subversion (Bristol 1985; Knowles 1998). In the study of early modern performance culture, the conventional scholarly distinctions between theatre, pageantry, and folk custom are largely anachronistic and in urgent need of renegotiation. Most late medieval theatre, and all medieval and Renaissance pageantry, was ‘customary’ in the sense of being performed as, or in the context of, a traditional, recurrent observance or activity, be it a seasonal festival or a celebration to mark some special occasion. Conversely much custom and pageantry had significant theatrical aspects, although in consequence of its embeddedness this ‘customary drama’ as often as not comprised less or other than fully fledged, rounded plays achieving a distinct, fictional play-world.

Disruptions and Continuities It is in the nature of living traditions to change over time as well as to persist through time, but the sixteenth century saw exceptionally abrupt dislocations, and given the integration of local, customary drama in broader socio-cultural practices such as worship and religious celebration, it is not surprising that the Reformation (on which see Chapter 27, English Reformations) had a vastly more substantial impact than the Renaissance, whose major contributions (say in the use of classical myth and legend) occurred more within the emerging theatre as an independent cultural system, or in particularly sophisticated courtly or academic oicotypes of customary performances. The Edwardian regime in particular, in its doctrinal extremism and its liturgical interventions, effectively destroyed the quintessentially medieval and Catholic holy legend plays (enactments of the lives, martyrdoms, and miracles of saints, or miracles achieved by the Host); and in putting down religious guilds and votive lights it severely damaged the institutional auspices, the physical context, and the raison d’être of numerous traditional observances such as sword-dancing and plough-trailing. Customary celebrations that survived faced a new barrage of attacks from the Elizabethan Puritans (Greenfield 2003). In the seventeenth century there was some alleviation through royal support expressed in the Book of Sports of 1618 and 1633, but the onslaught culminated in the cataclysm of the mid-century civil war and the

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Cromwellian Interregnum: village wakes and church-ales were prohibited, maypoles destroyed, Christmas abolished. After a brief resuscitation to welcome the restoration of the monarchy in 1660, the older customs survived, if at all, without the benefit of official, institutional auspices, in those unofficial, increasingly plebeian traditions destined to be rediscovered as ‘popular antiquities’ and ‘folklore’ by the educated elite in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Hutton 1994, 1996). Given these difficult conditions, exacerbated by the demographic and economic crises of sixteenth-century urban communities, the great provincial mystery cycles and other biblical plays produced under civic and guild auspices impress by the obstinacy with which they persisted – evidently a symptom of the religious and cultural conservatism of the general population increasingly discerned by historians, hitherto hidden behind the aggressive discourse of the radical reformers. Compromising with metropolitan politics and theology where necessary (excising deferential references to the Pope; omitting plays on the Virgin Mary), the mystery plays survived in several places into the 1570s, and in remote Kendal (Westmorland) just made it into the seventeenth century. The strength of commitment to civic drama in Coventry led briefly in the 1580s and 1590s to experiments replacing the biblical plays with more secular material: the Destruction of Jerusalem; the Conquest of the Danes; the History of King Edward the Fourth. Although the dates of the surviving texts and contextual evidence would qualify them at least chronologically as ‘Renaissance’ drama, mystery cycles and the like are conventionally treated under medieval theatre, and their influence on the emerging professional stage is explored elsewhere in this volume (see Chapter 43, Continuities between ‘Medieval’ and ‘Early Modern’ Drama). The focus here will therefore be on less familiar or less theatrical (but by the same token perhaps more typical) activities. As always in the case of popular cultural traditions, this involves difficult decisions concerning the legitimacy of appeal to the more informative sources available on what are assumed to be the ‘survivals’ of early modern customary activities in more recent folk traditions. Fortunately, such regressive extrapolation proceeds into an increasingly documented past, thanks to the efforts of the Records of Early English Drama project in identifying, transcribing, and publishing records of dramatic performances connected to local communities, institutions, and households prior to 1642. Indeed the sections on ‘Drama, Music, Dance and Popular Customs’ and the like in the introductions to the individual twenty or so volumes now published together constitute a uniquely informed review of precisely ‘local’ drama, most of which, leaving aside the performances of itinerant professionals, is also customary (Douglas and MacLean 2006).

Household Theatre and Custom As Samuel Cox observed, traditional entertainments within households displayed an incidence clustering around the series of great midwinter festivals at Christmastide,

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in some cases with a prologue at All Saints’ Day and persisting beyond Twelfth Night to Candlemas or even Shrovetide. Largely analogous festive activities were observed by the institutional households constituted by educational foundations such as Oxford and Cambridge colleges and the London Inns of Court, whose records have inevitably had a better chance of survival. In domestic households customary revelry could also make out-of-season appearances at major life-cycle celebrations, particularly weddings, but a birth (the ‘gossips’ feast’ for the women in attendance rather than the christening), a coming of age, and even a death (the ‘lyke-wake’ rather than the funeral) would also prompt traditional conviviality. These household revels mainly took place in the (‘great’) hall that was physically, socially, and functionally the central room in most dwellings and institutions, with the festive activities, particularly around Christmas, organised by a lord of misrule, appointed by the head of the household, or chosen by lot for a given festival. His installation in office, choice of officers, and exercise of authority (a set of stocks seems to have been a standard accoutrement) constituted some of the major semi-dramatic ceremonies of the Christmas revels, as did his leave-taking as the end of the festive season (see also Chapter 46, Drama of the Inns of Court). At almost any social level, under festive auspices, such a household group would play traditional games, ranging from formal contests of physical strength and skill to almost unstructured horseplay, for all of which the standard term seems to have been ‘gambols’. Some had a minimal dramatic element, for example the game called ‘shoeing’ (or ‘riding’) the ‘mare’ (or ‘wild mare’), frequently mentioned in Renaissance evocations of Christmas revelry. One participant, presumably a woman, was designated as the mare, others as jockeys or blacksmiths, their attempts to ride or to shoe her a token mimetic framework for a rough and tumble. Rather more complex is the combat game known (in later folk tradition) as ‘skewer the goose’ of which we have a precious early account as a ‘gambol’ (jocum sive gambolium) performed during the Christmas revels of an Elizabethan gentleman’s household in County Down, Ireland, in 1602: Two servants squatted on the ground … Their hands were tied together so that they embraced their knees between them, and a stick was placed between the bend of their arms and legs so that they could not move their arms in any way. Between forefinger and thumb of each hand they held a certain small stick of about a foot in length and sharpened at the further end. These two servants are placed in the following way: one faces the other at about an ell’s distance. When these things have been arranged, the two start to approach each other, and tackling with his feet, each tries to topple his opponent; for once thrown over he can never recover himself, but he offers his backside to be prodded with the small stick previously mentioned. (trans. Fletcher 1986: 135–6)

While these were pastimes in which almost anyone might participate, other activities qualify as entertainments, with a clearer distinction between spectators and performer. The household accounts of Princess Mary for 1522 record a payment to ‘a man of

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Windsor, for killing of a calf before my Lady’s grace behind a cloth’ (Brewer 1867: 1098–1100). Since it persisted (as ‘Killing the Calf ’) into the late eighteenth century, we know that performance comprised a dialogue with sound effects performed by a single man hidden behind a curtain or door who impersonated both a butcher and his reluctant victim. It is tempting to suggest that this (his debut in the acting profession?) is what lies behind John Aubrey’s assertion that Shakespeare’s father was a butcher, and that as a boy Shakespeare ‘exercised his father’s trade, but when he killed a calf, he would do it in a high style, and make a speech’ (Aubrey 1958: 275). That Shakespeare may have known the custom is strongly suggested by Hamlet’s cryptic response to Polonius’ admission that as a student he had acted the part of Julius Caesar and been killed by Brutus in the Capitol: ‘It was a brute part of him to kill so capital a calf there’ (3.2.105). Given the demonstrable longevity of these two examples, it is very likely that other traditions recorded in the nineteenth century, for example at English harvest homes and Irish lyke-wakes, preserve earlier traditions. Juxtaposed with some early texts, such later traditions suggest that Elizabethan household revels also saw the semidramatic performance of wooing songs with a clear distribution of roles and dialogue between a girl and her rustic suitor, ‘Joan and John’, perhaps performed in the manner of children’s wooing games and dance-songs (Pettitt 2003b). There is likely to have been an uncertain boundary (and perhaps a history of development) between the more elaborate of such semi-dramatic games and entertainments and the fully dramatic ‘interlude’ which features in these same household revels in the sixteenth century (and over the years scholarship has been increasingly successful in assigning specific interludes to particular households). George Puttenham’s The Wooer, which he explicitly terms an ‘Enterlude’, does not survive as a whole, but to judge from the summary and extract he gives in his Arte of English Poesie (1589), it must have been closely related to the traditional wooing gambols (with one of which it shares the last line quoted here): the country clown came and wooed a young maid of the city, and being aggrieved to come so often, and not to have his answer, said to the old nurse very impatiently. Iche [‘I’ in stage Mummerset] pray you good mother tell our young dame, Whence I am come and what is my name, I cannot come a wooing every day. Quoth the nurse. They be lubbers not lovers that so use to say. (Puttenham 1970: 203)

The relationship is also underlined by the tendency of the more conventionally dramatic interludes to incorporate simpler gambols (sometimes apologised for as ‘toys’). For example Henry Medwall’s Fulgens and Lucres (1495), despite its humanist message on the nature of true nobility, incorporates, under the name of ‘fart prick in cule [buttocks]’, the ‘skewer the goose’ combat mentioned earlier, motivated as a mockjoust between two servants competing for the favours of a servant-girl.

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An interlude was rarely performed alone. Given its revels context it would need a strong ‘presentation’ (at the least a spoken prologue) to gain attention and to transform the revellers into an audience, and it was normally followed by a sub-dramatic spectacle for which the contemporary term was ‘disguising’. In the instructions set down for the conduct of the household of the earls of Northumberland in the early sixteenth century, the disguising, following the play presented before the lord and lady in the hall at Twelfth Night, is specified as comprising the entry, accompanied by torchbearers, of the disguisers, and their (many) dances, interrupted by a separate group of morris dancers, who come on concealed in a tower or other device, emerge from it, perform, and withdraw again (Lancashire 1980: 34–5). But no amount of scholarly reconstruction can match the living re-creation by that first and highly perceptive student of local, customary drama, William Shakespeare, at the end of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Shorn of the quirks deriving from other agendas, the show performed by the mechanicals of the city for the wedding revels of their duke resolves itself into the classic three-part sequence of a presentation (the spoken prologue, the parading on of the characters and their description, which modulates into a summary of the plot), an interlude (‘Pyramus and Thisbe’), and a disguising (the ‘bergomask’ which will have comprised a spectacular and probably grotesque display by – evidently masked – dancers) (Pettitt 2005b).

Community Theatre and Custom Outdoor activities, community custom, pageantry, and drama were mainly associated with the great festivals of the summer season, from St George’s Day, through May Day, Midsummer, and Whitsun, to the parish wakes of the late summer and early autumn. There is little documentation that English communities matched their continental European analogues in extensive Shrovetide (carnival) festivity, except for an extraordinary record from fifteenth-century Norwich. According to a claim by the civic leaders, in 1443 a certain John Gladman: of disport as hath been accustomed in any city or borough through all this realm, on Tuesday in the last end of Christmas, viz, Fastingong Tuesday [Shrove Tuesday] … having his horse trapped [decorated] with tinfoil and other nice disguising things, crowned as king of Christmas, in token that all mirths that season should end, with the twelve months of the year afore [before] him, each month disguised after the season required, and Lent clad in white and red herrings’ skins, and his horse trapped with oyster shell after him, in token that sadness should follow, and an holy time, and so rode in diverse streets of the city, with other people with him disguised, making mirth and disports and plays. (Tydeman 1978: 19)

This would give English cities a tradition of carnival processions, and even perhaps (in the ‘disports and plays’) Carnival-versus-Lent conflicts familiar from the continent, but as yet there is little independent confirmation of the custom elsewhere, and the

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Norwich authorities are here defending themselves against the charge that the parade was insurrectionary. We are on much safer ground with the better-documented ‘ridings’ of St George and the dragon performed, mainly by the local St George’s guild, in provincial cities. Sometimes the parade demonstrably paused for a conflict between the two figures. In some cities there was a major mustering and parade of the ‘Watch’, with varying degrees of accompanying pageantry, on Midsummer Eve, while in many communities, particularly in the north, the parading season would culminate with the bearing of newly harvested rushes – on a decorated cart accompanied by musicians and dancers – to strew the floor of the parish church. Rush-bearing was often associated with the parish ‘wake’, technically celebrating the anniversary of the church’s dedication, in practice a late summer or autumn holiday. This in turn provided a characteristic context for community drama: the assembly of the inhabitants at some traditional venue (churchyard; play-field) for banqueting, pastimes, and entertainment. That the latter could include dramatic items is suggested by Robert Herrick’s mid-seventeenth-century evocation, which lists, alongside the reappearance (from festivals earlier in the season) of Maid Marian and her morris dancers: a Mimick to devise Many grinning properties [peculiarities]. Players there will be, and those Base in action as in clothes: Yet with strutting they will please The incurious [uncritical] Villages (Herrick 1963: H-761, 9–14)

Earlier, on 29 July 1557, the diarist Henry Machyn recorded what was evidently a rather pleasant summer evening in London: The same day, being saint Olave’s day, was the church holiday in Silver street; and at eight of the clock at night began a stage play of a goodly matter, that continued until xij at midnight, and then they made an end with a good song. (Machyn 1968: 145)

Earlier in the season is the ‘Maying’, but the term refers as much to the activity as the date: the fetching in of ‘may’ (whitethorn blossom). Its distinctive feature was the early morning parade from the woods to the community bearing greenery and, often, a maypole, and early records suggest the procession could be enlivened by the presence of drummers, musicians, and morris dancers. It culminated in effectively establishing the venue for the games and festivals of the upcoming summer festivals (setting up the pole; building summer ‘bowers’), the first of which ensued immediately, and this assembly too would provide a suitable context for dramatic entertainments. In a retrospective account (1603) of London mayings John Stow notes both the pageantry of the procession and the drama of the ensuing festival:

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I find also, that in the month of May, the citizens of London of all estates, lightly in every parish, or sometimes two or three parishes joining together, had their several mayings, and did fetch May-poles, with divers warlike shows, with good archers, morris dancers and other devices, for pastime all the day long; and towards the evening they had stage plays and bonfires in the streets. (Stow 1987: 90–1)

While it could have a wider application, the ubiquitous term ‘may-game’ was sometimes used synonymously with the maying, and early usage suggests the presence of a dramatic element. For example the notorious Act (‘to Restrain the Abuses of Players’) of 1605–6 forbids profanity ‘in any stage play, interlude, show, May-game or pageant’ (Chambers 1965: IV, 338–9) and in John Fletcher’s The Woman’s Prize, having been locked up as mad, and seeing a doctor brought to examine him, Petruchio exclaims, ‘Death, gentlemen, do ye make a may-game on me?’ (Fletcher 1966: 3.5.65). That there was indeed a traditional festive routine involving a doctor and patient is suggested by Thomas Nashe’s use of the term ‘Maygame’ to refer to a notorious stage merriment of 1589 in which a figure representing the Puritan propagandist Martin Marprelate was subjected to grotesque surgery (Chambers 1965: IV, 230). Perhaps the classic summer festival scenario is provided by the church-ale. Most often it is associated with Whitsun, but the procedures involved could be deployed in connection with any community festival. Designed to raise funds for good purposes within the parish through sale of the proverbial cakes and ale, the business side was overseen by the church wardens, while the jollifications themselves were organised by an annually chosen leader, the ‘Summer King’, ‘May King’, ‘Whitsun Lord’, or ‘Robin Hood’. To the degree that this temporary ruler, his ‘Queen’ (or ‘Maid Marian’) and his various officers and attendants were dressed in part and mimicked royal protocol, the custom as a whole had a distinctly mimetic element, but more substantial and conventionally dramatic performances might feature as an additional attraction at the ale. We may never come closer to the spirit of such occasions than the epilogue to a play recorded (probably in the 1470s) in his commonplace book by a Robert Reynes, who as a parish official (of Acle, Norfolk) might well have had the task of thanking the audience for their attention, apologising for shortcomings in the performance, and urging them to stay and drink: Sovereigns all insame [together], Ye that are come to see our game, We pray you all in God’s name To drink ere [before] ye pass [depart]; For an ale is here ordained by a comely assent For all manner of people that appear here this day, Unto holy church to be increasement [a benefit] All that exceedeth the costs of our play. (Davis 1970: no. XIII, 24–31)

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While the culmination of the festival was the communal feast with accompanying revelry and plays, a definitive preliminary was the ‘gathering’ of money and provisions in a perambulation of the host parish and neighbouring communities. And just as the feast could be made more attractive by the performance of a play, so the gatherers drew attention to themselves by some kind of display: in addition to the costumed Robin Hood and his associates, a morris or sword dance, the cavorting of grotesques in the form of beasts (for example a hobby-horse), fools, and even a brief dramatic item: to the extent that it also advertises the performance at the ale such a perambulation concurrently has the status of the ‘banns’ for the play. It is in this connection that it is appropriate to invoke the Robin Hood plays. In many early records, reference to a Robin Hood ‘game’ or ‘play’ may mean no more than the doubtless colourful and raucous spectacle he provided in parading from one venue to another to make his ‘gathering’; others may suggest rather more, for example when the churchwardens of St John’s Bow parish, Exeter (which had a ‘play’ of Robin Hood from at least 1426–7), in 1507–8 record expenditure on ‘the repair of St Edmund the martyr’s arrow for Robin Hood’ (Wasson 1986: 118 [original], 393 [translation]) which looks very much like the recycling of a property previously used in a saint’s play (legend had it the Anglo-Saxon St Edmund was martyred by the arrows of marauding Vikings). The occurrence of actual dramatic performances is confirmed by the chance survival of three texts of fully fledged (if brief) plays of Robin Hood. The earliest, ‘Robin Hood and the Sheriff ’, preserved (as lines of unattributed and uncontextualised dialogue) in a manuscript of c.1475, was probably performed at the ale itself, comprising action somewhat too elaborate to be suitable for perambulatory performance. It opens with a series of contests (archery, stone-throwing, wrestling) between Robin and an unnamed knight, culminating in a sword fight that Robin wins. He decapitates his opponent, puts on his clothes, and goes off carrying the head. In further scenes (difficult to reconstruct precisely) Robin’s followers (Little John, Scarlet, Friar Tuck) confront the sheriff and are captured – we may surmise they will be rescued later by the disguised Robin. The two other plays, printed (as one piece) c.1560 by William Copland as ‘The Play of Robin Hood, very proper to be played in May Games’, are short and simple enough to have been performed in the course of a money-gathering perambulation. The first comprises a confrontation between Robin Hood and a friar, first verbal, then violent, broadening into a general melee between their followers. They are reconciled, the friar is rewarded with a lady to disport himself with, and the show ends with the two of them dancing together. The second piece similarly pits Robin against the potter (after a preliminary encounter with the latter’s comic servant) in a sword-and-buckler fight which Robin loses. There follows a confrontation between the potter and Little John whose outcome is not clear (Wiles 1981: appendix 4). The summer assemblies also provided a suitable venue for the performance of plays satirising local people who had fallen foul of the local community. In South Kyme, Lincolnshire, in 1601, at the last (late August) festival of the season a skit was performed ostensibly dramatising the death and funeral of the outgoing summer lord,

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but apparently satirising an unpopular local magnate, the earl of Lincoln, who complained it included a dirge in which all the whores of the neighbourhood were called on to pray for his soul (Barber 1972: 37–50). Such ‘scandal plays’ could also take the form of jigs, in which the misbehaviour – typically sexual – of local people could be satirised in musical verse-sketches where performers danced as they sang their roles. The practice was sufficiently rife for the archbishop of Canterbury’s visitation articles of 1560 to enquire about ‘sowers of discord between neighbours, by plays, rhymes, famous libels or otherwise’ (Frere and Kennedy 1910: III, 84). For communities, as for households, special occasions could prompt the out-ofseason performance of activities normally associated with seasonal festivals. Relatively unstructured revelry (bonfires; drinking; dancing) might greet events of national importance such as a military victory or a coronation, but a characteristic Renaissance occasion for more organised community celebration would be an actual visit by a monarch or a member of the royal family, say in the context of a summer progress. Local groups would put on parades and other performances for the visiting monarch, often reruns of what they might do at a regular festival, say the parading of the Midsummer ‘watch’, or the performance of the local civic plays. It could also happen that local townspeople would take a customary show to entertain a monarch who did not visit their city but the residence of a local nobleman, as when local morris dancers where brought in to entertain Queen Anne and Prince Henry at Althorp on their way from Scotland to London in 1603, or when the citizens of Coventry performed their hocktide play of the Danes beaten by the English women for Elizabeth at Kenilworth in 1576. In involving a performance by representatives of local communities for an audience comprising the (albeit itinerant) royal household, these occasions may, however, better qualify for consideration under a different heading.

Customary Encounters While the festive assemblies of households and communities provide major opportunities for the performance of dramatic custom and customary drama, equally or more significant is the quite distinct contextual scenario encompassing traditional, contrived, and structured encounters between two such groups. In addition to involving various permutations between such groups (household and household; household and community; community and community), encounter customs can also be distinguished in terms of their relative patterns of movement, and the motivations of the parties involved, between whom it is usually possible to assign, respectively, the active and reactive roles in the encounter (Pettitt 1995). As the precondition for an encounter between distinct social groups relative movement is of course definitive, the least common (and least conducive to dramatic performance) being the ‘collision’ form achieved by two groups moving towards each other, as in the often violent sporting contests, not least Shrovetide football, pitting

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two neighbouring communities against each other on the terrain that lies between them. In all other permutations the encounter is between a mobile and a stationary group, either of which can be in the active or reactive role. Most common is the parade, when the active group is mobile, and moves deliberately along a route which establishes and sustains contact with the reactive group. It is this encounter aspect which makes a mere procession (which can be purely introvert) into a parade (Pettitt 2002), like, for example, the Lord Mayor’s show, the bridal procession, or the hockcart (with the last load of corn from the harvest), demonstrating status, change of status, or achievement to the community at large. And such parades can also involve semi-dramatic elements: effigies, song, speeches; the dancing and posturing of guised or costumed figures, sometimes approaching the fully dramatic, as in an impressive London procession observed by Henry Machyn in 1553: The 27th day of March came through London, [from] Aldgate, Master Maynard, the Sheriff of London, with a standard and drums, and after giants both great and small, and then hobby-horses, and … after great horses and men in coats of velvet, [with chains] of gold about their necks, and men in harness; [and then] the morris dance, and then many minstrels; and af[ter] the sergeants and yeomen on horse-back with ribbons [of green] and white about their necks, and then my lo[rd justice?] late being lord of misrule, rode gorgeously [in cloth?] of gold, and with chains of gold about his neck, with hands full of rings of great value; the w[hich] sergeants rode in coats of velvet with chains of [gold;] and then came the dullo [fool] and a soldan [sultan], and then [a priest?] shriving [hearing the confession of] Jack-of-Lent on horse-back, and a Doctor his physician, and then Jack-of-Lent’s wife brought his physician and bad save his life, and he should [have] a thousand pounds for his labour; and then came the cart with the Worth[ies?] hanged with cloth of gold, and full of ban[ners] and minstrels playing and singing and before rode master Cook, in a coat of velvet with a chain of gold, and with flowers. (Machyn 1968: 33)

The evidently mortal illness of the figure representing Lent suggests the parade took place at the approach of Easter: it is not, however, clear whether the scenes (presumably with dialogue) between Jack and the priest, his wife, and the physician were performed as they rode along, or at stations along the route. The opposite of a parade is an interception, in which the active group awaits the passage of a reactive group whose movement has purely utilitarian aims. At village level it could take the form of an obscene exhibition intercepting the bridal procession of a woman reputed to be unchaste, but in Renaissance England the most familiar instance is the (from this perspective) misleadingly termed ‘royal entry’, when a monarch processes through a city, on the occasion of a visit in the case of provincial cities, in London on the eve of the coronation. To the extent that the royal procession, in its size, magnificence, and insignia, demonstrated the power and magnificence, or asserted the dynastic legitimacy, of the monarch, it qualified as a parade (a ‘triumph’), but the pageantry proper took the form of a series of stationary exhibitions on scaffolds, often with dramatic elaborations, with which the community intercepted the

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royal party on its route between the gate by which they entered the city and the palace at which they were to reside. Two further categories can be identified when the encounter occurs within or at the threshold of a building, the mobile and stationary groups respectively in the role of visitors and hosts. Overwhelmingly more common is the house-visit form, when the visitors are the active group, and enter a house or present themselves at the threshold in order to achieve a customary encounter with those within: mumming, masking, wassailing, souling, pace-egging, shroving, clementing, catterning, hodening (most involving some kind of display or performance) all belong to this category. The reverse form, in which the stationary hosts initiate an encounter with incoming visitors, is again largely confined to royal occasions, those ‘welcomes’ with which Queen Elizabeth was received on her summer progresses, her essentially utilitarian approach to the next stately home intercepted by stationary pageants, displays, and semidramatic performances at strategic gateways and doorways of the residence and its precincts. This aspect – the movement of the active and reactive participants in a customary encounter in relation to each other and to the ambient topography – is more than a somewhat mechanical system of categorisation, for it is an essential and organic feature of the activity, and can give the occasion dimensions not possible under other customary auspices or in more conventional theatrical arrangements, where the performance does not begin until the audience is sitting comfortably (Pettitt 2003a). For example, under encounter auspices performances can begin and end in phases involving different means of communication. In the case of house-visit customs a sense of anticipation (of pleasure or apprehension depending on the custom concerned) can be built up before the performers enter, when their approach is heralded by trumpets, drums, singing, or shouting, followed by the scrape of boots on the doorstep, before they are seen. Audiences along the streets can see and hear a parade approaching from a distance, while conversely a stationary show designed to intercept an approaching dignitary can deploy appropriate media as they come closer, as when Queen Elizabeth entered Norwich in 1578: At the first sight of the Prince, and till her Majesty’s coming to the pageant, the musicians, which were close in the chambers of the said pageant, used their loud music, and then ceased; wherewith her highness stayed, to whom the personage representing the city of Norwich, did speak in these words … (Galloway 1984: 256)

Indeed, customary encounters, particularly parades and interceptions, can involve the crossing of a whole series of communicative thresholds as the mobile group approaches the stationary. Visual contact is established when the one group comes within sight of the other, initially so broader effects and colours can be discerned, then details, culminating with the crossing of a textual threshold when the audience can read any inscriptions or notices (identifying figures; explicating symbolism) deployed by the performers. Somewhere along the way a series of aural thresholds will also be crossed,

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beginning with the hearing of louder noises such as bells and firearms, progressing through louder then quieter forms of music (brass to woodwind and strings), ending with a verbal threshold when the audience can hear any speeches or dialogue spoken by the performers. The final threshold is crossed with the achievement of physical contact (a tactile threshold), in the form say of hand-shaking and embracing or the presentation of gifts. On occasion the remaining two senses could also be involved, with the crossing of an olfactory threshold when the audience could register the scents and smells which could be a deliberate part of a performance (ranging from the dispersal of rosewater, through burning incense and sulphur, to the throwing of ordure), and establishing gustatory contact through offering food and drink or throwing out sweetmeats. It might even have been possible to integrate the relative movement of audience and performers into the dramaturgy of the performance, as when an intercepting pageant stages the Judgment of Paris, and the latter awards the prize not to one of the three goddesses on the scaffold but to the noble visitor whose presence he belatedly registers (implying she has only just arrived): the device was used to compliment both Anne Boleyn and Elizabeth I (Kipling 1977a: 43). On a larger scale, multiple encounter customs could combine the different patterns of movement in various permutations, and the London Lord Mayors’ shows offer interesting displays of this essentially vernacular competence, rarely accorded the attention it deserves in relation to the classical and biblical learning deployed in the themes of the pageantry. This customary performance was indeed the Lord Mayor’s ‘show’ in that it was structured around the newly elected incumbent’s purely utilitarian movements, on the day of his inauguration, between swearing fealty to the monarch at Westminster, dining at the Guildhall, worshipping at St Paul’s, and returning to his residence. These movements indeed acquired the status of parades in their own demonstrative magnificence with many costumed figures and even speeches, but as with a royal entry the most elaborate pageantry took the form of interceptions by stationary exhibitions that the Lord Mayor encountered on his progress. The growing importance of the aspect is registered in the changing direction of the speeches composed for the day by professional authors: in the first half of Elizabeth’s reign they are mainly addressed from the parade to the community; in the second half from the stationary scaffolds to the Lord Mayor. However, as the custom developed over the years the stationary scaffolds of the traditional medieval entries, typically built at or on existing architectural features such as city gates and water conduits, were supplemented with equally spectacular but mobile pageants – either on wheels or carried by scores of porters. These could accordingly be deployed more than once and in more than one way. Having intercepted the mayor at one point, they could later do so at another; or having intercepted him, they could swing into line and become part of the procession, which accordingly became longer and more magnificent – more of a parade – at each encounter. Finally the mobile scaffolds could assemble at the gateway to the new mayor’s residence, and greet his arrival in what amounts to a reception. Customary parades are also amenable to analysis in terms of their patterns of movement in relation to the terrain they cross. Ultimately these patterns can comprise only

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two basic movements: linear, when a parade departs from one point and ends at another, and circular, when it in due course returns to its point of departure, and both are potentially signifying, making statements about the groups and locations involved. A circular parade can assert the rights of the active group in relation to the terrain thus circumscribed (as in the parochial ‘beating of the bounds’) or to places visited along the route. A linear parade can assert or confirm a relationship between the places at its beginning and end, as when the authorities of Shaftesbury paraded a ‘Bezant’ (a frame decorated with flowers, ribbons, feathers, and jewels) to a nearby village to maintain their right of access to water sources there, or when the people of Wishford Magna, Wiltshire, paraded from nearby Grovely Forest carrying green boughs, and their representatives carrying oak-sprigs danced into Salisbury Cathedral to ensure the continuance of their rights to woodland resources. The theatricality of encounter customs can be assessed by juxtaposing evidence on the performance with criteria established by the modern scholar, but under some circumstances it is possible to view the question from the perspective of the participants themselves. In the larger cities the more elaborate forms of civic pageantry involved separate contributions from the local trade and craft guilds, who might each take responsibility for a stationary scaffold in an interception or a mobile stage in a parade (as in the mystery cycles). The guilds were notoriously self-conscious about their relative prestige and status, which was registered publicly in the order in which they went in processions, or in which their representatives welcomed incoming dignitaries: disputes over precedence could rumble on for decades, or lead to the splitting of a procession into two parallel columns. But in the few cases where documentation makes comparison feasible, it seems that beyond a certain point of elaboration in the pageantry, a dramatic custom becomes more drama than custom, more theatre than ceremony, and the relative order of the guild contributions can be determined by other factors, such as their capability to produce a pageant with a given content. The contrast is most readily visible in communities where guilds contributed individual plays to a cycle in connection with a religious festival (Corpus Christi; Whitsun): the order of their plays did not correspond to the order in which their representatives marched in the affiliated religious procession. For the late medieval and early modern periods, the term ‘processional theatre’ is evidently an anachronism, as drama and processions followed mutually incompatible protocols. Cutting across this dramaturgical typology is another based on the motivation of the active group that initiates the encounter. Like the parades just examined, most encounter customs have a demonstrative aspect, in communicating the attitude of the active group to the reactive, and this can extend from malevolence (negative demonstration) to benevolence (positive demonstration), with a range of intermediate motivations (criticism, warning, advice, approval) in between. The encounter can also be designed to enable a physical interaction between the active and reactive groups, ranging from the negative extreme of inflicting damage on persons or property (maleficence) to a positive extreme of conferring benefits (beneficence), practically or more often by immaterial means such as prayers or magic; between these extremes

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are the limited harm inflicted by mischief (personal harassment or material vandalism) and the more amiable interaction of participating in convivial pastimes. Finally, customary encounters can be located on a spectrum representing their redistributive aspect, depending whether the active group has instigated the encounter with a view to donating worldly goods in the form of cash or provisions, or exacting them (in the conventional euphemism, a quête): at intermediate positions the transfer can be provisional or virtual, the performers acknowledging duties, or asserting rights, in relation to the reactive group. In many cases of course the motivation is not merely at an intermediate point on one of these spectrums, but involves aspects of more than one of them. The gatherings for the church-ales glimpsed earlier, as the term indicates, seek the exaction of money and resources from members of the community through which they perambulate, but the latter risk incurring malevolence or even maleficence from a ‘Robin Hood’ and a ‘Little John’ who will not have been selected from the puniest youths of the parish. The royal encounters with cities examined above will involve complex motivations from both sides. The ruler’s parade with both signals his benevolence and asserts his rule; the city’s pageants will acknowledge its allegiance (often confirmed by the symbolic surrender of the key to the city), but will somehow manage to respectfully remind the visitor of the city’s ancient rights and privileges and probably throw in some advice about good governance for good measure. In the malevolent/maleficent corner of the encounter matrix, breaches of the traditional code of domestic behaviour not punished by the official judicial system (typically the dominance of a weak husband by a shrewish or adulterous wife) could be sanctioned by ‘folk law’ in the form of a spectacular and raucous ‘riding’ (Ingram 1984; Pettitt 1999). In this shaming ritual, disguised representatives of the community paraded the offender, or more often a surrogate, on a horse or plank (‘riding the stang’), ignominiously facing the rear, and accompanied by the ‘rough music’ of banged pans and kettles, the firing of guns, and raucous shouts. Some of these features evidently express the perceived unnaturalness and disharmony of the relationship condemned; other inversionary symbolism might include the holding aloft on poles of a skirt (female dominance) or a reversed sword (male subservience), and the scattering among spectators of grains mixed with dung (a negative mirror-image of the benevolent wedding custom in which spectators threw grains on the procession of bride and groom). In a regional (West Country) variant, the male figure paraded might be accompanied by a female (a man dressed as a woman representing the shrewish wife), beating him with the ladle or ‘skimmington’, which gave the form its traditional name. If surrogates were deployed, the parade would end with a housevisit to the residence of the offenders. If the latter were themselves paraded, they might, after a good deal of rough treatment, end up in the village stocks, and there was clearly considerable confusion in the minds of participants about the legal status of the activity, as many official punishments for antisocial behaviour at the time took a very similar form. The satirical riding with appropriate symbolism could also be deployed in (sub-)community expression of malevolence prompted by other factors:

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witness the notorious parades in Wells, Somerset, in the summer of 1607 castigating an unpopular Puritan faction in the town, which conveniently included two men surnamed Yard and Hole, and provoking what must be the most extensive documentation for any customary observance in Renaissance England (Stokes 1996: I, 261–367). Within the important category of encounter customs taking the form of housevisits, one of the most common in the Renaissance period is the ‘mumming’ of the Christmas season, an interactive encounter in which disguised and vizored visitors penetrated households in order to indulge with them in convivial pastimes, usually gambling with dice. In small communities, or among members of an elite coterie (as in Henry VIII’s notorious visit to Cardinal Wolsey), the fun could also include trying to recognise the resolutely ‘mum’ visitors (as in more recent traditions in Newfoundland and Scandinavia), but in the anonymity of cities a custom facilitating the entry of disguised strangers into private domestic space was open to abuse, prompting local and national legislation banning the use of masks in its observance. Beyond the display of their costumes and masks, and their dancing entry (accompanied by pipe and drum), mummers offered little by way of entertainment. It is just possible that in the later Middle Ages, by gradually acquiring first an introductory prologue, then mimetic action (as in Lydgate’s fifteenth-century ‘disguisings’ for Henry VI), and finally dialogue, one variety of the mumming developed into the more elaborate and more conventionally dramatic masque, but it is equally likely that the latter is an amalgamation of a number of originally and essentially distinct house-visit customs. These evidently included a variant (possibly imported by Henry VIII) of the convivial mumming in which the visitors danced (as in Romeo and Juliet) with the hosts. London diarist Henry Machyn witnessed what seems to be a three-way variant at a wedding banquet in 1562: after supper came 3 masques: one was in cloth of gold, the next was friars, and the 3rd was nuns; and after[wards] they danced betimes [for a while], and after[wards] friars and nuns danced together. (Machyn 1968: 288)

Another significant ingredient in the court masque will have been a festive house-visit custom involving not so much convivial interaction as demonstrative courtesy by subordinates (say manorial tenants) bringing a show to honour and entertain their lord (who reciprocated with hospitality and largesse). The early modern financial accounts of provincial households contain payments at Christmastime to ‘the men of ’ specified communities of which the householder was manorial lord offering an entertainment, which is rarely specified beyond a tantalising ‘singing and dancing’. Whatever its exact origins, and despite the literary and scenic sophistication achieved by Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones, the Renaissance masque maintains its customary features in terms of incidence (Christmas revels and weddings), its mixture of semi-dramatic display and social interaction, and the at least fictional representation of the performers as visitors who bring greetings and blessings to the household (a

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fiction which retains a literal truth in those instances where the performers come from the Inns of Court, or who are technically visitors from one of the court sub-households to another). Indeed even a court masque, presumably with some scenic simplification, could be taken on a series of visits to select households of royal favourites, this ‘running mask’ effectively reverting to the basic auspices of one of its customary antecedents. Ben Jonson’s Christmas his Masque, performed for James I on Christmas Day 1616, is effectively a history lesson in the development of this particular branch of the customary house-visit, in which what is essentially a pseudo-visit produced by the royal court itself (performed indeed, by the King’s Men) masquerades as a true visit, a seasonal courtesy-offering by London citizens and shopkeepers, with the structure and content of a much simpler phase of development, evidently persisting outside the court.

The Mummers’ Plays It might have been expected that pride of place in a survey of this kind would be assigned to the mummers’ plays: an encounter custom recorded in hundreds of Victorian communities over much of Great Britain and Northern Ireland, in which a group of rural labourers or urban youths, in outlandish garb, perambulated the locality performing at street corners, in public houses, or in private homes, in most areas during the Christmas season. The plot of their play usually comprised a verbal confrontation, culminating in a sword fight, between Saint (or sometimes King) George and a vaguely outlandish antagonist (the King of Egypt; Bold Slasher; the Turkish Knight): one would eventually be killed, but then ‘revived’ by a garrulous Quack Doctor. Mummers’ plays were long believed to be the survival of a primitive, pre-Christian ritual, the death-and-revival originally intended, in accordance with the principles of sympathetic magic set out in Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890), to ensure the continued fertility of crops, herds, and men. But while theatre historians have continued to discern the influence of the mummers’ plays on Renaissance drama (Laroque 1991: 55; Woodbridge and Berry 1992: 5), and even assign them prominence among the traditional festivities the young Shakespeare ‘might … have participated in, growing up in Stratford and its surrounding countryside’, and which accordingly ‘had a significant impact upon Shakespeare’s imagination, fashioning his sense of theater’ (Greenblatt 2005: 39–40), both the evolutionary anthropology and the survivalist folklore underpinning the theory of primitive origins were long ago repudiated in the respective disciplines, exposing such speculations to the simple historical circumstance that there is no direct and convincing evidence for the mummers’ plays as we know them earlier than the middle of the eighteenth century (Pettitt 2005). That does not necessarily exclude the possibility that our extensive documentation of the mummers’ plays in recent, living tradition can be of use in understanding local

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and customary drama in the Renaissance period. Whatever the situation with regard to historical continuity, the mummers’ plays of recent tradition display striking analogies to the winter revels of Renaissance households, surveyed earlier here, not least in encompassing the play proper within a show which opened with a presentation (asking for the audience’s goodwill, announcing the purpose of the performers, and (often) calling on and introducing the characters, and ending with a non- or sub-dramatic entertainment usually comprising a miscellany of odd speeches by supernumerary characters (often including a club-bearing Beelzebub), then perhaps songs, or dances. The mummers’ plays accordingly provide a suitable laboratory for examining the interaction of dramatic and non-dramatic modes of performance under seasonal, festive auspices, for example the reciprocal interference of their respectively representational and presentational dress and dramaturgy, the distribution of roles among performers of differing talents, the impact of untrained memories on the transmission of the scripts. And while some parts of modern performances (notably the play proper) may be new, other parts – the host customs; the non-dramatic features of the traditional show – may be older, although the situation will vary between different branches of tradition. As they have been recorded over the last couple of centuries, the mummers’ plays fall fairly clearly into three broad categories: the ubiquitous hero combat plays (as just described); the sword-dance plays of the north of England (in which a slaying-and-cure sequence provides a dramatic interlude amidst the segments of a skilled dance display); and the wooing plays of the East Midlands (in which a slaying and cure can be embedded in a distinct plot involving a ‘lady’ who is wooed by one or more suitors), often performed in the context of a begging custom (quête) in which a decorated plough is perambulated through the community on ‘Plough Monday’ (the first Monday following Epiphany). There is little doubt that the host customs of these last two forms (respectively sword-dance and plough-trailing quêtes) are survivals, under unofficial auspices, of late medieval and sixteenth-century ‘gatherings’ in support of guild or parish funds of the kind discussed above (and playless traditions of both customs have also been recorded in recent times). In the case of the hero combat plays it is more difficult to identify an analogous but playless host custom: it may have been (like the tradition just suggested as lying behind the masque) a now otherwise defunct courtesy visit to the household of a lord by representatives of a neighbouring, dependent community: Victorian village traditions showed a distinct predilection for gentry households, and sometimes put on a distinctly more elaborate version of the show for the squire. While the dramatic parts of the mummers’ ‘plays’ are either modern inventions or grossly simplified oral versions of earlier stage plays, the custom as a whole remained significant in reproducing the structure of the early modern revels show under the auspices of a customary house-visit perambulation, matching and so illuminating significant features of both the household and community traditions, and the encounters of communities with households, that constituted the bulk of the local, customary drama of the Renaissance period.

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Aubrey, John (1958). Aubrey’s Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick, 3rd edn. London: Secker & Warburg. Barber, C. L. (1972). Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form in its Relation to Social Custom. Princeton: Princeton University Press (originally published 1959). Brewer, J. S. (ed.) (1867). Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII. III.ii. London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office. Bristol, Michael D. (1985). Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England. New York: Methuen. Chambers, E. K. (1965). The Elizabethan Stage, 4 vols. London: Oxford University Press (originally published 1923). Clopper, Lawrence M. (2001). Drama, Play and Game: English Festive Culture in the Medieval and Early Modern Period. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Davis, Norman (ed.) (1970). Non-Cycle Plays and Fragments. EETS st 1. London: Oxford University Press. Douglas, Audrey and Sally-Beth MacLean (eds.) (2006). REED in Review: Essays in Celebration of the First Twenty-Five Years. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Fletcher, Alan J. (1986). ‘ “Farte prycke in cule”: a late-Elizabethan analogue from Ireland’. Medieval English Theatre, 8/2, 134–9. Fletcher, John (1966). The Woman’s Prize, ed. G. B. Ferguson. The Hague: Mouton. Forrest, John (1999). The History of Morris Dancing, 1458–1750. Toronto: Toronto University Press. Frere, W. H. and W. McC. Kennedy (eds.) (1910). Visitation Articles and Injunctions of the Period of the Reformation, 3 vols. London: Longman, Green. Galloway, David (ed.) (1984). Records of Early English Drama: Norwich 1540–1642. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Greenblatt, Stephen (2005). Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare. London: Pimlico. Greenfield, Peter H. (1999). ‘The carnivalesque in the Robin Hood games and King Ales of southern England’. In Konrad Eisenbichler and Wim Hüsken (eds.), Carnival and the Carnivalesque (pp. 19–28). Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Greenfield, Peter H. (2003). ‘Regional performance in Shakespeare’s time’. In Richard Dutton et al. (eds.), Region, Religion and Patronage: Lancastrian Shakespeare (pp. 243–52). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hayes, Tom (1992). The Birth of Popular Culture: Ben Jonson, Maid Marion and Robin Hood. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Herrick, Robert (1963). The Complete Poetry of Robert Herrick, ed. J. Max Patrick. New York: New York University Press. Hutton, Ronald (1994). The Rise and Fall of Merry England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hutton, Ronald (1996). The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ingram, M. (1984). ‘Ridings, rough music, and the “reform of popular culture” in early modern England’. Past and Present, 105, 79–113. Ingram, R. W. (ed.) (1981). Records of Early English Drama: Coventry. Toronto: Toronto University Press. Jensen, Phebe (2009). Religion and Revelry in Shakespeare’s Festive World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jonson, Ben (1969). The Complete Masques, ed. Stephen Orgel. New Haven: Yale University Press. Johnston, Alexandra F. and Wim Hüsken (eds.) (1996). English Parish Drama. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Kipling, Gordon (1977a). ‘Triumphal drama: form in English civic pageantry’. Renaissance Drama, ns 8, 37–56. Kipling, Gordon (1977b). The Triumph of Honour: Burgundian Origins of the Elizabethan Renaissance. The Hague: Leiden University Press. Knowles, Ronald (ed.) (1998). Shakespeare and Carnival: After Bakhtin. London: Macmillan. Lancashire, Anne Begor (2002). London Civic Theatre: City Drama and Pageantry from Roman Times to 1558. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lancashire, Ian (1980). ‘Orders for twelfth day and night circa 1515 in the second Northumberland household book’. English Literary Renaissance, 10, 6–45

Local Drama and Custom Laroque, François (1991). Shakespeare’s Festive World: Elizabethan Seasonal Entertainment and the Professional Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lindley, David (ed.) (1984). The Court Masque. Revels Plays Companion Library. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Machyn Henry (1968). The Diary of Henry Machyn (1848), ed. J. G. Nichols. London: Camden Society. Marcus, Leah S. (1986). The Politics of Mirth. Jonson, Herrick, Milton, Marvell, and the Defense of Old Holiday Pastimes. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Marcus, Leah S. (2006). ‘Shakespeare and popular festival’. In Stuart Gillespie and Neil Rhodes (eds.), Shakespeare and Elizabethan Popular Culture (pp. 42–66). Arden Critical Companions. London: Thomson Learning. Pettitt, Thomas (1984). ‘Tudor interludes and the winter revels’. Medieval English Theatre, 6/1, 16–27. Pettitt, Thomas (1995). ‘Customary drama: social and spatial patterning in traditional encounters’. Folk Music Journal, 7/1, 27–42. Pettitt, Thomas (1999). ‘Protesting inversions: charivari as folk pageantry and folk-law’. Medieval English Theatre, 21, 21–51. Pettitt, Thomas (2002). ‘The morphology of the parade’. European Medieval Drama, 6, 1–30. Pettitt, Thomas (2003a). ‘Moving encounters: choreographing stage and spectators in urban theatre and pageantry’. Medium Ævum Quotidianum, 48, 63–93. Pettitt, Thomas (2003b). ‘ “I am here, Syre Cristesmasse”: dramatic aspects of early poetry and song’. European Medieval Drama, 7, 1–28. Pettitt, Thomas (2005a). ‘When the Golden Bough breaks: folk drama and the theatre his-

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torian’. Nordic Journal of English Studies, 4/2, 1–40. Pettitt, Thomas (2005b). ‘Midsummer metadrama: “Pyramus and Thisbe” and early English household theatre’. Angles, 5, 31–43. Puttenham, George (1970). The Arte of English Poesie, ed. G. D. Willcock and A. Walker. 1936; repr. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stokes, James (ed.) (1996). Records of Early English Drama: Somerset, including Bath. 2 vols. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Stow, John (1987). A Survey of London. 2nd edn. (1603), ed. H. B. Wheatley (1912). Repr. London: Dent. Streitberger, W. R. (1994). Court Revels, 1485– 1559. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Tillis, Steve (1999). Rethinking Folk Drama. London: Greenwood Press. Tydeman, William (1978). The Theatre in the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Twycross, Meg and Sarah Carpenter (2002). Masks and Masking in Medieval and Early Tudor England. Aldershot: Ashgate. Wasson, John (ed.) (1986). Records of Early English Drama: Devon. Toronto: Toronto University Press. Weimann, Robert L. (1978). Shakespeare and the Popular Tradition in the Theatre. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Westfall, Suzanne R. (1990). Patrons and Performance: Early Tudor Household Revels. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wiles, David (1981). The Early Plays of Robin Hood. Cambridge: Brewer. Woodbridge, Linda and Edward Berry (eds.) (1992). True Rites and Maimed Rites: Ritual and Anti-Ritual in Shakespeare and his Age. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

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The Critical Elegy John Lyon

In critical elegies – poems written by one poet on the death of a contemporary or near-contemporary – we find a distinctively concentrated and complex history of English writing, ‘the heart of literary history’ (Lipking 1981: 138). Typically such poems characterise the main literary concerns specific to the times in which they were written. W. H. Auden’s elegy for W. B. Yeats, for example, spoke of anxieties particular to the twentieth century – a century of wars and atrocities but also of remarkable emancipations – in worrying about the political responsibilities and efficacy of literature. By contrast, in the nineteenth century, poets as diverse Shelley writing of Keats, Matthew Arnold elegising his friend Arthur Hugh Clough, and Swinburne lamenting the loss of Baudelaire were all exercised by the possibility (or impossibility) of belief, and religious belief in particular. The concern which dominated the elegy of the Renaissance – coinciding with a culture increasingly aware of print as a means of preserving its poetry for posterity – was the English language itself: the question, repeatedly posed and diversely answered, was whether English might serve as the medium for an enduring and major literature. Critical elegies were particularly prevalent in the earlier half of the seventeenth century when ‘an English writer’s death would almost automatically occasion poetic tributes from mourning fellow citizens of the literary world’ (Murphy 1972: 75). The rewarding concentration and the interpretative difficulty of such poems arise from the same source. The views of one poet, expressed in verse, on the works of another are usually altogether richer and more intense than the mere discursive commentary of non-practitioners. Typically these poems at times enact and at times resist the poetic styles and practices they explicitly discuss. Yet poems, addressed to the writings of contemporary poets, may be about many complex things, diverse things which prove difficult to disentangle: such poems may appear as true and accurate tributes, but also may represent the workings of anxiety, hostility, rivalry, appropriation, and rewriting. No less a figure than John Dryden, writing in the latter part of the seventeenth century, affords evidence of the difficulty of reading such concentrated critical elegies

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when, in ‘A discourse concerning the original and progress of satire’, he described and dismissed the most important of them all – Ben Jonson’s poem on Shakespeare – as ‘an insolent, sparing, and invidious panegyric’ (Dryden 1900: II, 18). Yet again, in contrast to such general interpretative complexity, these elegies are often remarkably direct and particular in offering the nearest thing to what we presently think of as practical criticism or close reading: through ‘mirror technique’ (Murrin 1968: 203), where the elegist mimics the style of the poet whom he mourns, we gain highly specific illustrations of what the poet’s contemporaries may have regarded as the defining characteristics of the poet’s style. John Cleveland, Abraham Cowley, Richard Crashaw, John Donne, John Fletcher, Ben Jonson, Richard Lovelace, Katherine Philips, and William Shakespeare are among the poets who were the subjects of such poems; Thomas Carew, Abraham Cowley, Sidney Godolphin, Ben Jonson, Henry King, Henry Vaughan, and Edmund Waller among those who wrote them. Critical elegies, often in great numbers, prefaced posthumous editions of individual poets. An entire volume, Jonsonus Virbius (1637), was devoted to Ben Jonson. Registering the elegiac prolixity which Jonson’s death occasioned, Sir Thomas Salusbury began his tribute ‘Shall I alone spare paper?’ (Jonson 1925–52: XI, 485–6, line 1) while Sidney Godolphin’s fine elegy ‘On Jonson’ celebrated Jonson’s superlative status as a sociable poetic influence, fathering a lucid and plain style to be practised by Jonson’s successors, the whole ‘tribe of Ben’: The Muses’ fairest light in no dark time, The wonder of a learned age; the line Which none can pass; the most proportioned wit To nature; the best judge of what was fit; The deepest, plainest, highest, clearest pen; The voice most echoed by consenting men … (Jonson 1925–52: XI, 450 lines 1–6)

In the poem above, Jonson’s supremacy is acknowledged appropriately in the very poetic form which Jonson himself, paradoxically in elegising Shakespeare, had sought to make his own. His ‘To the memory of my beloved, the author, Mr William Shakespeare: and what he hath left us’ (Jonson 1925–52: VIII, 390–2) – the very title has the characteristic, detailed precision of a Jonsonian inventor – is a poem of great affection and admiration, but also a poem whose true subject is contentious. Is Jonson’s poem really about Shakespeare? Or an idealised Shakespeare? Or Shakespeare refashioned in Jonson’s own image? The poem’s original context is as part of the prefatory writings to the great and posthumous Shakespeare Folio of 1623, but that context is already as Jonsonian as it is Shakespearean, since Jonson’s own earlier folio stands as precursor of and model for the present Shakespearean volume. In 1616 Jonson had had the audacity to publish – in turn after the model of the then current works (Opera) of the Latin poets – an edition of his own Works: but Jonson’s works were in English and provocatively included the ephemera of the theatre – ‘being but plays’, as the poet John Suckling

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put it scorningly in ‘The Wits’ (Suckling 1971: 71–6, line 20), plays now boldly invested by their author with greater permanence and status. Moreover, in respect of drama, Jonson’s move into print places textuality above theatricality, and the writer above the players. And so, prefacing the Folio of 1623, Jonson’s elegy on Shakespeare reminds readers of the Jonsonian example which precedes the volume in hand; thus reverses the priority of the two writers’ careers, declaring Jonson’s primacy; and recasts the Shakespearean playwright as a Jonsonian author. We must recognise, then, that if Shakespeare endures as the greatest English writer it is, in part at least, as a result of a process which Ben Jonson’s aggressive elegiac prediction, ‘He was not of an age, but for all time!’ (43) initiated. We must recognise too that if Shakespeare endures it is, again at least in part, as Jonson’s Shakespeare: ‘my beloved’, ‘My Shakespeare, rise’ (title and line 19; emphases added). George Donaldson has persuasively contested too Jonsonian a description of the Shakespeare First Folio of 1623. The latter is anti-Jonsonian in being a folio made up exclusively of Shakespeare’s plays, with none of Shakespeare’s poems represented, and thus marks a more radical development, a more thoroughgoing commitment to the enduring literary value of plays. The materials prefatory to the 1623 Shakespeare Folio are various. They do not consist solely of Jonson’s poetic account of Shakespeare but extend to a visual image of Shakespeare and to the wonderful epistolary prose of Hemming and Condell. There is, as Donaldson points out, a contest going on in the First Folio, particularly in the prefatory materials, over which image or images of Shakespeare are being presented, and an argument about who should read this Shakespeare (or these Shakespeares) and the way or ways in which he should be read. In contrast to the monolithic Shakespeare, the ‘My Shakespeare’ possessively and prescriptively presented by Jonson, the players, Hemming, and Condell, present a multifaceted Shakespeare to be read again and again, in a freer spirit of interpretative pluralism, by a great variety of readers. The vast, ever-varying history of Shakespeare’s critical and theatrical reception confirms that, rather than Jonson’s account of Shakespeare, the players’ view of Shakespeare won this contest and that Shakespeare has eluded, to the point of our near-bafflement, Jonson’s elegiac attempt to pin him down (Donaldson 2008). Matters are more complicated too when we move beyond Jonson’s poem on Shakespeare to consider Jonson’s views on Shakespeare more generally. Such views appear complex, if not contradictory. In his prose writings, Timber, or Discoveries, Jonson lamented Shakespeare as a writer who ‘never blotted out line’ and ‘flowed with that facility, that sometime it was necessary he should be stopped.’(Jonson 1925–52: VIII, 583–4) The record of Jonson’s conversations with William Drummond includes the abrupt view that ‘Shakespeare wanted art’ (Jonson 1925–52: I, 128–78, line 50). In contrast, Jonson’s elegy goes out of its way to emphasise Shakespeare as reviser and improver: Yet must I not give nature all: thy art, My gentle Shakespeare, must enjoy a part.

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For though the poet’s matter, nature be, His art doth give the fashion. And, that he, Who casts to write a living line, must sweat, (Such as thine are) and strike the second heat Upon the muses’ anvil; turn the same, (And himself with it) that he thinks to frame; Or for the laurel, he may gain a scorn, For a good poet’s made, as well as born. And such wert thou. (55–65)

As a characterisation of Ben Jonson at work, the above is and has always been entirely persuasive. In contrast, how plausible we have found Jonson’s picture here of the hardworking striker of second heats as an accurate account of Shakespeare has varied greatly over time. For example, Lukas Erne (2003) has argued that Shakespeare, like many other playwrights, was a literary dramatist – that is to say, that Shakespeare wrote with an eye to the endurance of appearing in print. Hence some of Shakespeare’s long quartos could never be performed on stage for the simple reason that they were too long, were never intended to be performed, and were written for the page rather than the stage. Erne’s position comes at a tangent to the quarrel that dominated Shakespearean studies in the latter part of the twentieth century, the quarrel over whether Shakespeare was or was not a reviser, did or did not strike the second heat. For Erne, Shakespeare is less of a reviser, and more the producer of alternative versions directed either at audiences or at readers. Nonetheless what is perhaps most interesting in the extract from Jonson’s poem on Shakespeare quoted above is how the second parenthesis in the extract – ‘(And himself with it)’ – insists that a turning or transforming of language is also a turning or transforming of the artistic self: Jonson is here continuing an emphasis on the intimate interrelatedness of Shakespeare’s art, nature, and the English language, an emphasis literally central to the poem. Jonson sees a perfect and permanent fit between Shakespeare and nature, in which one cannot readily discern where one ends and the other begins: Nature herself was proud of his designs, And joyed to wear the dressing of his lines! Which were so richly spun, and woven so fit, As, since, she will vouchsafe no other wit. (47–50)

We under-read these lines if we see in them only an example of the familiar neoclassical notion of language as dress, and assume that here Jonson cedes priority to nature, and conceives of Shakespeare and Shakespearean language as secondary and subsequent. In insisting on a perfect and enduring fit of language and nature, Jonson is presenting Shakespearean language as shaping as well as dressing nature. Indeed Jonson

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remarkably anticipates some of the best twentieth-century accounts of Shakespeare’s power to endure in his suggestion that Shakespeare not merely reflected but changed nature, so much so that previous artists’ representations are rendered obsolete, untrue, and denatured: The merry Greek, tart Aristophanes, Neat Terence, witty Plautus, now not please; But antiquated, and deserted lie As they were not of nature’s family. (51–4)

In these lines we find examples of another audacious aspect of this audacious poem – favourable comparisons with, and indeed dismissals of, ‘all, that insolent Greece or haughty Rome / Sent forth, or since did from their ashes come’ (39–40). Though Shakespeare had ‘small Latin, and less Greek’ (31), the great classical tragedians are summoned to honour Shakespeare, and the classical comedians dismissed as inadequate. Time has rendered true and commonplace for us what was at the time an extraordinary and daring move by the classicist Jonson – the claims for an English writer’s legitimate and enduring place in the largest of literary contexts, and the declaration of the triumph of English: Triumph, my Britain, thou hast one to show, To whom all scenes of Europe homage owe. He was not of an age, but for all time! (41–3)

In writing his elegy for Shakespeare, Jonson established the model for the way in which his own death was to be received. The many elegies for Jonson play and replay the tropes which Jonson had himself deployed in writing of Shakespeare: the national pride; favourable comparison with the classics; the works a more enduring monument than any tomb; the combining of art and nature; the poet born and made – and, above all, the declaration of Jonson’s poetic immortality. What also recurs repeatedly in these poems is the surprised and proud recognition that Jonson the classicist who boasted to Drummond that he ‘was better versed, and knew more in Greek and Latin, than all the poets in England’ (Jonson 1925–52: I, 128–78, lines 622–3) was wholeheartedly and unequivocally committed to English as his sole literary medium. ‘Yet he wrote English’, declared the water-poet, John Taylor, in his funeral elegy for Jonson (Jonson 1925–52: XI, 440–1, line 71). Whatever the realities of the matter, this period seems still to have felt acutely the precariousness and vulnerability of English, particularly as a medium for literature. In 1635 Sir Francis Kynaston translated Chaucer’s Troilus into Latin in order to preserve the poem’s intelligibility. Theodore Bathurst performed a similar service for Spenser’s The Shepheardes Calender. Edmund Waller advised poets who sought ‘last marble’ to ‘carve in Latin, or in Greek’; English poets merely ‘write in sand’ (all these pro-Latin examples are taken from Jones 1953:

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263–6). More persuasive perhaps than these quirky examples are the facts that both Bacon’s and Milton’s literary achievements equivocate between English and Latin; that Latin exerted a claim on literature well into the eighteenth century; and that Samuel Johnson, despite his famous English Dictionary, continued often to favour Latin as a poetic medium. In contrast, Ben Jonson was from the outset patriotically loyal to English. His elegists celebrate his particular pure English: … that spring, To whose most rich and fruitful head we owe The purest streams of language which can flow. For ’tis but truth; thou taughtst the ruder age, To speak by grammar … (Henry King, ‘Upon Ben Jonson’, 22–6) Our canting English (of itself alone) (I had almost said a confusion) Is now all harmony; what we did say Before was tuning only; this is play. (Richard West, ‘On Mr. Ben Jonson’, 79–82)1

If Jonson insisted on the intertwining of Shakespeare and the English language, and predicted Shakespeare’s literary immortality, he had harsher predictions for another writer whom he nevertheless much admired. For Jonson, Donne’s poetic wit was not in any easy relationship with English, and consequently Jonson took the view that Donne, ‘for not being understood, would perish’ (Jonson 1925–52: I, 128–78, line 196). Since it was truly only in the twentieth century that Donne again received admiration and attention comparable to those that his contemporaries afforded him, the evidence of time for the prediction of Donne’s obscurity is still on Jonson’s side. Dayton Haskin has shown the intermittence of interest in Donne the poet in the nineteenth century. In particular, while Dr Donne, Donne the divine, and the Donne who is the biographical figure always endured – in part due to Izaak Walton’s Life of Donne of the mid-seventeenth century – Donne the poet, and especially Donne the erotic love poet, was rediscovered in Harvard in the late nineteenth century, to be fully rehabilitated by T. S. Eliot in the early twentieth (Haskin 2007). Jonson also feared the damage that the influence of Donne’s highly idiosyncratic strong lines might do to English poetry: Others, that in composition are nothing, but what is rough and broken […] and if it would come gently, they trouble it of purpose. They would not have it run without rubs, as if that style were more strong and manly, that struck the ear with a kind of unevenness. These men err not by chance, but knowingly, and willingly […] And this vice, one that is in authority with the rest, loving, delivers over to them to be imitated: so that oft-times the faults which he fell into, the others seek for. This is the danger, when vice becomes a precedent. (Jonson 1925–52: VIII, 585)

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Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the critical elegy in the Renaissance is the way in which Thomas Carew, a ‘son of Ben’, took this Jonsonian poetic form – the critical elegy – and Jonson’s negative views of John Donne, and transformed them into an elegiac celebration of Donne. Carew effected subtle but crucial shifts in Jonson’s argument, transforming Jonsonian censure into praise. For Jonson, Donne will not survive the test of time, and that is an indictment of Donne. For Carew, Donne will not survive, and that is an indictment of time and language. For Jonson, Donne is the bad example who should not be imitated. For Carew, Donne is the unique poet who cannot be imitated. Thus Carew’s poem celebrates Donne as the coterie poet who never had his Works printed and who, indeed, often cultivated obscurity rather than lucidity. Carew seizes a Pyrrhic victory from Donne’s predicted defeat at the hands of time, seeing such defeat as a measure of Donne’s exceptional and fleeting greatness. Carew makes virtues out of Donne’s exclusiveness and out of his imperious wrenching of the English language to serve his poetic will: Thou shalt yield no precedence, but of time, And the blind fate of language … Yet thou mayst claim From so great disadvantage greater fame, Since to the awe of thy imperious wit Our stubborn language bends, made only fit With her tough-thick-ribbed hoops to gird about Thy giant fancy, which had proved too stout For their [other poets’] soft melting phrases. (‘An Elegy upon the death of the Dean of Paul’s, Dr John Donne’, 45–6, 47–53; Carew 1949: 71–4)

Momentariness rather than endurance is here a measure of greatness. A further enriching complication – typical of the complexity of the critical elegy genre – is that despite the vehement of his insistence that Donne is inimitable, Carew, in his elegy, does imitate Donne’s poetic style. Indeed, the brilliance of Carew’s characterisations of Donne’s verse is unlikely ever to be surpassed. In the moment of lamenting the irrecoverable loss of Donne, Carew audaciously elaborates and audaciously controls a parenthesis worthy of Donne himself: But the flame Of thy brave soul, (that shot such heat and light, As burnt our earth, and made our darkness bright, Committed holy rapes upon our will, Did through the eye the melting heart distil; And the deep knowledge of dark truths so teach, As sense might judge what fancy could not reach;) Must be desired forever. (14–21)

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Here the violent compression of Carew’s own ‘holy rapes’ captures something of Donne’s typical and provocative transposition of the erotic and the spiritual. The insistence on Donne as the poet of the dark and the deep, the far from obvious, is reinforced here by the conceit of distillation and later in the poem by the notion of Donne opening us ‘a mine / Of rich and pregnant fancy’ (37–8). The illumination which Donne affords, the scorching heat of lightning which ‘made our darkness bright’, contrasts precisely with the characterisation of Jonsonian light offered by Sidney Godolphin in his tribute cited above: Donne works violently and suddenly in the dark, while Jonson’s is a steady, sociable illumination, a superlative example yet continuous with the other poetic talents of his time – ‘The Muses’ fairest light in no dark time’. More persuasive perhaps than even Carew’s explicit descriptions of Donne’s verse is the way that some passages of Carew’s elegy – including those quoted above – mimic, in run-on lines of ‘masculine expression’ (39), the characteristic movement of Donne’s strong-lined verse. But, in so far as Donne is imitated in Carew’s elegy, it is imitation locally controlled and confined. It is valedictory imitation and reveals Donne’s influence growing feeble by the poem’s close, as the conceit of the turning wheel explains and justifies: Oh, pardon me, that break with untuned verse The reverend silence that attends thy hearse, Whose awful solemn murmurs were to thee More than these faint lines, a loud elegy, That did proclaim in a dumb eloquence The death of all the arts, whose influence Grown feeble, in these panting numbers lies Gasping short winded accents, and so dies: So doth the silent turning wheel not stand In the instant we withdraw the moving hand, But some small time maintain a faint weak course By virtue of the first impulsive force. (71–82)

By the end of Carew’s elegy, true to Carew’s own argument that Donne and Donne’s influence will not survive, the Donnean voice has gone and Donne’s epitaph is pronounced, with greater poetic propriety, in closed couplets: Here lies a king that ruled as he thought fit The universal monarchy of wit; Here lie two Flamens, and both those, the best, Apollo’s first, at last, the true God’s Priest. (95–8)

It is Carew who emerges triumphantly at the close of this elegy for John Donne. Indeed the triumph is such that Scott Nixon, arguing against what is our present

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underestimation of Thomas Carew as a poet, who in Nixon’s view can stand alongside both Jonson and Donne in poetic stature. For Nixon, Carew, particularly as his poems circulated in manuscripts alongside the poems of, among others, John Donne, ‘appears to have been one of the most popular poets of the 1630s’ (Nixon 1999: 90). An introduction such as this can only begin to suggest something of the complexity of the critical elegy, a particularly intense form of poetic criticism whose own medium is itself poetry. Readers interested in pursuing this complexity might begin by noticing the important rhyme of ‘fit’ and ‘wit’ – to be found in the passage just quoted, in other passages cited in this essay, and in many other critical elegies of the seventeenth century: such a noticing is one way of registering how intimate and attentive a dialogue these poems are engaged in, one with another, and how that dialogue is often furthered by poetic, non-discursive means, such as rhyme. See also Chapter 12, Publication: Print and Manuscript, and Chapter 15, Poets, Friends, and Patrons.

Notes 1

Respectively Jonson 1925–52: XI, 440–1, 468–70.

References and Further Reading Carew, Thomas (1949). Poems, ed. R. Dunlap. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Donaldson, George (2008). ‘The First Folio: “My Shakespeare”/“Our Shakespeare”: whose Shakespeare?’ In Richard Meek, Jane Rickard, and Richard Wilson (eds.), Shakespeare’s Book: Essays in Reading, Writing and Reception (pp. 187– 206). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Donaldson, Ian (1997). Jonson’s Magic Houses: Essays in Interpretation. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Donne, John (1978). The Epithalamions, Anniversaries and Epicedes, ed. W. Milgate. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Donne, John (2008). The Poems of John Donne, ed. R. Robbins, 2 vols. Harlow: Longman. Dryden, John (1900). Essays, ed. W. P. Ker, 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Erne, Lukas (2003). Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Gottleib, Sidney (1983). ‘Elegies upon the author: defining, defending, and surviving John Donne’. John Donne Journal, 2, 23–38. Haskin, Dayton (2007). John Donne in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jones, Richard Foster (1953). The Triumph of the English Language. London: Oxford University Press. Jonson, Ben (1925–52). Works, ed. C. H. Herford, P. Simpson, and E. M. Simpson, 11 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kay, Dennis (1990). Melodious Tears: The English Funeral Elegy from Spenser to Milton. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Lipking, Lawrence (1981). The Life of the Poet: Beginning and Ending Poetic Careers. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lyon, John (1997). ‘Jonson and Carew on Donne: censure into praise’. Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 37, 97–118.

The Critical Elegy Lyon, John (1999). ‘The test of time: Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne’. Essays in Criticism, 49, 1–21. Murphy, Avon Jack (1972). ‘The critical elegy of earlier seventeenth-century England’. Genre, 5, 75–105. Murrin, Michael (1968). ‘Poetry as literary criticism’. Modern Philology, 65, 202–7.

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Nixon, Scott (1999). ‘Carew’s response to Jonson and Donne’. Studies in English Literature 1500– 1900, 39, 89–109. Peterson, Richard S. (1981). Imitation and Praise in the Poems of Ben Jonson. New Haven: Yale University Press. Suckling, John (1971). The Non-Dramatic Works, ed. T. Clayton. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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As figures be the instruments of ornament in every language, so be they also in sort abuses or rather trespasses in speech, because they pass the ordinary limits of common utterance, and be occupied of purpose to deceive the ear and also the mind, drawing it from plainness and simplicity to a certain doubleness, where by our talk is the more guileful and abusing. For what else is your metaphor but an inversion of sense by transport, your allegory but a duplicity of meaning or dissimulation under covert and dark intendments; one while speaking obscurely and in riddle called Enigma; another by common proverb or Adage called Paremia; then by merry scoff called Ironia; then by bitter taunt called Sarcasmos. (Puttenham 1936: 128)

This is how, in his Art of English Poesie, George Puttenham defines allegory. The passage occurs in his catalogue of figures of speech immediately after ‘metaphor’, and it is interesting that Puttenham categorises allegory as ‘an inversion … by a duplicity of meaning’. Moreover, figures of speech, although in Puttenham’s opinion the ‘ornament of every language’, exemplify ‘abuses’ or ‘trespasses’ of speech itself, a claim that points at an unstable or disquieting power of language to disguise and deceive. Allegory is a ‘duplicity of meaning or dissimulation under covert and dark intendments’. Since Aristotle and Quintilian, allegory as a rhetorical figure (sometimes defined as permutatio or inversio) functioned by way of saying one thing while stating another. It implied a form of obscurity distinct from irony and sarcasm. Medieval rhetorical theory following the Church Fathers (see, for instance, Origen who lived in Alexandria in the third century) recognised the application of allegorical modes in the interpretation of sacred texts.1 In the second half of the fourteenth century Coluccio Salutati, a contemporary of Boccaccio, talked of poetry as something always hiding a deeper meaning; he valued a form of poetry defined as a ‘translated’ discourse, betraying in its turn the influence of the medieval concept of symbolum, a term of unclear, ambiguous meaning (see, for example, some of his letters and his De Sensibus allegoricis

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fabularum Herculis). Salutati celebrates a concept of poetry informed by metaphor or allegorical metaphor. From a form of exegesis in medieval times, we pass during the Renaissance on to a use of allegory as narrative structure within poetry; St Augustine’s theory of allegory in the Bible contributed to a development of a secular theory in poetry in this period. Renaissance theories of language highlighted the concepts of integumentum (covering) and involucrum (wrapping) in poetry, as theories developed together with the critical interpretations of biblical texts. The tendency of allegory to expose polysemy in language is a feature confirmed by the etymology of the word, which derives from the Greek allos (‘other’) and agoreuo (‘to speak openly’, ‘to speak in the agora or marketplace’) – to ‘say’ something ‘other’, i.e., something different from what is said literally. Like puns, therefore, allegories dispel the illusion that our words mean what they say (Fletcher 1964). As the most important of rhetorical figures (‘the chief ringleader and captain of all other figures, either in the poetical or oratory science’, Puttenham 1936: 186), allegory exemplifies a deceitful practice at work in all tropes: We dissemble again under covert and dark speeches, when we speak the way of riddle (Enigma). (Puttenham 1936: 188) Ye do likewise dissemble, when ye speak in derision or mockery, and that may be many ways: as sometime in sport, sometime in earnest, and privily, and apertly, and pleasantly, and bitterly: but first by the figure Ironia. (Puttenham 1936: 189) Nevertheless ye have yet two or three other figures that snatch a spice of the same false semblant, but in another sort and manner of phrase, whereof one is when we speak in the superlative and beyond the limits of credit, that is by the figure which the Greek call Hyperbole. (Puttenham 1936: 191) Then have ye the figure Periphrasis, holding somewhat of the dissembler, by reason of a secret intent not appearing by the words. (Puttenham 1936: 193)

As a ‘radical linguistic procedure’ (Fletcher 1964: 3), allegory can appear in a range of literary contexts, while in a wider sense it might define a distinctive feature of literature itself, revealing literature’s self-reflexivity, and calling attention to the implied ‘medium’, leaving meaning to linger in the very distance between the literal and metaphorical. As Northrop Frye pointed out, all literary commentary is more or less allegorical, while ‘no pure allegory’ will ever be found (Frye 1957: 89) Implied in verse as well as prose, allegory is ubiquitous in drama – ancient, medieval, Renaissance, or modern drama. In 1639 one R. Willis, who was then in his seventy-fifth year (which means that he was almost an exact contemporary of Shakespeare), wrote an account of an allegorical play he had seen as a young boy in Gloucester. Gloucester is only about forty miles from Stratford, so it is conceivable that the same play was performed in both towns and seen by the young Shakespeare:

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In the city of Gloucester the manner is (as I think it is in other like corporations) that when players of interludes come to town, they first attend the mayor to inform him what nobleman’s servants they are, and so to get licence for the public playing. And if the mayor like the actors, or would show respect to their lord and master [i.e. their patron], he appoints them to play their first play before himself and the aldermen and common council of the city: and that is called ‘The Mayor’s Play’, where everyone that will comes in without money, the mayor giving the players a reward as he thinks to show respect unto them. At such a play my father took me with him and made me stand between his legs as he sat upon one of the benches and [I] heard very well. The play was called The Cradle of Security, wherein was personated a king or some great prince with his courtiers of several kinds, amongst which three ladies were in special grace with him, and they, keeping him in delights and pleasures, drew from his graver counsellors, hearing of sermons, and listening to good counsel and admonitions, that in the end they got him to lie down in a cradle upon the stage, where these three ladies, joining in a sweet song, rocked him asleep that he snorted again and, in the meantime, closely conveyed under the cloths where withal he was covered, a vizard like a swine’s snout upon his face, with three wire chains fastened thereunto, the other end whereof being holden severally by those three ladies, who fall to singing again and then discovered [uncovered] his face that the spectators might see how they had transformed him, going on with their singing. Whilst all this was acting, there came forth of another door at the farthest end of the stage, two old men, the one in blue with a sergeant at arms [armed knight], his mace on his shoulder, the other in red with a drawn sword in his hand, and leaning with the other hand upon the other’s shoulder, and so they two went along in a soft pace round about by the skirt of the stage, till at last they came to the cradle, when all the court was in greatest jollity; and then the foremost old man, with his mace, struck a fearful blow upon the cradle, whereat all the courtiers with the three ladies and the vizard all vanished, and the desolate prince, staring up bare-faced and finding himself thus sent for to judgment, made a lamentable complaint of his miserable case, and so was carried away by wicked sprits. This prince did personate in the moral the wicked of the world, the three ladies, Pride, Covetousness, and Luxury, the two old men the end of the world and the Last Judgment. (Willis 1639: 110–13)

Dramaturgy of this kind still appears in more ‘modern’ plays: witness the fleeting appearance of a ‘Mower’, a figure of Death, in Marlowe’s Edward II (4.7) or the garden scene in Shakespeare’s Richard II (3.4). (See also Chapter 43, Continuities between ‘Medieval’ and ‘Early Modern’ Drama.) Allegory was also a time-honoured rhetorical method for preaching, often used in priest’s homilies, and was the foundation of morality plays or medieval dream visions in verse – Langland’s The Vision of Piers Plowman, for example. During the Renaissance it was gradually marginalised in popular drama, although it retained a pivotal role in the masque, i.e. in a courtly, aristocratic dramatic form celebrating the monarch, the court, and regal power. Allegory also persisted in lyrical and metaphysical verse and in epic or pastoral (the genres that were combined in Spenser’s Faerie Queene) as a

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fundamental vehicle for a form of representation, although it was ultimately destined to a political and cultural twilight, unless revived in satirical forms, for instance in Swift’s A Tale of a Tub in the eighteenth century. Recent critics have analysed allegory ahistorically, concentrating on theoretical considerations of genre (e.g. Quilligan 1979) or mode of discourse,2 but for the writers of the early modern period allegory was simply a rhetorical figure involving a substitution or transference of meaning. Puttenham, however, specifically related it to politics and the court: The use of this figure is so large and his virtue of so great efficacy as it is supposed no man can pleasantly utter and persuade without it, but in effect is sure never (or very seldom) to thrive and prosper in the world, that cannot skilfully put in ure [use], insomuch as not only every common courtier, but also the gravest councillor, yea and the most noble and wisest prince of them all are many times enforced to use it, by example (say they) of the great emperor who had it usually in his mouth to say, ‘Qui nescit dissimulare nescit regnare’ [He who knows not how to feign knows not how to reign]. (Puttenham 1936: 186)

Puttenham calls allegory both ‘the figure of false semblant’ and ‘the courtier’: ‘the courtly figure Allegoria is … when we speak one thing and think another, and that our words and our meanings meet not’ (1936: 186). In his peroration to the queen, Puttenham writes that the courtier should ‘dissemble his conceits as well as his countenances, so as he never speak as he thinks – or think as he speaks, and that in any matter of importance his words and his meanings very seldom meet’; and that ‘our courtly poet’ should ‘dissemble not only his countenances and conceits but also his ordinary actions of behaviour, or the most part of them, whereby the better to win his purposes and good advantages’ (1936: 229–300). In other words, Puttenham equates the courtly poet with the courtier. For sixteenth- and seventeenth-century courtly culture, irony, allegory, and impersonation are fundamental concepts, with a common denominator – what might be termed ‘tropicity’, that is, direct or monosemic signification replaced by indirect or polysemic signification (Plett 1983: 607). In his treatise Puttenham points to the moral ambiguity that is generated by the aestheticism of court culture, a feature that is apparent in the masque where power is figured in rituals which, although ostensibly celebrative, could also unmask aberration. To him, decorum persists in the delicate balance between virtue and vice. The moral question becomes very complex since, if all figures are transgressive of the norm that Puttenham calls ‘ordinary’ language, that which is in itself unnatural and deceitful might result in a sort of ‘cure’ for the defects of nature. As the court seemed to be the place where rule and disguise, or Machiavellian dissimulation, went hand in hand, allegory as ‘false semblant’ was the courtly figure’ par excellence, able as it were simultaneously to reveal and conceal the truth. The more refined the Renaissance reader was, the deeper the pleasure in the verbal disguise, while the naive reader had to be contented with the litera. If, in the wake of the widely

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read Institutio Oratoria by Quintilian, obscurity for Renaissance rhetoricians was a fatal flaw, to reveal and to conceal remained a fundamental trait of courtly aesthetics.3 In The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser incorporated in the heroic frame of the poem what he terms a ‘continued allegory, or dark conceit’. In his dedicatory epistle to Ralegh, the author gives a crucial definition of allegory, emphasising its variability of signification and placing his work in the context of the allegorical tradition: ‘I have followed all the antique poets historical, first Homer … then Virgil … after him Ariosto … and lately Tasso.’ While imitating the heroic conception of his work, he is nonetheless aware that: To some I know this method will seem displeasant, which had rather have good discipline delivered plainly in way of precepts, or sermoned at large, as they use, than thus cloudily enwrapped in allegorical devises. (cit. Herron 1970: 181–2)

Even more interestingly, Spenser adds that this characteristic veiling or ‘cloudily enwrapping’ is appropriate to an age which admires ideal fictions and things not as they are but ‘as might best be’ (Herron 1970). The explicit purpose of his work is ‘to fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline’ (1970: 407). Stressing duality in interpretation, Spenser gives two different definitions of Gloriana: ‘In that Faery Queene I mean glory in my general intention, but in my particular I conceive the most excellent and glorious person of our sovereign the Queen and her kingdom in Faery Land’. Later he adds: ‘And yet in some place else I do otherwise shadow her. For, considering she beareth two persons, the one of a most royal queen or empress, the other of a most virtuous and beautiful lady, this latter part in some places I do express in Belphoebe’ (Spenser 1961: II, 486). He therefore warns against seeking one-to-one correspondences between his fictive characters and historical personages or abstract ideas. In drama, allegory, although having ostensibly fallen out of favour at the end of the sixteenth century, survived as a structuring principle in play-texts for the public playhouses by virtue of its presence in inductions, inserted masques, emblematic scenes, and subplots. Particular sub-genres, such as city comedy, the most topical form of drama, retained structural allegorical features (as is the case, for example, with Volpone and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside). Not only can it be argued that ‘there is an allegorical dimension to all verse drama’ (Hattaway 2000), but an allegorical mode of thinking was structural in Renaissance and Baroque culture, finding its expression in the ‘textualisation’ of the world. In such a cultural system rhetoric becomes in effect a sort of metatext, pervading all forms of what Manfred Windfuhr calls this ‘tropical court-society’ (cit. Plett 1983: 607). Plett ventures an interesting conclusion: Research has shown that the symptoms of a courtly decadence were on the increase during the final years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. It is also the period when the discrepancy between appearance and reality becomes an increasingly frequent topic of

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Shakespeare’s plays. Whatever may be the causes of this development – the boundless ambition of a new generation of politicians, the upper-class need for status and luxury, the decline of traditional concepts of order – the ‘crisis of the aristocracy’ makes the socio-aesthetic problem of allegory, the duality of ‘beau semblant’ persistently apparent. (Plett 1983: 612)

The aesthetic precept ars est celare artem, transferred from court life to the writing of texts, served the purpose of helping the artist to avoid censorship or to keep an official position. As a courtly code of behaviour the courtier was urged to ‘use in every thing a certain disgracing to cover art withal, and seem whatsoever he doth and saith, to doe it without pain, and (as it were) not minding it’ – this is the explanation Castiglione offered of his key notion of sprezzatura (Castiglione 1928: 46). But if courtly rhetoric aims at presenting the artificial as natural, the opposite tendency is present as well, since the natural is presented, described, and depicted (in a word, represented) as artificial, to be read continuously and problematically. In this process of textualisation of the world – with the moral dangers the duplicity of any figure posits – allegory follows the general Renaissance philosophical attitude of reading the patterns of both nature and art as analogical constructions. The book of nature was there for poets and scientists to uncover an ordered and interrelated universe. The microcosm was a reproduction of the macrocosm, in politics or in the social order of the family as well as in the arts. If God spoke to human beings through tropes and signs, the world-as-emblem-book required allegorical representation and decodification (Grzegorzewska 1993). The theatrum mundi metaphor is just one example – even if a major one – of this coalescence of reality and iconography at the time: the very shape of the amphitheatre playhouses similar to the Globe illustrates this desire for a convergence between human and divine order. As Frances Yates, drawing a hypothetical plan which represents the stage as world, concludes: this suggested plan draws near to the Vitruvian image of man within the square and the circle, a basic Renaissance image which [the magus John] Dee knew very well and popularised in his Preface, as a statement in symbolic geometry of man’s relation to the cosmos, of man the Microcosm whose harmonious constitution relates him to the harmonies of the Macrocosm. (Yates 1969: 133)

The form of the Globe playhouse recalls the recently discovered rotundity of the earth, which Shakespeare probably had in mind while writing sequences such as the famous one containing Jaques’ speech beginning ‘All the world’s a stage’ in As You Like It (2.7.139–65), or the dark allusion to the ‘great globe’ itself which ‘shall dissolve’ leaving ‘not a rack behind’ (The Tempest, 4.1.153–6; see also Dutton 1988). Shakespeare draws the allegorical topos of the theatrum mundi from the stage into the sonnets, as in Sonnet 23 (‘As an unperfect actor on a stage, / Who with his fear is put besides his part, / Or some fierce thing replete with too much rage … / So I, for fear

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of trust, forget to say / The perfect ceremony of love’s rite’). Likewise Spenser, in Sonnet 54 of his Amoretti, borrows images of the theatrum mundi for his lover who plays ‘all the pageants’ while the audience take the role of the loved one ‘who idly sits’ and is ‘but a senseless stone’. The same emblematic vision informs two short poems by Sir Walter Ralegh which are constructed through a pattern of analogies recalling the stage. To quote just one of them: What is our life? a play of passion, Our mirth the music of division. Our mother’s wombs the tiring-houses be, Where we are dressed for this short comedy. Heaven the judicious sharp spectator is, That sits and marks who still doth act amiss. Our graves that hide us from the searching sun, Are like drawn curtains when the play is done. Thus march we playing to our latest rest, Only we die in earnest: that’s no jest. (Ralegh 1951: 51–2)

Even in anti-theatrical pamphlets an allegorical structure can be detected: the theatres are called, variously, ‘Synagogue of Satan’, ‘church of infidelity’, ‘bastard of Babylon’, and ‘hellish device’ (see Nashe 1966–74: I, 212; Purkiss 1996: 181). If we read Elizabethan courtly culture through Renaissance eyes as a sequence of allegorical texts requiring interpretation, an important role is played by pictorial and iconographic representation. In the figurative arts allegory was predominant; but even in the description of ceremonial events, such as Elizabeth’s entry to the city, or her summer progresses, the visual-pictorial aspects are encoded with allegorical traits. As we read in a passage from a description of the progress in print a few days after Elizabeth’s entry to the city, a spectator ‘could not better term the city of London that time than a stage wherein was showed the wonderful spectacle of a noble-hearted princess toward her most loving people, and the people’s exceeding comfort in beholding so worthy a sovereign, and hearing so prince-like a voice’ (cit. Montrose 1996: 26). In fact we could maintain that all aesthetic forms of the period, literature as well as painting, music as well as architecture and ceremonial, have an allegorical dimension by virtue of their ideological focus on the queen and the legitimisation of the House of Tudor (see Fischlin 1997). Renaissance portraits are indeed interesting ‘icons’, to use Roy Strong’s term, concerned more with religious and political allegorical notions than with actual likeness (Strong 1987). An example might be the well-known ‘Rainbow Portrait’ (c.1600–3 – see Figure 4), which, according to Strong, is ‘above all a composite portrait which has, like the ‘Sieve’ portraits, to be read as a series of separate emblems as well as collectively’ (Strong 1987: 158). More than depicting an individual, the ruler’s portrait was intended to reproduce the abstract principles of that power, evoking at once aesthetic, religious, literary, and political concepts.

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The highly refined technical features of the painting were intended to distract the viewer from the composite artifices that are keys to an allegorical interpretation of the portrait. First, the queen is always represented in her youth, with an allegorical dissimulation of the decay of her body. In her case, the allegorical representation of an ageless body politic disguises not simply the decadence of a monarch’s body natural, but hides the flaws and weaknesses to which, according to cultural constructs, a female body is prey. Triumph over age meant triumph over a sexual body, which had to be ideologically preserved as pure and virgin and intact as the Virgin Mary’s body (Montrose 1980; Yates 1985). The distance between the literal and the figurative body of the queen recalled a miraculous integrity and immutability in the sovereign, which denied both the narrative of the Edenic Fall and the feminine destiny attached to it. In a sense, it gave pictorial voice to Elizabeth’s motto, Semper Eadem, and to her supposed declaration: ‘I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman, but I have the heart and stomach of a king, and of a King of England too’ (cit. Montrose 1986: 315). Escaping normative constructions of the feminine, the iconic representation of the monarch’s two bodies was made even more complicated by other details (the coiled snake and ears and eyes suggesting the queen’s vigilance; the colourless, cylindrical rainbow in her hand, possibly a suggestion of masculine attributes or in any case an emblem of power and autonomy), details which underline the ‘essentially iconic nature of Renaissance interpretive codes’. Breitenberg continues: ‘The proliferation and popularity of emblem books … allows us to realize the sixteenth-century perception of the interconnectedness of pictorial representation, allegorical tableaux and rhetorical figuration’ (Breitenberg 1986: 4–5). The very lack of colour of the rainbow, while seemingly a subversive undercutting of Elizabeth’s symbolic brilliance, might suggest that her magnificence is in decline or, on the contrary, that her splendour is such that no rainbow can shine in comparison to her. The allegory implied, therefore, both hides and simultaneously reveals contradictory features,4 in a manner similar to the punning motto displayed right over the queen’s hand holding the rainbow: Non sine sole Iris, which might be read as ‘there is no rainbow without the sun’ but also, (since Iris was one of the ancient names for Ireland), ‘there is no Ireland without her queen’. This might identify her symbolic link with the demonised Irish ‘other’, as the symbols on her mantle could also signify (see Fischlin 1997; Neill 1994). Interestingly, the word ‘allegory’ appears in the title that is applied to two pictures produced during the Tudor period Allegory of the Low Countries: the first by an unknown artist, c.1583, an oil on panel, presently at the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, and representing Philip II, Elizabeth I, William of Orange, and the duc d’Anjou. The second is by the same hand, and includes the duke of Alva besides the aforementioned potentates, (also oil on panel, private collection). It is probable the Spanish ambassador Mendoza was referring to the former when he wrote from London to Philip II on 2 March 1583: ‘The picture they sent from Flanders represents a cow, signifying the States, with his Majesty mounted thereon and spurring it till the blood flows. [William of] Orange is depicted milking the animal, whilst a lady, to represent the Queen of England, is giving it a little hay with one hand, and holding out a porringer to Orange

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with the other, and Alençon is holding on by the tail.’5 They represent allegorically the situation of the seventeen provinces constituting the Low Countries, divided among themselves and at the convergence of the interests of the Spanish, the English, and the French, thus exemplifying what Louis A. Montrose has termed ‘pictorial representation of geopolitical conflict and negotiation’ (Montrose 2006: 132). Allegory is a fundamental instrument in the process of the textualisation of the world: we may also think of the visual pun depicted in the painting We Three Loggerheads (Figure 24), today at the Shakespeare Birthplace Museum, Stratford-uponAvon, c.1650, in which the third fool, not present in the painting but implied, is the spectator himself, or the ‘Fool’s Head World Map’ (Figure 20) (Antwerp, c.1590), where the fool’s cap holds all the world’s lands. Allegory, while it seems to follow the general philosophical tendency of reading nature’s and art’s models as analogical constructions, at the same time testifies to the differential gap among things, perceiving and representing new identities and modern instabilities. What is hidden in the allegorical process is that there is always a potential alternative reading lurking behind representation, as another famous painting, Holbein’s The Ambassadors, exemplifies. Here the use of anamorphosis (perspectivism) hints at the hidden text of the painting – the impermanence of material things and the fragility of human destiny – with the skull as subtext creating an allegorical reading of the surface of the main plot. (The skull is visible only when the painting is viewed awry, from the side.) In the gap between main plot, so to speak, and subplot, the inverted space of the subjacent allegory – death pervading everything, leaving not a rack behind – lies open, its message subversive of the main plot, so establishing a punning commentary on the duplicity and deceitfulness of the spectacle presented to the viewer’s eyes. To conclude, as John Bunyan wrote, allegories are ‘dark and cloudy’ (Bunyan 1966: 144) and they ‘shadow’ meaning in unstable and overlapping ways. But reading the court and the world as text sub specie allegorica for the postmodern critic might nonetheless prove that: full-fledged allegory … recognises the same ‘duplicity’ of language that propels deconstructionist theory, but allegory rejoices in it, finding in it a source of connection and a mire of undiscovered meaning … For deconstruction, all language puns, and all puns are disjunctive, driving the mind to disparate and intolerable extremes … For allegory, all puns are conjunctive, weaving the universe together … Conjunctive punning makes a fair metaphor for the way allegory says one thing and means another. (Maresca 1993: 36)

In other words, if the Renaissance world puns, the distance opened by allegory between language and the world seems analogical rather than oppositive, which might be consistent with Foucault’s view that the start of the seventeenth century signals the point when the main ‘activity of the mind’ ceased to ‘consist in drawing things together, in setting out on a quest for everything that might reveal some sort of kinship,

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attraction, or secretly shared nature within them, but, on the contrary, in [it turned towards] discriminating, that is, in establishing their identities’ (Foucault 1973: 55; emphasis original).

Notes 1

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See Dante’s Epistle to Can Grande, §7, where he distinguishes four categories of sense or meaning that might be derived from a text: the literal, the allegorical, the moral, and the anagogical. Fletcher 1964 applies the repetition compulsion principle in psychoanalysis to personified universals in important allegorical texts; see also Caldwell 1977. Quintilian, 7.6.50–3, ‘When … allegory is too obscure, we call it a riddle. Such riddles are, in my opinion, to be regarded as blemishes, in view of the fact that lucidity is a virtue.’ This work set the pattern for future rhetoricians from Wilson to Day, to Raynolde, Puttenham,

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and Peacham. George Chapman, however, elevates what is difficult over what is merely perspicuous (see Chapman 1941: 49–50). Fletcher contends that allegory expresses ‘conflict between rival authorities, as in time of political oppression’ similar to ‘symbolic power struggles’ (Fletcher 1964: 22–3); even if this might be true for some cases, I nonetheless see an analogical trait structuring most allegories at root. Bernardino de Mendoza to Juan de Idiaquez, King Philip’s Secretary, from London, 2 March 1583. , accessed 31 Jan. 2009.

References and Further Reading Astell, A. W. (1999). Political Allegory in Late Medieval England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Attridge, D. (1988). Peculiar Language. Literature as Difference from the Renaissance to James Joyce. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Boys-Stones, G. R. (2003). Metaphor, Allegory, and the Classical Tradition: Ancient Thought and Modern Revisions. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Borris, K. (2000). Allegory and Epic in English Renaissance Literature: Heroic Form in Sidney, Spenser, and Milton. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Breitenberg, M. (1986). ‘ “The hole matter opened”: iconic representation and interpretation in The Queenes Majesties Passage’. Criticism, 28, 1–26. Brittan, S. (2003). Poetry, Symbol, and Allegory: Interpreting Metaphorical Language from Plato to the Present. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

Bunyan, J. (1966). Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners and The Pilgrim’s Progress, ed. Roger Sharrock. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Burlinson, C. (2006). Allegory, Space and the Material World in the Writings of Edmund Spenser. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Caldwell, M. K. (1977). ‘Allegory: the Renaissance mode’. English Literary History, 44, 580–99. Castiglione, B. (1928). The Book of the Courtier, trans. Sir Thomas Hoby, ed. W. H. D. Rouse. London: Everyman. Chapman, George (1941). Poems, ed. Phyllis Brooks Bartlett. New York: MLA. Curtius, Ernst Robert (1953). ‘Poetry and philosophy’ and ‘Poetry and theology’. In European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. W. R. Trask (pp. 203–27). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Dutton, Richard (1988). ‘Hamlet, An Apology for Actors, and the Sign of the Globe’. Shakespeare Survey, 41, 35–43.

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Fabiny, T. (1984). ‘Theatrum mundi and the ages of man’. In T. Fabiny (ed.), Shakespeare and the Emblem (pp. 273–331). Szegeb: Attila Jozsef University, Fischlin, D. (1997). ‘Political allegory, absolutist ideology, and the “Rainbow Portrait” of Queen Elizabeth I’. Renaissance Quarterly, 50/1, 175–206. Fletcher, A. (1964). Allegory. The Theory of a Symbolic Mode. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Foucault, M. (1973). The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. New York: Vintage Books. Frye, N. (1957). Anatomy of Criticism. Four Essays: Princeton: Princeton University Press. Grzegorzewska, M. (1993). ‘Theatrum orbis terrarum on the court stage’. In Jerzy Limon and Jay L. Halio (eds.), Shakespeare and his Contemporaries (pp. 219–42). Newark: University of Delaware Press. Hattaway, M. (2000). ‘Allegorising in drama and the visual arts’. In P. Happé (ed.), Allegory in the Theatre (Théta, 5, 187–205). Berne: Peter Lang. Herron, D. (1970). ‘The focus of allegory in Renaissance epic’. Genre, 3, 176–85. Kiefer, Frederick (2003). Shakespeare’s Visual Theatre: Staging the Personified Characters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Maresca, T. E. (1993). ‘Personification vs. allegory’. In Kevin L. Cope (ed.), Enlightening Allegory, Theory, Practice, and Contexts of Allegory in the Late Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. New York: AMS Press. May, S. W. (1991). The Elizabethan Courtier Poets: The Poems and their Contexts. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Montrose, L. A. (1980). ‘ “Eliza, queen of shepheardes”, and the pastoral of power’. English Literary Renaissance, 10, 153–82. Montrose, L. A. (1986). ‘The Elizabethan subject and the Spenserian text’. In P. Parker and D. Quint (eds.), Literary Theory/ Renaissance Texts (pp. 303–40). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Montrose, L. A. (1996). The Purpose of Playing. Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Montrose, L. A. (2006). The Subject of Elizabeth. Authority, Gender, and Representation. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Nashe, Thomas (1966–74). Pierce Penniless his Supplication to the Devil, in The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow, 5 vols. Oxford: Blackwell. Neill, M. (1994). ‘Broken English and broken Irish: nation, language, and the optic of power in Shakespeare’s histories’. Shakespeare Quarterly, 45, 1–32. Plett, H. F. (1983). ‘Aesthetic constituents in the courtly culture of Renaissance England’. New Literary History, 14, 597–621. Purkiss, Diane (1996). The Witch in History. Early Modern and Twentieth Century Representations. London: Routledge. Puttenham, G. (1936). The Arte of English Poesie (1589), ed. Gladys D. Willcock and Alice Walker. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Quilligan, M. (1979). The Language of Allegory: Defining the Genre. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Quintilian (1920). Institutio Oratoria, ed. H. E. Butler. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Ralegh, Walter (1951). Poems, ed. Agnes Latham. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Ramelli, Ilaria and Giulio Lucchetta (eds.) (2004). Allegoria, vol. 1: L’età classica. Milan: Vita e Pensiero. Spenser, E. (1961). The Faerie Queene, ed. J. C. Smith, 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Strong, R. (1987). Gloriana: The Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I. London: Thames & Hudson. Treip, Mindele Anne (1994). Allegorical Poetics and the Epic: The Renaissance Tradition to Paradise Lost. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Warner, M. (1985). Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form. Berkeley: University of California Press. Willis, R. (1639). Mount Tabor. London. Yates, F. (1969). Theatre of the World. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Yates, F. (1985). Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.

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Pastoral Michelle O’Callaghan

Why was there a vogue for pastoral poetry in the Renaissance? One reason why pastoral attracted successive generations of poets is that it was understood to be one of the most ancient forms of poetry. It therefore provided powerful myths of origins and an ideal model for imitation, which encapsulated the Renaissance interplay between tradition and originality. The challenge posed was ‘how to say something entirely new within the confines of established parameters and formulae that were so old’ (Hubbard 1998: 7). The subject of pastoral is the shepherd, who is typically depicted resting in the shade during the heat of the day, engaging in ‘familiar conversation’ and singing songs composed for his beloved, or at play during pastoral festivals, competing for honours through song contests. Because of this focus on lyric composition, pastoral was a self-consciously literary form; the shepherd-poet was a persona adopted by authors to announce their literary vocation and to place themselves in a tradition that reached back to the very origins of poetry. Renaissance pastoral was not primarily nostalgic and escapist. George Puttenham, the English Renaissance rhetorician, insisted in The Art of English Poesy (1589) that from its inception this homely form paradoxically had a serious ethical purpose ‘to inform moral discipline, for the amendment of man’s behaviour’ (Puttenham 2007: 128). More recently, William Empson famously described the ‘pastoral process of putting the complex into the simple’ (1950: 23). Pastoral poets demonstrated their virtuosity precisely through their ability to hold the high-minded purpose of pastoral and the depiction of the homely simplicity of rustic life in balanced and dialectical tension. Alexander Barclay was the first poet to write distinctively English pastoral eclogues, populated by ‘unequivocally English peasants’, in his five Eclogues published in the early years of Henry VIII’s reign (Cooper 1977: 119). But it is Edmund Spenser who is credited with inventing an English pastoral tradition in The Shepheardes Calender (1579) (Chaudhuri 1989: 5). Both original and syncretic, it is a summation of the pastoral tradition as it came to Spenser from the classical Greek and Roman poets, Theocritus and Virgil, and later medieval and Renaissance poets. From

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Theocritus’ Idylls came a line of bucolic pastoral. Theocritan pastoral is often associated with the idealisation of the good and simple life, but it is more than this. Even in this earliest known phase, pastoral was not a realistic form that described the lives of actual shepherds. The Idylls take part in debates over literary style that engaged scholars at the Alexandrian court in the third century BC. Theocritus’ herdsmen are singers, poets, who belong to these literary and courtly circles as much as to the fields. The Idylls set in motion a complex dialectical interplay between rusticity and refinement, between the realism of the fields and sophisticated golden age mythology. The acknowledged father of pastoral was the Roman poet Virgil. Servius’ commentary on the Eclogues, written at the end of the fourth century AD, established a way of reading Virgil that dominated medieval and Renaissance pastoral (Patterson 1988: 39–40). The key pastoral was the first eclogue, in which the fortunate shepherd Tityrus, understood to be the pastoral persona of the poet Virgil, enjoys a life of ease in the countryside through the favour of the gods, while his fellow shepherd Meliboeus ‘must leave my home place, the fields so dear to me’ because his lands have been expropriated to reward ‘a godless soldier’ (Virgil 2004: 31, line 70). When Sir Philip Sidney wrote in praise of pastoral in The Defence of Poesy it was the double perspective of this eclogue that he responded to: Is the poor pipe disdained, which sometime out of Meliboeus’ mouth can show the misery of the people under hard lords or ravening soldiers? And again, by Tityrus, what blessedness is derived to them that lie lowest from the goodness of them that sit highest. (Sidney 2008: 229)

For Puttenham, pastoral was a form of allegory, not a mode of realism: ‘under the veil of homely persons and in rude speeches’ the pastoralist could ‘insinuate and glance at greater matters’ (Puttenham 2007: 128). Virgil’s fourth eclogue famously tries ‘a somewhat loftier strain’ in its prophecy of the return of the golden age (Virgil 2004: 49, line 1), and was the basis for a later Christianised pastoral which transformed the eclogue into a vehicle for religious allegory. Classical pastoral life was re-evaluated to focus on the Christian figure of the shepherd-pastor who tends his flocks, which meant that the pastoral values promoted were those of piety and humility. As this brief introduction to pastoral suggests, its history is one of generic accommodation and transformation. Such expansiveness resulted in a variety of pastoral forms in the Renaissance. The pastoral eclogue is a distinct genre that conventionally consists of a dialogue between shepherds, often on the theme of love, or poetry, or other higher matters, set in a rustic landscape. That said, within the pages of books of eclogues can be found singing contests, funeral poems, praise poems, complaints, and satires. Pastoral sub-genres flourished alongside the eclogue. The Renaissance witnessed the revival of Greek pastoral romance and also the emergence of a new genre, pastoral tragi-comedy. Elements of georgic found their way into pastoral. The subject of georgic, which derives from Virgil’s Georgics, is the farmer and his labour

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across the changing seasons. The labouring shepherds of Christianised pastoral owe much to georgic, which introduces a social and moral complexity into the pastoral through the themes of husbandry and cultivation (Lindheim 2005: 10). The expansiveness of pastoral is demonstrated by William Browne’s pastoral epic, Britannia’s Pastorals (1613, 1616), described by W. W. Greg as ‘the longest and most ambitious poem ever composed on a pastoral theme’ (1906: 131). Elizabethan pastoral is characterised by its seriousness: in the words of Nancy Lindheim, it is not ‘a poetry of place but of ethos’ (2005: 4). The opening description of Arcadia in Sir Philip Sidney’s pastoral romance Old Arcadia is telling: ‘Arcadia among all the provinces of Greece was ever had in singular reputation, partly for the sweetness of the air and other natural benefits, but principally for the moderate and well tempered minds of the people’ (Sidney 1985: 4). Arcadia is valued not because of its golden age landscape, but because of the moral character of its people. That said, pastoral does undergo a reorientation in the seventeenth century. Its ethical stance is maintained, but it also begins to turn into a poetry of place, which means that the status of the natural world in relation to man becomes a dominant pastoral concern.

Elizabethan Pastoral: Spenser, Sidney, Shakespeare, and Marlowe The Shepheardes Calender launched Spenser’s literary career. Pastoral is key to its fashioning of the ‘newe Poet’ and his youthful ambitions. ‘E.K.’ provided the opening epistle, which introduced this new poet and defined the pastoral tradition, as well as extensive glosses on the eclogues. The eclogue is a ‘kind of writing’, E.K. explains, specially devised by ‘the best and most auncient Poetes’, being both so base for the matter, and homely for the manner, at the first to trye theyr habilities: and as young birdes, that be newly crept out of the nest, by little first to proue theyr tender wyngs, before they make a great flight … So finally flyeth this our new Poete, as a bird, whose principals be scarce growen out, but yet as that in time shall be hable to keepe wing with the best. (Spenser 1999: 29, ‘Epistle’, 144–58)

To canonise pastoral as the poetry of youthful aspiration, E.K. must overlook the fact that not all the poets he cites wrote pastorals in their youth. But, in doing so, he is able to add weight to his use of the Virgilian rota to model the career of this new English poet: following in Virgil’s footsteps, the poet tests his skill in pastoral, which is to be understood as a step on the path towards the epic, where he makes ‘a great flight’. The pastoral is particularly suited to the aspiring yet inexperienced poet because of its lowly place in the hierarchy of genres: since its subject, shepherds, were socially low or ‘base’, notions of literary decorum favoured in the Renaissance demanded that the style or ‘manner’ should also be ‘homely’ and simple.

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The progress implicit in the Virgilian rota, or career pattern, comprehends pastoral in terms of process, rather than as an end in itself. The Shepheardes Calender both reinforces and complicates pastoral process by using the calendar to structure the eclogues into a sequence, the twelve eclogues corresponding to the months of the year and the changing seasons. The cycle begins not in the conventional pastoral months of spring and summer, but in January, in winter, with the poet’s pastoral persona, Colin Clout, a young ‘shepeheards boye’ (‘Januarye’, 1), newly in love with the disdainful Rosalind and uncertain whether love can blossom in a winter landscape; a state of mind artfully mirrored in nature through the pathetic fallacy: ‘Thou, barrein ground, whome winters wrath hath wasted / Art made a myrrhour, to behold my plight’ (19–20). Pastoral complaint incorporates Petrarchan elements to intensify the focus on the poetic persona and the expression of erotic frustration. At the very start of this poet’s progress, he breaks his pipe, an act qualified by his motto ‘Anchôra speme’ (80), ‘Still hope’. When in the June eclogue, at the height of summer, Colin contemplates his readiness to take on the mantle of the ‘God of shepheards Tityrus’, his ambitions are tempered by his failure to win the love of Rosalind, hence his revised emblem, ‘Gia speme spenta’ (122), ‘Hope utterly extinguished’. Finally, in December, Colin looks back despairingly over his life, ‘thus of all my haruest hope I haue / Nought reaped but a weedye crop of care’ (121–2), and composes his own pastoral elegy. There is a tension between the woodcut, in which Colin’s pipe lies broken at his feet, and his act of hanging his pipe upon the tree in the eclogue: ‘Was neuer pype of reede did better sounde’ (142), a conventional sign that the poet is now ready to leave the lowly pastoral and attempt higher things (Hubbard 1998: 348–9). Pastoral provided a place for self-reflection. The Shepheardes Calender represents the pastoral process of maturation as one that is fraught with difficulties and ultimately ambiguous – the eclogue cycle ends where it begins with winter and Colin’s uncertain song. The calendar structure works against any simplistic sense of a timeless pastoral golden age. Instead, a series of conflicting states are held in balanced tension: hope and despair, love and friendship, youth and age, desire and fulfilment (Montrose 1996: 33). Pastoral thrives on paradoxes. Spenser is highly attuned to the Virgilian eclogue’s double perspective: its ability to speak for the fortunate and praise the powerful and to lament the plight of those who are dispossessed, their ambitions frustrated. Colin’s profound alienation merges with a strand of religious and political satire that runs throughout the eclogues. Spenser imitates the medieval Christianised pastoral allegory of Mantuan (1448–1516), a Carmelite monk, in his July and September eclogues. The specific contours of his allegory, however, owe just as much to Reformation polemic. There is a Protestant aspect to the primitivism of Spenser’s pastoral that speaks of his debt to a native tradition of pastoral satire (see Chapter 64, Traditions of Complaint and Satire). The February, May, July, and September eclogues dramatise the religious debates following the Elizabethan settlement through stories of wolves in sheep’s clothing (February), ‘good shepheardes’, ‘proude and ambitious Pastours’ (July, ‘Argument’), and the corruption and ‘loose liuing of Popish prelates’ (September, ‘Argument’) (Chaudhuri 1989: 123–5; King 1986: 369–98). In keeping

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with the duality of pastoral, alongside satire is panegyric. One of the uses of pastoral is encomiastic, to show ‘what blessedness’, in the words of Sidney, ‘is derived to them that lie lowest from the goodness of them that sit highest’ (Sidney 2008: 229). Spenser celebrated Queen Elizabeth I in the guise of ‘fayre Elisa, Queene of shepheardes all’ (‘Aprill’, 34) in both The Shepheardes Calender and Colin Clovts Come Home Againe (Montrose 1980: 153–82). The virtuosity of The Shepheardes Calender lies both in its synthesis of classical and continental pastoral traditions and its self-proclaimed Englishness. Spenser traced his pastoral lineage to Geoffrey Chaucer, the ‘God of shepheards Tityrus’, ‘Who taught me homely, as I can, to make [write poetry]’ (‘June’, 81–2). Spenser may not acknowledge Barclay’s Eclogues, but they share a ‘homely’ Englishness. Spenser’s English shepherds properly speak the language of their countrymen, which gives additional weight to ideas of decorum: literary style should be appropriate to its subject matter. As E.K. points out, ‘good and naturall English words’ are restored to ‘theyr rightfull heritage’, and are ‘fittest for such rusticall rudeness of shepheards’ (‘Epistle’, 79–80, 38–9). These English shepherds do not lead an Italianate pastoral life of aristocratic leisure but endure the georgic hardships of seasonal labour (Fowler 1986: 113; King 1986: 376). Its twelve eclogues correspond to the labours of the months in the tradition of almanacs and calendars, often appended to psalters and books of hours, which displayed human activity within a providential framework (Chaudhuri 1989: 450–6). Godly labour frequently turns into poetic labour, and the shepherd-pastor merges with the shepherd-poet so that the ethical responsibilities of the poet become a prominent theme of the eclogues. Spenser dedicated The Shepheardes Calender to Sir Philip Sidney, who in turn commended his eclogues as ‘indeed worthy the reading’ in his Defence of Poesy. Yet Sidney’s praise did not extend to the ‘old rustic language’ of Spenser’s English shepherds, which he criticised for breaching decorum (Sidney 2008: 242). There are two versions of Sidney’s prose romance: the earlier pastoral romance, Old Arcadia, circulating in manuscript from the 1580s, and the later New Arcadia, published posthumously by Sidney’s friend Fulke Greville in 1590, in which pastoral tends to give way to chivalric romance. In the Old Arcadia, each book is accompanied by a set of eclogues, exemplifying ‘pastoral pastimes’ (Sidney 1985: 80), notable for their technical refinement and virtuosity. Sidney’s shepherds fall into two distinct types: his aristocratic shepherds, like Dorus, who is not a shepherd at all but Prince Musidorus in disguise, and Pamela, the princess forced to live the life of a shepherd; and his common shepherds, Dametas, Miso, and their daughter, Mopsa, who are grotesque and clownish figures employed in pastoral work. Sidney’s aristocratic shepherds, by contrast, are free from Spenserian rusticity and the taint of labour. Renaissance pastoral, as Raymond Williams and Louis Montrose have argued, is predicated on the elision of the agrarian labour of actual shepherds, which, in turn, enabled the ‘metaphorical identification between otiose shepherds and leisured gentlemen’ (Montrose 1983: 431; Williams 1973). Yet for Sidney it is precisely pastoral leisure that is the problem. In an early pastoral entertainment, The Lady of the May (c.1578/9), Queen Elizabeth is asked to preside

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over a debate between the relative virtues of the contemplative pastoral and active heroic life represented by the shepherd Espilus and the forester Therion. Elizabeth apparently chose the contemplative shepherd Espilus, although the weight of Sidney’s argument was with the active life of Therion. Basilius in the Old Arcadia chooses pastoral retirement in an act of folly determined by his superstitious faith in the ‘soothsaying sorceries’ (6) of the oracles. Pastoral retirement does not symbolise processes of renewal; rather, it is identified with enforced confinement – the emblem Pamela wears is a lamb tied at the stake (34). The erotic energies of pastoral are similarly held up for scrutiny. The transformation of Musidorus and Pyrocles into pastoral lovers is fraught with more than the usual Petrarchan frustrations. Pastoral nature brings human and animal eroticism into dangerous proximity; its propensity towards bestiality is figured in the low ‘realism’ of the common shepherds, particularly the shepherdess Mopsa (Newcomb 2003: 237–40). Under the influence of love and in the pastoral world, the princes are in danger of succumbing to their animal passions – Pyrocles’ rape of Pamela is prevented not by his virtue, but by outside forces. In Spenser’s version of pastoral romance in Book 6 of the Faerie Queene, Calidore embraces the pastoral retreat, yet this state cannot last, and the Arcadian world is violently destroyed. Sidney’s courtly pastoral is a complex meditation on proper aristocratic occupations: enforced pastoral retirement is dangerously unproductive, leaving active young men like Sidney, who are better employed in the public arena, with too much time on their hands. The relationship between court and country in Elizabethan pastoral is not a straightforward opposition: its courtly orientation insists on a complex dialectic between these symbolic spaces. Shakespeare’s As You Like It (c.1600) develops the dramatic dialogic form of the eclogue to produce a pastoral comedy that addresses many of the themes familiar from the pastorals of Spenser and Sidney. Like Sidney’s Arcadia, Shakespeare’s Arden is a pastoral retreat populated by the aristocracy in exile: Duke Senior, his court, his daughter, Rosalind, and her cousin, Celia, appropriately disguised as the shepherdess Aliena. Yet unlike Sidney’s Arcadia, Shakespeare’s pastoral retreat functions positively as a site for renewal, so that exile is ‘not banishment’ but a comedic space for ‘liberty’ (1.3.137; Shakespeare 2008). The pastoralism of As You Like It is eclectic. Italianate and native modes of pastoral are juxtaposed in the exchanges between its courtier lovers, Rosalind and Orlando, its Petrarchan shepherd lovers, Phoebe and Silvius, and clown lovers, Touchstone and Audrey (Chaudhuri 1989: 358). Arden is simultaneously a place of courtly pursuits and populated by shepherds, like Corin, a distinctly English countryman, who does not own his flock, but must hire out his labour, and articulates the hardships faced by the labouring rural poor (2.4.76–85). Such interplay between realistic and idyllic pastoralism gives complex tonal variation to this pastoral comedy. Shakespeare intensifies the conventional self-consciousness of pastoral to the point of parody. The mock-debate between the court fool Touchstone and the rustic shepherd Corin over the relative merits of the court versus the country parodies the ‘serious’ humanist use of the pastoral dialogue for the purposes of debate. The Petrarchism of

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pastoral is similarly given a deliberately light, comic touch in the treatment of Phoebe and Silvius. Its playfulness owes much to the type of pastoralism epitomised by Christopher Marlowe’s popular pastoral lyric, ‘Come live with me and be my love’, which circulated widely in manuscript in the late 1580s, and was published posthumously in the anthology The Passionate Pilgrim (1599), with an answer by Sir Walter Ralegh – these poems were later given the titles ‘The Passionate shepherd to his love’ and ‘The Nymph’s reply to the shepherd’. Marlowe quite self-consciously ‘invent[s] a “shallow” poetry’, as his recent editors point out, producing an invitation to lightness written in delicately tripping tetrameters: And we will sit upon the rocks, Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks By shallow rivers, to whose falls Melodious birds sing madrigals. (Marlowe 2006: 11, lines 5–8)

There is a delight in surface, and a playful repudiation of the seriousness of the pastoral ethos that is also apparent in later, seventeenth-century Cavalier pastoral lyrics. Instead the speaker embraces sensual pleasures, figured through acts of gift-giving, which linger over the luxurious softness of the promised clothes. The pastoral landscape is quite self-consciously of the poet’s making: birds are gifted poets and the natural world is a world of exquisite artifice, ‘Embroidered’ (12) like the kirtle promised to the beloved. Its sprezzatura claims natural grace, a poetic making that is not laboured, as the characteristic of the gentleman shepherd-poet. Pastoral is a responsive mode, deliberately imitative and echoic (Loewenstein 1984). Marlowe’s pastoral lyric invites a reply: when published in the pastoral anthology, England’s Helicon (1600), his poem and Ralegh’s response were joined by ‘Another of the same nature, made since’ (‘Come live with me and be my dear’). Pastoral, because it so insistently figured processes of imitation and intertextuality, dramatised in the form of dialogues and singing contests, was available for complex meditation on ideas of community. The Shepheardes Calender claims to shadow ‘familiar freendes and best acquanytaunce’ under the names of various shepherds appearing in the eclogues (gloss to ‘September’, 176). Here, the pastoral world describes a semi-private space in which like-minded friends can freely meet and speak with each other under the veil of allegory (Patterson 1988: 127, 133–4). Communal values are also at the heart of pastoral elegy. The elegist brings the community together to lament the loss of one of its singers, and finds consolation in the communal commemorative song. Spenser, in his volume of elegies for Sidney, Astrophel, began by invoking this aspect: ‘Hearken ye gentle shepheards to my song, / And place my dolefull plaint your plaints emong’ (5–6). Death prompts a meditation on posterity. Through pastoral elegy’s echoic song, the poet speculates on his place within the wider literary tradition. With Astrophel, Spenser took this process to the next stage. It is Spenser who is responsible for turning Sidney into the archetypal pastoral poet. In canonising Sidney, Spenser canonised

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himself and a tradition of Spenserian poetry (Kay 1990: 65–6). John Milton’s Lycidas (1637, 1645), ‘the last great example of the traditional pastoral elegy’, would decisively respond to this challenge in the next century (Alpers 1996: 93).

Seventeenth-Century Pastoral In the first decades of the seventeenth century, the majority of pastorals continued to be produced by poets who maintained the ethical responsibilities of the Elizabethan shepherd-poet (Grundy 1969; Norbrook 2002). If anything, pastoral took a decidedly anti-court turn in this period. The new motto to the second (1614) edition of the pastoral anthology England’s Helicon recast the conventional court/country dialectic in oppositional terms: ‘The Court of Kings heare no such straines / As daily lull the Rusticke Swaines’. When King James succeeded to the English throne, pastoral motifs were called into service for royal panegyric (MacLean 1990: 64–96). Yet it was only in the last years of his reign that pastoral became a distinctly royalist mode, which resulted in a reorientation away from these earlier Spenserian forms of pastoral satire. Poets writing in the Spenserian tradition identified strongly with his pastoral persona Colin, but as pastoral satirist, not as a love poet. Satire and complaint dominate Michael Drayton’s heavily revised The Shepheardes Garland (1606), William Browne’s The Shepheard’s Pipe (1614), which included eclogues by Christopher Brooke and George Wither, and Wither’s own The Shepherd’s Hunting (1615), written while he was in prison for satirising a prominent courtier. The values identified with pastoral were plain-speaking – and speaking freely – particularly when ‘discovering’ the corruption of public life. A contemporary, Richard Brathwaite, made this clear in his celebration of ‘lovely Wither and. … bonny Browne’, who … when they come to take a view of th’court, (As some have done) and have bin mew’d up for’t, They’ll tell her freely, (as full well they may) That in their judgements, after due survey, Of th’court and th’cottage, they may well maintain, Vices in the court, but virtues in the swain. (Brathwaite 1615: 23–4)

These volumes of eclogues are avowedly homosocial; the focus is on male friendship to the exclusion of heterosexual love. Pastoral friendship is understood politically, and contrasted to the sycophancy of the court. It is the basis of the literary commonwealth, the Spenserian ‘shepheards nation’ (Colin Clovts Come Home Againe, 17), represented in the dialogic and collaborative form of the eclogues themselves. Pastoral allegory may lose some of its ambiguity in the hands of these poets, but their eclogues do realise its political potential for imagining idealised forms of male sociability in which likeminded friends speak freely in a hostile environment (O’Callaghan 2000: 26–62).

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An English translation of the foundational pastoral tragi-comedy, Tasso’s Aminta, was available at the end of the sixteenth century, in Abraham Fraunce’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Ivychurch (1591). But it was not until after the 1602 English translation of Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido that this new Renaissance genre was picked up by the English dramatists Samuel Daniel and John Fletcher. Pastoral tragi-comedy intensifies the darker elements already present in pastoral. Its Arcadia is set at a distance from the golden age, and the presence of the court or city threatens and corrupts this pastoral idyll. The subject is love: chastity is both an ideal and a state that must be renounced in favour of heterosexual love; erotic energies are figured in the form of lustful satyrs and nymphs and, as in pastoral romance, take a violent turn – unrestrained passions and the confusions of love result in attempted rape and suicide. When Daniel and Fletcher ‘Englished’ Guarini’s pastoral tragi-comedy, they emphasised the ethical dimension of this new mixed form: the practice of genera mista, the artistic control over various genres and multiple plots, was intended to mirror the way passions are brought under the sway of reason over the course of the play, and provided a lesson in temperance that likened the proper rule of the body to the government of the commonwealth (Yoch 1987). Arcadia in Daniel’s pastoral tragicomedy for Queen Anne’s court, The Queen’s Arcadia (1606) is a troubled place, disturbed by corruption and discord. The twists and turns of the tragi-comic plot dramatise the trial of virtue through adversity. The villains, Colax (Flattery), a traveller, and his companion, the nymph Techne (Art), have learnt their various tricks at court. Their exile in the final act does not prompt the conventional compliment to the court on its virtues. Instead the counsel given is one of vigilance, to guard against abuses and to maintain the highest standards of conduct. The passions in Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess (c.1610) are similarly violent: her beloved, Perigot, deceived by false reports, twice stabs Amoret, the faithful shepherdess. Amoret’s wounds are cured and Arcadia is reformed through the agency of the distinctly Elizabethan virgin priestess, Clorin (McMullan 1994). Fletcher’s attempt to transfer the courtly pastoral tragi-comedy to the public stage was not a success. Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale (1611) borrows heavily from pastoral tragi-comedy for its plot and its pastoral, although its more immediate source is Robert Greene’s prose romance Pandosto. Pastoral tends to be confined to Act 4; that said, it does make an earlier troubling appearance when the Edenic pastoral state is used by Polixenes to figure childhood: ‘We were as twinned lambs that did frisk i’th’ sun, / And bleat the one at th’other’ (1.2.66–7; Shakespeare 1996: 98). Pastoral innocence is lost with sexual maturity, and Polixenes identifies fallen nature explicitly with woman. This misogynist pastoral story provides the logic for Leontes’ violent and destructive sexual jealousy. The sea voyage in 3.3 signals the movement into pastoral romance. Perdita is the conventional princess disguised as a shepherdess. The set-piece pastoral debate between Perdita and Polixenes on the theme of grafting engages with Renaissance debates over the status of tragi-comedy: like Perdita, Italian critics argued that mixing kings and clowns violated the natural order and produced a bastard form. Given Shakespeare’s own grafting in his tragi-comedy, the weight of the argument

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would seem to be with Polixenes who, like Guarini, defends such artful mixing as natural, it is ‘an art / That nature makes’ (4.4.91–2; Lewalski 1991: 91). And yet, ironically, it is Polixenes who violently opposes the ‘mongrel’ marriage of his son, Prince Florizel, to the shepherdess. The anti-court tone of political pastoral can be heard in Perdita’s counter-assertion that she ‘was about to speak and tell him plainly / The selfsame sun that shines upon his court / Hides not his visage from our cottage, but / Looks on alike’ (4.4.440–3). Tragi-comic violence is encapsulated in the chilling brutality of Polixenes’ threat to destroy Perdita’s lovely face. Florizel’s accounts of mythic transformations, of Perdita into Flora, and of gods taking the shape of beasts to explain his own transformation into a shepherd, are stories of rape that similarly figure the destructive eruption of violence and bestial passions into the pastoral world. Lady Mary Wroth’s pastoral tragi-comedy, Love’s Victory, provides one of the few examples of a woman writer working with pastoral. The pastoral eclogue, as we have seen, was predominantly a homosocial form, and the love expressed was just as likely to be homoerotic as heterosexual. The unrequited homoerotic love of Hobbinol for Colin in The Shepheardes Calender mirrors and is in tension with Colin’s heterosexual love for the disdainful Rosalind. Shepherdesses were spoken of in their absence, and lacked the literary authority and voice of the shepherd-poet. There is an exception: it is appropriate that authorship of the female-voiced pastoral lament, ‘The Doleful lay of Clorinda’, was attributed to Sidney’s sister, Mary, countess of Pembroke, by Spenser in his volume of elegies for Sidney, Astrophel. Wroth was Sidney’s niece, and it is in part due to this legacy she was able to reconfigure pastoral to establish a voice for the shepherdess-poet (Newcomb 2003: 245–51). Wroth’s pastoral tragi-comedy feminises the genre by making female friendship just as central as male friendship within the pastoral community, and is part of a wider feminisation of pastoral romance in both its narrative and dramatic forms in the Renaissance (Lewalski 1991: 97–101; Starke 2007). Pamela, although not the primary subject of Sidney’s Arcadia, provided a pattern of female heroism in which the defining virtue is chastity (David 1991: 36–7). The shepherdess Urania, the heroine of Wroth’s pastoral romance The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, is heiress to Pamela: she is both a pastoral singer and undergoes heroic trials, ‘a sentimental education through adversity’, to prove the value of the pastoral ideal of temperance. The virtue of the Lady in Milton’s pastoral masque Comus, written for the Bridgewater family in 1634, must similarly be tested within the pastoral romance landscape to prove its true value (Starke 2007: 107–14). Wroth’s aristocratic pastorals were coterie rather than public court productions. Jonson’s masque Pan’s Anniversary: or, The Shepherds Holy-Day, performed before James I in 1620, appropriates the political pastoral mode for the purposes of royalist panegyric, and in doing so rejects the Spenserian affiliation between pastoral and satire (Butler 1992: 370). Set in Arcadia, nymphs, shepherds, and priests honour Pan with sacred pastoral rites and sports, including an antimasque in which the city-bred Boethians challenge the Arcadians and are ‘dismisse[d] with contempt’ (Jonson 1950: 534, line 158; Butler 1992). The masque ends by praising James, ‘Great Pan, the Father of our peace, and pleasure’ (255). Sir Richard Fanshawe, in his Poems (1648),

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similarly deployed pastoral motifs for Caroline panegyric. His ‘An Ode upon the occasion of his Majesty’s proclamation in the year 1630. Commanding the gentry to reside upon their estates in the country’ imagines England as Arcadia, enjoying a golden age under the beneficent rule of King Charles. Political pastoral, in the hands of these later royalist poets, was closely tied to Stuart policy in a way that exerted an ideological pull on the genre as a whole (Marcus 1994: 139–59). Just over a decade later, England was in the midst of a civil war. When Fanshawe translated Guarini’s Il Pastor Fido in 1643–4 he discovered in pastoral tragi-comedy an appropriate form for representing Arcadia/England ravaged by violent disorder (Parry 1990: 38–40). Royalist pastoral, partly in response to royalist defeats and exile during the civil wars and commonwealth, is marked by a shift away from the figure of the shepherd-poet to concentrate on Arcadian landscapes and the pastoral retreat, which, in turn, figure loss and failed ideals. Vaughan’s poem of pastoral withdrawal, ‘Upon Priory Grove’, published in his 1646 Poems, seeks a ‘fresh grove in th’ Elysian Land’, where he might find ‘our first innocence, and love’ (Parry 1990: 50–1). While Vaughan’s Arcadian sanctuary is to be found at his priory in Wales, other royalist poets located the pastoral idyll in the aristocratic country house (Marcus 1994: 146–55; see Chapter 25, ‘An Emblem of Themselves’: Early Renaissance Country House Poetry). Despite the vibrancy of royalist pastoral, the form’s ideological possibilities remained open throughout this period. Hence Milton confidently reasserted the oppositional forms of political pastoral, and its ethical and religious commitments, when he republished his pastoral elegy, Lycidas, in 1645. Throughout the seventeenth century, pastoral topoi were integrated within topographical poetry to produce a poetics of place. The prominence of the pastoral garden and its flowers in later Renaissance poetry owes much to the developing field of garden design, itself an expression of aristocratic otium or leisure (Bushnell 2003; see Chapter 26, Literary Gardens, from More to Marvell). The discussion of grafting in The Winter’s Tale is philosophical and practical, drawing on gardening manuals as much as on long-standing debates about the relationship between nature and art. The natural world in Elizabethan pastoral is frequently depicted through the device of the pathetic fallacy; thus understood as a projection of the speaker’s state of mind, nature is therefore ‘naturally’ responsive to man. Shakespeare’s As You Like It turned its audience’s attention to the mindset implicit in pastoral’s view of nature. The mediation on fallen nature in 2.1 culminates in the Lord’s description of Jaques weeping over the ‘sobbing deer’ (2.1.66). When Jaques decries man’s destructive impact on the natural world, he argues for the liberation and separation of nature from man. Yet he does so by sentimentalising the deer in a manner so stylised that the deer becomes his mirror. Like the artful anthropomorphism of Marlowe’s birds singing madrigals, the episode suggests that the idea that nature can be understood independently of culture is fallacious (Watson 2006: 78–81). Drayton’s long chorographical poem PolyOlbion (1612, 1622) laments the destruction of England’s natural habitats. To do so, in pastoral fashion, he gives the trees and rivers a voice; an act of anthropomorphism that insists that human history is implicated in natural history, and argues for man’s

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ethical responsibilities towards the natural world (Dasgupta 2008). Recent ecocriticism, by studying later Renaissance pastoral as a form of nature-writing, provides a methodology for understanding this interplay between ethos and place (see Chapter 82, Early Modern Ecology). Pastoral is expansive: it is present in the form of distinct genres, such as the pastoral eclogue and the pastoral elegy, and becomes increasing modal in the Renaissance, combining with and infusing a range of other literary kinds, from romance to topographical poetry. Its flexibility meant that it was capable of sustaining a range of critical questions, from the nature of the literary vocation to the place of nature itself. What this essay has attempted to do is to identify the key features and outline the historical contours of this notoriously complex literary kind.

References and Further Reading Alpers, Paul (1996). What Is Pastoral? Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Brathwaite, Richard (1615). A Strappado for the Devil. London. Bushnell, Rebecca (2003). Green Desire: Imagining Early Modern English Gardens. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Butler, Martin (1992). ‘Ben Jonson’s Pan’s Anniversary and the politics of early Stuart pastoral’. English Literary History, 22, 369–95. Chaudhuri, Sukanta (1989). Renaissance Pastoral and its English Developments. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Cooper, Helen (1977). Pastoral: Mediaeval into Renaissance. Ipswich: D. S. Brewer. Dasgupta, Sukanya (2008). ‘ “A turfe beyond them all”: Poly-Olbion and the politics of landscape’. Unpublished paper delivered at the Land, Landscape and Environment, 1550– 1750 conference, held at the University of Reading. David, Gail (1991). Female Heroism in the Pastoral. New York: Garland. Doelman, James (ed.) (1999). Early Stuart Pastoral. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies. Empson, William (1950). Some Versions of Pastoral. London: Chatto & Windus. Ettin, Andrew (1984). Literature and the Pastoral. New Haven: Yale University Press. Fowler, Alastair (1986). ‘The beginnings of English georgic’. In Barbara Lewalski (ed.), Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and

Interpretation (pp. 105–25). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Greg, W. W. (1906). Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama. London: A. H. Bullen. Grundy, Joan (1969). The Spenserian Poets: A Study in Elizabethan and Jacobean Poetry. London: Edward Arnold. Haber, Judith (1994). Pastoral and the Poetics of Self-Contradiction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hubbard, Thomas K. (1998). The Pipes of Pan: Intertextuality and Literary Filiation in the Pastoral Tradition from Theocritus to Virgil. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Hunter, William B. (ed.) (1977). The English Spenserians: The Poetry of Giles Fletcher, George Wither, Michael Drayton, Phineas Fletcher, and Henry More. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Jonson, Ben (1950). Works, ed. C. H. Herford, Percy Simpson and Evelyn Simpson, vol. 10. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kay, Dennis (1990). Melodious Tears: The English Funeral Elegy from Spenser to Milton. Oxford: Clarendon Press. King, John N. (1986). ‘Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender and Protestant pastoral satire’. In Barbara Lewalski (ed.), Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation (pp. 369–98). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Lewalski, Barbara (1991). ‘Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory and pastoral tragicomedy’. In Naomi Miller and Gary Waller (eds.), Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern

Pastoral England (pp. 88–108). Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Lindenbaum, Peter (1986). Changing Landscapes: Anti-Pastoral Sentiment in the English Renaissance. Athens: University of Georgia Press. Lindheim, Nancy (2005). The Virgilian Pastoral Tradition: From the Renaissance to the Modern Era. Pittsburgh, Pa.: Duquesne University Press. Loewenstein, Joseph (1984). Responsive Readings: Versions of Echo in Pastoral, Epic, and the Jonsonian Masque. New Haven: Yale University Press. Loughrey, Bryan (1994). The Pastoral Mode: A Casebook. London: Macmillan. MacLean, Gerald (1990). Time’s Witness: Historical Representation in English Poetry, 1603–1660. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press. Mallette, Richard (1981). Spenser, Milton and Renaissance Pastoral. Lewisburg: Bucknell. Marcus, Leah (1994). ‘Politics and pastoral: writing the court on the countryside’. In Kevin Sharpe and Peter Lake (eds.), Culture and Politics in Early Stuart England (pp. 139–59). Basingstoke: Macmillan. Marlowe, Christopher (2006). Collected Poems, ed. Patrick Cheney and Brian Striar. Oxford: Oxford University Press. McMullan, Gordon (1994). The Politics of Unease in the Plays Of John Fletcher. Amherst, Mass.: University of Massachusetts Press. Montrose, Louis Adrian (1979). ‘ “The perfect paterne of a poete”: the poetics of courtship in The Shepheardes Calender’. Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 21, 34–67. Montrose, Louis Adrian (1980). ‘ “Eliza, Queene of shepheardes”, and the pastoral of power’. English Literary Renaissance, 10, 153–82. Montrose, Louis Adrian (1983). ‘ “Of gentlemen and shepherds”: The politics of Elizabethan pastoral form’. English Literary History, 50, 415–59. Montrose, Louis Adrian (1996). The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Newcomb, Lori Humphrey (2003). ‘Unfolding the shepherdess: a revision of pastoral’. In Constance C. Relihan and Goran V. Stanivukovic (eds.), Prose Fiction and Early Modern Sexualities in England, 1570–1640 (pp. 236–55). Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

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Norbrook, David (2002). Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance, rev. edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Callaghan, Michelle (2000). The ‘Shepheards Nation’: Jacobean Spenserians and Early Stuart Political Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Parry, Graham (1990). ‘A troubled Arcadia’. In Thomas Healy and Jonathan Sawday (eds.), Literature and the English Civil War (pp. 38–54). Cambridge: Cambridge University press. Patterson, Annabel. (1988). Pastoral and Ideology: Virgil to Valéry. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Puttenham, George (2007). The Art of English Poesy, ed. Frank Whigham and Wayne A. Rebhorn. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Shakespeare, William (1996). The Winter’s Tale, ed. Stephen Orgel. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shakespeare, William (2008). As You Like It, ed. Alan Brissenden. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sidney, Philip (1985). The Old Arcadia, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sidney, Philip (2008). The Major Works, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Snyder, Susan (1998). Pastoral Process: Spenser, Marvell, Milton. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Spenser, Edmund (1999). The Shorter Poems, ed. Richard McCabe. London: Penguin. Starke, Sue (2007). The Heroines of English Pastoral Romance. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer. Virgil (2004). Eclogues, Georgics, Aeneid I–VI, ed. H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. G. P. Gould. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Watson, Robert (2006). Back to Nature: The Green and the Real in the Late Renaissance. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Williams, Raymond (1973). The Country and the City. London: Chatto & Windus. Yoch, James (1987). ‘The Renaissance dramatization of temperance: the Italian revival of tragicomedy and The Faithful Shepherdess’. In Nancy Klein Maguire (ed.), Renaissance Tragicomedy: Explorations in Genre And Politics (pp. 115–30). New York: AMS Press.

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In 1577 Thomas Underdowne prefaced the second edition of his translation of Heliodorus’ Greek romance, the Ethiopica (third century BC), with the following observation: If I shall commend the reading of it to any, I might find other better to be commended. If I shall compare it with other of like argument, I think none cometh near it. Morte Darthur, Arthur of Little Britain, yea, and Amadis of Gaule, etc. account violent murder, or murder for no cause, manhood: and fornication and all unlawful lust, friendly love. This book punisheth the faults of evildoers, and rewardeth the well livers. (Underdowne 1577: sig. 3r)

Underdowne’s judgement is typical of sixteenth-century attitudes to romance in its simultaneous fascination with, and rejection of, the stuff of romance, and also in its desire to find a legitimate means of engaging with romance narrative. Anxieties about romance reading are not just restricted to the matter of romance: one of the reasons for rejecting romance with such vehemence lies in the imaginative delight it exercises and the pleasure its reading provides, often described at the time in quasi-sexual terms such as ‘ravishment’. As well as indicating the sites of anxiety associated with romance, Underdowne’s preface also demonstrates a very accurate sense of the subdivisions of romance in Renaissance England: he lists the best-known examples of medieval Arthurian romance, Tudor translated romance, and Spanish chivalric romance. With the addition of Greek romance, we have here a catalogue of four of the major groupings into which sixteenth-century romances fall. The only categories missing are epic romance and pastoral romance, which in 1577 had not yet reached their full potential in English. Underdowne’s comment further provides a revealing insight into the capaciousness of Renaissance romance: as a literary mode it addresses matters of human society and identity (‘manhood’, ‘friendly love’) against a backdrop of religion, moral philosophy, and history.

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Spenser’s conception of romance is similarly capacious. In articulating for Ralegh the ‘darke conceit’ that is the allegory of The Faerie Queene, he invokes literary models of male endeavour (the epics of Homer and Virgil and the romances of Tasso and Ariosto) alongside Aristotle’s Ethics in order to claim that his work is concerned with the governance of the ‘priuate man’, that is, the realm of ethics, or ‘morall vertues’ (Spenser 2001: 715). This is why Arthur figures in The Faerie Queene as a lone knight (the archetypal agent of romance subjectivity) rather than as a king. But as the letter to Ralegh also makes clear, the ‘priuate man’ of romance must necessarily find himself thrust into the wider world of government as a consequence of love: Arthur is ‘rauished’ in a moment of intimate mental possession by his dream of the Faerie Queene’s beauty (Spenser 2001: 716), but his pursuit of her far exceeds the bounds of private interest once Spenser’s identification of Arthur with magnificence and of the Faerie Queene with glory is overlaid upon this narrative of ostensibly individual, sensory ravishment. The capaciousness of Spenser’s romance does not end even here, however: tucked away near the end of the letter is the poet’s acknowledgement that, however clear a moral scheme he may seem to be presenting, romance is fundamentally inclined to expansion and to the proliferation of endless possibilities, or intermeddlings, and narrative ‘accidents’, as Spenser puts it: ‘But by occasion hereof, many other aduentures are intermedled [intermingled], but rather as Accidents, then intendments. As the loue of Britomart, the ouerthrow of Marinell, the misery of Florimell, the vertuousnes of Belphœbe, the lasciuiousness of Hellenora, and many the like’ (Spenser 2001: 718). (It is worth noting in passing here that whereas the masculinist discourse of the letter to Ralegh may sideline these amorous narratives of predominantly female passion as being ‘intermedled’ with the serious matter of moral virtue, the poem itself demonstrates that these ‘accidents’ play an equal part in Spenser’s ‘darke conceit’). ‘Intermeddling’ is a widespread feature of romance composition. In Spenser’s usage here it invokes the principle of ‘interlace’ inherited from medieval French prose romances, in which the threads of various narratives are interwoven, being taken up or abandoned at unpredictable moments by the writer. In other contexts, the same principle of combination and capaciousness – often specifically the interweaving of alien or even disruptive material into the matter of a love plot – takes the form of digressions on matters of politics or history, on courtly deportment, on education, on women, on love, on poetry, and so on. The principle of capaciousness is also manifested in the enthusiasm with which romance will invoke or incorporate, often without warning or signposting, material from other works or non-literary realms of experience. The ‘unnatural natural history’ culled from Pliny’s Natural History in Lyly’s Euphues (1578) does this in the manner of the swift allusion (for example, ‘the crystal toucheth the toad, and is not poisoned’, Lyly 1902: I, 193), whereas Sidney’s Arcadias include lengthier, set-piece disputations on subjects such as suicide (in the Old Arcadia) and raising a siege (in the New Arcadia). Joel Altman notes of such debates that they end in ‘irresolute resolution’, which makes him wonder ‘what Sidney’s point is in including these arguments if they settle nothing’ (Altman 1978: 94). These

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debates may have little direct impact on the plot, but such moments bestow upon Sidney’s romance an encyclopaedic function that seeks, like Spenser’s letter, to draw elements of all human experience and enquiry within the remit of romance writing. At other times, Sidney’s encyclopaedism does serve a more integrated purpose within the plot of the whole: in the episode of the princes’ hunting with Kalander in the New Arcadia, Sidney weaves together the literary tradition of the hunt with actual courtly practice by combining allusions to Echo and Actaeon (taken from Ovid) with details such as the huntsmen’s cries that reflect the practice of his time, as described for example in Gascoigne’s Noble Art of Venery (1575). This combination is a virtuoso exercise demonstrating the author’s rhetorical and technical skills in the art of venery, while at the same time accessing a remarkable degree of sympathy with the humanised despair of the weeping stag: the incident thereby exemplifies the coexistence of elegance and brutality, compassion and cruelty, that occurs frequently throughout the New Arcadia (Sidney 1987: 54 and 517–18). Many of the romances written in this period possess just such an encyclopaedic dimension, revealed as they dip into or invoke categories of knowledge or experience as diverse as ancient lore, modern technology, geography, or exploration. The inspiration for such ravenous behaviour derives partly from the system of humanist education that trained writers to keep commonplace books and to seek connections between different realms of learning, and partly it lies deep within the roots of the genre, being heralded both in classical romance (as illustrated by the ethnographic digressions of the Ethiopica), and in its medieval successors: Spanish prose romances, for example, incorporate consiliaria (passages of philosophical moralising) into their narratives. As a rhetorical strategy, the ‘intermeddling’ into sixteenth-century romance of material culled from non-literary categories is typical of its time. On the other hand, the negotiation and juxtaposition of apparently incompatible material has always been a feature of romance; it is one of the key techniques in the creation of romance wonder, which is achieved notably through the yoking of the strange and the familiar that is to be found in romances of all types and derivations. Medieval romance frequently rejoices in its situation on the boundary between the ‘knowable’ and the marvellous (or ‘faery’): human feats of engineering, buildings and artefacts, as well as magical phenomena, can all enjoy the status of marvels in medieval romance. These medieval texts were still available to early modern readers via the presses of printers such as Wynkyn de Worde, and the principle of the romance marvel is embraced enthusiastically by early modern writers of romance, partly under the influence of Greek romance and its poetics of wonder, and partly as a consequence of the artistic, technological, and scientific advances of the time. The rhetorical technique of ekphrasis (the description of an artefact) lends itself particularly well to marvellous scenarios in Renaissance romance, permitting as it does rhetorical embellishment to rival the visual splendour of the marvel, and offering the writer a means of allying his own art of writing with that of the painter. Thomas Lodge’s romance A Margarite of America (1595), for example, features an extended ekphrasis describing a chamber adorned with statues of classical deities, gemstones, and a wondrous tapestry, ‘beautified with gold and pearl’,

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depicting Orpheus and the Muses. The narrator (and by extension the reader) is ravished by wonder at this display of art, the highest achievement of which (as so often in Renaissance romance) is to blur the boundary between the real and the made by rendering material objects ‘lively’ (that is, life-like): ‘It was strange to think, and more strange to behold, in what order Art matched with Nature, and how the limning painter had almost exceeded Nature in life, saving that the beauteous faces wanted breath to make them alive, not cunning to prove them lively’ (Lodge 2005: 83). In this context, archetypal approaches to romance that foreground its interest in themes such as renewal and rebirth can be fruitfully reconciled with materialist readings stressing romance’s intense engagement with the wonders of human craft. One area of such craft that exerted a particular influence upon sixteenth-century romance was the fashion for placing architectural marvels, often powered by hydraulics, into a pastoral setting. The turning table in Basilius’ garden in Sidney’s New Arcadia, for example, is typical of the devices constructed and owned by European aristocrats (Sidney 1987: 86). Hermione’s appearance as a statue in Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale probably also partakes of this same fashion, which enables Shakespeare to suggest the wonder of rebirth and restoration through the wonder of technology, as in this incident ‘life imitates art rather than art imitating life’ (Tigner 2006: 115). Tigner further observes the political consequences of this double wonder: ‘through the orchestration of this extravagant garden performance in which the corporeal body appears mechanical, Hermione regains her rightful place as wife and as co-ruler in the political state’. Like technological marvels, foreign locations feature in Renaissance romance as sources of wonder that are imaginatively delightful and yet also demonstrative of human craft, power, and history. The eastern Mediterranean, in particular, enjoys a double signification as the site of Heliodoran strangeness (biological, topographical, and ethnographical) and also as the birthplace of Christianity and Western culture. It was, furthermore, also the subject of intense interest as a consequence of its trading significance and the ongoing military conflict between Christians and Turks. Emmanuel Ford’s romance Ornatus and Artesia (c.1595) blends these legendary and contemporaneous identities of the eastern Mediterranean into a fictionalised romance geography: ‘as places of danger and pleasure’, writes Stanivukovic, ‘the Natolia and Phrygia of Ornatus and Artesia are fantasy lands with an historical name and a loosely defined past’ (Ford 2003: 29). Looking westwards, a similar blending of the legendary and the contemporaneous occurs when Renaissance romance engages with the subject of the New World: in describing Guyon’s encounter with Mammon in Faerie Queene 2.7.4–5, Spenser depicts the fabled gold hoards of South America and satirises the Spanish obsession therewith. Mammon sits, surrounded by ‘Great heapes of gold, that neuer could be spent’, turning over a ‘masse of coyne’ in his lap, ‘to feede his eye / And couetous desire with his huge threasury’. Closer to home, popular romances often rewrite the erotic fantasies of courtly romance into mercantile fantasies of material success, in which the sexual agency of the male lover is allied with – indeed transmuted into – the financial and commercial acumen that in these romances brings sexual rewards alongside material ones. Different kinds of wonder abound in such a

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scenario: in Thomas Deloney’s Jack of Newbury (c.1597), for example, we enter a topsyturvy romance world in which Jack is wooed by his mistress. Sexual hierarchies are inverted as he, rather than she, consents to be married (the blandishments of her estate being never far from his mind), to be quickly followed by social upheaval, as Jack finds himself seated in his master’s chair at table, much to the surprise of the other servants: ‘The folks looked upon one another, marvelling at this strange news’ (Salzman 1987: 330). Act 4 of The Tempest constitutes an excellent example of the romance urge to be ravished by, and yet to possess and master, the wondrous. The hymeneal masque of Juno and Ceres is simultaneously a manifestation of Prospero’s skill (‘some vanity of mine art’, 4.1.41), a celebration of the play’s central ‘wonder’, Miranda (whose name is derived from the Latin verb miror to wonder), and a threatening injunction against youthful sex when it is unlegislated by the patriarch-magus, ‘th’fire i’th’blood’, as Prospero warns Ferdinand (4.1.53). As the close of the play reveals, Prospero’s hopes of dynastic security and restoration are vested in Miranda’s future fertility – a kind of transformative magic in itself – and so it is no surprise that all his art is summoned here to legislate and secure Ferdinand’s experience of wonder, to the extent that the force of the magus’ power almost supplants the sexual attractions of his daughter: ‘so rare a wondered father and a wise / Makes this place paradise’ exclaims Ferdinand (4.1.123–4). The limitations on the human command of wonder are revealed, however, as the masque ends abruptly with Prospero’s sudden start on remembering Caliban’s threat against his life. Just as Prospero has secured one threat against his authority, another returns to challenge him. The incident speaks to the heart of the highly divergent attitudes to Prospero and to the wonder of the play that divide modern critics from their predecessors: is Prospero ‘an inspiring magus’ or ‘an arrogant and ill-tempered magistrate’, and is the play’s romance form a ‘utopian spectacle of wonder’ or ‘a participant in the ideological activity of imperialism’ (Kastan 1999: 184)? As these examples reveal, Renaissance romance is thoroughly embedded, implicated, and engaged in the cultural politics prevailing at the moment of its making. The extent of romance’s engagement with its own time has always been a matter of scholarly controversy, and the general consensus has shifted over time from predominantly archetypal modes of reading towards those that ally an awareness of romance’s transferable methods and motifs (or ‘memes’, Cooper 2004) with an acknowledgement of the socio-political dimension to romance writing and reading at any particular period. Derek Brewer, underlining the importance of the quest motif to romance, was typical of a generation of critics in asserting that ‘society is important in romance, but as a frame, or as a home, to be validated only if it can be left and returned to’ (Brewer 1978: 37). Helen Cooper, on the other hand, reads romance as lying at the heart of a society’s ‘self-representation’, being ‘a means by which cultural values and ideals were recorded and maintained and promulgated’ (Cooper 2004: 6). As Cooper goes on to describe, one of the ways in which romance exercised such a role was through its self-proclaimed status as exemplary and educative. The exemplary

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function of romance could be variously ethical, as proposed in Spenser’s letter to Ralegh, amorous, as in the Amadis romances that figured forth the hero and his love Oriana as the embodiment of ‘loyal lovers’, or rhetorical, as in the case of the Arcadia, which was mined for rhetorical gold in guides such as Abraham Fraunce’s The Arcadian Rhetoric (1588). It is important to note in this context that the exemplary function of romance also admits of anti-examples, as Underdowne’s comments make clear: ‘evil doers’ are as integral to the genre as the ‘well livers’ who find themselves rewarded, and romance has always incorporated more than its fair share of murderers, shapechangers, and malevolents. Age-old worries about the illegitimate behaviour embedded in and licensed by romance, ranging from magic to ‘cutting one another’s throat for frivolous matters’ and ‘dishonest lusts’ (De la Noue 1587: sig. G8r), continue to be articulated throughout the early modern period, and are afforced by a new fear of Italian fiction, with its trickster plots and air of urban licence (Ascham 1967). Faced with the charge that the criminalities of romance rendered it morally dangerous and disabling, particularly for youthful and female readers, writers and translators sought to claim a double function for romance reading as admonitory and exemplary, thereby fulfilling the Horatian ideal of ‘profit and delight’. In the case of chivalric fiction, an imitative and socially efficacious purpose could also be advanced, as in Margaret Tyler’s 1578 preface to her translation of the Spanish romance The Mirror of Princely Deeds and Knighthood, where she hopes that, being moved by the examples of magnanimity and courage contained therein, the reader may ‘hazard thy person and purchase good name’ in the service of his prince (Tyler 1578: sig. A3r). Efficacy is construed rather differently in the remarks to readers that preface non-chivalric romances such as those by Lyly and Greene, however. When the dedicatee and envisaged reader are male, the epistles and dedications tend to stress the importance of male society and crave gentlemanly toleration. When an address to women readers is also included, there is an additional, ambiguous emphasis upon pleasure and leisure that actually speaks as much (if not more) to the male than to the female reader, suggesting ‘voyeuristic pleasures’ that are to be enjoyed by the male reader as he shares the private reading space of the female reader’s chamber and encounters the female ‘erotic secrets’ to be revealed in the book (Hackett 2000: 11). The implied or imagined readership of romance, whether accurately or fictitiously presented, exerts a profound and increasing influence upon the paratextual framing of romances throughout the period, operating forcefully upon their commercial characterisation and material production. Lori Humphrey Newcomb’s study of the fortunes of Greene’s Pandosto, for example, examines the material and textual changes that were made in order to appeal to a burgeoning non-elite and increasingly female seventeenth-century readership. After 1632, she notes, ‘the title was changed to The Pleasant History of Dorastus and Fawnia, presumably directing the book towards women interested in courtship, and later abridgements played up Fawnia’s Cinderella-like story’ (Newcomb 2002: 7). Newcomb rightly stresses that, although these changes have been regarded by traditional literary history as a descent in standing for Pandosto, they actually bear witness to the remarkable capacity of romance to reformulate itself for new readerships, and have their own

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literary interest. The themes of obedience and social mobility that characterise Pandosto and other popular romances, for example (Newcomb 2002: 8), are for a popular readership the natural successors to the emphasis upon knightly identity and ethical virtue that characterises elite romance. Renaissance romance is thus engaged in a constant negotiation between the illicit impulses of its matter and the expected moral ends of fiction, particularly as regards its erotic content. In consequence, the legislation of marital and gender roles – often orchestrated by a patriarchal figure such as Prospero in the face of threatened youthful insubordination – is everywhere to be found, and extends equally to men and women. In chivalric romances, such legislation tends to focus upon the courtly and ethical behaviour of the young and their ‘conversation’ (a term that encompasses both talk and sex), whereas in the later part of the century, popular romances such as those by Ford and Henry Robarts address the aspirations of newly literate and aspirational mercantile male readers, reformulating the aristocratic codes of love and chivalry into the norms most efficacious for their readerships, such as ‘prudent behaviour, tempered passions, and ways of maturing into marriage’ (Stanivukovic 2007: 66). Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) contains many anti-romantic elements, including a pastiche version of a tournament in Sidney’s Arcadia; it is in many ways framed in rebellion against the ethical and social regulation of young men, and against the idealism and typically redemptive teleology of romance. The young men of The Unfortunate Traveller are not knights, princes, or even merchants, but pages, and the self-portrait by the narrator, Jack Wilton (even his name is a play on the Herbert family seat at Wilton, where the Arcadia was written), undermines the rhetoric of instruction, delight, and bodily beauty associated with romance while rejoicing in its own indecorum: For your instruction and godly consolation, be informed that at that time I was no common squire, no under-trodden torchbearer. I had my feather in my cap as big as a flag in the fore-top [i.e. top of the foremast], my French doublet gelt [cut; lit. castrated] in the belly as though, like a pig ready to be spitted, all my guts had been plucked out, a pair of side-paned [made of strips of different coloured cloth] hose that hung down like two scales filled with Holland cheeses … I must not discover what ungodly dealing we had with the black jacks, or how oft I was crowned king of the drunkards with a court cup. (Salzman 1987: 224–5)

As far as women are concerned, writers and readers seeking unconventional roles for women that extended beyond their traditional functions as objects of desire, godly mothers, and domestic helpmeets could look to exotic figures such as the Amazon (found in the Amadis cycle of romances or in formulations such as Spenser’s Radigund), or to the wealthy, sexually independent mistresses of prose fictions such as Jack of Newbury and Gascoigne’s Adventures of Master F.J. (1573). One of the defining characteristics of romance has always been the latitude it permits in the depiction of female sensibility, especially eroticism. Sidney’s New Arcadia is acknowledged as a more virtuous and dignified, less trifling and illicit, version than the Old, but even here we

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find a startlingly frank depiction of female desire, as Philoclea surrenders to the feared reality of her love for another woman, Zelmane: ‘… if she can love poor me, shall I think scorn to love such a woman as Zelmane? Away, then, all vain examinations of why and how. Thou lovest me, excellent Zelmane, and I love thee!’ And with that, embracing the very ground whereon she lay, she said to herself (for even to herself she was ashamed to speak it out in words), ‘O my Zelmane! Govern and direct me, for I am wholly given over unto thee.’ (Sidney 1987: 149)

Unbeknown to her, Philoclea’s desire is legitimated, of course, by the fact that Zelmane is actually the prince Pyrocles. Such a fortuitous solution to amorous difficulty is not available, however, to the protagonist of The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (1621), written by Sidney’s niece, Lady Mary Wroth. Wroth’s heroine Pamphilia is, like Philoclea, ‘wholly given over’ to her love, Amphilanthus, who is irredeemably inconstant (see Chapter 61, The Heart of the Labyrinth: Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus). The Urania exists in two parts, and Wroth undertakes in each to reassess the gender and amorous norms of chivalric romance. In the first, published, part, the motif of constancy is redefined in the character of Pamphilia as ‘fidelity to one’s own freely chosen love’ rather than one’s spouse (Wroth 1995: lxi), a move that necessarily pits amorous imperatives firmly against patriarchal, familial, and societal ones. As Mary Ellen Lamb points out, Wroth’s emphasis upon Pamphilia’s determined constancy results in ‘an abundant interiority’ that punctuates the plot and renders the romance ‘in some sense a long, lyric complaint’ (Lamb 2001: 107). (The punctuation of Renaissance romance with complaints, letters, and poems, of which the Urania is an extreme example, is yet another manifestation of its encyclopaedic tendency). In the Urania, the oppositionality of Pamphilia’s constancy, and its redefinition as a tool of self-assertion and in some ways lyric self-alienation, marks a distinctive break with the Arcadia. Whereas the abundant interiorities of Philoclea (expressed in her illicit desire) or Pamela (in the calamity of her incarceration) can ultimately be resolved into the orthodox securities of royal marriage, Pamphilia’s constancy must be endlessly reiterated in the face of Amphilanthus’ betrayals; in this respect, the Urania represents a strikingly feminised and internalised version of the narrative postponements and deviations with which romance typically proceeds, at the same time as it quests for union and closure (Parker 1979). In the unpublished second part of Wroth’s Urania, the paradigm of amorous union is tantalisingly proffered when the lovers perform a verbal marriage, but any fragile faith in the efficacy of this ironically designated ‘knot never to be untied’ (Wroth 1999: 45) is undermined when both subsequently marry others – the Princess of Slavonia in the case of Amphilanthus and Rodomandro in the case of Pamphilia. As was recognised from the moment of its publication, the messy realities of love and marriage in the Urania are a reflection, a ‘shadowing’, as Wroth’s editor calls it (borrowing from Spenser’s letter to Ralegh), of Wroth’s relationship with her cousin William Herbert. The ‘biopolitics’ of this liaison and of the extended Sidney/Herbert

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circle are inescapable in the Urania (Lamb 2001), and determine the signification even of such common romance memes as the illegitimate son who seeks recognition from his absent father. (After her husband’s death, Wroth bore two children by Herbert, and her version of the unacknowledged son, called the ‘Faire Designe’, is still seeking his father Amphilanthus when the manuscript continuation breaks off (Wroth 1995: lxvi).) In the Elizabethan, Jacobean, and Caroline periods, the biopolitics of marriage, sex, and family that are both archetypal and topical concerns of romance intersect intensively and very publicly with the domestic lives of the monarchy. Although the propositions that the family of James I constitutes a ‘text’ that Shakespeare read in gathering material for his romances, and also that he wrote hints of his own familial life into his late plays (Bergeron 1985: 11), are now regarded as potentially reductive, it is no doubt the case that Shakespeare’s romances return again and again to questions of succession, legitimacy, and ‘issue’ that were particularly germane to the royal politics of this period. There is nothing new about this, of course: Sidney’s Old Arcadia engages directly with the personal politics of Elizabeth’s rule as concentrated in the controversy over her potential marriage to the duc d’Alençon, and both versions address themselves to broader political themes such as monarchical obligation, the common good, the role and responsibilities of nobles and counsellors, and the dangers of tyranny (Norbrook 2002; Shrank 2004; Worden 1996). The inherent militarism of chivalric romance could also be employed with polemical purpose in a specifically Renaissance colonial context, as the genre’s interest in narratives of conquest and the ideology of rule are turned to self-justificatory ends, most notoriously in the case of Spenser’s treatment of Ireland in Book 5 of The Faerie Queene (Lockey 2006; see also Chapter 17, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Book 5: Poetry, Politics, and Justice). The increasing ‘pressure of reality’ that has been noted as romance progresses into the seventeenth century (Salzman 1985: 141) is nowhere more evident than in the romances composed during the 1650s, in the final phase of the genre’s pre-eminence before the post-bellum upsurge of novelistic fictions. As Elizabeth Sauer has pointed out, the ‘growing disenchantment with courtly life and the escalation of civil and political tensions’ typical of the Caroline period (Sauer 2003: 195) enhanced the tendency to intermeddle politics into romance, giving rise to the genre of political romance in which the protagonists are thinly veiled versions of royalty. In another manifestation of romance encyclopaedism, the subtitle of Richard Brathwaite’s Panthalia: A Royal Romance (1659) therefore begins ‘A discourse stored with infinite variety in relation to state-government …’, and the romance shadows Elizabeth, James, Charles I, Charles II, and Cromwell under the persons of Bellingeria, Basilius, Rosicles, Charicles, and Climenes respectively. Such self-conscious writing of topicality into a literary mode that was most often associated at the time with mental ravishment and a dangerous lack of verisimilitude brings into sharp relief the contradictory identity of romance as a poetics of both wonder and topicality, encompassing the strange and the familiar, throughout this period. In the early sixteenth century, romance had engaged with matters of political

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import in the generalised manner of the speculum principis tradition, that is, by depicting the rise and fall of kings and princes, and the virtues (notably courage and magnanimity) and vices (notably pride) that attended upon their positions. Arthurian romance had always held a potentially political charge in English literature and enjoyed a controversial relationship to reality, thanks to the incorporation of Arthurian material into Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century History of the Kings of Britain. In the Henrician period, the relationship between Arthurian romance and British history came under particular scrutiny as a result of the rise of humanist history and an increasing scepticism about the veracity of Arthurian sources. On one side of the argument, Polydore Vergil in 1534 rejected the ‘soothsayings of one Merlin’ (Ellis 1846: 29) as historical evidence but allowed that Arthur was a historical figure; on the other, ten years later, the antiquarian John Leland defended the historicity of the Arthurian legend on the basis of the witness of the landscape: ‘I betake me unto those rocks and monuments, the true witnesses of Arthur’s renown and majesty’ (Mead 1925: 54). Throughout this period, romance interrogates and complicates the relationship of history to fiction, exulting, as in Spenser’s letter to Ralegh, in its capacity to intermeddle the knowable, imitable, and political with the seductions of ‘faery’. References and Further Reading Altman, J. (1978). The Tudor Play of Mind: Rhetorical Inquiry and the Development of Elizabethan Drama, Berkeley: University of California Press. Ascham, R. (1967). The Schoolmaster, ed. Lawrence V. Ryan. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Bergeron, David M. (1985). Shakespeare’s Romances and the Royal Family. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press. Brewer, Derek (1978). Chaucer and his World. London: Eyre Methuen. Cooper, H. (2004). The English Romance in Time: Transforming Motifs from Geoffrey of Monmouth to the Death of Shakespeare. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Davis, A. (2003). Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. De la Noue, F. (1587). The Politic and Military Discourses of the Lord de la Noue … translated out of the French by E.A. London. Ellis, H. (1846). Polydore Vergil’s English History, from an Early Translation Preserved Among the Manuscripts of the Old Royal Library in the British Museum, vol. 1. London: The Camden Society. Ford, E. (2003). The Most Pleasant History of Ornatus and Artesia, ed. Goran Stanivukovic. Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions.

Hackett, H. (2000). Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kastan, D. S. (1999). Shakespeare After Theory. London and New York: Routledge. Lamb, M. E. (2001). ‘The biopolitics of romance in Mary Wroth’s The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania’. English Literary Renaissance, 31, 107–30. Linton, J. P. (1998). The Romance of the New World: Gender and the Literary Formations of English Colonialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lockey, B. (2006). Law and Empire in English Renaissance Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lodge, T. (1997). Rosalind. Euphues’ Golden Legacy Found after his Death in his Cell at Silexedra, ed. Donald Beecher. Publications of the Barnabe Riche Society 7. Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions. Lodge, T. (2005). A Margarite of America, ed. Donald Beecher and Henry D. Janzen. Publications of the Barnabe Riche Society 17. Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies.

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Lyly, J. (1902). The Complete Works of John Lyly, ed. R. Warwick Bond, 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Mead, W. E. (1925). The Famous Historie of Chinon of England by Christopher Middleton to which is added The Assertion of King Arthure Translated by Richard Robinson from Leland’s Assertio Inclytissimi Arturii together with the Latin Original. EETS os 165. London: Early English Text Society. Mentz, S. (2006). Romance for Sale in Early Modern England: The Rise of Prose Fiction. Aldershot: Ashgate. Newcomb, L. H. (2002). Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England. New York: Columbia University Press. Norbrook, D. (2002). Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance, rev. edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Parker, P. (1979). Inescapable Romance. Studies in the Poetics of a Mode. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Salzman, P. (1985). English Prose Fiction 1558– 1700: A Critical History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Salzman, P. (ed.) (1987). An Anthology of Elizabethan Prose Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sauer, E. (2003). ‘Emasculating romance: historical fiction in the Protectorate’. In Constance C. Relihan and Goran V. Stanivukovic (eds.), Prose Fiction and Early Modern Sexualities in England, 1570–1640 (pp. 195–213). New York and Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Shrank, C. (2004). Writing the Nation in Reformation England, 1530–1580. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sidney, P. (1987). The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia (The New Arcadia), ed. Victor Skretkowicz. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Spenser, E. (2001). The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton; text ed. Hiroshi Yamashita and Toshiyuki Suzuki. London: Longman. Stanivukovic, G. V. (2007). ‘English Renaissance romances as conduct books for young men’. In Naomi Conn Liebler (ed.), Early Modern Prose Fiction: The Cultural Politics of Reading (pp. 60– 78). New York and Abingdon: Routledge. Tigner, A. L. (2006). ‘The Winter’s Tale: gardens and the marvels of transformation’. English Literary Renaissance, 36, 114–34. Tyler, M. (1578). The Mirror of Princely Deeds and Knighthood. London. Underdowne, T. (1577). An Æthiopian Historie. London. Worden, B. (1996). The Sound of Virtue: Philip Sidney’s ‘Arcadia’ and Elizabethan Politics. New Haven: Yale University Press. Wroth, M. (1995). The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, ed. Josephine A. Roberts. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 140. Binghamton, NY: Renaissance English Text Society. Wroth, M. (1999). The Second Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, ed. Josephine A. Roberts, completed by Suzanne Gossett and Janel Mueller. Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies 211. Tempe: Renaissance English Text Society/Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

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Love Poetry Diana E. Henderson

Was love poetry being written in Renaissance England? The obvious answer is a resounding yes: this was the age of Shakespeare’s sonnets and John Donne’s metaphysical lyrics, of Cavalier invitations to ‘gather ye rosebuds’ (and have sex), and of elegies to dead beloveds of all ages and varieties. During the past quarter-century however, many scholars of the early modern period have answered the question differently. Certainly, they grant, a voluminous body of poetry spoke of desire, but was the subject really ‘love’? And even if it was, did the writer actually feel such emotions? (Despite postmodernity’s emphasis on play, the criterion of sincerity and the appeal of biography still appear to be particularly potent when we turn to love lyrics.) Because so much lauded love poetry was generated at and for the court of Queen Elizabeth I, sceptics have argued that its rhetoric was primarily a cover for social advancement or special pleading within a system headed, unconventionally, by a female authority. In instances such as Sir Walter Ralegh’s ‘Ocean to Cynthia’, the masking was slight indeed: Elizabeth had nicknamed him ‘Water’, and Cynthia was one of the chaste goddesses with whom the queen was routinely identified. Furthermore, given the general misogyny characteristic of Renaissance thought, honouring non-royal women as an actual (as distinct from fictional) audience might be regarded as debasing rather than elevating for male courtiers. Why hold themselves up to ridicule? Certainly, traces of conventional contempt for women can be found in poems by Ben Jonson and Donne. Women poets writing to male beloveds would not face this particular problem, but their access and practice of writing was itself deeply vexed, and their expression of desire constrained. Considering that even normative forms of desire such as those leading to marriage remained suspect on broader philosophical grounds as well (signalling indulgence in emotion to the detriment of reason), far more dubious would be the expression of culturally unsanctioned samesex physical desire. Granted, there were forms of affection – parental, companionate, and fraternal – which were held in generally high esteem, although even these forms most often occasioned poetry only at life’s close, in the elegiac mode. Nevertheless,

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when most people speak of ‘love poetry’, thoughts turn swiftly to desire and romance. So, with all this in mind, what is the proper answer to the question with which we began? Alas, a more qualified ‘yes … sometimes’. But often it was very good indeed – arguably the greatest body of lyric poetry in the English language, in quality as well as quantity. And for all our distance and potential cynicism about the gendered relations represented therein, we may continue to learn much about love as well as poetry from studying early modern verses. While in many cases it remains uncertain whether an actual beloved inspired the poetry, sometimes beloveds did; sometimes but not always that beloved was female. And while one might debate the contours and depths of various affections, some can be elevated by the name of love. Just because the general codes of conduct dismissed or condemned behaviour did not make it disappear. And whether or not a young man was truly in love, he could not produce such verse without being conscious that he was writing poetry: at least the artistic craft had to be genuine. The majority of Elizabethan and Stuart writers were well versed in the traditions of classical and European love poetry, and all were aware of the ballads and folk songs of their own land. They drew on all sources to create fresh, vital lyrics. As the English language began to settle into its modern systems of syntax and sound, amateur poets were already there, ready to express feelings of love in the developing vernacular. ‘Western wind’, one of the briefest anonymous lyrics of the early Tudor period, is also among the most poignant. It remains a starting point for accounts of English lyric, and may stand here for the large body of unattributed or anonymous verses that provided background music for those poets whose names endure: Western wind, when will thou blow? The small rain down can rain – Christ, if my love were in my arms And I in my bed again!1

Holding in tension the seeming antitheses of specificity and abstraction, self and landscape, emotional yearning and formal control, and immediacy and invisibility, this quatrain’s exquisite balancing act foreshadows, in small, one great achievement of Renaissance love poetry. As is true of many sonnets by Shakespeare, its simple diction and melancholy urgency make it appear timeless and portable. Thus it continues to echo centuries later, its lines reappearing in such seemingly unlikely places as Virginia Woolf ’s The Waves. In that high modernist novel, ‘Western wind’ serves both as an expression of a character’s deep feeling and as a nostalgic wish for connection with others and with the past in a harsh, fragmented world. These desires, among others, continue to draw twenty-first-century readers back to Renaissance poetry. But there they encounter other, less immediately accessible verse as well – verse just as remarkable and beautiful, but requiring some

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knowledge of its context, conventions, and project to gain our own readerly affections. What were the traditions upon which the English poets constructed their own? Especially with the expansion of humanist-inspired programmes of education, classical Latin verse provided examples for every schoolboy to imitate. Hence the pervasive influence of Ovid on Christopher Marlowe and Shakespeare. The sensuality and playfulness of Ovid’s language had wide appeal, as did his investigation of the psychological twists and torments of desire (often presented in Renaissance editions with Christian allegorisations and moralising glosses to tame the Roman’s wantonness – which nevertheless remained discernible). Marlowe translated Ovid’s Amores, the autobiographical representation of an illicit love affair, as a sequence of scandalous English Elegies. In doing so, Marlowe challenged the usual philosophical ‘excuse’ for memorialising sexual desire, as championed by Renaissance Neoplatonists. They likewise drew upon the writing of the ancients, such as the philosopher Plotinus, to argue that contemplation of earthly beauty led one up the ‘ladder of love’ to the idea of beauty itself, and hence ultimately to the good and to God. Dante’s Divine Comedy provided a glorious medieval precedent, with the beloved, unattainable Beatrice serving first as poetic muse and ultimately as heavenly guide. By contrast, Marlowe’s Ovid remained earthbound and lustful, achieving sexual union with the married Corinna yet still obsessed and tormented, sublimating nothing. The volume in which the Elegies were published alongside Sir John Davies’s satires (after Marlowe’s death) fell victim to the bishops’ ban and was burned in 1599: while the ostensible reason was concern that topical satires were having corrosive effects upon social stability at a fractious moment, no doubt the clergy was pleased to see Marlowe’s libidinous verse going up in flames as well. Learning too much from the Romans had its dangers. Closer to home, poets looked back to the fourteenth-century Englishman Geoffrey Chaucer, who was admired primarily for his Troilus and Criseyde and courtly poems. Published along with The Testament of Cresseid (a continuation of Chaucer’s narrative by the fifteenth-century Scots poet Robert Henryson, but often presented as if by Chaucer himself), the Troilus story of courtly love betrayed and punished by fate provided another influential narrative for Elizabethan poets. Edmund Spenser also imitated Chaucer’s The Book of the Duchess when writing of the deep grief caused by love – specifically, by a wife’s death – in Daphnaida, a poem for and about the widowed Sir Arthur Gorges. Here, as in his own sonnet sequence the Amoretti, Spenser played a pivotal role in adapting courtly traditions to address marital love. A generation later, Bishop Henry King would take the next step in this direction by writing a vivid elegy on his own wife’s death, ‘The Exequy’. It likewise presages Western modernity’s emphases on autobiography and the ideological involvement of love and marriage. But before this move towards bourgeois family values, and providing the most important model of all, came Petrarch. Poet of the Canzoniere and Trionfi, the fourteenth-century Italian poet Francesco Petrarca was the Renaissance embodied. He ‘revived’ a romanticised notion of antiquity, crowning himself poet laureate (complete with laurel wreath) and writing a Latin epic about Scipio Africanus. At the same time,

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in his vernacular poetry he made himself – pace his love for the idolised, unattainable Laura – his own supreme poetic subject. Building upon the achievements of Dante (in Vita Nuova) and other proponents of the dolce stil novo in developing a flexible lyric form and style, Petrarch made both the sonnet and a model of courtship synonymous with his own name. When he moved to Provence, he began the transmission of that figure and style across western Europe (despite his personal aim of retreat), in effect initiating the modern cult of celebrity authorship. A cynic might say he also began, through his poetic self-exploration, the modern cult of narcissism. But Petrarch and his rime were more than just a fad or phenomenon. He was a remarkable craftsman of sound and sense who made the love lyric seem capable of capturing all that mattered most in human experience. Grouping his sonnets thematically (approximately half to the living Laura, half after her death), he gave stature to the freestanding sonnet sequence. His poems, and those of the sixteenth-century French Pléiade school whom he inspired and which included du Bellay and Ronsard, drew upon classical learning but created something truly new: a non-classical form that could be successfully adapted to several European languages, the sonnet; and an innovative representation of the poet/lover’s experience of heterosexual desire, focusing on his internal struggles and subjectivity. The story of the sonnet’s gradual rise to become the dominant form of Elizabethan love poetry is also the story of the shift from manuscript to print culture (see Chapter 12, Publication: Print and Manuscript) and the enlargement of the audience for written poetry. It epitomises the change from ‘lyric’ understood as words set to music (as is still true in popular music) to ‘lyric’ as a genre of short poem, often written in the first person and primarily contemplative or emotive rather than narrative in emphasis. The different illusions of a ‘speaker’ conveyed by diverse sonneteers reflect changing attitudes towards love and poetic expression, and suggest what options were available to writers who would present, or even self-consciously fashion, a self for wider consumption. Two ‘courtly makers’ of love poetry during Henry VIII’s reign stand pre-eminent, in part because they were well represented after their deaths in one of the most influential poetry anthologies of any day. Richard Tottel’s Songs and Sonnets (1557; also known as ‘Tottel’s Miscellany’) contained numerous poems by Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, including the earliest versions of Petrarch’s sonnets published in English. Having spent time abroad as a diplomat, Wyatt returned with a continental taste for vernacular love poetry, and translated Petrarch’s eleven-syllable lines into (often irregular) iambic pentameter sonnets of internal struggle, such as ‘My galley chargèd with forgetfulness’ and ‘I find no peace’. He captured Petrarch’s emphasis on the lover’s split psyche and torment, and adapted images to fit his own uncertain position as the blunt, outspoken servant of a notoriously temperamental monarch. Wyatt’s achievement in the Petrarchan sonnets was to meld continental trends with his own distinctive, rough-edged ‘voice’, in the process providing a model of vernacular English love poetry. A brilliant instance is his adaptation of Petrarch’s ‘una candida cerva’, figuring the beloved as an elusive deer, in his sonnet ‘Who so list to

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hunt’ (see Chapter 60, Wyatt’s ‘Who So List To Hunt’). Wyatt also drew on traditional lyric forms, as in his lute songs (‘Blame not my lute’, ‘My lute awake’), which recall the close connection between words and music at Henry’s court. Many are songs of love betrayed or denied, with the ability to versify becoming a form of release and revenge (publicising the beloved’s treachery). Despite his poetic innovation, Wyatt usually presents himself pining for the good old days, unable to understand or master ‘newfangledness’. In the spectacular three-stanza rime royal ‘They flee from me that sometime did me seek’, Wyatt merges medieval form and new sophistication, again mixing erotics and images of animals tame and wild, in a fantasia from which the speaker’s voice emerges baffled, righteous, and wounded. Some (including later poets) have identified the plain-speaking scepticism about love in such poetry as the English contribution to Petrarchism, or even as an anti-Petrarchan antidote to Italianate worship of the inaccessible madonna-love. But Wyatt – like the Elizabethans George Gascoigne, Ralegh, and Donne, all dubbed ‘plain stylists’ by certain scholars – is not so easy to schematise. More accurately, a struggle persists throughout the century between the extremes of veneration and debasement, belief and scepticism, played out stylistically within single poems and more broadly by schools of poetry that tend either towards rough disruption or smooth sound and metrics. In this larger scheme, Wyatt’s younger peer and admirer Surrey becomes his stylistic foil: where Wyatt stresses resistance, anger, and confusion, Surrey glosses over the rough edges with more regular, sonorous versification, greater attention to the relationship between self and landscape, and muted expressions of love as melancholy. Setting Wyatt’s Petrarchan translation ‘The long love that in my thought doth harbour’ alongside Surrey’s alternative ‘Love that doth reign and live within my thought’ the smoothness of the younger poet is self-evident. And Surrey’s more controlled, understated manner was long regarded not only as truer to Petrarch’s subtleties but also as the more perfect poetry in its own right. Especially given what we know of Surrey’s tempestuous arrogance (which contributed to his beheading shortly before Henry VIII’s death), his achievement is the more classical, subordinating at least some aspects of his personality to the task of translation. Only with our contemporary emphasis on individuality and struggle has Wyatt’s reputation eclipsed Surrey’s. Tottel’s Miscellany played a crucial role in establishing their respective positions as forerunners for Elizabethan sonneteers. As aristocrats whose poetry circulated in manuscript, their words remained closely connected to that courtly context and moment. Only when Tottel transferred their poetry from the manuscript to the print medium did it have a broader impact. Tottel also regularised Wyatt’s metre – an infamous act in the eyes of many now, yet at the time, a necessary step to update an older poet’s style for a new audience. (As the early Elizabethan Gascoigne lamented, the regular iambic line had become the ‘tyrant’ of his day.) Such editing played an important part in establishing the iambic norm of modern English poetry, moving away from the four- and five-stress lines of fourteenth-century verse to a metrical system that considered both accent and the number of syllables. Although Surrey’s metrics were impeccable, Tottel ‘improved’ his manuscripts too, giving sonnets

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biographical titles (such as a ‘description and praise of his love Geraldine’). Tottel thereby generated an apocryphal love story of Surrey and Geraldine that provided fodder for Elizabethan writers. Thus modified in medium, metre, and narrative context, the Petrarchan adaptations of Wyatt and Surrey exemplify the difficulties inherent in asserting an authentic personal ‘voice’ on paper. The tension between the lover’s desire and what is actually expressed by his poem becomes a central topic for Sir Philip Sidney in his influential sonnet sequence Astrophil and Stella, which in turn generated many more sequences – and parodies, such as Shakespeare’s mockery of courtly sonneteers in the comedy Love’s Labour’s Lost. Sidney’s poetic achievement becomes all the more dazzling when understood in historical context. For while Tottel provided models for those wishing to adapt continental innovations, his immediate impact was to generate readers rather than a flourishing school of such poets. Even within his anthology, Petrarchan poetry collides with the moralistic native tradition of other mid-century writers. In their poems, love is distanced, the stuff of a prodigal youth now viewed through more mature eyes. Lord Vaux’s ‘The agèd lover renounceth love’ exemplifies what could be achieved in this vein, using broken poulter’s measure (alternating seven- and six-beat iambic lines). Gascoigne, the early Elizabethan who developed love poetry and many other genres the farthest, plays with the moralising convention in lyrics such as ‘The lullaby of a lover’ and ‘The Green Knight’s farewell to fancy’. In each case, the speaker professes to be abandoning love – but its emotional power remains vivid. Again a split self emerges, allowing a struggle of perspectives between the ‘mature’ speaker and his own bodily desires (here addressed in the second person): With lullaby your looks beguile: Let no fair face, nor beauty bright, Entice you eft with vain delight. (Gascoigne 1907–10: I, 44)

Repeating the word ‘beguile’, the poem suggests that self-deception lies in present renunciation just as much as in past ‘vain’ delights. Similarly, when the Green Knight says farewell to ‘fancy’, it embraces poetry as well as love – yet the putative farewell is of course itself a poem (and not Gascoigne’s last). In fact, Gascoigne was among a growing number of poets, including Barnabe Googe and George Turberville, making new claims as authors, either publishing their work directly or announcing themselves as producers of volumes, rather than contributing single poems in anthologies or manuscripts only. Love lyrics were gradually becoming detachable from their stated audience as well as from manuscript or accompanying melodies: published anthologies recontextualised them, different mixes of words and song were suggested, and readers with no personal familiarity with the writer copied verses into commonplace books. Sonnets and court lyrics in this way resembled ballads and more widely popular songs, some authored, some anonymous. Gascoigne plays with the very idea of the poetic speaker, at times implying autobiographical allusions

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(referring to ‘George’ within a verse or including ‘Gascoigne’ in the title); using personae such as the Green Knight, Master F.J., or Dan Bartholomew of Bath; and claiming in the preface to his voluminous collection The Posies, ‘if ever I wrote a line of love for my self in causes of love, I have written ten for other men in lays of lust’ (Gascoigne 1907–10: I, 16). For all his playfulness and desire, however, it remains true that Gascoigne classifies love as a comparatively light, unworthy topic, and most of his love stories end in sadness and disillusionment. Ultimately, like most of his Protestant contemporaries, he turns away from amorous affairs to moral and religious themes. One might almost say the same of Sir Philip Sidney – except that his emphasis on love is so extensive, his defence of poetry so much stronger, and his innovative treatments of the topic so vivid, that it is the love poetry rather than his deathbed renunciation that must be taken seriously. While Thomas Watson’s Hekatompathia (1582) can claim the prize as the first extensive sequence of love sonnets published in English, Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella showed what variety and drama could be produced within the form; moreover, the mythologising of Sir Philip after his death from battle wounds (and gangrene) in the Netherlands gave his writings almost unmatched cultural power. Again, the move from manuscript to print was crucial. As an aristocrat, Sidney did not offer his writings for general consumption, but after his death they were published and then imitated by middle-class poets hoping for advancement and fame. Thomas Nashe railed against the cheap ubiquity of ballad-makers and sonneteers, but Sir Philip’s sonnets even when printed communicated the aura of a privileged, coterie world, and gave the form social distinction. By the 1590s, almost every aspiring poet seemed to be writing a sonnet sequence. Sidney spent time on the continent, and familiarity with French Protestant humanism in particular melded with his knowledge of classical and European literature. His lengthy prose romance, Arcadia, was modelled on the Spaniard Montemayor’s Diana, and includes love poems written using classical metrics and elaborate forms such as the double sestina. Similar formal innovation and mastery appear in Astrophil and Stella, which begins with an unconventional sonnet in alexandrines (a twelve-syllable line usually more successful in French) even as it speaks of Imitation and ‘other’s feet’ impeding the poet’s expression of love. The sequence dramatises the struggle to make the Petrarchan tradition one’s own, and adds another layer by sustaining the semifiction that the speaker is Astrophil (star-lover) – who is and is not Sidney. Like the actual poet, Astrophil jousts well, frequents the court, and is smitten with a blackeyed woman married to a man named Rich. Yet Astrophil is presented by the intelligent, urbane Sidney as being fitfully absurd in his logic, buffoonish, and immoral in his attempts to justify his sexual longings. In a sense, Sidney makes himself into a fictive spectacle of the sort Stella is said to enjoy; desperate to win his beloved’s attention, Astrophil concludes ‘I am not I; pity the tale of me’ (no. 45). Sidney’s desired audience clearly includes many besides Stella, with some poems addressed to courtier friends, and all implicitly requiring a coterie that would understand the myriad allusions and coy self-referentiality. As a frustrated advocate of radical

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Protestant positions Queen Elizabeth chose to subdue, Sidney provides one of the best cases for those who argue that love poetry was a rhetorical means to political ends: his romantic hopes, rejection, and marginalisation nicely figure his tenuous hold on courtly power and position. Yet Sidney’s artistic control and wide-ranging allusiveness make it hard to reduce Astrophil and Stella to any single agenda or allegorical reading. The 108 sonnets show the influence of the Pléiade poets, as in a sub-sequence of baiser poems seeking a kiss from the beloved. As in Petrarch, songs are interspersed, sometimes advancing the narrative, sometimes adding another perspective (see the pastoral ninth song, or song 8’s third-person account of Astrophil and Stella’s brief tryst, prefiguring Act 2 of Romeo and Juliet). Out of all this, Sidney creates a serio-comic drama in which Astrophil attempts to climb the ladder of love but instead finds himself gradually debased by desire. Despite his familiarity with Neoplatonic theories of love’s elevating influence, he finds that lust overpowers sublimation: ‘ “But ah”, Desire still cries, “give me some food” ’ (no. 71). Loving a married woman encounters more impediments at Elizabeth’s court than it had in Ovid’s Rome, leaving Astrophil disconsolate and unfulfilled. The language of the last sonnets echoes Sidney’s own theoretical discourse in defence of poetry, with a twist: whereas in theory he argues that the poet creates a golden world which teaches and edifies more effectively than brazen reality can, his sonnet sequence shows a man deploying the resources of poetry for corrupt ends, left all the more mired in dross as he pines for lost gold. Scholars still debate the tone, moral claims, and levels of irony in this sequence, some believing that Sidney’s additional sonnets which turn explicitly to God (‘Leave me, oh love, that reaches unto dust’) indicate a resolution or absolute split between Astrophil’s position and Sidney’s; others are less sure that Sidney’s practice is so schematic. His sheepish, partial defence of love poetry in An Apology for Poetry (also published as The Defence of Poesy) implies that the militant Protestant courtier sometimes found himself holding inconsistent, if not untenable, positions. What is indubitable is that Astrophil and Stella presented a marvellously skilful puzzle, meditation, drama, and set of lyrics all in one, and had a deep and wide influence on other composers of sonnet sequences, including Henry Constable (Diana), Samuel Daniel (Delia), Michael Drayton (Idea), Barnabe Barnes (Pathenophil and Parthenope), Philip’s niece Lady Mary Wroth (Pamphilia to Amphilanthus – see Chapter 61, The Heart of the Labyrinth), and his best friend and biographer Fulke Greville (Caelica). All built on Sidney’s model but added their own twists, from the more integral Neoplatonism of Constable and philosophical contortions of Greville to the gender reversals of Wroth. Comparing Sidney’s sequence with that of another great Elizabethan lyricist, Edmund Spenser, demonstrates how the form had become capacious enough for two quite different narratives and conceptions of love. Like blank verse in drama, the sonnet sequence provided these poets with a malleable verse form and framework in which to pursue their own philosophical and social meditations, to tell a story or express emotion. Rather than emphasise social constraints and self-incrimination,

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Spenser’s Amoretti foregrounds the vagaries of a developing relationship between the poet-speaker and his proud beloved, and hearkens to the seasonal and religious calendar to chart its ‘natural’ evolution towards marriage. The sequence, as published, concludes with an Epithalamion celebrating the poet’s marriage, a tour de force of natural, ceremonial, and mythical imagery contained within an elegant metrical and numerological system. Nevertheless, even here – as in the sonnets themselves – the poet worries whether time is on his side: mutability and mortality loom large. As if playing Surrey to Sidney’s Wyatt, Spenser sonorously subdues rather than accentuates his struggle through elegant technique, while nevertheless presenting a conflicted speaker. As with the earlier pair of poets, seeing them only as foils is an oversimplification: Sidney had an impeccable sense of proportion and number, and Spenser’s poet-lover had his rages. Both make the question of how one reads (a lover’s gesture, a word, a poetic line) into a major theme, stressing the partiality of interpretation even as they argue their case. What emerges from reading their sequences, nevertheless, is a more vivid awareness of distinctive sensibilities and adjustments to the social, philosophical, and religious quandaries occasioned by erotic desire. Amoretti 67 (‘Like as a huntsman after weary chase’) captures not just another deer in the love-hunting tradition but also Spenser’s particularity. Although beginning with a typical Petrarchan comparison, the sonnet reverses expectations in the second quatrain: So after long pursuit and vain assay, When I all weary had the chase forsook, The gentle dear returned the self-same way, Thinking to quench her thirst at the next brook. (Sylvester 1974: 378)

Rather than draw the obvious parallel between the exhausted hunter of the first quatrain and himself, the speaker here makes the simile with a huntsman apply – at least grammatically – to ‘the gentle dear’, placing himself in a subordinate modifying clause. After one has read hundreds of poems beginning ‘Like as a hunter … so I’ or ‘Like as a ship … so I’, the effect is profound, and accords exactly with the poem’s own wonder at the shifting power relations between the first-person writer and his object of his desire: There she beholding me with milder look, Sought not to fly, but fearless still did bide: Till I in hand her yet half trembling took, And with her own goodwill her firmly tied. Strange thing me seemed to see a beast so wild, So goodly won with her own will beguiled.

Who is the hunter, who is the hunted? Who leads, who follows, whose will? As the ambiguous modifier ‘half trembling’ indicates, the sonnet alters convention by

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mingling the two parties grammatically and thereby merging their sensibilities. Like Spenser’s epic The Faerie Queene (whose stanza is itself an expanded version of his distinctive interlocking ababbcbccdcdee rhyme scheme in these sonnets), Amoretti 67 is fascinated by doubling and gender-bending, tensions between masculine action and passive receptivity to the good, between courtly love schema and the intimacy of marital love, and between female chastity (so fetishised in this period) and fully realised sexuality. As in the epic, it remains debatable which kind or level of allegory should be emphasised in this clearly figurative story: some say erotic love between man and woman, others stress Christian love of God. Symbolising Christ as a deer was not Spenser’s innovation. Wyatt’s ‘Who so list’ also plays with the association when his deer’s neck proclaims Christ’s warning, Noli me tangere – before adding that she belongs to Caesar. Poems by Tasso and especially Marguerite de Navarre echo in Spenser’s sonnet: in the sixth lyric of the Frenchwoman’s Chansons spirituelles, the deer stands for the crucified Christ and may be caught by the net of a humble heart only (see Prescott 1985). Whereas Marguerite has a wise woman so instruct her young hunter, however, Spenser mystifies the process (and mutes Marguerite’s gendering of wisdom) by representing only the intimate scene between speaker and ‘beast’. The ironies of so naming the gentle creature/Creator recoil, like so much in the Amoretti, upon the speaker, conjuring an effect of comic humility for all Spenser’s poetic mastery and ultimate masculine self-assertion. The fact that the Amoretti do not leave the earthly world of gendered bodies, despite their religious overtones and allusions, arguably creates a sense of greater power for ‘real’ women. Though still only represented during the period of courtship, and drawn from the elevated lady-love of courtly tradition, Spenser’s beloved is praised for her pride, her mind, and her goodness even as she figuratively comes down from her pedestal, eventually marrying him. The fears that haunt much Renaissance love poetry when women become sexual are not entirely erased, but the usual diatribes against female fickleness and weakness do not come to the fore and drown out the Epithalamion’s song of wedded love. And indeed, ‘real’ women – those few with the access and education to write their own poetry – also saw potential in the sonnet tradition, as had continental poets Louise Labé and Vittoria Colonna. Women wrestled with the conventions that positioned them as the silent, obscure objects of desire (the petit objet à in a modern Lacanian’s reading), and nevertheless added their own voices. Sometimes they enlarged the types of love (both maternal and the love between female friends in Katherine Philips’ seventeenth-century lyrics). Sometimes they took conventional associations and made them resonant, as Mary Wroth did when claiming darkness, stasis, and confinement as expressive of her experience. She might have less social mobility, but found consolation in familiar forms: ‘When others hunt, my thoughts I have in chase’ (Norbrook and Woudhuysen 1992: 341). Like men, women writers found in love poetry a vehicle for confronting social, religious, gender, and authorial struggles – and sometimes, a way to express feelings of love as well.

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What comes after Sidney and Spenser is too diverse and multitudinous to summarise. The possibilities established, poets worked to distinguish themselves from the conventional mass. It is within this context that Shakespeare’s sonnets can be read as more than an autobiographical account of vexed love for a fair youth and a dark lady; from his seemingly simple vocabulary and looser English form (three quatrains and a couplet, seldom carrying a rhyme beyond four lines) emerges not only an accessible set of exquisite poems but a strenuous attempt to triangulate familiar dichotomies and further invert expectations. In dehistoricising Shakespeare, readers get portable quotations and lovely lines, but miss much of the force and newness of his sonnets. They also miss his debts to and links with other poets, and the power of his unconventional address to the beloved male (Richard Barnfield being the other poet to use the sonnet to express male–male desire explicitly). Both in his queering of the sonnet’s gendered logic and in dramatising the poet’s subordination to his desired male patron, Shakespeare’s play with lyric conventions suggests analogies with the self-conscious, revelatory distortion of Michelangelo’s late Renaissance mannerism in the visual arts. One may turn from Shakespeare’s ‘dark lady’ poems to Michael Drayton’s later revisions of Idea (1619) and see how far the sonnet has come from a courtly tribute to idealised femininity: dismissing the pride of ‘painted things’ (ladies riding in their carriages), Drayton makes it clear that true power lies with the hyper-masculine writer who can give his poetic subject ‘eternity’. Shakespeare is not alone in upholding his black lines of ink as more powerful than time’s lines and marble monuments. Nor was he, despite the bardolatry of Harold Bloom or the compelling Lacanian reading of Joel Fineman, the only begetter of modern subjectivity or ‘the human’. Self-creation was a group achievement. With the new century and a new king making courtly subordination to a high and mighty woman a thing of the past, the floodgates of seventeenth-century reaction against Elizabethan Petrarchism opened wide: A libertine, fantastically I sing; My verse is the true image of my mind, Ever in motion, still desiring change … My muse is rightly of the English strain, That cannot long one fashion entertain. (Sylvester 1974: 583)

Drayton’s lines pave the way for Stuart Cavaliers: for Robert Herrick, Sir John Suckling, the witty licentiousness of Thomas Carew, and eventually the gendered difference of Aphra Behn. Eroticism became, more than ever, a form of individuated self-expression. But these writers too had sixteenth-century forerunners, not to be forgotten when telling the dominant story of sonnets and love songs. In addition to the putatively ‘English’ scepticism within the tradition from Wyatt through Sidney and beyond, there were those like Marlowe who stood apart from the Petrarchan model entirely. As well as Marlowe’s Ovid, he produced one of the most delightful and

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oft-imitated lyrics, ‘Come live with me and be my love’, which offered conditional bliss in an aestheticised future in exchange for love now. Sir Walter Ralegh took up his challenge in a sceptical companion poem, in which a nymph reminds the Marlovian ‘shepherd’ that time matters: If all the world and Time were young, And truth in every shepherd’s tongue Your pretty pleasures might me move To live with thee, and be thy love. (Sylvester 1974: 331)

Reality bites poet. In small, here is the playful volleying between the carpe diem invitations of salacious suitors and the pragmatic resistance of vulnerable maidens that will be elaborated by Stuart poets for a century to come. Marvell’s ‘To his coy mistress’ rolls the tradition into a ball and shoots it into eternity, after which a new era, the Restoration, would see coyness crumble in a libertine triumph, at least within certain circles (for both sexes and all orientations in the erotic poems of Behn). But that short time soon passed as well, to be followed – albeit in novel genres – by the reiteration and recontextualisation of the narrative Edmund Spenser first created as the stuff of poetry: the seemingly endless monumentalisation of monogamous love culminating in marriage. To others in this volume I leave the wit and passion of John Donne, only noting here his dramatic reworking of the relationships between the holy and metaphysical and the erotic in a volume borrowing its title from Tottel, Songs and Sonnets.2 He could not have rebelled and yet reworked the tropes of love poetry so effectively, nor made the transition from blasphemous sexuality to sexualised worship in his Holy Sonnets, had it not been for the patterns – distinct from one another and from his own – laid forth by Sidney and Spenser. From the woman as conquered prey to the woman as (conquered) New Found Land, topographies and scientific metaphors would change, though not always or entirely the gendered and philosophical relationships upon which they were constructed. Donne might cast himself the sceptic rebel in regard to what came before, but those after would also see his involvement in similar social relations. When Katherine Philips later wondered why an unmarried friend would wish to marry given the poetry written to woo her, she challenged the endpoint of the Spenserian narrative most obviously: She is a public Deity, And were’t not very odd She should depose her self to be A petty household God? (Norbrook and Woudhuysen 1992: 378)

Why let go of the moment of symbolic power? Nor does Philips’ comic questioning stop here. Her mockery embraces the metaphysical as well as Spenserian lyricists when

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she orders the youth to ‘make the Sun in private shine … That so he may his beams confine / In complement to you’. Anticipating his inability to do so, she then chastises his presumption: Think how you did amiss To strive to fix her beams which are More bright and large than his.

The now-dead John Donne, who had censoriously commanded that ‘Busy old fool, unruly sun’, and the Draytons and Shakespeares who likewise perceived their poetic powers as fixing and hence enlarging their beloved’s value, now face the revenge of the mutable: life, Philips says, triumphs over art. For her, Donne’s poem is (to invert the gendered insult of Drayton’s sonnet) the ‘paltry, foolish, painted thing’ that cannot compete with the living woman’s worth. One might well imagine a friend saying to Philips, as Don Pedro says to Shakespeare’s Beatrice in Much Ado, ‘You have put him down, lady, you have put him down’. Should we put these love poets down, as we begin a new millennium? Deeply embedded in their cultures as we must all be, Renaissance poets now alienate many readers – be it for their narrow images of the ‘fair’ or their dissecting catalogues ‘blazoning’ female beauty as fetishised parts while the speaker revels in dominating the imagined whole; for their repetitious turning back to certain figures, tropes, and metaphors; or for simply acting as if erotic love were all-important when we know that history tells a different story. I think we should still pick these poems up rather than put them down – and not only because of the historical and cultural stories they reveal, which are of indubitable interest to scholars. For one thing, this verse provides a master class in the deployment of poetic form, rhetoric, and convention from which later poets learned – lessons more valuable than ever now, when so many feel alienated from the power of everyday eloquence. At the same time, I don’t think we (who have time and space to do so) should simply wonder and delight in the artistic game and mastery, as do those who would entirely forget the historical context. Rather, this poetry matters now because it addresses and combines both the imperatives implicit above: it makes us aware of how people have imagined their worlds and interactions and it simultaneously aspires to free itself from those worlds through its own internal systems, shapes, and beauties. To the extent that we still value the worlds they imagined or participate in similar systems, the game is one requiring serious reflection about what to preserve and what to discard. To the extent that we have left the dreams and assumptions of these poems behind, they force us to examine what has taken their place, and whether their paradises are well lost or suggest new pastures. And finally, while we sort through the representations and meanings of ‘love’, we cannot help but recover something of their excitement at creating a new language and control over poetic expression, writing at a moment when, with sudden energy and ubiquitousness, the word was love.

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1

2

The poem exists in many variant forms: the modernised punctuation cited here derives from Hebel and Hudson 1929: 42. See Chapter 63, Donne’s Nineteenth Elegy; Chapter 15, Poets, Friends and

Patrons: Donne and his Circle; Ben and his Tribe; and Chapter 14, The Manuscript Transmission of Poetry.

References and Further Reading Alexander, Gavin (2006). Writing after Sidney: The Literary Response to Sir Philip Sidney, 1586–1640. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Austen, Gillian (2008). George Gascoigne. Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer. Bell, Ilona (1998). Elizabethan Women and the Poetry of Courtship. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Braden, Gordon (1999). Petrarchan Love and the Continental Renaissance. New Haven: Yale University Press. Distiller, Natasha (2008). Desire and Gender in the Sonnet Tradition. Houndsmill, Basingstoke: Palgrave. Dubrow, Heather (1995). Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and its Counterdiscourses. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Fineman, Joel (1986). Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets. Berkeley: University of California Press. Gascoigne, George (1907–10). The Complete Works of George Gascoigne, ed. John W. Cunliffe, 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Greene, Roland (1991). Post-Petrarchism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hamrick, Stephen (2002). ‘Tottel’s Miscellany and the English Reformation’. Criticism, 44, 329–61. Hebel, John William and Hoyt H. Hudson (1929). Poetry of the English Renaissance, 1509–1660. New York: F. S. Crofts. Helgerson, Richard (1976). The Elizabethan Prodigals. Berkeley: University of California Press. Henderson, Diana E. (1995). Passion Made Public: Elizabethan Lyric, Gender, and Performance. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

Henderson, Diana E. (1997). ‘Female power and the devaluation of Renaissance love lyrics’. In Yopie Prins and Maeera Shreiber (eds.), Dwelling in Possibility: Women Poets and Critics on Poetry (pp. 38–59). Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Javitch, Daniel (1978). Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Johnson, William C. (1990). Spenser’s ‘Amoretti’: Analogies of Love. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Jones, Ann Rosalind (1990). The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyric in Europe, 1540–1620. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Marlowe, Christopher (1971), The Complete Poems and Translations, ed. Stephen Orgel. New York: Penguin Books. Marotti, Arthur (1982). ‘ “Love is not love”: Elizabethan sonnet sequences and the social order’. English Literary History, 49, 396–428. May, Steven W. (1991). The Elizabethan Courtier Poets: The Poems and their Contexts. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Norbrook, David and H. R. Woudhuysen (eds.) (1992, 1993). The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse 1509–1569. London: Penguin Books. Pequigney, Joseph (2002). ‘Standpoints on the sexualities of the Sonnets’. In W. R. Elton and John M. Mucciolo (eds.), Where Are We Now in Shakespeare Studies? vol. 2 (pp. 33–46). Aldershot: Ashgate. Prescott, Anne Lake (1985). ‘The thirsty deer and the lord of life: some contexts for Amoretti 67– 70’. Spenser Studies, 6, 33–76. Roche, Thomas P. (1989). Petrarch and the English Sonnet Sequence. New York: AMS Press.

Love Poetry Schalkwyk, David (2008). Shakespeare, Love and Service. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sidney, Philip (1970). Apology for Poetry, ed. Forrest G. Robinson. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill. Stephens, Dorothy (1998). The Limits of Eroticism in Post-Petrarchan Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sylvester, Richard S. (ed.) (1974). English SixteenthCentury Verse: An Anthology. New York: Norton.

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Vickers, Nancy (1981). ‘Diana described: scattered woman and scattered rhyme’. Critical Inquiry, 8, 265–80. Wall, Wendy (1993). The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Waller, Gary (1986). English Poetry of the Sixteenth Century. New York: Longman.

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Music and Poetry David Lindley

Most people at the present day, at least once they have left school, encounter poetry or verse primarily as lyrics for music; they hear it on their iPods, and carry it around in memory rather than see it on a printed page. The same was true in early modern England. For the vast bulk of the population, verse was experienced with music attached, in the street, at church, at local festivities, or in the theatre. The close connection between poetry and music, of course, has a long and continuous history stretching back in the European tradition at least to the ancient Greeks, and poets and theorists alike frequently invoke that history. Sir Philip Sidney, for example, observed that the poet ‘cometh to you with words set in delightful proportion, either accompanied with, or prepared for, the well enchanting skill of music’ (Sidney 1965: 113). Exactly what that relationship might imply for both poet and musician was to become a topic of heated debate across Europe in the latter part of the sixteenth century. These discussions, however, affected what one might – somewhat anachronistically – call ‘high art’, and in this consideration of poetic and musical relationships it is important to consider some of the contexts within which a wider audience encountered poetry as song. Orsino describes the ‘old and antique song’ song he wants to hear in Twelfth Night, as one which is old and plain, The spinsters and the knitters in the sun, And the free maids that weave their thread with bones, Do use to chant it. (2.4.3, 43–6)

The Duke here invokes an idea of singing as a communal activity and accompaniment to work, in exactly the same way as Thomas Deloney does in his account, in Jack of Newbery, of a hundred looms with ‘two men working in every one, who pleasantly

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sung’ before the king and queen. Even if neither Deloney’s ballad nor Shakespeare’s lyric are actually traditional work-songs, they undoubtedly allude to what was common practice in Elizabethan society. At the same time they invoke an image of music easing toil, which has a long history. In the fourth century St John Chrysostom, for example, similarly claimed that ‘women, too, weaving and parting the tangled threads with the shuttle, often sing a particular melody, sometimes individually and to themselves, sometimes all together in concert’ (Strunk 1998: 124) and the author of The Praise of Music (1588) – a treatise attributed (probably wrongly) to John Case – wrote that: manual labourers and mechanical artificers of all sorts, keep such a changing and singing in their shops, the tailor on his bulk, the shoemaker at his last, the mason at his wall, the shipboy at his oar, the tinker at his pan, and the tiler on the house top. And therefore well saith Quintilian, that every troublesome and laborious occupation useth music for a solace and recreation. (Praise of Music, 44)

Puttenham, in The Art of English Poesy (1589), was not being complimentary in describing old ballads as ‘made purposely for recreation of the common people at Christmas dinners and bride-ales, and in taverns and alehouses and such other places of base resort’ (1589: 69), but Sidney more sympathetically recorded that ‘I never heard the old song of Percy and Douglas that I found not my heart moved more than with a trumpet; and yet it is sung but by some blind crowder [fiddler], with no rougher voice than rude style’ (Sidney 1965: 118). For Elizabethans many old ballads were still current, preserved in oral tradition even though they were not to be recorded in written or printed form for some considerable time afterwards. As John Stevens remarks, ‘the surviving remains of early Tudor popular song are tantalisingly small’ (1961: 44). ‘Ballads’ of a related but rather different kind, however, formed a significant part of the ‘popular’ music of the time. These are often known as ‘broadside’ ballads, since they were printed on one side of a large sheet of paper, or else as ‘street ballads’. Their content was enormously varied. The largest category embraced narratives of love, seduction, and desertion often expressed in decidedly earthier fashion than one might encounter in more upmarket publications. News was distributed via ballads, sometimes of a fantastic kind, such as the ‘Windmill blown down by the witch’s fart’ that Nightingale offers his customers in Jonson’s Bartholomew Fair (2.3), but often retailing stories of murder and execution, historical narrative, and contemporary comment. Religious topics are also found; not infrequently a published ballad might attract a moralised commentary on it within a few days of publication. At a cost of one penny (the same as the cheapest standing at the Globe) the sheets were accessible across a wide social spectrum. They were sold by itinerant pedlars – of the kind Shakespeare memorably drew in the character of Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale – up and down the country. They were intended to be sung, though the music was rarely printed on the sheet; instead, they were described as ‘to the tune of …’, and it was expected that prospective customers would know the melodies, or else, like

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the rural inhabitants in The Winter’s Tale, be ready to learn them from the vendor. Thousands of ballads were printed – it has been estimated that as many as 3 million copies might have circulated in the latter part of the sixteenth century (Watt 1991: 42) – of which some at least achieved a kind of permanence by being pasted up on walls in homes and taverns. Those who could not read would have learned both tune and words by ear, and there cannot have been any part of Tudor and Stuart society that was not in some degree touched by and familiar with the genre. When major composers such as Byrd or Morley wrote sets of keyboard variations on tunes such as ‘Fortune my foe’ or ‘Go from my window’ they must have been able to assume that those who played or listened were fully familiar with them. (Indeed, paradoxically enough, it is sometimes only these ‘high art’ sources which preserve versions of the ‘popular’ tunes.) Many ballads are anonymous, but figures such as William Elderton, Thomas Deloney, Samuel Rowlands, and Richard Johnson, among others, are associated with numerous publications, but, as Ross Duffin observes: ‘it is not always clear whether someone like Deloney … actually wrote a certain ballad or simply edited or perhaps expanded an anonymous one’ (cit. Owens 2006: 36). Balladeers were commonly caricatured with contempt, as drunken hacks, but many other writers, including the dramatists, were engaged in exactly the same activity of writing new lyrics to old tunes. Theatre audiences expected songs, and dramatists, including Shakespeare, provided them. The story of music in the theatre is not straightforward – and only the briefest summary can be given here. The choirboy companies in their various incarnations were able to provide music not only within the play but also before and during the intervals that were required in their indoor playhouses. They could also afford the rehearsal time, and had the musical expertise on hand to commission settings to many of the songs that their comedies in particular called for (see Austern 1992). The adult companies, on the other hand, at least in the Elizabethan and early Jacobean period, had a much more hectic schedule of performances, and did not have a permanent band of musicians on tap but relied on members of the company to provide music – actors were proficient instrumentalists. It seems unlikely that in normal circumstances they would have asked composers to write specific settings for their songs. Instead, as Ross Duffin has powerfully and persuasively argued in Shakespeare’s Songbook, it is probable that they would either have imported an existing song or else written new lyrics that the actors could perform to tunes they knew. The effect, then, would have been quite different from that in the modern theatre, when newly commissioned settings are provided for every production. Instead there would have been a recognition of the familiar, and therefore, perhaps, a readier identification with the character singing a known melody. It also makes possible a dialogue between the known song and the words that are being heard on stage, of the kind that John Gay, a century later, was to exploit in The Beggar’s Opera. After 1608, however, everything changed for Shakespeare’s company, the King’s Men. In that year they were able to take possession of the indoor theatre at the

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Blackfriars, inherited the musicians who had performed there with the children’s companies (or at least continued the musical practices of the past), and were able to employ composers, such as the court lutenist Robert Johnson, to write settings of songs. In terms of Shakespeare’s career, The Tempest most obviously took advantage of these new opportunities, and possibly the changed situation might be reflected in the Johnson settings of songs for The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline (though these may reflect music for later performances). Certainly in later years music became one of the trademarks of the King’s Men – though they, and other companies, even in these changed circumstances, continued to make use of familiar ballads. Balladeers and dramatists were not the only poets engaged in writing for musical setting. For, next to the ballad, the music that probably formed the most significant part of the cultural experience of the sixteenth- or seventeenth-century person was that of psalmody. The Whole Book of Psalms, known by the name of its original compilers, Sternhold and Hopkins, was the most frequently published book of the age, after the Bible and the Prayer Book, and it advertised itself on the title page of edition after edition as set forth and allowed to be sung in all churches, of all the people together before and after morning and evening prayer, as also before and after sermons, and moreover in private houses for their godly solace and comfort, laying apart all ungodly songs and ballads, which tend only to the nourishing of vice and corrupting of youth.

After the Reformation music in parish churches was largely restricted to the singing of psalms. By the middle of Elizabeth’s reign organs were being removed, or falling into disuse, and singing was led, not by a choir, but by the parish clerk. (Cathedrals continued with more elaborate music at least until the Commonwealth.) The singing of psalms seems to have been taken up with enthusiasm both in public and in private. Bishop Jewel claimed in 1560 that ‘You may now sometimes see at Paul’s Cross after the service, six thousand persons, old and young, of both sexes, all singing together and praising God’ (Temperley 1979: I, 43), and the diary of Margaret Hoby, for example, on several occasions refers to her singing psalms with servants, or to herself. (It is also true, however, that the psalm-singing Puritan was a not infrequent butt of satire.) In both secular and religious contexts, then, the music and verse that most people most often heard consisted of words matched to well-known tunes that might serve promiscuously to accompany other lyrics. Yet there are very obvious and significant differences between psalms and ballads. The first four lines of Psalm 1 in the edition of 1564 read: The man is blest that hath not bent To wicked rede [counsel] his ear, Nor led his life as sinners do, Nor sat in scorner’s chair.

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This is in the metre that is the most frequently employed throughout the book, with lines of alternating eight and six syllables. In its time it was known as ‘Sternhold’s metre’, and has persisted as ‘common metre’ in hymnbooks down to the present. It is relentlessly iambic and insistently regular. Compare that with the opening of ‘The Famous battle between Robin Hood and the curtal [roguish] friar. To a new northern tune’ (taken from the English Broadside Ballad Archive): In summer time when leaves grow green And flowers are fresh and gay, Robin Hood and his merry men Were disposed to play. Then some would leap, and some would run, And some would use artillery [hunting gear], Which of you can a good bow draw A good archer for to be.

These two stanzas have roughly the same shape as the psalm, but each stanza is realised slightly differently, with more or fewer syllables than the norm and with frequent departures from a regular stress-pattern. These are words written with a tune in mind, but a tune which the singer can modify by introducing extra notes, omitting upbeats, and the like. By contrast the writer of the metrical psalms hears no particular tune as he writes, but simply intends that the words can be accommodated to a metrical schema and, above all, will be plain and intelligible to the congregation who sing them. The evolution of the tunes for the psalter is, as Nicholas Temperley demonstrates, a complicated story (1979: I, 22–76), but some at least of them have persisted to the present day (the ‘Old Hundredth’ to the words ‘All people that on earth do dwell’ being perhaps the best known). Only very occasionally, if at all, however, does it seem that those who contributed to the evolving text of the psalm-book had specific tunes in mind. Comparing psalm and ballad makes an obvious but essential point: that writing to music is a very different activity from writing for music. Anthony Munday prefaced his A Banquet of Dainty Conceits (1588), composed for those ‘who take pleasure in music’ with this apologia to his ‘gentle reader’: Thou art to consider that the ditties herein contained are made to several set notes, wherein no measure of verse can be observed, because the notes will afford no such liberty: for look how they rise and fall in just time and order of music, even so have I kept course therewith in making the ditties, which will seem very bad stuff in reading, but, I persuade me, will delight thee when thou singest any of them to thine instrument. (sig A3)

Munday’s assessment of his verses is, sadly, not far off the mark; nonetheless, the effort of writing words to fit existing music did offer a significant stimulus to a range of

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poets in the latter part of the sixteenth century. Philip Sidney, one of the most adventurous of experimenters with different poetic forms, for example, composed five lyrics to fit Italian songs. The result of Sidney’s effort was ‘the introduction of trochaics into English poetics and the reappearance of feminine rhymes after an absence of nearly two centuries’ (Fabry 1973: 234). He was not the only writer to compose words to Italian music. In 1588 Nicholas Yonge published Musica Transalpina, the first and most influential of five volumes of Italian madrigals in translation to appear in the next decade. He was a singer in St Paul’s choir, and in the preface to his volume explained that: Since I first began to keep house in this city it hath been no small comfort unto me that a great number of gentlemen and merchants of good accompt (as well of this realm as of foreign nations) have taken in good part such entertainment of pleasure as my poor ability was able to afford them, both by the exercise of music daily used in my house, and by furnishing them with books of that kind yearly sent me out of Italy and other places.

He goes on to claim that he had come into the possession of some translations made five years ago ‘by a gentleman for his private delight (as not long before, certain Neapolitans had been Englished by a very honourable personage and now a councillor of estate, whereof I have seen some, but never possessed any)’. We do not know who this ‘gentleman’ was, let alone the ‘councillor’ engaged in a similar task. What this preface indicates, however, is that there was a social reality behind Henry Peacham’s advice to a gentleman that: ‘I desire no more in you than to sing your part sure and at the first sight withal to play the same upon your viol or the exercise of the lute, privately to yourself ’ (Peacham 1962: 112). So too it is confirmation of the fact that the poverty of English musical publication led many to seek out continental music to provide for their domestic entertainment. More significantly for the present discussion, such translation provided further stimulus to experiment with complex verse forms. The ‘madrigal’ proper in Italian, for example, is a single stanza with a free rhyme scheme and a varying number of seven- and eleven-syllable lines – though the term came to be used much more freely for a wide variety of texts, and it is above all the flexibility of the form, the varying relationships of phrase- and line-lengths within a mutable rhyme scheme which offered new possibilities. Poets, of course, could, and did, imitate Italian verse forms without the exercise of fitting their words to the precise demands of a musical setting, but there can be little doubt that the vogue for Italian madrigals in the last decades of the sixteenth century was significant for poets in developing freer metrical and stanzaic patterns, as it was for the composers who produced nearly fifty editions between 1588 and 1627, including, in the works of Thomas Morley, Thomas Weelkes, and John Wilbye especially, fine compositions that stand up well in modern performance. Edward Doughtie suggests the effects that these translated musical texts ‘might have had on English poetry. They introduced new rhythms and sound, and they con-

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tributed to the vogue for amatory Petrarchan and pastoral subjects, lightening the general tone of English verse.’ He goes on to point out that, unlike the Italians, English madrigal composers rarely chose to set poems by major writers or poems of great literary merit, concluding that ‘the better madrigal texts share many of the qualities of good light verse: brevity, wit, formal control, linguistic playfulness, technical ingenuity’ (Doughtie 1986: 97–8, 105). These are not entirely trivial skills for writers to learn, but for the madrigal composer it might not matter whether the verses he chose to set were of high literary quality, or indeed, even a lyric that fitted the standard prescriptions for what makes ‘good’ verse for music. What mattered was that the verse should provide opportunities for the musical devices that madrigal composers enjoyed displaying – the illustration of individual words, the imitation of natural sounds and phenomena, the articulation of strongly delineated moments of feeling. Nothing, one would have thought, could be less promising to a composer than a first line which reads ‘Thule, the period of cosmography’ (which might be paraphrased as ‘Iceland, the outer limit of mapmaking’), yet this is a lyric which Thomas Weelkes chose to set in his 1600 collection of madrigals: Thule, the period of cosmography, Doth vaunt of Hecla, whose sulphurious fire Doth melt the frozen clime and thaw the sky; Trinacrian Aetna’s flames ascend not higher. These things seem wondrous, yet more wondrous I, Whose heart with fear doth freeze, with love doth fry.

In its illustration of the volcanic fire with a prolonged melisma, the chromatic change of harmony to illustrate the ‘frozen’ sky, and its musical contrast of the conventional Petrarchan heat and fire, this is an extremely effective and hugely enjoyable piece of music, one which self-consciously delights in its mannered excesses – yet as a poem it barely makes the starting line. This illustrates a truism: that composers are free to set whatever they like, including prose. So Thomas Tomkins included in his madrigalian 1622 collection, Songs of 3, 4, 5 and 6 Parts, a setting of the biblical text ‘When David heard that Absalom was slain’, one of his best-known and most effective choral works, movingly elaborating the grief of the king in its setting of the words ‘would God I had died for thee’. In the collection it is sandwiched between two utterly conventional poems addressed to Phyllis, protesting at her treatment of him. But then Tomkins was perfectly prepared to use the same music for words both religious and secular – his ‘Holy, holy, holy’, printed in the posthumous collection Musica Deo sacra, for example, is a contrafactum of ‘See, see the shepherds’ queen’ from Songs. A number of things follow from this mixture. First, it emphasises the importance of the domestic environment in which much of the most elaborate music of the period was actually consumed. Anthems could still be heard in the cathedrals (though there is dispute about how expert the choirs outside the Chapel Royal and St Paul’s might have been during the latter part of the period), but it was in private homes that

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madrigals would principally have been performed. Thomas Morley’s account of a domestic evening might have been generated as a sales pitch for his instructional treatise, A Plain and Easy Introduction to Practical Music, but it clearly is based in reality: But supper being ended and music books (according to the custom) being brought to the table, the mistress of the house presented me with a part earnestly requesting me to sing; but when, after many excuses, I protested unfeignedly that I could not, every one began to wonder; yea, some whispered to others demanding how I was brought up, so that upon shame of mine ignorance I go now to seek out mine old friend Master Gnorimus, to make myself his scholar. (Morley 1952: 9)

The middle-class sniffiness at the inexpert speaker that this extract records has an air of authenticity. It was precisely this kind of anxiety which drove parents to provide musical tuition for their children, as the autobiography of Thomas Whythorne testifies, which encouraged young men to take their lutes to university with them, and persuaded young ladies to acquire musical skills to ensure their marriageability. The context, then, in which madrigals were heard and performed was quite unlike the public environment of the ballads and psalms discussed earlier. Secondly, the mix of materials in this collection underlines the asymmetries that always pertain in the relationships between poetry and music, poets and composers. On the one hand the influence of music might show up in poems not directly destined for musical setting, in their metrical and rhythmic structures, for example, while on the other hand, fine pieces of music can be made from texts that are inferior, not even poetic in form, and that were not composed with music in mind. Nonetheless the topic of the ‘ideal’ relationship of poetry and music is one that continued to exercise the minds of writers and musicians alike, provoking extensive heated debate in intellectual circles across Europe in the latter years of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries. In order to appreciate the terms of these debates, they need to be located in the period’s veneration of the classics, and understood as attempts in various ways to recover the real or imagined classical union of words and music, and thereby to re-create the effects that had been claimed for music in the distant past. In Castiglione’s The Courtier, the Count answers Lord Gaspar’s cynical observation that ‘music … together with many other vanities is meet for women … but not for them that be men indeed’ with the following riposte: I shall enter into a large sea of the praise of music and call to rehearsal how much it hath always been renowned among them of old time and counted a holy matter; and how it hath been the opinion of most wise philosophers that the world is made of music, and the heavens in their moving make a melody, and our soul framed after the very same sort, and therefore lifteth up itself and (as it were) reviveth the virtues and force of it with music. wherefore it is written that Alexander was sometime so fervently stirred with it that (in a manner) against his will he was forced to arise from banquets and run to weapon, afterward the musician changing the stroke and his manner of tune, pacified himself again and returned from weapon to banqueting. (Strunk 1998: 326)

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The invocation of a heavenly harmony ordering the cosmos is part of the standard praise of music, but what is more immediately significant here is its narrative of music’s power to raise and quell the passions, using the familiar story of Alexander the Great first being inspired by the musician Timotheus to martial frenzy and then calmed down by the same means. Myths of Orpheus and Arion were similarly invoked to suggest a time when music’s effects were more powerful than they had become in these latter days. In Campion’s Lords’ Masque (1613) the figure of Orpheus claims precisely this control over the disordered minds of the ‘Frantics’ who make up the antimasque: For Jove into our music will inspire The power of passion, that their thoughts shall bend To any form or motion we intend.

The Frantics enter and dance in ‘an absolute medley of madness … till by virtue of a new change in the music, the lunatics fell into a mad measure, fitted to a loud fantastic tune; but in the end thereof the music changed into a very solemn air’, which duly calmed the madmen down, allowing them to be led offstage (Campion 1969: 250–1). Here it is instrumental music on its own which works miraculous effects, but in most of the debates of the period it was the right combination of words and music which was held to have enabled music’s power. And here there was profound disagreement about what that relationship should be. To oversimplify considerably, it is possible to see two fundamentally different routes to achieving this end offered by musicians first in France, and then in Italy. In France the focus was on the formal relationship of verbal and musical structure. The French Academy of Poetry and Music was led by the poet Antoine de Baïf and the composer Joachim Thibault, and pursued the creation of verses in the quantitative metres of the ancients, which could be set to music that exactly imitated the pattern of long and short syllables. Their aspirations were clearly set out in the proposed Statutes of the Academy, which was to be established: In order to bring the use of music back to its perfect state, which is to represent words in song made up of harmony and melody, themselves consisting of the choice and well arranged regulation of voice, sound and concord so as to create the effects required by the sense of the words, constraining, freeing or enlarging the soul; and in order to revive also the ancient fashion of composing measured verse to accord with song likewise measured according to the art of metre. (Strunk 1998: 340)

The Academy was established in 1571, produced a number of volumes of music according to its prescription of musique mesurée, but seems to have ceased operating before 1584. Extreme though this movement may seem, it found an echo in England. Experiments with importing classical quantitative metres into English were being made in

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late sixteenth-century England. Among those who flirted with this enterprise were Edmund Spenser, Richard Stanyhurst, Abraham Fraunce, and, perhaps most significantly, Philip Sidney and Thomas Campion. The last two are particularly important in that both felt that the creation of poems in quantitative metre made them appropriate for musical setting. Sidney (who could have met Baïf) wrote that: of versifying there are two sorts, the one ancient, the other modern: the ancient marked the quantity of each syllable, and according to that framed his verse; the modern observing only number (with some regard of the accent) … Whether of these be the most excellent, would bear many speeches. The ancient (no doubt) more fit for music, both words and tune observing quantity, and more fit lively to express diverse passions, by the low and lofty sound of the well-weighed syllable. (Sidney 1965: 140)

Campion wrote a whole treatise in defence of classical metres, his Observations in the Art of English Poesy, and essayed one song in direct imitation of the French style, whose first stanza runs: Come, let us sound with melody the praises Of the kings king, th’omnipotent creator, Author of number, that hath all the world in Harmony framèd.

The metre is quantitatively Sapphic, but it takes the music to make that apparent. The Elizabethan understanding of classical rules which make a syllable ‘long’ or ‘short’, and their relationship to the sounds that were actually heard when reading Latin was complicated – and has been best explicated by Derek Attridge in his Well-Weighed Syllables (1974). They need not concern us here, but perhaps the words Campion chooses for his musical-poetical synthesis, with their salutation of God as the originator of ‘number’ – mathematical, musical, and metrical – indicate the seriousness with which this endeavour was made. This was his only strict experiment in the French manner, but the spareness of its musical form suited with his general approach to the business of word-setting. In the address ‘To the Reader’ which Campion probably composed to introduce his first book of airs, a jointly authored publication with his colleague Philip Rosseter in 1601, he writes caustically: But there are some, who to appear the more deep and singular in their judgement, will admit no music but that which is long, intricate, bated with fugue, chained with syncopation, and where the nature of every word is precisely expressed in the note, like the old exploded action in comedies, when if they did pronounce memini [I remember], they would point to the hinder part of their heads, if video [I see], put their finger in their eye. But such childish observing of words is altogether ridiculous, and we ought to maintain as well in notes as in action a manly carriage, gracing no word but that which is eminent and emphatical. (Campion 1969: 15)

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For Campion as a poet/musician the shape of the line is important, and throughout his settings he almost always sets no more than two notes to a single syllable, respects the lineation of the lyric in the shape of the setting, and allows for clear projection of the words. His lyrics, in complementary fashion, are generally carefully organised so that the words of the second and subsequent stanzas will suit the musical pattern and phrasing established by the first. On occasion he adopts and adapts the convention of a refrain (as in his version of Catullus, ‘My sweetest Lesbia’, or his playing with the London street-seller’s cry, ‘cherry ripe’ in ‘There is a garden in her face’, for example). Once or twice his lyrics are designed to fit a conventional musical structure in which a tune beginning in duple time has a middle or final section in triple time. (Shakespeare does this in Ariel’s song ‘Where the bee sucks’, which moves into the triple-time movement of ‘Merrily, merrily shall I live now’). If he rarely touches the deepest notes in words or music, his lyrics have a rare command of rhythm and sound. Campion’s songs are written for voice and lute – but he was aware of the marketing possibilities for domestic singing groups, and so for many of the airs provided fourpart settings since, as he observed in the preface to his Two Books of Airs, ‘these airs were for the most part framed at first for one voice with the lute or viol, but, upon occasion, they have since been filled with more parts which who so please may use, who like not may leave’ (Campion 1969: 55). In providing these parts Campion was following the precedent established by Dowland in his First Book of Songs or Airs of 1597, which printed the melody and lute accompaniment on the left-hand page, and the lower three parts arranged on the right-hand page in such a way that three singers could stand on three sides of a table and read their own parts simultaneously. This was one of the most successful of musical publications, running through at least four editions before 1613, and was the first of a series in which Dowland established himself as undoubtedly one of the greatest songwriters in English musical history. In many ways this first book is the most straightforward of his collections; a large proportion of the songs are in dance form, and quite probably the words were written to fit their already existing tunes. This was almost certainly the case in what became, in modern terms, Dowland’s ‘signature’ tune, the song ‘Flow my tears’ from the Second Book of Airs (1600). The tune is in three sections, the first two repeated, and the lyrics, perhaps written by Dowland himself, follow the music exactly, with completely different metrical patterns for each section. In instrumental form it appears in the collection Lachrimae (1604), and in its extravagantly melancholy subject matter it is typical of many of his songs. He adopted as his motto the phrase ‘semper Dowland, semper dolens’ (always Dowland, always doleful), and in perhaps his greatest song, ‘In darkness let me dwell’, he turns a rather conventional lyric (the first stanza of which was earlier set by Giovanni Coprario) into a powerful, introspective melancholy meditation. This song, with its complex lute part and varied declamation of the words, bears witness to Dowland’s awareness of a very different attitude to the setting of words from that which obtained in the French Academy. The French, as we have seen, attempted to revive the ancient effects of music by ensuring the exact formal correspondence between word and note, and Campion, even

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in his non-quantitative airs, as he said: ‘chiefly aimed to couple my words and notes lovingly together, which will be much for him to do that hath not power over both’ (Campion 1969: 55). In Italy at almost exactly the same time, a group in Florence who gathered at the salon of Giovanni de’Bardi, and became known as the ‘Camerata’ were also researching ancient Greek music and attempting to re-create its effects. But they went a different way about it, even though Vincenzo Galilei’s Dialogue on Ancient and Modern Music made very similar criticisms of madrigalian style to those which Campion offered, and cited the familiar classical examples of musical effects. They rejected polyphony of all kinds, preferring music with only a single singing voice at a time, and demanded a flexible interpretation of the rhythm of the words in order to imitate the speaking voice of a person in a particular state of mind. The result, in the works of Caccini and others, was a recitative-like declamation, using a limited vocal range, and leading to the first dramas in music, or prototype operas (themselves thought to imitate classical Greek drama). Claudio Monteverdi became the dominant practitioner of the new style, which he called ‘the Second Practice’, to distinguish it from the older ‘First Practice’. His brother Giulio defended him against conservative criticism, explaining that: By First Practice he understands the one that turns on the perfection of the harmony, that is, the one that considers the harmony not commanded, but commanding, and not the servant, but the mistress of the words … By Second Practice … he understands the one that turns on the perfection of the ‘melody’, that is, the one that considers harmony commanded, not commanding and makes the words the mistress of the harmony. (Strunk 1998: 539–40)

To argue that the words should dominate the relationship was not entirely new. Sidney, for example, in a pastoral dialogue about music and metre preserved in two manuscripts of the Old Arcadia, has one shepherd argue that the other ‘did much abuse the dignity of poetry to apply it to music, since rather music is a servant to poetry, for by the one the ear only, by the other the mind, was pleased’ (Sidney 1985: 363). This reflects the suspicion of music’s capacity to stir irrational emotion and the consequent need to control and direct its power that reaches back to Plato. Monteverdi’s doctrine has different foundations, and turns the focus from form to affect. The free declamation of the voice over a slow-moving bass line that became one of the trademarks of the style was actually only slowly imported into England, but composers like Dowland, Ferrabosco, and Nicholas Lanier gradually imitated some of the features of the declamatory manner. This music was far away from the popular ballad, or even from the tuneful airs of Campion, and it found its chief home not so much in the domestic environment as in the altogether more exclusive world of the court masque (see Chapter 47, ‘Tied to Rules of Flattery’? Court Drama and the Masque). In these entertainments music was central, and songs propelled much of the action forward. It was imperative, then, that their words be clearly projected, and a requisite of the genre that it should be as fashionably up to the minute as possible in every

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aspect of its scenery, dance, and music. It is not surprising, then, that in Nicholas Lanier’s setting of the song ‘Bring away this sacred tree’ from Campion’s Somerset Masque (1613) we should have what has been hailed as probably the first successful English example of Italianate word-setting. It is in the masques The Lovers Made Men and The Vision of Delight (both 1617) that, probably, something approaching an Italianate recitative was first heard, sung by the same Nicholas Lanier, though there is some controversy over quite what was heard (see Walls 1996: 86–103). Recitative can set anything, prose or verse, and, paradoxically enough, although it is a style which claims to give sovereignty to the words, it might appear to have little or nothing to offer in return to the poet. Yet in its effort to represent the fluid movement of speech within the overall control of a rhythmic pulse it was attempting in music what, analogously, Donne, for example, was attempting in verse. When Donne’s lyrics were posthumously published, they appeared under the collective title Songs and Sonnets. In ‘The Triple Fool’ he anticipates the possibility that ‘Some man, his art and voice to show, / Doth set and sing my pain’. Donne’s lyrics are not obvious candidates for musical setting: subsequent stanzas are often impossible to fit to music that suits the first, and their intellectual, argumentative manner seems far away from the kinds of ‘simple, sensuous and passionate’ words that are so often assumed to be appropriate for musical setting. Yet there are manuscripts that suggest that some poems were written to fit existing tunes, and a number of settings survive, most of which are in an early declamatory style. (Pelham Humfrey, later in the century, produced perhaps the most successful setting of ‘A Hymn to God the Father’, in a maturer version of the style.) Yet, of course, whether a particular lyric is ‘settable’ or not is no necessary indication of whether the poet was directly inspired by music. The ‘music’ of language is independent of the music of music itself, and it can be learnt as well by listening to other poems as by musical practice. So, for example, though Ben Jonson wrote successfully for music – his ‘Slow, slow, fresh fount’, for example, being a fine madrigalian poem and ‘See the chariot at hand here of love’ an attractive lyric deftly deploying triple-time rhythms – there is little evidence that Jonson was particularly interested in music for its own sake. He makes very little use of musical imagery, and his poetical praise of Ferrabosco seems formulaic. By contrast George Herbert is known to have been devoted to music, and Walton claimed that he set his own verses. His poems are full of musical imagery, and it is hard not to believe that his exquisite control of rhythm, phrasing, line, rhyme, and form was not influenced by his weekly exercise in singing at Salisbury. Whether or not one can pin down the influence of music on particular poets or poems is not, in the end, the point. During this period there was a real intellectual interest in exploring the relationship between what Milton called the ‘Sphere-born, harmonious sisters, Voice and Verse’, which stimulated new ideas and practices in both arts. At the same time the music of the streets, the theatres, and the church penetrated deeply into the popular consciousness. Then, as now, music formed a constant backdrop to work and leisure; unlike now, however, it was in general actively made, not passively consumed.

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References and Further Reading Attridge, Derek (1974). Well-Weighed Syllables. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Austern, Linda Phyllis (1992). Music in English Children’s Drama of the Later Renaissance. Philadelphia: Gordon & Breach. Booth, Mark W. (1981). The Experience of Songs. New Haven: Yale University Press. Bray, Roger (ed.) (1995). The Blackwell History of Music in Britain, vol. 2: The Sixteenth Century. Oxford: Blackwell. Campion, Thomas (1969). The Works of Thomas Campion, ed. Walter R. Davis. London: Faber & Faber. Doughtie, Edward (1986). English Renaissance Song. Boston: Twayne. Duffin, Ross (2004). Shakespeare’s Songbook. New York: Norton. English Broadside Ballad Archive. University of California-Santa Barbara. . Fabry, Frank J. (1973). ‘Sidney’s poetry and Italian song-form’. English Literary Renaissance, 3, 232–48. Jorgens, Elise Bickford (1982). The Well-Tun’d Word: Musical Interpretations of English Poetry 1597–1651. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Lindley, David (1985). Thomas Campion. Leiden: Brill. Lindley, David (2006). Shakespeare and Music. London: Cengage. Morley, Thomas (1952). A Plain and Easy Introduction to Practical Music, ed. R. A. Harman. London: J. M. Dent & Sons. Owens, Jessie Ann (2006). ‘Noyses, sounds, and sweet aires’: Music in Early Modern England. Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library.

Peacham, Henry (1962). The Complete Gentleman, ed. Virgil B. Hertzel. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Puttenham, George (1589). The Art of English Poesy. London. Sidney, Philip (1965). An Apology for Poetry, ed. Geoffrey Shepherd. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Sidney, Philip (1985). The Old Arcadia, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Smith, Bruce R. The Acoustic World of Early Modern England. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Spink, Ian (1992). The Blackwell History of Music in Britain, vol. 3: The Seventeenth Century. Oxford: Blackwell. Stevens, John (1961). Music and Poetry in the Early Tudor Court. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Strunk, Oliver (1998) Source Readings in Music History, ed. and rev. Leo Treitler. New York: Norton. Temperley, Nicholas (1979). The Music of the English Parish Church, 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Walls, Peter (1996). Music in the English Courtly Masque, 1604–1640. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Watt, Tessa (1991). Cheap Print and Popular Piety. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whythorne, Thomas (1962). The Autobiography of Thomas Whythorne, ed. James M. Osborn. London: Oxford University Press. Woodfill, Walter (1953). Musicians in English Society from Elizabeth to Charles I. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

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Wyatt’s ‘Who so list to hunt’ Rachel Falconer

A master of verse translations, songs, sonnets, and satires, Sir Thomas Wyatt is known as one of the most technically versatile and original poets of the Tudor period. Above all, Wyatt’s distinctive poetic voice has long been admired for its abrupt and plainspeaking directness, a sign of ‘authenticity’ contrasting with the elegance of other courtly Tudor ‘makers’. In reading Wyatt, ‘we are convinced that we have been hearing the authentic voice of a man of much experience and humanity’ (Mason 1986: 11). For Stephen Greenblatt, Wyatt ‘captures the authentic voice of early English Protestantism’, above all, ‘its inwardness’ (Greenblatt 1980: 115). If for earlier generations this brusque, Protestant voice was associated with moral uprightness (Nott 1816: 2, 546), now readers are more likely to admire its confessional honesty and its detailed rendering of the inner life (Greenblatt 1980: 159). But if Wyatt is praised for the ‘honesty’ of his poetic voice, it is worth bearing in mind that, in the Tudor period, this concept included a sense of rhetorical skill, of being able to match one’s performance to an audience and occasion. Drawing on Jennifer Richards’s study of the early modern understanding of the Latin term honestas (truth-telling, but also restraint and tact), Cathy Shrank argues that Wyatt’s poetic voice is ‘honest’ in the sense of being both plain-speaking but also evasive and circumspect (Richards 2003; Shrank 2007: 399–400). As Shrank justly points out, ‘a rough, plain style … is not necessarily sincere; it can be imitated, assumed like a cloak’ (2007: 398). Wyatt’s sonnets in imitation of Petrarch provide fascinating ground for exploring this complex blend of poetic strategies in the Tudor period: performance and truth-telling, rhetoric and revelation, confession and evasiveness. My discussion here will focus on one of Wyatt’s best-known Petrarchan poems, ‘Who so list to hunt’, in order to illustrate how Wyatt’s speaker performs his inwardness. To begin with a general point about different senses of authenticity: a poem cannot be ‘authentic’ in the most commonly understood sense of the term, meaning ‘real, actual, “genuine” (opposed to imaginary, pretended)’ (OED, sense 5), since it is in itself a representation. But one might judge the poem to be referentially authentic if it

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could be demonstrated to refer to an actual event or situation, to be ‘in accordance with fact’ (OED, sense 3). Alternatively, a poem might be thought of as emotionally authentic, in the sense of being a sincere transcription of the thoughts of a particular individual in a specific situation. In poems addressed in the first person, the emotions would be those of the poem’s fictional speaker, but, more problematically, they may also be attributed to the biographical author. If attributed to the author, the ideas and emotions expressed in the poem would be deemed ‘authentic’ in the sense of being ‘authoritative’, bearing the authority of the author (OED, sense 1), just as ‘authentic’ paintings are distinguished from those that are merely ‘attributed’ to a particular artists (‘really proceeding from its reputed source or author’, OED, sense 6). In the history of Wyatt scholarship, these different senses of ‘authenticity’ have frequently been elided, so that the allusion to a specific event has been interpreted as mimetic of historical reality, and the emotions expressed by the speaker attributed directly to Wyatt himself. As we shall see below, Wyatt’s poetry succeeds in conveying an impression of authenticity by conveying the strength of its speaker’s emotions, and by alluding or hinting referentially to external events. But in neither case can a straight line be drawn between events in the poem and actual events beyond it, and nor are the speaker’s emotions verifiably those of the biographical author Wyatt. The current critical emphasis on Wyatt’s opacity and reserve might appear to lessen the impact of his poetry on a modern reader, for whom it is less likely to sound like the painfully direct outpourings of a man living through fraught and dangerous times. But in fact once this notion of transparent mediation is set aside, Wyatt may come to seem more our contemporary than ever, since his complex representation of the suffering ‘I’ anticipates the poststructuralist idea that the subject is constructed in the very process of linguistic communication. At first reading, Wyatt’s sonnet ‘Who so list to hunt’ gives every appearance of being a confessional poem, intimately confiding its author’s anxieties to a sympathetic reader. The poem is full of insistent hints towards an actual situation that would be recognisable to Wyatt’s contemporaries. The emotional state of the speaker is also a prominent feature, and the ‘I’ asserts itself plaintively, eleven times in twelve lines. The speaker has become caught up in a dangerous courtly game of flight and pursuit, from which he now wishes desperately to disentangle himself: Who so list to hounte: I know, where is an hynde. but, as for me: helas, I may no more. the vayne travaill hath weried me so sore, I ame of theim, that farthest cometh behinde. yet, may I, by no meanes, my weried mynde drawe from the Diere: but as she fleeth afore faynting I folowe. I leve of therefore: sithens in a nett I seke to hold the wynde. Who list her hount: I put him owte of dowbte: as well, as I: may spend his time in vain. and, graven with Diamondes, in letters plain:

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Rachel Falconer there is written, her faier neck round abowte: noli me tangere: for Cesar’s I ame: and wylde for to hold: though I seme tame.

A long-standing critical tradition, dating back to Wyatt’s time, holds that the ‘Diere’ (deer, dear) to which the text refers is Anne Boleyn, that ‘Cesar’ is Henry VIII, and that noli me tangere (let no one touch me) refers to the sexual prohibition surrounding Anne, after it became clear that she was the king’s new favourite (Wyatt 1969: 267). The relationship between Wyatt and Anne Boleyn was imputed by a Spanish chronicler who reported the contents of a letter from Wyatt to the king, in which Wyatt admits to having slept with Anne on one occasion, at the lady’s own encouragement (Mason 1986: 147). In May 1536 Wyatt and half a dozen other men were arrested for treasonous involvement with Anne. Wyatt was kept in the Tower of London for several months, while Anne, and those men found guilty by association with her, were put to death (Burrow 2004). A later poem, ‘Who lyst his welthe’, is taken by some critics to imply that Wyatt actually witnessed Anne’s execution from his prison window (‘The bell towre showed me suche syght / That in my hed stekyss day and nyght’ (Wyatt 1969: 187). In so far as it alludes to these historical events, ‘Who so list’ would immediately strike a reader as referentially authentic. But while the poem alludes to these events, it does not situate itself specifically in the period in which Wyatt first learned about the king’s interest in Anne Boleyn (c.1527); hence the disappointment and frustration expressed by the poem’s speaker may or may not convey Wyatt’s own emotions at the time. The Egerton MS is dated c.1535, long after Wyatt’s alleged involvement with Anne Boleyn, but before his imprisonment in 1536. Mason claims that the sonnet must have been written several years after Wyatt first heard news of the king’s interest in Anne, and that therefore the speaker’s emotions must be interpreted as wholly fictional, though one might counter that a rejected lover’s resentment could last longer than a few years (Mason 1986: 136). Recent critical consensus is that the identity of the ‘Diere’ is finally indeterminate. In Elizabeth Heale’s view, Wyatt ‘makes it impossible to decide whether the ‘her’ of this poem is a particular woman (Anne Boleyn), any woman as prize … or woman as a figure for worldly favour’ (Heale 1998: 58). Stephen Greenblatt takes this approach a step further, arguing that the sonnet expresses the frustration and anxiety of an entire social class rather than an individual (Greenblatt 1980: 146). But we should not lose sight of the fact that the poem’s mode of address is individual and intimate; it invites its readers to guess at a specific, though necessarily shrouded, historical situation. The opening line makes reference to a common social activity, hunting, with which the text’s narratees are evidently very familiar, and it is equally clear that the hunt is being used as a metaphor for the courtly game of amorous pursuit. At another level, the poem invites its readers to engage in a hunt for an exact identification of the deer. This is the first sense in which ‘Who so list’ makes us complicit in a game of pursuing meaning within a complex maze of indeterminate signifiers.

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Whether or not he expresses Wyatt’s own thoughts, the speaker of the poem presents himself at the start as emotionally sincere and direct. On the one hand wishing to renounce his part in the hunt in which only ‘Cesar’ will win the prize (lines 2, 10), he candidly confesses that he cannot desist though he knows he should (lines 5–6). Wyatt’s style here, as in other poems, is conversational, idiomatic, and sometimes deliberately inelegant (Shrank 2007: 381–3). The speaker exclaims, sighs, and despairs; he appears to be, at one level, the victim of other people’s more sophisticated guile. But, less artlessly, he is also engaged in a conscious struggle to assert his agency against various ‘others’, principally the elusive ‘Diere’, and the tyrannical Cesar who claims to own her. Greenblatt suggests that courtier-diplomats like Wyatt made a cult of rebellious forthrightness because their marginal status in an absolutist court denied them any exercise of real power or agency (1980: 136–7). We can see this strategy enacted by the speaker here, in his caustic reference to Cesar’s prohibition. At the same time, however, power relations were also played out in courtly romance (see Chapter 57, Romance), and here Wyatt’s speaker attempts to assert his agency and authority over the fugitive ‘Diere’ by discrediting her character as fickle and ‘wild’ (for interpretation of the gender dynamics, see Estrin 1994). The struggle for agency is evident, not only in the fluctuating power relations between the principal characters of the poem, but also in its intertextual dialogue with Petrarch and the Italian sonnet tradition, on the one hand, and the alliterative and accentual verse of ‘native’ English traditions on the other. The speaker of Wyatt’s sonnet, who so insistently foregrounds the ‘I’, is to be understood perhaps above all as ‘I, not Petrarch’. Petrarch’s famous sonnet, ‘Una candida cerva’, is the basis for Wyatt’s ‘Who so list to hunt’, and at the same time the text against which Wyatt asserts his difference and his agency: Una candida cerva sopra l’erba verde m’apparve, con duo corna d’oro, fra due riviere, all’ombra d’un alloro, levando’l sole a la stagione acerba. Era sua vista si dolce superba ch’i’ lasciai per seguirla ogni lavoro, come l’avaro che’n cercar tesoro con diletto l’affanno disacerba. ‘Nessun mi tocchi’ al bel collo d’intorno scritto avea di diamanti e di topazi, ‘libera farmi al mio Cesare parve.’ Et era ’l sol già volto al mezzo giorno, gli occhi miei stanchi di mirar, non sazi, quand’io caddi ne l’acqua, et ella sparve. A pure white doe upon green grass Appeared to me, with two horns of gold, Between two streams, in the shade of a laurel, While the sun was rising, in the bitter season.

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Rachel Falconer Her appearance was so sweetly proud, That to follow her I abandoned all work; Like the miser who in seeking treasure With delight makes his work less bitter. ‘Let no one touch me’ round about her beautiful neck Was written with diamonds and topazes; ‘It pleased my Caesar to set me free.’ And already the sun had turned to midday, My eyes wearied with gazing, not satiate, When I fell into the water, and she disappeared.1

Petrarch’s sonnet is structured as a series of oppositions and oxymora. The entire visionary experience is mapped out between two extremes, the sacred purity of the deer (candida) and the profanity of the speaker (who in the last line, falls into water – io caddi – and betrays his fallen nature). With her two horns of gold, and appearing between two rivers, the deer is the visual symbol of the speaker’s irreconcilably dualistic universe. To the poet’s world belongs labour (lavoro) in the bitter season (la stagione acerba); to the deer’s, freedom (libera) and the power to transcend bitterness (disacerba). The prohibition (Nessun mi tocchi) in Petrarch’s sonnet does not lead to the onlooker’s despair; on the contrary, it increases the creature’s desirability. In other words, Cesare is a benevolent force in the poem; it pleases (parve) God to let the deer roam freely, and to grant the speaker a fleeting glimpse of her (apparve). If God owns the deer, she also expresses possessiveness towards ‘her’ deity. But if the vision of the collared deer is itself positive, it is also foreign to the speaker’s own world. In this dualistic schema, there is no bridge between the sacred and the profane. This dualism can also be seen in the sonnet’s temporal organisation, a feature that is effaced in Wyatt’s translation. ‘Una candida cerva’ unfolds in the simple (completed) past tense. The white doe first appears to inhabit a timeless realm; in the fourth line, we then hear that she appears to the speaker at dawn. The vision lasts the space of a morning, then disappears as the sun approaches midday. Petrarch brilliantly conveys the speaker’s sense of temporal suspension while the vision lasts, and then the return of post-Fall temporality at the end of the sonnet (Et era ’l sol gia volto). But the key temporal marker, upon which the whole of the sonnet turns, is the quando of the final line. It is this ‘when’ that divides the time of the speaker into a then and a now, a pre- and post-Fall consciousness. The ‘when’ is the decisive temporal split which divides the speaker’s dreaming from his waking self and the desiring io from the ella he so desires. But it is also the temporal split that makes the vision narratable. Looking back at the time before ‘when’, the speaker is able to frame his vision within a specific temporal sequence. More importantly, he is able to stand outside and beyond the self who gazes wearily at the untouchable deer. The speaker’s unfortunate fall into the water is also, simultaneously, a conversionary baptism which permits the ‘new self ’ to speak of the ‘old self ’ as a separable identity. The temporal break signified by quando allows Petrarch to plot desire along a single trajectory, with a final resolution.

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Although, of course, Petrarch re-narrates and re-plots Laura’s unattainability many times in his Rime, here in ‘Una candida cerva’ the deer appears to the speaker once and then is gone. By contrast, Wyatt’s sonnet takes place in a present tense of indefinite duration. His most decisive resistance to Petrarch lies in his refusal to emplot his knowledge of the deer into the narrative structure of a single, conversionary experience. Estrin argues that the chronological sequence of octet and sestet are reversed in Wyatt’s sonnet (1994: 138). She claims that the speaker glimpses the deer in the final six lines, and that this prior event explains the emotional outpouring of the first eight lines. But can we even assume that Wyatt’s speaker actually sees, or has seen, the deer of which he speaks? If so, when does this happen? Wyatt’s sonnet lacks chronological coherence. There is no decisive ‘when’ to distinguish the present time of narrating from the time of narration in which the deer may actually have been glimpsed. Thus, unlike Petrarch’s, Wyatt’s sonnet conspicuously lacks the conversionary point which breaks past from present speakers, and turns vision into narratable experience. Wyatt’s rejection of Petrarchan temporal organisation (in Bakhtinian terms, his reordering of Petrarch’s visionary chronotope) accompanies other, thematic, changes. Wyatt’s Cesar is secular, possessive, and tyrannous, but his ‘Diere’ is also secular and arguably powerful herself. Wyatt’s added description of her as ‘wylde for to hold: though I seme tame’ suggests a powerful duplicity not present in Petrarch. There is a suggestion that this duplicity might equally be exercised against the speaker, his rivals, or Cesar himself. In Petrarch’s sonnet, Cesar and the deer belong to the sacred world, in contrast to the poem’s fallen speaker. In Wyatt’s, we discover unlooked for affinities between both the deer and the speaker, and the speaker and Cesar. As Elizabeth Heale notes, Wyatt’s speaker is feminised by the hunt (Heale 1998: 7). In the lines, ‘as she fleeth afore, / faynting I folowe’, both hunter and hunted lack agency; both are victims of the courtly chase. But the speaker’s vain attempt ‘to hold the wynde’ (line 8) is also an imitation of Cesar’s possessive act of ‘holding’ the deer by collaring her (line 14). Thus the speaker identifies by turns with feminine and masculine, with the ‘Diere’ and Cesar, with possessed and possessing subjects in the poem. As a subject, then, the speaker is unfinalised in terms of gender and social position, in addition to lacking a definite ‘address’ in time, as we have seen. But if Wyatt’s speaker is an unfinalised subject, it might be objected that the text itself is finalised; it has a definite beginning, middle, and end. So the subject achieves closure in so far as it is enclosed in a finished poem. While this is arguably true of any published text, the intertextuality of ‘Who so list’ is distinctively open-ended, especially in its relation to Petrarch. Wyatt resists the authority of his Italian model by turning to the prosodic rhythms and verse forms of earlier English verse. As J. W. Lever has shown, Wyatt gradually evolved his own sonnet structure, evolving from Petrarch’s two-part to his own tripartite division, three quatrains concluded by a rhyming couplet (Lever 1956: 34). After Wyatt’s death, Surrey developed this form, which became known as the ‘English’, as opposed to ‘Italian’, sonnet. In ‘Una candida cerva’, the octave and sestet form two halves of a diptych which together represent a ‘finalised’ visionary experience. Muir and Thomson arrange Wyatt’s sonnet in similar

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form on the page, although the manuscript contains no stanzaic division (Wyatt 1969: 5). The editors further guide the reader’s eye towards the Petrarchan model by indenting Wyatt’s text to create two quatrains within the octet, and two triplets within the sestet, producing the Petrarchan rhyme scheme, abba abba cdd cee. But this editorial arrangement obscures Wyatt’s emphasis on the final couplet, Cesar’s ‘don’t touch’, which functions as a ‘twist in the tail’, a retort to what has come before. Arranged differently, Wyatt’s sonnet appears to be closer to the new English type, with the rhyme scheme abba abba cddc ee. At the same time, however, the third quatrain does not stand alone syntactically or semantically, so the structure is not entirely and unambiguously ‘English’. In terms of its structure, ‘Who so list’ hovers between Italian and English types; the sonnet enacts the claim to agency, as it were, by asserting its distance from both existing models. The intertextual conflict with Petrarch is evident not only in the sonnet’s structure, but also in its play of syllabic versus accentual metres. Here again, we find evidence of an ‘English’ rhythm being juxtaposed with an Italian one, or more precisely, Wyatt’s English approximation of Italian rhythm. This conflict over rhythm is especially evident when the punctuation of Egerton MS 2711 is retained (as reproduced above, following Hughey 1934–5: 414–15) rather than modernised as in Muir and Thomson’s edition (Wyatt 1969). There is some dispute over whether the heavy pointing of the manuscript is Wyatt’s, or that of Nicholas Grimald, or an unknown scribe (Daalder 1971: 214), but it seems to have been the version authorised by Wyatt for circulation and, until contrary evidence comes to light, should be considered integral to the text. The heavy pointing of the Egerton MS not only governs syntactic breaks and pauses, but also gives a rhythmic structure to the sonnet, wherein each of the first twelve decasyllabic lines is divided into five accents or stresses. Each five-beat line is then further subdivided by a mid-line caesura, producing units of varying rhythm. The most striking examples of rhythmic punctuation occur in lines 5 and 10. Here the ungrammatical pointing serves to emphasise the speaker’s attempts to break away from the chase. Having failed to break free, the speaker then changes to a lighter pointing, and a more rapidly flowing iambic rhythm. These rhythmic variations occur within the regular ten-syllable, five-beat line, which Wyatt employs in imitation of Petrarch’s eleven-syllable lines. His most decisive break with Petrarchan rhythm occurs in his final two lines, where he abandons the five-beat syllabic line in favour of the four-beat accentual line of traditional English lyric. Wyatt’s songs and ballads had regularly employed the traditional English accentual metre, where the number of beats or accents in a line is counted, rather than the number of syllables. After his visit to Italy in 1527, Wyatt had begun experimenting with quantitative and syllabic metres, in which, respectively, the length of vowels and the number of syllables in a line are counted. In ‘Who so list’ and a number of other Petrarchan sonnets, Wyatt unusually hybridises both syllabic and accentual metre systems. Although the couplet of ‘Who so list’ may be scanned as two ten-syllable lines (‘wylde’ is disyllabic, according to Mason), its heavy mid-line and end-stopped punctuation permits of no ambiguity as regards its stress pattern. Each half-line unit contains two

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accentual beats, regardless of the number of syllables in the half-line. This ostentatiously chiming beat reads like an imposition of order on the ‘wylde’ and dramatically varied rhythms of the previous quatrains. With each four-beat, accentual line severed by a mid-line caesura, the last two lines form a self-enclosed double chiasmus. This severely symmetrical closure contrasts strongly with Petrarch’s lyrical and introspective diminuendo. To this conscious Englishing of Italian syllabic rhythm might be added the poem’s use of alliterative lines (‘fleeth afore / faynting I folowe. I leve of therefore’) and homely aphorisms (‘sithens in a nett I seke to hold the wynde’), both characteristics of English lyric verse. J. W. Lever finds a political allegory in the clash of national metric forms: ‘beneath this artificial conformity [of Italian syllabic metre] the old English stress patterns with their turbulent beat fought hard to reassert themselves, like feudal barons under the yoke of Tudor despotism’ (Lever 1956: 18). But the political parallel is inexact in ‘Who so list’ because it is the despotic Cesar who introduces the ‘turbulent beat’ of accentual metre. Moreover the idea that a return to accentual forms signified the reassertion of English liberty against foreign despots would have been contested by some of Wyatt’s contemporaries. In terms of metre, English ballads and songs are not without their own ‘artificial conformities’ of course, as they are governed by their own generic conventions (one conspicuously not adopted in ‘Who so list’ is the lack of an individualised narrator). Rather than asserting one verse tradition’s superiority over the other, Wyatt’s unusual hybridisation of sounds and structures seems rather to declare his difference and distance from either tradition, while maintaining a close dialogue with both. While structurally the final couplet is closed, semantically it is open-ended, and intertextually it leaves questions unanswered about the sonnet’s relation to its Italian model. Wyatt’s two lines, ‘noli me tangere: for Cesar’s I ame: / and wylde for to hold: though I seme tame’, are a loose translation of Petrarch’s ‘Let no one touch me … It pleased my Caesar to set me free’. Wyatt strikingly translates Petrarch’s Nessun mi tocchi into the Latin noli me tangere, Christ’s words to Mary Magdalene after his resurrection, in the Vulgate Bible. As Patricia Thomson and Cathy Shrank have shown, the Vulgate line appears in the commentary to Wyatt’s edition of Petrarch (Shrank 2007: 393; Thomson 1959: 225–33). But this does not explain why Wyatt chooses to stress the biblical allusion over the vernacular phrase, nor why he doubles this effect with another biblical echo immediately afterwards (‘Cesar’s I ame’ approximating Matthew 20:20, ‘render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s’ (see Shrank 2007: 393). Moreover, the second line of Wyatt’s couplet, while ostensibly reiterating the sense of the first, Petrarchan line, in fact introduces a host of new ambiguities. Why should the speaker expect to surprise the reader with the knowledge that the deer turned out to be wild? Wouldn’t the hunt metaphor lead us to expect it to be so? Are the connotations of ‘wylde’ in this instance wholly negative, suggesting ‘unruly’ or ‘foreign’, or are they positive, meaning ‘untouched’ or ‘pure’, as in Petrarch? Likewise, is ‘tame’ a positive attribute of the ‘Diere’ (‘chaste’, ‘obedient’) or a negative one (‘of a prostitute’, ‘owned’). The ‘letters plain’ on the collar seem to be anything but ‘plain’ on

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closer scrutiny. The paratactic link, ‘and, graven’ is much looser and more ambiguous than ‘for [because], graven’ might have been. The weak syntactic link suggests an inability to clarify why the ‘Diere’ should have become suddenly untouchable, or where the speaker stands in relation to her in the poem’s present. Indeed, the final line, ‘wylde for to hold: though I seme tame’ in several senses applies equally well to the poem’s speaker as to the ‘Diere’. The speaker is ‘wylde’ in the sense that he both is, and is not, assimilable to the identity of the poem’s author, just as the situation alluded to in the poem both is, and is not, referential to Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn. And finally, Wyatt both is, and is not, deferential to his Italian model in that he freely changes the sense and rhythms of Petrarch’s lines, yet retains their ‘foreignness’ with respect to English accentual verse. In this way, the more closely one reads this ‘authentically’ confessional poem, the less one grasps of the ‘inwardness’ of its elusive speaker.

Notes 1

My translation of Petrarch draws on translations by d’Amico 1979, Musa 1985, and Mason 1986.

References and Further Reading Brigden, S. (1996). ‘ “The shadow that you know”: Sir Thomas Wyatt and Sir Francis Bacon at court and in embassy’. The Historical Journal, 39/1, 1–31. Burrow, C. (2004). ‘Wyatt, Sir Thomas (c.1503– 1542)’. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Online edn., 2008 , accessed 3 Feb 2009. Crewe, J. (1988). Trials of Authorship: Anterior Forms and Poetic Reconstruction from Wyatt to Shakespeare. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Daalder, Joost (1971). ‘Some problems of punctuation and syntax in Egerton MS 2711 of Wyatt’s verse’. Notes and Queries, 18, 214–16. d’Amico, J. (1979). Petrarch in England: An Anthology of Parallel Texts from Wyatt to Milton. Speculum artium 5. Ravenna: Longo. Dasenbrock, R. W. (1988). ‘Wyatt’s transformation of Petrarch’. Comparative Literature, 40/2, 122–33.

Durling, R. A. (ed. and trans.) (1976). Petrarch’s Lyric Poems. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Estrin, B. L. (1994). Laura: Uncovering Gender and Genre in Wyatt, Donne, and Marvell. London: Duke University Press. Ferry, A. (1983). The ‘Inward’ Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fox, A. (1989). Politics and Literature in the Reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Greenblatt, S. (1980). Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Greene, T. (1982). The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry. New Haven: Yale University Press. Heale, E. (1998). Wyatt, Surrey and Early Tudor Poetry. London: Longman. Hughey, R. (1934–5). ‘The Harington manuscript at Arundel Castle and related documents’. The Library, 15, 388–444.

Wyatt’s ‘Who so list to hunt’ Kennedy, W. (1994). Authorizing Petrarch. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kerrigan, J. ‘Wyatt’s selfish style’. Essays and Studies, 34, 1–18. Lever, J. W. (1956). The Elizabethan Love Sonnet. London: Methuen. Mason, H. A. (ed.) (1986). Sir Thomas Wyatt: A Literary Portrait. Bristol: Bristol Classical Press. Muir, K. (1963). Life and Letters of Sir Thomas Wyatt. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Musa, M. (1985). Selections from the Canzoniere and Other Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nott, G. F. (1816). The Works of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey and of Sir Thomas Wyatt the Elder, 2 vols. London: T. Bensley, for Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown. Richards, J. (2003). Rhetoric and Courtliness in Early Modern Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Shrank, C. (2007). ‘ “But I, that knew what harbred in that hed”: Sir Thomas Wyatt and his posthumous interpreters’. Proceedings of the British Academy, 154, 375–401. Southall, R. (1964). The Courtly Maker: An Essay on the Poetry of Wyatt and his Contemporaries. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Thomson, P. (1959). ‘Wyatt and the Petrarchan commentators’. Review of English Studies, ns 10/39, 225–33. Thomson, P. (1964). Sir Thomas Wyatt and his Background. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Thomson, P. (ed.) (1974). Wyatt: the Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Walker, G. (2005). Writing Under Tyranny. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wyatt, Thomas (1969). The Collected Poems of Sir Thomas Wyatt, ed. K. Muir and P. Thomson. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press.

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The Heart of the Labyrinth: Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus Robyn Bolam

I… Since I exscribe your Sonnets, am become A better lover, and much better poet. ( Jonson, ‘To the noble Lady, the Lady Mary Wroth’)

Although there are instances of sixteenth-century sonnet sequences being attributed to women writers, Lady Mary Wroth was the first Englishwoman to publish a complete sonnet sequence and a long work of fiction of undisputed female authorship. In the 1620s, she was also probably the first female to create a dramatic comedy, Love’s Victory, though its text was not printed until 1988.1 While women sonneteers may not have been quite as rare as previously supposed (see Smith 2000: 415; Smith 2005), Wroth’s originality and range remain striking for any author, but particularly for a Renaissance woman: she is now widely recognised as one of the most exceptional and outstanding writers of her day. In 1621 her controversial 558-page prose romance, The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, appeared with a separately numbered, forty-eightpage sequence of sonnets and songs, entitled Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, appended to it.2 Pamphilia, the fictional writer of the sonnet sequence, and Amphilanthus, her inconstant lover, are characters in Urania, where examples of their poetry appear. Although the appended sonnets are linked to Urania, they can be read successfully on their own. Born Mary Sidney, like her greatly respected aunt and godmother Wroth had an impressive family heritage to which she drew readers’ attention on the title page of Urania. She had a female mentor and role model in her aunt, but did not follow her ‘rare and pious example’3 as a translator of religious literature, choosing instead to concentrate on traditionally male-dominated genres and original, secular texts. Her father, Sir Robert Sidney, though not as celebrated as his siblings for literary accomplishments, nevertheless left a manuscript of sixty-six poems (including an incomplete corona of sonnets; see Sidney 1984), which his daughter appears to have read

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and recalled during the writing of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. It is also possible to see her adoption of the Elizabethan romance and sonnet sequence favoured by her uncle, Sir Philip Sidney, as an attempt to revive and continue Sidneian literary tradition at a time when these genres were no longer fashionable. While many features of her verse are conventional, she is even more experimental than he in her treatment of the Petrarchan sonnet, experimenting with sestet and octet variations and often deviating from tradition in subject and style, particularly in her use of enjambment between stanzas. Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia and Astrophil and Stella are echoed in her The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania and Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, but although Wroth identified her work with that of her uncle, she also demonstrated their differences. She followed and revered her aunt, yet showed that she was a new kind of Renaissance female writer. Like Urania (a lost, lamented, and significantly absent shepherdess in Arcadia, who is given a prominent place as Wroth’s title figure in her own romance), Wroth was involved in a quest – not, as in the case of her character, for lost origins, but for a place in literary tradition which she could call her own. It is significant that, in Urania, Pamphilia, the character most associated with Wroth, inherits her kingdom from her uncle rather than her father, suggesting a parallel with Wroth’s literary inheritance. It is also possible that Wroth’s poetry was not as apolitical as critics have previously inferred. Rosalind Smith emphasises Wroth’s political alignment with radical Protestant writers at court and views her as ‘positioning her sequence in a wide political and religious frame, and in a Protestant literary tradition integrating both Sidneian and radical Spenserian agendas’ (Smith 2000: 431). For Smith, Wroth’s choice of genre – a Petrarchan sonnet sequence from an earlier period – suggests ‘a pointed and public rejection of the present court in favour of that period’ (Smith 2000: 416). Mary Wroth wrote 105 sonnets in all: the published Urania contains nineteen; there are three in a manuscript of the second part of Urania, which was not completed or published; and eighty-three comprise the published Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. It is possible that, as well as being a literary friend of Jonson, she exchanged manuscripts with Donne and others.4 A holograph manuscript of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, corrected and revised in Wroth’s hand, is held today in the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington (Folger MS V.a.104). This contains five sonnets and a song, which were not printed elsewhere, and two sonnets and seven songs that were later incorporated into Urania. The fourth sonnet in the published Pamphilia and Amphilanthus does not appear in the manuscript. Wroth corrected her manuscript to make minor changes to language, particularly to improve grammar or metre. When the poems were published, spelling was modernised, punctuation was altered (often to avoid enjambment), the order of the poems was changed, and some were not printed. As the 1621 version (Wroth 1621) includes changes (particularly to punctuation) which are not necessarily Wroth’s, and some which may be printer’s errors, I have followed Josephine Roberts (Wroth 1983) in using the selection and sequence of the printed edition with the Folger manuscript’s versions of the poems,

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modernising spelling and punctuation as lightly as possible. As well as Wroth’s separate numbering for each part of the sequence, I have cited Roberts’s continuous system for clarity.5 Roberts suggests that the paper on which the manuscript was written can be dated as early as 1587 (Wroth 1983: 62), the probable year of Wroth’s birth, but the exact time of writing is unknown, although it seems likely to have been after her husband’s death in 1614. (Robert Wroth left her with large debts and a month-old son, who died two years later, taking her last claims to his father’s estate with him, and perhaps prompting her to consider writing for publication.) The 1621 published version of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus contains four numbered sequences of sonnets interspersed with songs. Between the sequences are two transitional sections of unnumbered sonnets and songs and a third of four numbered songs. The name ‘Pamphilia’ appears at the end of the first and last sonnet sequences, as if to authenticate her fictitious authorship.

Pamphilia to Amphilanthus: A Matter of Names Wroth’s choice of the persona, Pamphilia, suggests the double role of female writer and constant lover. The Greek-based reading of ‘Pamphilia’ is ‘all-loving’, while Amphilanthus, her unfaithful lover and cousin, has a name meaning ‘lover of two’.6 May Nelson Paulissen suggests Latin derivations: ‘one who loves everyone’ or is ‘beloved of all’ (from Pamphilus) and ‘one who scatters light all around’ for Amphilanthus (a combination of amphi, ‘all around’ and lanthus, light or lantern). Additionally, Wroth’s persona shares her name with Pamphilia, the prolific poet and prose writer, who lived during the reign of Nero, but in Urania Pamphilia is a queen and writes her poetry and tales privately. Roberts speculates that the name may ‘be a witty conflation’ of Sidney’s Pamela and Philoclea, or may ‘ironically recall Sidney’s philandering character, Pamphilus, who abandons women’ in the New Arcadia. She also notes that ‘Pamphilus’ is a ‘common name for a male lover mistreated by women … in sixteenth-century ballads and romances’.7 Despite its melancholic tone, such ironies suggest that Pamphilia to Amphilanthus is not tragic. Pamphilia suffers trials in her love for Amphilanthus, but she survives and, in the published version, finally seems stronger, if resigned. The work charts the speaker’s progress in exploring the nature of love and the virtue of constancy that Pamphilia champions. The choice of her characters’ names indicates the multiplicity of approaches Wroth demonstrates throughout, which makes her a rewarding subject for feminist criticism. Jeff Masten points to ‘absence as a palpable presence’ (Masten 1991: 74) in these sonnets, and Naomi J. Miller focuses on the ‘multiplicity of speaking positions for women’ in Wroth’s texts (Miller 1996: 5). Puns on the poet’s name or on the semi-disguised named of a loved one were popular in Elizabethan sonnets. In Wroth’s case possible examples have been discerned which may refer to herself and her lover, William Herbert, third earl of Pembroke

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(1580–1630), her cousin and a man ‘immoderately given up to women’.8 As a young widow, she had two children by him – William and Catherine. In Sonnet 8 (P9) of her Crown of Sonnets (p. 84), Wroth follows a contemporary practice of punning on her own name (Wroth/worth): He that shuns love doth love himself the less And cursèd he whose spirit not admires The worth of love, where endless blessedness Reigns, and commands, maintained by heavenly fires Made of virtue, joined by truth, blown by desires Strengthened by worth … (Sonnet 8, 1–6)

This can be read as an assertion of the part love plays in the development of the self. To love is to be beloved, as Pamphilia’s name suggests. Love brings self-esteem: constant love brings ‘endless blessedness’ and is ‘maintained by heavenly fires’, not the destructive fires of desire fanned by Cupid in the very first sonnet. ‘Virtue’, which originally appeared as ‘vertu’, like the pun on worth/Wroth and its link with the character of Pamphilia, brings the divine power of love into play with the finest aspects of art and self. Earlier, in Sonnet 48 (P55), the final poem of the first sequence, Pamphilia/Wroth appears to be punning on the name, ‘Will’, possibly alluding to Herbert’s Christian name. Again, images of fire portray the strength of her consuming passion: How like a fire doth love increase in me, The longer that it lasts, the stronger still, The greater purer, brighter, and doth fill No eye with wonder more, then hopes still be Bred in my breast, when fires of love are free To use that part to their best pleasing will … My breath not able is to breathe least part Of that increasing fuel of my smart; Yet love I will till I but ashes prove. (Sonnet 48, 1–6, 12–14)

The last line implies eventual destruction, but up to that point the speaker describes a love with the fierce intensity of a heavenly phenomenon – surpassing the experience of the senses and showing no sign of abating. It is a fitting end to the first part of the sequence, creating a bridge between physical lust and the enduring nature of constant love, which transcends transitory worldly passion. There is clearly an autobiographical element to Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, but it would be unwise to think that the sequence is no more than a literary working out of Wroth’s complex personal life. The references to herself and, perhaps, Pembroke, are not at the forefront. A

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continuous reassessment of the nature of love is the true subject, and while this is carried out by a woman, she appears to be appealing to lovers of both sexes.

A Woman’s Voice Mary Wroth was not the first woman poet to speak through a female persona, but she was the first writer of a complete English sonnet sequence to do so (Miller 1996: 35). At times her approach is ungendered, but there are also moments when the fact that a woman is speaking helps to intensify the pathos and courage of the work; however, the subject is still as relevant to men as to women, as Jennifer Laws has shown. If it were not for the title of the sequence, a reader would not immediately identify the speaker as female. We hear a voice conjuring up the deepest darkness of night to describe the speaker’s temporary dislocation from her conscious self and the onset of a vivid dream, which takes total possession of her thoughts. In this dream ‘winged Desire’, rather than the traditional Ovidian doves, draws Venus’ chariot, in which Cupid intensifies the heat of burning hearts, held aloft by his mother (as portrayed on the title page of Urania). When Venus places a heart ‘flaming more than all the rest’ against the speaker’s breast and commands Cupid to enclose it within her body (‘now shut, said she, thus must we win’) he obeys, and the speaker’s original heart is ‘martyred’. On waking, the speaker discovers that the legacy of her dream remains; the flaming heart has consumed her own and burns on in its place, making her a lover against her will. Thinking of Cupid’s arrow (which is not mentioned in the sonnet), several critics and editors substitute ‘shoot’ for ‘shut’, but the latter is in both manuscript and printed versions of the poem and expresses love’s seizure of control in a more graphic image of the body’s violation than can be expressed solely by a wound from an arrow-head. Wroth begins her sequence with allusions to Petrarch’s Trionfi d’Amore, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Dante’s Vita Nuova, and conventional Renaissance tropes, such as ‘sleep (death’s image)’, but we are also aware, from the title, that her helpless lover is not the traditional male. Nor is the object of desire chastely unattainable, as was the usual Petrarchan beloved. Like Shakespeare’s Dark Lady, he is only unattainable to the speaker because he is lavishing his favours temporarily on others. Amphilanthus is rarely addressed and is always physically absent. He is not given a voice (even Sidney’s Stella and Spenser’s Elizabeth speak briefly). Pamphilia does not create a blazon of his physical attributes, and when she briefly portrays his appearance it is in the conventional imagery of former sonneteers, seeing his eyes as ‘Two stars of Heaven’ (Sonnet 2 (P2)). Her unconventionality is in applying such Petrarchan tropes to a man. In her sonnets Pamphilia writes almost therapeutically – to obtain ‘some small ease’ – but putting her grief into ‘lines’ only increases her pain and makes her conclude: ‘grief is not cured by art’ (Sonnet 8). In Sonnet 39 (P45), she portrays

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herself as one long used to sorrow who is able to suffer in silence, being unable to ‘enjoy / My own framed words’, which are inadequate, ‘For where most feeling is, words are more scant’. In this she is set apart from the ready wits, of whom she says, ‘your plenty shows your want’. True feeling, then, is privately expressed to the self in ‘purer thoughts’ than words can express: it is not for public consumption. The reader therefore feels privileged to be party to such private explorations and the poems we are reading are experienced as if they were the speaker’s most inward thoughts. By this means Wroth draws her audience into Pamphilia’s mind, encloses us in her thoughts. Images of enclosure abound. In the first poem the newly enclosed heart is associated with negative aspects of desire – destruction, pain, and danger. Later, Wroth demonstrates the positive aspects of enclosure, which allow the reader to share Pamphilia’s thoughts, and Pamphilia to find comfort in the private world of her own mind. Far from being limited, this is an enclosed world that brings freedom with its endless potential for expansion of thought – both enabling Pamphilia to dwell on thoughts of Amphilanthus and allowing her to continue her analysis of love in a movement towards self-knowledge, as in Sonnet 23 (P26). Like the personae of the male sonneteers, the speaker focuses mostly on her own state but, unlike many of them, does so mainly to concentrate on the nature of love itself. In this, Wroth seems closer to Shakespeare than to other, nearer, contemporaries. From the outset Pamphilia is shown to be singled out by love against her will. Amphilanthus is introduced in the second sonnet solely as the object of her desire in order to demonstrate the strength of the passion she now has to combat, and all responsibility for her predicament is shown to rest with love itself, rather than the beloved. Pamphilia’s plea is for justice and responsibility on love’s part. In Sonnet 3 (P3), addressed to love, she introduces a link with the third part of the sequence, ‘A Crown of Sonnets Dedicated to Love’: ‘Think but on this; / Who wears love’s crown, must not do so amiss, / But seek their good, who on thy force do lie.’ Both lover and beloved are helpless victims in this view. These first poems of Pamphilia’s show her joy in the loved person alongside the pains produced by his indifference and are concerned with her fluctuating moods as she struggles with the effects of love. Pamphilia staves night off in Sonnet 4 (P4), but welcomes her in Sonnet 15 (P17); within Sonnet 16 (P18) she switches from trying to hold back sleep to abandoning herself to it,’ let me for ever sleep, / And so forever that dear image keep, / Or still wake, that my senses may be free.’ In both cases the plea is for control – and it is love rather than Amphilanthus who has taken that control from her. The secret nature of her love is also a source of pain. In Sonnet 22 (P25), which incorporates images apparently associated with Jonson’s Masque of Blackness (in which Wroth performed), Pamphilia considers the Indians ‘who … to blackness run’ as ‘better’ than her pale, grieving self because they have sight of the sun they worship and, as was believed, carried evidence of its power in the colour of their skin, whereas she has to carry the power of her love hidden in her heart. Jeff Masten sees Wroth as

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privatising the essentially public Petrarchan genre, and suggests that she is opposed to the kind of gestures of theatrical display in her verse that her male counterparts used. Sonnet 22 suggests the opposite, with Pamphilia’s regret that her sacrifices are ‘hid as worthless rite’. This surfaces again in Sonnet 36 (P41), in which she addresses her ‘poor heart’, whose ‘chief pain’ is that she must hide her love ‘From all save only one who should it see’. Her need to conceal enables her to produce an internal drama far more intense than any public play; nor does Pamphilia wholly escape the public gaze. Bemoaning love’s blindness in Sonnet 42 (P48), she reasons: For had he seen, he must have pity showed; I should not have been made this stage of woe Where sad disasters have their open show O no, more pity he had sure bestowed. (11–14)

It is not open display alone that is the problem, but the state of her unhappiness, which she would prefer to keep from the eyes of the world. Through their perceived role as transmitters of light to produce sight, and as transmitters of love, eyes are powerful images throughout. Pamphilia complains of Cupid’s lack of vision, but she is nevertheless able to find joy in the arms of the blind female, Fortune, who tells her to trust them both in Sonnet 31 (P36). Eyes or lack of them help to characterise all the main figures, but such bodily features are often used to imply far more than the physical. In Sonnet 6 (P6), ‘the depth of my heart-held despair’ recalls the first sonnet in its Sidneian compound ‘heart-held’ – both despair because Pamphilia’s heart is held by Venus and because it is a heart full of despair. In Sonnet 13 (P15), her emotional struggles are expressed in terms of bodily survival. Here, a lover, once fed on love, is now starved of it; she is an easy victim whose blood is constantly being shed because she allows it, wishing (as she does in Sonnet 6) for death as the only hope of release. Her suffering is graphically evoked through metaphors of the physical body, which are used paradoxically to negate the physical and describe a spiritual state. In Sonnet 26 (P30) Pamphilia alludes to the Petrarchan exchange of hearts in her request to Amphilanthus to ‘Send me your heart which in mine’s place shall feed / On faithful love to your devotion bound.’ Her own heart is now in his breast, and without his in its place she cannot survive. Importantly, she hopes that, once in her body, his heart, feeding on her ‘faithful love’, will realise ‘the sacrifices made / Of pure and spotless love which shall not fade / While soul and body are together found.’ In Sonnet 33 (P38) Pamphilia briefly looks ahead to the Crown of Sonnets when she temporarily dismisses criticism of Cupid because humans neglect to consider their own folly. She makes the case for admiring his ‘sacred power’ rather than treating it as a child’s mischief – for if love takes offence humans will ‘be born without fire’ into a passionless existence. To make the best of the human predicament Cupid needs to be praised, not mocked. The sequence is constantly turning and enclosing, looking

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back and then moving forwards in a labyrinth of emotional struggles and reasoning.

The Labyrinth as Image, Metaphor, and Style Following Petrarch, like many English sonnet writers before her, Wroth made use of the image of a labyrinth in her poetry (see Lisle 1938: 65 and n.94). Nancy Miller draws attention to the fact that in his sonnet sequence, transcribed sometime after 1596 (the date of the manuscript’s watermark), Robert Sidney wrote of a ‘saving thread’ of the lady’s faults, which allowed the lover to come to his senses and escape the ‘maze’ of love. She concludes that, just as, in one version of the myth, Ariadne ‘provided Theseus with the thread, only to be abandoned by him … on … Naxos to commit suicide in despair’, ‘embedded’ in Robert Sidney’s use of these images ‘is a trope of masculine abandonment of the feminine other, justified as masculine escape from female wiles, with the understated possibility that female sexuality is perceived as the monstrous power lurking at the centre of the maze of male desire’ (Miller 1996: 42). Countering this, in the first published English defence of women possibly written by a woman, Jane Anger writes of a labyrinth ‘At the end of men’s fair promises’ in Her Protection for Women (1589). She urges women to ‘shun men’s flattery, the forerunner of our undoing’ as men’s rule ‘is to flatter: for Fidelity and they are utter enemies. Things far fetched are excellent, and that experience is best which cost most: Crowns are costly, and that which cost many crowns is well worth God thank you, or else I know who has spent his labour and cost, foolishly’ (Anger 1589: C4v). Wroth follows neither writer directly, but is closer to Anger’s line in her choice of ‘A Crown of Sonnets dedicated to Love’ which spring from Pamphilia’s costly experience, i.e. her suffering because of Amphilanthus’ inconstant behaviour and her struggle with her own emotions. Dubrow suggests that she stresses the labours of love from a female perspective, even to the point of her spelling of ‘labourinth’ in the Folger holograph manuscript, and Mary Villeponteaux links her own observation that ‘the labyrinth is also an image used to describe a womb in some early medical texts’ to this (Villeponteaux 1999: 172). Love’s complexities present Pamphilia with her biggest challenge and opportunity for heroism: ‘In this labyrinth, where shall I turn?’ – as well as her best consolation – that it is not a maze with dead ends, but an ongoing journey which leads to the heart of the labyrinth and constant love itself, ‘the soul’s content’. Madelaine Bassnett stresses the positive aspects of the labyrinth: ‘The circularity of the crown gives the impression that the narrator herself is being encircled, that the labyrinth’s spiralling path encloses and perhaps supports her in her searching’ (Bassnett 2004: 61–2). This reinforces the positive reading of the enclosure imagery mentioned earlier. The problem for Pamphilia is not knowing how much further she needs to twist and turn in these labours before she will be delivered from her task. She must also keep hold of the thread: ‘As the final line of each sonnet in the corona is repeated in the first

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line of the successive sonnet, Pamphilia’s voice becomes her thread of love expressed, revealing her chosen path through the labyrinthine turns of her male beloved’s fluctuating behavior’ (Miller 1996: 42). The repetitions demonstrate the extent of her perseverance, and either a growing weariness or a strengthened conviction, depending on her state of mind at a particular point. Mary Moore draws together many labyrinthine aspects of Wroth’s style, pointing out that her crown of sonnets ‘represents perplexity even as it perplexes’ (Moore 1998: 109). What Moore sees as deliberately labyrinthine style, a male critic has held up as a weakness: ‘Each sonnet really should be grammatically self-contained, but Wroth did not manage that. In fact, she often has difficulty with her grammar; her sentences frequently lose direction, impetus and clarity’ (R. E. Pritchard, in Wroth 1996: 11). Like Moore, I prefer to give her credit for innovation. Pamphilia’s dilemma infuses style as well as content. The repeated lines at the beginning and end of each sonnet finally enclose the crown completely when the last line of the final sonnet repeats the first line of the first. This appears to be enclosure without closure, for Pamphilia leaves the reader with her unanswered question, ‘In this strange labyrinth how shall I turn?’ In the printed version the opening use of this phrase is punctuated with a comma, which contrasts with the emphatic question mark at the end of the final stanza. This works against the symmetrical circularity of the manuscript in Wroth’s hand, which has a question mark in both places, suggesting either that the speaker is in the same state at the end of the sequence as at the beginning – and that no progress has been made – or that the way she turned initially was inwards, to an exploration of the nature of love itself and her relation to it, and that the final question mark therefore indicates an even greater awareness of the complexities of her dilemma, but still provides no answer to it. Of course, if she cannot turn to right or left, move forward or go back, the only other way is upwards – and by the end of the sequence it could be argued that Pamphilia has turned in this direction, i.e. a spiritual one, via her inward explorations. She now looks ‘To truth, which shall eternal goodness prove’ to give her everlasting joy. There is resignation and maturity as well as newly found contentment in her final resolution to ‘Leave the discourse of Venus and her son / To young beginners’, who will use ‘stories of great love’, such as hers, as their muse ‘and from that fire / Get heat to write the fortunes they have won’. The fire of Pamphilia’s physical passion has finally become a fire of inspiration for other writers and lovers. A woman’s poetic art, rather than the woman herself, is the new Muse. Notes 1 2

Wroth 1988, edited by Michael G. Brennan. For modern editions, see Wroth 1977, 1983, 1996. 3 Sir Edward Denny to Lady Mary Wroth, 26 Feb. 1621–2, cit. Wroth 1983: 239.

4

From Margaret Quilligan’s unpublished paper (1992 MLA convention), cit. Miller 1996: 34. 5 Signified by P before the number. For alternative views to Roberts’s assumptions about Wroth’s manuscript see Masten 1991: 68–9.

Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus 6 7

Urania, First Part, Book 2, p. 250 (Wroth 1621). See Roberts’s introduction to her edition of The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania (Wroth 1995: xxv–xxvi).

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See Hyde 1988: I, 73; Wroth 1983: 43; Roberts 1982: 1 (1).

References and Further Reading Anger, Jane (1589). Her Protection for Women. London. Bassnett, Madelaine (2004). ‘ “Injoying of true joye the most, and best”: desire and the sonnet sequences of Lady Mary Wroth and Adrienne Rich’. English Studies in Canada, 30, 49–66. Beilin, Elaine (1981). ‘The onely perfect vertue: constancy in Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus’. Spenser Studies, 2, 229–45. Beilin, Elaine (1987). Redeeming Eve: Women Writers of the English Renaissance. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dubrow, Heather (1995). Echoes of Desire: English Petrarchism and its Counterdiscourses. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Farrell, Kirby, Elizabeth H. Hageman, and Arthur F. Kinney (eds.) (1990). Women in the Renaissance: Selections from English Literary Renaissance. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Fienberg, Nona (2002). ‘Mary Wroth’s poetics of the self ’. Studies in English Literature: 1500– 1900, 42, 121–36. Harvey, Elizabeth D. and Katharine Eisaman Maus (eds.) (1990). Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Haselkorn, Anne M. and Betty S. Travitsky (eds.) (1990). The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: Counter-Balancing the Canon. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Hyde, Edward (1988). Edward Hyde, First Earl of Clarendon’s History of the Rebellion, ed. W. Dunn Macray. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jones, Ann Rosalind (1990). The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyric in Europe, 1540–1620. Bloomington: University of Indiana Press. Lamb, Mary Ellen (1990). Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Family Circle. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Laws, Jennifer (1996). ‘Gender and genre in the sonnet sequences of Philip Sidney and Mary Wroth’. Deep South, 2, 1–7.

Lewalski, Barbara Kiefer (1993). Writing Women in Jacobean England. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Lisle, John C. (1938). The Elizabethan Sonnet Sequences. Studies in English and Comparative Literature. New York: Columbia State University Press. Luckyj, Christina (2001). ‘The politics of genre in early women’s writing: the case of Lady Mary Wroth’. English Studies in Canada, 27, 253–82. MacArthur, Janet (1989). ‘ “A Sydney, though unnamed”: Lady Mary Wroth and her poetical progenitors’. English Studies in Canada, 15, 12–20. Masten, Jeff (1991). “Shall I turne blabb?”: circulation, gender, and subjectivity in Mary Wroth’s sonnets’. In Naomi J. Miller and Gary Waller (eds.), Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England (pp. 67–87). Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Miller, Naomi J. (1996). Changing the Subject: Mary Wroth and Figurations of Gender in Early Modern England. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky. Miller, Naomi J. (2007). ‘Lady Mary Wroth and women’s love poetry’. In Patrick Cheney, Andrew Hadfield, and Garrett A. Sullivan (eds.), Early Modern English Poetry: A Critical Companion (pp. 195–205). New York: Oxford University Press. Miller, Naomi J. and Gary Waller (eds.) (1991). Reading Mary Wroth: Representing Alternatives in Early Modern England. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Moore, Mary (1998). ‘The labyrinth as style in Pamphilia to Amphilanthus’. Studies in English Literature 1500–1900, 38, 109–25. Moore, Mary B. (2000). Desiring Voices: Women Sonneteers and Petrarchism. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Pacheco, Anita (ed.) (1998). Early Women Writers 1600–1720. London: Longman.

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Paulissen, May Nelson (1982). The Love Sonnets of Lady Mary Wroth: A Critical Introduction. Salzburg: Institut fur Anglistik und Amerikanistik, University of Salzburg. Pritchard, R. E. (1996). ‘George Herbert and Lady Mary Wroth: a root for “the flower”?’ Review of English Studies, ns 47, 386–9. Quilligan, Maureen (1990). ‘The constant subject: instability and female authority in Wroth’s Urania poems’. In Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katharine Eisaman Maus (eds.), Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry (pp. 307–35). Chicago: Chicago University Press. Randall, Martin (ed.) (1997). Women Writers in Renaissance England. London: Longman. Roberts, Josephine A. (1982). ‘The biographical problem of Pamphilia to Amphilanthus’. Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature, 1, 43–53. Roberts, Josephine A. (1996). ‘ “Thou maist have thy Will”: the sonnets of Shakespeare and his stepsisters’. Shakespeare Quarterly, 47/4, 407–23. Sidney, Robert (1984). The Poems of Robert Sidney, ed. P. J. Croft. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Smith, Rosalind (2000). ‘Lady Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus: the politics of withdrawal’. English Literary Renaissance, 30, 408–31. Smith, Rosalind (2005). Sonnets and the English Woman Writer, 1560–1621: The Politics of Absence. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

Villeponteaux, Mary (1999). ‘Poetry’s birth: the maternal subtext of Mary Wroth’s Pamphilia to Amphilanthus’. In Sigrid King (ed.), Pilgrimage for Love: Essays in Early Modern Literature in Honor of Josephine A. Roberts (pp. 163–75). Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Walker, Kim (1996). Women Writers of the English Renaissance. New York: Twayne; Prentice Hall International. Wilcox, Helen (ed.) (1996). Women and Literature in Britain 1500–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wroth, Mary (1621). Urania. London. Wroth, Mary (1977). Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, ed. G. F. Waller. Salzburg: Institut fur Englische Sprache und Literatur, University of Salzburg. Wroth, Mary (1983). The Poems of Lady Mary Wroth, ed. Josephine A. Roberts. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Wroth, Mary (1988) Lady Mary Wroth’s Love’s Victory, ed. Michael G. Brennan. London: Roxburghe Club. Wroth, Mary (1995) The First Part of the Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, ed. Josephine A. Roberts. Renaissance English Text Society 7th series, 17. Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies. Wroth, Mary (1996). Lady Mary Wroth Poems: A Modernized Edition, ed. R. E. Pritchard. Keele: Keele University Press.

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Ovidian Erotic Poems Boika Sokolova

Ovidian narrative poems form a distinct group in the output of erotic writings in Renaissance England. Their stories, which end with death and metamorphosis, tell of male and female wooers pursuing physical love, give voice to sexual desire, set out the pain and comedy of failure, and revel in the joys of sex. Known (since the nineteenth century) as epyllia (minor, little, or short epics), these poems flourished briefly in fin-de-siècle Elizabethan England and petered out in the seventeenth century. Along with their subject matter – the sexual, passionate, and violent encounters of mythological deities and humans – many of their formal features and narrative strategies come from Ovid. The epyllion also openly avails itself of the conventions of the Petrarchan sonnet, which it both exploits and overturns. Formally, these longish narrative poems are shaped in six-line stanzas or in rhyming couplets. Other important features are the use of narrative digressions, playfully ironic narrator personae who directly address the reader, and blazons, which conceptualise the female body as a lush landscape. The erotic poems explore human psychologies, attitudes, and proclivities, their readers are taken on a voyage through the lows and highs of desire, played out among legendary characters in deliquescent settings. Sexual love with its passionate excesses is presented with mild irony and an amused, non-judgemental acceptance of its varying dispositions; gender barriers are seen as permeable, as are those between species. In the unstable universe of the epyllion, the final metamorphosis becomes an escape from the ultimate cruelty of life, a challenge to the inevitability of death, a consolatory fiction – the tragic lovers Hero and Leander will live together as bright-coloured finches, young Adonis will return every spring as a purple anemone. The aestheticised escapism of the epyllion captures something fundamental to life’s reality – its mutability and ambivalence. Though the narrator is always male, as is the implied readership, the female characters whose dramas are played out are given an independent subjectivity and inwardness; female sexuality is presented as autonomous, powerful, and often controlling. Elizabethan erotic poems prefer to dramatise

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the frustration of fulfilment and emphasise ‘the comic, violent and grotesque aspects of erotic experience’ (Keach 1977: 144). It is generally agreed that Thomas Lodge’s Scylla’s Metamorphosis (1589) stands at the outset of this fashionable Elizabethan development, of which Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (published in 1593) and Christopher Marlowe’s first two sestiads of Hero and Leander (written c.1591 and published in 1598) are the two outstanding examples. In the late years of Elizabeth’s reign, the younger generation of poets gave the epyllion a satirical twist, as John Marston’s The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image (1598) illustrates. Though concerned with philosophical and aesthetic matters, George Chapman’s Ovid’s Banquet of Sense (1595) can also be placed in the group of erotic poems, because of its Ovidian subject matter and style and the sense of sexual expectation it creates. Pushing erotic poetry beyond the Ovidian story, though still using it as a model, Thomas Nashe discarded mythological paraphernalia to write openly about sex as commodity, in his witty and obscene Choice of Valentines (1592?; see Hibbard 1962: 56–8). Ovid’s influence on late sixteenth-century English literature was all-pervasive as he had entered the bloodstream of Elizabethan culture through the curriculum of the schools opened after the Reformation. The generation of Shakespeare and Marlowe (both born in 1564), and those educated in the years shortly before and after this, had their sense of the poetic modelled in great measure by the Roman poet who offered an inexhaustible source of stories, characters, and voices, which were imprinted in the young imaginative minds through learning by heart. In spite of his popularity with educators, Ovid’s earthly paganism sat uncomfortably in the cultural climate of the reformed state. Arthur Golding’s landmark translation of the Metamorphoses, when it emerged between 1565 and 1567, offered an Ovid moralised so as to meet the expectations of a Christian culture. On the other hand, and in an illuminating contradiction, it was the Latin Ovid that was taught in Elizabethan schools. In the final decades of Elizabeth’s reign religious controversy affected the fortunes of this legacy. The 1580s and 1590s brought in restraint and moral tightening: in 1582, the Privy Council banned the teaching of Ovid; four years later, in 1586, a decree requiring all published work to have ecclesiastical approval was issued. The end of the 1590s felt the harsher side effects of these changes. One of its consequences was that Marlowe’s translation of Ovid’s Amores was banned as licentious and burned. Still, his Hero and Leander, printed in 1598, was not affected by the ban. Perhaps Marlowe’s racy opening sestiads sounded less provocative after George Chapman had added four more, executed in a more sober tone. Indeed, the Elizabethan interest in the destructive side of erotic experience suggests an uncertainty about the shifting criteria of moral correctness, though the rise of the epyllion in the midst of this period points in another direction as well – to a specific moment when secular literature with a significant degree of social autonomy was coming into being (Callaghan 2003: 34). Multiple theatre closures caused by the plague in the early 1590s made patronage particularly important for the survival of a poet, and the epyllion became a channel by which favour might be obtained. Thomas Nashe, started his ‘wanton elegy’ with

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a dedicatory sonnet to ‘The Right Honourable Lord S.’ – Ferdinando, Lord Strange, one of Shakespeare’s patrons, is the supposed dedicatee; Hero and Leander was ‘offered’ by its publisher, Edward Blunt, to Sir Thomas Walsingham (patron to both Marlowe and Chapman) with a direct reference to the latter’s love to the deceased poet. Patronage could provide financial security – Southampton is known to have spent vast amounts on clients (Shakespeare 2007: 13–14, 35–1), but no less importantly, it helped poets to acquire an author status, something the writing of plays at this stage did not. As their presence in various miscellanies testifies, the erotic poems were originally disseminated in manuscript form among coteries of aristocratic and professional readers. Though the envisaged readership was primarily male, there is also evidence of women possessing copies of erotic poems (Moulton 2000: 54–70). Soon, the epyllion made it to the printing presses, and sold well, as the several reprints of Venus and Adonis testify. Thomas Lodge, Shakespeare, and John Marston chose to appear for the first time in print as authors of epyllia in the Ovidian vein, which suggests that there was prestige in the undertaking (Moulton 2000: 23). Materialised in the printed book, the erotic poem dedicated to an aristocratic patron joined the circulation of cultural capital as its author became a participant ‘in the collective consciousness of publishing individuals’ and, in this way, in the dissemination of authority over the creation of meaning and taste (Montrose 1996: 85). Elegantly gift-wrapped in layers of dedicatory sonnets and prefatory letters, the epyllion played a role in spreading a particular aesthetics to a learned public, and created a sense of belonging to a fashionable club. Even though Ovid’s sensuality had become morally problematic, his authority as a poet remained uncontested. Francis Mere’s Palladis Tamia. Wit’s Treasury (1598) gives the ultimate in accolades by comparing a living contemporary to the ancient great: ‘the sweet witty soul of Ovid lives in mellifluous honey-tongued Shakespeare; witness his Venus and Adonis, his Lucrece, his sugared sonnets among his private friends’. Venus and Adonis was to become the most often cited of Shakespeare’s works in his time, a proof that he had himself become a gold standard. Apart from cementing his fame as an author, it is very likely that the narrative poems and the sonnets, dedicated to the arbiter elegantiae, the brilliant earl of Southampton, made Shakespeare rich; in spite of theatre closures, poetry had helped him move upmarket (Shakespeare 2007: 14). The taste for erotic poetry in sixteenth-century England was not unique. European Renaissance literature abounds in erotic writings in a variety of literary forms, spanning the range from the scurrilous, bawdy, and obscene to the teasingly playful and highly literary. A radical and influential way of writing the erotic in this period is associated with Pietro Aretino (Aretine) (1492–1557), poet, playwright, and art critic. In 1527 he irreverently applied the Petrarchan sonnet form to compose commentaries on a series of pictures of sexual poses.1 Voyeuristic, detailed, and self-assertive, these poetic accounts of all manner of sexual positions and the thrill of lovemaking caused a huge scandal (see Aretino 1988). Living in the courtesan culture of Venice, Aretino extensively wrote in defence of courtesans and commercialised sex. Along with his writings, Aretino’s reputation became an inspiring model for English poets (Moulton

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2000: 127–43).2 He was a strong example of authorial freedom and independence (Aretino 1988: 14). This humbly born man had become fabulously wealthy and immensely influential. He could scourge verbally the powerful of the day and get away with it. Popes and princes feared him and sought his friendship. The Italian provided a model of social advancement, poetic autonomy, and licence. He had defended his explicit writing about sex by arguing that sex ‘had produced … the Titians and the Michelangelos; and after them the popes, the emperors and the kings’ and that not sex, but rather ‘one’s hands should be … kept hidden, because they wager money, sign false testimony … gesture obscenely, rend, destroy, strike blows, wound, kill’ (Aretino 1988: 20). As an influential art critic, he had argued for the identity of poetry and painting or art because of their imitation of nature and the objectivity of the seeing eye. By asserting that the visual, too, resides in the mind, traditionally regarded as the seat of poetry, he stressed the interconnectedness between the two. The imitation of nature, this fundamental principle of Renaissance artistic thinking, was presented by him as a ‘form of male control over the alluringly female’ nature, while poetry and painting were conceptualised as ‘brother’ rather than ‘sister’ arts (Hulse 1990: 108). Thus the development of powerful illusionism of the art of perspective painting and chiaroscuro was connected to the development of fresh poetic techniques pushing the limits of linguistic representation in new directions (Gent 1981: 6–66). Mannerist painting had removed ‘the fourth wall’ by allowing figures to spill out of their frames and by unbalancing the poise of the art of the high Renaissance, just as the epyllion directly addresses and involves its reader. In either painting or poetry it is mostly impossible to separate the erotic and aesthetic, the intellectual and the sensual – the visual is the basis of the erotic (Hulse 1981: 106). Sly the tinker is aroused by ‘wanton pictures’ in The Taming of the Shrew (Induction, 1.43); similar is the function of the painterly imaginative verbal cameos of the amorous horses in Venus and Adonis. Art as a way of arousing pleasure of all kinds is indeed a very Ovidian (as well as Aretinian) subject, as his Amores, Metamorphoses, and Ars Amatoria amply reveal. In the shifting sands of religious politics in post-Reformation England, his urbane wit and pagan delight in the physical offered a precedent, ‘lawful as eating’ (The Winter’s Tale 5.3.111), for delving into illicit pleasure in a youthful, playful, and elegant way, for developing a poetry expressing desires and selfhood transcending those of the Petrarchan sonnet. Ovid’s legacy offered an eroticism accommodating the male, female, and the androgynous, the heterosexual and homoerotic, a self-conscious virtuosity which teasingly played with issues of power and gender while ostensibly engaged with its own aestheticism, a tendency which, in the visual arts, found expression in the knowing fallaciousness of the visual conceit of the trompe l’oeil (Greenwood 1988: 22). The epyllia address their readers in a tone of complicity, launch into dazzling descriptions, revel in the wit of their own narrators, gesture to classical sources. They are concerned with the interrelatedness of sexual, emotional, artistic, and poetic experience and aware of the titillation they produce through their self-conscious artistry.

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Hero and Leander Marlowe’s Hero and Leander was published in 1598, though written before 1593. Mingling the erotic with the playful and classical, the first two sestiads exhibit an enhanced awareness of the significance of painterly detail in producing aesthetic and voyeuristic pleasure. George Chapman, who had the poem published, wrote the continuation, Sestiads 3–6. The sections written by Marlowe and Chapman cannot be more different, an indication not just of personal and temperamental differences, but of a shift away from Ovid’s pagan eroticism in the course of the decade. While Marlowe’s devil-may-care brilliance invites the reader into a glittering world of sexual desire and satisfaction, Chapman is in the grasp of gods consumed by rages, passions, and hatreds. In opposition to Marlowe’s pagan comedy, a moral order makes itself apparent in Chapman’s tragic section – Leander is visited in a dream by a figure named Ceremony, who warns him of the dangers of neglecting nuptial rites (3.105–54). Thus, from Marlowe’s focus on the ‘rites of love’ driven by desire, the poem moves to socially codified rites and rituals of a divine political order. Metrically, the poem is written in heroic couplets (rhymed five-foot iambic couplets), which give it a swiftness, lightness of touch, and epigrammatic sharpness. The first sestiad offers a feast of stunning descriptive passages, a veritable banquet ‘for men to gaze upon’ (1.8). The reader is kept agog by exuberant descriptions, and teased both by having his curiosity aroused and the gratification of an erotic climax deferred. In walks Hero, ‘Venus’ nun’ (1.45), decked out like Botticelli’s Primavera. Clothed in sparkling silks and veils embroidered with ‘artificial flowers and leaves / Whose workmanship both man and beast deceives’ (1.19–20), this ornately ravishing vestal provokes passionate desire. Hero’s cold chastity comically jars with the exuberance of her dress and the destructive effect she has on men, so much so that her ‘kirtle blue’ is splattered with ‘many a stain, / Made with the blood of wretched lovers slain’ (1.15–16). She is a perfect objet d’amour (of the kind found in the sonnet) and an ironically presented trompe l’oeil. Marlowe does not miss an opportunity to amplify effect: Apollo has courted her ‘for her hair’ (1.5–6), Cupid’s blindness is caused by looking at her face (1.38), Nature itself weeps that so much beauty belongs to a mortal and will eventually die (1.45–50). Nor are those killed by her rebuff less than a legion: ‘Poor soldiers stand with fear of death dead-strooken / … Await the sentence of her scornful eyes; / He whom she favours lives, the other dies.’ (1.121–4) Leander appears in a no less spectacular extended blazon (1.51–90) starting with his ‘dangling tresses that were never shorn’ (1.55), then slyly sliding down his naked body through images of consumption invoking sensual desire: Even as delicious meat is to the taste, So was his neck in touching, and surpassed The white of Pelops’ shoulder. I could tell ye How smooth his breast was, and how white his belly … (1.64–7)

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Leander’s nakedness, like Hero’s veils, inflames both ‘the loves of men’ (1.70) and gods, turning him into a complex site of lustful cravings. The ‘vent’rous youth of Greece’, ‘Jove’, ‘wild Hippolytus’ (1.77–8), and ‘the barbarous Thracian soldier’ are all ‘moved by him’ (1.49–90), as is Hero. The lovely boy, deliciously and dangerously attractive to both sexes, is himself, as the culture requires, heterosexual, but Marlowe never lets go of the other, less lawful desires he awakens, as when ironically noting that men thought ‘he was a maid in man’s attire’ (1.83), or when he has Leander fly in amorous Neptune’s face: ‘I am no woman, I’ (2.192). The dual attraction of a young man is a theme Shakespeare developed in his sonnets, as it were in the very bones of the theatre for which he and Marlowe wrote, where female parts were taken by boys. While the comedy around Leander builds on the sexual attraction he provokes in men and women, that around Hero builds on the opposition between her innocence and a consistently evoked female stereotype presenting women as ‘naturally’ prone to guiles and carnality. A similar comic duality, innocence/competence, operates behind Leander, too. His long speech against virginity is an exercise in sophistry (1.208–310), which, in another genre, would be worthy of an Iago: This idol, which you term virginity, Is neither essence subject to the eye, No nor to any one exterior sense, Nor hath it any place of residence … (1.270–3; compare Othello 4.1.16–17)

Authorial presence is wryly ironic, omniscient, and knowing, working through tongue-in-cheek self-deprecation, as in ‘My rude pen / Can hardly blazon forth the loves of men’ (1.69–70), and crucially appearing at the very point when the modest narrator has already managed to stir erotic fantasies to the uttermost. Other comments directed ‘in confidence’ to the reader vary from banal wise saws, ‘Love deeply grounded hardly is dissembled’ (1.185), to strategic advice, ‘Women are won when they begin to jar’ (1.332), to knowing misogynist ‘winks’, ‘All women are ambitious, naturally’ (1.428), or direct addresses, ‘Harken awhile, and I will tell you why’ (1.85). The narrative weaves its way through digressions: Mercury and the country girl (1.386–484), or Neptune’s tale about the shepherd and the Leander-like boy ‘so fair and kind / That for his love both earth and heaven pined’ (2.192–201). Whether invented or classical, these provide a master class on how to produce imaginative delight and postpone the gratification of curiosity. Like Hero’s elaborate clothes, these additional narratives provide aesthetic pleasure and whet voyeuristic appetite while self-consciously displaying their own cleverness. In the course of a seamless flow of stories within stories, the authorial voice almost casually mentions ‘divine Musaeus’ (1.52), not only to signal respect for its classical source, but also to draw attention to its own mastery and the fact that here and now the legendary Greek poet has been

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outdone by a contemporary one. Thomas Nashe would later affirm this poetic self-confidence by speaking of ‘divine Musaeus … and a diviner muse … Kit Marlowe’ (Gent 1981: 5). Along with the digressions about the lusts of gods, the setting is also heavily eroticised. Hero makes her offerings in Venus’ ‘church’ decorated with cunningly executed images of ‘the gods in sundry shapes, / Committing heady riots, incest, rapes’ (1.143–4). By choosing to speak of the temple as ‘church’ Marlowe irreverently challenges the Christian subtext of the word (which is then applied in a broader sense), just as the subject matter in Aretino’s sonnets challenges the idealisms associated with the form. The position of the virgin officiating in an ambience of violent sexuality is deeply ironical – and slightly disturbing. For his part, Leander also moves in sexually aggressive surroundings – as he swims across the Hellespont to Hero’s tower, old Neptune makes lascivious passes at his naked body (2.153–80). The second sestiad deals with the lovers coming together in Hero’s tower, and takes the reader through the process of their discovery of physical love rendered as a series of comic dissimulations, failures, and misunderstandings. At the outset, on seeing Leander emerge from the sea, Hero faints; he tries to revive her by ‘breathing life into her lips’ (2.3), an action which resembles a kiss; she recovers and makes a seductively slow move away from him, dropping her fan so that he can bring it to her. He, for his part, ‘being a novice, knew not what she meant’ (2.13), but decides to stay ‘and after her a letter sent’ (2.140). As Leander gets to the tower, he finds that the door is left, of course, wide open, so ‘he need not climb’ (2.19). Lines 20 to 85 induce a subversive series of false conclusions: ‘He asked, she gave, and nothing was denied’ (2.25). At the end of that night, however, Leander still ‘suspected / Some amorous rites or other were neglected’ (2.63–4). As it turns out, it has all been foreplay, made even more exciting and comic by the fact that Leander has emerged from the sea quite naked. Only on his second visit does he, after some ‘Herculean toil’ enter ‘the orchard of the Hesperides’, the forbidden place ‘Whose fruit none rightly can describe but he / That pulls or shakes it from the golden tree’ (2.299–300). This classical image contains an inherent duality. On the one hand, it suggests ultimate sexual satisfaction – the golden apples given to Zeus and Hera as a wedding gift. On the other hand, stealing these apples from the tree where the Hesperides guarded them was laden with danger and was one of the labours of Hercules. In its complexity it presents sex as male heroic behaviour and treats Leander with tragic-comic compassion. Marlowe’s facetious narrator is particularly amused by Hero, both innocent and inviting, fighting for her virginity and yet, having lost it, wishing ‘this night were never done’ (2.301). This stereotypical wily woman, however, is quickly replaced by a touchingly innocent one grasped by a genuine feeling of shame, a frightened girl who makes the sheet into a tent to hide from the sight of naked Leander in her bed (2.264). In the final lines, Hero tries to slip out, but is held back by her lover thus ending half on the bed and half on the floor in a proleptic metamorphosis – ‘mermaidlike / One half appeared, the other half was hid / Thus near the bed she blushing

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stood upright’ (2.315–17). The sestiad ends, as the poem had begun, with the gaze of the reader focused on Hero, balanced ‘amid the contrary movements of adoration and laughter’ (Hulse 1981: 123). Marlowe’s virtuoso piece ends with the lovers’ awakening, yet what follows in Chapman’s following sestiad is not an aubade (a song celebrating awakening), but a story of a disturbing dream. Chapman toned down the erotic and dramatised the tragedy of the lovers as playthings of wilful and vengeful deities. Compared to the amused and wryly detached narrator of the first two sestiads, his authorial figure is more compassionate, with Hero at the emotional centre. At the very beginning of the third sestiad, in a dream, Leander is visited by Ceremony, who upbraids him for neglecting the rights of marriage and delivers a long speech about the dangers this portends. Superficially, this seems easy to correct, as Leander and his father immediately start preparing a wedding. However, human action begins to grate against the order of the gods. Hero is torn by guilt, not knowing how ‘she could look upon her sire’ (3.233) for fear that her eyes will give her away as the eye is ‘an animate glass that shows / In-forms without us’ (3.237–8). She also fears Venus. Dreading the consequences of forfeiting her virgin vows, she decides to dissemble in the hope that the goddess will not discover her treason. In a mirror-piece to Leander’s speeches against virginity (1.198–310) Hero spins an argument, which in the Marlovian context would have been comically persuasive, but which at this stage of the story proves the futility of love’s sophistry. Starting with the idea that lovers ‘make one of two’, she concludes that if ‘Leander did my maidenhead get, / Leander being myself I still retain it’ (3.358–60). In the world of Chapman’s poem, defined by the whims and rages of the gods, her attempt to justify deception, though viewed with understanding, is also exposed as a moral failure. In the fourth sestiad Hero attempts to disguise what has happened by sacrificing her hair and torn robes on the altar, which infuriates the goddess. However, at this point, the poem balances its position by turning the tables on the moral order itself – Venus is challenged by Leucote, one of the doves pulling her chariot: why should Hero not dissemble if Venus herself is a dissembler of the highest order, hiding under ‘innocent cheeks [her] wantonness’? ‘Why in your priest then call you that offence / That shines in you, and is your influence?’ (3.279, 283–4). Under Chapman’s pen Hero grows in stature and depth. Her spiritual torture is revealed in an artistic act of creation – in an elaborate piece of embroidery she represents her hopes, forebodings, and fears (4.37–101) that love will end in tragedy. Her ‘prophetic’ (4.109) fingers create a picture showing a fisherman pulling a heavy net out of the sea, which turns out to contain a lethal serpent that ‘in his bosom flew and stung him dead’ (4.91). Hero’s embroidery is described at some length, and forms one of the many digressions. Here, however, it is not living bodies that are at its centre, but their artistic representation. The verbal narrative thus points to the transferability of one artistic medium to another: as in Hero’ pictures, so in Chapman’s verses. While her talents are ‘Arachnean’, feminine, doomed to failure, and cannot withstand the adversities of mythical history, the Renaissance poet who comes to the

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rescue can restore the glory of the lovers, first sung by the father of all poets, divine Musaeus himself. The poem closes with series of shifts of thought suggesting the similarity between the work of the gods and that of the poet, the possibility for a metamorphic transformation of art into poetry. As the dead lovers are turned by Neptune into colourful finches, the poem pans on the colour symbolism of their feathers (6.282–91), and the power of poetry to express, the ‘true honour’ of love (6.292) in resistance to the ravages of mythical politics. Chapman’s story-telling is slower and more meditative than Marlowe’s, lingering over images and incidents, making the reader rethink their meaning, alienating us from the pressing immediacy of the erotic and inviting us into the realm of the moral, aesthetic, and political (Hulse: 1981: 132).

Ovid’s Banquet of Sense Chapman’s other poem, Ovid’s Banquet of Sense, written in stanzaic form, places voyeurism and the male eye at the heart of eroticism (Snare 1989).3 The poem plays with optical reversal, sophisticated transfer of signification, and extended digressions, similes, and metaphors linking together eroticism, metamorphosis, and the act of writing poetry (Snare 1989: 113). It tells the story of Ovid’s falling in love with Julia/ Corynna, Augustus Caesar’s daughter, as a process of awakening of the senses. Originally, the lover-poet is drawn to Corynna’s secluded bower by her song and fragrance, then his eye is captivated by her beauty; later, he ‘tastes’ her after persuading her to grant him a kiss, and finally he touches her as she willingly bares her breasts. At this climactic moment the lovers are disturbed by distant voices, and further voyeuristic gratification is suspended, but the poem has long before reached its erotic climax in the depiction of Corynna’s impact on Ovid’s sight. ‘Eye’ images are consistently conjured up: Corynna’s bower itself has the structure of an eye whose pupil is a statue of ‘Niobe, shedding tears’ (2) placed in a pool.4 Depending on the light and the position from which it is observed, the statue changes: from afar ‘it showed a woman’s face / Heavy and weeping; but more nearly viewed, / Nor weeping, heavy, nor a woman showed’ (3). In stanza 7, ‘In a loose robe of tinsel’, Corynna steps into the bower to redefine it from Niobe’s disempowered tragic eye to an eroticised space (9). In the watery centre of the bower’s eye, naked Corynna, though still invisible to the poet, is already an object of admiration in full view of the reader. The sublime moment of Ovid’s seeing (49) is prepared by a digressive epic simile comparing his reluctance to look with the womanish movements of the Thames before she embraces her lover the Ocean (44 and 45). Amorous Ovid blends into the eroticised landscape through feminine images until, like an Actaeon, he charges ‘the arbour with his eye’ (49); effecting a crucial reversal, he steps into the privileged seeing position which so far has been held by the narrator and reader. Then, through a selfreferential pun on his name Chapman/chapmen, he links himself with Ovid, the character of the poem, just before expounding a very Renaissance theory of

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perspective. This privileged seeing, whose source is in the eye of the artist, is used to support the argument of the interchangeability of poetry and art: Betwix mine eye and object, certain lines, Move in the figure of a pyramis, Whose chapter in mine eyes gray apple shines, The base within my sacred object is: On this will I inscribe a golden verse, The marvels reigning in my sovereign bliss, The arcs of sight, and how her arrows pierce: This in the region of the air shall stand In Fame’s brass Court, and all her trumps command. (64)

Once seen by Ovid, Corynna undergoes a series of imageal transformations into a map of paradise, her body becoming the Elysian fields, her arms, legs, and fingers turning to rivers and brooks (58–63). These recall the lover’s earlier feminised inscription in the forms of nature before he acquires a point of seeing, and suggest that the position of the observing subject is the one conferring erotic meaning on the observed object. As Ovid and Corynna vanish, the poem calls on readers to share in the creative effort by construing for themselves what has been left out. In a masterly conclusion aligning sexual enjoyment, poetic organisation, and the rules of perspective painting, the ‘royal hand’ (of the painter/poet?) provides the metaphorical centre connecting all art, literary and visual: But as when expert painters have displayed, To quickest life of monarch’s royal hand Holding a sceptre, there is yet bewrayed [shown] But half his fingers; when we understand The rest not to be seen; and never blame The painter’s art, in nicest censures stand: So in the compass of this curious frame, Ovid well knew there was much more intended, With whose omission none must be offended. (117)

The erotic, the poetic, and the visual are thus subsumed under similar principles, transcending the limits of individual arts and unambiguously commending their achievement as the product of a male subjectivity.

Venus and Adonis Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis is prefaced by a Latin epigraph from Ovid’s Amores, which, in Marlowe’s translation, runs as follows: ‘Let base conceited wits admire vile

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things, / Fair Phoebus lead me to the Muses’ spring’ (Shakespeare 2007: 127). This appositely declared high purpose in the language of the educated classes is followed by a dedicatory epistle (to the earl of Southampton), and might be related to events to do with his procrastination and refusal of a proposed marriage. There is no doubt that the reader is holding an exclusive product, intended for the delectation of a particular patron. Shakespeare found his story in the Metamorphoses, but significantly modified it. Ovid’s Venus is by accident grazed by Cupid’s arrow, which explains her passion. She is also matched with a virile Adonis, who is not overtly averse to her advances. Shakespeare’s goddess, on the other hand, is in the grasp of a lustful, unprovoked infatuation with a pre-pubescent boy not yet interested in sex.5 Thus, the poem inverts mythological and gender expectations and precludes the possibility of consummated sex. Like an overblown sonnet sequence, it dramatises the passion, frustration, comedy, and drama of a hopeful lover, forever persuading and always rebuffed by an emotionally cold beloved. The fact that the goddess of love herself is the slighted lover is one of the hyperbolic comic reversals on which the poem depends. On the level of erotic ‘event’, except for a few sweaty embraces there is precious little. The poem generates its tension from what does not happen, and its effect by juxtaposing contrasting elements. Venus is in amorous pursuit of Adonis; he is after the boar; both fail to obtain what they desire. Effects are always contradictory. Venus is fleshly ‘soft and plump’ (142) and feminine, but also muscular and capable of manhandling Adonis (31–5) with ease. Her powerful figure corresponds to the aesthetics attributed to her by painters and theorists like Aretino: ‘this goddess imparts her qualities in the desire of the two sexes’ and can accommodate in her female body a ‘male musculature’ ‘moved by virile and womanly feelings through an artifice of elegant vivacity’ (cit. Prado 1993: 77). However, it is precisely this monumental physique that makes her comical when she tries to be playful. As Venus offers to ‘trip upon the green’ (147) the poem juxtaposes her monumental figure with the fairy sprightliness she claims. Even when said to be walking upon a bank of violets, which ‘like sturdy trees support’ her (152), the language suggests heaviness. As she is, Venus is a match for heroic Mars whom she led ‘in a red-rose chain’ (110), not for Adonis, who in his own description, is still a ‘green plum’ (527). In opposition to this monumental and assertive Venus and in an obvious comic reversal, Adonis exhibits the bashful beauty of the sonnet lady. From the beginning, Shakespeare plays with the different meanings of ‘sport’, or ‘hunt’, both of which are essential to the story. The opening stanza masterfully introduces the theme, the inversion of gender roles, and the style. Venus, ‘sick-thoughted’, ‘like a bold-faced suitor’ (5–6) and red hot like the sun’s ‘purple-coloured face’ (1) is wooing ‘rose-cheeked Adonis’ (3) who loves hunting, but ‘love he laughed to scorn’ (4). The overabundance of complex adjectives signals the hyperbolic nature of events, while the patterning of images demonstrates the principle of shifting juxtapositions that will operate further on. The narrative abounds in symmetries and games on every level. It has been noted (Shakespeare 2007: 16) that the erotic climax comes right in the middle of the text (stanza 100 of 199, lines 595–600), and figures a situation in which Adonis is on top

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of Venus; however, in terms of the story, this constitutes an erotic anticlimax, since he is trying to revive her from her swoon, not make love to her. Another feature is the patterned insertion of cameo descriptions of animals (259–324, the horses; 613– 30, the boar; 679–716, the hare), intercut with reflections on the nature of art and poetry (289–94, 601–6). The poem has two large ‘movements’. As already mentioned, at the beginning traditional gender roles in sexual advances and linguistic persuasion are reversed to hilarious effect. Venus lavishes on Adonis exuberant praise, which, through its very presence and the nature of its rhetoric, undermines the perception of his manliness. ‘Thrice fairer than myself ’, begins Venus, ‘The field’s chief flower … Stain to all nymphs, more lovely than a man’ (8–9). After she lifts him off his horse (31–2) like a toy, she tries to ‘quench the maiden burning of his cheeks’ (50). Where he is red as a rose (10), she is red with lust (78); she burns with desire, he ‘with bashful shame’ (49); she exudes heat (175, 190, 194), he is ‘cold and senseless stone’ (211). Venus’ passion comes across as the ravenous appetite of an ‘empty eagle’ that needs to gorge itself full (55–60), while Adonis, ‘fastened in her arms’, looks like ‘a bird tangled in a net’ (77–8). Balancing moments representing him as a victim are those which reveal Venus’ constraint as gentle and generous, as when she offers him her body as a park where he, her deer (a pun on ‘dear’, 230), can graze. The next stanza creates an eroticised landscape of the lower part of her body, where he is invited to take shelter (235–40), at which ‘Adonis smiles as in disdain’ (241). In this section, Venus’ passion is also rendered through a language suggesting optical aberration. Parts of Adonis are seen as if through a magnifying lens: as he mouths scornful words, the dimples in his cheeks are likened to ‘lovely caves’, ‘enchanting pits’ with ‘mouths’ ready to ‘swallow’ her (246–7), a reversal of the images of hunger associated so far with her. Up to this moment he has been presented with a compassion due to a young boy almost bullied by another’s passion, yet, as he prepares to leave Venus, the narrative hitherto driven by her compulsive speeches of persuasion, postpones his departure by launching into a major digression: Adonis’ horse runs away to mate with a beautiful jennet, an event occupying the following eleven stanzas (259–324). Right in the middle of this new story, used as an extended guide to passionate mutuality, appears a direct address, beginning with ‘look’ (289), drawing attention to the simile that follows. It concerns the capacity of nature to create extraordinary creatures and the power of both painting and poetry to ‘surpass the life’ (289). Poised at the exact centre of the sequence about the horses, the stanza highlights the artifice involved in producing the narrative itself. In stark contrast to the ecstasy of the animals, the central characters perform something resembling comic wrestling. To stop Adonis, yet again, from going away, Venus feigns a swoon; to revive her, he ‘wrings her nose’, ‘strikes her on the cheeks’ (474) and, in the tussle, kisses her. Again he pleads his ‘unripe years’ (524), but she overpowers him, and feeling ‘the sweetness of the spoil, / With blindfold fury she begins to forage; / Her face doth reek and smoke, her blood begin to boil’ (554–5). Though almost comatose, like a captive bird ‘tamed with too much handling’ (560), Adonis

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manages to break free, declaring that the next day he will go hunt the boar. This time Venus collapses indeed and ‘sink[ing] down, still hanging by his neck, / He on his belly falls, she on her back’ (593–4). As already mentioned, this happens in the precise middle of the poem and provides a false sexual anticlimax. But this is also the moment when the poem turns on its axis and elegantly transits to its tragic second movement through another allusion to painting. Venus’ state is rendered through a reference to the locus classicus of the trompe l’oeil, a popular anecdote about the craft of the ancient painter Zeuxes: Even as poor birds deceived with painted grapes Do surfeit by the eye, and pine the maw, Even so she languished in her mishaps As those poor birds that helpless berries saw. (601–4)

Gathering into a focus the hopelessness of the situation through the image of the painted grapes, the stanza gestures back to the history of painting and at the same time reverses the attitude to Venus. So far, Adonis has been consistently likened to a captive bird; now Venus becomes a deluded and helpless one, and the narrative voice addresses her with true compassion: ‘But all in vain, good queen, it will not be’ (607). In this part of the poem, the maternal, nurturing, and protective side of Venus comes to the fore. She, though goddess of love, is doomed to lose the contest with the boar, who is dangerous, masculine, and destructive (624–30). In this context, ‘death’ (an Elizabethan word for orgasm) will not be a sexual fulfilment, but a fatal impalement. Venus tries endearingly maternal ploys to protect Adonis. One is to tell him a story about the hare, suggesting that he should hunt this harmless animal instead. As a last-ditch attempt to save him she urges the argument, typical of the sonnets, ‘make love, do not die in fruitless chastity’. In a long verbal flourish Adonis rebuffs her love as lust, which, though true, sounds like an oration delivered by a young pedant. At this stage the poem consistently foregrounds Venus’ reactions: at the noises of the hunt she ‘starts, like one that spies an adder’ (878); she runs through the bushes ‘Like a milch doe, whose swelling dugs do ache’ (876) to discover Adonis’ bloodied body, a moment figured as ‘murder’ of vision (1031–2). A cuttingly poignant simile, of vulnerable softness, based on a striking animal image, conveys the emotion: … as the snail, whose tender horns being hit, Shrinks backward in his shelly cave with pain, And, there all smothered up, in shade doth sit, Long after fearing to creep forth again: So at his bloody view her eyes are fled Into the deep recesses of her head. (1033–8)

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The lover’s loss, irreversible as an artist’s loss of sight, leaves the poet as the only ‘voice’ to bring the narrative to its statuesque finale. As the goddess leaves the human world in her chariot, with the purple anemone into which she has transformed Adonis lying on her bosom, the reader is poised between the emotion of a tragic metamorphosis and the pleasure of its complex poetic rendering into poetry. In its selfconscious craft, Venus and Adonis not only positions itself along with the art of Ovid himself, but claims to stand on a par with the ancient fame of the painter Zeuxes, thus linking art and poetry, the greatness of the past and the achievement of its author.

The Choice of Valentines While the epyllia discussed so far dress the erotic in the garb of the Ovidian, Thomas Nashe’s Choice of Valentines (known in his day as ‘Nashe his dildo’) discards the mythological paraphernalia for an overt London setting. Described by his contemporaries as the ‘English Aretine’, Nashe launched in the 1580s and 1590s a series of satirical invectives in the hyperbolic style of the Italian. This poem is an example of how ‘Aretinian’ subject matter, the appreciation of courtesans and brothels, can be accommodated within an Ovidian literary form such as the epyllion. At the poem’s centre is a situation found in Ovid’s Amores 3.7 (recently translated into English by Christopher Marlowe); the end gestures to the Roman poet as the source of inspiration. Two sonnets (the only ones Nashe ever wrote) bracket the text, whose addressee is an aristocratic patron. The first sonnet, an ironic (and excessive) dedication to, perhaps, Lord Strange, declares an Aretinian indignation at the hypocrisy governing the writing of poetry: Ne blame my verse for loose unchastity For painting forth the things that hidden are, Since all men act what I in speech declare, Only inducèd by variety.

The closing sonnet hopes to have ‘pleased’ the recipient friend and wishes, tongue in cheek, that ‘Ovid’s wanton Muse did not offend’. The poem begins on St Valentine’s Day when villagers entertain their sweethearts, drink ale, ‘perambulate the fields’, and ‘taste cream and cakes’ (Nashe 1972: 458–9). In contrast, the savvy city-dweller and narrator, Tomalin, goes to a brothel, trying to find an old flame called Frances, who has moved from a village to the red light district of London. Briefly, it seems that the man is seeking one he loves, but the illusion disappears as he strikes a hard-nosed transaction with the Madam. Eventually, Frances herself walks in, ‘Sweeping … the ground: / Her rattling silks my senses do confound’. After mock-serious exchanges as to why she is in the brothel, they spring into action, but the woman, with a professional sense of deferral of satisfaction, reveals herself bit by bit. A paradisal landscape emerges:

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A pretty rising womb without a weam [blemish] That shone as bright as any silver stream, And bare out like the bending of a hill, At whose decline a fountain dwelleth still That hath his mouth beset with ugly briars Resembling much a dusky net of wires. A dusky buttock barred with azure veins …

At this point, however, the man loses control. As he is about to see ‘Jerusalem’, he loses his erection, which displeases the woman, who sets about reviving it by ‘rub[bing] and chaf[ing]’. Recovery follows, as well as an extended description of the phases and rhythms of lovemaking, culminating in an orgasm for the woman. Yet the man suffers another setback. It turns out that the satisfaction he has given is not enough: Frances needs more, and claims to be able to get it in a different way. A new object appears in the economy of love – the dildo. The poem continues with a lengthy description of the object and the way it functions, presented as a mock-invective, framed as confidential advice for sexually active males. In describing the ‘eunuch’ and ‘counterfeit’ dildo, the poem again runs through the technicalities of a sexual act. The dildo is presented as metamorphosed into a ‘youth’ with autonomous existence, the complete substitute for a man. Interestingly, in this brothel setting, Nashe’s text gives freedom to an ‘independent [female] sexuality, which needs to be satisfied’ (Orgel 1996: 161), an important Aretinian idea. The dildo, which threatens masculinity by revealing its instability, places the woman in a position of independence and control. Frances emerges as a power boasting a ‘manly thigh’ and is a source of heat (like Shakespeare’s Venus); her sexual organ is twice referred to as ‘he’ (e.g. ‘his mouth’ in the above quotation). The poem’s irreverent wit, literary allusion, self-conscious mock-seriousness, and explicitness do not objectify the woman in a pornographic way. Rather, the text suggests that the man is there to satisfy the woman’s desires, not the other way round. The brothel emerges as an ambiguous place equally serving female and male needs, a very Aretinian notion. Unlike the other epyllia, which mix love with sex, Nashe’s text keeps commodified sex and love apart, as in the real economy of the city. The poem was banned in 1599, along with Marlowe’s translation of the Amores, but the fact that it has survived in a number of manuscript collections testifies to its popularity with a sizeable group of readers (Moulton 2000: 188–92).

The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image It is only apposite that John Marston’s The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image (1598) should come as a final illustration of the contradictory strands running through the culture of the 1590s. Its story is both Ovidian and metamorphic, but the style avoids embellishments, such as digressions and allusions. The end result is also very different

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in that the poem views the amorous pleasures which it encourages the reader to imagine not as pleasurably joyful, but as problematic, even shameful. Marston takes the story of Pygmalion, a sculptor who creates an ivory statue of perfect beauty and falls in love with his own creation. His prayers to Venus are answered, the statue becomes a real woman, the lovers end up in bed. The final stanza even announces that they have a daughter, and suggests a sense of an ever-after for the artist and his animated creation. The erotic dynamic of the poem, however, is not created by the final scene, but rather by what precedes it – the futile passion for a piece of exquisitely carved bone. Marston consciously provokes voyeuristic titillation as he launches in a prolonged description of how Pygmalion’s gaze traces the statue’s hair (stanza 6), lips, and chin (7), then slips down her breasts of polished ivory (8) and, finally, rests on the ultimate place of sexual satisfaction, where ‘Venus hath her chiefest mansion’ (9).6 What is peculiar is that there is relatively little descriptive detail and the reader is involved in Pygmalion’s growing excitement by being encouraged to unleash his own sexual imagination, to ‘conceit but what himself would do’ (34). There is also the disturbing thought that what is being performed most of the time is not sex but a strange form of masturbation (Moulton 2000: 24). Pygmalion is so aroused by his statue that he ‘strips him naked quite’ (25) and begins to rub himself against it: ‘His breast her breast, oft joined close unto … Hands, arms, eyes, tongue, lips and all parts did woo’ (17). What is disturbing, too, is that Pygmalion’s lover, though transformed into a human being, remains an object, a female body with no other function but the sexual satisfaction of its/her own maker, deprived of individuality and subjectivity. It has been pointed out that the poem shares with later forms of pornography a conscious sense of its arousing effect on the reader (Moulton 2000: 25), a consciousness of causing ‘wanton itching’ and ‘lustful thoughts’ (33), and appeals to a knowing imagination (38). The poem ends abruptly, eliding the description of real sex, having in its progress simultaneously aroused and undermined erotic desire by relating it to forms of religious depravity: Pygmalion’s protracted ‘winking’ at the crotch of the statue is likened to ‘the subtle city-dame’ looking through her parted fingers, prying instead of praying in church (10); his infatuation with the effigy is seen as another sinful and damnable act, of ‘peevish Papists crouch[ing] and kneel[ing] / To some dumb idol’ (14). The poem is deeply divided in its attitudes in relation to many of the questions that might be asked of it. In reference to the debate about the relationship between nature, art, and poetry, Pygmalion can be seen as subverting ideas of art’s power. As Pygmalion, a sculptor of supposedly perfect images tries to put his infatuation into words he comes up with listless Petrarchan tropes: ‘Such red and so pure white, / Did never bless the eye of mortal sight’ (6). Nor is the perfect artistic creation capable of satisfying erotic desire. Divine intervention, an art of a different order, is required to make sex possible. Marston seems to be ambiguously offering a critique of art as a kind of vanity, imagining that it can vie with nature or the divine, while simultaneously exploiting his own text’s capacity to titillate. In denying the pleasures of playful Ovidian aestheticism and expressing the fear that ‘idle poesy’ might become ‘obscene’,

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by urging its readers to ‘Expect no more’ (38), the poem signals an ambivalence and uncertainty about its own status, and questions the moral acceptability of literary eroticism and the relationship between the poet and his audience (Moulton 2000: 27). Though escapist in its subject matter, the erotic poem flourishing during Elizabeth’s fin de siècle moved beyond the lines of Petrarchan idealism into the Ovidian realm of sex, a region of contradictory, powerful, and painful emotions. In doing so, it pushed the limits of convention, questioned received ideas of gender and power roles, and reflected on the nature and value of art and poetry. Seen in a larger socio-cultural context, this moment in history helped promote the poet to the status of author – a creator of cultural value – by making playfully explicit his mastery over a complex aesthetic product and by forming a bond with a reading public capable of appreciating it.

Notes 1

2

His I sonnetti lussuriosi was a response to the suppression of sixteen engravings by Marcantonio Raimondi, known as I Modi, made after paintings of their mutual friend Giulio Romano. For the dissemination of Romano’s images and their influence specifically on Andrew Marvell, see Turner 1999. Around 1530 Aretino wrote a book of dialogues, the Ragionamenti, discussing the three positions of women in society, as wives, nuns, and whores. He arrived at the conclusion that they were best off as courtesans. By engaging with established gender categories, class, and

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politics, Aretino draws attention to the political and social side of the problem. Snare offers an excellent discussion of the poem, not as turgidly philosophical, but as erotic and artistic. The present section is indebted to this study for many insightful observations. Quotations are from Chapman 1941; in-text references are to stanza numbers. Shakespeare 2007: 26–31; all quotations are from this edition, by Katherine Duncan-Jones and H. R. Woudhuysen. Quotations are from Marston 1994.

References and Further Reading Aretino, Pietro (1988). I Modi, The Sixteen Pleasures, trans. and ed. Lynne Lawner. London: Peter Owen. Aretino, Pietro (1988). The Works of Pietro Aretino (1933), trans. Samuel Putnam, vol. 1. New York: Covici-Friede. Callaghan, Dympna (2003). ‘Comedy and epyllion in post-Reformation England’. Shakespeare Survey, 56, 27–38. Chapman, George (1941). Poems, ed. P. B. Bartlett. New York: MLA. Dubrow, Heather (1987). Captive Victors: Shakespeare’s Narrative Poems and Sonnets. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

Gent, Lucy (1981). Picture to Poetry 1560–1620. Leamington Spa: James Hall. Greenwood, John (1988). Shifting Perspectives and the Stylish Style: Mannerism in Shakespeare and his Jacobean Contemporaries, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Hibbard, G. R. (1962). Thomas Nashe. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Hulse, Clark (1981). Metamorphic Verse: The Elizabethan Minor Epic. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hulse, Clark (1990). The Rule of Art: Literature and Painting in the Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Keach, William (1977). Elizabethan Erotic Narratives. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Kolin, Philip C. (ed.) (1997). Venus and Adonis, Critical Essays. New York and London: Garland Publishing. Lerner, Laurence (1988). ‘Ovid and the Elizabethans’. In C. Martindale (ed.), Ovid Renewed: Ovidian Influences on Literature and Art from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century (pp. 121– 35). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Marlowe, Christopher (1971). Hero and Leander. In Stephen Orgel (ed.), The Complete Poems. Poems and Translations (pp. 2–26). Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. Marston, John (1994). The Metamorphosis of Pygmalion’s Image. In Sandra Clark (ed.), Amorous Rites (pp. 117–25). London: Everyman. Montrose, Louis (1996). ‘Spenser’s domestic domain: poetry, property and the early modern subject’. In Margreta de Grazia, M. Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass (eds.), Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (pp. 83–130). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moulton, Ian Frederick (2000). Before Pornography: Erotic Writing in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Nashe, Thomas (1972). The Choice of Valentines. In J. B. Steane (ed.), The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works (pp. 458–68). London: Penguin Books. Orgel, Stephen (1996). ‘Gendering the crown’. In Margreta de Grazia, M. Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass (eds.), Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture (pp. 133–65). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Prado, Mary (1993). ‘Artifice as seduction in Titian’. In James Graham Turner (ed.), Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe, Institutions, Texts, Images. (pp. 55–89). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shakespeare, William (2007). Shakespeare’s Poems, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones and H. R. Woudhuysen. Arden. London: Thomson Learning. Snare, G. (1989). The Mystification of George Chapman. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Talvacchia, Bette (1999). Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Turner, James Graham (1999). ‘The libertine abject: the “postures” of Last Instructions to a Painter. In Warren Chernaik and Martin Dzelzainis (eds.), Marvell and Liberty (pp. 217–48). Basingstoke: Macmillan.

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John Donne’s Nineteenth Elegy Germaine Greer

For Marlowe who translated Ovid’s Amores, Campion who imitated them in Latin, and Donne who imitated them in English, the project was transgressive; the three books of the Amores were not among the Ovidian texts studied by Elizabethan schoolboys and could be published with impunity only in Latin. One printing of Marlowe’s translation of the elegies was burnt by order of the bishops in 1599. Donne’s performance was to be assessed only by those who could not be corrupted by it, among which select company his elegies circulated in manuscript, inspiring many more exercises in the genre. Helen Gardner’s observation: The great popularity of the Elegy from 1595 to 1640 is rather overlooked in literary histories because the work of gentlemen writers in this genre has not been collected or anthologized as their songs and lyrics have been. Much of it is still in manuscript. (Donne 1965: xxxiii n.)

still holds good. Donne’s first publisher printed only eight of his elegies in the first edition; this number was expanded in the second edition of 1635; more Ovidian elegies more or less likely to have been by Donne were added in subsequent editions. Elegy 19 (following Grierson’s numbering) did not appear in print until 1669, thirtyeight years after the poet’s death, when it was given the title ‘To his mistress going to bed’. During the seventy or so years that the poem had circulated in manuscript under the title ‘Elegy’ the text had destabilised to some extent, but the contested readings from the fourteen manuscripts that survive are not crucial. The precedent of the Amores allows a poet to interrogate his own sexuality in a disabused, wry, even embittered fashion, whether mildly amazed at his own perfidy or disgusted by the reality of abortion. Anthony La Branche has argued that what Donne inherited from the classic elegiac tradition is an ‘awareness of self-deception’ (La Branche 1996: 362, 366). M. L. Stapleton (1996: 2–6) identifies the speaker of the Amores as desultor amoris, who is always outsmarted by the women he seeks to use

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and abuse, though he may not be aware of the fact: ‘We can see much more about the desultor than he can see himself, a lesson of the master not lost on the pupil Donne.’ The subject of Ovidian elegy is not the woman who is its apparent occasion, but the man who is sniffing around her. Donne’s speaker is more aware of the sophistry of phallic arguments even than Ovid’s, because he lives and acts in the world within worlds of Protestant Christianity. His erotic concerns are compromised and complicated in ways that Ovid’s Latin lover would not understand. The elegist may ostensibly address his mistress, his mistress’s maid, the go-between, his rival, Cupid, the gatekeeper, or none of the above, but they are given no space for a reply. The Ovidian lover’s imagination projects its own states on to the objects of his interest; it is up to the reader to assess the degree of solipsism in his account of situations and events. The Ovidian lover may confess anything from impotence or premature ejaculation to priapism or inflicting actual bodily harm; it is up to the reader to grant or refuse absolution. The first of Donne’s elegies is an imitation of Elegy 4 of Book 1 of the Amores but as the series progresses, the Ovidian situations are left behind. Elegy 19, purporting to be an address from a man who is already abed to the woman he expects to join him there, has no direct Ovidian model, though it may be an allusion, by way of contrast, to 1.5 in the person of the lover describing his mistress’s naked body: ut steatite ante oculos posito velamine nostros, in toto nusquam corpore menda fuit. quos umeros, quales vidi tetigique lacertos! forma papillarum quam fuit apta premi! quam castigato planus sub pectore venter! quantum et quale latus! quam iuvenale femur!

In Marlowe’s translation: Stark naked as she stood before mine eye, Not one wen in her body could I spy: What arms and shoulders did I touch and see, How apt her breasts were to be pressed by me! How smooth a belly under her waist saw I, How large a leg, and what a lusty thigh!

This is what the lover in Donne’s elegy does not get to see, and for which he pleads, beginning in peremptory vein: ‘Come, madam, come’. This repeated urging in the imperative is followed by a curiously inverted statement in the indicative mood, which could be misconstrued at first hearing as another instruction to the woman: ‘all rest my powers defy’. To get the sense right the reader has to flip the clause over to read ‘my powers defy all rest’. ‘All rest’ implies that neither man nor woman will be allowed to rest by the speaker’s ‘powers’, a curiously aggrandising way of referring to his virility, evidenced one may suppose by his erection. ‘All rest’ implies all rest for

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everybody ever, as if this mighty penis could unhinge the very spheres. The feeling of upside-downness or back-to-frontness is reflected by the inversion in which it is the male speaker who is on his back, ‘brought to bed’ as it were, seeing himself as in travail from which he must be delivered. The repetition of ‘labour’ contrasts the different meanings of the verb and the noun, and both are contradicted by the doublemeaning verb ‘lie’: ‘Until I labour, I in labour lie’. Both birth and death haunt the poem as invisible presences, which the switchback syntax seems pettishly to deny. This is a man totally intent upon the release of his own genital tension. The lovelessness of the opening turns to actual enmity in the next couplet: The foe oft-times having the foe in sight, Is tired with standing, though he never fight.

The battle metaphor reinforces the suggestion that intercourse may involve more risk than pleasure for the woman. The male speaker is already tired with ‘standing’ though, as we discover in the next line, she has not even begun to undress. The peremptoriness of the opening ‘Come … come’ returns in the next couplet, which seems almost to snatch at her, only to reel backwards in a skyey figure: Off with that girdle like heaven’s zone glittering, But a far fairer world encompassing.

A new motif has made its appearance, of the woman as unexplored globe, the new world itself. The woman’s silence and distance dehumanise her; the lover is now as it were ‘silent on a peak in Darien’, marvelling at the beauties of a distant unconquered realm. The woman is next invoked as a blazon that is undoing itself: Unpin that spangled breastplate which you wear, That th’eyes of busy fools may be stopped there.

We do not know whether these instructions are being followed or even whether they have been heard; the previousness of the speaker is the only certainty. The description of the woman’s stomacher as a ‘spangled breast-plate’ revives the suggestion of sexual warfare; in a reversal of the epic machinery the female warrior is being unarmed for combat. The gazes of ‘busy fools’ are presented as assaults to be warded off by her stomacher; without it she is vulnerable to the voyeur in bed. She will inform him of her approach no more consciously than if she were a clock. Unlace yourself, for that harmonious chime, Tells me from you that now it is bedtime.

Though he uses the present tense, we do not know if he has in fact heard the clinking of her points; his present tense may be the present habitual, reinforcing the

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impression that this is a domestic scene. If this woman’s bedtime ritual has been witnessed so many times that it can be securely imagined now, we might suspect that the speaker’s erection is just as habitual. From the beginning of the poem the lover has sounded insensitive; the hint of incontinence becomes more than a hint when he tells the reader that he envies her busk, her stiff corset, because it can be so close to her for so long and still stand, that is, not ejaculate and detumesce. Among his concerns is anxiety about the maintenance of his erection; one of the functions performed by his roving fantasy is keeping that erection entertained. The woman is relevant only as the object of his fantasy; her silence, distance, and obliviousness are masterfully implied. Your gown going off, such beauteous state reveals, As when from flow’ry meads th’hills shadow steals.

To appreciate the way the shadows of the upland retract as the sun climbs higher the viewer must be at some distance. Whatever the ‘beauteous state’ may denote, it is not a revelation of the woman’s body or of enjoyment to be gained from it. We have had the hint of woman as landscape before, in the verb ‘labour’ which originally means to plough, a commonplace for sexual intercourse; the still-to-be-enjoyed woman is an untilled meadow full of wild flowers, which the ploughshare would destroy. Catherine Ginelli Martin identifies the speaker’s purpose in this poem as ‘at once objectifying, shaming and figuratively raping his “new-found-land” ’, thus satisfying Freud’s description of the function of obscene wit, ‘linking himself to a host of phallic allies who receive his “gift”, the shared exploitation of woman’ (Martin 1995: 80). The person exposed in the poem is not the woman but the aroused man. Martin’s claim that Donne details ‘not only each garment he would have his mistress discard but also precisely what it should conceal’ (1995: 79) cannot be substantiated. Donne’s speaker would be desperately envious of Chapman’s Ovid in Ovid’s Banquet of Sense (printed in 1595) gazing his fill on Julia/Corynna (stanza 58). Now as she lay, attired in nakedness, His eye did carve him on that feast of feasts: Sweet fields of life which Death’s foot dare not press, Flowered with th’unbroken waves of my Love’s breasts, Unbroke by depths of those her beauties’ floods: See where with bent of gold curled into nests In her head’s grove the spring-bird lameate [gilt?] broods: Her body doth present those fields of peace Where souls are feasted with the soul of ease.

And so on for several stanzas, which develop an extended parallel of the woman’s body with the Garden of Eden. Donne certainly knew Chapman’s poem, and may in fact be ironically alluding to it. Donne’s speaker, like the reader, sees nothing and must imagine all.

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The behaviour of Donne’s woman is not that of Ovid’s Corynna, a complaisant mistress seizing amorous opportunity, but of a woman going to bed for the night. The man observing her as it were through the bed curtains, as postmodern man might listen for sounds beyond the bathroom door, is acting less as a lover than as a husband. His addressing the woman as ‘madam, and nothing else’ as Sly is instructed to call the page masquerading as his wife in The Taming of the Shrew, reinforces the suggestion that the object of his lust is indeed the speaker’s wife. If he were as interested in raping and colonising as is often suggested, it is the more remarkable that he lies naked in his bed imagining the woman undressing rather than undressing her himself. By instructing her to remove her clothes, as it were sotto voce, he enacts passivity; his aggression is all in the mind. She will come bedward, as any decent woman would, in her shift. In such white robes heav’n’s angels used to be Received by men: thou angel bringst with thee A heaven like Mahomet’s Paradise.

The irruption of a reference to exotic carnal pleasures with soulless female houris underlines the independence of his fantasies from the couple’s shared reality. He develops his conceit to revel in its apparent perversity. His witticism that he knows her for a good angel because she sets his flesh rather than his hair on end drives him further into his solipsism. Licence my roving hands and let them go, Before, behind, between, above, below.

The imperative ‘Licence’ is also a noun with transgressive connections; Albert C. Labriola has pointed out that the lover expresses himself furthermore as if he were a privateer begging the queen’s permission to sack and plunder in her name: The word ‘licence’ was the technical expression for the queen’s favour or approval of a maritime expedition. The word ‘roving’ has a two-fold significance: wandering and robbing. … In accounts of voyages, such language is commonplace for navigating against or across lines of latitude and longitude; traveling between, below and above points of reference on the terrestrial globe. (Labriola 1996: 56)

Intrusion, invasion, and spoliation are all implied. The non-co-operation of the woman remains the still centre-point of the turning poem, assailed again and again by the man’s restless fantasy. O my America, my new-found-land, My kingdom, safeliest when with one man manned, My mine of precious stones: my empery, How blest am I in this discovering thee!

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It is Donne’s achievement to strike us with the wonder and elation produced by the lover’s mounting sexual excitement, without compromising the unassailability of the woman. She is a continent, and therefore continent; as Donne reminded Sir Francis Nethersole in his wedding sermon, ‘the fitness that goes through all is a sober continency; for without that “matrimonium jurata fornicatio”, Marriage is but a continual fornication sealed with an oath.’ The insistence on the woman’s unimaginable vastness cannot but carry with it the ironic suggestion of her lover’s comparative tininess. Donne jolts the reader even harder by allowing the transported lover suddenly to disquisit upon monarchy as the best form of government, implying the usual parallels of the husband’s role with that of a monarch, only to collapse the grand proprietorial metaphor into ownership of a single mine before inflating it again to encompass empire. The reader leaps from couplet to contrasting couplet over anything but solid ground, briefly knocking against the legal contract between spouses, which endorses the husband’s authority and his right over her, ‘in coniugio transactis’ as Donne’s epitaph for his wife has it (Hester 1995: 517). To enter in these bonds is to be free; Then where my hand is set my seal shall be.

The speaker may be admitting some form of reciprocity, a partnership, and by implication the bonds or bands of wedlock, but there is no consultation. His partner in the sexual activity has dwindled to an abstraction. The lover suddenly interrupts himself with a peal of praise to nakedness, which he follows with an unprovable and unmistakably argumentative statement. As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be To taste whole joys.

This bald assertion begins a typically masculine dispute with ‘you women’ who wear jewels to attract male concupiscence. A bejewelled woman is likened to an illustrated book made for illiterate ‘lay-men’, while the sacerdotal husband asserts the right to read the mystery itself. As consciously transgressive as the assertion that we may know good angels because they cause erections (as the succubus does) is the equation of self-revelation with the shifting of the shift. Then since that I may know As liberally as to a midwife show Thyself: cast all, yea, this white linen hence.

The spectre of pregnancy now at centre stage, the shift becomes the white garment in which individuals taken in adultery were ordered to stand at the church door in partial expiation of their sin. The woman’s modesty having been speciously parlayed into evidence of guilt, he absolves her in his own interest only to deny her innocence too. There is no penance, much less innocence.

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In his marriage sermon for the wedding of Sir Francis Nethersole, Donne quoted St Jerome ‘Nihil foedius, quam uxorem amare tanquam adulteram’, glossing it: ‘There is not a more uncomely, a poorer thing, than to love a wife like a mistress.’ The chaste wife does not capitulate to her husband’s importunity; she remains hidden from both speaker and reader. The last couplet is almost petulant. To teach thee, I am naked first: why then What needst thou have more covering than a man?

The ambiguity reaches to a pun on ‘covering’. As a woman needs no more covering than a man does, a woman needs no more than a man to cover her. The idiom derives from animal husbandry, and once more implies mating and ensuing pregnancy. Ending on a question implies a lack of closure; the woman, and perhaps the speaker’s orgasm, have eluded him after all. A further nuance is more difficult for modern readers to intuit. In The Order of Household Government (1592) Fenner uses ‘cover’ in a special sense: The proper care for the wife is to cover her, that is, to provide all things meet for a mate so nearly joined in full blessing to him and thus according to their condition, to give honour to her, as the fittest to him in heaven and in earth, with a patient covering or bearing of her infirmities.

Ovid’s elegies provide the precedent for a man’s presenting his sexuality as unpredictable, peremptory, and occasionally degrading, at the same time that it provides him with his only glimpses of heaven. For Donne sex is more specifically anagogical, as in Christian teleology sacred things can only make themselves known through physical signs. The sacramental bond of matrimony is made flesh in the act of copulation. The naked body of the woman becomes the emblem of truth and as such, paradoxically, the embodiment of sacred love. The contradictions are relentless. The woman’s body is only exciting because it is so seldom disclosed; the elation of exploring it is only possible because it is not laid open to the lover’s view. Husband and wife may be one flesh only in the spirit. The poem was not written to a woman, is not a negotiation with a woman, but is an exploration of a paradigmatic confrontation between the overt, obvious sexuality of a man and the elusive and inscrutable object of his desire. That desire, clearly carnal and specific, is sanctified by divine mandate at the same time as it is bedevilled by fantasy and human perversity. What sex is not is intercourse; the object of desire is a projection of the desire itself. Not only is the female figure of the elegy silent, she is unresponsive in every way. She does not do as she is told, but as she always does, as the voiceless speaker watches and gives instructions that are no more than predictions. Elegy 19 is so teasingly ambiguous that learned critics have on the one hand seen it as Donne’s epithalamium for himself and on the other refused to accept it as having any relevance whatsoever to marriage. Yet all readers of Donne know that the

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contradictions in his work are the contradictions of the human condition with which, both conceptually and actually, marriage is replete. The love expressed in Elegy 19 is ‘begotten by despair upon impossibility’, captious and captivating, occasionally cruel, heated to irresistibility by what distinguishes a great lover according to all the imitators of Ovid, the flame not of lust but of wit.

References and Further Reading Armstrong, Alan (1977). ‘The apprenticeship of John Donne: Ovid and the Elegies’. English Literary History, 44, 319–42. Benet, Diana Trevino (1994). ‘Sexual transgression in Donne’s Elegies’. Modern Philology, 92, 14–35. Carey, John (1981). John Donne, Mind, Life and Art. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Donne, John (1912). The Poems of John Donne, ed. Herbert J. C. Grierson. Oxford University Press. Donne, John (1956a). ‘Preached at a marriage’. In Evelyn M. Simpson and George R. Potter (eds.), The Sermons of John Donne (vol. 2, pp. 241–55). Berkeley: University of California Press. Donne, John (1956b). ‘Preached at Sir Francis Nethersole’s marriage’. In Evelyn M. Simpson and George R. Potter (eds.), The Sermons of John Donne (vol. 3, pp. 335–47). Berkeley: University of California Press. Donne, John (1956c). ‘A sermon preached at the earl of Bridgewater’s house in London at the marriage of his daughter, the Lady Mary, to the eldest son of the Lord Herbert of CastleIsland, November. 19, 1627’. In Evelyn M. Simpson and George R. Potter (eds.), The Sermons of John Donne (vol. 8, pp. 94–100). Berkeley: University of California Press. Donne, John (1965). John Donne: The Elegies and the Songs and Sonets, ed. H. Gardner. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Donne, John (2000). The Elegies, vol. 2 of The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne, ed. G. A. Stringer (4 vols., 1995–2005). Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Donne, John (2008). The Poems of John Donne, ed. R. Robbins, 2 vols. Harlow: Longman. Feinstein, Sandy (1994). ‘Donne’s “Elegy 19”: the busk between a pair of bodies’. Studies in English Literature, 1500–1900, 34, 61–77.

Fowler, Alastair (1993). ‘Genre and tradition’. In Thomas N. Corns (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to English Poetry: Donne to Marvell (pp. 80– 100). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gill, Roma (1972). ‘Musa iocosa mea: thoughts on the Elegies’. In A. J. Smith (ed.), John Donne: Essays in Celebration. London: Methuen. Greene, Thomas M. (1989). ‘The poetics of discovery: a reading of Donne’s Elegy 19’. Yale Journal of Criticism, 2/2, 129–43. Guibbory, Achsah (1990). ‘ “Oh, let mee not serve so”: the politics of love in Donne’s Elegies’. English Literary History, 57, 811–33. Guibbory, Achsah (2006). ‘Erotic poetry’. In A. Guibbory (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to John Donne (pp. 133–48). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hester, M. Thomas (1995). ‘ “Miserrimum dictu”: Donne’s epitaph for his wife’. JEGP, 94, 513–29. La Branche, Anthony (1996). ‘ “Blanda elegeia”: the background to Donne’s “Elegies” ’. Modern Language Review, 61, 357–68. Labriola, Albert C. (1996). ‘Painting and poetry of the cult of Elizabeth I: the Ditchley portrait and Donne’s “Elegie: Going to Bed” ’. Studies in Philology, 93/1, 42–63. Lerner, Laurence (1988). ‘Ovid and the Elizabethans’. In C. Martindale (ed.), Ovid Renewed: Ovidian Influences on Literature and Art from the Middle Ages to the Twentieth Century (pp. 121– 35). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mann, Lindsay (1985–6). ‘Sacred and profane love in Donne’. Dalhousie Review, 65, 534–50. Marotti, Arthur F. (1986). John Donne, Coterie Poet. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Martin, Catherine Cinelli (1995). ‘Pygmalion’s progress in the Garden of Love, or The Wit’s Work Is Never Donne’. In Claude J. Summers and Ted-Larry Pebworth (eds.), The Wit of

Donne’s Nineteenth Elegy Seventeenth-Century Poetry (pp. 78–100). Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Ricks, Christopher (1988). ‘Donne after love’. In Elaine Scarry (ed.), Literature and the Body: Essays on Population and Persons (pp. 33–70). Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Selden, Raman (1975). ‘John Donne’s “incarnational conviction” ’. Critical Quarterly, 17, 55–73.

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Stapleton, M. L. (1996). ‘ “Why should they not alike in all parts touch”: Donne and the elegiac tradition’. John Donne Journal, 15, 1–22. Turner, James Grantham (1987). One Flesh: Paradisal Marriage and Sexual Relations in the Age of Milton. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

64

Traditions of Complaint and Satire John N. King

In An Apology for Poetry (composed c.1583), Sir Philip Sidney emulates the genial urbanity of Horace in describing the satirist as a sportive wit who makes readers ‘laugh at folly’. Although George Puttenham shares Sidney’s Horatian principles, the normative definition of early modern English metrical satire in his Art of English Poesy (1589) veers toward ‘bitter invective against vice and vicious men’ associated with Juvenal. Puttenham goes on to extend from drama to poetry the view of Aelius Donatus, a Roman grammarian, that satire derived from vicious personal attack in ancient Greek satyr plays.1 The fashion for stylistic roughness and invective in early modern English satire accords with a false etymology that identified satyr with both verse satire and lustful woodland inhabitants who combined human form with that of goats (Kernan 1959: 54–5). Puttenham confers a place of honour upon The Vision of Piers Plowman, the fourteenth-century alliterative allegory commonly attributed to William Langland, as the outstanding instance of native English satire. Homage to Langland acknowledges the medieval origins of English verse satire at a time when, late in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, Latinate and Italianate practices were being imported. In accepting the ‘hard and obscure’ language of Langland’s archaic dialect, Puttenham deems it equivalent to the ‘rough and bitter speeches and … invectives’ of the Roman satirists Lucilius, Juvenal, and Persius (Smith 1904: II, 27, 64–5; Kernan 1959: 57). Because complaint and satire are literary modes rather than genres, one cannot differentiate between them with precision. Rooted in medieval practices, the more unambiguous and oratorical mode of complaint gives way over time to the more indirect play of satirical irony. During the early modern era, complaint encompassed attacks on worldly vanity (e.g. Edmund Spenser’s Complaints, Containing Sundry Small Poems of the World’s Vanity and Sir Walter Ralegh’s ‘The Lie’) and moralistic verse concerning the tragic fall of illustrious individuals (e.g. The Mirror for Magistrates). Because satire has never corresponded to any particular genre, that problematic mode can inform a variable array of external formal characteristics (Fowler 1982:

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106–7, 110). The reader encounters attitudes that range from delicate Horatian laughter at human folly capable of reform to Juvenalian grief at irredeemable vice. Not limited to the rough language associated with Langland’s Middle English verse, the satirical mode infuses instances of different genres to produce, for example, parodies of Petrarchan convention in poems such as Shakespeare’s ‘My mistress’ eyes are nothing like the sun’ (Sonnet 130) or epic convention during the War in Heaven in Milton’s Paradise Lost. The satiric mode encompasses vilification, ridicule, or mockery of recognisable historical targets. Attack by means of linguistic appropriation, imitation, or innuendo is a distinctive feature of literary, political, social, and religious satire. It encompasses puns and quibbles; beast fables that veil allegorical attack; and parody, burlesque, or travesty of recognisable literary styles, devices, and forms. We may think in terms of a satirical spectrum that ranges from invective complaint collared by rhetorical figures that stop short of fictiveness, to constructions that are more or less fictive, to a point where satire shades into comedy unconcerned with discernible historical particulars (Rosenheim 1963: 31). The remote family resemblances associated with the satirical mode link texts in the manner of distant cousins within a far-flung clan. Puttenham’s Art of English Poesy grants John Skelton a place second to Langland as ‘a sharp satirist, but with more railing and scoffery than became a poet laureate’. Falling short of the prophetic visions of Piers Plowman, in Puttenham’s view, Skelton applied his wit ‘to scurrilities and other ridiculous matters’ (Smith 1904: II, 65). During service as tutor to Prince Henry (later Henry VIII), Skelton composed The Bowge of Court, a satire on courtly vices in the form of a late medieval ship of fools allegory. Personified habitués of court include: The first was Favell, full of flattery, With fables false, that well could fain a tale; The second was Suspect, which that daily Misdempt each man, with face deadly and pale; And Harvy Hafter that well could picke a male; With other four of theyr affinity: Disdain, Riot, Dissimilar, Subtlety. Fortune their friend, with whom oft she did dance: They could not fail, they thought, they were so sure. And oftentimes I would myself advance With them to make solace and pleasure; But my disport they could not well endure: They said they hated for to deal with Dread. (134–46)

After departing court to serve as rector at Diss in East Anglia, Skelton composed satirical poems in idiosyncratic meters that came to be known as Skeltonics. They are notable for breathless mono-rhyme leashes that run on line after line. Avoiding rhetorical adornment for the sake of native plain style, he exploited a jarring mixture of

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high and low styles, puns, and obscure allegory. A rollicking portrayal of a rowdy alewife exemplifies these traits in a secular satire entitled The Tunning of Eleanor Rumming: Her lothly leer Is nothing clear, But ugly of cheer, Droopy and drowsy, Scurvy and lousy; Her face all boozy, Comely crinkled, Wonderously wrinkled, Like a roast pig’s ear, Bristled with hair. (12–21)

Drawing upon medieval traditions of anticlerical complaint and satire, Skelton’s religious satires afforded a flimsy basis for Protestant reformers who attempted to appropriate Skelton as a proto-Protestant satirist. The objects of anticlerical satire (for example simony, priestly avarice, and clerical ignorance) were non-doctrinal in nature. ‘Ware the hawk’ incorporates parody of transubstantiation and the Mass, not in order to mock the Eucharist, but to defend its sanctity and that of the clerical vocation by satirising a profligate priest. For example, his attentiveness to hunting results in sacrilegious travesty when his hawk sheds blood upon an altar: This fond frantic falconer, With his polluted pawtenar, As priest unreverent, Straight to the sacrament He made his hawk to fly, With huge shout and cry. The high altar he stripped naked; There on he stood, and craked; He shook down all the cloths, And swore horrible oaths Before the face of God, By Moses and Aaron’s rod, Or that he thence yede, His hawk should pray and feed Upon a pigeon’s maw. The blood ran down raw Upon the altar stone. (43–59)

During the early 1520s Skelton composed virulent satires on the excesses of Cardinal Thomas Wolsey, archbishop of York and Lord Chancellor of England: Speak,

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Parrot, Colin Clout, and Why Come Ye Not to Court? They attack a prelate, born a butcher’s boy, whose princely magnificence subverted clerical humility and outshone the grandeur of Henry VIII. Written in ‘rhyme royal’ (seven-line stanzas), the first poem veils attack by exploiting the persona of a parrot whose seriocomic mixture of sense and nonsense is clearly evident in the following speech: Difficult it is to answer this demand; Yet, after the sagacity of a popingay, Franticness doth rule and all thing command: Willfulness and Brainless now rule all the ray. Again Frantic Frenzy there dare no man say nay, For Franticness and Willfulness and Brainless ensemble, The nebbish of a lion they make to treat and tremble … (418–24)

Employing Skeltonics, the second satire assumes the persona of a rural truth-telling malcontent: My name is Colin Clout. I purpose to shake out All my conning bag, Like a clerkly hag. For though my time be ragged, Tattered and jagged, Rudely rain-beaten, Rusty and moth-eaten, If ye take well therewith It hath in it some pith. (49–58)

The third attacks the archbishop for subversion of the Bible, the liturgy, and other bases for worship and devotion: And of holy scriptures saws, He counteth them for gewgaws; And putteth them to silence And with words of violence, Like Pharaoh, void of grace, Did Moses sore menace And Aaron sore he threat, The word of God to let. This mammet in like wise Against the churche doth rise. The preacher he doth despise With craking all with boast

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Also notable for allegiance to the ‘old religion,’ John Heywood thrived under Henry VIII, Edward VI, and Mary I. A dramatist, musician, and versifier of proverbs, Heywood defended traditional devotional practices such as pilgrimages and the sale of pardons in farces written under King Henry: Pardoner and Friar, The Four PP, and Johan Johan. Beginning with An Hundred Epigrams (1550), Heywood versified everexpanding collections of poems notable for brevity and wit. Early modern readers regarded the epigram as a species of satire. Pro-clerical bias produced poems such as ‘A Man of the country shriven in Lent late’, which mocks the ignorance of lay people. During an age when monarchs determined the official religion of England, ‘Of Turning’ satirises those who recant in order to avoid execution for heresy: ‘Half turn or whole turn, where turners be turning, / Turning keeps turners from hanging and burning’. When Mary I reversed the schism from the Church of Rome effected by Henry VIII and continued under Edward VI, Heywood published The Spider and the Fly (1556), an obscure allegory that personifies Protestantism as a spider that attempts to prey upon a Catholic fly until the queen as a divine handmaid cleanses England’s house. Refusing to ‘turn’ when Elizabeth I restored Protestantism, Heywood went into exile. We remember Sir Thomas Wyatt chiefly for domesticating the Italian sonnet and, in company with Henry Howard, the earl of Surrey, importing techniques and conventions of romantic love derived from Petrarch, the fourteenth-century Italian humanist poet. Nonetheless, Wyatt is notable for cultivating the geniality of Horatian wit in a set of three epistolary satires that harmonise Chaucerian style with imported techniques and conventions derived from Horace and Luigi Alamanni, a contemporary Italian follower of the Roman poet. Wyatt’s unadorned plain style reflects Horatian practice, but his poems also exemplify characteristics of native English tradition, including moralistic sentiment and heavy use of aphorisms. Addressed to Sir Francis Brian, Wyatt’s ‘A spending hand that always poureth out’ dramatises courtly failures, including flattery and avarice: … Now hark what I intend Thou know’st well, first, whoso can seek to please Shall purchase friends where truth shall but offend. Flee therefore truth: it is both wealth and ease. For though that truth of every man hath praise, Full near the wind goeth truth in great misease. (31–6; Wyatt 1978: 192)

Modelled upon Alamanni’s tenth satire, Wyatt’s ‘Mine own John Poins’ is addressed to another Henrician courtier. Apparently composed during the poet’s 1536

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withdrawal from court, the poem hinges upon the conventional identification of courtly life as a breeder of hypocrisy and vice in contrast to country life as a repository of moral virtue. The speaker adopts the conventional satirical persona of a plainspoken truth-teller: My Poins, I cannot frame my tune to feign, To cloak the truth, for praise without desert, Of them that list all vice for to retain. (19–23)

Verging upon republican opposition to monarchical tyranny, the speaker aligns his rural pursuit of hunting, reading, and writing with both liberty and religious faith. Also addressed to Poins, Wyatt’s reworking of Aesop’s fable of the country mouse and the city mouse continues his satire on life at court. Satires on Roman Catholic doctrine and ritual, notably transubstantiation and the Mass, poured from the printing press when the militantly Protestant regime of Edward VI relaxed censorship. They are important as a seedbed for religious satire by poets such as Edmund Spenser and John Milton. The prominence of parody and lampoon (exaggerated mockery grounded in malice) in writings by Robert Crowley, Luke Shepherd, William Baldwin (see the discussion of Beware the Cat in Chapter 70, Prose Fiction), and others contradicts the stereotyped view of early Protestants as humourless opponents of poetry and drama. Writers modelled satirical verse upon Piers Plowman, the pseudo-Chaucerian Ploughman’s Tale, and Skelton’s Colin Clout. Texts include dialogues in which sceptical lay people mock the mystifying ignorance of pompous clerics and allegorical analyses of the Reformation. Notable for editing the first printed editions of Piers Plowman (1550), Crowley incorporated an influential commentary that interprets that medieval allegory as both a satire on religious and social abuses and a prophecy of the Protestant Reformation. Langland’s poem afforded a model for the versification and subject matter of Crowley’s own ‘gospelling’ poems, which include a pair of estates satires that address lessons to different levels of the social hierarchy ranging from beggars to magistrates: The Voice of the Last Trumpet and A New Year’s Gift, Wherein Is Taught the Knowledge of Our Self and the Fear of God. Showing a particular concern for social welfare, the poems issue apocalyptic warnings to avaricious landlords, rack renters, and wealthy idlers who ignore the plight of the poor. Crowley’s One and Thirty Epigrams affords a precedent for Puttenham’s identification of the ‘bitter taunts, and privy nips or witty scoffs, and other merry conceits’ of epigram as a species of satire (Smith 1904: II, 56). The collection includes satires on institutions including alehouses and brothels, and social estates personified by examples that include a bribe-taking bailiff, a wealthy coalminer who yearns to be a knight, and a friar who travels to Louvain in order to wear his habit once again. The most interesting of Crowley’s satires is Philargyry of Great Britain (1551), an appeal for completion of religious reforms blocked by Henry VIII’s failure to redis-

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tribute the wealth of dissolved monasteries to the poor. The gold-eating giant Philargyry personifies avarice in general, but the personified vices, who serve in sequence as his chief minister, Roman Catholic Hypocrisy and Protestant Philaute (self-love), align him with Henry VIII’s ecclesiastical policy. The conclusion looks to a millennial king to redress oppression of the poor common people (King 1980). Like Crowley, Luke Shepherd works within native traditions of late medieval verse satire. Sharing Skelton’s predilection for vigorous colloquial vocabulary, macaronic diction, copious verse catalogues, and scatological innuendo, Shepherd stands alone as a successful imitator of Skeltonics. Among nine satires published during the reign of Edward VI, John Bon and Master Parson stands out as a memorable fusion of medieval English and Lutheran satirical traditions. On the model of polemical dialogues composed by Hans Sachs and other German Lutherans, a rural malcontent descended from Piers Plowman cannily confutes an ignorant cleric. The satire hinges upon the common-sense rationality of John Bon, whose mocking response denies the cleric’s assertions concerning transubstantiation on the ground that he can neither taste nor see it. Doctor Double Ale ridicules a London priest who neglects parish affairs in order to haunt alehouses. Exemplifying the appeal lodged by Desiderius Erasmus and William Tyndale for the laity to read the Bible in vernacular translation, a cobbler’s boy risks execution as a heretic when he opposes subversive scriptural interpretation to the drunken ignorance of a Catholic priest who mistakes an ale-pot for his Mass-book. The narrator describes him thus: A man of learning great For if his brain he would beat He could within days fourteen Make such a sermon as never was seen I wot not whether he spoke in drink Or drink in him how do ye think? I never heard him preach God wot But it were in the good ale pot Also he sayth that fain he would Come before the council if he could For to declare his learning And other things concerning Goodly councils that he could give Beyond all measure ye may me believe His learning is exceeding Ye may know by his reading Yet could a cobbler’s boy him tell That he read a wrong gospel (155–72)

The Piers Plowman tradition endured until midway through the reign of Elizabeth I2 in the form of satires such as Thomas Churchyard’s Davy Diker’s Dream (1552), a

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blunt truth-teller’s vision of a millennial time of social justice. The poet models that speaker on a poor ditch-digger whose prophesied death by starvation is cited in Langland’s attack on avaricious clergy and landlords. George Gascoigne employs Piers Plowman as a satirical voice in The Steel Glass (1576), a complaint against social ills that assumes the form of late medieval estates satire. It shares the moralistic perspective of mid-century satirists such as Crowley and Shepherd (Smith 1952: 210–12). Although Gascoigne casts the poem in blank verse, its plain style and alliterative manner link it to the native tradition. Classical and humanistic elements underwent infusion into native satire when Edmund Spenser composed pastoral eclogues (i.e. short monologues or dialogues spoken by shepherds) that followed precedents set by Virgil, Petrarch, and Mantuan (i.e. Baptista Spagnuoli). Not only did Petrarch originate the attribution of speeches to pastors in the double sense of shepherds and clergymen, he redirected Virgilian eclogue to denounce the alleged depravity of the Avignon papacy. Later poets grounded anticlerical satire on pastoral eclogues by Petrarch and Mantuan, who imitated both Virgil and Petrarch. Mantuan’s eclogues, which were on the curriculum of English grammar schools, found favour with Protestant readers because of their stringent satire on clerical corruption. The unconventional use of simple English names establishes a vernacular context within which Spenser’s own pseudonym, Colin Clout, invokes the authority of John Skelton, whose satires on Cardinal Wolsey underwent anachronistic interpretation as proto-Protestant polemics. Combination of sophisticated verse with paradoxically humble character and setting affords a thin mask in the view of Puttenham, who notes that poets compose eclogues ‘under the veil of homely persons and in rude speeches to insinuate and glance at greater matters’ (Smith 1904: II, 40). According to the General Argument supplied by E.K., five out of twelve months in Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender are ‘moral [eclogues], which for the most part be mixed with some satirical bitterness’. February and October are non-controversial in nature, but May, July, and September satirise alleged clerical corruption in a Mantuanesque manner. Piers Plowman and the narrator of the pseudo-Chaucerian Ploughman’s Tale live on in the guise of Piers, the austere shepherd who attacks surviving Roman Catholic practices in May. By inviting the reader to identify the interlocutors, Piers and Palinode (‘counter-song’), respectively with ‘two forms of pastors or ministers, or the Protestant and the Catholic’, the Argument announces that the eclogue allegorises contemporary religious controversy. Piers’ fable concerning a kid who foolishly falls victim to a ‘false Foxe’ (‘Maye’, 279) assimilates the Protestant satirical tradition that Roman Catholic clerics conceal themselves as wily foxes or ravenous wolves. In his railing attack on May games, Piers also attacks the ignorance of avaricious clerics who, under the guise of shepherds, ‘playen, while their flockes be vnfedde’ (‘Maye’, 44). That diatribe against both hirelings and those who abandon their flock by putting them out for hire (i.e., non-resident holders of benefices) attacks a longstanding clerical abuse.

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Spenser’s July eclogue allegorises the disgrace of Algrind, a thinly veiled figure for Edmund Grindal, archbishop of Canterbury, whose official powers underwent suspension by Queen Elizabeth when he rejected her order that he discipline Puritan clergy who engaged in unauthorised scriptural interpretation. The eclogue takes the form of a debate between Thomalin, a humble shepherd, and Morrell, a goatherd whose name offers an anagram for John Aylmer, bishop of London. Thomalin’s humble dedication to pastoral care aligns him with Grindal’s advocacy of a preaching ministry. Morrell’s extravagant attire and prideful arrogance associate him, by contrast, with the survival of prelatical pomp in the Elizabethan Church of England: They bene yclad in purple and pall, so hath theyr god them blist, They reigne and rulen ouer all, and lord it, as they list: Ygirt with belts of glitterand gold … (‘Iulye’, 173–7)

That description echoes the Ploughman’s Tale. In the September eclogue, the native persona of Davy Diker undergoes metamorphosis into Diggon Davy, a shepherd who narrates a story that idealises Spenser’s patron, John Young, bishop of Rochester, as a model cleric attentive to pastoral care. He assumes the guise of Roffy, a watchful shepherd-pastor who protects his flock by killing ‘a wicked Wolfe … / Ycladde in clothing of seely sheepe’ (‘September’, 184, 188). Roffy’s protection of the laity from a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a gospel figure for ‘false’ clerics, recalls the role of Jesus Christ as the Good Shepherd. Diggon Davie is a penitent prodigal recently returned from ‘a far country’ where he became disillusioned by the prideful greed of bad shepherds. The headnote’s reference to the ‘abuses … and loose liuing of Popish prelates’ identifies that locale with Rome, thus situating Roffy’s vigilance within the context of a hunt for a crypto-Catholic cleric in a diocese of the Church of England. In their application of beast fable as a genre appropriate for satire, ‘Maye’ and ‘September’ are in the tradition of polemical dialogues by John Bale and William Turner. Those tracts employed allegorical hunts for ‘Romish’ foxes and wolves as devices for satirising Bishop Stephen Gardiner, leader of the anti-Protestant opposition. Spenser’s eclogues also concur with Sidney’s moralistic interpretation of Aesop’s fables: ‘whose pretty allegories, stealing under the formal tales of beasts, make many, more beastly than beasts, begin to hear the sound of virtue from these dumb speakers’. Even though An Apology for Poetry formally disallows Spenser’s ‘framing of his style to an old rustic language’ as a violation of pastoral decorum (Smith 1904: I, 167, 196), Sidney adopts archaic language in his own Ister Bank eclogue (Patterson 1984: 24–43). Sung in the Old Arcadia by Philisides, a persona for Sidney as a shepherd-poet, that beast fable employs the gathering of a parliament of animals to satirise the increasingly authoritarian and repressive reign of Elizabeth I.

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Spenser appears to agree with Sidney’s position in Prosopopoia: Or Mother Hubberd’s Tale (1591), the composition of which may date from the time of The Shepheardes Calender. On the model of medieval versifications of the story of Reynard the Fox, the Spenserian allegory features an unscrupulous fox and ape, who wreak havoc upon a kingdom that mirrors England. Although the poem’s meaning is obscure, the indolent slumber of the regal lion seems to allegorise militant Protestant allegations concerning the religio-political negligence of Queen Elizabeth. The beast fable functions as a vehicle for estates satire through its exposure of the vices and follies of husbandmen, clerics, and courtiers as the ape and fox prey upon a misgoverned realm. Courtly vices are at issue in Colin’s complaint in Colin Clovts Come Home Againe (composed in 1591): For sooth to say, it is no sort of life, For shepheard fit to lead in that same place. Where each one seeks with malice and with strife, To thrust downe other into foule disgrace, Himselfe to raise: and he doth soonest rise That best can handle his deceitfull wit, In subtil shifts, and finest sleights deuise, Either by slaundering his well deemed name, Through leasings lewd and fained forgerie: Or else by breeding him some blot of blame, By creeping close into his secrecie; To which him needs, a guilefull hollow hart, Masked with faire dissembling curtesie, A filed toung furnisht with tearmes of art, No art of schoole, but Courtiers schoolery. (688–702; Spenser 1989: 552)

From the Redcrosse Knight’s opening encounter with monstrous Error in Book 1 of The Faerie Queene (1590, 1596), religious and political satire recur within the encyclopaedic array of genres and modes that constitute Spenser’s romantic epic. Satire inheres in the historical level of a poem whose multiple allegorical senses also encompass more general ethical, poetic, and social concerns. Error’s dragonets, which ‘sucked vp their dying mothers blood’ (FQ 1.1.25.9) after her slaughter by the clumsy knight, bring to mind Protestant slurs concerning Jesuit missionaries or clandestine priests. The youngling monsters’ cannibalistic feast upon the body and blood of their parent constitutes a blasphemous parody of the Mass offered by the Roman Church conceived of as an unholy mother. Archimago’s ensuing deception of the knight and his lady, Una, derives from that shape-changer’s personification of hypocrisy both as archmagician and as maker of dissimulating images. The false hermit functions as the butt of Protestant satire on recusant priests as wizards and necromancers. The Redcrosse Knight’s infidelity to Una and dalliance with Duessa (‘duplicity’), whose scarlet attire misrepresents her as Fidessa (‘faith’), affords an allegory for England’s abandonment of the ‘true’ church for the Church of Rome as the Whore of

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Babylon. Following Una’s abandonment by Redcrosse, her sojourn at the house of Corceca satirises abuses associated with ‘blind’ devotion personified in the form of a sightless mother who ceaselessly performs acts of formulaic piety. Allegations that convents breed irregular sexual practices satirise both the vow of celibacy and monasticism, which undergo personification in Abessa, Corceca’s daughter, who functions as abbess of a disorderly house. Her lover, Kirkrapine (‘church robbery’), personifies an ambiguous cluster of allegations concerning misappropriation of ecclesiastical wealth and excesses of Protestant iconoclasts who destroy church ornaments and other holy things. The low point in Redcrosse’s fall involves anti-Catholic satire at the Castle of Orgoglio. The lover of Duessa as the Whore of Babylon, that giant seems to associate Spanish Catholicism with ‘spiritual fornication’ in the historical allegory. Duessa’s wearing of a papal tiara and brandishing of a golden chalice as she rides her SevenHeaded Beast mock the papacy and the Mass. After the trial and execution of Duessa in Book 5 (see Chapter 17, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Book 5: Poetry, Politics, and Justice), which contains extended satire on female misgovernment associated with the Catholic Queens, Mary I and Mary, Queen of Scots, and on Spanish Catholicism, a return to estates satire marks the conclusion of Book 6 (‘The Legend of Courtesy’). Renewing the slanderous onslaught that began in Book 5, the Blatant Beast ranges ‘through all estates’ before its rampage through a monastery and ‘sacred Church’ satirises both abuses of monasticism abuses and failures of Protestant iconoclasm (6.12.23–5). In contrast to Spenser’s harmonisation of classical, Italianate, and native English precedents, most late Elizabethan poets turned to the Roman satirists, Horace, Juvenal, Persius, and Lucilius, as models for formal verse satire that came into fashion during the 1580s and 1590s. Its conventions include obscure allusions, ambiguity, and abrupt and unclear transitions. Following Spenser’s practice in Mother Hubberd’s Tale, Thomas Lodge helped to establish the pentameter couplet as a normative satirical metre in A Fig for Momus (1595), a collection that features epistolary satires in addition to pastoral eclogues. Also important are Edward Guilpin’s Skialetheia, Or a Shadow of Truth, in Certain Epigrams and Satires (1598) and sardonic epigrams by Ben Jonson and Sir John Harington. Among contemporaries of Lodge and Spenser, the pre-eminent satirists were John Donne, Joseph Hall, and John Marston, the last of whom joined Jonson in composing satirical plays that crabbedly attack social foibles and vices. Although Marston builds upon classical models, obscure passages his Certain Satires (1598) and Scourge of Villainy (1598) remain in touch with the stylistic roughness of Tudor satire. Fusing the role of malcontent with the newly fashionable pose of the melancholy satirist, Marston accepts the theatrical convention that the persona of the satirist rails against vice that he exemplifies. Composed circa 1593 to 1598, five satires by Donne circulated in manuscript until posthumous publication of his verse in 1633 (Patterson 2006). The censor’s original refusal to license the poems for publication affords evidence concerning their controversial character. The notoriously difficult sense and irregular prosody of the poems

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exemplify satirical roughness. The satires mock fashionable excesses of Elizabethan costume, hyperbole in romantic poetry, courtly flattery, and corruption in law courts. Most often read among those poems, Satire 3 concerns the speaker’s search for ‘true’ religion. It anatomises the failures of those who decline to undertake that quest or unite with ‘false’ churches (e.g., the Church of Rome and Genevan Calvinism) personified in the form of women. Sceptical of organised religion, the speaker instead identifies ‘truth’ with the strenuous process of his spiritual search: To adore, or scorn an image, or protest, May all be bad; doubt wisely; in strange way To stand inquiring right, is not to stray; To sleep, or run wrong, is. (76–9)

Joseph Hall, who later gained prominence as a conservative bishop, claimed to be the originator of English satire in Virgidemiarum Six Books (1597–8). Despite that declaration, the subject matter of the collection’s two volumes is largely conventional. ‘Of toothless satires’ incorporates Horatian criticism of vices and foibles, whereas ‘Of biting satires’ contains Juvenalian attacks. His greatest innovation lies both in imitation of Juvenal and Persius and in inclusion of academic topics and literary criticism. Objects of attack include the fashion for blank-verse drama and elaborate poetic conceits: When Maevio’s first page of his poesy, Nailed to an hundred posts for novelty, With his big title, an Italian mot, Lays siege unto the backward buyer’s groat. Which all within is drafty sluttish gear, Fit for the Oven or the Kitching fire. (15–20)3

Mid-sixteenth-century precedents exist for the project of purging bawdiness from poetry in ‘Of toothless satires’. Hall cites Thomas Nashe’s frankly pornographic Choice of Valentines, composed for circulation in manuscript, but his attack also includes titillating verse such as Donne’s ‘To his mistress going to bed’ (see Chapter 63, John Donne’s Nineteenth Elegy) and Sir John Davies’ obscene parody of romantic love, ‘Faith, wench, I cannot court thy sprightly eyes’. Marston and John Milton contested Hall’s attempt to redefine verse satire. Although Milton shares Hall’s moralism, his Apology for Smectymnuus (circa April 1642) would ridicule the aged bishop’s composition of formal verse satire on the model of ‘the Latin, and Italian satirists’ as well as his definition of toothless satire: For if it bite neither the persons nor the vices, how is it a satire, and if it bite either, how is it toothless, so that toothless satires are as much as if he had said toothless teeth. (Milton 1953–82: I, 915–16)

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Emulating Spenser’s archaic language and allegory, Phineas Fletcher emulated The Faerie Queene as a model for anti-Catholic satire in The Locusts, Or Apollyonists (1627). Lucifer’s worldly guise as Equivocus (i.e. equivocation) recalls the mastery of disguise and slippery speech of Archimago. Jesuitical locusts who swarm in Hell under the tutelage of Lucifer recall the offspring of Spenserian Error, with whom they share common antecedents in the book of Revelation. Echoes of Spenser’s Cave of Error also resonate in the apocalyptic conclusion of Fletcher’s Purple Island (1633). Milton’s Lycidas (1637) features a satirical outburst in the manner of Spenser’s ‘Maye’ and eclogues by Spenserian poets including William Browne, George Wither, and John Davies of Hereford (Hunter 1977; O’Callaghan 2000). In the manner of Spenserian shepherd-clerics, St Peter employs rough-hewn language akin to Tudor verse satire to utter a jeremiad against prelatical wolves that abandon pastoral care and misappropriate church wealth: Besides what the grim wolf with privy paw Daily devours apace, and nothing said, But that two-handed engine at the door, Stands ready to smite once, and smite no more. (128–31)

A headnote added to the 1645 edition guided revolutionary readers to discover a prophecy of the downfall of Archbishop William Laud and his associates: ‘And by occasion foretells the ruin of our corrupted clergy then in their height.’ Scholars have acknowledged scattered instances of political satire in Paradise Lost, but a prevailing engagement with religious complaint and satire has received little attention until now. Before the Fall, polemical innuendoes focus heavily, but not exclusively, on Satan in the demonic world of Hell and Chaos. Thus the initial gathering of fallen angels in Hell takes on anti-papal shading when they converge upon a secret conclave (that term generally denotes a gathering of cardinals to elect a pope) at Pandemonium, where they proclaim Satan their leader. Sin and Death reunite with their father, Satan, in a problematic intrusion of Spenserian allegory that shares common ground with seventeenth-century Protestant satire. Satan’s ensuing sojourn at the Paradise of Fools affords an occasion for the epic’s most explicit outburst of ecclesiastical satire. Satan’s wolfish predation in Eden, which affords a precedent for ‘lewd hirelings’ who will intrude ‘into his [God’s] church’ (4.193), prepares the way for the Edenic meal shared by Adam and Raphael, a repast that hints at Protestant anxieties concerning the Roman-rite Mass. Parodies of Roman Catholic devotional formulae and hymns infuse the intrusion of idolatry in Eden at the time of the Fall. Books 11 and 12 foretell despoliation of the Christian church by ravening clerical ‘wolves,’ a stock target of anticlerical satire. Paradise Lost underwent publication during the Restoration, but it resorts to timehonoured traditions of complaint and satire rather than the newly fashionable mode of neoclassical satire composed in heroic couplets. Although A Satire Against Mankind

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(1679) by John Wilmot, the earl of Rochester, and John Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe (1682) recall the harsh voice of the Tudor satyr-satirist and the pentameter couplets of Spenser’s Mother Hubberds Tale, they also anticipate eighteenth-century satirical practices notable in poems such as Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad. Andrew Marvell’s satires, notably The Last Instructions to a Painter, observe Restoration fashion. By 1700 the homely voices of malcontents descended from Piers Plowman, Colin Clout, and other agrarian radicals had fallen silent. Eighteenth-century readers encountered not shepherd-hunters and prelatical wolves, but neoclassical voices modelled more strictly upon Virgilian eclogues. See also Chapter 27, English Reformations; Chapter 30, Theological Writings and Religious Polemic; and Chapter 70, Prose Fiction.

Notes 1

Smith 1904: I, 176, II, 32. Quotations are modernised with the exception of passages from verse by Spenser and Spenserian poets such as Phineas Fletcher. References to work by John Skelton are from John Scattergood’s edition (Skelton 1983). References to work by Luke Shepherd are from Janice Devereux’s

2 3

edition (Shepherd 2001). Unless otherwise noted, all other quotations are from Norbrook and Woudhuysen 1992 or Sylvester 1984. After its 1561 publication, the poem remained out of print until 1813. Joseph Hall, Virgidemiarum, Book 5: Norbrook and Woudhuysen 1992: 406–7.

References and Further Reading Carlson, David R. (ed.) (2008). John Skelton and Early Modern Culture: Papers Honoring Robert S. Kinsman. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Crane, Mary Thomas (1993). Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Crowley, Robert (1872). The Select Works of Robert Crowley, ed. J. M. Cowper. London: Early English Text Society. Fowler, Alastair (1982). Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Griffiths, Jane (2006). John Skelton and Poetic Authority: Defining the Liberty to Speak. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hadfield, Andrew (1994). Literature, Politics, and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Hall, Joseph (1949). Collected Poems, ed. A. Davenport. Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Heywood, John (1991). Plays, ed. R. Axton, and P. Happé. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Hunter, William B. (ed.) (1977). The English Spenserians : The Poetry of Giles Fletcher, George Wither, Michael Drayton, Phineas Fletcher and Henry More. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. Kernan, Alvin (1959). The Cankered Muse: Satire of the English Renaissance. New Haven: Yale University Press. Kerrigan, John (1991). Motives of Woe: Shakespeare and ‘Female Complaint’: A Critical Anthology. Oxford: Clarendon Press. King, John N. (1990). Spenser’s Poetry and the Reformation Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press. King, John N. (ed.) (1980). ‘Philargyrie of Greate Britayne by Robert Crowley’. English Literary Renaissance, 10, 47–75.

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King, John N. (1982). English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition. Princeton: Princeton University Press. King, John N. (2000). Milton and Religious Controversy: Satire and Polemic in Paradise Lost. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McRae, Andrew (2004). Literature, Satire and the Early Stuart State. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Milton, John (1953–82). Complete Prose Works of John Milton, ed. Don M. Wolfe et al., 8 vols. New Haven: Yale University Press. Norbrook, David G. E. (1984). Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Norbrook, David and H. R. Woudhuysen (eds.) (1992). The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse, 1509–1659. London: Penguin. O’Callaghan, Michelle (2000). The ‘Shepheard’s Nation’: Jacobean Spenserians and Early Stuart Political Culture, 1612–25. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Patterson, Annabel M. (1984). Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Patterson, Annabel M. (2006). ‘Satirical writing: Donne in shadows’. In A. Guibbory (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to John Donne (pp. 117– 32). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Peter, John (1956). Complaint and Satire in Early English Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Prescott, Anne Lake (1999). ‘Humour and satire in the Renaissance’. In Glyn P. Norton (ed.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 3: The

Renaissance (pp. 284–91). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Prescott, Anne Lake (2000), ‘The evolution of Tudor satire’. In Arthur F. Kinney (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to English Literature: 1500– 1600 (pp. 220–40). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rosenheim, Edward W. (1963). Swift and the Satirist’s Art. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Shepherd, Luke (2001). An Edition of Luke Shepherd’s Satires, ed. Janice Devereux. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies/Renaissance English Text Society. Skelton, John (1983). John Skelton: The Complete English Poems, ed. John Scattergood. London: Penguin. Smith, George Gregory (ed.) (1904). Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Smith, Hallett (1952). Elizabethan Poetry: A Study in Conventions, Meaning, and Expression. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Spenser, Edmund (1977). The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton. London: Longman. Spenser, Edmund (1989). The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William A. Oram et al. New Haven: Yale University Press. Sylvester, Richard (ed.) (1984). English Sixteenthcentury Verse: An Anthology. New York: Norton. Walker, Greg (1988). John Skelton and the Politics of the 1520s. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wyatt, Thomas (1978; repr. 1988). Sir Thomas Wyatt: The Complete Poems, ed. R. A. Rebholz. London: Penguin.

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The emergence of academic English studies in the nineteenth century was roughly contemporaneous with a wave of enthusiasm for folk traditions or ‘popular antiquities’. However, of the forms enthused over, only the ‘popular ballad’ made it into the literary canon. The investigation of spoken folk narrative has accordingly been undertaken under other scholarly auspices, and from other than literary perspectives. Folklorists have been variously engaged in recording texts from living tradition and exploring their socio-cultural functions, pursuing primitive origins, and plotting geographical diffusion, while students of cultural and social history are naturally more interested in deploying folk narratives as evidence for mentalities and social mores than in analysing them as significant discursive forms in their own right (Blamires 1979). One of the most celebrated analyses of folk tales as tales, Vladimir Propp’s pursuit of their narrative ‘morphology’ (Propp 1968), in so far as it has prompted pursuit of the same structures in, or application of the same structuralism to, literary narratives, is actually a reminder of the folk tale’s essentially auxiliary role in literary studies. Folk narratives – passed on primarily in oral tradition, through performance under domestic as opposed to institutional, and amateur as opposed to professional, auspices – display considerable variety, and various typologies have been proposed (Goldberg 1997). But since vernacular tradition is more subject to needs than to norms, folk narratives may more appropriately be perceived and grouped within a matrix of possibilities, each of its three dimensions comprising a spectrum in relation to a particular aspect. On the functional axis, one extreme would represent the absolute dominance of conveying information (the utilitarian pole), the other the achievement of a wellwrought narrative or an appreciated performance for its own sake (the aesthetic pole). The discursive environment ranges from a narrative scarcely distinguishable from the ambient discourse – say casual conversation – in which it is embedded, perhaps even distributed among several participants, to a verbal set-piece with a clearly signalled beginning and end, a distinct style of delivery, offered by a narrator who commands respectful attention from the remainder of the company, relegated to the role of

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audience. The third dimension comprises the degrees of correspondence between this first world in which the narrating takes place, and the second world explicitly or implicitly established within the narrative: from a close reproduction of ‘this world’ to the construction of a distinct once-upon-a-time ‘other world’. The conventional but problematic distinction between ‘tales’, which are accepted as fiction, and ‘legends’, believed to be true, may be replaced by or subsumed within their respective distributions within this spherical matrix, the tales tending towards the set-piece, otherworldly and aesthetic quadrant, the legends more embedded, thisworldly, utilitarian (Lüthi 1976) – but as a matter of degree rather than kind, with a good deal of overlapping between them (and between them and other narrative forms with centres of gravity within the other quadrants).

The Wonder Tale From the perspective of literary history the most interesting folk narratives are undoubtedly those which now go by the name of ‘fairy tale’, and not merely because conscious rewritings or imitations by individual modern authors, from Hans Christian Andersen to Angela Carter, have entered the literary canon. While not so honoured themselves, folk tales of this kind have been assigned significant indirect roles as sources for literary works or influences on individual authors, not least in the Renaissance period. It has been suggested, for example, that As You Like It is indebted to tales like the Grimms’ Dummling, in which the unregarded third son fulfils the quest and wins the princess (Belsey 2007: 22–40), and King Lear to ‘Love Like Salt’ (or a hybrid within the ‘Cinderella’ cluster), in which a father subjects his three daughters to a love test, repudiating the youngest when she offers a riddling declaration which he misinterprets (Young 1975). Cymbeline intertwines threads manifestly related to ‘The Wager on the Wife’s Chastity’ and ‘Snow White’ (Rosenberg 1991: 63–9), while The Merchant of Venice deploys the traditional folk-tale motifs of the three caskets and the pound of flesh (Belsey 2007: 149–59). Milton’s Comus is riddled with fairy-tale motifs and thematics, including the brothers’ quest for the lady lost in the wood, human– animal hybrids, one-dimensional characters, and stylistic features identified by folklorists as characteristic of the genre (Resetarits 2006). Spenser’s Faerie Queene displays throughout an ‘evident debt to an oral literature of fairy-tales’ (Lamb 2006: ch. 7), while more specifically the adventures of Britomart in Book 3 echo both ‘Mr Fox’ (related to the Grimms’ ‘Robber Bridegroom’) and ‘East of the sun and west of the moon’ (Micros 2008). Much Ado About Nothing has roots in ‘The Search for the Lost Husband’ (Bamford 2005), while The Winter’s Tale announces its fairy-tale connections in its title and confirms them in its content, which the play itself more than once compares to ‘an old tale’ (Belsey 2007: 66–7, 82–3). In an energetic survey including many of these, Linda Woodbridge adds The Taming of the Shrew (wife-taming and perilous maiden tales), All’s Well that Ends Well

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(impossible tasks), 3 Henry VI (father slaying son and vice versa), The Tempest (the giant’s daughter helps the captive prince), and Macbeth (the fisherman whose wife demands increasingly higher status from a magical helper), and adds a plethora of subsidiary features, including Joan of Arc (in 2 Henry VI) as Cinderella, Sylvia (in Two Gentlemen) as Rapunzel, Pandarus (Troilus) as Rumpelstiltskin, Queen Margaret (in Richard III) as the thirteenth fairy in ‘Sleeping Beauty’, Othello as Bluebeard – all by way of illustrating ‘this curious fact: when the greatest, most sophisticated writer in the annals of English literature wanted to steal a plot, he typically dusted off a musty old folk tale’ (Woodbridge 1993: 5–9). Catherine Belsey has similarly concluded that this connection is the key to Shakespeare’s ‘singularity’: ‘the resemblances of the plays to fairy-tales constitute the secret of both their familiarity and their adaptability’ (Belsey 2007: 19–20). Of course the connection is not always due to a conscious decision on the part of the author to use fairy-tale material directly. In the classic instance of King Lear, Shakespeare had the ‘folk’ motifs from his major source, the earlier stage play of King Leir and his Three Daughters, which in turn inherited them, through a long sequence of literary works, from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s twelfth-century chronicle of the lives of the British kings, Historia Regum Britanniae, behind which may ultimately lie some form of folk narrative. Similarly the wager-story in Cymbeline may have come from Boccaccio’s Decameron, which had it from folk tradition via a shorter or longer literary tradition, and while The Winter’s Tale contains ‘The Calumniated Wife’ and other folk-tale motifs, they have come to Shakespeare via medieval romances (Burton 1988). In such cases the fairy-tale connection will be significant to the extent – of interest only to some schools of literary criticism – that something of its ‘primitive’ nature persisted through the literary transformations, and remains a factor in the interpretation of the final product. But there can also be a more immediate relevance – of interest to other schools of literary criticism – in that if the fairy tale concerned was still current at the time the literary work was first published or performed, it will have coloured the latter’s reception by the original readers or audiences (in the case of King Lear deepening the shock of Shakespeare’s perversely tragic ending). The stakes are higher, however, than the influence of the fairy tale on the composition or reception of literary works, for it can be argued that the genre merits acknowledgement as an achievement of verbal culture in its own right, with its own distinctive characteristics: ‘The secret power of the folktale lies not in the motifs it employs, but in the manner in which it uses them – that is in its form’ (Lüthi 1986: 3). It has as good a claim to a place in the literary canon as the popular ballad, and any appreciation of English Renaissance literature and culture would be incomplete without taking it into consideration. That poverty, illiteracy, and physical exhaustion are compatible with narrative skill and create a powerful impact worthy of a major artist is demonstrated by the fairy tales of several European countries recorded directly and accurately from oral tradition in the nineteenth century and later. Even the relatively sparse harvest of English fairy tales can offer the occasional masterpiece – for example the ‘Cap[e] of Rushes’ reported

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to the Ipswich Journal in 1877 by a correspondent who recalled it as recited to him when a child by an old servant. (Briggs 1970: II, 387–9). As it happens this is (as we shall see) one of the few fairy tales for which there is evidence in the Renaissance period, and it is precisely the variant within the ‘Cinderella’ cluster with the distinctive ‘love test’ opening analogous to the beginning of King Lear, only here with the narrative efficiency, and the verbal repetition patterning, typical of tales in oral tradition: Well, there was once a very rich gentleman, and he’d three daughters. And he thought to see how fond they was of him. So he says to the first, ‘How much do you love me, my dear?’ ‘Why,’ says she, ‘as I love my life.’ ‘That’s good’, says he. So he says to the second, ‘How much do you love me, my dear?’ ‘Why,’ says she, ‘better nor all the world.’ ‘That’s good’, says he. So he says to the third, ‘How much do you love me, my dear?’ ‘Why,’ says she, ‘I love you as fresh meat loves salt’, says she. Well, he were that angry. ‘You don’t love me at all,’ says he, ‘and in this house you stay no more’. So he drove her out there and then, and shut the door in her face.

This classic instance of the ‘rule of three’ in folk narrative is repeated on a larger scale in the sequence of incognito visits made by the protagonist to a ‘great dance’ in the climactic phase of the story where the story falls into line with the more familiar ‘Cinderella’ form – except that in this humbler environment she captivates not the prince but the son of the master of the household where she has acquired a position as kitchen skivvy. With near-verbatim formulations, the other servants go off to look at the ‘grand people’ while Cape of Rushes, pretending tiredness, stays home. But once alone she doffs the cape of rushes which has hidden her fine clothing, goes to the ball, and dances with the master’s son and, having returned home early, receives with feigned wonderment the report of the other servants about the beautiful unknown lady. The increment in the third narrative unit enabling matters to proceed further is not the familiar loss of the glass slipper, but the gift of a ring from the now besotted young master. When his pining for the unknown lady threatens to undermine his health, Cape of Rushes slips the ring into his evening gruel, prompting an investigation that reveals her identity, and their wedding quickly follows. These triple structures are organised within the narration’s highly effective binary structure, the rupture with the father balanced by the reconciliation when his daughter invites him to her wedding, and serves only unsalted dishes at the feast, so he finally understands what she meant. Within this outer framework, the detachment from the old family where she was a daughter comprises a bundle of aspects which are reversed as she joins the new family where she will be a wife: personal estrangement matched by engagement; spatial separation by approach; visual degradation by upgrading when she removes the cape of rushes; social degradation by promotion

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when the menial employed, without pay ‘to wash the pots and scrape the saucepans’, is revealed as one rich man’s daughter and becomes the wife of another. At the very centre of the narrative is the brief but pivotal episode in the wilderness when she pauses briefly to make that cape of rushes, which is a major device in her survival strategy and provides her not merely with a disguise and a transitional identity, but the only name by which the narrative knows her. The fairy tale, whatever its own literary qualities or its influence on canonical literature, has a further claim to significance in relation to the English Renaissance as the powerful image of an alternative verbal culture largely associated with female storytellers (Warner 1995) and one that mainstream literary culture found at once attractive and repulsive: ‘Shakespeare does not disguise his debt to folk tale, yet his affection for storytellers is mingled with contempt’ (Woodbridge 1993: 42; cf. Belsey 2007: 17). It has been plausibly suggested that this is more or other than aesthetic distancing, and reflects the sense of threat, tinged with fascination and nostalgia, with which literate, male, book-based culture considered what amounted to an alternative female culture of hearth and nursery, from which educated writers had been weaned by years of enculturation into the exclusively masculine world of literacy and Latinity (Lamb 1998). But all the roles in Renaissance literature and culture invoked for folk narrative – as source for a literary work or influence on its reception, as significant narrative achievement in its own right, as powerful image of an alternative woman’s culture – are vulnerable to the simple historical uncertainty as to what exactly there was by way of folk narrative, particularly fairy tales, in Renaissance England. It is no longer acceptable to define folklore, narrative or otherwise, as comprising inert survivals of earlier, more primitive phases of our cultural evolution – traditions recorded in the nineteenth century must have been around through intervening periods. Nor can it be assumed that nineteenth-century tales accurately reflect their content and form in the late medieval or Renaissance periods, having been subject to both the changes natural in tradition and the impact of print: very early in the nineteenth century, well ahead of the folklorists’ collection efforts, John Clare was learning ‘Cinderella’, ‘Little Red Riding Hood’, and ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ from ‘sixpenny Romances’ (Spufford 1981: 3). The history of the fairy tale prior to the massive collections from oral tradition of the nineteenth century and later has yet to be written, not least for England, where whatever may have survived of native traditions has been comprehensively usurped by fairy tales deriving from printed continental sources, notably Charles Perrault’s Histoires ou Contes du temps passé of 1697 (first translated in 1729 and often referred to, from a caption in the frontispiece illustration, as contes de ma Mère l’Oye, ‘Mother Goose Tales’), and the Grimms’ Kinder und Hausmärchen (first edition 1812/15; first translated in 1823). We might hypothesise that this happened because England, as a result of the early onset of socio-cultural changes (including the ‘printing and gunpowder’ which according to John Aubrey, ‘frighted away Robin-good-fellow and the fairies’, Fox 2000: 211), lost its oral fairy tales earlier than continental Europe, but that

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antediluvian oral tradition may actually be a romantic invention of a later period (Harries 2001: ch. 3). Lest we are tempted to deploy those European traditions as indirect evidence of what existed in Renaissance England, it is salutary to encounter a sceptical school of folk-tale studies which acknowledges that while the narrative material – motifs, sequences of action, and even complete stories – that we have more recently encountered as fairy tales has a deep historical tradition behind it, it did not necessarily take the form of short tales originating in or essentially belonging to ‘folk’ (oral, domestic, amateur) tradition. The parallels may equally reflect a later ‘sinking’ of this material from literary to folk tradition, and even if a literary work is derivative, the oral source to which it was indebted may not have been a tale of the kind familiar more recently. For Jack Zipes, oral tradition was compromised early with the emergence in the late medieval or early modern period of what he calls a ‘literary fairy-tale’, and it is this that is recorded in the Renaissance collections (Zipes 2001: 846–7). Of the seventyfour novellas in Straparola’s Le piacevoli notti (The Delightful Nights) of 1550–3, only fourteen have any claim to be considered fairy tales, and of these only two (versions of ‘Puss in Boots’ and ‘The Pig King’) are related to tales familiar in later tradition (Zipes 2001: 853). Basile’s Pentamerone of 1634–6 contains fifty Neapolitan tales which the framing narrative claims were of the kind told by local, working-class women, and indeed six are antecedents of fairy tales familiar from later collections (‘Cinderella’, ‘Sleeping Beauty’, ‘Beauty and the Beast’, ‘Diamonds and Toads’, ‘Snow White’ and ‘Puss in Boots’), but their language seems to be a typically baroque hybrid of self-conscious literary style and folk idiom (Zipes 2001: 855–6). This, astonishingly, is all there is by way of European fairy tales as folk tales prior to the classic collections of Perrault and the Grimms, and the latter may be as much continuations of this literary tradition as new harvests from folk tradition. Basile’s work was much published and was known to Perrault, and we know the Grimms had access to both of them. It has long been appreciated that, far from collecting their tales from rural peasants, the Grimms relied mainly on their social networks among the local bourgeoisie, some of whom were of French extraction. In one of the rare studies directly confronting the early history of the wonder tale on the basis of historical evidence, Elizabeth Warning Harries is uncompromising: What we now know as fairy-tales have always been deeply affected by the practices of writing – and never existed in anything like their present form until long after the invention of print … In fact, the tales we now call fairy-tales were created primarily by highly educated and literate people, sometimes imitating what they claimed were the tales of less-educated or illiterate people. (Harries 2001: 4)

Confronted with such well-qualified scepticism, we clearly need to examine more closely the kind of evidence invoked in support of more optimistic conclusions, like that offered in Adam Fox’s authoritative survey of ‘old wives’ tales and nursery lore’ in Renaissance England:

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The fact … that so few of what we now describe as fairy-tales were written down in full before the modern period is testimony to their circulation, and survival, by word of mouth. Sufficient allusions to such tales in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries make it clear that they were then well known to contemporaries. (Fox 2000: 201)

A major part of the problem, as might be anticipated, lies in the terminology: many of the assertions noted earlier are problematic only in relation to ‘fairy tales’: tales about fairies are an entirely different matter. The diaphanously winged creatures diminutive enough to shelter in foxgloves are best left out of account, being as much indebted to Mercutio’s Queen Mab as to folk tradition, whose fairies belong rather among the elves, brownies, goblins, and other secretive and supernaturally endowed ‘people’ who are not so ‘little’ as to obviate physical or indeed sexual intercourse with humans on equal terms (Briggs 1959: chs. 4 and 5). Such creatures figure massively in English folklore of recent centuries, and are adequately documented for the early modern period too, but scholarship does not always distinguish sufficiently between folk beliefs about such creatures and actual narratives in which they are personae: historical evidence for the beliefs does not in itself document the currency of stories. More importantly, tales about fairies, for which we do have evidence in the early modern period, and which bolsters assertions about their influence on literary works (for example on Spenser’s Faerie Queene or A Midsummer Night’s Dream), should not be confused with the ‘fairy tale’ in the generic sense. Most folk narratives about fairies and similar creatures, like the ‘tales of hobgoblins and deluding spirits that abuse travellers and carry them out of their way’ told by ‘our nurses and old women’ mentioned by William Cornwallis in 1601 (Fox 2000: 195), report their interactions, often recent and local, with humans in an otherwise this-worldly environment, and are adjacent to or even overlap with the field of legend. ‘Fairy tale’, like many of the specific tales it refers to, is a translation from French, and the ‘fairies’ of these contes de fées tend rather to be mature individuals with supernatural powers, closer to the wise women, wise men, or white witches of folk belief. Never the central figures, they intervene in the trajectory of the protagonists, benignly or malignly, actively or reactively, like the familiar ‘fairy godmothers’ of Cinderella and Sleeping Beauty, or the little old man whose request for a share of one’s food and drink should always be met, if one is en route to a quest. Their presence is symptomatic of a narrative world in which supernatural powers (which can take other forms) are paradoxically a natural feature of the environment: a world of Faërie, as Tolkien put it, rather than fairies. ‘Wonder tale’, corresponding to the continental conte merveilleux, trylleeventyr, Zaubermärchen, usefully avoids the confusion with ‘tales about fairies’ and distinguishes this variety of folk narrative, which, in relation to other folk-tale forms, is at the extreme of the otherworldly axis. There are similar problems with the favourite Elizabethan term, the ‘old wives’ tale’. In Renaissance usage it could, perhaps more often than not, refer to vulgar superstitions rather than narratives, and scholarly discussion and citation can sometimes drift between ‘stories’, ‘narratives’, and ‘tales’, on the one hand, and ‘lore’ and

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‘beliefs’ on the other (Lamb 2006: 44–5; Fox 2000: ch. 3, esp. p. 175). Whether it matters depends on the topic of interest, since while the tales will reflect the superstitions, the superstitions could be communicated in non-narrative mode. The distinction may indeed explain the powerful ambivalence noted from the perspective of gender studies in educated male attitudes to the domestic ‘old wives’ tale’ – the contempt directed to the superstitions; the grudging acknowledgement to the narrative arts. But as with ‘fairy tale’ (and the evocative ‘winter’s tale’), even when referring to narratives, ‘old wives’ tale’ may just as likely evoke types of folk narrative other than the wonder tale, unless, say, the bare reference has suggestive elaborations such as ‘old romantic stories of the old time’ or ‘antiquated romances’ or the like (Fox 2000: 190, citing Aubrey and Addison). Accordingly, if we exclude what may be references to non-narrative expressions of belief and to legend-like tales of encounters with fairies, hobgoblins, ghosts, and the like, documentation for wonder tales in early modern England is desperately limited, and some specific tales referred to, such as the man in the moon and the baker’s daughter turned into an owl (Fox 2000: 200), are somewhat peripheral. Of the more likely references commonly appealed to, the most encouraging, because both a reference and a quotation, is Benedick’s statement in Much Ado About Nothing that another character’s false denial of an accusation is ‘Like the old tale … it is not so, nor ‘twas not so, but indeed God forbid it should be so’ (1.1.175–6), which anticipates almost verbatim the reiterated denial of misdoing on the part of the murderous wooer in the tale of ‘Mr Fox’, an English oicotype (local form) of ‘The Robber Bridegroom’ not recorded until much later (Fox 2000: 200; Woodbridge 1993: 7, 11). Less convincing is Edgar’s ‘Fie, foh, and fum, / I smell the blood of a British man’ in King Lear (3.4.175–6), now associated with the Giant in ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’: it is something of a formula, also uttered by giant figures in ‘Jack the Giant Killer’ and Peele’s Old Wives Tale (discussed below), and Edgar’s immediate source is probably the ballad or chante-fable ‘Child Rowland’, to which he has made reference immediately before. (This may also be the point to remark that some studies of early ‘folk narrative’ invoke ballads as if they were merely versified folk tales – a generic telescoping unlikely in the discussion of canonical literature.) Also useful, if symptomatic of this clutching at straws, is a casual reference in As You Like It: when le Beau begins an account of an off-stage event with ‘There comes an old man, and his three sons’, Celia interrupts, ‘I could match this beginning with an old tale’ (1.2.11–112, cit. Belsey 2007: 21), suggesting that there may indeed have been wonder tales of the successful third son (to which, as we have seen As You Like It itself has been connected). It may also be a sign of desperation that Scottish evidence (if of Lowland Scots rather than Highland Gaelic tradition) is appealed to, but it may be decisive. In the second decade of the sixteenth century the poet Sir David Lindsay was a member of the household of the young king, James V; he later reported how he would lull the boy to sleep by narrating ‘antique stories’ of Hector, Arthur, Caesar, Alexander,

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Hercules, and Sampson, and many a ‘fable’ of Thebes and Troy, but also ‘many another pleasant story, / Of the Reid Etin [giant], and the Gyir Carlyng [old woman/witch]’ (Lindsay 1874: lines 31–45). Only a little later, The Complaint of Scotland, printed in 1548, presents a fictional scene in which a group of shepherds agree to take turns telling tales to while away an evening, including ‘the tale of the red ettin with the three heads’ (Fox 2003: 27). The story of ‘The Red Etin’ was not recorded until it appeared in print (on the basis of a now lost manuscript) in the early nineteenth century (Fox 2003: 26), but proves to be a classic wonder tale in which the youngest of three candidates defeats the (indeed three-headed) giant and wins the princess by passing the preliminary tests which both demonstrate his worthiness and supply the necessary information and magic weapons (Briggs 1970: I, 463–70). The repertoire of those tale-telling shepherds in The Complaint of Scotland also included other items of interest for the early history of the wonder tale. Their ‘tale of the well of the world’s end’ is undoubtedly an early reference to the wonder tale with the same name, which emerges into print from Scottish oral tradition in the course of the nineteenth century. Rather than losing her ball in the well (as in the analogous and now more familiar ‘Frog Prince’ of the Grimms), the Scottish protagonist is sent thither to fetch water with a sieve – on the expectation she will not return – by a wicked stepmother (Fox 2003: 27). That the tale was also known in Renaissance England is strongly suggested by Reginald Scot’s recollection, in his Discovery of Witchcraft of 1584, of being told a tale of ‘A maid who fetched water in a sieve’ during his Kentish childhood ‘among my grandam’s maids’ (Fox 2000: 200). The Scottish shepherds also had a ‘tale of the poor tynt’ (‘servant-maid’, Danish tyende?), which is probably the ‘Cape of Rushes’ discussed above or a related variant within the ‘Cinderella’ cluster (Fox 2003: 27; Young 1975: 310 n.9), also recorded from later Scottish tradition (Briggs 1970: I, 455–6). These several instances are cumulatively encouraging, but are all instances of the characteristic configuration of the evidence and its limitations: an early modern reference to a tale being performed under ‘folk’ auspices which has to be juxtaposed with a nineteenth-century text more or less closely derived from current oral tradition. It is in this context that we can hail a Renaissance document whose extraordinary significance for the history of the wonder tale, in a European as well as a specifically English context, has yet to be fully appreciated: George Peele’s play, The Old Wives Tale, printed in 1595 (Peele 1970). Katherine Briggs’ apology, ‘though it contains no fairies, [it] is … a medley of fairy-tales’ (Briggs 1959: 90) is positively encouraging in its assurance that this particular Old Wives Tale is a fairy tale (wonder tale) rather than a tale about fairies. For all the false starts, confusions, and corrections reflecting Peele’s ambiguous commentary on the genre and folk performance, the Old Wife of the title tells a wonder-tale medley, largely comprising material compatible with the folk genre, most of it the earliest recorded documentation of specific tales familiar from later tradition, introduced with what must be among the earliest occurrences of the classic wondertale opening and of a vernacular formula for female beauty:

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Once upon a time there was a king or a lord, or a duke that had a fair daughter, the fairest that ever was; as white as snow and as red as blood: and once upon a time his daughter was stolen away, and he sent all his men to seek out his daughter … [T]here was a conjurer, and this conjurer could do anything, and he turned himself into a great dragon, and carried the king’s daughter away in his mouth to a castle that he made of stone, and he kept her I know not how long, till at last all the king’s men went out so long, that her two brothers went to seek her. O I forget: she (he I would say) turned a proper young man to a bear in the night, and a man in the day, and [the young man] keeps [remains standing] by a cross that parts three several ways, and [the conjuror] made [the young man’s] lady run mad … (Peele 1970: lines 110–29)

At this point players in the roles of the two brothers seeking the abducted princess enter, and the Old Wife’s narrative mode is usurped by the dramatic. The play is a highly sophisticated piece of dramatic writing, skilfully interlacing (with other, non-folk material) the plots and characters of what elsewhere are several distinct wonder tales: the abducted maiden, the man transformed into a bear, the grateful dead, the giant and the king’s daughter, the heads in the well (Hook 1970: 321–35). Their presence here can accordingly be legitimately appealed to in support of the influence of these particular tales on other Renaissance works. The play has attracted a good deal of interest from drama historians, puzzled by its genre and the status of the surviving text (Binnie 1980), or intrigued by the relationship between the plot structure and folk-tale narrative style (Jenkins 1991), while folklorist approaches have largely focused on identifying the motifs and tales involved (Russell 1981). There is also interest in the attitude to wonder tale and folk narrative more generally implied by the play (Lamb 2006: 57–61), but scholarship rarely pauses to exclaim with sufficient emphasis at the sheer historical significance of this early and plausible association of authentic wonder-tale material with the term ‘old wives’ tale’, and plausibly framed as a performance by an old peasant woman in her woodland cottage by night. One of her unexpected guests urges the old wife to tell ‘a merry winter’s tale’ (Peele 1970: line 83), and she agrees ‘to drive away the time with an old wife’s winters tale’ (1970: line 91), effectively combining both the Elizabethan terms which could be synonymous with wonder tale. That this was the meaning intended is confirmed when the request is exemplified by ‘The Giant and the King’s Daughter’ (1970: lines 87–8), evidently something like the tale of the ‘Red Etin’ touched on above. In his authoritative introduction to the Yale edition, speaking as a literary editor, Frank S. Hook sees it as a problem for discussion of the sources that ‘the tales with which we are concerned are often not extant in written form earlier than the eighteenth century’ (1970: line 319). Might he not have considered that these references constitute one of the play’s major claims to fame, making it altogether one of the most significant documents in the pre-modern history of the European wonder tale? It is over 200 years earlier than the Grimms’ collection, almost exactly a century earlier than Perrault’s, with nothing to show that (other than mixing his tales together) Peele was less loyal to his folk materials than they were. If The Old Wives Tale is forty years later than one of the Italian collections in which wonder-

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tale-like material is provided with a narrating frame (Straparola’s), it is earlier by the same interval than the other (Basile’s), as authentic in content as either, and more plausible in its framework than both. It has been a close-run thing, but ultimately it seems possible at least to hope that when the seventeenth-century century educationalist Obadiah Walker asserted that not merely did early modern housewives have a goodly stock of tales but that their successful performance was an achievement of some merit, he also had wonder tales in mind: The most innocent, grateful and universal discourse, is telling stories … Some are so well stocked with this trade as to be able to answer any question, or parallel any case by a story, which is (if well done) a very great perfection of eloquence and judgement. (cit. Fox 2000: 189–90)

Legends In conventional English usage (Dégh 1997: 485–6) ‘legend’ encompasses both religious and secular narratives: north European practice is etymologically more correct in reserving it for saints’ lives deriving ultimately from texts designed to be read, and in distinguishing secular narratives with a term implying something spoken (German Sage; Danish sagn). This also reflects the general tendency to categorise legends in terms of subject: standard surveys distinguish, say, between ‘etiological’ legends explaining the way things are as they are, ‘mythological’ legends of gods and heroes, supernatural legends (where the forces or beings involved may be divine, demonic, or ambivalent), and historical legends – in the sense of the deeds of kings and heroes worthy of inclusion in conventional history books (Dégh 1997: 489–90). The following survey deals with ‘historical’ legends in the quite different sense of their having been current during a particular period of history, but, when analysing legends, the interesting chronological factor is neither the time when a legend was told, nor the time assigned to the events told, but the distance between them. Oral tradition notoriously ‘telescopes’ the past, but the early modern period, which included the upheavals of the Reformation (which affected not merely belief, but religious practice, social relationships, material culture, and even the landscape), cannot but have been alert to historical change (Fox 2000: 225, 214). Contemporaries may accordingly have sensed a distinction between rumour-like legends of things happening very recently or at least in the ‘our times’ of narrator and listeners, historical legends set in pre-Reformation ‘old times’, and perhaps others set in ‘ancient times’ when the world was altogether different – and bordering on the ‘once upon a time’ of wonder tales. But equally interesting is the way this time aspect itself responds to the passage of time. For if a legend about an allegedly recent event is retold on subsequent occasions, the gap between occurrence and telling technically widens, but alternatively the event can be silently updated at each retelling to remain recent, a

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definitive characteristic of what is now distinguished as the ‘contemporary legend’ (Pettitt 1995). The spatial aspect, analogously, is most significant in relation to the distance between the place where a legend is being told and the location assigned to the events related. Many, perhaps most, folk legends are ‘local legends’ in the sense that the two are identical or at least very close: the term is rarely used of legends that are merely told in a particular place or which merely localise the events to a particular place. But analogously to the time factor there is a further distinction in terms of how space is handled across different locations. Retold at new locations, a local legend technically becomes less local, but some legends, for which the designation ‘migratory’ tends to be reserved, when they migrate, relocalise the events so that they remain local. In the Renaissance the English undoubtedly told legends on a wide variety of matters, religious and secular, displaying many permutations of the time and place aspects just surveyed. But while the situation is more encouraging than in the case of wonder tales, here too an assessment of the available evidence is a more viable option than a definitive survey of the legends themselves. From an essentially historical perspective – the legend in history; history in the legend – Adam Fox’s chapter ‘The Historical Imagination’ in his Oral and Literate Culture in England (2000: ch. 4) can hardly be bettered, but while the stakes may be lower than in the case of wonder tales, legends also merit analysis and appreciation as narratives. Unfortunately the authoritative collection of texts, Katharine M. Briggs’s Folk Legends (1971), with very few exceptions specifies only the immediate documentary sources rather than the date and character of the original records. Jennifer Westwood and Jacqueline Simpson’s The Lore of the Land: A Guide to England’s Legends (2005) is, by contrast, exemplary in specifying when a given legend was current and the circumstances of its recording; it tends, however, to encompass legends in the sense of local superstitions and beliefs as well as extended and rounded narratives, and the latter are quoted in full only sparingly. As with the wonder tales, the temptation to extrapolate into the past the betterrecorded later phases of tradition must be resisted, as recently recorded legends purportedly concerning early modern events can very well be later inventions (Fox 2000: 258). Moreover, given the instability inherent in oral tradition, even if a legend is known to have existed earlier, it need not have been in the form recorded more recently, which may reflect later elaborations, however traditional-looking the result. For example a late fifteenth-century memorial brass in the church of St Giles at Great Wishford in Wiltshire, which depicts Thomas Bonham (d. 1473), his wife Edith (d. 1469), and their nine children (Ettlinger 1970) is an instance of the extent to which ‘local historical tradition in England … was inspired, nurtured, and perpetuated by the visual evidence of the immediate environment’ (Fox 2000: 216). Something atypical about the way the children are depicted evidently prompted a legend on the circumstances of their begetting, glimpsed in a remark on a flyleaf of the parish register in 1640 by the then curate, about ‘Bonham and his wife that had seven children at one birth’. When the antiquarian John Aubrey visited Great Wishford in 1659 he

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encountered a more informative ‘confident tradition’ among the locals: ‘This Mr Bonham’s wife had two children at one birth, the first time and he, being troubled at it, travelled and was absent seven years. After his return she was delivered of seven children at one birth.’ This core narrative’s legendary status is confirmed by its occurrence elsewhere, both nearby, in Chulmleigh, Devon, and in Europe (Westwood and Simpson 2005: 786). By the early nineteenth century the Wishford legend had developed into a fully rounded tale with numerous motifs familiar from popular romance and folk narrative, which, in the absence of dated records, we would be tempted to claim was the original: the couple agreed to separate on the understanding that if the husband did not return after seven years his wife was free to remarry. He missed the deadline, but when her wedding to another man approached, was warned by a witch, who transported him home by magic. Denied admittance because of his uncouth appearance, not having shaved throughout his exile, he proved his identity by producing his half of the ring they had broken on parting. Conjugal relationships re-established, his wife duly gave birth to septuplets. It may be symptomatic that, while the elaborations have a medieval feel, the motivation has been modernised: the couple now part for financial reasons. The early modern formulation may reflect contemporary notions that the birth of twins resulted from over-enthusiastic sexual activity on the part of the parents (or even the wife’s infidelity). This is also a useful reminder that a vital resource for early legends is the work of the antiquarians – accounts of people and places by the likes of William Camden, John Leland, William Lambarde, and first and foremost John Aubrey – elite historians and topographers who, in their reconstruction of the past, were still willing to countenance legends passed on by oral tradition. A very local manifestation of this impulse is Richard Gough’s History of Myddle (started in 1700), an account of all the major families in the parish, largely based on local memories. It accordingly comprises a good deal of family and community lore, some doubtless coloured by or comprising legend. There was, for example, an earlier keeper of the castle of Myddle, Humphrey Kinaston (Gough 1981: 56–7), who, having been outlawed (for debt), lived in a cave, ‘which, to this day, is called Kinaston’s Cave, and of him the people tell almost as many romantic stories as of the great outlaw Robin Hood’. In one particularly dashing incident, when the sheriff ’s men had removed several planks from a bridge to ambush him, Humphrey Kinaston spurred his horse into a miraculous leap over the gap – its length commemorated by the distance between an ‘H’ and a ‘K’ cut into the grass of a nearby meadow, which Gough himself had seen. As with wonder tales, analogues in literary works are a problematic resource, but with regard to legends the more popular, ephemeral forms of literary production are a useful resource. As Clare R. Kinney has noted (Kinney 2008) a particularly, perhaps uniquely, informative documentation of both legends and legend-telling auspices is available in William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat (written c.1553; published 1570; see Chapter 70, Prose Fiction). One of its characters reports a fireside conversation among the members of a household which turned to the question of whether cats had intelligence, ‘for confirmation whereof one of the servants told this story’ (Schwegler

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1980: 439). The legend that follows is of a man riding through a wood accosted by a talking cat who asks him to tell ‘Pus thy Acton’ that ‘Grimalkin is dead’. Reporting this on his return home, his own house cat ‘looked upon him sadly and at the last said “And is Grimalkin dead? Then farewell, Dame”, and therewith went her way and was never seen after’. Its traditional status well attested elsewhere (Briggs 1971: I, 294–5; Schwegler 1980: 440 n.17), it is here offered effectively as a contemporary – but localised rather than local – legend, claimed by the narrator to have happened to a man in the part of the country from which he came. Similarly informative is the account in Thomas Deloney’s Thomas of Reading (c.1600) of an inn with a room where the bed was nailed to a trap door in the floor so that when a catch was released by the murderous landlord the sleeping victim was tipped into a cauldron of boiling water in the kitchen below, then disposed of into an adjacent river. Couched as an etiological legend – the river acquiring its current name from the final victim whose death led to the arrest and execution of the perpetrators – Deloney’s account is evidence that this kind of legend was current at this period, but has furthermore a relationship, in one direction or another, with actual local tradition: in the early twentieth century a narrative very close to Deloney’s was being told in and of the locality concerned. Whether Deloney used an existing local legend or inspired a new one is the classic conundrum in this field, but perhaps equally significant is his insight into the process of legend development, describing a scene in which a group of local women compare the rumours circulating, some of which had already generated formulaic elaborations such as the flesh of the victims, cooked in the cauldron, being served to the guests at the inn (Westwood and Simpson 2005: 38–9). For some categories of legend, early modern records may be available in unexpected places, and even approximate to transcripts of performances. Personal experience stories tend to conform to existing models, and will presumably be more a narrative construction, a ‘fabulate’ rather than a ‘memorate’, in the case of interactions with supernatural beings, and it may be claimed that a significant archive of folk legend survives in the substantial corpus of confessions from people prosecuted for witchcraft in early modern England and Scotland (Purkiss 2000: ch. 3). Under coercion the accused may of course merely have told the prosecutors what the latter had made very clear they wanted to hear, but a plausible trend in research (Wilby 2000) accepts that there may have been a significant vernacular input: ‘Scrabbling frantically for an answer, women probably told their interrogators stories that they had heard, changed to the first person, and stories that they had told as pastimes, not meaning to be believed’ (Purkiss 2000: 88). Particularly interesting is the way the interactions with their familiar spirit, confessed to by many witches, paralleled those in legends about less demonic creatures such as elves, fairies, brownies, and the like. Indeed a confession to a relationship with such ‘little people’ could be reformulated by the interrogator into something more culpable: ‘the devil, which she calls the fairy man’ (Wilby 2000: 284, citing a case from Orkney in 1616).

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While they report events in a chronological and causal sequence, many such confessions lack the dynamic structure and natural conclusion of a fully fledged narrative, but there are exceptions, for example that of a Somerset cunning woman, Joan Tyrrie, tried in 1555: at one time she met with one of the ‘fair fairies’, being a man, in the market of Taunton, having a white rod in his hand, and as she came to him, thinking to make an acquaintance of him, and then her sight was clean taken away for a time, and yet hath lost the sight of one of her eyes. (Purkiss 2000: 131)

This loss of ordinary sight balances the gift of magic sight granted by her fairy friends, which she was about to misuse: the latter enabled her to see the otherwise invisible fairies, and her accosting the fairy man would have given his presence away to others at the market. Diane Purkis suspects this may be ‘another case of a woman who … groped desperately for something to say, and hit upon a story she knew, one she told to the children on winter’s nights when they asked her how she lost her eye’ (Purkiss 2000: 132). Official archives may also document another class of folk legend in the form of rumours concerning the activities and intentions of national or local rulers. When they alleged royal misconduct such as Queen Elizabeth’s having a bastard child with this or that courtier (Fox 2000: 361–3), they were technically seditious, and accordingly prosecuted and so recorded. A narrative element is implied in the specification of ‘false seditious and slanderous news, rumours, sayings, or tales’ in the Marian statute of 1554 (strengthened by Elizabeth in 1581). Narrative elaboration is indeed under way in the seditious gossip for which two Essex peasants were prosecuted in 1590: they alleged not merely that the queen had borne children to the earl of Leicester, but that he had stuffed them up a chimney and burnt them alive (Samaha 1975: 64, 69). Other rumours alleging injustices or atrocities and misrepresenting government policy were a potential threat to public order, and were monitored by the authorities, intensely so in connection with social unrest and rebellion, of which the sixteenth century had its share, and with an obsessive pursuit of the original ‘author’, worthy of the early students of our modern legends (Manning 1976–7: 19) A significant source of legendary material is also to be found in religious publications seeking to influence attitudes and practices by reporting supernatural interventions. Late medieval miracle legends designed to encourage the worship of saints qualified as what Andrew Hadfield elsewhere in this volume (see Chapter 70) calls ‘the sorts of superstitious tales that Protestants were so keen to discredit as the remnants of the Catholic dark ages now superseded by Protestant light and truth’, but they were amply compensated for by the contemporary ‘judgement’ legends favoured by Puritan homilists, in which sinners, not least sabbath-breakers, are visited by divine punishment in the form of accident or disability. They survive to us in printed collections, but in many instances the sources are probably local reports, and the narratives may subsequently have circulated orally: ‘Protestantism effectively forged an

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oral tradition of its own – albeit one deeply infected by literature and learning. Recycling older materials and incorporating new ingredients, it created a distinctive body of tales and stories that might legitimately be described as a corpus of Protestant legend and folklore’ (Walsham 2003: 173). They are often somewhat shapeless if colourful anecdotes, but some achieve narrative structure by balancing the sin and its punishment, like the case of Thomas Tree, carpenter of Gloucester, who when asked to help (on the sabbath) with the fetching of a maypole, ‘swore by the Lord’s wounds, that he would, though he never went more [walked again]’: he is predictably struck down with a paralysis of the limbs, ‘and still goes lame to this day’ (Douglas and Greenfield 1986: 325; cf. 289). These may be at the ‘contemporary’ end of a spectrum of cautionary tales whose historical antithesis are legends of punishments inflicted well in the past but with evidence persisting to the present, like the sinners turned into stones still standing in the neighbourhood (Westwood and Simpson 2005: 798–9), some of which were current in the Renaissance period (Simpson 1986: 54). The contemporary legend itself is one of the hardest categories to document, characterised not by its matter but by the recent, local, ‘friend of a friend’ packaging, less likely to be recorded, and performed under literally unremarkable social and domestic auspices. Some early modern contemporary legends were very likely the same as our modern, urban contemporary legends, but in a different dress appropriate to the setting of both the narrative and the narration, an antecedent of our classic ‘vanishing hitchhiker’, say, joining a rider on a horse rather than a driver in a car. We come close to the natural habitat of contemporary legends in the diary of Pepys. On 9 October 1660, for example, he had lunch with colleagues at Deptford, all being ‘very merry at table, telling of tales’, Sir William Penn contributing ‘a good jest about some gentlemen blinding of the drawer [i.e. of beer or wine], and who he catched was to pay the reckoning. And so they got away, and the master of the house coming up to see what this man did, his man got hold of him, thinking it to be one of the gentlemen, and told him that he was to pay the reckoning’ (Pepys 1970: I, 262). We have lost a valuable anthology of the convivial narratives heard by Pepys in this a legend-exchanging community for, as he notes in the diary, he has written down the best in his ‘book of tales’ (Pepys 1970: IV, 405–6, V, 103, VIII, 95): an analogue perhaps to the Renaissance Italian facetie, personal miscellanies of unusual or bizarre occurrences in the ‘news’ of the day, including what were evidently contemporary legends in circulation at the time (Ellis 2001). Whatever the contemporary significance of the legend in the early modern period, the period was highly significant for the legend because of the growing challenge to oral tradition from the spread of literacy and the increasing availability of cheap printed materials. In what is known in linguistics as ‘domain loss’, the role of the folk legend was increasingly challenged with regard to the communication of news and rumour on recent events, by written and printed newsletters (Fox 2000: 242–8; 363ff.; Levy 2000), and with regard to entertainment by chapbooks (Spufford 1981). As Robert Schwegler suggests, the change will have been all the more effective by being

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natural and gradual, the reading aloud of written or printed material slipping easily into the role of the tale or rumour recited from memory on the domestic occasions – social assemblies or domestic group-work sessions – which were the natural habitat of legend performance and transmission (Schwegler 1980: 438–9). But, by the same token, this peaceable coexistence may have enabled the evidently vigorous persistence of folk legend through the early modern period, and the sustained ability of folk tradition to reshape materials deriving from printed sources (Fox 2000: 214). References and Further Reading Bamford, Karen (2005). ‘Foreign affairs: the search for the lost husband in Shakespeare’s All’s Well that Ends Well’. Early Theatre, 8, 57–72. Belsey, Catherine (2007). Why Shakespeare? London: Palgrave. Binnie, Patricia (ed. and introd.) (1980). The Old Wives Tale. Revels Plays. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Blamires, David (1979). ‘The challenge of fairytales to literary studies’. Critical Quarterly, 21, 33–40. Bottigheimer, Ruth B. (2009) Fairy Tales: A New History. New York: State University of New York Press. Briggs, K. M. (1959). The Anatomy of Puck: An Examination of Fairy Beliefs among Shakespeare’s Contemporaries and Successors. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Briggs, K. M. (ed.) (1970). Folk Narratives. A Dictionary of British Folk-Tales in the English Language, Part A, 2 vols. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Briggs, K. M. (1971). Folk Legends. A Dictionary of British Folk-Tales in the English Language, Part B, 2 vols. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Burton, Julie (1988). ‘Folktale, romance and Shakespeare’. In Derek Brewer (ed.), Studies in Medieval Romances: Some New Approaches (pp. 176–97). Cambridge: Brewer. Dégh, Linda (1972). ‘Oral folklore, folk narrative’. In R. M. Dorson (ed.), Folklore and Folklife: An Introduction (pp. 53–83). Chicago: Chicago University Press. Dégh, Linda (1997). ‘Legend’. In Thomas A. Greene (ed.), Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Beliefs, Customs, Tales, Music and Art (vol. 2., pp. 485– 93). Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio.

Douglas, A. and P. Greenfield (eds.) (1986). Records of Early English Drama: Cumberland, Westmorland, Gloucestershire. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Ellis, Bill (2001). ‘Haec in sua parochia accidisse dixit: the rhetoric of 15th century contemporary legends’. Contemporary Legend, ns 4, 74–92. Ettlinger, Ellen (1970). ‘Seven children at one birth’. Folklore, 81, 268–75. Fox, Adam (2000). Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500–1700. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fox, Adam (ed.) (2003). Spoken Word: Oral Culture in Britain, 1500–1800. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Goldberg, Christine (1997). ‘Folktale’. In Thomas A. Greene (ed.), Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Beliefs, Customs, Tales, Music and Art (vol. 1., pp. 356–66). Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio. Gough, Richard (1981). The History of Myddle, ed. David Hey. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Greene, Thomas A. (ed.) (1997). Folklore: An Encyclopedia of Beliefs, Customs, Tales, Music and Art. 2 vols. Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio. Harries, Elizabeth Wanning (2001). Twice Upon a Time: Women Writers and the History of the Fairy Tale. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Jenkins, Ron (1991). ‘The Old Wives Tale: a study in folkloric narrative’. Journal of the Society of English and American Literature, 36, 1–24. Kinney, Clare R. (2008). ‘Clamorous voices, incontinent fictions: orality, oratory, and gender in William Baldwin’s Beware the Cat’. In Mary Ellen Lamb and Karen Bamford (eds.), Oral Traditions and Gender in Early Modern Literary Texts (pp. 195–207). Aldershot: Ashgate. Lamb, Mary Ellen (1998). ‘Engendering the narrative act: old wives’ tales in The Winter’s Tale,

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Macbeth and The Tempest’. Criticism, 40, 537–42. Lamb, Mary Ellen (2006). The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson. London: Routledge. Lamb, Mary Ellen and Karen Bamford (eds.) (2008). Oral Traditions and Gender in Early Modern Literary Texts. Aldershot: Ashgate. Levy, F. J. (2000). ‘Staging the news’. In Arthur F. Marotti and Michael D. Bristol (eds.), Print, Manuscript and Performance (pp. 252–78). Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Lindsay, David (1874) The Poetical Works of Sir David Lindsay, ed. David Laing, 3 vols. Edinburgh: William Paterson. Lüthi, Max (1976). ‘Aspects of the Märchen and the legend’. In Dan Ben-Amos (ed.), Folklore Genres (pp. 17–33). Austin: University of Texas Press. Lüthi, Max (1986). The European Folk Tale: Form and Nature. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Manning, Robert B. (1976–7). ‘Violence and social conflict in mid-Tudor rebellions’. Journal of British Studies, 16, 18–40. Micros, Marianne (2008). ‘Robber bridegrooms and devoured brides: the influence of folktales on Spenser’s Busirane and Isis Church episodes’. In Mary Ellen Lamb and Karen Bamford (eds.), Oral Traditions and Gender in Early Modern Literary Texts (pp. 73–84). Aldershot: Ashgate. Peele, George (1970). The Old Wives Tale, ed. Frank S. Hook. New Haven: Yale University Press. Pepys, Samuel (1970). The Diary of Samuel Pepys, ed. Robert Latham and William Matthews, 11 vols. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Pettitt, Tom (1995). ‘Legends contemporary, current and modern’. Folklore, 106, 96–8. Propp, Vladimir (1968). The Morphology of the Folktale, 2nd edn. Austin: University of Texas Press. Purkiss, Dianne (2000). Troublesome Things: A History of Fairies and Fairy Stories. London: Penguin.

Resetarits, Cheryl Rogers (2006). ‘The fairy-tale elements of Milton’s Comus’. Fabula, 47, 79–89. Rosenberg, Bruce A. (1991). Folklore and Literature: Rival Siblings. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press. Russell, W. M. S. (1981). ‘Folktales and the theater’. Folklore, 92, 3–24. Samaha, Joel (1975). ‘Gleanings from local criminal-court records: sedition among the “inarticulate” in Elizabethan Essex’. Journal of Social History, 8, 61–79. Schwegler, Robert A. (1980). ‘Oral tradition and print: domestic performance in Renaissance England’. Journal of American Folklore, 93, 435–41. Simpson, Jacqueline (1986). ‘God’s visible judgements: the Christian dimension of landscape legends’. Landscape History, 8, 53–8. Spufford, Margaret (1981). Small Books and Pleasant Histories. London: Methuen. Walsham, Alexandra (2003). ‘Reformed folklore? Cautionary tales and oral tradition in early modern England’. In Adam Fox (ed.), Oral Culture in Britain, 1500–1850 (pp. 173–95). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Warner, Marina (1995). From the Beast to the Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers. London: Vintage. Westwood, Jennifer and Jacqueline Simpson (2005). The Lore of the Land: A Guide to England’s Legends, from Spring-Heeled Jack to the Witches of Warboys. London: Penguin. Wilby, Emma (2000). ‘The witch’s familiar and the fairy in early modern England and Scotland’. Folklore, 111, 283–305. Woodbridge, Linda (1993). ‘Patchwork: piecing the early modern mind in England’s first century of print culture’. English Literary Renaissance, 23, 5–45. Young, Alan R. (1975). ‘The written and oral sources of King Lear and the problem of justice in the play’. Studies in English Literature, 1500– 1900, 15, 309–19. Zipes, Jack (ed.) (2001). The Great Fairy Tale Tradition: From Straparola and Basile to the Brothers Grimm. New York: Norton.

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‘Such pretty things would soon be gone’: The Neglected Genres of Popular Verse 1480–1650 Malcolm Jones

In recent times there have at long last been moves to extend the canon of ‘approved authors’ of English literature during our period, though rarely to extend the canon of approved genres. There has, for example, been surprisingly little interest in the parodic forms (but see Jones 1997 and 1999) and almost none in inscriptional and functional verse, for all its ubiquity. In A Dialogue full of Pith and Pleasure (1603), Nicholas Breton wrote that ‘Verses are so common that they are nailed upon every post’ (Breton 1879: II(1), 6), and, surprisingly, we have a fair idea of what such ephemeral verses were like thanks to the litigious nature of an age in which an attack on a man’s honour, or a woman’s ‘honour’ (which usually implied an attack on her sexual reputation), was likely to end up in court. Hundreds of such libels survive in our county and national record offices. Many of these ‘railing rhymes’ are halting in the extreme: they stutter and splutter, but nothing better conveys the passion, the immediacy, of personal or group antagonisms. At the beginning of the third millennium it is not easy for us to understand why these squibs are invariably in verse, albeit often ill scanned and otherwise imperfect. For us prose is the ‘default position’: we live in a culture that is, literally, more prosaic. The early modern mentalité, if it had something urgent to say, naturally expressed itself in rhyme – small wonder that Chapman’s eponymous hero, Monsieur d’Olive (1606), was moved to say, ‘I am afraid of nothing but I shall be balladed’ for, given some of the ‘ballads’ that follow, he was right to be afraid. Of course, the production of such libellous ballads was not without risk, and Fox suggests that the poetaster whose tongue is nailed to the post in Book 5 of The Faerie Queene, who ‘lewd poems … did compile … and railing rymes had spread’, would have been ‘quite a familiar sight’ to his Elizabethan contemporaries (Fox 2000: 306; see also Fox 1992: 211–12, 224, and Figure 28). In 1619, for instance, a group of aggrieved Lancashire tenants composed a ‘scandalous libel in rhyme and fasten[ed] and pinn[ed] it to the common whipstock [whipping-post] standing in the most public place’, and were furthermore ready to ‘read and sing the said libel as a ballad’.

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Only very exceptionally would one of these essentially local ballads ever reach print, but on the other hand, some bear a distinct resemblance to published ballads. Martin Ingram pointed out that the following defamatory verse, found in the Essex village of Earls Colne in 1588 – Woe be unto Kendal That ever he was born; He keeps his wife so lustily She makes him wear the horn. But what is he the better, Or what is he the worse, She keeps him like a cuckold With money in his purse

– is clearly closely related to a rhyme published in Tarlton’s Jests (1613): ‘Woe worth thee, Tarlton, That ever thou wast born; Thy wife hath made thee cuckold, And thou must wear the horn.’ ‘What and if I be, boy, I’m ne’er the worse; She keeps me like a gentleman With money in my purse.’

Ingram further noted an elaborated version which appeared at Bremhill, Wiltshire, in 1618; it seems safest to assume that a traditional mocking verse, circulating below the level of print, was eventually fathered on Tarlton by the compiler of his (posthumous) Jests in exactly the same way many of ‘his’ equally traditional jests themselves were (Ingram 1988). From another Wiltshire village, Ogbourne St Andrew, comes the following scatological verse dated 1626: O hark a while and you shall know Of a filthy beast did her breech show … Although she be never so brave and fine I say her breech is not the moonshine

We are surely entitled to see in this some adumbration of the modern English sense of the verb ‘moon’, ‘to expose the buttocks’. It should be pointed out that these ‘libels’ are of great importance for filling out the record of the language. It is particularly in the taboo areas of the lexicon, of course, that such verse can most usefully supplement the printed record, not least because the majority of such cases to reach the courts concern illicit sexual relations or the imputation of such. The following verse relates

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to Bath in 1614/15; the clerk, to whom we must be grateful for what follows, finally gave up his transcription in disgust, remarking that ‘the residue and other part of the said libel rhyme and verses is so obscene and foul as it is not fit herein to be written or remembered, neither is the same fitting for any modest eyes to read or ears to hear’. To judge from what he did transcribe, it must have been very strong meat indeed: Of all the whores that I have known, From court that came unto our town, There’s none compares with Muddy Mall, That plays the whore from spring to fall: From spring to fall was never see[n], A pocky [infected with the pox] jade worse than Marie. All honest women do her scorn, Because she was a bastard born, A bastard born of noble race, Which makes her wear a brazen face; A brazen face of opal hue, An arrant whore fit for a stew [brothel]; If you have gold she shows her arse, If you have none she burns your tarse [infects your penis], She keeps herself just like a punk [prostitute], And lays her heels against a trunk, Against a trunk she lays her feet, And wipes her cunt with a foul sheet. (Stokes and Alexander 1996: 24 [Bath, 1614–15)

In an era of such awful penalties for lese-majesty, rarely do we come across such outrageous verses as the following quatrain apparently circulating in the little Welsh village of Llansilin in 1612: The The The The

Bible is a bauble, Lord Chamberlain is a fool, old Queen a bastard, Lord Treasurer a long tool [prick] (Somerset 1994: 69 (Llansilin, 1612))

No Puritan, presumably, would have countenanced the following abuse of biblical authority in the form of this parodic decalogue, entitled Andrew Abington’s Commandments, from Trent, Somerset, in 1616: Thou Thou Thou Thou Thou

shalt shalt shalt shalt shalt

do no right nor thou shalt take no wrong; catch what thou canst; pay no man; commit adultery; bear false witness against thy neighbour;

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Malcolm Jones Thou shalt covet thy neighbour’s wife; Thou shalt sell a hundred sheep to Henry Hopkins after thou shalt draw the best of them; Thou shalt sell thy oxen twice; Thou shalt deny thy own hand. (Fox 1994: 78)

A typically scurrilous verse from Worcestershire in 1605 shows the value of such authentically popular rhyme in illuminating our knowledge of colloquial usage: I can no more: This is the whore Of cowardy George Hawkins; He got with child In a place most wild, Which for to name It is a shame. Yet for your satisfaction I will make relation: It was in a privy, A place most filthy As, gent [gentleman], you may judge, Yet nothing too bad For a knave and a drab, And so they pray go trudge. (Fox 1992: 206ff.)

The colloquial adjective ‘cowardy’ is not recorded in the OED until 1836, but the final words of this verse provide an interesting parallel by which to gauge the colloquiality of Falstaff ’s dismissal of his cronies in the third scene of The Merry Wives of Windsor (1598), ‘Go! / Trudge, plod away o’th’hoof: seek shelter, pack!’ (1.3.71–2). A verse from the village of Beckington near Berkley in Somerset of 1611/12 alludes to an ancient folkloric ritual by which a man might be insulted by cutting off his horse’s tail, preparatory to a skimmington ride – a satirical parade in which a community conveyed its disapproval of one of its number, usually for some marital irregularity or other sexual offence felt to outrage local mores. At Beckington the animal was prepared by having a large pair of horns bound to its head (thereby implying that the procession was conceived as an attack on a cuckold), and having the hair cut off its ears, mane, and tail, whereupon, thus mutilated, it was led through the village accompanied by loud shouts and outcries – interestingly, the word used to describe what was done to the horse is ‘disgraced’, though this is clearly a transference of the disgrace done thereby to its owner, the target of the skimmington: William Swarfe, I heartily commend Your mare; tail she hath spended.

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I pray take it for no scorn, For in her head there hangs a horn; Because your mare is somewhat pied, She is finely trimmed for you to bide [? ride] …1

Occasionally, as in the case of the disturbances in Wells in 1607, the verses recorded belong rather more obviously in a (para-)dramatic context. O’Conor has masterfully reconstructed the circumstances attending the parodic sermon preached against the earl of Lincoln with satirical intent at South Kyme in Lincolnshire in 1601, with, at the end of a play, an interlude ‘termed and named the Death of the Lord of Kyme, as the Earl’s Bill of Complaint has it’ (O’Conor 1934: 108–26). It was further alleged that John Cradock the Elder who delivered the sermon, ‘in frown of religion and the profession thereof, being attired in a minister’s gown and having a corner-cap [as worn by divines] on his head, and a book in his hand opened … in a pulpit made for that purpose, [did] deliver and utter a profane and irreligious prayer … and did … read a text out of the book of Mabb, as he then read it’. The form of verse used here is a delightful farrago of liturgical parody and sheer nonsense: De profundis pro defunctis. Let us pray for our dear Lord [i.e. Summer Lord] that died this present day, Now blessed be his body and his bones: I hope his legs are hotter than gravestones, And to that hope let’s all conclude it then, Both men and women pray, and say, Amen.

A little later, ‘he … did read a text which he said was taken out of the twenty second chapter of the book of Hitroclites,2 which text was’ (in meaningless pseudo-Latin): Cesar Dando, sublivando, ignoscendo gloriam adeptus est

On examination, the sermon’s author, Talboys Dymoke, was able to give the text of the preacher’s parodic blessing, with the alliteration of which he was, perhaps, particularly pleased: ‘The mercy of mustard seed and the blessing of bull-beef and the peace of potluck be with you all. Amen.’ There is not space here to exemplify all the parodic genres, but perhaps we might just take two examples of the parodic prescription from both ends of our period: c.1520 we find the anonymous Good medicine if a maid have lost her maidenhead to make her a maid again (Wright and Halliwell Philips 1841: I, 250ff.), and from c.1647, one of Katherine Philips’ juvenilia, surviving in the form of ‘A recipe to cure a love-sick person who can’t obtain the party desired’:

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Popular verse has long been at the service of political protest, of course, and one of the best known of such verses, which saw its author executed, is the rhyming couplet which William Collingbourn fixed to the doors of St Paul’s in 1484: The Cat, The Rat and Lovel our dog, Rule all England under a hog [Richard III].

Often such political protest was couched in prophetic verse. In Norfolk in 1549 the peasants who followed Kett were encouraged by a prophecy, which they openly proclaimed in public places: The country knaves, Hob, Dick, and Hick, With clubs and clouted shoon [patched shoes] Shall fill up Dussindale With slaughtered bodies soon. (cit. Thomas 1971: 478)

In the 1530s, according to Cavendish, his biographer, Wolsey had been impressed by the prophecy ‘When this cow rideth the bull / Then, priest, beware thy skull’ – popularly interpreted to allude to the influence of Anne Boleyn (pronounced ‘bull-ain’) over King Henry VIII and the dissolution of the monasteries. The following verse from Wye in Kent dates from 1630 and voices popular protest at high prices, as well as threatening retribution on those in authority: The corn is so dear, I doubt [fear] many will starve this year; If you see not to this, Some of you will speed amiss; Our souls they are dear, For our bodies have some care, Before we arise Less will suffice. (Clark 1976)

An apparently increasing anxiety throughout the early modern era as to ‘who shall wear the breeches’ is reflected in unsophisticated verse of the type found in Plat’s The Flowers of Philosophy (1592), in which John says to Joan, ‘if thou wilt wear thy husband’s gear, then shalt thou be above me’, and

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Make me promise never more That thou shalt mind to beat me. For fear thou wear the wisp,3 good wife, And make our neighbours ride [act out a skimmington ride].

In the same poem Joan envisages a topsy-turvy world in which … women then must play the men, And ride about the land, And men must reel, and wind the [spinning] wheel, With distaff in their hand,

exactly like the hapless man shown in one of the engravings from a series first issued in 1628 (Figure 14; see Chapter 33, The English Broadside Print, c.1550–c.1650). Located somewhere between literary and inscriptional verse is the quite unresearched genre of ‘trencher poetry’ – though the literary men were quite sure at which end of that spectrum it belonged. In his Art of English Poesy (1589), however, Puttenham is not judgemental, neutrally stating that ‘We call them [epigrams] posies, and do paint them nowadays upon the backsides of our trenchers of wood, or use them as devices in arms or in rings’ (Puttenham 1589: 47), but Joseph Hall refers to ‘hungerstarved trencher poetry’ (Satires (1598), 1.1.13). Milton couples such verses with ring-posies: ‘Instead of well-sized periods, he greets us with a quantity of thumb-ring posies. “He has a fortune therefore good / Because he is content with it.” This is a piece of sapience not worth the brain of a fruit-trencher’ (Apollo Smectymnus (1642), 28). Middleton has one of his characters in The Old Law (c.1618) refer sneeringly to ‘running admonitions / Upon cheese-trenchers, [such] as “Take heed of whoring, shun it; / ’Tis like a cheese too strong of the runnet [rennet]’ (2.1.126ff.). Maybe it is the contempt of the seventeenth-century litterati that has led to the unaccounted scholarly neglect of the genre, which, however, has much to reveal about the contemporary mentalité. John Davies’s Verses given to the Lord Treasurer [Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst] upon New Year’s Day upon a Dozen of Trenchers, commonly known as The XII Wonders, represents twelve social types with corresponding painted figures. At least three copies of this original set, which must have been presented around 1600, survive, and the following lines are taken from the verse accompanying the twelfth of the dozen stereotypes depicted, ‘The Maid’: I marriage would forswear, but that I hear men tell That she that dies a maid must lead an ape in hell; (Tilley 1950: M37) Titles and lands I like, yet rather fancy can, A man that wanteth gold, than gold that wants a man. (Tilley 1950: M361)

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It is perhaps not without a certain significance that the majority of trencher-sets to survive are painted with verses which relate to marriage and relations between the sexes. From a set of a dozen trenchers dated 1599, I excerpt three quatrains, the first well exemplifies the sententious nature of these verses: A quiet life surmounteth gold, [see Tilley 1950: L244] Though goods great store thy coffers hold; Yet rather death I do beseech, Than most masters to wear no breech[es]. (Tilley 1950: M727)

These trencher marriage-debates are very reminiscent, stylistically too, of Thomas Tusser’s ‘Dialogue Between two Bachelors, of Wiving and Thriving’ (Tusser 1580). The third trencher of this set, for example, reads: What needs such cares oppress thy thought, For Fortune saith that hap is naught: A shrew thy chance is for to keep, But better a shrew, say, than a sheep. (Tilley 1950: S412)

This may be compared with Tusser’s verse: She may in something seem a shrew, Yet such a housewife as but few, To help thee, sir, to thrive: This proverb look in mind ye keep, As good a shrew is as a sheep, For you to take to wive.

The idiom of ‘wearing the breeches’ turns up again: I shrew [beshrew, curse] his heart that married me; My wife and I can never agree; A knavish quean [shrew], by Jys [by Jesus!], I swear, The goodman’s breech she thinks to wear.

Two verses from another set dated 1595 clearly refer to the stereotypical idle housewife or sloven, with more than a hint of sexual excess in the second: Early rising shall do me no harm, [I shan’t allow rising early to harm me] Till ten or eleven I keep my bed warm; Knitting and spinning I lay both aside, The smoke of the kitchen I cannot abide.

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You are a good housewife and careful to gain A world of goods by travail and pain; For all that you lose at night by your play [love-making], You get it up again4 by sleeping all day.

The majority of such verses are typically misogynist, and the ‘curst’ or ‘shrewish’ wife is the target of many such (and note in this next the traditional prejudice against the red-haired): A woman that is wilful is a plague of the worst, As good live in hell as with a wife that is curst. Pick out a shrew that will serve you a choice, With a red head, a sharp nose, and a shrill voice.

The passage berating women in Othello (2.1.110ff.) is shown for the commonplace it is (Tilley 1950: W702) by its incidental (and incomplete) occurrence on one of these trenchers: A widow that is wanton, with a running [giddy] head, Is a devil in the kitchen, and an ape in her bed.

Another writer of such ‘trencher poetry’ when composing couplets to accompany a now lost set painted with plants, could not resist, for ‘pea’, employing the suggestive word, ‘peascod’; one A.M.R. published the couplet in question thus in the Gentleman’s Magazine (1794, no. 64): Peascods are restorative, and hardly found, When for [*] some women give a pound,

with a note that the asterisk replaced a word ‘so indelicate that it is not worth supplying’ – presumably the inverted ‘codpieces’. One such trencher couplet, not dated unfortunately, seems to come close to the title of one of Shakespeare’s plays, perhaps strengthening the case for considering it – like so many others of that era – proverbial: Thy love that thou to one hast lent: In labour lost thy time was spent.5

More ‘popular’ writers, such as Richard Brathwaite, however, were not above ‘composing posies upon bracelets’ (see ‘The Courtier’ in his Strappado for the Devil (1615), 128), and from c.1630 survives a broadside ballad entitled, ‘A Delicate New Ditty composed upon the Posie of a Ring, Being “I fancy none but thee alone”: Sent as a New Year’s Gift by a Lover to his Sweetheart’. It is interesting to note that, even then, the literary elite lumped such posies together with the verses to be found on

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painted cloths and knives as beneath their dignity: Jonson has his sneer in Every Man in his Humour (1598), where the foolish Stephen is seen composing a ring-posy, ‘The deeper the sweeter, I’ll be judged by St Peter’, and lamely explains that he put in the saint’s name, ‘to make up the metre’ (2.4). Knife handles were another site for inscriptions, and we may recall Gratiano’s contemptuous reference to the ring given him by Nerissa in The Merchant of Venice (5.1.147ff.): … a hoop of gold, a paltry ring That she did give me, whose posy was For all the world like cutler’s poetry Upon a knife: ‘Love me, and leave me not’.

Actual non-literary examples of such ‘cutlers’ poetry’ include the following knifehandle inscription dated to the second quarter of the sixteenth century: BETTER IT IS A POOR HOUSE TO HOLD THAN TO LIE IN PRISON IN FETTERS OF GOLD6

From the very end of our period, the British Museum possesses a pair of weddingknives dated 1676, one of which is inscribed My Love is fixed, I will not range; I like my choice, I will not change. (Evans 1931: xix n.2)

which must be one of the most popular of all amatory couplets, and is later found, for example, embroidered on a pair of garters also bearing the date 1717 (but with a heart symbol in place of the word ‘Love’).7 Another very popular inscription found on posy-rings (but also on a piece of metropolitan slipware dated 1650: Hodgkin 1891: 25) is The gift is small, Good will is all.

The earliest printed collection of such amatory posies appears to be Love’s Garland, or Posies for Rings, Hand-Kerchieves, and Gloves, and such Pretty Tokens that Lovers send their Loves (1624), but earlier John Manningham jotted down some ‘Posies for a jetring lined with silver’ in his diary. An ingenious semi-rebus type is included in Cupid’s Posies (1642), and actually survives on a poke-dial found near Petworth: The love is true that I.O.U. As true to me then C.U.B. [see you be]

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Other ring-posies use tiny images either to represent the word itself (e.g. a heart or a hand) or to suggest it (e.g. a skull = death), as does the inscription surrounding the lovesick ‘Shepherd Buss’ on a piece of blackwork embroidery of uncertain function (possibly a table-covering) preserved in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The rebuses (pictures representing words) appear in bold: FALSE CUPID WITH MISFORTUNE’S WHEEL HATH WONDED [wounded] HAND AND HEART WHO SIREN-LIKE DID LURE ME WITH LUTE AND CHARMED HARP THE CUP OF CARE AND SORROW’S CRUTCH DID CLIPS [eclipse] MY STAR AND SUN MY ROSE IS BLSTED [blasted] AND MIY BONES LO DEATH INTERS IN URN. (reproduced in Geddes, Mac, and Macneill 1965: 42)

Seventy years ago Joan Evans catalogued a large number of posies both from manuscripts and the rings themselves,8 and a few follow: That heart that hopeth hath no rest. If hope were not my heart would burst.9 True Love hath led my heart to choose: My heart is dead if you refuse. (Harleian MS 6910; c.1596) My joy will die If you deny. (Sion College MS English 65, c.1605)

A wedding-ring with this posy in it: You have my heart till death depart.10 (1596/7) Forever or never: love is all. (ring in Museum of London) Hurt not his heart Whose joy thou art. (ring found at Sullington, Sussex)

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More utilitarian objects might also be inscribed – with more utilitarian messages. A pair of bellows bearing the date 1645 was inscribed: DO. YOUR. WORK. AS. WELL. AS. I AND. YOU’LL. HAVE. FIRE. BY. AND. BY.11

A church bell formerly at Martham, Norfolk, and made by Thomas Brend in 1660, is inscribed God amend what is amiss and send love where none is

– a proverbial sentiment only recorded earlier as the title or first line of a (lost) ballad entered in the Stationers’ Register to John Allde in 1567/8. Pottery of this period is frequently inscribed, but it can speak for itself: a metropolitan slipware jug in the Museum of London reads: BREAK ME NOT PRAY IN YOUER HASTE FOR I TO NONE WILL GIVE DISTASTE 164512 (Rackham and Read 1924: fig. 55)

A beautiful majolica jug of c.1630, made at a pottery in Lambeth or Southwark, sounds like another lover’s gift; a young man in the conventional melancholic pose – not unlike Hilliard’s famous miniature of the young man amongst the roses – is surrounded by an inscription which reads: I AM NO BEGGER I CANNOT CRAVE YOU KNOW THE THING THAT I WOULD HAVE. (Rackham and Read 1924: pl. V)

However spiritually we may be inclined to interpret the ‘thing’ the young man would have, there can be no doubting the suggestiveness of the legend, ‘See my conny 1657’, on a mug in the Victoria and Albert Museum, with a rabbit (i.e. a ‘con(e)y’) painted inside on the bottom which loomed into the drinker’s view as the contents were drunk – a familiar period innuendo.13 Rather more wholesome is the inscription borne by a majolica plate made in London and dated 1600: THE ROSE IS RED THE LEAVES ARE GREEN GOD SAVE ELIZABETH OUR QUEEN (Opie and Opie 1997: no. 417)

The earliest surviving samplers date from the latter part of our period, and include such verses as

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—— is my name, and with my nedell I rought [needle I wrought] the same, and if my skil had beene better, I would have mended every letter (Bolton and Coe 1921: no. 128)

evidenced on an American sampler of c.1630. Weever’s interest in Ancient Funeral Monuments (1631) reminds us that epitaphs, of course, frequently consist of short poignant verses, and one such is recorded on the Judd funeral monument (1560): THE WORD OF GOD HATH KNIT US TWAIN AND DEATH SHALL US DIVIDE AGAIN

Many of the verses we call nursery rhymes are of some antiquity. Although, of the 550 rhymes in the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, the Opies were able to trace only a very few (mostly riddles) as far back as the late Middle Ages, almost a quarter of the rhymes were known before 1600, and half of the 550 by 1700. Certainly of seventeenth-century date, for example, is ‘I do not love thee, Dr Fell’ and, although political and personal satires are far rarer than some popular authors have claimed, ‘Jack Spratt’ may ridicule a seventeenth-century Archdeacon Pratt. The couplet ‘Cocka doodle dooe, / Peggy hath lost her shooe’ is found in The Most Cruel and Bloody Murder (1606), and is probably the opening of a bawdy ballad – ‘losing one’s shoe’, being an earlier idiom for ‘losing one’s virginity’, when used of women. Although ‘I had a little nut-tree’ is not recorded before the late eighteenth century, it too may well be a sexual innuendo – like the reference to the master’s lost ‘fiddling stick’ in the following couplet of ‘Cock-a-doodle-doo’ – as is suggested by close verbal parallels in an early fifteenth-century erotic lyric, ‘I have a new garden’: In the midst of my garden is a pear-tree set and it will no pear bear but a St John’s pear. The fairest maid of this town prayed me to give her a graft of my pear-tree.

The singer gives the maid a good ‘grafting’, and twenty weeks later she gives birth. A couplet in the Skeltonic Image of Hypocrisy (c.1533) seems similarly familiar: As wise as a gander, Wots [knows] not where to wander

appearing to adumbrate ‘Goosey, goosey gander’, which the Opies could not find before 1784.

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In William Wager’s The Longer Thou Livest the More Fool Thou Art (written c.1559), Moros enters singing snatches of songs he was taught by his mother’s maid as he used to sit on her lap and – by way of excuse – says, ‘Such pretty things would soon be gone, If I should not sometime them remember’. He sings a fragment of one song that is not known again until printed in an early nineteenth-century nursery-rhyme book: Tom-a-lin and his wife, and his wife’s mother They went over a bridge all three together; The bridge was broken, and they fell in, ‘The Devil go with all!’ quoth Tom-a-lin.

‘John Cook’s mare’ is also hinted at in Moros’s ‘I laid my bridle upon the shelf, If you will any more sing it your self ’ – implying two and a half centuries’ survival in the oral tradition. ‘Broom, broom on hill’, also alluded to by Moros, is included amongst Captain Cox’s Ballets and Songs, All Ancient (1575). The ‘inexpressibility topos’ represented by ‘If all the world were paper’, is first found in print in Wit’s Recreations (1641), but not found in print again until 1810, which suggests it was kept alive by the oral tradition through the intervening two and a half centuries; a similar period in the solely oral tradition is inferred for a verse collected by Halliwell in 1842, ‘I went to the toad that lies under the wall, I charmed him out, and he came at my call’, which is only known earlier as spoken by one of the witches in Jonson’s Masque of Queens (1609). A catch given in the play the Pinder of Wakefield (1632), ‘The hart he loves the high wood’, is similarly not heard of again until 1846. Painted cloths, a cheap substitute for tapestry, are another genre of artefact almost entirely neglected by scholars – admittedly very few are extant – but their ubiquity, as confirmed by the evidence of inventories, for example, means that an ignorance of their iconography and literary content seriously misrepresents the popular visual culture of the era. A lengthy passage in William Bullein’s A Dialogue against the Fever Pestilence (1564) records ‘a comely parlour, very neatly and trimly apparelled, Londonlike, the windows … well glazed, and fair cloths with many wise sayings painted upon them … in golden letters’, several of which he goes on to specify. The sententiousness of such verses had already fallen from favour amongst the elite by the end of the sixteenth century, so that it should not surprise us to find John Hoskins, in his Directions for Speech and Style (1599), asking rhetorically, ‘why should the writers of these days imprison themselves in the straitness of these maxims? … and doth not he vouchsafe to use them that [are called] posies conned from goldsmith’s rings’ (Hoskins 1935: 39–40). A similar disdain is implied in The Rape of Lucrece (1594): Who fears a sentence or an old man’s saw [proverb] Shall by a painted cloth be kept in awe,

This is an opinion voiced elsewhere by Shakespeare, in Jaques’ sparring with Orlando, in As You Like It (written c.1599):

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You are full of pretty answers; have you not been acquainted with goldsmiths’ wives and conned them out of rings? Not so; but I answer you right painted cloth, from whence you have studied your questions. (3.3.228–31)

In similarly dismissive vein, the vastly learned Robert Burton, in his Anatomy of Melancholy (1621), concludes a long list of entirely serious maxims and adages with ‘Look for more in Isocrates, Seneca, Plutarch, Epictetus, etc., and for defect, consult with cheese-trenchers and painted cloths’ (Burton 1932: pt. 2, sect. 3, mem. 8). John Taylor, the Water Poet, who may surely be termed a popular writer, lodged at an inn called the Star in Rye in 1653, as he records in The Certain Travels, and records five such sententious couplets from painted cloths: And as upon a bed I musing lay, The chamber hanged with painted cloth, I found My self with sentences beleaguered round … Thus truly, lying, I transcribed them all: No flower so fresh, but frost may it deface, None sits so fast, but he may lose his place: ’Tis concord keeps a realm in stable stay, But discord brings all kingdoms to decay. No subject ought (for any kind of cause) Resist his prince, but yield him to the laws. Sure God is just, whose stroke, delayed long, Doth light [alight] at last, with pain more sharp, and strong, Time never was, nor ne’er I think shall be, That Truth (unshent) [unharmed] might speak, in all things free. … And ’tis supposed, those lines written there Have in that room been, more than forty year.

In Sir Thomas More’s house when he was a boy was ‘a goodly hanging of fine painted cloth, with nine pageants on the Ages of Man’, and about 1490 the young More composed ‘verses over every of those pageants’, which were duly printed in Rastell’s 1557 edition of his English works (More 1931: I, 332–5). We do not know much about the latrinalia and other graffiti of this period, but there is no reason to suspect they differed much in kind from their modern descendants. Graffiti were not above the notice of Sir Thomas More, either, who coyly cites the following example in his Treatise … upon these Words of Holy Scripture, Memorare novissima (1522): Men are wont to write a short riddle on the wall, that D.C. hath no P. Rede[interpret] ye this riddle I cannot: but I have heard say, that it toucheth the readiness that woman hath to fleshly filth, if she fall in drunkenness. And if ye find one that can declare it, though it be no great authority, yet have I heard say that it is very true. (Whiting and Whiting 1968: C619)

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(‘A drunken cunt has no porter’ is still listed as one of Howell’s Proverbs or Old SaidSaws and Adages in the English Tongue published in 1659.) In much the same vein, Lovewit complains of ‘ “Madame with a dildo”, writ o’the walls’ in Jonson’s The Alchemist (1610), a presumably bawdy rhyme (unless a pictorial graffito – ‘writ’ still retaining the possible sense, ‘scratched, incised’ at this period). In a more respectable vein, a glass quarry formerly at Smither’s Farmhouse, Sutton, Essex, was inscribed with the dates 1581 and 1594, some initials, and the legend: I favour as I find And love as I like

– both lines are to be found (albeit separately) amongst the list of ring-posies written in a commonplace book of c.159614 (see also Fleming 2001). More earnest verses were, of course, inscribed more officially on walls. In the first decade of the seventeenth century John Smith, estate steward at North Nibley, Gloucestershire, jotted down a list of ‘moral notes and sayings’ to be painted ‘above the wainscot’ in his house, including: They that perceive not deceit are often deceived themselves. Crows will not peck a man till he be dead, but flatterers will devour a man being alive Happy is he that wooeth virtue, but more happy is he that is contracted to her.

Dating from c.1597, another sentiment also on Smyth’s list is still extant on the wall of a farmhouse at Bazings, Sussex: For he that will not hear the cry of them that stand in need Shall cry himself, and not to be heard when he doth hope to speed.

Among published authors, it is perhaps the verse of the East Anglian farmer Thomas Tusser which best represents the sort with which we are concerned here, and, indeed, in his The Points of Housewifery (1570) he includes sample ‘Posies for the parlour’, ‘Posies for the guests’ chamber’, ‘Husbandly posies for the hall’, and decidedly pious ‘Posies for thine own bed-chamber’. In the presumably ‘comely decked’ guest-room, Tusser’s guests were greeted by: The sloven and the careless man, the roinish [scabby, scurvy], nothing nice, To lodge in chamber comely decked, are seldom suffered twice. With curtain some make scabbard clean, with coverlet their shoe, All dirt and mire some wallow bed [dirty the bed], as spaniels use to do.

It is to be hoped they could take such broad hints as to appropriate behaviour. A significant proportion of the popular verse produced during our period had a mnemonic function – Tusser’s Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry (1573) is the

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classic example of this habit of mind, and the fact that much of it is arranged according to the agricultural yearly round is no coincidence: mastering the calendar has long taxed the ingenuity of popular versifiers. Even today, we still recite sotto voce an only slightly modernised version of this verse, found already in a fifteenth-century manuscript and later in Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577): Thirty days hath November, April, June, and September; Of eight-and-twenty is but one And all the remnant thirty-and-one

The absolute apogee of ingenuity, however, must surely be granted to the Cisiojanus, a set of mnemonic verses, one for each month of the year, more or less sensible, and designed to recall the feasts of the Church calendar; the example excerpted here was published in a Book of Hours printed for the English market by Regnault in Paris in 1527: March Da.vid.of.Wales.lo.veth.well.leeks. That.will.make.Gre.go.ry.lean.cheeks. if.Ed.ward.do.eat.some.with.them. Ma.ry.send.him.to.Bed.lem. April In.A.pril.Am.brose.is.fain. To.see.us.wa.shed.with.rain. Os.wald.forth.with.sent.vic.tore. With.George.and.Mark.to.do.so.no.more.15

According to Deloney’s set of rules for the ‘gentle craft’, as well as being able to ‘bear his part in a three-man’s song’, the cobbler must also be able to ‘readily reckon up his tools in rhyme’ (cit. Pattison 1970: 286), and such a verse composition listing all the tools of the trade, opening ‘Listen lords, verament [verily]’, does indeed survive from the beginning of our period, in a late fifteenth-century manuscript,16 while a similar rehearsal of the tools of his trade (though politicised) is given in a ballad entitled ‘The Cobbler’s last will and testament’, printed c.1660. Blason populaire is the folklorist’s term that designates rhymes about particular localities and their inhabitants. Howell’s Proverbs (1659) and Fuller’s Worthies (published posthumously in 1662) are two of the earliest sources to record such material. The reputation of the river Humber in Yorkshire is summed up in the following couplet: Between Trent-fall and Whitten-ness, Many are made widows and fatherless

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as is the unsavoury reputation of Salisbury Plain, Never without a thief or twain.

Similarly uncomplimentary are rhymes of the sort which seem first to have been published by Ray in his Collection of English Proverbs (1670), but which we may presume were around earlier, and purport to itemise the characteristics of the inhabitants of various towns and villages in a particular county, such as these two referring to Essex and Suffolk respectively: Beckles for the Puritan, Bungay for the poor, Halesworth for a drunkard, And Bilborough for a whore.

Traditional epithets for the inhabitants of particular counties – for example, ‘Wiltshire moonrakers’, ‘Hampshire hogs’, etc. – also emerge during our period, several being found as early as c.1500 in a poem on the counties of England. There was something almost numinous, an aura of magic perhaps, that still hung about the use of rhyme in our era, and we mistake if we take Rosalind’s sophisticated reference to being ‘never so berhymed since Pythagoras’ time that I was an Irish Rat’, as representative of contemporary popular attitudes to rhymed blessings and cursings.17 The ‘White Paternoster’ is a charm that survived into the last century as a children’s prayer. Writing in A Candle in the Dark (1656), Thomas Ady noted that ‘An old woman in Essex who … had lived … in Queen Mary’s time, had learned thence many popish charms, one whereof was this; every night when she lay down to sleep she charmed her bed, saying: “Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, / The bed be blest that I lie on” ’ (Opie and Opie 1997: 303). The apocalyptic feel of a charm, recorded in mid-seventeenth-century Devon, must strike us at this distance as bathetic when we learn that it was used merely to relieve a scald: Two angels came from the West: The one brought fire, the other brought frost. Out fire! In frost! In the name of the Father, Son and Holy Ghost.18

There are hundreds more such unaccountably neglected charms still to be found in manuscripts. Like most other genres of popular orality, the riddle is not one we look on with much favour today, yet riddle collections were published throughout the period, beginning with the Demands Joyous printed by Wynkyn de Worde in 1511 (much of it translated from a late fifteenth-century French collection), which contains all

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the usual obscenity and curiously postmodern wit associated with the genre, for example, ‘Which was first the hen or the egg?’ Riddles are to be found, of course, scattered incidentally throughout the literature of the period. The grave-digger in Hamlet (1601), for example, poses the riddle, ‘What is he that builds stronger than either the mason, the shipwright or the carpenter?’ His interlocutor does well to respond with, ‘The gallows-maker; for that frame outlives a thousand tenants.’ But the grave-digger is not satisfied with this solution and eventually solves the riddle himself: ‘A grave-maker. The houses he makes last till Doomsday.’ What was the Book of Riddles that Master Slender lent to Alice Shortcake in the opening scene of the Merry Wives of Windsor? The earliest extant edition of the Book of Merry Riddles was printed c.1600, but was not the first, and Shakespeare might well have known it. In 1939 J. J. Graham published a book of local folklore entitled Weardale and in it included this riddle, which he had collected orally: Little bird of paradise, She works her work both neat and nice; She pleases God, she pleases man, She doe the work that no man can.

This was last published in the seventeenth century in the Book of Merry Riddles (1631), but even earlier in the first printed English riddle-book of 1511 in the form: What is it that is a wright and is no man, And he doth that no man can, And yet it serveth both God and man?

Randle Holme copied another oral version of this bee-riddle into his manuscript collection c.1645. Riddles have always gone in for the scatological and the risqué, and riddlers seem particularly to enjoy the ‘catch riddle’ in which the guesser is embarrassed into refusing to offer the indecent solution, only to be rebuked by the riddler, who offers some innocuous answer, for being so dirty-minded. A classic instance of this technique is to be found in a typically unhealthy erotic exchange between Ferdinand and his sister, the Duchess of Malfi, in Webster’s eponymous play published in 1614: ferdinand: duchess: ferdinand:

Women like that part, which, like the lamprey, Hath never a bone in’t. Fie, sir! Nay, I mean the tongue … Farewell, lusty widow.

Extraordinarily, the ‘boneless beast’ would appear to be an erotic motif of IndoEuropean antiquity.

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Nonsense verse is a perhaps understandably neglected genre,19 but one which, paradoxically, has something to teach us. It is a truism that it is very difficult to write complete nonsense, that fragments of sense will, as it were, keep breaking through; and nonsense has its own clichés. The Tudor playwright and publisher John Rastell seems to have had an affection for such verse, and in his Nature of the Four Elements (1520), Ignorance sings a song which opens Robin Hood in Barnsdale stood And lent him to a maple thistle, Then came our lady and sweet Saint Andrew, Sleep’st thou, wak’st thou, Geoffrey Coke?

The final line of this opening stanza recurs in a round or canon printed in Ravenscroft’s Pammelia (1609), but the verses were recently discovered written in a roughly contemporary hand on a mid-fifteenth-century fragmentary Exchequer Issue roll (Holt and Takamiya 1989: 213–21). The same issue roll also contains a scrap of sixteenth-century verse of an – at first sight – apparently similar nature: Tomorrow alleluia shall be locked20 And in the stocks fast stocked Fast by the legs; He shall never come out of sorrow Till goose and pigs be his borrow [security].

This apparent nonsense is not nonsense at all, but a valuable scrap of tradition relating to popular English attitudes towards the dietary restrictions of Lent with its ‘Lenten fare’. It is a matter for regret that none of the rhymes ‘set forth to deprave Lent’ reported by Bishop Gardiner in 1547 has survived, nor Jack of Lent’s Testament, which he complains is aimed at him and being openly sold in Winchester market (Baskerville 1929: 47) – mock-testaments being another most entertaining and usually satirical verse-type.21 Entered in the Stationers’ Register on 15 February 1636 were ‘Lent and Shrovetide, with Verses to them by John Taylor’, two pictures which survive as a pair of engraved prints (see Figure 22) – English representatives of the European ‘Battle of Carnival and Lent’ tradition familiar from Bruegel’s great painting. Curiously, the woodcut on the title page of Taylor’s Jack a Lent (1620), which shows this personification of Lent as an emaciated figure riding on a herring behind a fat Shrove Tuesday (see Figure 22), derives not from this painting but from another of Bruegel’s works, the engraved print of his Thin Kitchen. That historians of English literature have not for the most part been familiar with the sort of popular verse discussed here is not a testimony to their refinement but to an ignorance which has compounded the suppression of a popular culture

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available to both high and low, and seriously distorted our modern perception of the era. If much of what is snapped up here is unconsidered, it is far from being all trifling.

Notes 1

2

3

4 5

6

7 8

9 10

Stokes and Alexander 1996: 35 (Berkley, 1611/12); see further Ingram 1984, 1988, and 1997. OED citations for heteroclite adj., sense 2, and heteroclital, show that the three earliest citations of these words, all belonging to the final decade of the sixteenth century, are associated with the figure of the fool. Cf. OED wisp n. 1, sense 2b ‘A twist or figure of straw for a scold to rail at’, and citations: ‘He writhed a litell wipse of strawe, and sette it afore her, and saide, ladi, yef that ye will chide more, chide with that straw’ (Knight de la Tour Landry (1450), xv. 21); ‘Women Whose tatling tongues, had won a wispe’ (Drant, Horace, Satires (1566) vii. D 7b); Shakespeare, 3 Henry VI (1593), 2.2.144; ‘Theres nothing mads her [sc. a scold] more then but the very naming of a wispe’ (H. Parrot, Cures for the Itch (1626), B 5b). ‘get it up again’: (1) you recover; (2) your husband recovers his erection. Cf. J. Florio, First Fruits (1578): ‘It were labour lost to speak of love’ (p. 71); and see further Dent 1981: L551.1 Masterpieces of Cutlery and the Art of Eating (Victoria and Albert Museum, London, 1979), cat. no. 15, from a private collection. There is only one other known instance of this proverbial couplet, found scribbled in the margin of a manuscript of Hoccleve’s verse a generation or so earlier. Reproduced as plate 12 in Spufford 1984 – no provenance given. Evans 1931; the earliest example is in the 1596 Harleian MS 6910: ‘Though a guifte be smale, yet good will is all’. On a mid-sixteenth-century armillary-sphere ring found at Bodwrdda. Cit. O’Hara 1992: 1–40. For the second line, cf. Book of Common Prayer, ‘Matrimony’

11 12

13 14

15

16 17

18

19

20

21

(1548–9): ‘Till death us depart’ (altered to ‘do part’ in 1662). Reported in Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries, 2 (1849–53), 215. The spelling seems to suggest that ‘your’ is to be pronounced as a disyllable as required by the couplet metre. For a full discussion, see Jones 1991. Cit. Hooper 1999: 11 (from Transactions of the Essex Archaeological Society, ns 5 (1895), 72). The references are, for March, line 1: 1st, St David; line 2: 12th, St Gregory the Great; line 3: 18th, St Edward, King and Martyr; line 4: 25th, Feast of the Annunciation. For April, line 1: 4th, St Ambrose and St Isidore (is); line 2: 15th, translation of Oswald of Worcester; line 3: 20th, Pope Victor; line 4: 23rd, St George; 25th, St. Mark. The most recent full discussion of this class of text is by Kully 1974. Published as A Shoemaker’s Verse Testament in Wilson 1980. Shakespeare, As You Like It (1600), 3.3.146– 7; compare Jonson, Poetaster, ‘An Apologetical Dialogue’, line 163 and Gray 1984. Thomas 1971: 212, citing F. Glanvile et al., The Tavistocke Naboth proved Nabal (1658), 40–1. But now see Noel Malcolm’s excellent The Origins of English Nonsense (1998), which at long last specifically addresses the nonsense verse of the seventeenth century. See the Middle English Dictionary s.v. ‘to lock alleluia’: during Lent the ‘Alleluia’ is not sung; it is sung again at Easter, which marks the end of Lent, i.e. of the period during which meat and dairy produce (butter, cheese, and eggs) may not be eaten. For which, down to 1565, see Wilson 1994.

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Baskerville, C. R. (1929). The Elizabethan Jig and Related Song Drama. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Bolton, E. S. and E. J. Coe (1921). American Samplers. Boston: Massachusetts Society of the Colonial Dames of America. Breton, Nicholas (1879). The Works in Verse and Prose of Nicholas Breton, ed. A. B. Grosart, 2 vols. Edinburgh: T. & A. Constable. Burton, Robert (1932). The Anatomy of Melancholy, ed. H. Jackson. London: J. M. Dent & Sons. Clark, P. (1976). ‘Popular protest and disturbance in Kent, 1558–1640’. Economic History Review, 29, 369–70. Dent, R. W. (ed.) (1981). Shakespeare’s Proverbial Languages: An Index. Berkeley: University of California Press. Edwards, A. S. E. (1997). ‘Middle English inscriptional verse texts’. In J. Scattergood and J. Boffey (eds.), Texts and their Contexts: Papers from the Early Book Society (pp. 26–43). Dublin: Four Courts Press. Evans, Joan (1931). English Posies and Posy Rings. London: Oxford University Press. Fleming, Juliet (2001). Graffiti and the Writing Arts of Early Modern England. London: Reaktion. Fox, Adam (1992). ‘Aspects of oral culture and its development in early modern England’. Ph.D. thesis, Cambridge University. Fox, Adam (1994). ‘Ballads, libels and popular ridicule in Jacobean England’. Past and Present, 145, 47–83. Fox, Adam (2000). Oral and Literate Culture in England, 1500–1700. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Geddes, Elisabeth, Neill Mac, and Moyra Macneill (1965). Blackwork Embroidery. London: Mills & Boon. Gowing, L. (1993). ‘Gender and the language of insult in early modern London’. History Workshop Journal, 35, 1–21. Gray, D. (1984). ‘Rough music: some early invectives and flytings’. In C. Rawson and J. Mezciems (eds.), English Satire and the Satiric Tradition (pp. 21–43). Oxford: Blackwell. Hodgkin, J. E. (1891). Examples of Early English Pottery. London: Cassell.

Holt, J. C. and T. Takamiya (1989). ‘A new version of “A Rhyme of Robin Hood” ’. English Manuscript Studies, 1, 213–21. Hooper, B. (1999). ‘Graffiti on windows’. Folk Lore Society News, 30 (Nov.), 11. Hoskins, John (1935). Directions for Speech and Style, ed. H. H. Hudson. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Ingram, M. (1984). ‘Ridings, rough music and the “reform of popular culture” in early modern England’. Past and Present, 105, 79–113. Ingram, M. (1988), ‘Ridings, rough music and mocking rhymes in early modern England’. In B. Reay (ed.), Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (pp. 166–97). London: Routledge. Ingram, M. (1997). ‘Juridical folklore in England illustrated by rough music’. In C. W. Brooks and M. Lobban (eds.), Communities and Courts in Britain, 1150–1900 (pp. 61–82). London: Hambledon Press. Jones, M. (1991). ‘Folklore motifs in late medieval art III: erotic animal imagery’. Folklore, 102, 192–219. Jones, Malcolm (1997). ‘The parodic sermon in medieval and early modern England’. Medium Ævum, 66, 94–100. Jones, Malcolm (1999). ‘The abbot of evil profits’. Medieval English Theatre, 21, 81–102. Kully, R. M. (1974). ‘Cisiojanus. Studien zur mnemonischen Literatur anhand des spätmittelalterlichen Kalender-gedichts’. Schweizerisches Archiv für Volkskunde, 70, 93–123. Limbert, C. (1986). ‘Two poems and a prose receipt’. English Literary Renaissance, 16, 383–90. Malcolm, Noel (1998). The Origins of English Nonsense. London: Fontana. More, Thomas (1931). English Works, ed. W. E. Campbell and A. W. Reed, 2 vols.. London: Eyre & Spottiswoode. Northall, G. F. (1892). English Folk-Rhymes. London: Kegan Paul. O’Conor, Norreys Jephson (1934). Godes Peace and the Queenes: Vicissitudes of a House, 1539–1615. Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Hara, Diana (1992). ‘The language of tokens’. Rural History, 3, 1–40.

Neglected Genres of Popular Verse Opie, I. and P. Opie (1997). Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pattison, Bruce (1970). Music and Poetry of the English Renaissance. London: Methuen. Puttenham, George (1589). The Art of English Poesy. London. Rackham, Bernard and Herbert Edward Read (1924). English Pottery: Its Development from Early Times to the End of the Eighteenth Century. London: Ernest Benn. Simpson, C. M. (1966). The British Broadside Ballad and its Music. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Sisson, C. J. (1936). Lost Plays of Shakespeare’s Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Somerset, J. A. B. (ed.) (1994). Shropshire 1 The Records. Records of Early English Drama 69. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Spufford, M. (1984). The Great Reclothing of Rural England. London: Hambledon Press. Stokes, James and Robert Joseph Alexander (1996). Somerset. Records of Early English Drama. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

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Thomas, Keith (1971). Religion and the Decline of Magic. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Tilley, M. P. (1950). A Dictionary of the Proverbs in England in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Tusser, Thomas (1580). Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry. London. Whiting, B. J. and H. W. Whiting (1968). Proverbs, Sentences, and Proverbial Phrases from English Writings Mainly before 1500. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Wilson, Edward (1980). ‘Some new texts of early Tudor songs’. Notes and Queries, NS 27, 293–5. Wilson, E. (1994). ‘The Testament of the Buck and the sociology of the text’. Review of English Studies, ns 45, 157–84. Wright, Thomas and James Orchard HalliwellPhillipps (eds.) (1841). Reliquiæ Antiquæ, 2 vols. London: William Pickering. Wurzbach, N. (1990). The Rise of the English StreetBallad 1550–1650. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

67

Religious Verse Elizabeth Clarke

In the early seventeenth century there was intense consideration of the nature of holy poetry. The pioneers of the Reformation had identified a need for sacred verse to replace profane song in the vocabulary of ordinary men and women: the frantic translation and paraphrase of biblical verse which marked the late sixteenth century was part of an answer to that perceived problem, and helped to produce the seventeenth-century religious lyric. At the court of King James, who had himself ventured into poetic composition, there was also keen interest in what a holy poetry might be: David Norbrook has traced the subtle interactions of poetry, religion, and politics at court in the early seventeenth century (Norbrook 1984: 215–34). Part of the problem was with the character of classical rhetoric, the dominant force in education and writing in the sixteenth century in England, which was implicated in self-display to an extent thought unworthy of the practice of a religious poet. The closer to biblical language a poet kept his verses, the purer they were considered to be: since it was axiomatic to Protestant theology that the Bible was perspicuous, biblical verse had to be simple, and preferably unrhetorical. Thus the plodding psalm paraphrases of Sternhold and Hopkins held sway in church liturgy throughout this period – more literary alternatives were considered indebted to merely human invention. On a more positive note, the gorgeous manuscripts of psalm paraphrases by Philip and Mary Sidney, circulated widely at the turn of the century, seem to have formed many poets’ ideas of what sacred poetry looked like: eighteen of these manuscripts are still extant. Critics’ attitudes towards this joint authorship tend to polarise along predictable lines: traditional reverence for Philip Sidney versus feminist valorisation of Mary Sidney’s work. Susanne Woods has suggested that this volume and its enormous influence should be attributed entirely to Mary Sidney, who revised the forty-three psalm versions left by her brother at his death, and composed the other paraphrases, over twothirds of the entire work (Woods 1984: 169–82). Various critics have stressed Mary Sidney’s feminising of the biblical text, in the Protestant tradition of annexing psalms for the experience of an individual: distinctively female events such as marriage,

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pregnancy, childbirth, and gender restrictions are emphasised and even inserted into her paraphrases (Hageman 1996: 193). Other critics, however, have found such feminist criticism to be special pleading. Devotion to the biblical text meant that the work could be enlisted in the Sidney–Dudley project to persuade the queen to greater Protestant radicalism, as Margaret Hannay has argued (Hannay 1990: 89–98). Moreover, Sidney engages in a deliberate and daring experimentation with the lyric form, which is modelled on the metrical variation of the 1562 French Psalter. Her work clearly inspired many writers of religious verse, not least George Herbert, whose characteristic combination of long and short lines owes something to the verse-forms of the Sidney Psalter.

John Donne John Donne wrote a poem in praise of the Sidney psalm paraphrases, but he does not seem to have been troubled by a Puritan attitude to religious poetry: his sermons show a sensitivity to metaphor that is theologically conceived. In the 1580s, Philip Sidney had suggested, in his Defence of Poetry, a straightforward substitution of sacred subject matter for profane as the strategy of a true Protestant lyric poet: ‘that lyrical kind of songs and sonnet … Lord, if He gave us so good minds, how well it might be employed, and with how heavenly fruit both private and public, in singing the praises of that god who giveth us hands to write and wits to conceive’. John Donne’s religious poetry, likewise, seems to reflect his choice of a religious subject but not a completely different rhetorical direction as a poet, despite his instruction to mortify rhetorical gifts, in ‘The Cross’: So when thy brain works, ere thou utter it, Cross and correct concupiscence of wit. (Donne 1978: 27)

Unlike other poets of this period, there is no attempt to modify the exercise of wit discernible in Donne’s religious poetry, apart from his biblical paraphrase, ‘The Lamentations of Jeremy’, which is in the Reformed poetic tradition of simple form and metre. Unlike Herbert and Marvell’s crowns of praise to God, Donne’s ‘La Corona’ of holy sonnets does not deconstruct itself but ends its meditations on the life of Christ with the completion of a complex form: the expressed hope is that the graceful interlocking of first and last lines is an acceptable technique for a heavenly Muse. Critical opinion has differed as to whether there is a deliberate order to the rest of Donne’s Holy Sonnets, but their subject matter – death of a loved one, difficulties with the doctrine of original sin, the struggle to be holy, the confrontation with death itself – is the stuff of the religious vocation, although the tone of the sonnets varies widely. The subject matter of some sonnets, such as 14 and 18, is clearly transgressive, and some of the concluding couplets may be ironic or just self-evidently wrong in an age sensitive to doctrinal correctness.

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This ambiguity has allowed many devotees of Donne to endow the figure of the rather austere dean of St Paul’s with a complex and troubled inner life, apparently continuous with the Donne of the secular poems, although critical opinion dates the sonnets from the period 1608–10, well before Donne took up an ecclesiastical appointment. Theological discussion of the Holy Sonnets continues in many of the betterknown journals to this day. In 2001 a reprint of the famous edition of the religious poems by Helen Gardner was issued, and in 2005 a Donne Variorum edition of the Holy Sonnets appeared. The problem with well-known religious poems is that readers find it easy to argue that their own favourite theologies inspired them, which means that the religious lyrics have been read at one extreme as thoroughly Calvinist in tone, and at the other as evidence that the Catholicism into which Donne was born is still troubling him: Peter McCullough has recently described him as ‘muddled’. There has been a recent reaction by Catholic scholars against criticism with a rather Protestant emphasis on the importance of the individual soul, yet Donne’s religious lyrics are to all intents and purposes the locus classicus for such a poetic subjectivity. Rather than view these poems in isolation, it is salutary to place them in an English tradition of holy sonnets, as William Stull does, suggesting a comparison between Donne’s sonnets and those of Protestant writers such as Fulke Greville, as well as Catholic sonneteers such as Alabaster (Stull 1982: 129–35), a project on which Susanne Woods has made a start (Woods 1984:133–5). ‘Good Friday, 1613. Riding Westward’ is a brilliantly complex ‘occasional’ poem – it is dated and located – which is also an Ignatian meditation, a form of Catholic spirituality which was well known in this period, and which Donne in particular would have been familiar with. Ignatian ‘composition of place’ demanded the imaginative recreation of biblical scenes, especially from the passion: the believer then placed himself within the scene. In a typical subversion of this process, Donne turns his progress westward into a flight from the imaginatively conceived scene of the crucifixion, which he locates in the east. The whole poem becomes a refusal to locate himself at the passion of Christ, an ironic refusal since the scene is vividly present in his mind: Could I behold those hands, which span the poles And turn all spheres at once, pierced with those holes? (Donne 1978: 31)

Even the half-presence of riding away from this scene, however, has the spiritual benefit offered by proponents of this kind of meditation: at the end of the poem Donne can envisage a point at which he can wholly confront the dying Christ, a sight which threatened him with annihilation at the start of the poem, as long as the work of redemption and regeneration has been performed for him by God. Like many of the secular lyrics, Donne’s hymns stage elaborate rehearsals for death, and have been appropriated from Isaac Walton’s Life onwards for biographical purposes. Perhaps the most complex is ‘Hymn to God, my God, in my sickness’, said by

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Walton to have been composed on his deathbed, but which scholars think probably dates from his illness in 1623, eight years before his death. It employs his rhetorical habit, familiar from the secular lyrics and sermons, of applying the chosen metaphor in as many extended variations as possible. In this case, the metaphor is his prone body as a map: Whilst my physicians by their love are grown Cosmographers, and I, their map, who lie Flat on this bed, that by them may be shown That this is my southwest discovery Per fretum febris, by these straits to die, I joy that in these straits I see my west; For, though their currents yield return to none, What shall my west hurt me? As west and east In all flat maps (and I am one) are one, So death doth touch the Resurrection. (Donne 1978: 50)

A reader delighting in poetic justice might see this as a rather pleasing reversal of his geographical exploration of the woman’s body in Elegy 19, ‘To His Mistress Going to Bed’ (see Chapter 63, Donne’s Nineteenth Elegy). It is characteristic of Donne’s method of argument that he proceeds from metaphor to metonymy to produce a triumphant conclusion: ‘what shall my west hurt me?’ The one religious poem with impeccable claims to lyric (Donne had it set to music in his lifetime) is ‘A Hymn to God the Father’, which is as sparse and simple as any Puritan poetic might demand – except for the incessant playing on the poet’s name.

George Herbert George Herbert’s 1633 volume, The Temple, has often been contrasted with Donne’s religious poetry, most of which was printed for the first time in the same year. It has been characterised as being more serene, and less troubled, but this may simply be a feature of the different choice of forms. All the poems of ‘The Church’, the central part of The Temple, are lyrics, with a corresponding smoothness of technique and lack of intellectual difficulty: even when Donne wrote lyrics, the absence of such qualities in his poetry was often commented on. Occasionally Herbert engages in something like a traditional meditation on biblical events, as in ‘The Sacrifice’: what his poems typically chart, however, are the vicissitudes of the Reformed Christian’s spiritual life. Even his sonnet on ‘Redemption’ is not an excursion into Christ’s Palestine but a translation of the gospel story into the terms of Jacobean property-letting. When Herbert confronts Christ, it is not in the imaginative space of a vividly realised meditation, but in the circumstances of his own spiritual life: the cross in his poem of that

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name has been uprooted from Golgotha and planted firmly in his seventeenth-century path. The reluctant progress towards eye-contact with Christ himself is conducted in terms which are not at all Ignatian in tone: Michael Schoenfeldt has represented the rhetoric of ‘Love (III)’ as a courtly exchange of the Jacobean era charged with eroticism (Schoenfeldt 1991: 200–29, 263–4). Unlike Donne, Herbert is haunted by the inadequacy and even the iniquity of representing the divine in poetry. His poetry is extremely biblical in character, but what marked it as holy to a seventeenth-century readership was probably the Calvinist obsession with failure expressed there: not simply failure as a Christian, but failure as a Christian poet. His poems such as ‘A True Hymn’ chart the difficulty of matching the motion of the Holy Spirit, always non-rhetorical, often non-verbal, with the sophisticated verbal ‘motions’ of rhetoric: the two poems entitled ‘Jordan’ seem to reject the contemporary practice of lyric poets for something altogether plainer, and more severe. When first my lines of heav’nly joys made mention, Such was their lustre, they did so excel That I sought out quaint words, and trim invention; My thoughts began to burnish, sprout, and swell, Curling with metaphors a plain intention, Decking the sense, as if it were to sell. … As flames do work and wind, when they ascend, So did I weave my self into the sense. But while I bustled, I might hear a friend Whisper, How wide is all this long pretence! There is in love a sweetness ready penned: Copy out only that, and save expense. (Herbert 2007: 367)

The complication here is that these lines from ‘Jordan II’, which seem to valorise spontaneity and lack of sophistication, are also a clever parody of Sidney’s Sonnet 3. Herbert’s famous ‘simplicity’ is always relative (see Chapter 68, Herbert’s ‘The Elixir’). One way to avoid the besetting sin of poets, self-glorification, was to make gestures in the direction of failure, as Herbert does with lack of rhyme in ‘Denial’, or with the use of the ballad form in ‘Submission’. A brilliant stroke by the person who gave The Temple its subtitle was to invoke the theology of ejaculatory prayer, which in early seventeenth-century England meant spontaneous prayer in response to an impulse from God. To call a volume Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations is to claim the complex verbal artefacts of The Temple as the results of spontaneous religious inspiration. Again, the poetry reinforces this impression with intensely emotional and verbally stark pieces such as ‘Longing’ and ‘Discipline’, and with motions towards wordlessness in ‘Love III’ and ‘Love Unknown’. It is this apparently self-destructive

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movement that was noted in Stanley Fish’s Self-Consuming Artifacts, an essay that has had huge influence on treatments of the religious lyric at the end of the twentieth century. Andrew Marvell, who wrote one exquisite religious lyric, ‘The Coronet’, seemed to think that the essence of the genre was the writing of a poem about the impossibility of writing divine poetry: When for the thorns with which I long, too long, With many a piercing wound, My Saviour’s head have crowned, I seek with garlands to redress that wrong: Through every garden, every mead, I gather flow’rs (my fruits are only flow’rs) Dismantling all the fragrant tow’rs That once adorned my shepherdess’s head. And now when I have summed up all my store, Thinking (so I myself deceive) So rich a chaplet thence to weave As never yet the King of Glory wore: Alas I find the serpent old That, twining in his speckled breast, About the flow’rs disguised does fold, With wreaths of fame and interest. Ah, foolish man, that would’st debase with them, And mortal glory, Heaven’s diadem! But Thou who only could’st the serpent tame, Either his slipp’ry knots at once untie, And disentangle all his winding snare: Or shatter too with him my curious frame: And let these wither, so that he may die, Though set with skill and chosen out with care. That they, while Thou on both their spoils dost tread, May crown thy feet, that could not crown thy head. (Marvell 2003: 48–9)

This poem is a distillation of the language and ideas of three of Herbert’s poems: the two entitled ‘Jordan’, and ‘The Wreath’. The flowers for such garlands are of course the ‘flowers’ of rhetoric, which the poet intends to weave into a poem, not a pastoral, but a reformed hymn, in praise of Christ. However, the very intention to produce something worthy of God is suspect: hiding in the rhetoric, as Herbert found in ‘Jordan II’, is the snake of human pride. The only solution is for God himself to destroy the ‘curious frame’, which is the complex rhetorical structure. This God apparently does in ‘Jordan II’ as the divine voice interrupts Herbert’s poem. However, the sacrifice both poets gesture towards is only a theoretical one: for each, a complex poem survives intact, even though it is not, apparently, the perfect song of praise each set out to write.

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The influence of Herbert’s poetic strategy on religious poets of this period is apparent in the subtitles of volumes for the rest of the century, which constitute a veritable ‘school of Herbert’. Henry Vaughan chose the title for his 1650 volume as an explicit act of homage: Silex Scintillans, or, Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations. In a volume which resounds with allusions to Herbert’s poetry, Vaughan’s openings often have the force of ejaculation: ‘They are all gone into the world of light!’. What Vaughan seems to take from Herbert is a directly expressed but profound sense of religious emotion. Some opening lines are enigmatic, their reference only explicated later in the poem: ‘Peace, peace; it is not so’ (‘Affliction (1)’) ‘Sure, it was so’ (‘Corruption’). This sense of ‘ejaculation’ draws on the Anglican use of the term, derived from continental Catholic spirituality, as a response to some kind of external stimulus; sometimes Vaughan provides scriptural verses as epigraphs to his poems, which represent the spiritual starting-point for his meditation. Other poems are a response to observation of the external world (‘The Water-fall’, ‘The Timber’). In effect these become occasional meditations, another genre in which Anglican spirituality expressed itself in the seventeenth century. However, the connection between nature and the spiritual life is often represented in terms that go far beyond the typology which was the conventional Reformed manner in which to cast their relationship, and which gave the priority firmly to biblical hermeneutic. The alchemical practice of Henry and his brother Thomas has only recently received the attention it deserves given the ubiquity of alchemical imagery in the religious lyric. However, their hermetic philosophy has often been commented on, and its influence is obvious in lyrics such as ‘The Night’ and ‘Cock-Crowing’: Father of lights! What sunny seed, What glance of day hast thou confined Into this bird? To all the breed This busy ray thou hast assigned; Their magnetism works all night, And dreams of Paradise and light. (Vaughan, 1976: 188)

Less than metaphorical illustrations of a biblically based aspect of the divine, these poems reveal a perception of the divine in nature beyond the place of the natural world in Reformed theology. Given this theological embracing of a broad spectrum of natural phenomena, it is not surprising that there is none of the deep-rooted suspicion of the poetic process in Henry Vaughan’s poetry, despite the Herbertian sentiments of a poem like ‘Idle Verse’. Henry Vaughan’s poetry is that of a royalist and Church of England conformist in retirement, celebrating his particular brand of spirituality within the formal complexity that is the religious lyric, which took the place of external ceremony during the Interregnum, as Nigel Smith has argued (Smith 1994: 274). Christopher Harvey’s 1640 work The Synagogue: Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations also made

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explicit its debt to Herbert, so much so that it was bound with Herbert’s The Temple in 1647, and reprinted in this joint format twelve times before 1709. This volume is an explicit celebration of Laudian churchmanship in a way that The Temple is not; the second edition includes an additional section on ‘ Church-utensils’, an attention to external detail rather out of harmony with Herbert’s poetry, where the temple is usually a spiritual and inward construction. Although the format in which many readers read Herbert’s poetry was thus an explicitly royalist one, devotion to his particular kind of religious lyric was widespread in the seventeenth century. The parliamentary general Robert Overton and Dudley, Lord North, at opposite ends of the political spectrum in the Interregnum, both found Herbert’s poetry profoundly congenial. Herbert’s ubiquitous popularity has allowed the religious lyric to become the site of what Gene Veith calls, humorously, a re-enactment of the Civil War amongst critics (Veith 1985). This has not only involved the attempt to pin down poets’ precise political and religious position, but to claim a context of Protestant or Catholic texts as essential for understanding religious verse. Thus Louis Martz (Martz 1962) offers continental texts of meditation as the authentic context for the religious lyric, while Barbara Lewalski (1970) offers a biblical poetics infused by Puritan doctrine. The recent attention drawn to the difficulty experienced by in publishing the manuscript of ‘The Country Parson’ immediately prior to the Civil War offers a new perspective on George Herbert’s churchmanship: his pastoral practice if not his poetic one was clearly too radical for the Laudian censors (Clarke 2003: 479–96).

The Epigram and the Lyric The study of the religious lyric has of course been dominated by the discipline of English literature: it is one of the first distinctively English genres to evolve. However, attention to the related pan-European genre of Latin epigram, often employed in a religious context, is enlightening. Although the condensed wit of the epigram, which was often employed in religious polemic between Catholic and Protestant, or in England between various wings of the Church of England, seems far from the lyric form, a study of Herbert’s treatment of the Latin epigram shows many formal features in common with his English lyrics. It was as a Latin poet that Herbert was first known. The first publication of Richard Crashaw, another Cambridge poet who participated in the neo-Latin tradition, was a collection of Latin and English epigrams, Epigrammata Sacra (Cambridge, 1634). It was published to fulfil the terms of a scholarship, and its origins in the academic curriculum that included the epigrams of Martial and The Greek Anthology are rather more obvious than those of Herbert, who shares many of the same sources. But the practice of extravagant conceit noted by contemporary and later critics as characteristic of ‘metaphysical’ poetry is very obvious in Herbert’s Latin epigram ‘In Arund. Spin. Genuflex. Purpur.’, and Crashaw’s English epigram ‘On our crucified Lord Naked, and bloody’, which share one vivid image:

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Herbert’s epigrams occur in manuscript collections, and show features of manuscript culture such as answer-poetry. Many practitioners of the religious lyric – Donne, Herbert, and Herrick – were primarily manuscript poets, at least in their lifetime. Peter Beal’s Index of Literary Manuscripts offers many manuscript contexts for religious lyrics. In this context Arthur Marotti has drawn attention to the importance of the posthumous editions of Donne’s and Herbert’s verse in 1633. He argues that the presentation of printed volumes of poetry as serious works by sober churchmen helped to overcome ‘the stigma of print’ and paved the way for other collections of religious verse (Marotti 1995: 246–59). ‘The aristocratic and conservative associations of poetry within the manuscript system carried over into the medium of print when, in the middle third of the seventeenth century, lyric texts moved from one medium to the other.’ He characterises this printing enterprise as ‘a manifestation of Royalism’ (Marotti 1995: 259). Philip West, examining the influence of Herbert on Nathaniel Wanley’s manuscript lyrics of the 1650s (West 2006), and Sharon Achinstein, charting readers of Herbert in the Restoration (Achinstein 2006), have recently challenged the widespread consensus that royalists most appreciated Herbert’s lyrics.

Historicist Approaches The New Historicist criticism has drawn attention to the politicisation of what could look like a personal, spiritualised form. George Herbert’s poetry has been reread by Michael Schoenfeldt as participating in secular court rhetoric as much as in the devotional discourse of Reformed Protestantism, an interpretation which offers new critical insight into the poems (Schoenfeldt 1991). The poetry of Richard Crashaw in particular has benefited from attention to the micro-history of Cambridge under the influence of Archbishop Laud as well as to the texts of Counter-Reformation devotion to which his lyrics explicitly pay homage. The explicit corporeal imagery and spirituality rather more typical of Catholic devotion have isolated him among the English religious poets: words like ‘baroque’ and ‘mannered’ have been used of him, without, as Thomas Healy points out, much justification. Healy’s careful study starts from the premise that Crashaw clearly situated himself within the ‘school of Herbert’, as indicated by the title of his 1646 volume Steps to the Temple. Much of his poetry’s devotion to the Virgin Mary and sensual spirituality, which has been read in the light of Crashaw’s later conversion to Catholicism, was in fact current in the practice of the chapel at Peterhouse in the 1630s. Healy comments that Crashaw is not only interested in typological interpretations of biblical stories, a characteristically

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Puritan approach, but in dramatising the experience of those who knew Christ (Healy 1986: 121). Another poet, who has been characterised by retirement from religious controversy and immersion in a mystical devotional spirituality, although of a more Protestant tradition, is Thomas Traherne. Traherne, like Crashaw, seems to have no problem with figuring the body in his poetry: his first ‘Thanksgiving’ is for the body, and the thanksgiving for the soul comes second. Unlike Crashaw, however, he opts for a simple style that is everywhere reminiscent of George Herbert, and his statement of poetic intention owes much to Herbert’s ‘Jordan’ poems: No curling metaphors that gild the sense, Nor pictures here, nor painted eloquence … An easy style drawn from a native vein, A clearer stream than that which poets feign. (Traherne 1958: II, 2)

However, this perception of Traherne is likely to change, thanks to recent manuscript discoveries by the late Jeremy Maule. A new biography is in preparation and two new collected editions are in train, one by D. S. Brewer and one from Oxford. One volume of essays, entitled Re-Reading Thomas Traherne, has already been published, and more are sure to follow. The religious lyric not only features in the Cavalier miscellanies, which kept alive the nostalgic spirit of pre-war royalism, but in the journals and commonplace-books of nonconformists under persecution. Henry Pinnell used Herbert’s poems in a 1650s defence of Antinomianism, and a Herbert lyric was sung by a West Country dissenter about to be executed for his part in the Monmouth rebellion in 1685. However, it is royalist conformists such as Robert Herrick and less familiar poets such as Cardell Goodman who practised the religious lyric as opposed to reading it (Wilcox 1994: 10). Sophisticated lyric form, even when it is religiously directed, is not congenial to a Puritan spirituality. George Wither, whose poetry has been neglected until David Norbrook’s treatment of his work in Writing the English Republic (1984), wrote one ejaculation, but its title showed that he was unwilling to participate in the fictions that enabled less scrupulous poets to imply spontaneous composition for their highly wrought poetry: ‘An Interjection, occasioned by a sudden ejaculation, whilst this review of neglected remembrances was transcribing, which shall here stand inserted, though it be no part of what was heretofore experienced, or intended to be hereunto added. And in such language as may evidence the truth, without affected eloquence.’ An Collins’s 1653 volume, Divine Songs and Meditations, which celebrates the triumph of the religious party of Independents in government, may be an attempt to impose a Puritan aesthetic on the religious lyric. She experiments with various forms, but there is clearly an attempt to subordinate form to content in a way that often interferes with conventional aesthetic value. Nigel Smith, who has argued for the lyric form as ‘an instrument of religious policy’ (Smith 1994: 276), has traced a Dissenting practice

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of the religious lyric as simple stanza form with vivid imagery as practised by the Welshman Morgan Llwyd, which eventually produced the hymns of Isaac Watts. The poetry of Julia Palmer, which exists in a manuscript of 200 poems in the Clark Library dated 1671–3, fits into this history: it is simple, emotional, and biblical.

The Gendering of Religious Verse Religious poetry was favourite and recommended reading matter for women in this period, as seen by the frequent mentions of Herbert and, particularly, Quarles, in women’s manuscripts. Susanna, countess of Suffolk, is commended in her funeral sermon for knowing all of Herbert’s poems off by heart. It would be surprising, therefore, if women did not in their first ventures into poetry try their hand at this perhaps most approved form. This acrostic tribute from the manuscripts of Anne, Lady Southwell (1573–1636), credits Francis Quarles with inspiration for her own efforts: Fain would I die whilst thy brave muse doth live Quaintest of all the Heliconian train Raised by thy artful quill, that life doth give Unto the dullest things, thy fiery strain Adds immortality, maugre privation And by thy power brings forth a new creation. Unhappy they that poesy profess, Raising their thoughts by any star but thine, Nor let them think celestial powers will bless Loose ballads or hyperbolising rhyme; Curst be those sulph’rous channels that make stink; Each crystal drop that in their crannies sink; Enthrone thy Phoenix in Jehovah’s breast: Since she approves herself bird of that nest So shall she live immaculate and blest. (Southwell 1997: 20–1)

The contempt for extravagant secular poetry, and the need for an alternative Muse, is typical of religious poetry of the period. The figuring of inspiration as divine liquid channelled through poetic form is typical of a strand of seventeenth-century imagery, probably triggered by the recent installation of piped water supplies in English cities. Less common is the confidence in a woman’s poetic authorship expressed here: Anne Southwell has produced a critique of seventeenth-century poetics from the standpoint of one engaged in the same process, although she represents herself as vastly inferior to Francis Quarles. There is very little poetry by women extant from the early modern period: most of this is in manuscript, as publication by women seems to have been regarded as

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little short of prostitution. The Perdita Project for the recovery of women’s manuscript writing has attempted to rectify the scarcity of women’s poetry with an anthology of verse from women’s manuscripts published in 2005. In a poetic discursion on authorship Anne Southwell expresses total contempt for those who publish their poetry (Millman and Wright 2005: 68). In this hostile climate Aemilia Lanyer published Salve Deus Rex Judaeorum in 1611, an extraordinary religious poem apparently inspired by the Sidney Psalter, which begins with dedicatory epistles to various learned and well-born Stuart women from one who, as wife to a court musician and distinctly non-aristocratic, would not normally be expected to engage in poetic authorship. The poem has been both celebrated as a construction of a community of learned women and dismissed as an unsuccessful attempt to gain patronage. Lanyer’s version of the passion of Christ is interrupted by several set-pieces of rhetoric, all highly gendered: a ‘Defence of Eve’, which is a reinterpretation of the Genesis story to Adam’s disadvantage, and a version of a ‘blazon’ from the Song of Songs in which the beauty of Christ is celebrated from an explicitly feminine perspective. The prominence given to female characters in the biblical story, such as Pilate’s wife and the women who accompanied Christ to his death, have led some feminist critics to claim her work as ‘proto-feminist’. Susanne Woods aligns her Christianised Neoplatonism with that of Spenser, and her treatment of the red and white topos with Shakespeare’s use of it in Venus and Adonis: she compares Donne’s ‘First Anniversary’ with Lanyer’s poem, published in the same year (Woods 1984). This integration of a woman’s writing into the Renaissance canon is part of the phase in feminist scholarship that follows the recovery of much unknown women’s writing of the period. However, this enterprise is fraught with methodological difficulty, not least because major works by men have been thoroughly edited and modernised over centuries to produce something that looks very different from a newly discovered woman’s text, which often emerges with her own idiosyncratic spelling, and without a tradition of interpretation behind it. One of the few manuscript poets who has been published in a modern edition is Anne, Lady Southwell. Even within the protected medium of manuscript she seems to feel the need to defend her own practice of writing religious verse: a prose letter to her friend Cecily Ridgeway is, in effect, her own elegant ‘Apology for Poetry’. She takes for granted, of course, that it is religious verse that she is defending. In the Folger manuscript, which has been edited by Jean Klene (Southwell 1997), entitled ‘The workes of the Lady Ann Sothwell’, some of which seem to have been collected by her husband after her death, there are a few shorter poems (some of them transcribed from other writers) including her own defence of Eve which wittily reinterprets the Genesis story to exonerate Eve from male prejudice. What she considered her major work, however, seems to be a series of long poems on the Ten Commandments. These are less restricted in scope than might appear from the title: taking as her point of departure a particular commandment, she ranges over a great deal of philosophical and moral opinion. She defends her particular choice of religious verse with a rather simple form, repudiating the kind of rhetorical competition that was the basis for much courtly poetry. This statement is particularly interesting in view

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of the probability that she was the ‘A.S.’ who, in younger days, engaged in rhetorical games at court with the likes of John Donne. Her criticisms of seventeenth-century culture include the relentless sexualisation by men of women’s bearing and behaviour. The plight of the woman poet (and later, interestingly, of the woman prophet), is lamented in witty but forthright terms: Dare you but write, you are Minervas bird the owle at which these battess & crowes must wonder, they’l critickize uppon the smallest word this wanteth number case, that tense & gender then must you frame a pitifull epistle to pray him bee a rose was borne a thistle. (Millman and Wright 2005: 71)

It can be no coincidence that this stanza is taken from the British Library manuscript which bears a dedicatory poetic epistle to James I, the Scottish thistle trying hard to become an English rose. Religious verse in manuscript was not necessarily an exercise in private devotion: Lady Southwell’s poetry was circulated at the very highest level. One woman who left a major body of poetry in a recently uncovered manuscript at the Brotherton Library in Leeds is Lady Hester Pulter (1605–78), sixth daughter of the earl of Marlborough. As well as political poems, philosophical poems, a series of emblems, and an unfinished prose romance, her work contains many religious lyrics in which the debt to George Herbert is clear: the lyric that begins ‘Dear God from thy high throne look down’ has echoes of his ‘Church-monuments’, as well as imagery that reflects her interest in alchemy. Such female poetic confidence is, however, rare in this period. The few male-sanctioned volumes of women’s writing published pre1640 are usually prose treatises: several of them, however, do have verses by the author affixed to the volume, as if to show that she is competent at a limited, authorised style of poetry, which invariably consists of conventional religious content in a pedestrian form. Only women from the highest aristocratic contexts with access to elite literary circles experiment further. The religious lyric has been noted as a feminised form by Helen Wilcox because of its characteristic stance of dependence on God, and its debt to secular love poetry. Recent research such as that by Michael Schoenfeldt has begun to explore this highly gendered aspect of the religious lyric, which introduces a kind of eroticism into Herbert’s poetry, despite its contemporary reputation for holiness. Sexuality is more of an issue in religious verse, which explicitly adopts a feminine subject position in relation to God, in accordance with the sacred poetry of the Song of Songs. Yet to be explored is the significance of women themselves using this feminised form: Aemilia Lanyer, Anne Southwell, An Collins, and other female poets of the seventeenth century seem to find an authorised feminine subjectivity in the biblical voice of the Bride of Christ. The anonymous author of ‘Eliza’s Babes’ (1656) has used this biblical type in conjunction with the conventional ‘offspring’ trope for poetry to present her verses as

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divinely engendered children. However, use of this rhetoric is complicated for women. The female voice in the secular love lyric of the Renaissance has been already appropriated as a vehicle for the display of male rhetorical skill; and the voice of the Bride in the Song of Songs is not straightforwardly gendered female, as it has been interpreted in many biblical commentaries of the Reformation as the voice of the individual male Christian. Those critics who refuse to spiritualise all the sexual imagery of seventeenthcentury religious verse have begun to investigate its complex gendering. Richard Crashaw, who often uses the tropes of the Song of Songs, has been identified as a poet whose lyrics manifest an instability of gender roles: many critics are uncomfortable with what Healy calls his ‘indecorous’ rhetoric. Richard Rambuss has recently highlighted the explicit eroticism of his poetry, along with that of Traherne and other religious poets, disputing the tendency to allegorical interpretation that would desexualise the imagery. He notes the figuring of the religious ecstasy of St Teresa, in one of Crashaw’s most famous poems ‘A Hymn on the Name and Honour of the Admirable Saint Teresa’, as the ecstasy of a male body possessed by his male lover: O how oft shalt thou complain Of a sweet and subtle PAIN. Of intolerable JOYS; Of a DEATH, in which who dies Loves his death, and dies again. And would forever so be slain; And lives, and dies; and knows not why To live, But that he thus may never leave to DIE. How kindly will thy gentle HEART Kiss the sweetly-killing DART! And close in his embraces keep Those delicious wounds, that weep Balsam to heal themselves with. (Crashaw 1957: 319–20)

Such cross-gendering raises the question of whether the model for the relationship between Christ and the believer is always the heterosexual one of mystical marriage. Rambuss draws links between the seventeenth-century imagery of wounds which pervades so many religious lyrics and modern gay pornography, pointing out that a number of Crashaw’s sacred epigrams are concerned with ‘lyricising the various implements that had been employed at one time or another to open or enter Jesus’ body’ (Rambuss 1998: 26). He highlights the figuring of the believer as Ganymede in Traherne’s ‘Love’ soon after a heterosexual rape topos reminiscent of one of Donne’s bolder conceits (Rambuss 1998: 54–7). Rambuss is concerned not to impose modern categories of gender orientation, but the very process of gesturing towards twentiethcentury gay culture tends to elide differences from, and between, early modern sexualities. Suspicious of an ahistorical psychoanalytic criticism, New Historicism has not

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found a convincing way of dealing with gendered writing in the Renaissance, an issue that is particularly pertinent to the religious lyric. Many scholars have been looking for the next dominant critical movement after New Historicism, which, based as it is on a theologically inflected early modern history, has been particularly congenial for students of the religious lyric. It is not obvious from where any new critical impulse will come, although proponents of ‘the new formalism’ will find material in the religious lyric. Much of the best writing on this subject, however, continues to be interdisciplinary with various aspects of early modern culture, and is essentially historicist in nature.

References and Further Reading Achinstein, S. (2006). ‘Reading George Herbert in the Restoration’. English Literary Renaissance, 36, 430–65. Albrecht, R. J. (2008). Using Alchemical Memory Techniques for the Interpretation of Literature: John Donne, George Herbert and Richard Crashaw. Lewiston, NY: Mellen. Blevins, J. (ed.) (2007). Re-Reading Thomas Traherne: A Collection of New Critical Essays. Tempe: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies. Clarke, E. R. (1997). Theory and Theology in George Herbert’s Poetry: ‘Divinitie, and Poesie, Met’. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Clarke, E. R. (2003). ‘The character of a nonLaudian country parson’. The Review of English Studies, 54, 479–96. Crashaw, R. (1957). The Poems, English, Latin and Greek of Richard Crashaw, ed. L. C. Martin. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Doerksen, D. W. and C. Hodgkins (eds.) (2004). Centred on the Word: Literature, Scripture and the Tudor-Stuart Middle Way. Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses. Donne, J. (1978). The Divine Poems, ed. H. Gardner. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hageman, E. H. (1996).’ Women’s poetry in early modern Britain’. In H. Wilcox (ed.), Women and Literature in Britain 1500–1700. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hannay, Margaret P. (1990). Philip’s Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Healy, T. (1986). Richard Crashaw. Leiden: E. J. Brill.

Herbert, George (2007). The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. H. E. Wilcox. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lewalski, B. K. (1970). Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth-Century Religious Lyric. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Marotti, A. (1995). Manuscript, Print and the English Renaissance Lyric. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Martz, Louis (1962). The Poetry of Meditation: A Study of English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press. Marvell, Andrew (2003). The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. N. Smith. Harlow: Longman. Millman, Jill Seal and Gillian Wright (2005). Early Modern Women’s Manuscript Poetry. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Norbrook, D. (1984). Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Rambuss, R. (1998). Closet Devotions. Durham: Duke University Press. Roberts, J. R. (ed.) (1994). New Perspectives on the Seventeenth-Century English Religious Lyric. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Rudrum, A. (2007). ‘ “These fragments I have shored against my ruins”: Henry Vaughan, alchemical philosophy, and the Great Rebellion’. In S. J. Linden (ed. and introd.), Mystical Metal of Gold: Essays on Alchemy and Renaissance Culture (pp. 325–38). New York: AMS. Schoenfeldt, M. C. (1991). Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Renaissance Courtship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Religious Verse Smith, N. (1994). Literature and Revolution in England 1640–1660. New Haven: Yale University Press. Southwell, Lady Anne (1997). The Southwell– Sibthorpe Commonplace Book: Folger MS. V.b.198, ed. J. Klene. Tempe, Arizona: Medieval and Renaissance Text Society. Stull, W. (1982). ‘ “Why are not Sonnets made of thee?” A new context for the “Holy Sonnets” of Donne, Herbert, and Milton’. Modern Philology, 80, 129–35. Summers, C. J. and T.-L. Pebworth (eds.) (1987). ‘Bright Shootes of Everlastingnesse’: The SeventeenthCentury Religious Lyric. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Traherne, Thomas (1958). Centuries, Poems and Thanksgivings, ed. H. M. Margoliouth, 2 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Vaughan, H. (1976). Henry Vaughan: The Complete Poems, ed. A. Rudrum. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Veith, Gene Edward (1985). Reformation Spirituality: The Religion of George Herbert. Lewisburg, Pa..: Bucknell University Press.

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West, P. (2006). ‘Nathaniel Wanley and George Herbert: the dis-engaged and The Temple’. Review of English Studies, 57, 337–58. Wilcox, H. E. (1990). ‘Exploring the language of devotion in the English Revolution’. In T. Healy and J. Sawday (eds.), Literature and the English Civil War. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilcox, H. (1994). ‘ “Curious frame”: the seventeenth-century religious lyric as genre’. In J. R. Roberts (ed.), New Perspectives on the SeventeenthCentury Religious Lyric (pp. 9–27). Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Wilcox, H. E. (2000). “Whom the Lord with love affecteth”. In D. Clarke and E. Clarke (eds.), ‘This Double Voice’: Gendered Writing in Early Modern England. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Woods, S. (1984). Natural Emphasis: English Versification from Chaucer to Dryden. San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library. Woods, S. (1999). Lanyer: A Renaissance Woman Poet. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Herbert’s ‘The Elixir’ Judith Weil

Teach me, my God and King, In all things thee to see, And what I do in any thing, To do it as for thee: Not rudely, as a beast, To run into an action; But still to make thee prepossest, And give it his perfection. A man that looks on glass, On it may stay his eye; Or, if he pleaseth, through it pass, And then the heav’n espy. All may of thee partake: Nothing can be so mean, Which with his tincture (for thy sake) Will not grow bright and clean. A servant with this clause Makes drudgery divine: Who sweeps a room, as for thy laws, Makes that and th’action fine. This is the famous stone That turneth all to gold: For that which God doth touch and own Cannot for less be told.

George Herbert’s lyric takes its title from the ‘famous stone’ stressed in its final stanza – that substance sought by alchemists, which would supposedly change baser metals

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into purest gold. In her influential study, The Metaphysical Poets, Helen C. White analysed the process by which Herbert revised an earlier version of ‘The Elixir’ entitled ‘Perfection’. She argued that his new final stanza containing the ‘somewhat rigid alchemical figure brilliantly sums up the whole poem, with the completeness and firmness of arc that is one of the characteristic movements of Herbert’s mind’ (White 1962: 181). White’s reading provides a useful point of departure because she misses the surprise of finding an ‘elixir’ among the qualities she so values in Herbert’s poetry, ‘the little passages of daily life and the small passages of our common environment’ (1962: 182). How could a notorious metal-changer/tester have slipped into Herbert’s Temple? And does this metaphor behave with the fixity or finality that White perceives? ‘Elixir’, according to the OED, derives from a compound of Arabic ‘al’ with Greek ‘xerion’, a ‘desiccative powder for wounds’. It may refer, in addition to the ‘stone’ or alchemical processes, to a drug or essence that prolongs life indefinitely, to a ‘strong extract or tincture’ (including a quintessence, soul, or kernel), and to a pharmaceutical concoction. Herbert’s ‘stone’ could be dry and wet, a dust and a rock, a core principle and a boiled-down reduction, an occult cause and an ordinary domestic medicine. While scarcely so paradoxical, other words in this remarkable poem also seem to have been touched into mobility. I begin with OED’s gathering of senses available to Herbert, because his poem activates and increases its significations by compressing them or by turning restrictive figures of speech into conduits and connectors. Through a closer reading of the poem I will try to account for the propriety of its final metaphor, the ‘famous stone’. In conclusion I will suggest that specific cultural contexts, those of service and hospitality, help to clarify the work being done by the language of the poem. Like other poems near the conclusion of The Temple, ‘The Elixir’ communicates a joyful, straightforward trust in the speaker’s reciprocal relationship with God. Earlier poems may express a longing for such reciprocity but treat it as almost inaccessible. In ‘Love II’, for example, Herbert imagines with near-apocalyptic fervour that only the ‘greater flame’ of God’s love will allow human hymns to ‘send back thy fire’ or make ‘our eyes … see thee, which before saw dust’. ‘The Elixir’ also has a simplicity of representation that the following poem, ‘A Wreath’, associates with God’s ways, as opposed to the ‘crooked winding ways’ of a sinful Herbert. Arnold Stein comments that ‘Most of what he has to say to God and himself is relatively unhandicapped by the forbidding prestige of pure intellect’ (Stein 1968: 204). Following the method suggested by Herbert’s own desire to understand sacred texts in ‘The H[oly] Scriptures II’ – ‘Oh that I knew how all thy lights combine, / And the configurations of their glory!’ – Herbert’s readers often place individual poems like ‘The Elixir’ within patterns descried throughout The Temple. We can begin to understand Herbert’s lyrics by treating them as their author treated ‘constellations of the story’ in Old and New Testaments: ‘Thy words do find me out, and parallels bring, / And in another make me understood’. Chana Bloch has shown that frequent

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links among Herbert’s poems probably reflect the practice of collating and comparing biblical passages (Bloch 1985: 53–78). Because it stresses behaviour and action informed by God’s presence, ‘The Elixir’ might be linked with ‘The Windows’; there Herbert compares the fusion of precept and practice within an effective minister to the story of Christ annealed in stained glass. If poems concerned with the preacher and his calling (cf. ‘The Odour, 2. Cor. 2’) shine out as an obvious group in which to view ‘The Elixir’, words and phrases within the poem can also draw our attention to other broad patterns of emphasis in The Temple. Herbert’s opening personal address to ‘my God and King’ employs a form repeated in the Psalter and echoed by such poems as ‘Antiphon (I)’ and ‘Jordan (I)’; this address sounds a note of psalm-like sincerity. His third stanza could affiliate ‘The Elixir’ with more visionary ontological lyrics like ‘Love II’, mentioned above, or ‘The Glance’: ‘What wonders shall we feel, when we shall see / Thy full-ey’d love!’ Through the first line of the fourth stanza, ‘All may of thee partake’, he invokes the Eucharist, which is celebrated by many of his lyrics. Commentators who emphasise the prominence of traditional religious practices in Herbert’s poetry have often taken this sacrament to be, as C. A. Patrides writes, ‘the marrow of Herbert’s sensibility’ (Patrides 1974: 17). With his references to polishing something ‘mean’ or to the ‘drudgery’ of sweeping a room, Herbert seems to repudiate elitism in theology and society, inviting a scholar like Richard Strier to group ‘The Elixir’ with poems strongly motivated by a Protestant sense of grace: ‘A true Hymn’, ‘Faith’, and ‘The Forerunners’ (Strier 1983: 206). Several more parallels will be cited below when I relate Herbert’s service and hospitality tropes to seventeenth-century customs. As we read more closely through ‘The Elixir’, we can discover an interpenetrating set of ‘constellations’, which shift as the poem becomes more familiar. The speaker whose first two lines address God with such urgent humility, chiming the vowel sounds of ‘Teach’ with those of its object and effects, appears to need no more instruction by the third stanza, which matter-of-factly counsels readers on how visions may be had. Not, in this case, by seeing through a glass darkly (1 Cor. 13:12), but rather by passing through the ‘glass’ at will (‘if he pleaseth’). Northrop Frye has observed that when Emily Dickinson ‘meets an inadequacy in the English language she simply walks through it, as a child might do’ (Frye 1963: 203). Herbert seems to walk through laws of grammar, which could indicate whether the eye or the man can ‘pass’ through the ‘glass’ and whether the pronoun ‘he’ in ‘if he pleaseth’ is human or divine. A heaven ‘then’ to be spied is accessible to ‘Man’ as it once was to Adam, according to ‘The H[oly] Communion’: ‘He might to heav’n from paradise go, / As from one room t’another’. It seems local and familiar, like the New Jerusalem glimpsed in the first book of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene: Angels descending ‘to and fro’ can ‘wend’ into ‘that City’ as ‘commonly as friend does with his friend’ (FQ 1.10.56.2–5). Using the figure of a passage through glass, Herbert connects his almost detachable and oracular third stanza to other types of movement in ‘The Elixir’: the repeated ‘do’s of stanza 1, the perfected ‘action’ of stanza 2, the implied work of purifying or cleaning in stanza 4, the ‘drudgery’ of the servant who sweeps a room in stanza 5,

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and the final transforming agency of the stone, whose power to ‘touch and own’ may both echo and answer the initial ‘Teach me’ prayer. Within ‘The Elixir’, ‘perfection’ (line 8) acquires a dynamism latent in its Latin root, the verb perficio, meaning to ‘carry out, accomplish, perform, finish, complete’. This sense of sufficient action emerges with special force in the vivid image of the sweeping servant whose work ‘as for thy laws’ seems to create the space around its own achievement. Herbert’s swept ‘room’ removes any legal grime or abstraction from ‘clause’ – referring back to the parenthesis ‘(for thy sake)’ which circumscribes and stipulates the significance of ‘tincture’ (literally an imparted colour) in the preceding stanza. It also suggests that ‘clause’, connoting enclosure and the ending of a grammatical period, has been opened up and made ready for new purposes. Vigorous activity in ‘The Elixir’ may express Herbert’s belief that a soul should be ‘quick’ rather than ‘dull’ and impeded. According to Terry G. Sherwood, Herbert recognised that liveliness of ‘thought, feeling, and expression are evidence of Christ living in the believer through the quickening Spirit’ (Sherwood 1989: 129). Perhaps because the servant’s sweeping offers the only action within the poem that can easily be visualised, it has often been discussed by scholars who are particularly alert to material circumstances. For Marion Singleton, mindful of how Herbert the aristocratic courtier struggled to reform himself, the servant image suggests ‘a descent to lowliness’ as part of an unremitting ‘effort’ (Singleton 1987: 159) on which real change depended. ‘Only a thoroughly worldly courtier of the late Renaissance could so sharply model a pattern of loyal service that fully incorporates the interior and exterior limits to “perfect freedom” ’ (Singleton 1987: 11). Michael C. Schoenfeldt, also adept at recognising anxiety about the politics of courtship in Herbert, cites Christopher Hill’s opinion that the ‘servant’ stanza represented ‘a point of view more common among employers and independent craftsmen than among employees’. Schoenfeldt implies that Hill is pointing to Herbert’s elitism, whereas Hill in fact argues that ‘Puritans and others’ were ‘evolving a doctrine of the dignity of labour’ (‘property in a man’s own labour and person’) even as the English working class was demonstrating its ‘hatred of wage labour’. Schoenfeldt himself regards the ‘tincture (for thy sake)’ as ‘a kind of magical spell’ and concludes that ‘mortal agency is a necessary but misleading fiction under the rule of an omnipotent deity’ (Schoenfeldt 1991: 94, 234–5, 179). Surprisingly, those who emphasise Puritan faith rather than political consciousness find little more dignity or freedom in Herbert’s evocations of labour. Bloch believes that he selected the servant image for its ‘lowliness’ rather than for its intrinsic value: ‘the dignity of all vocations in the eye of God [was] a favourite theme of the Reformers’ (Bloch 1985: 227). The ‘aristocratic Herbert’, she observes, probably never held a broom. In Love Known, Richard Strier denies both that ‘The Elixir’ concerns preparation for a visionary ascent (Stein’s opinion) and that it is even about ‘actually doing things well’ (Strier 1983: 207). Strier wisely reminds us (in connection with ‘The Temper’, 227–34) that Herbert treats spaces or rooms as metaphors; in Resistant Structures he takes Schoenfeldt and other New Historicists to task for a ‘systematic

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confusion of the vehicle with the tenor of metaphors’ (Strier 1995: 110). But Strier’s Reformation Protestant reading of ‘The Elixir’ shrinks the dynamic expansiveness of Herbert’s housekeeping tropes by making ‘as for thee’ a mere ‘fiction’, a ‘tincture’ that has become little more than a tint or stain. God, Strier insists, does not supply a lack but accepts a ‘frame of mind’ (Strier 1983: 208). It seems to me that Herbert has indeed dignified the agency of his servant figure, not only by brightening the dark glass of Christian dualism in his third stanza but also by equivocating on ‘prepossest’ in his second one (‘still to make thee prepossest’). According to Patrides, Herbert would have understood God’s grace as ‘above all “prevenient”, anticipatory of man’s behaviour by virtue of Christ’s presence in history’ (Patrides 1974: 18–19). To ‘prepossess’ is to seize upon or to influence in advance – actions that seem impossible where God is concerned unless we imagine human agents as capacities preoccupied by God. But when Herbert vows ‘to make thee prepossest’, he briefly anticipates divine ends with human means. Moreover, if we consider that ‘as for thee’ may mean ‘precisely for thee’ or ‘on thy behalf ’ rather than ‘as if for thee’, human agency will seem more significant, less hypothetical. Students of Herbert have often disagreed about the extent to which his Calvinist theology was modified by his trust in God’s love and his preference for traditional church order (Clarke 1997: 9–13, 179–223; see Chapter 67, Religious Verse). If ‘The Elixir’, like many of his lyrics, had emphasised Herbert’s stony heart and sinful helplessness, one could agree, with Stanley Fish, that its human agents have ‘no room to manoeuvre’ (Fish 1978: 160). Herbert’s prepossessing, however, probably acts out the paradox, mentioned by Singleton above, that ‘service is perfect freedom’. As David Evett and others have shown, this ideal, developed by Cranmer in the Tudor Book of Common Prayer, became a commonplace in an age when many social roles and relationships could be characterised as services (Evett 2005: 1–16). Christ himself was referred to as a self-sacrificing servant, both in the Bible and in contemporary discourse. ‘The Elixir’ gestures towards a reciprocity between master and servant rarely glimpsed in paternalistic laws or in the household guides teaching total subordination of the servant’s agency and will. An ideal of service as perfect freedom may have special relevance to those poems in The Temple that touch on the activities and duties of priests. Such poems have invited students of Herbert to enter his own A Priest to the Temple; or the Country Parson; his Character and Rule of Holy Life. For example, Stanley Stewart turns from ‘Prayer II’, an ‘extemporaneous’ private exercise characterized by Ease’ (Stewart 1986: 36), to Herbert’s ‘Anglican’ approval of public ceremonial prayers, and he cites (1986: 37–8) from A Priest this sentence, which also resonates with ‘The Elixir’: This is that which the Apostle calls a reasonable service, Rom. 12. when we speak not as parrots, without reason, or offer up such sacrifices as they did of old, which was of beasts devoid of reason; but when we use our reason, and apply our powers to the service of him that gives them. (Herbert 1941: 232)

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Bloch compares Herbert’s ‘homely’ poetic images with his comment that the country parson ‘neither disdaineth … to enter into the poorest Cottage, though he even creep into it, and though it smell never so loathsomely’ (Bloch 1985: 229, citing Herbert 1941: 249). Equally pertinent are Herbert’s reflections on Christ as the ‘true householder’ who used ‘familiar things’ to teach and uplift the ‘meanest’ of hearts and minds, ‘even in the midst of their pains’ (Herbert 1941: 261). Or his advice that pastors imitate Scripture by naming ‘things of ordinary use’, thereby showing ‘they are not only to serve in the way of drudgery, but to be washed, and cleansed, and serve for lights even of Heavenly Truths’ (Herbert 1941: 257). In her fine essay on ‘The Windows’, Judy Z. Kronenfeld observes that it is ‘like a private, meditative version of “The Author’s Prayer before Sermon” ’ (Kronenfeld 1985: 65). This prayer with which Herbert ends A Priest includes an obvious parallel to ‘The Elixir’ – his direct appeal, ‘Lord Jesu! Teach thou me, that I may teach them’ (Herbert 1941: 289). Serving and served by God, the priest serves others. ‘The Elixir’ intersects with Herbert’s personal biography through general attitudes and tropes. The poem itself has almost no narrative, for all its ease and fluidity. To identify a biographical development (Vendler 1975: 270–1) from a loftily ‘intellectualised’ second stanza to a humble fifth one may be to ignore seventeenth-century commonplaces; it is certainly to miss the active, creative force of the verb ‘make(s)’, shared between the agents of these two stanzas. Not surprisingly, Herbert often uses more negative service tropes to suggest man’s troubled, anxious dependence on God. In ‘Employment (I)’ the speaker complains ‘all my company is a weed’ and prays ‘Lord place me in thy consort’. In ‘The Star’, he begs, ‘Get me a standing there, and place / Among the beams, which crown the face’ of Christ. His saviour’s face has the spiritual power to transform him, even as he draws upon terms that invoke the mundane, quasi-feudal practice of good lordship and protection, or ‘countenancing’. The villainy of base followers is dramatised by the speaker, Christ, in ‘The Sacrifice’, where ‘Servants and abjects’ flout him; he dies ‘A servile death in servile company’. In ‘Sighs and Groans’ the speaker describes himself as an ‘ill steward’, confessing ‘I have abused thy stock, destroyed thy woods, / Sucked all thy magazines’. And in ‘Affliction IV’ he begs God’s help against his own thoughts – attendants who are not merely ‘at strife, / Quitting their place / Unto my face’; they are plotting to assassinate him. Seeing with his own eyes rather than with God’s in ‘Submission’, he desires place and power: ‘How know I, if thou shouldst me raise, / That I should then raise thee?’ This recalcitrance is emphasised in ‘Love unknown’, where a blunt ‘Friend’ must finally explain to the speaker that his spiritual condition justifies the seemingly harsh treatment he has received: ‘Your master shows to you / More favour than you wot of ’. Aside from ‘The Elixir’, Herbert’s most positive use of figures for service occurs in ‘The Odour, 2 Cor. 2’ which begins, ‘how sweetly doth “my Master” sound!’ The effect upon the speaker of sensing or hearing as a response, ‘My Servant’, would be an experience of mending ‘by reflection’. Much more complex is the service trope, which Herbert develops in his long poem ‘Affliction I’. Here the speaker seems to

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begin his spiritual career by enjoying ‘the service brave’ which surrounds and rewards him with the ‘glorious household-stuff ’ of the created universe. But his master then uses sorrow, conflict, and pain to ‘cross-bias me’. If he were a tree, the speaker feels, he could at least shelter the ‘household’ of ‘some bird’. No sooner has he vowed to find another service and master, however, than he corrects himself, exclaiming, ‘Ah my dear God! Though I am clean forgot, / Let me not love thee, if I love thee not’. ‘Affliction I’ does not merely identify service with love. It suggests that a rebellious, contrary dependent has glimpsed a love that is contrary to normal desires and satisfactions. Gary Kuchar has persuasively argued that the ‘confounding ending’ evokes a ‘gap between human life and Christ’s alien life in the human soul’ (Kuchar 2008: 13). Herbert may be distinguishing the love of God from the love of a mortal master in whose will a servant’s was supposedly subsumed. Herbert treats tropes of hospitality in much the same way as he treats those of service. Both explore strains in reciprocity between God and man; both employ common social practices in order to imagine a divine love that is strange and wonderful. For example, ‘Lent’ concludes with an arresting image for abstinence: the sinstarved soul joins the ‘poor’ by revelling in a banquet being given at his own door. The speaker of ‘Unkindness’ has let ‘the poor / And thou within them, starve at door’. Herbert presents his prayers as noisy beggars both in ‘Gratefulness’ (‘Perpetual knockings at thy door, / Tears sullying thy transparent rooms’) and in ‘Longing’, but in the latter poem he also writes, ‘Thy board is full, yet humble guests / Find nests’. It is difficult to find in such poems the ‘vision’ which, in Schoenfeldt’s view, prompted Herbert to represent noble hospitality: his ‘profound insight into the power and prestige bestowed by the capability to feed others’ (Schoenfeldt 1991: 201). Schoenfeldt cites the research of Felicity Heal to support his interpretation of ‘Love III’ as a strategic power-struggle between courtly host and guest. But he omits her emphasis on the vigour of hospitality as a continuing, lived ideal in the seventeenth century (cf. Heal 1990: 3–4, 89–90, 221–2). All men, she demonstrates, were expected to act as hosts within their means, providing food, drink, and accommodation for neighbours and strangers, rich and poor. When ‘harbingers’ mark his door (and head) with white in ‘The Forerunners’, Herbert makes room for God, imagined as a lord or king approaching on progress, by parting with his ‘beauteous words’. But when he writes about the well-ordered soul as God’s household in ‘The Family’ (‘where thou dwellest all is neat’) or in ‘Christmas’ describes on ‘My dearest Lord’ as an innkeeper offering ‘all passengers most sweet relief ’, prestigious courtship seems far beside the point. This innkeeper offers yet another example of ‘prevenient’ grace on the part of a Lord who in ‘H. Baptism (II)’ ‘didst lay hold, and antedate / My faith in me’. Within a few lines, the ‘Christmas’ passenger or traveller is praying ‘Furnish and deck my soul, that thou mayst have / A better lodging, then a rack, or grave’. Like service, hospitable housekeeping gives Herbert a trope for reciprocity between God and men which foregrounds the shifting conditions of mutual trust. How beautifully he writes in ‘Providence’ about God’s ‘curious art’ in shaping the ‘goods’ that fill his ‘house’: ‘Light without wind is glass: warm without weight / Is wool and furs: cool without

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closeness, shade’. He concludes The Temple with ‘Love III’, where a liberal divine host offers ‘meat’ to his reluctant guest -– an action of self-sacrifice and of profound reassurance. In ‘The Elixir’, too, Herbert creates a temper of welcome and readiness without belabouring the work of preparation (as he does in his Latin poem, ‘Martha: Maria’). Helen Wilcox has suggested that because Herbert turns his readers into participants, seventeenth-century women were involved with his poetry ‘at every stage of the transmission and reception of a text’ (Wilcox 1996: 204). Perhaps children and servants as well as women would quickly have sensed the calmly festive mood of ‘The Elixir’ or have seen themselves reflected in the ‘glass’ of its actions. Compared with a service or hospitality trope, that of an elixir, which Herbert uses only once, is startlingly strange. But Herbert’s ‘stone’ does not astonish or enchant in any way. As Singleton shows (1987: 159), it replaces the hardness of graves and hearts so evident in the poems that begin The Temple. I would like to supplement White’s comment on Herbert’s final stanza, which she praises for a ‘precision and economy of statement that does justice to but also hides the fine elaboration of the thought’ (White 1962: 182). In a more historical sense, ‘economy’ once meant ‘oeconomy’, the arts of managing a household. ‘The Elixir’ turns White’s ‘little passages of daily life’ and some difficult passages of Christian thought into neat, hospitable song. References and Further Reading Bloch, Chana (1985). Spelling the Word: George Herbert and the Bible. Berkeley: University of California Press. Charles, Amy M. (1977). A Life of George Herbert. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Clarke, Elizabeth (1997). Theory and Theology in George Herbert’s Poetry. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Evett, David (2005). Discourses of Service in Shakespeare’s England. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Fish, Stanley (1978). The Living Temple: George Herbert and Catechizing. Berkeley: University of California Press. Frye, Northrop (1963). Fables of Identity: Studies in Poetic Mythology. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Heal, Felicity (1990). Hospitality in Early Modern England. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Heaney, Seamus (1995). The Redress of Poetry. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Herbert, George (1941). The Works of George Herbert, ed. F. E. Hutchinson. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Herbert, George (1965). The Latin Poetry of George Herbert: A Bilingual Edition, trans. Mark McCloskey and Paul R. Murphy. Athens: Ohio University Press. Herbert, George (2007). The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. Helen Wilcox. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hill, Christopher (1974). ‘Pottage for freeborn Englishmen: attitudes to wage labour’. In Christopher Hill, Change and Continuity in SeventeenthCentury England (pp. 219–38). London: Secker & Warburg. Kronenfeld, Judy Z. (1985). ‘Probing the relation between poetry and ideology: Herbert’s “The Windows” ’. John Donne Journal, 2, 55–80. Kuchar, Gary (2008). The Poetry of Religious Sorrow in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Patrides, C. A. (1974). ‘A crown of praise: the poetry of Herbert’. In The English Poems of George Herbert, ed. C. A. Patrides (pp. 6–25). London: Dent.

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Schoenfeldt, Michael C. (1991). Prayer and Power: George Herbert and Renaissance Courtship. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Sherwood, Terry G. (1989). Herbert’s Prayerful Art. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Singleton, Marion White (1987). God’s Courtier: Configuring a Different Grace in George Herbert’s Temple. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stein, Arnold (1968). George Herbert’s Lyrics. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Stewart, Stanley (1986). George Herbert. Boston: Twayne. Strier, Richard (1983). Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert’s Poetry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Strier, Richard (1995). Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts. Berkeley: University of California Press. Vendler, Helen (1975). The Poetry of George Herbert. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. White, Helen C. (1962). The Metaphysical Poets: A Study in Religious Experience. New York: Collier Books (originally published 1936). Wilcox, Helen (1996). ‘Entering The Temple: women, reading, and devotion in seventeenthcentury England’. In Donna B. Hamilton and Richard Strier (eds.), Religion, Literature, and Politics in Post-Reformation England, 1540–1688 (pp. 187–207). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Conversion and Poetry in Early Modern England Molly Murray

Early modern Christians lived in a culture of conversion, and inherited a number of intersecting definitions of this central concept. In general theological terms, conversion indicates an individual’s basic spiritual reorientation, what William James describes as a ‘process, gradual or sudden, by which a self … becomes unified and consciously right superior and happy, in consequence of its firmer hold on religious realities’ (James 1997: 160). In the gospels, what James calls ‘inward alterations’ are often described with the Greek word metanoia, literally a ‘turning of the mind’ (often translated into English as ‘repentance’ or ‘penitence’); so, in Mark, Jesus announces that ‘the kingdom of God is at hand, repent ye [metanoeite] and believe the Gospel’ (Mark 1:16); in Luke, he insists that ‘except ye repent [metanoeite], ye shall all likewise perish’ (Luke 13:3). Starting with the earliest generations of Christianity, however, conversion also denoted a shift in outward religious communities, a process that A. D. Nock calls ‘adhesion’ (Nock 1933: 15). The paradigmatic early converts St Paul and St Augustine, for example, did not simply experience an ‘inward alteration’, but further expressed that change in the outward embrace of a new church (Nock 1933: 14–16). So, Paul was originally ‘of the stock of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, an Hebrew of the Hebrews’ (Philippians 3:17), who spent his early life ‘breathing out threatenings and slaughter against the disciples of the Lord’ (Acts 9:1) before his epiphany on the road to Damascus led him to his new life as a Christian evangelist. In the Confessions, St Augustine precedes the famous account of his own Christianising epiphany in the garden (when ‘all the shadows of darkness were dispelled’) with the stories of other converts: Victorinus, Simplicianus, Ponticianus, and, especially, St Anthony, ‘converted to [Christianity]’ (esse conuersum) through a dramatic encounter with Scripture (Augustine 1998: 133–46, 153). For centuries of Christian believers, then, ‘conversion’ could indicate both an inward transformation of the soul (penitence, and turning towards God) and an outward reformation of ethics (turning to the correct practice of piety). In medieval Christianity, conversio took on the additional sense of submission to monastic disci-

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pline: the conversio (or conversatio) morum (conversion of manners) described by the Rule of St Benedict (Morrison 1992: 14). In the early modern period, another more particular definition of the term came to prominence: ‘conversion’, in post-Reformation England, could indicate movement between Christian churches, and especially between Catholicism and Protestantism. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, England would undergo several national changes of religion back and forth across this central ecclesiastical divide (see Chapter 27, English Reformations; Marotti 2005; Questier 1996). It would also witness a surprisingly large number of individual conversions to and from the Roman Church, not always corresponding to these officially legislated turns. Describing the ‘variety of religion’ in the early seventeenth century, the Jesuit Leonardus Lessius observes that ‘many in this point do continually waver, nor can they determine any certainty, passing from one religion to another as it were from house to house for trial’s sake’ (Lessius 1621: 1). Across the denominational spectrum, early modern English Christians longed to experience an inward turn to God, and sought to reform their lives in accordance with that longing. In doing so, many found it necessary to reject and replace the particular ecclesiastical forms through which they practised their Christian faith. Much English devotional poetry in this period reflects an intense concern with conversion in both its inward and outward registers. Within the Catholic and Protestant traditions, many poets would depict individual conversion as a turn to greater holiness, representing the complicated relationship between divine grace and human acts of devotion or repentance. Many poets who converted between the Catholic and Protestant churches, meanwhile, depicted conversion as a redefinition of individual devotional identity and a revision of devotional communities. No matter what their definition of conversion, and no matter what their confessional position, many early modern poets across the religious spectrum would convey these turns of individual faith and ecclesiastical form by exploiting the technical turnings of verse itself. Conversion, in other words, not only provided a subject for early modern devotional poets, but also found its formal analogue in the turns and tropes of poetic language. These various engagements with conversion finally helped to produce a body of English devotional poetry characterised by unprecedented psychological depth and formal complexity.

Reformation, Conversion, and the Poetry of Grace The Protestant Reformation began with a conversion – indeed, with a conversion that ‘consist[ed] in nothing less than a new understanding of conversion’ (Cummings 2002: 62). This was the Augustinian monk Martin Luther’s famous Turmerlebnis, or ‘tower experience’, which he recounts in the preface to his 1545 Collected Works (Luther 1960: 328–37). Here, he describes his struggle to understand the writings of another convert, St Paul, particularly Paul’s assertion that ‘the just shall live by faith’ (Romans 1:17). ‘I meditated day and night’, Luther tells us, ‘and then I began to

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understand the Justice of God as that by which the just lives by the gift of God, namely by faith’ (Luther 1960: 337). In Luther’s theology, and even more clearly in its Calvinist elaboration, man is unable to earn God’s grace through his independent will or works. Some English Protestants insisted more stringently upon man’s depravity than others; but the mainstream of the English Church nevertheless held fast to the basic idea that grace is unmerited, and good works are impossible without God’s action upon the soul. The Thirty-Nine Articles that formed the bedrock of the established church asserted the ‘corruption of the nature of every man’ (Art. 9), and insisted that ‘we have no power to do good works pleasant and acceptable to God without the grace of God by Christ preventing [i.e. going before] us’ (Art. 10). Man’s justification, according to the Articles, ‘only for the merit of Our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ … and not for our own works or deservings’ (Art. 10). Metanoia, here, remains a central desideratum of Christian life, but this inward turn to God can happen only as a consequence of God’s own prevenient (foregoing) gift of faith. Much devotional poetry written by English Protestants, accordingly, presents a corrupt human speaker who longs for the divine grace that he does not, and indeed cannot, deserve. The final poems of Fulke Greville’s sonnet sequence Caelica offer some of the bleakest expressions of such sinful self-consciousness: Wrapped up, O Lord, in man’s degeneration, The glories of Thy truth, Thy joys eternal, Reflect upon my soul dark desolation And ugly prospects e’er the sprites infernal; Lord, I have sinned and mine iniquity Deserves this hell; yet, Lord, deliver me. (XCVIII, 1–6)

The ‘degenerate’ speaker of this poem deserves only hell, yet continues to pray for God’s deliverance. For a Calvinist like Greville, such prayers must remain unanswered, their speakers remaining ‘emphatically unredeemed’ (Cummings 2002: 304). Caelica as a whole, however, can be read as a conversion narrative in structural terms. It begins as a secular sequence, with love poems in a Sidneian vein, addressed to the titular lady. Then, following the models of Dante and Petrarch, whose poetic sequences tell of erotic love sublimated into the love of God, Greville’s sequence turns to religious subjects in its final poems. The despair of the speaker is, in this sense, a sign of his growing ability to repudiate worldly things. He cannot merit God’s grace, but his desire for it marks a significant transformation (Ho 1992: 50–2). Decades later, the poetry of George Herbert would elaborate on the Reformed understanding of conversion (Halewood 1970: 88–105). In contrast to Greville, who shows his speaker’s growing despair over an entire lyric sequence, however, Herbert depicts highly charged spiritual and ethical transformations within single poems. Like many of Greville’s later lyrics, many of the poems in Herbert’s 1633 collection The Temple describe man’s sinfulness and need for God’s unmerited grace (Strier 1983:

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1–28). As the speaker puts it in a poem of that title, ‘My stock lies dead, and no increase / Doth my dull husbandry improve: / O let Thy graces without cease / Drop from above!’ (‘Grace’ 1–4). In contrast to Greville’s painfully unanswered pleas, however, many of Herbert’s poems dramatise precisely such a ‘dropping’ of grace, frequently in the form of correction or reproof. So, in ‘Jordan I’, the speaker describes his ambitious attempts to fashion ‘witty’ sacred verse – only to be interrupted by the voice of a mysterious ‘friend’, who cautions him that ‘there is in love a sweetness ready penned / Copy out only that, and save expense’ (13–14). Such moments of rebuke mark much of The Temple: again and again, Herbert’s speaker begins in sinful solipsism, only to be interrupted by another voice appearing without warning in the poem’s last lines, transforming both speaker and poem. Such interruptions have led Stanley Fish to describe Herbert’s poems as ‘self-consuming artifacts’ that dramatise a process of ‘letting go’ (Fish 1972: 156–223). We can also read them as poetic performances of conversion, in which the advent of unmerited, prevenient grace enables the justification of both poem and speaker. In ‘Denial’, for instance, Herbert employs a stanza in which uneven line lengths, awkward enjambments, and a jarringly unrhymed last line combine to evoke the errant sinfulness of the speaker: When my devotions could not pierce Thy silent ears; Then was my heart broken, as was my verse: My breast was full of fears And disorder.

The state of sin is marked by ‘broken … verse’, and the speaker concludes by entreating God to heal this linked poetic and spiritual ‘disorder’: O cheer and tune my heartless breast, Defer no time; So that thy favours granting my request, They and my mind may chime, And mend my rhyme.

With the final couplet, however, we realise that the speaker’s ‘rhyme’ has already been mended, the question answered even as it is asked. The poem allows us to witness conversion as unexpected ‘chiming’ of man and God, one that without warning ‘turns’ the soul – and the poem – towards a miraculous, graceful harmony. This formal rendering of sudden and unmerited grace also characterises one of Herbert’s best-known poems, ‘The Collar’. In the first line of this poem, the speaker reveals the title’s pun: he recalls a state of sinful ‘choler’ in which he angrily resisted a life of pious obedience (‘I struck the board, and cried, “No more. / I will abroad”.’) This unregenerate speaker once believed – erroneously – in his capacity to improve his lot without God’s help, by refusing the ethical strictures of Christianity; ‘my life

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and lines’, he recalls declaring, ‘are free; free as the road, / Loose as the wind, as large as store’. The last quatrain, however, both recalls and performs a dramatic conversion of both ‘life’ and ‘lines’: But as I raged and grew more fierce and wild At every word Me thoughts I heard one calling, ‘Child’; And I replied, ‘My Lord’.

Interrupted by this divine ‘caller’, human ‘choler’ is miraculously ‘collared’ into immediate and unthinking obedience. Abandoning his earlier, brash monologues of moral self-sufficiency (‘He that forbears / To suit and serve his need / Deserves his load’), the speaker, in these last lines, literally turns towards the ‘Lord’ who calls him. Once again, poetic form enacts this turning: after thirty-two lines in which the speaker proclaims his error in equally errant poetic rhythms, the final quatrain abandons such ‘fierce and wild’ metre and falls obediently into fourteener couplets – in other words, into the ‘common metre’ used for hymns and prayers among the English Reformers, most notably in the 1562 Sternhold–Hopkins Psalter (Lewalski 1970: 283–316; Targoff 2001: 102). In such moments, Herbert virtuosically uses the technical resources of English verse to both illustrate and demonstrate his vision of the conversion experience: an experience in which a sinful human speaker – and his imperfect, human poem – are simultaneously ‘mended’ through the prevenient grace of God.

Catholic Conversion and the Poetry of Repentance Protestants did not have a monopoly on the poetic rendering of conversion in early modern England. English Catholic poets of the period engaged in equally sophisticated reckoning with metanoia, particularly in the sense of individual penitence. Rather than depicting human depravity and unmerited grace, however, much of this Catholic poetry reflects a newly strengthened sacramental theology that reasserted the place of human will and works in the process of justification. The Council of Trent, which concluded in 1563, defined ‘justification’ as ‘the transition from the state of sin … to the state of grace’ (Delumeau 1977: 11). Such a transition required a divine call – but, the Council insisted, it also involved a free human response to that call, particularly in ‘good works’ and acts of contrition. So, the fourth canon of the Council declared, ‘if anyone says that man’s free will, moved and stimulated by God, cannot cooperate at all … but like an inanimate creature is utterly inert and passive, let him be anathema’ (Delumeau 1977: 12). Where Protestants had asserted the human being’s powerlessness in the face of his own sin, post-Tridentine Catholics envisioned penitence as something effective, able to merit God’s gracious forgiveness. ‘If anyone says that the justified man’s good works are gifts from God to the extent that they are not at the same time his own merits’, the Council asserted, ‘or that, by the good

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works he achieves by God’s grace, he does not genuinely merit an increase in grace … let him be anathema’ (Delumeau 1977: 12). Man’s turn towards God, for early modern Catholics, required his active and free participation; the Tridentine idea of gratia congrua reserved a place for human effort in the process. This understanding of conversion – emphasising man’s free and effective participation – energises the English poetry of the Jesuit Robert Southwell (Sweeney 2006: 25–7). By focusing on the extravagant sorrows of saints and martyrs, particularly those of St Peter and Mary Magdalene, Southwell represents varieties of human repentance, and its ability to merit God’s grace. Indeed, Southwell’s penitent speakers seek God’s restorative mercy precisely through ever more elaborate descriptions of their misery and confessions of their sin. The longer version of St Peter’s Complaint, for instance, begins with the penitent saint addressing his tormented soul after his betrayal of Christ: Launch forth, my soul, into a main of tears, Full fraught with grief the traffic of thy mind: Torn sails will serve, thoughts rent with guilty fears; Give care the stern; use sighs in lieu of wind: Remorse, thy pilot, thy misdeed, thy card [chart], Torment, thy haven: shipwrack, thy best reward. (1–6)

The speaker in this poem is as abject as Herbert’s chastised ‘child’ or Greville’s ‘iniquitous’ sinner, insisting upon his own flaws and failings. Where Southwell’s poem differs, however, is in its insistence – at first tacit, and eventually explicit – that this penitence can help to effect the process of justification. By the end of the poem, St Peter imagines a divine audience for both his sin and his poem: With mildnesses, Jesu, measure my offence, Let true remorse thy due revenge abate: Let tears appease when trespass doth incense: Let pity temper thy deserved hate. (781–4)

Peter speaks in the language of ‘measure’ and ‘appeasement’, and expresses the idea of adequate contrition in neatly balanced figures of speech: Peter’s ‘true remorse’ can abate God’s ‘due revenge’, Peter’s ‘tears’ can compensate for his alliterative ‘trespass’. This moment in the poem differs dramatically from Herbert’s eleventh-hour turns in which the impenitent speaker receives an unexpected reply. In contrast to Herbert’s poetry of unmerited grace, Southwell’s poetry depicts the sinner’s protracted but ultimately effective struggle to earn God’s ‘pity’ (Sweeney 2006: 79–80). This struggle, again, finds its expression through aspects of poetic form. Alison Shell has argued that ‘Southwell’s call is … not simply to contrition, but to the creativity of contrition’ (Shell 1999a: 69). A signal aspect of this creativity is Southwell’s

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use of metaphorical language. The long version of St Peter’s Complaint, for instance, consists mainly in the saint’s account of his own tearful sorrow. Tears were a favourite image in early modern Catholic poetry and visual art – including Southwell’s Italian source, Luigi Tansillo’s Lagrime di San Pietro (Kuchar 2008: 31–46). But the point of Southwell’s presentation of weeping does not seem to be descriptive verisimilitude, but rather the very accumulation of comparisons and figurative descriptions. In nearly 800 lines, Peter attempts, again and again, to give adequate words to his own penitence (with an inset nineteen-stanza apostrophe on Christ’s eyes). In one stanza alone, Peter describes his sinfulness with the following set of images: Ah life, the maze of countless straying ways Open to erring steps, and strowed with baits To wind weak senses into endless strays; Aloof from virtue’s rough unbeaten straights; A flower, a play, a blast, a shade, a dream, A living death, a never-turning stream. (91–6)

These rapidly shifting metaphors are more than just vehicles to convey an inward state of penitence. Instead, they themselves comprise Peter’s act of poetic contrition. For Southwell, these strenuous and copious gestures of figuration approximate the arduous work of human penitence in the process of conversion. In St Peter’s Complaint, as in many of his other penitential poems, metaphor and metanoia are intrinsically linked.

Conversion – and Poetry – between the Churches Catholic and Protestant versions of conversion would prove fruitful for poets writing within those theological traditions. Some of the most innovative devotional poetry of the period, however, addresses the more particular early modern definition of conversion as a move between Christian churches. Particularly after the launch of the Jesuit Mission in the 1580s, England became a country of confessional chameleons, as Catholics and Protestants alike sought to gain new members for their respective faiths (Questier 1996; Shell 1999a). The phenomenon of inter-denominational conversion produced a virtual torrent of polemical writings, to which both Catholics and Protestants contributed with equal vigour. In polemical sub-genres such as the statement of motives for conversion, the guide to resolution of religious doubt, or the familiar letter of counsel to ‘wavering’ Christians, writers attempted to map an individual’s inward turn to God onto an outward turn from one devotional community to another (Marotti 2005: 95–130; Questier 1996: 12–23). A striking number of early modern English poets – Donne, Jonson, Davenant, Crashaw, Marvell, and Dryden, to name only the most canonical – converted either to or from Catholicism during their literary careers. In the work of some of these

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poets, we find another version of conversion, one that emphasises its institutional as well as inward dimensions, while at the same time resisting the strident teleology of much polemical writing. The Elizabethan Catholic convert William Alabaster, for instance, marked his turn in the late 1590s not only with a lengthy prose autobiography, but also with a series of English sonnets (Marotti 2005: 98–109). In his autobiography, Alabaster recounts the many debates he had with Protestant divines anxious to secure his recantation (as a former chaplain to the earl of Essex, Alabaster was a prominent convert whose return to the Protestant fold was sought by many). Before moving to questions of doctrine, however, he describes his conversion itself as violent and unexpected, in a passage modelled on the central moment of Augustine’s Confessions. While a Protestant, Alabaster tells us, he had engaged in heated debate with an English Jesuit, who loaned him a book by the Catholic controversialist William Rainolds. He returned to his room and looked at the book’s preface, when he was ‘lightened upon the sudden … I leapt up from the place where I sat, and said to myself, “Now I am a Catholic” ’ (Alabaster 1997: 118). Alabaster’s sudden transformation leads to a change in poetic genre; as a Protestant, he had begun a Latin epic, the Elisaeis, celebrating Queen Elizabeth’s triumph over popery. Once a Catholic, he composed a series of English sonnets ‘to stir up others also that should read them to some estimation of what which I felt within myself ’ at the time (Alabaster 1997: 123). These poems take as their subject exactly that: what Alabaster felt in a period of radical inward and outward transformation. While many of them allude to familiar topoi of Catholic devotion (penitent saints, the blessed Virgin), Alabaster’s explicitly autobiographical sonnets eschew doctrine almost entirely, focusing instead on the individual experience of conversion and on its capacity to disrupt both spiritual unity and social community. In order to emphasise this message of disruption, Alabaster makes deliberate use of the sonnet form, in which a volta, or ‘turn’, creates a dramatic separation between the first eight and last six lines of the poem. In the octave of Sonnet 48, for instance, Alabaster describes his post-conversion exile from friends, family, and career: Lord, I have left all and myself behind: My state, my hopes, my strengths, and present ease, My unprovoked studies’ sweet disease, And touch of nature and engrafted kind Whose cleaving twist doth distant tempers bind, And gentle sense of kindness that doth praise The earnest judgements, other wills to please: All and myself I leave thy love to find.

These eight lines neatly sum up the dire consequences of Catholic conversion in a time of persecution, described in Alabaster’s narrative as ‘the overthrow of my whole course of life hitherto led and designed: the losing of my living, friends, honours, and other worldly commodities’ (Alabaster 1997: 121). Following the sonnet’s turn from

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octave to sestet, however, Alabaster imagines a surprising kind of compensation for such losses. Rather than envisioning the conclusive and consoling presence of divine grace, or praising the certainty offered by the Catholic Church, he instead comforts himself with an image of painful internal division, pleading for God to create in him a productive wound: O strike my heart with lightning from above, That from one wound both fire and blood may spring, Fire to transelement [change the elements of] my soul to love, And blood as oil to keep the fire burning, That fire may draw forth blood, blood extend fire, Desire possession, possession desire.

Conversion, in Alabaster’s poem, does not reveal a resting place for a restless spirit, but rather acts as an engine of perpetual division and reversal. This vision is both indicated and replicated by the last line’s chiasmus. In The Art of English Poesy (1589), George Puttenham associates this figure (which he calls the ‘counterchange’) with the more general category of divided lines which ‘the Greeks call … antistrophe, the Latins conversio’, but which he terms ‘the counterturn, because he turns counter in the midst of every metre’ (Puttenham 2007: 283–93). By ending his poem with such a bold ‘counterchange’, Alabaster wittily harnesses an aspect of poetic form to the central insight of the last line and of the sonnet as a whole: that the life of a convert could centre on a potentially endless alternation between volition and surrender, reassurance and estrangement. It is unsurprising, perhaps, that the author of these lines would go on to convert back and forth between the rival churches several more times before his death, becoming what one Jacobean commentator dismissed as a ‘double or treble turncoat’ (Alabaster 1959: Sonnet 21). In life, as in poetry, he seems to have been drawn inexorably to the turn. Alabaster’s plea for God to ‘strike my heart’ echoes (or perhaps anticipates) the entreaty ‘Batter my heart’ found in a better-known holy sonnet by a better-known early modern convert, John Donne. Donne was Alabaster’s near-contemporary in conversion, but his early religious turn took him in the opposite direction, from the Catholicism of his family to the Protestantism of his king (Bald 1970: 22–6, 67–72). Like Alabaster’s sonnets, much of Donne’s religious poetry addresses the subject of religious choice and change. Yet compared with Alabaster’s poetic focus on the dynamism of conversion itself, Donne’s poetry works rather differently: insisting on the necessity of singular choice, but at the same time removing the object of that choice from view. We can see a version of this poetic strategy in Satire III. Here, Donne’s speaker issues a stern injunction: ‘Seek true religion.’ He immediately follows this directive, however, with a question: ‘O where?’ With this question, Donne acknowledges that ‘religion’, in a culture of intra-Christian dispute, cannot be separated from particular acts of devotional affiliation. To make this point clearer still, he offers an illustrative catalogue of converts:

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Donne follows this pair of Catholic and Calvinist converts with further caricatures: timid Graius obediently follows the religion by law established, ‘Embracing’ whomever ‘his Godfathers will / Tender to him’ (59–60), while ‘careless Phrygius’ rejects all churches, with the faulty reasoning of one who ‘Knowing some women whores, dares marry none’ (64). Finally, the irenically minded Graccus admits no difference among denominations, and ‘loves all as one’ (65), choosing to make no choice at all. The addressee of the poem is asked to look askance at all these versions of conversion; the poem’s erotic conceit mocks every version of those choices being made by Donne’s contemporaries (and, indeed, by Donne himself). The poem famously encourages its reader to ‘doubt wisely’, since ‘to adore or scorn an image, or protest, / May be all bad’ (67–8). But doubting does not excuse the reader from choosing: ‘thou / Of force must one, and forced but one allow; / And the right’ (69–71). Despite his tone of urbane scepticism, Donne here clearly insists that religion can be in ‘but one’ place only, and enjoins his readers to ‘Be busy to seek her’ (74) – in other words, to accept the necessity of active religious choice. Donne’s satire thus engages in contemporary debates over conversion between the churches, joining the chorus of polemical writers, Catholic and Protestant, who sought to counsel their readers about ‘what religion should be embraced’, and to direct what Francis Walsingham called a ‘search into matters of religion’ in his book of the same title. Unlike contemporary polemicists, however, Donne refuses to make explicit the endpoint of the search, framing the desired object of religious enquiry with preterition and circumlocution. The poem describes ‘true religion’ only in vague terms like ‘the best’, or ‘the right.’ Its most famous image places Truth ‘on a huge hill / Cragged and steep’, accessible only through an arduous climb to an invisible pinnacle (‘he that will / Reach her, about must, and about must go; / And what the hills suddenness resists, win so’ 80–2). This hazy goal never comes into view at the poem’s end; instead, Donne concludes with a caution about those who ‘choose men’s unjust / Power from God claimed’, rather than trusting ‘God himself ’ (109–10). This caution, however, is as oblique as the positive advice to ‘seek’ and ‘do’ in the foregoing poem. Throughout Satire III, Donne insists on the simultaneous necessity and difficulty of conversion in a world of ‘contraries’ (98); the poem, like the search it advocates, requires careful circumspection, and resists both prediction and parsing. Donne reasserts the ideal obliquity of conversion in Holy Sonnet 18, albeit in a different metaphorical register. Donne’s Holy Sonnets are well known for the daring

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with which they figure the relationship between God and man, often importing the erotic diction of his own secular poetry (as in, for example, ‘Batter my heart’). This poem also employs an erotic conceit; the speaker begins by asking his ‘dear Christ’ to reveal ‘thy spouse, so bright and clear’, his pair of adjectives suggesting a desire for ecclesiastical legibility and visibility that Satire III had finally denied. Like that poem, however, the sonnet begins by depicting religious options as sexual objects, beginning with feminised visions of the Roman and Reformed churches: ‘is it she, which on the other shore / Goes richly painted? Or which, rob[b]ed and tore, / Laments and mourns in Germany and here?’ After presenting a number of alternatives, the final four lines ask Christ, scandalously, to make his wife available to all suitors: Betray, kind husband, thy spouse to our sights, And let mine amorous soul court thy mild dove, Who is most true, and pleasing to thee, then When she’s embraced and open to most men.

This conclusion, advocating the ideal promiscuity of the ‘bride of Christ’, could be read as Donne’s praise of a broad Protestantism, one that could comprehend ‘most men’ within its community of believers. And yet what seems more striking is the poem’s resolute refusal to specify the identity of the ‘spouse’, even in that last, purportedly descriptive, couplet. What Donne suggests, instead, is that a church is ‘true’ to the extent that it is ‘courted’ and ‘embraced’ – once again, true religion is defined not by its doctrinal tenets, but by the process by which a convert arrives at it. In Satire III that process is a tortuous, spiralling ascent to a summit obscured by clouds. In this sonnet, conversion is an experience of sexual consummation, one that is both ‘pleasing’ to God and hidden from human view, paradoxically both ‘open’ and ‘embraced’ – pursued in company, but enjoyed privately. The fusion of ecclesiastical and sexual discourse also characterises the poetry of a third early modern convert, Richard Crashaw. Crashaw is often included in anthologies and critical studies of ‘recusant’ poetry, and several of his poems – such as the extraordinary tears-poem’ The Weeper’ – do seem clearly to reflect a CounterReformation sensibility. But Crashaw was not simply a Catholic, but a Catholic convert, and many of his poems reflect not just the tenets of the Roman Church, but also the particular politics of conversion at the court of Charles I. Charles’s French queen, Henrietta Maria, was allowed to worship according to her Catholic beliefs, even as recusancy was persecuted in the country at large. Her court became a haven for European Catholics in London, and many English courtiers and ladies attached to this court converted to Catholicism throughout the 1630s and 1640s (Dolan 1999: 19–20; Hibbard 1983: 5–8). This trend, unsurprisingly, alarmed the members of the English Reformed establishment, who had long seen women as vulnerable to predatory Catholics, and their appeals to sensual and affective modes of devotion. In 1609 the Puritan Edward Hoby, writing a public letter to the Catholic convert

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Theophilus Higgons, dedicated the text ‘To all Romish collapsed ladies of Great Britain’, who are all too willing to ‘prostrate [themselves] to that Antichristian beast, whose spotted skin and alluring scent leadeth into the den of destruction’ (Hoby 1609: sig. A2). By the 1630s and 1640s, the increasingly frequent conversions of noblewomen to Catholicism seemed to many a disturbing possible harbinger of England’s wholesale return to popery, and Hoby’s successors composed numerous letters of religious ‘advice’, attempting to protect women from the charms of Catholic ‘seducers’. Crashaw’s verse epistles to noblewomen reflect this cultural moment – but, strikingly, they emphasise and celebrate the very affective qualities of feminine religious choice that others were keen to correct. This can be seen even in the poems Crashaw composed before his departure for Catholic Italy. His 1648 volume Steps to the Temple includes a poem entitled ‘To the same party: counsel concerning her choice’, following the ‘Ode on a prayer book Sent to Mrs M.R.’. The identity of this woman has not been conclusively determined, but the ‘choice’ she confronted seems clearly to be a choice among forms of devotion. In ‘Ode on a prayer book’, Crashaw depicts prayer as an autoerotic rapture (perhaps, indeed, Crashaw may have been influenced by Carew’s highly explicit erotic poem of that name); reading her prayer book, Mrs M.R. will experience ‘Delicious deaths, soft exhalations / Of soul; dear, and divine annihilations, / A thousand unknown rites / Of joys, and rarefied delights’ (71–4). The conceit of this subsequent verse epistle, by contrast, centres on a process of worldly seduction. The speaker seeks his addressee’s affections on behalf of ‘his dearer Lord’, differentiating this potential divine lover from ‘the rest / of suitors that besiege your maiden breast’. His editor speculates that the poem urges Mrs M.R. to ‘retire to a convent’ (Crashaw 1974: 66). But with this allusion to ‘suitors’, Crashaw also seems to be alluding to the voluminous controversial literature addressing courtly ladies on the brink of conversion. Urging her to ‘choose your rooms / Among his own fair sons of fire’, Crashaw positions Mrs M.R. as a potential convert, one whose choice is not simply between world and God, between the ‘sons of men’ and ‘a far more worthy spouse’. It is a choice among spouses, figured as a process of trial and error: It was his heavenly art Kindly to cross you In your mistaken love That, at the next remove, Thence he might toss you And strike your troubled heart Home to himself; to hide it in his breast The bright ambrosial nest, Of love, of life, and everlasting rest.

This dynamic vision of thwarted and errant love feminises the amorous, ecclesiastically confused speaker of Donne’s Holy Sonnet 18. In Donne’s poem, the speaker surveys

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various unsatisfying female options in his search for Christ’s ‘mild dove’, a church to which he can convert, figured as a ‘spouse’ he can embrace. Crashaw’s addressee, also figured as erotically errant, is herself a potential ‘spouse’ who must evaluate various male suitors. Even as the poem presents her as passively ‘crossed’, ‘tossed, and ‘struck’ by God, it nevertheless pivots on the idea of her devotional agency, of her ‘choice’ in religious practice. This feminised vision of conversion becomes still more explicit in Crashaw’s verse epistle to Susan Villiers, countess of Denbigh. Susan was sister to the court favourite Charles Villiers, second duke of Buckingham, as well as first lady of the bedchamber to Queen Henrietta Maria. Her religious affiliations wavered throughout the 1640s, before her conversion to Catholicism was made public in 1651, and the high level of court access she enjoyed made her religious vacillation something of a political flashpoint for those who saw the Caroline court as suspiciously crypto-Catholic (Hibbard 1983: 55). Crashaw’s editor speculates that the first version of the poem to the countess, though it appeared in the posthumous 1652 volume Carmen Deo Nostro, was in fact composed around 1646, well before the countess had announced her turn definitively. Crashaw makes his own position clear, however, in the poem’s title: ‘To the Noblest and best of ladies, the Countess of Denbigh. Persuading her to resolution in religion, and to render herself without further delay into the communion of the Catholic Church’. A second version of the poem, published in 1653, simply declared itself ‘A letter from Mr. Crashaw to the Countess of Denbigh, against irresolution and delay in matters of religion’. In both versions of the poem, however, Crashaw urges his addressee towards a particular kind of conversion, in language that at once recalls the erotic terms of the poem to Mrs M.R. and extends its meditation on feminine agency in conversion. The poem begins with a paradoxical question: What heav’n-besiegèd heart is this Stands trembling at the Gate of Bliss; Holds fast the door, yet dares not venture Fairly to open and to enter?

Susan’s hesitation in conversion, here, places her on both sides of the Gate of Bliss; she is ‘besieged’ by heaven and ‘holds fast the door’ from the inside, but also trembles on the threshold, afraid to enter from the outside. By means of this nearly inconceivable image, Crashaw makes clear his understanding of conversion as a simultaneous act of assertion and surrender, a point he makes both more explicit and complex several lines later: Say, ling’ring fair, why comes the birth Of your brave soul so slowly forth? Plead your pretences (O you strong In weakness) why you choose so long

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The conversion that Crashaw encourages here will be a process of simultaneous self-annihilation and self-generation. The countess will give birth to her newly converted self; but she will also ‘die’, yielding to her own ‘labour’ as well as God’s ‘siege’. This miraculous vision of conversion is clearly erotic (in the pun on ‘die’, for example); it is paradoxical (it is ‘want of courage not to yield’); and it is above all dynamic, a rejection of ‘delay’ and an embrace of all that ‘moves’. Finally, the poem proposes that conversion will bestow on Susan the ability to cross erotic and gendered thresholds – seducing, impregnating, yielding to, and ultimately giving birth to a new self. Like Alabaster’s sonnets and Donne’s satire, then, Crashaw’s two verse epistles to women praise conversion as both an inward spiritual transformation and an outward confessional reaffiliation. Further, Crashaw’s description of the experience deliberately adopts and exaggerates the very elements of seduction and sensual rapture that many of his contemporary male controversialists saw as the most pernicious grounds for women’s conversion. In the androgynous, ambiguous scenarios of erotic choice and consummation, Crashaw represents conversion as an expansion of identity, a miraculous simultaneity of feminine and masculine, active and passive, intellectual and emotional, adult and child, as well as Catholic and Protestant.

Conclusion In an essay on Dante’s terza rima, John Freccero argues for the dense theological significance of this particular aspect of poetic form (Freccero 1986: 258–71). He suggests that the simultaneous forward movement and ‘recapitulation’ of Dante’s rhyme scheme offers a ‘spatial representation of narrative’ (Freccero 1986: 263), and more particularly of a conversion narrative (the collection of Freccero’s essays is tellingly entitled Dante: The Poetics of Conversion). Dante’s conception of conversion was that of a medieval Augustinian, one who wished to represent the Christian believer’s spiritual ascent to God rather than his worldly choice of churches. In post-Reformation England, as I have suggested, Christian understandings of conversion had become more complex and diversified – and, accordingly, English poets experimented with a greater variety of schemes and tropes in order to convey these various versions of metanoia or adhesion. From Herbert’s moments of unexpected ‘rhyme’ to Alabaster’s dramatic chiasmus, from Southwell’s accumulation of figures to Crashaw’s manipulation of paradox, we can see in this period a poetics of conversion that cannot be reduced to a particular form or a particular theology, but which is as multiple and mutable as conversion itself.

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References and Further Reading Alabaster, William (1959). The Sonnets, ed. G. M. Story and H. Gardner. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Alabaster, William (1997). Unpublished Works of William Alabaster, ed. D. Sutton. Salzburg Studies in English Literature, Elizabethan and Renaissance Studies 126. Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik. Augustine (1998). Confessions. ed. and trans. H. Chadwick. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bald, R. C. (1970). John Donne: A Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bossy, J. (1975). The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850. London: Longman. Constable, Henry (1960). Poems, ed. J. Grundy. Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press. Crashaw, Richard (1974). The Complete Poetry, ed. G. W. Williams. New York: Norton. Crowley, J. P. (1998). ‘He took his religion by trust: the matter of Ben Jonson’s conversion’. Renaissance and Reformation, 22, 53–70. Cummings, B. (2002). The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Delumeau, J. (1977). Catholicism Between Luther and Voltaire. London: Burns & Oates. Dolan, F. (1999). Whores of Babylon: Catholicism, Gender, and Seventeenth-Century Print Culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Donne, John (1994). The Complete English Poems, ed. C. A. Patrides. London: Everyman. Fish, S. (1972). Self-Consuming Artifacts: The Experience of Seventeenth-Century Literature. Berkeley: University of California Press. Freccero, J. (1986). Dante: The Poetics of Conversion. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Greville, Fulke (1945). Poems and Dramas, vol. 1, ed. G. Bullough. New York: Oxford University Press. Halewood, W. (1970). The Poetry of Grace: Reformation Themes and Structures in English SeventeenthCentury Poetry. New Haven: Yale University Press. Herbert, George (2007). The English Poems, ed. H. Wilcox. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hibbard, C. (1983). Charles I and the Popish Plot. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

Hindmarsh, D. Bruce (2007). The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ho, E. Y. L. (1992). ‘Fulke Greville and the Calvinist self ’. English Literary History, 32/1, 35–57. Hoby, Edward (1609). Letter to Mr T.H., Late Minister, Now Fugitive. London. James, W. (1997). The Varieties of Religious Experience, ed. R. Niebuhr. New York: Touchstone. Kneidel, G. (2001). ‘John Donne’s Via Pauli’. Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 100/2, 224–46. Kuchar, G (2008). The Poetry of Religious Sorrow in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lessius, Leonardus (1621). A Consultation what Faith and Religion is Best to be Embraced, 2nd edn. St Omer. Lewalski, B. (1970). Protestant Poetics and the Seventeenth Century Religious Lyric. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Luther, Martin (1960), Complete Works, vol. 34, ed. H. Lehmann, trans. L. W. Spitz. Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press. Marotti, A. (2005). Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and Anti-Catholic Discourses in Early Modern England. Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press. Martz, L. (1954). The Poetry of Meditation: A Study in the English Religious Literature of the Seventeenth Century. New Haven: Yale University Press. Matthew, Sir Toby (1904). A True Historical Relation of the Conversion of Sir Tobie Matthew to the Holy Catholic Faith, ed. A. H. Mathew. London: Burns & Oates. Milton, A. (1995). Catholic and Reformed: The Roman and Protestant Churches in English Protestant Thought, 1600–1640. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Miola, R. (ed.) (2007). Early Modern Catholicism: An Anthology of Primary Sources. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Morrison, K. (1992). Understanding Conversion. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press.

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Nock, A. D. (1933). Conversion: The Old and the New in Religion from Alexander the Great to Augustine of Hippo. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Papazian, M. A. (ed.) (2003). John Donne and the Protestant Reformation. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Puttenham, George (2007). The Art of English Poesy: A Critical Edition, ed. F. Whigham and W. Rebhorn. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Questier, M. (1996). Conversion, Politics and Religion in England 1580–1625. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rambuss, R. (1998). Closet Devotions. Durham: Duke University Press. Roberts, J. (ed.) (1994). New Perspectives on the Seventeenth-Century English Religious Lyric. Columbia: University of Missouri Press. Shell, A. (1999a). Catholicism, Controversy and the English Religious Imagination. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shell, A. (1999b). ‘Multiple conversions and the Menippean self: the case of Richard Carpenter’, in A. Marotti (ed.), Catholicism and Anti-Catholi-

cism in Early Modern English Texts (pp. 154–97). Basingstoke: Macmillan. Southwell, Robert (2007). The Collected Poems, ed. P. Davidson and A. Sweeney. Manchester: Carcanet. Strier, R. (1983). Love Known: Theology and Experience in George Herbert’s Poetry. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Strier, R. (1989). ‘John Donne awry and squint: The “Holy Sonnets”, 1608–1610’. Modern Philology, 86, 357–84. Sullivan, Ceri (2008). The Rhetoric of the Conscience in Donne, Herbert and Vaughan. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sweeney, A. (2006), Robert Southwell. Snow in Arcadia: Rewriting the English Lyric Landscape 1586–95. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Targoff, R. (2001). Common Prayer: The Language of Public Devotion in Early Modern England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Targoff, R. (2008). John Donne: Body and Soul. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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Prose Fiction Andrew Hadfield

Prose fiction in English in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries forms an amorphous and diverse category of writing. As with so many genres or kinds of literature produced in the Renaissance, it is hard to overestimate the experimental nature of the works produced or the sheer variety of types of writing – realism, romance, picaresque fiction, satire, often mixed together in the same work. Moreover, we do not really know that writers themselves knew what they were doing and were basing their efforts on tried and tested models that were commonly understood (see Hadfield 1994: introduction). Prose fiction, like drama, did not generally occupy a high literary status – as various forms of poetry did – and was often produced by writers who followed a variety of professions, all of which may have been as important to them as their fiction: soldiers, secretaries to the good and great, tutors, and civil servants (Rambuss 1993). Certainly this is the case with such important writers of prose as William Baldwin (fl. 1547–53), author of Beware the Cat (1553), often considered the first novel in English, who had an important political and later clerical career; Geoffrey Fenton (1539?–1608), translator of stories from the French and Italian collected in Certain Tragical Discourses (1567), who abandoned his literary endeavours for a career in the civil service in Ireland; George Gascoigne (1525?–77), author of The Adventures of Master F.J. (1573), who was at various times a soldier and MP; and Thomas Lodge (1557?–1628), author of Rosalynde and a host of other romances, who wrote little once he had graduated as a doctor of medicine in 1602. Writers who did not pursue other careers, such as Robert Greene (c.1558–92) and Thomas Nashe (1567–c.1601), were, notably, extremely prolific and very poor.1 It would be wrong, however, to suggest that prose fiction was a genre of exclusively low cultural status. After all, there were a large number of Greek and Roman writers of prose fiction studied by gentlemen as part of their humanist-inspired education: Apuleius (fl. c.155 AD), Heliodorus (fourth or fifth century AD), Longus (late second century AD), Lucian (115–200 AD), and Xenophon (c.430–c.355 BC).

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Equally, there were contemporary Europeans such as Cinthio, Belleforest, and Bandello (Hadfield 1999). Prose fiction, specifically romance, was closely associated with the court and courtly values through the efforts of John Lyly (1554?–1606), author of Euphues, or the Anatomy of Wit (1578) and Euphues and His England (1580), whose prose style of ‘euphuism’ became the generally accepted and most frequently imitated form of courtly English prose until supplanted by the sophisticated English of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, first published in 1590, but circulating in an earlier form from 1580 onwards (for Lyly and Sidney see Bates 1992: ch. 4). The literary and political careers of Lyly and Sidney serve to reinforce rather than undermine our sense of prose fiction’s indeterminate nature and function; Lyly, while being a successful dramatist and writer, never achieved the preferment he hoped for and failed to secure the coveted post of Master of the Revels (Hunter 1962). Sidney’s desire to influence contemporary political events and his vision of a Protestant literature as a major part of a contemporary public sphere provides some indication of the complex forces that informed his writing, especially his long prose romance (Duncan-Jones 1991). In short, prose fiction undoubtedly performed a variety of roles in the English Renaissance, not all of which can easily be recovered. While some works may have been translated to help advance the careers of cynical authors, whether through providing their social superiors with useful advice in fictional form, or through simply telling diverting stories, others seek to mould and influence a whole way of writing and hence thinking, basing hopes for success on the marketplace of print rather than patronage.2 If one work stands behind much prose fiction it is undoubtedly Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), written in Latin but translated into English by Ralph Robinson (1551), just at the point when writers such as William Baldwin were becoming interested in experimenting with prose fiction. Utopia’s unsettling and stimulating blend of fiction and fact, sensible political advice and fantasy, helped to pave the way for later works that adopted the same mixture of aims, styles, and forms. More’s most famous work makes heavy demands on the reader despite its apparently straightforward narrative. The reader has to intervene actively and decide whether certain key passages – such as the famous description of the Utopians’ contempt of gold and ornaments in general, or the acceptance of women priests – need to be taken seriously. It is significant that More revised the text and added the long opening book which discusses the issue of serving an unsympathetic monarch when he appears to have realised that even sophisticated readers close to him could not understand the work as he wished (Hexter 1952). Utopia grew out of a European circle of astute readers, passing on the ways in which More and his principal friends and allies – Desiderius Erasmus, Peter Giles, Cardinal John Morton, Cuthbert Tunstall, and others – scrutinised and debated texts, a seriocomic enterprise that forced the reader to sift the kernel of truth from the husk of delusion. It is hard to ignore the impact that their debates, enshrined in Utopia, had on the subsequent development of prose fiction and the relationship between author and audience.

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Early Prose Experiments William Baldwin’s A Marvellous History Intituled, Beware the Cat (1553), written soon after Robinson’s translation of Utopia, is a hard work to classify and forms part of the vast range of literary experiments produced at the court of Edward VI (Baldwin 1963; King 1982). Although it was written in 1553 it was not published until 1570, undoubtedly because it fell foul of the Marian authorities after Edward died on 6 July 1553. This multi-layered text combines a host of different types of writing – satire, beast fable, dream vision, proverb, hymn, chronicle – indicating the ‘mixed’ genesis of English prose fiction in the second half of the sixteenth century (King 1982: 387–406; Gresham 1980–1: 113–15). Baldwin’s three sections cleverly play with the relationship between reader and narrator. The first part, narrated at third hand via an English soldier or traveller to Ireland, is set in Ireland in the aftermath of a successful cattle raid. The successful thieves rest in a churchyard roasting a sheep. A cat approaches and demands food, eating a cow as well as the sheep. The men flee and slay the cat after it chases them on a horse, at which point a host of cats appears. They kill and eat one of the two thieves. When the other returns home and tells his wife, their cat exclaims, ‘Hast thou killed Grimalkin!’ and strangles him. The story is unsettling in a number of ways. First, it suggests that cats, as an allegorical representation of Catholics, function like the hydra. Grimalkin, the chief of cats, is destroyed, but her death only leads to further destruction as more elusive but equally dangerous figures appear. The task of separating loyal and safe subjects from threatening and subversive ones is problematic enough, especially given the nature of the death of the second thief. As Robert Maslen (1997) has observed, many writers of early Elizabethan fiction were also either employed by the state as spies to catch Catholics, or were Catholics themselves, so there are extensive references to spying and espionage in many literary works. Furthermore, as the above episode illustrates, the very nature of fiction served to complicate and challenge notions of straightforward ‘truth’, showing how close literature could come to subversion or even treason. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that many authors fell foul of the authorities.3 The description does contain the names of Irish families and chieftains, the Kavanaghs and Butlers, and is set in real historical time after a feud between the two. However, the story of Grimalkin also bears an uncomfortably close resemblance to the sorts of superstitious tales that Protestants were so keen to discredit as remnants of the Catholic dark ages now superseded by Protestant light and truth (see e.g. White 1963). In short, the very form of the story itself is doubleedged, suggesting that what is the target of the satire is already contained in the writing itself. The rest of the work confirms these suspicions. In the second part, the principal narrator, Streamer, applies a potion to his ears that enables him to understand what the beasts in England are saying. What he hears is an assault on his senses:

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Barking of dogs, grunting of hogs, wawling of cats, rumbling of rats, gaggling of geese, humming of bees, rousing of bucks, gaggling of ducks, singing of swans, ringing of pans, crowing of cocks, sewing of socks, cackling of hens, scrabbling of pens, peeping of mice, trulling of dice, curling of frogs, and toads in the bogs … with such a sort of commixed noises as would a-deaf anybody to have heard. (Baldwin 1963: 46)

Streamer has to recognise that beneath the apparently calm surface of English life there is a distinct cacophony of voices – showing that England is a divided land; much like Ireland, in fact, where the division between English Protestantism and Irish Catholicism was an open war (see Ellis 1985). The story of Grimalkin might look like an exaggerated traveller’s tale from a remote land, but it is really a warning of what is happening much closer to home. In part 3, Streamer, using his special power to act as a spy, listens to the cats one night and overhears the trial of Mouse-Slayer, who has broken their laws. What he hears further reinforces the reader’s sense of confusion, unease, and inability to control a threat from within as much as from without. Mouse-Slayer defends herself by narrating the story of her life to show that she has remained faithful to the principles of cat morality. Her story is a picaresque adventure through England of which we hear only a small part because most has been relayed on the previous four nights and Streamer’s potion wears off before the trial is concluded. Again, the uncertain and unstable relationship between fiction and truth is emphasised. Mouse-Slayer’s experiences reveal the parlous and fractured state of contemporary English religion. She lives with a superstitious old lady who believes that her blindness has been cured by the priest’s wafer bread (the credulous cats have to be told that this is not a reliable cure), and afterwards with a pious hypocrite who prays before a statue of the Virgin but makes a good living out of receiving stolen goods and keeping a brothel. The brothelkeeper feeds Mouse-Slayer mustard, making her weep, and then tricks a local beauty into sleeping with a young man when she claims that her daughter has turned into a cat for refusing his advances, constantly weeping as a result of her cruel misfortune. Mouse-Slayer is then mistaken for a devil and makes an old priest look ridiculous when he tries to exorcise her. Finally, she revenges herself on the old bawd and the young lecher by revealing him in compromising circumstances to the wife’s husband. Beware the Cat – like Utopia – never allows the reader to settle for easy answers and assume that the world can be neatly divided up into the sheep and the goats. The cats may be superstitious, greedy, tyrannical, spiteful, and vindictive by turns, but they are significantly no worse than the humans encountered in the book, and their society bears an uncomfortable resemblance to that of their human counterparts. It is never safe to assume that the ‘cats’ can be equated with ‘Catholics’; or, if they can, then rather a large number of Englishmen and women, whether they know it or not, are ‘cats’ (Maslen 1997: 79–80). In breaking down such binary oppositions, Beware the Cat struck a note of profound paranoia, arguably the definitive mood of the early English novel.

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A similar sense of uncertainty and unease pervades the collections and translations of stories from Italian and French sources which had such an impact in the 1560s. Among the most significant of these are William Painter’s The Palace of Pleasure (1566, 1567, and 1575), Geoffrey Fenton’s Certain Tragical Discourses of Bandello (1567) and George Pettie’s A Pettie Palace of Pettie His Pleasure (1566, 1576), all of which provided a fund of stories, many reused by dramatists. It is clear that such collections were successfully aimed at a popular market (Relihan 1994: ch. 2; Wright 1935: ch. 2). They encountered the wrath of some observers, notably Roger Ascham, who railed against the Italianate Englishman and the malign influence of ‘fond books, of late translated out of Italian into English, sold in every shop in London, commended by honest titles the sooner to corrupt honest manners’ (Salzman 1985: 7). Ascham’s lament is that readers are neglecting sound humanist works of improving educational merit in favour of frivolous romances and scandalous tales (Barbour 1993: ch. 4; Hutson 1989). It is important, yet again, that we understand the miscellaneous and diverse character of these collections of prose fiction. Most did, as Ascham alleges, contain numerous Italianate tales many of which told stories of adultery – usually indirectly derived from Boccaccio, via French translations, and the medieval genre of the fabliau – and spectacular cruelty, not necessarily directed to any specifically educational end, even if they supposedly pointed out the likely penalties of behaving badly. However, it is worth noting that Painter’s Palace of Pleasure was originally entitled The City of Civility when it was entered into the Stationers’ Register in 1562, and that the author’s letter ‘to the Reader’ emphasises the didactic ‘profit’ of reading stories that taught through positive and negative examples: ‘they disclose what glory, honour, and preferment each man attaineth by good desert, what felicity by honest attempts … they do reveal the miseries of rapes and fleshy actions, the overthrow of noble men and Princes by disordered government’ (Painter 1968: I, xxiv). Of course, such a defence could be made of virtually any collection of stories, but it is clear that the work contains a number of stories translated from Livy’s republican history of Rome, and is keen to place responsibility on the individual to behave well. Collections may well have ended up being vulnerable to Ascham’s critique, but they did not necessarily start off as the frivolous literary froth that they eventually became. And, of course, many apparently trite and vicious stories could be transformed into moral works when they were adapted for the stage later on. Othello began life as a spectacular story in Giovanni Battista Giraldi Cinthio’s Gli Hecatommithi (translated in 1566), which has few credible claims to high moral seriousness. Painter’s collection is of more substance and does contain a large number of stories of tyrants behaving badly towards their subjects, one reason why the nature of the project may have changed before it appeared in print – although commercial reasons might equally explain the title change (Hadfield 1998: 147–62). The reader finds an interesting mixture of tales – as one does in Fenton and Pettie’s similar miscellanies. The second story in the volume is that of Tarquin’s rape of Lucrece,

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and her subsequent suicide, which results in his banishment and the transformation of the city from monarchy to republic. Tarquin’s behaviour is a synecdoche for his tyrannical rule over Rome and shows how good government needs to be established with the consent of the people. The fourth story is that of Coriolanus, which concludes when the aristocratic rebel’s mother persuades him to spare the city. Shakespeare’s use of these two tales suggests that he either used Painter’s work, or worked within a similar intellectual culture (tale 28 is that of Timon of Athens). Intermingled with such stories are more obviously Italianate ones, some of which seem quite tame in comparison, such as the story of Grimaldi, a mean Genoese gentleman, who is embarrassed into becoming more liberal with his wealth (tale 31); the story of Giletta of Narbona, the source of All’s Well That Ends Well, who wins the hand of Beltrano, count of Rossiglione, after she heals the French king, separating him from his wife and two children (tale 38); and the story of Sisterno, a Bolognan scholar, who is revenged on three ladies who ridicule his attempts to seduce them. More spectacular are the tales of dark deeds at Italian courts, the most significant of which is the story of the Duchess of Malfi, who is imprisoned and then murdered by her brothers after she has secretly married Antonio Bologna, her steward (see Chapter 50, Jacobean Tragedy). Whereas John Webster’s dramatisation of the story is very sympathetic to the plight of the Duchess, unable to have a private life because of the public pressures put upon her, Painter’s version is a tale of excess passion leading a woman astray (see e.g. Lever 1971: 5). The Duchess is, in essence, a virtuous character, but, for Painter, her position is problematic because of the inherent weakness of her sex and the difficulty of women ruling. The story concludes with an exhortation to the reader: ‘You see the miserable discourse of a princess’ love, that was not very wise, and of a gentleman that had forgotten his estate, which ought to serve as a looking-glass to them which be over-hardy in making enterprises, and do not measure their ability with the greatness of their attempts’ (Painter 1968: III, 43, emphasis added). Both Antonio and the Duchess have overstepped the mark, and the story boils down to the simple message that one should know one’s place in society. More specifically, it can be read as a misogynist tirade against the foolish wiles of female rulers who tend to make bad matches, neglect public duty, and ruin the lives of their subjects (see the discussion in Whigham 1996: ch. 4). The target of this ‘looking-glass’ (mirror) may well be Elizabeth herself, who in the 1560s was very likely to get married, either to a foreign prince, or one of her subjects such as Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester (Neale 1934: ch. 5).

Euphuistic and Arcadian Fiction In many ways the most fascinating fictional experiment of the first half of Elizabeth’s reign was George Gascoigne’s The Adventures of Master F.J., a work that exploits literary and narratorial techniques established in works such as Beware the

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Cat.4 It tells the story of F.J., who tries to win the love of Elinor through the exchange of letters. The story is narrated by G.T., an unreliable presence who draws the reader’s attention to ‘the sexual opportunism and hypocrisy behind the poses’ of courtly love and ideal passion (Salzman 1987a: xiv). F.J. has a female confidante in Frances, and there is the possibility of a genuine friendship developing between them, one independent of the exaggerated gender roles being played out between F.J. and Elinor. The story, which G.T. labels a ‘thriftless history’, challenging the reader to find a concluding moral, ends with F.J. a bitter, frustrated man, his desires doomed to failure. Gascoigne’s work stands as a challenge to the varieties of romance circulating throughout Europe, perhaps, in particular, the Spanish tale of Amadis de Gaule, well known throughout Europe, and eventually translated into English by Anthony Munday in 1618/19 (Munday 2004). Amadis de Gaule tells the story of a gentle, courteous, and sensitive knight who upholds proper Christian values; The Adventures of Master F. J. tells the story of a man on the make who has to behave less than perfectly to get what he really wants. Gascoigne leaves the reader unsure of what has been learned, a manoeuvre that points the way towards the later realist fiction of Daniel Defoe. The most influential work of the mid-Elizabethan period was John Lyly’s Euphues or the Anatomy of Wit, one of the best-selling works in Renaissance England. As G. K. Hunter has remarked, ‘Every aspiring author in the period must have read Euphues’ (1962: 259), and Lyly’s distinctive style of balanced shorter clauses and antitheses came to define a dominant form of literary English (Ringler 1938: 678–86). Lyly made the ‘Petrarchan paradox into the capstone of a whole view of life’ (Lyly 1902: III, 3). Lucilla, when infatuated with Euphues, for example, endures, ‘terms and contraries’, her heart caught ‘betwixt faith and fancy … hope and fear … conscience and concupiscence’ (Lyly 1902: I, 205). Euphues tells the story of a witty but arrogant and morally suspect young Athenian. He travels to Naples, where he betrays his friend, Philautus, when they are rivals for the affections of Lucilla, before she betrays him in turn. Lucilla dies in suitably miserable circumstances; Euphues and Philautus are reconciled; and Euphues, realising the error of his ways, returns to Athens to study moral philosophy, where he becomes a notable sage. The text ends with Euphues crossing the sea to England where he expects to ‘see a court both braver in show and better in substance, more gallant courtiers, more godly consciences, as fair ladies and fairer conditions’ (Lyly 1902: I, 323). The sequel, Euphues and His England, casts Philautus as the principal actor, as Euphues slips into the background. Philautus again suffers in love until he woos and marries the chaste and beautiful Camilla. Euphues, one of a number of moral guides whom the couple encounter on their travels, acts as a moral instructor, returning to Athens at the end of the book, where he writes ‘Euphues’ Glass for Europe’, a description of England for the edification of ‘the ladies and gentlewomen of Italy’. The ‘Glass’ ostensibly praises the pre-eminence of England, but the title is double-edged. On the one hand it indicates that England is the pre-eminent nation in Europe which other

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countries ought to observe and copy; on the other, the metaphor of the mirror implies that England represents an image in which all the good and bad of Europe is reflected back for the observer, who has to decide what should be adopted and what rejected. More pointed still is the fact that the arch-moralist Euphues arrives in England armed only with Julius Caesar’s De Bello Gallico, and all the reader learns in the ‘Glass’ is culled from William Harrison’s Description of England (1577), a frequently reprinted and already well-known text. Lyly’s works have been taken at face value and interpreted as straightforward celebrations of England and Englishness (see e.g. Marcu 1976: 79–81; Salzman 1985: 42). But, like so much early modern English prose fiction, the point of his works proves to be much more elusive, duplicitous, and sophisticated. Euphues is approached by an old Neapolitan gentleman near the start of the first work, who, respecting his abilities, warns him that his wit can either be used for good purposes or bad: ‘he well knew that so rare a wit would in time either breed an intolerable trouble, or bring an incomparable Treasure to the common weal’ (Lyly 1902: I, 186). Euphues stands poised between future triumph and disaster. He chooses the first path in Euphues and pays dearly for it, but redeems himself somewhat in Euphues and His England. By implication, Lyly suggests, England stands at the same crossroads, and future policies, such as the marriage of the queen to a suitable or unsuitable monarch, or the granting or withholding of political rights, will either lead to peace and prosperity or dearth and misery. From 1578 onwards Elizabeth had been considering the marriage proposal of François, duke of Alençon, a diplomatic manoeuvre that might lead to a lasting alliance with Spain, or, as many Protestants feared, a loss of English sovereign integrity and the Catholic corruption of the reformed church (Elton 1965: 324–5). There is extravagant praise of Elizabeth for her good government, justice, and mercy, but the deliberate use of Julius Caesar and William Harrison to describe England may well indicate that a true description of the realm cannot be safely made. Perhaps the irony is that Naples and Athens are more accurate representations of England. However one interprets the slippery politics of the texts, it is clear that they belong as much to a humanist literary tradition of works of counsel or a ‘mirror for princes’ as straightforward jingoistic propaganda.5 Yet again, we witness the influence of Utopia on the development of English prose fiction. Euphues and Euphues and His England had, in turn, an enormous influence on subsequent English fiction. Their influence has usually been attributed to a stylistic dominance, but it is noticeable that writers of prose fiction such as Robert Greene and Thomas Lodge were also keen to address current political issues in works such as Greene’s Gwydonius, or The Card of Fancy (1584) and Pandosto (1588), or Lodge’s Rosalynde (1590), which was subtitled ‘Euphues’ golden legacy: found after his death in his cell at Silexedra. Bequeathed to Philautus’ sons, nursed up with their father in England’. All these stories deal with the ways in which oppressed subjects and relations of kings have to escape from tyranny. Their settings are ostensibly foreign but can clearly be seen as representations of England. Both Lodge and

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Greene fit the profile of other contemporary English writers: restless, innovative, and productive. Lodge produced a variety of works in different genres that had a significant impact on his contemporaries, especially Shakespeare. Greene was astonishingly prolific, and his prose works, both fictional and non-fictional, played a major role in establishing the identity of the professional writer in Elizabethan England, prepared to write about anything. Greene’s work is at times realist, at others more influenced by varieties of romance, depending on the purpose of the work.6 If euphuism was one major strain of English fiction in the 1580s and 1590s, it was soon to lose its dominance to works inspired by Sir Philip Sidney’s massive prose romance, Arcadia. Although Sidney referred to the Arcadia as ‘this idle work of mine’ and ‘but a trifle’, it is likely that he took his experimental prose fiction extremely seriously, given its length, the extensive revisions he undertook, and the reflections of contemporary politics that it contains. Sidney probably wrote the first version of the Arcadia (The Old Arcadia) after he was banished from the court to his sister’s home at Wilton, and after he had vehemently protested at the queen’s projected marriage to the duke of Alençon. This version of the prose romance was written in the mode of a tragicomedy in five acts under the influence of theories of Latin dramatic composition. Eclogues and other poems were scattered throughout the narrative as commentaries on the action. It undoubtedly circulated widely in manuscript . The second version of the romance, The New Arcadia, was posthumously published in 1590. This version was some 50,000 words longer than The Old Arcadia, having been meticulously revised, often sentence by sentence. In 1593 Mary Sidney , countess of Pembroke, published a composite version of the work known as The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, probably revised by her. This reprinted the revised versions of the first three books of the New Arcadia together with the last two unrevised books of the Old Arcadia.7 The romance revolves around the problems precipitated by Basilius, who, without a proper constitution, rules Arcadia. He is warned of impending disasters and retires to the country with his wife, Gynecia, and daughters, Pamela and Philoclea, leaving government in the hands of Philanax, an elderly counsellor. Pyrocles and Musidorus, two young princes, arrive in Arcadia and fall in love with the daughters. Pyrocles decides to win Philoclea’s heart by dressing up as an Amazon and wooing her; Musidorus disguises himself as a shepherd. Unfortunately Basilius and Gynecia fall in love with Pyrocles, leaving Philoclea confused. Musidorus elopes with Pamela and plans to force Basilius to allow Pyrocles marry Philoclea. Pyrocles eventually wins the heart of Philoclea but, before they can elope, he is unmasked by a loyal shepherd, Dametas – but not before he has fooled both parents into sleeping with each other in a cave believing that they are satisfying their desires with Pyrocles. Musidorus and Pamela are captured by rebels eager to win favour with Basilius. Gynecia accidentally poisons Basilius and she is put on trial with the two princes, accused of trying to overthrow the legitimate ruler. They are all found guilty and sentenced to death. Fortunately, Pyrocles turns out to be the long-lost son of the judge, Euachus, making Musidorus

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his nephew. Basilius revives, Gynecia is restored to her position, and the princes and princesses get married. The revised Arcadia is, in many ways, a distinct work of literature, albeit unfinished. Sidney added a great deal of new material, most significantly in Book 3, where Cecropia, Basilius’ sister-in-law, kidnaps the princesses, because she has ambitions that her son, Amphialus, will become the next king of Arcadia. He also included the story of the blind Paphlagonian king, which later formed the Gloucester subplot in King Lear. The text breaks off with Cecropia dying and Amphialus revealing what has happened to the princesses. Sidney appears to have been keen to highlight the political themes central to the romance, and would probably have developed the text to foreground questions of rule, kingship, responsibility, and rebellion, as these problems are emphasised in the revised text. The Arcadia had a massive influence on the development of English prose fiction, especially in the early seventeenth century. For nearly 200 years, it was one of the most widely read works in English (Wright 1935: 389). Sidney’s characteristic style of periphrasis – providing the reader with a variety of ways of expressing the same idea – had replaced the literary vogue for euphuism by the turn of the century. Equally influential was the Arcadia’s overtly political allegory, particularly on the relatively neglected romance Argenis (1621) by John Barclay, first written in Latin but translated into English twice in the 1620s (Salzman 1985: 149–50). Arcadian romance had a particular influence on women writers, as they became important producers of prose fiction in the seventeenth century (Lucas 1989). The first and probably most important of these is Urania (1621, written c.1618), written by Mary Wroth, Sidney’s niece (Hackett 1996; Salzman 1987b: xii–xv). Wroth uses many of Sidney’s characters, but also based much of the romance on events from her own life. This caused a considerable scandal, with one of the episodes particularly offending Sir Edward Denny. The heroine of the romance, Pamphilia, a writer, is in love with her cousin, Amphilanthus, a relationship that appears to mirror Wroth’s affair with her cousin, William Herbert, and there are instances of unhappy women, Bellamira and Lindamira, whose misery in love and disgrace at court also appear to allude to unfortunate events in Wroth’s own life. The narrative places great emphasis on the sufferings of women and their lack of freedom. Whereas Amphilanthus is able to gallop around the countryside in the pursuit of his masculine heroic ideals, Pamphilia is doomed to withdraw into her gardens in solitary suffering. Urania is obviously an answer to sonnet sequences such as Sidney’s Astrophil and Stella, which emphasises male suffering at the hands of women, as well as a critique of the imbalance of gender roles that render women passive and men active. Pamphilia is able to act in one sense. Her solitary musing leads her to write poetry, and she uses a sonnet sequence she has written to woo Amphilanthus, who is ignorant of her passion for him. The romance clearly endorses Pamphilia’s view that the flashy poetry of court wits is less valuable than that produced from the heart. Pamphilia shows her poems to Amphilanthus at crucial points in the text, ‘granting disclosure

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as a token of intimacy’ (Hackett 1996: 184). In doing so, Wroth uses Urania to show how literature was becoming a means of finding a voice for women.

The Unfortunate Traveller and the Picaresque Novel If much fiction in the late sixteenth century remained within a humanist tradition of using the fictional text as an advice book, this relationship was consciously exploded by Thomas Nashe in his rhetorically pyrotechnic journalism and, most significantly, his picaresque novel, The Unfortunate Traveller (1594).8 Picaresque novels developed in Spain in the early sixteenth century, the most significant being Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), which was translated into French, German, Latin, Italian, Dutch, and English (1586) soon after its publication (see Alpert 1969). The genre takes its name from the central character, the pícaro, a rogue or dishonest delinquent, who has a series of adventures which help him to understand the wicked ways of the world. Picaresque novels tend to be episodic in style, as the hero moves from one location to another, and worldly-wise and cynical in their outlook. The Unfortunate Traveller fits easily into this tradition, aiming a number of blows at the assumptions of contemporary fiction – notably the moralistic tone of Euphues and its imitators – as well as the belief that travel broadens the mind and teaches the traveller about the world, a calculated attack on humanist assumptions. The hero, Jack Wilton, is ‘a certain kind of an appendix or page, belonging or appertaining in or unto the confines of the English Court’ during Henry VIII’s wars with the French (Nashe 1972: 254). Wilton is an involuntary traveller, a picaresque rogue par excellence, able to thrive in his environment by exploiting the possibilities which distance from the constraints of home provide for self-protection and, where possible, self-advancement. If the conclusion of Gascoigne’s The Adventures of Master F.J. left the reader uncertain of what might have been learned from the narrative, Wilton himself is clear enough throughout Nashe’s work. The pious discourse of humanist counsel counts for little in the harsh world of military conflict, as Wilton’s first paragraph asserts: ‘What stratagemical acts and monuments do you think an ingenious infant of my years might enact? You will say it sufficient if he slur a die, pawn his master to the utmost penny, and minister the oath of the pantofle artificially. These are signs of a good education’ (Nashe 1972: 255, emphasis added; the oath of a pantofle (old shoe) was used to initiate a freshman at university and, possibly, at court). Nashe’s desires to subvert received wisdom and use the tools of rhetoric against those who would assume a monopoly on them are evident. As a writer who had to live by his wits, his world bore an uncomfortable resemblance to that of Jack Wilton (especially if one bears in mind that many writers served as soldiers).9 Wilton learns quickly in his first two ‘jests’, performed while serving in the English army. First, he dupes a cider-maker into believing that he is suspected of treachery, a ploy that refers to the paranoia rife in post-Armada England, where a large number

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of Catholics and ‘extreme’ Protestants were publicly persecuted (Wernham 1984). Nothing significant comes of this affair, but Wilton is whipped, ‘though they make themselves merry by relating the tale many a winter’s evening after’ (Nashe 1972: 261). Second, Wilton dupes a captain into believing that he has been chosen to assassinate the king of France by pretending to be an English traitor and bluffing his way into the French camp in order to gain the king’s trust. The captain is exposed and only escapes torture because his story is too ridiculous to be believed. Wilton has learned how to inflict suffering on others. Images of torture and execution surround the rest of Wilton’s adventures as he travels further afield to witness the slaughter of the Anabaptists in Münster, then to Italy, where the novel, after a series of satires of the absurdities of Italian tales, ends with horrific descriptions of the execution of the Jew, Zadoch, and the thief, Cutwolfe. The latter persuades Wilton to return home and lead a good life, the cynical moral being that coercion and fear influence people more than exhortations to be good. But, of course, this might be a double bluff. Read another way, The Unfortunate Traveller can be seen to fit into the tradition of Italianate tales that dates back to their vogue in the 1560s. The work might seem cynical in tone and style, but the moral of Jack Wilton’s adventures could be seen to conform to a humanist ideal, in spite of his flamboyant disregard for moral values. Perhaps, more than other works that were ostensibly humanist in design, The Unfortunate Traveller affirmed the real values outlined in Utopia, demanding that readers worked things out for themselves, so learning skills and knowledge from the novel that they would not have learned from travelling to Italy. Whether it was properly understood or not, is likely that The Unfortunate Traveller aided the rise of a more ‘middle-class’ prose fiction, notably Thomas Deloney’s Jack of Newbury (c.1597; Davis 1969: ch. 7). The picaresque novel continued into the seventeenth century: Richard Head’s The English Rogue (1665) was a notable best seller.

Notes 1

2

3 4

5 6

For details see the respective DNB entries. For claims that Beware the Cat was the first novel in English, see Ringler 1979. A sophisticated reading of late sixteenth-century fiction in the light of one such concern is Hutson 1994. See also Halasz 1997. See the essays in Hadfield 2001. Gascoigne 2000: 141–216. Excellent discussions are contained in Maslen 1997: ch. 3, and Helgerson 1976: ch. 3. For further comments on this literary tradition, see Walker 1996. For recent discussion, see Melnikoff and Gieskes 2008. Much more work still needs to

be done on Greene’s crucial role in determining the development of Elizabethan literature. 7 The two standard editions are The Old Arcadia, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones (Sidney 1985) and The New Arcadia, ed. Victor Skretkowicz (Sidney 1987). Useful analysis and commentary can be found in McCoy 1979; Rees 1991; and, most recently, Alexander 2006: ch. 8. 8 On Nashe, see Hutson 1989; Kinney 1986: ch. 9; and Weimann 1996: ch. 12. 9 For one study of this relationship, see Breight 1996.

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References and Further Reading Alexander, Gavin (2006). Writing After Sidney: The Literary Responses to Sir Philip Sidney, 1586– 1640. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Alpert, Michael (trans.) (1969). Two Spanish Picaresque Novels. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Baldwin, William (1963). Beware the Cat, ed. W. P. Holden. New London: Connecticut College. Barbour, Reid (1993). Deciphering Elizabethan Fiction. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Bates, Catherine (1992). The Rhetoric of Courtship in Elizabethan Language and Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Breight, Curtis C. (1996). Surveillance, Militarism and Drama in the Elizabethan Era. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Davis, Walter R. (1969). Idea and Act in Elizabethan Fiction. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Duncan-Jones, Katherine (1991). Sir Philip Sidney: Courtier Poet. New Haven: Yale University Press. Ellis, Steven G. (1985). Tudor Ireland: Crown, Community and the Conflict of Cultures, 1470–1603. Harlow: Longman. Elton, Geoffrey (1965). England under the Tudors. London: Methuen (originally published 1955). Gascoigne, George (2000). A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, ed. G. W. Pigman III. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gresham, Stephen (1980–1). ‘William Baldwin: literary voice of the reign of Edward VI’. Huntington Library Quarterly, 44, 101–16. Hackett, Helen (1996). ‘Courtly writing by women’. In Helen Wilcox (ed.), Women and Literature in Britain, 1500–1700 (pp. 169–89). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hadfield, Andrew (1994). Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hadfield, Andrew (1998). Literature, Travel, and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance, 1545– 1625. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hadfield, Andrew (1999). ‘Renaissance narrative’. In Paul Schellinger (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Novel. (pp. 1087–91). Chicago: Fitzroy-Dearborn. Hadfield, Andrew (ed.) (2001). Literature and Censorship in Renaissance England. Basingstoke: Palgrave.

Halasz, Alexandra (1997). The Marketplace of Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Helgerson, Richard (1976). The Elizabethan Prodigals. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hexter, J. H. (1952). More’s Utopia: The Biography of an Idea. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hunter, G. K. (1962). John Lyly: The Humanist as Courtier. London: Routledge. Hutson, Lorna (1989). Thomas Nashe in Context. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hutson, Lorna (1994). The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in SixteenthCentury England. London: Routledge. King, John N. (1982). English Reformation Literature: The Tudor Origins of the Protestant Tradition. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kinney, Arthur F. (1986). Humanist Poetics: Thought, Rhetoric, and Fiction in Sixteenth-Century England. Amherst: Massachusetts University Press. Lever, J. W. (1971). The Tragedy of State. London: Methuen. Lucas, Caroline (1989). Writing for Women: The Example of Woman as Reader in Elizabethan Romance. Milton Keynes: Open University Press. Lyly, John (1902). The Works of John Lyly, ed. R. W. Bond, 3 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Marcu, E. D. (1976). Sixteenth-Century Nationalism. New York: Arabis. Maslen, Robert W. (1997). Elizabethan Fictions: Espionage, Counter-Espionage and the Duplicity of Fiction in Early Elizabethan Prose Narratives. Oxford: Clarendon Press. McCoy, Richard (1979). Sir Philip Sidney: Rebellion in Arcadia. Brighton: Harvester. Melnikoff, Kirk and Edward Gieskes (eds.) (2008). Writing Robert Greene: Essays on England’s First Notorious Professional Writer. Aldershot: Ashgate. Munday, Anthony (trans.) (2004). Amadis de Gaule, ed. Helen Moore. Aldershot: Ashgate. Nashe, Thomas (1972). The Unfortunate Traveller and Other Works, ed. J. B. Steane. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

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Neale, J. E. (1934). Queen Elizabeth. London: Cape. Painter, William (1968). The Palace of Pleasure, ed. J. Jacobs, 3 vols. Hildesheim: Georg Olms (originally published 1890). Rambuss, Richard (1993). Spenser’s Secret Career. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rees, Joan (1991). Sir Philip Sidney and Arcadia. Rutherford: Associated University Presses. Relihan, Constance C. (1994). Fashioning Authority: The Development of Elizabethan Novelistic Discourse. Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press. Ringler, William A. Jr. (1938). ‘The immediate source of euphuism’. PMLA, 53, 678–86. Ringler, William A. Jr. (1979). ‘Beware the Cat and the beginnings of English fiction’. Novel, 12, 113–26. Salzman, Paul (1985). English Prose Fiction, 1558– 1700: A Critical History. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Salzman, Paul (ed.) (1987a). An Anthology of Elizabethan Prose Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Salzman, Paul (ed.) (1987b). An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Fiction. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Sidney, Philip (1985). The Old Arcadia, ed. Katherine Duncan-Jones. Oxford: Oxford University Press Sidney, Philip (1987). The New Arcadia, ed. Victor Skretkowicz. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Walker, Greg (1996). Persuasive Fictions: Faction, Faith and Political Culture in the Reign of Henry VIII. Aldershot: Scolar. Weimann, Robert (1996). Authority and Representation in Early Modern Discourse. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wernham, R. B. (1984). After the Armada: Elizabethan England and the Struggle for Western Europe, 1588–95. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Whigham, Frank (1996). Seizures of the Will in Early Modern English Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. White, Helen C. (1963). Tudor Books of Saints and Martyrs. Madison: Wisconsin University Press. Wright, Louis B. (1935). Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.

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The English Renaissance Essay: Churchyard, Cornwallis, Florio’s Montaigne, and Bacon John Lee

Caveat emptor, or, buyer beware

‘Essay’ is a rather retrospective term, used originally more to identify a literary tradition than to define a new literary form. Francis Bacon (1561–1626), whose 1597 Essays was the first collection of short prose pieces to be published in English under that title, explained that ‘the word is late [recent], but the thing is ancient’, and cited Seneca’s Epistles to Lucilius as previous examples. Michel de Montaigne (1533–92), who had published his Essais in France in 1580, pointed to a similar classical heritage, which included Cicero and Plutarch as well as Seneca. What Bacon and Montaigne found interesting in these authors was the provisional quality of their writings: Seneca’s Epistles were essays, Bacon argued, because they were ‘dispersed meditations’, presented with more attention to the significance of their subject than to the elegance of their expression.1 Such loose sallies of the mind, as Samuel Johnson would later call them in his Dictionary, assumed an intimacy in the relationship between reader and writer, which created a strong sense of personality; Montaigne, in particular, valued the sense of companionship with the dead that this allows the reader. ‘Essay’, as an English term, picks up on these provisional qualities well, deriving as it does from the French essai, a trial or attempt, and the older French-English ‘assay’, an examination or tasting. The novelty of the ‘essay’, then, is the novelty of discovery; the term uncovers a literary tradition, long practised but little noticed. In the vernacular, however, the position of the ‘essay’ is somewhat different. Writing secular and non-fictional literary works in English was a relatively recent occupation; when Roger Ascham, for example, explains his love for archery in Toxophilus in 1545, he feels the need to begin by defending his use of English in place of the more natural Latin. Toxophilus is a work aimed at showing that the vernacular might be as capable a literary medium as Latin or Greek. This was a point of controversy at the time and, though the arguments were effectively settled in English’s favour by the end of the 1560s, they would continue

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to be raised well into the next century. Latin, meanwhile, would retain its prestige as the international language of learning and culture: Montaigne grew up speaking it (apparently before he spoke French), and Bacon wrote the majority of his work in it; later, John Milton would write his early poetry in Latin, and even at the end of the seventeenth century, Isaac Newton would publish his great theoretical work, the Principia, in Latin, reserving English for the more experiential Optics. It is difficult, however, to advance a claim for anything more than the relative novelty of the ‘essay’ in the vernacular. Ascham talks of Toxophilus as an ‘assay’, and in his introduction the sense is given of a particular voice examining itself in its likes and dislikes, in life and literature – though these ‘assaying’ qualities are lost in the body of the discussion of archery, which is set out as a dialogue. Thomas Churchyard has a far stronger claim to be writing essays before the name. Born in 1523, a professional soldier from the 1540s on, a famous poet by 1550, he began writing short pieces of prose alongside his poetry in the 1570s, only stopping, it sometimes seems, to die in 1604. Many of these ‘little pieces’ or ‘discourses’, as Churchyard calls them, have the qualities so far mentioned, and Churchyard gathered them together, along with his poetry, for publication. In Churchyard’s Challenge (1593), for example, ‘The Man is but his Mind’ takes as its starting point the moment when Churchyard comes across his title, which is a quotation in Jerome Cardan’s De Consolatione. ‘Weighing the worth of that conclusion’, Churchyard gives us his responses to it, ‘plainly set down … doubting not but some one man or other shall see a piece of his own mind, in this my presumption of [suppositions about] the same’. The subject and method are essay-like: a mind thinking about how minds think, offering itself, unselfconsciously perhaps, as evidence of its subject. As the discourse moves on, however, it becomes, with its summary wit and classificatory habit, an early example of ‘charactery’, drawing a roll-call of types to demonstrate the mind’s ability to shape men: ‘A grave and modest minded man’ is followed by ‘The merry and pleasant companion’ who in turn gives way to ‘A greedy minded groper of this world’, and so on. Another little piece, ‘A Discourse of True Manhood’, might be classified as belonging more within the tradition of the courtesy manual or advice book than the essay; while ‘A Discourse of Calamity’, in its praise of sorrows as the route to happiness, is clearly related to the religious literatures of sermon and meditation. Yet, even if one wanted to make such fine discriminations between the essay and what are, with the paradox and encomium, its related genres, it would be perverse to discount ‘The Honour of a Soldier’. This is an essay, reaching for and ranging among sayings, speeches, customs, and incidents drawn from classical literature, the Bible, and more recent European and Islamic history, all garnered as Churchyard tries to come to terms with his bewilderment before the facts of soldiering, which are also the facts of his life: ‘Were not this a madness, and more than a mere folly … to watch and ward, fight, strive, and struggle with strangers for victory: and then to come home and be rewarded as common persons, and walk like a shadow in the sun, without estimation or countenance?’ Churchyard knew this madness well: twice he had returned from the wars to try to find employment at the court of Queen Elizabeth,

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and twice he had failed. In the attempt, in the failure, and in the response, Churchyard could be said to be typical of his age. The dominant humanist education aimed to fashion fit servants to princes and their courts; and yet those courts and princes did not have enough posts and places to receive the aspirant courtiers. That Churchyard’s literary response to his failure should be to seek to relate his own times, and his place in his times, to the past, as mediated through his reading of classical texts, is similarly typical. Humanist education began with the attempt to acquire proficiency in Latin through the study and imitation of classical texts; central to that process, and the moral and personal benefits it was thought to bring was the culling of choice quotations into commonplace books, arranged in sections and topics. These commonplace books could then be used to discover, develop, and substantiate one’s own arguments for the present and future. Out of such an education and out of such books grew the prose forms of the vernacular, sharing common features as they shared a common literary humanist culture. Bacon and Montaigne’s dismissal of the novelty of the essay form, as it owes more to honesty than modesty, deserves respect; and yet the desire to restrict the term’s application – to see the essay as in some way beginning with and belonging to Bacon and Montaigne – remains strong. In large part, this desire is driven by the recognition of Bacon’s and Montaigne’s literary qualities. More important, however, is the recognition that, in some ways, Bacon’s and Montaigne’s essays are different from those that come before and most of those that follow.2 This difference, though, does not lie in what the essay is, but rather in what is being done with the essay: Bacon and Montaigne discovered that writing sequences of essays, as opposed to single essays, allowed them to exploit the provisional nature of the essay in new ways.

‘In strange way / To stand inquiring right, is not to stray’3 In their Essays, both Bacon and Montaigne are deeply concerned with the nature and status of human knowledge. Such epistemological questions are not immediately apparent, however, as both offer large amounts of practical and ethical counsel. This is most evident in the case of Bacon; he gave his final (1625) edition the double title of Essays or Counsels, Civil and Moral, and noted in his dedication that they were the most successful of his writings ‘for that, as it seems, they come home to men’s business and bosoms’. They came home in a wide variety of ways: some essays are the equivalent of guidebooks, advising the male and gentlemanly reader how to plant a garden, how to build a house and what to see on a tour of Europe; others are more like papers on topics of national interest, aimed more specifically at advising ministers and princes how to prevent rebellions, how to colonise countries, and in which ways to regulate the practice of moneylending. Lists often feature in these essays, and register Bacon’s delight in the details of the physical world: colonists should look first for natural foodstuffs, such as ‘chestnuts, walnuts, pineapples, olives, dates, plums, cherries, wild honey’, and then they should think about what can be harvested in a

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year, such as ‘parsnips, carrots, turnips, onions, radish, artichokes of Jerusalem, maize’ (‘Of Plantations’). Then there are the more directly moral essays, on death and how to die, on beauty and on friendship – which last, although strongly desired, seems almost impossible to find. Indeed, with the exception of the guidebook essays, in which man is not an actor, the world of the Essays is a rather grim and embattled place. ‘Of Negotiating’ never mentions the possibility of fair dealing: ‘All practice is to discover, or to work.’ Negotiation, in this world, can only be the art of discovering the opposing party’s concealed intents and of manipulating him to your purpose, while, of course, resisting being so discovered or worked – by secrecy, concealment or dissimulation. And nothing helps deception more than the reputation for honesty’ (see ‘Of Simulation and Dissimulation’). The Essays are a very concise user’s guide to conduct and survival in the public world of the court, and they everywhere attempt to engage with life as it is, and not as it should be; Bacon’s counsel is not morally didactic in any simple sense. Part of the interest of his dispassionate observation comes from the fact that Bacon is, or was, an insider. Through a career of some forty years he had risen, like his father, to hold the highest legal office of the land, the lord chancellorship, and he had also been a Member of Parliament and privy councillor to the king. Then, in 1621, he was charged by Parliament with corruption, stripped of his chancellorship, and banned from holding public office. Of more enduring interest than that observed world is the tolerant acceptance of humanity that comes out of Bacon’s dispassionate stance. He is not surprised that every man should have his own ends: ‘What would men have? Do they think those they employ and deal with are saints?’ (‘Of Suspicion’). He acknowledges the reality and necessity of emotion and finds perverse the Stoics’ attempt to deny, for example, anger. Occasionally, this strong sense of a human nature that must be understood, not denied, conjures up an elucidatory image: ‘Suspicions amongst thoughts are like bats amongst birds, they ever fly by twilight’ (‘Of Suspicion’). The image is unusual in having a twofold object of comparison: more typical might be, ‘Suspicions are like bats, they ever fly … ’. The presence of the birds allows, for a moment, a sense of the strange mix of the lovely and the ominous, the positive and negative aspects of the liberality of thought. Montaigne’s Essais exemplify the liberality of thought to an astonishing degree, though in a quite different, more discursive and conversational, register. He treats many of the same topics as Bacon (the title of the Italian edition of the Essais translates as Moral, Political, and Military Discourses), and he similarly refuses to be awed by place or finery – as he says at the end of his last essay (‘Of Experience’), ‘And sit we upon the highest throne of the world, yet sit we upon our own tail’ (all quotations from Montaigne 1910). That mention of ‘tail’ marks the difference in register, though: Bacon is capable of a vigorous colloquialism in his counsel, but it is typically impersonal; Montaigne’s counsel comes very much as part of Montaigne’s personality. He wryly warns the reader in his preface, ‘myself am the groundwork of my book: it is then no reason thou shouldest employ thy time about so frivolous and vain a subject’. As William Hazlitt rather breathlessly points out, however, ‘[Montaigne] did not set

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up for a philosopher, wit, orator, or moralist, but he became all these by merely daring to tell us whatever passed through his mind’ (Hazlitt 1819: 180). Montaigne’s essays have a vast historical and, especially, geographical range of example. Indeed, as he describes the lives of the natives of the new world of the Americas, it is tempting to see him as an early anthropologist: he argues, in response to other contemporary accounts, that the natives are neither natural savages nor barbarians, but rather people with different customs and culture (‘Of the Cannibals’). Unlike an anthropologist, however, Montaigne then proceeds to judge the native Americans by moral criteria; he argues that their fearlessness and devotion to honour has rendered them cultural savages. Here, as elsewhere, Montaigne is using the new world to explore the old world, and in particular the French civil war, a type of national cannibalism, which had begun in 1562, when Montaigne was 30, and would last until some three years after his death in 1592. He sees in the new world’s cultural savagery a reflection of the savagery of his own culture; nobility in both, it seems, is intimately related to a violence born of inflexibility. Montaigne’s sense of the innate savagery of nobility is a more sophisticated version of Bacon’s sense of the inadequacy of stoicism; and Montaigne’s humanity is similarly on a larger scale – if not deeper, then at least far more socially inclusive, dwelling on the troubles of women and the poor, and admiring of the ways in which they endure and alleviate adversity. Yet, as counsels, both Bacon’s and Montaigne’s essays have one great drawback; when read closely, they tend not to make very good sense. To Ben Jonson, a very fine close reader, inconsistency was the defining feature of the essay writer: ‘what they have discredited, and impugned in one work, they have before, or after, extolled the same in another. Such are all the Essayists, even their Master Montaigne’ (Timber: or, Discoveries). Jonson put these self-contradictions down to the immediacy of the form; essayists ‘write out of what they presently find or meet, without choice’. Jonson’s observations are accurate: there are contradictions, both explicit and implicit, between essays; within essays, time and again, when Bacon and Montaigne bring in an example, it cuts against the thrust of their argument, or, and sometimes as well, it leads the argument off in a completely new direction. Indeed, the more Bacon and Montaigne revise and expand their Essays, the more inconsistent and contradictory they become. In Bacon’s case, what may have been a relatively clear argument in 1612, for instance, becomes troubled and contradictory at twice the length by 1625 – the most famous example being ‘Of Friendship’; while Montaigne, by the time the three-volume edition of his essays comes out in 1588, sometimes seems to have trouble even in keeping sight of the titles of his chapters – as in ‘Of Coaches’. This either represents carelessness on a truly grand scale or, what seems more likely, the ironies and inconsistencies are intended, and Bacon and Montaigne are intent on creating ambiguous and contradictory texts (see Fish 1972 on Bacon; McGowan 1982 on Montaigne). Abrupt transitions lie at the heart of both their styles and reflect their epistemological concerns. In Bacon’s case, this relationship between style and philosophy – which is the relationship between a form of address and a mode of perception – is clearest in the 1597 Essays. These ten very short pieces are dominated by aphorisms,

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often placed one after another, as consecutive paragraphs. In their terse abruptness a new direction in English prose can be seen, and the Essays have often been credited with inaugurating what is usually known as the plain style. Bacon avoids the long periodic sentences, built up of many subordinate clauses and often elaborately figured, that were the hallmark of an English prose modelled upon the Latin of Cicero, and in their place uses short sentences related paratactically, taking Seneca and Tacitus as his models. Bacon does so not only for aesthetic, but also for philosophical reasons; he identifies the Ciceronian style as one of the defects of learning that hold back man’s reason in the pursuit of truth. In The Advancement of Learning (1605), and later in the Instauratio Magna (1620), Bacon argues that humanist education trapped the present in the past, by privileging classical learning and, in particular, an Aristotelian dialectics which sought only to test the cogency of an argument without considering the correctness of its premises. The Ciceronian style, which Bacon rightly identified as one of the products of humanist education, buttressed this solipsistic attitude because, in its devotion to an ideal of copious eloquence, it both encouraged men ‘to hunt after words more than matter’ and, in its intricately fashioned nature, gave them the impression that the knowledge expressed was complete and fully understood. The delivering of knowledge or counsel ‘in distinct and disjoined aphorism’, by contrast, emphasised its incomplete nature, and encouraged readers to test it against their own experience of the world.4 Bacon’s use of the plain style, at the heart of which lies the aphorism, is not, then, aimed at achieving a complete and simple elucidation, but rather the contrary – at presenting the world in a particularly provisional, and so useful, way to man’s reason. What Jonson sees as Bacon’s inconsistencies comprise Bacon’s call to true knowledge. The Essays’ counsels call attention to their status as first and incomplete formulations that are designed to be cast away, just as, in the mechanical arts, the first design for an object is soon discarded. As such they are a part of the great intellectual project of Bacon’s life: the attempt to move his age away from a contemplative, Aristotelian philosophy, which assumed that the world was known and which was typically deductive in its methods, to an experimental and inductive natural philosophy which sought to discover and achieve increasing degrees of mastery over the world. Bacon’s actual achievements in experimental science were limited; however, in his faith in the possibilities of collective progress and, relatedly, in his consciousness of the modernity of the present, Bacon has claims to be, if not the father of modern science (as was once claimed), at least a founding figure in the philosophy of science.

‘A book consubstantial to his author’ Montaigne distrusts authority and tradition every bit as much as Bacon (though, again like Bacon, he also believes in the need for obedience to political and religious authority). Unlike Bacon, however, Montaigne is deeply sceptical of the power of human reason. In ‘An Apology of Raymond Sebond’ (an essay of some 200 pages), Montaigne

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argues that man knows nothing with certainty, and takes as his conclusive proof the fact that man does not know himself. Montaigne’s first step towards truth, therefore, is to try to gain a better understanding of himself; where Bacon looks outward at the world, Montaigne looks inward at the world of his mind. Ironically enough, as he points out in ‘Of Vanity’, the least vain subject for Montaigne is Montaigne. The man who looks outward with that ‘trouble-feast’ reason, as he calls it, is ‘the magistrate without jurisdiction: and when all is done, the Vice of the play’. The last is a clever analogy: the Vice originated in medieval morality plays, where he was often instrumental in leading Everyman away from the true Christian path and into the clutches of the Devil. Making reasoning man the Vice is an ingenious move, a little like Christopher Marlowe’s internalising the figure of the Vice within his destructive and self-destructive Machiavel heroes, or William Shakespeare’s more subtle suggestion of Falstaff ’s Vice-like qualities – all of which recognise in man’s powers of reason great attractions and great dangers. That move, however, is not Montaigne’s but rather the Montaigne’s of John Florio (1553?–1625); a more literal translation of the French has man as ‘the judge without jurisdiction and, when all is done, the jester of the farce’.5 Florio’s translation is less than accurate, but fundamentally sympathetic to Montaigne and more effectively Englished; Florio’s Montaigne is a particularly rich English text, whose formulations often allow the reader that satisfying dual sense of a meaning understood and possibilities of meaning waiting to be found. What Florio is not sympathetic to is the relative plainness of Montaigne’s style which, while far less terse than Bacon’s, is similarly committed to moving away from a Ciceronian and towards a Senecan model of prose. Florio is above all the author of a World of Words, the first English–Italian dictionary. As his 74,000 definitions testify, Florio loved words as words; and he constantly expands Montaigne’s sentences, doubling words, often yoking an unusual term (sometimes a neologism) with a more common English word for explanation, and adding clauses in parallel, particularly if it gives him a chance to indulge his encyclopaedic knowledge of English proverbs. Sir William Cornwallis the Younger (1579–1614) was the first to capture Montaigne’s conversational and discursive style in his own Essays, which appeared in two volumes, the first in 1600 and a second in 1601. Cornwallis probably drew on a manuscript version of Florio’s translation, which was first published in 1603. Where Florio Englished the Montaignesque essay, Cornwallis could be said to have domesticated it. Cornwallis exchanges Montaigne’s scepticism for a gentlemanly uncertainty, and his essays are perhaps the easiest to enjoy of any of these writers, because they never risk pushing a point too far. The world, for Cornwallis, is essentially given and ordered, and one must adjust to it. To do so, Cornwallis expounds a youthful stoicism: as a young man given to indulgence and indebtedness, he can appreciate the need for constancy. What Montaigne had found, by contrast, when he came to study himself, was the impossibility of such constancy, however desired. Each essay was, as he recognised, a painting of himself, and, by making many such pictures, he was able to catch sight of himself or, rather, the movement of his mind, in time. Selfstudy, particularly from the 1588 edition of the Essais onward, became a form of

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self-portrayal: what shocked Montaigne, however, was that the essays were not as repetitious as they should have been; instead of giving him an array of pictures which identified their subject with increasing clarity, Montaigne found that ‘I cannot settle my object; it goeth so unquietly and staggering, with a natural drunkenness. I take it in this plight; as it is at the instant I amuse myself about it. I describe not the essence, but the passage … Were my mind settled, I would not essay, but resolve myself ’ (‘Of Repenting’). The essays become the formal device by which Montaigne represents the truth, as he sees it, that life is not being – ‘essence’ – but becoming – ‘passage’. For Montaigne, unlike Bacon, it is not our knowledge of the world or even of ourselves that is provisional, because we err and lack information, but rather it is ourselves that are provisional, as we vary through time. The essays portray different Montaignes who are all Montaigne, or as he puts it, ‘though the lines of my picture change and vary, yet lose they not themselves’ (‘Of Repenting’). That sense of a certain (or uncertain) degree of consistency within change – ‘yet lose they not themselves’ – in turn needs emphasis; a little later in the same chapter Montaigne refers to the fact that every man, if he listens carefully enough, can discover within himself ‘a peculiar form of his, a swaying form’. Montaigne’s notion of the provisionality of our senses of ourselves, then, is distinct from the more radically unfixed and quite secular subjectivities of modernity: Montaigne is still willing to declare that ‘Every man bareth the whole stamp of the human condition’ (‘Of Repenting’), as he is to argue that man can only fundamentally change himself with the help of God (‘An Apology for Raymond Sebond’). He is, in this, more distinctively early modern than he is modern. Where he is early modern is in the way in which self-knowledge becomes for him not a question of self-discovery and self-mastery, but rather a journey of self-exploration. Where Bacon had used the essay as a mode of perception, Montaigne also uses it as a mode of expression and self-creation. As Montaigne himself put it: In framing this portrait by myself, I have so often been fain to frizzle and trim me, that so I might the better extract myself, that the pattern is thereby confirmed, and in some sort formed. Drawing myself for others, I have drawn myself with purer and better colours than were my first. I have no more made my book, than my book hath made me. A book consubstantial to his author. (‘Of Giving the Lie’)

Notes 1

Dedication to the 1610–12 manuscript edition of the Essays. All quotations are from Bacon 1996. 2 Kiernan has a concise discussion of others who have been put forward as earlier proponents of the essay, and of those who wrote essays (or at least claimed to be writing essays) after Bacon

and during his lifetime. In the former group are Haly Heron, A New Discourse of Moral Philosophy (1579); William Paulet, The Lord Marquess’ Idleness (1586); and the anonymous Remedies against Discontentment, Drawn from Ancient Philosophers (1596). In the latter group are Robert Johnson, Essays or Rather Imperfect

The English Renaissance Essay Offers (1601); Daniel Tuvell (or possibly Jean l’Oiseau de Turval), Essays Politic and Moral (1608), and Essays Moral and Theological (1609); Thomas Tuke, New Essays (1614); John Stephens, Satirical Essays, Characters and Others (1615); Nicolas Breton, Characters Upon Essays, Moral and Divine (1615); the variously attributed (Grey Brydges, fifth Baron Chandos and William Cavendish being two possibilities) Horae Subsecivae, Observations and Discourses (1620); and William Mason, A Handful of Essays, or Imperfect Offers (1621). William Corn-

3 4

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wallis’s Essays (1600–1), more important than any of the above, I discuss below (see Bacon 1985: xlviii–lii). John Donne, Satire III. The quotation is from Bacon’s preface to Maxims of the Law (1597). A particularly interesting discussion of aphorism can be found in The Advancement of Learning, Book 2, section heading ‘De Methodo Sincera’ (Bacon 1996: 233). M. A. Screech’s fine translation (Montaigne 1991).

References and Further Reading Bacon, Francis (1857–74). The Works of Francis Bacon, ed. James Spedding, Robert L. Ellis, and Douglas D, Heath, 14 vols. London: Longman. Bacon, Francis (1985). Sir Francis Bacon: The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall, ed. Michael Kiernan. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bacon, Francis (1996). Francis Bacon: A Critical Edition of the Major Works, ed. B. Vickers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Baldwin, Geoff (2001). ‘Individual and self in the late Renaissance’. The Historical Journal, 44, 341–64. Bradshaw, Graham and Tom Bishop (eds.) (2006). The Shakespearean International Yearbook: Shakespeare and Montaigne Revisited. Ashgate: Aldershot. Burke, Peter (1981). Montaigne. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bush, Douglas (1962). English Literature in the Earlier Seventeenth Century: 1600–1660. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Cave, Terence (2007). How to Read Montaigne. London: Granta. Churchyard, Thomas (1593). Churchyard’s Challenge. London. Cornwallis, William (1946). Essayes, ed. D. C. Allen. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Fish, Stanley (1972). Self-Consuming Artifacts. Berkeley: University of California Press. Frame, Donald M. (1965). Montaigne: A Biography. London: Hamish Hamilton.

Germer, Roger Anthony (1965). ‘The life and works of Thomas Churchyard’. Ph.D. thesis, Northwestern University. Hamlin, William M. (2005). Tragedy and Scepticism in Shakespeare’s England. Palgrave: Basingstoke. Hazlitt, William (1819). ‘On the periodical essayists’. In Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Comic Writers. London: Taylor & Hessey. Jardine, Lisa and Alan Stewart (1998). Hostage to Fortune: The Troubled Life of Francis Bacon. London: Gollancz. Langer, Ullrich (ed.) (2005). The Cambridge Companion to Montaigne. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McFarlane, I. D. and Ian Maclean (eds.) (1982). Montaigne: Essays in Memory of Richard Sayce. Oxford: Clarendon Press. McGowan, Margaret (1982). ‘Talking about souls: Montaigne on human pyschology’. In I. D. McFarlane and Ian Maclean (eds.), Montaigne: Essays in memory of Richard Sayce. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Montaigne, Michel de (1910). The Essays of Michael, Lord of Montaigne (1603), trans. John Florio, ed. A. R. Waller. London: Dent. Montaigne, Michel de (1991). The Complete Essays, trans. M. A Screech. London: Penguin. Morini, Massimiliano (2006). Tudor Translation in Theory and Practice. Aldershot: Ashgate. Moss, Ann (1996). Printed Commonplace Books and the Restructuring of Renaissance Thought. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Peltonen, Markku (ed.) (1996). The Cambridge Companion to Bacon. Cambridge. Cambridge University Press. Quint, David (1998). Montaigne and the Quality of Mercy: Ethical and Political Themes in the ‘Essais’. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Regosin, Richard L. (1977). The Matter of My Book: Montaigne’s ‘Essais’ as the Book of the Self. Berkeley: University of California Press. Taylor, Charles Taylor (1989). Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vickers, Brian (1968a). Francis Bacon and Renaissance Prose. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Vickers, Brian (ed.) (1968b). Essential Articles for the Study of Francis Bacon. Hamden, Conn.: Archon. Wyatt, Michael (2005). The Italian Encounter with Tudor England: A Cultural Politics of Translation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yates, Frances A. (1934). John Florio: The Life of an Italian in Shakespeare’s England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zagorin, Perez (1998). Francis Bacon. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

72

Diaries and Journals Elizabeth Clarke

As Stuart Sherman complains in his intriguing study of diurnal form in literature, journals have hardly ever been given a literary treatment: they have been ransacked by historians for data, or classified into types. There are, however, two distinct categories of early modern journal. I am going to use the word ‘diary’ for the kind of document a modern reader would intuitively expect from the use of the word: a record of events, however brief or spasmodic, organised by date. The spiritual journal, which sometimes looks superficially like a diary, conforms to an entirely different set of rules. The link between this essay and the following one, on letters, implies that diaries and journals are also ‘private’ documents. In fact, the truly ‘private’ diary, with its entrusting of intimate thoughts and experience to the printed page for the benefit of the writer, does not really occur until the nineteenth century (Bourcier 1976: 7). In the early modern period, both types of document treated here were implicated in public discourses of vindication to a greater or lesser extent: to exculpate an individual, or to justify the political stance of a religious group. No diary or journal was actually printed in the period under discussion, but in an age when manuscript culture was still strong, this does not rule out circulation, however limited. The place of diaries in manuscript culture, with its problems of survival and recovery, to some extent explains the lack of modern scholarship and the relative difficulty of conducting research. The development of an individual self-consciousness during a ‘Renaissance’ has often been posited for the start and growth of diary culture, a theory confirmed in part by the early occurrence of journal-keeping in Italy, and the rather late emergence of the genre in England: it is not until 1660 that the English practice is common. An alternative, or perhaps complementary origin may be found in the dissemination of a form of popular culture which emphasised the diurnal form, the almanac: this publication listed all kinds of events and information, including astrological changes, according to date, and was published yearly. There was a huge market for such pamphlets, and many were published with blank pages on which the owner could make his own notes (Bourcier 1976: 25–9). Many well-known diaries literally began in

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almanacs: Ralph Josselin, for example, and the famous John Evelyn, began separate diaries when they ran out of room on the blank pages in their almanacs. It is tempting to link the diary with the emergence of autobiographical writing in the later seventeenth century. Of course, notes in an almanac convey a very different sense of the subjectivity of the author from that which a modern reader would expect in an autobiography: Adam Smyth has recently completed a study of subjectivity in such documents, pointing out how different the conception of ‘self ’ is in the early modern period. The diary-keeping impulse seems to be linked with a sense of history rather than autobiography, whatever ‘history’ meant to the individual. The subject often prefaces the diary proper with a brief account of his or her life to that date, as Elias Ashmole did. The word ‘diary’ as a title for a record of daily events seems to come into use in the 1640s, alongside the word ‘diurnal’. It is thus deeply implicated in the recording and dissemination of public occurrences, and in fact many diary writers seem to be offering public news as well as or instead of personal event. In some cases of course, as in one of the earliest diaries by Edward VI, the two coincide to some extent. The chatty, informative diary of Samuel Pepys has shaped our idea of what a diary should be, although the document seems to readers so direct and unmediated that we tend to forget that it was entirely written in shorthand.1 Of the diaries that survive, the tone and content vary enormously. Often a significant public event will prompt the commencement of a diary, as the execution of Sir Walter Ralegh did for William Whiteway in 1618. Sir Henry Slingsby’s diary finishes with the execution of Charles I in 1649. There is certainly a sense that some writers feel that they are living in important times: Elizabeth Jekyll includes news of the battles of the Civil War, while John Ashton’s short diary records his time as privy chamberman to Charles I during the first Bishops’ War. Another common obsession is with the writer’s own health: the recording of symptom and remedy, often rather explicit, is probably less due to hypochondria than a passionate interest in the emerging science of medicine and the need to record effective remedies. The spiritual journal is more uniform in form and content, and it has a very specific origin, in the prescriptions of Puritan preachers. Again, England followed Europe, in this case Lutheran Germany, in the emergence of this discourse. Although the character of Protestant religion, with its practices of self-examination, clearly prompted the development of this form, there is a link with secular writing practices in that such daily examination is clearly a form of accounting, if a spiritual one. Richard Rogers in his Seven Treatises of 1603 suggests an evening reckoning-up of the blessings and sins of each day, but it is only to ministers that he suggests such an account should be written: he cannot count on the kind of widespread literacy that would make such a practice feasible (Rogers 1603: 586, 590). Isaac Ambrose, writing in 1650, has no such scruple. His prescriptions for spiritual accounting are laid out as an account book, with columns; Elizabeth Mordaunt follows this practice (Mordaunt 1856: 225–39). He also offers sample entries from his own spiritual journal, which he has been keeping from 1641 (Ambrose 1657: 87–8, 163–8). In this example, the difference in conception from the secular diary is quite clear. The journal is not neces-

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sarily completed daily, but at any point considered spiritually significant by the writer: Elizabeth Turner chooses her wedding anniversary to make regular spiritual reckonings, while others use their birthday, and, more commonly, Christmas and Easter (these last two Christian feasts entailed the taking of the sacrament, for which there is a biblical injunction to self-examination). Isaac Ambrose does his spiritual accounting in the woods, as Mary Rich, countess of Warwick, uses her ‘wilderness’, and writes down the results later. In fact, many spiritual journals have a retrospective character: the date at the top of the entry does not necessarily reflect the time of writing. To complicate the temporal scheme further, spiritual journals usually survive in transcripts, erasing what was clearly a feature of the original, the blank spaces left between entries to facilitate later addition, when, as Ambrose suggested for his final column, the ‘Dispensation’ of an event, the meaning of it within a salvific plan for the individual’s life, became clear. Eleanor Stockton’s journal in Dr Williams’ Library is one of the very few ‘original’ documents that survives (Dr Williams’ Library MS 24.8). This formal characteristic is linked to a providential theology in which God’s purpose could only be ascertained from the outcome of an event, perhaps years later. Jane Ratcliffe was commended in her funeral sermon by John Ley in 1640 for keeping a journal in just this way. The emphasis in such documents is on God’s actions in the world, rather than the subject’s own, which is extremely frustrating for historians, who often find little detail of person, place, or event within the spiritual journal. Isaac Ambrose’s exemplary entries are entirely concerned with his spiritual state, as are the many volumes of Lady Mary Rich’s journal: as countess of Warwick she knew key figures in seventeenth-century religion and politics, but alludes to events of the period indirectly and non-specifically (British Library Add. MSS 27351–27358). Even more frustratingly, choice details such as names are often abbreviated, and sins committed are often written in incomprehensible code (Sir Humphrey Mildmay abbreviated the names of prostitutes, and John Winthrop registered his sins in code). It was only because Elizabeth Jekyll could see the hand of God so clearly in the conduct of 1640s battles that she recorded their outcomes in her own spiritual journal (Beinecke MS Osborn b. 221). Katherine Austen described the progress of her lawsuits, convinced of similar divine involvement (British Library Add. MS 4454). The survival of many of these manuscripts, several in scribal copies, indicates their value for the Protestant community, which had developed very little devotional literature in the early modern period, and often felt itself to be under siege. Ralph Josselin and Sarah Henry report the reading of other people’s manuscript journals to be an encouragement. The first printing of an autobiographical document was A Narration of the Life of Mr. Henry Burton in 1643, which was obviously politically motivated: he had suffered years of imprisonment under Archbishop Laud. In fact, several extracts from such ‘closet-writing’ appear in funeral sermons: such writing is assumed to be proof of one’s spiritual virtue, as for Elizabeth Juxon, married to a wealthy London citizen, whose writing is embedded in her funeral sermon of 1619. It is also perceived as containing the trace of Holy Spirit, present in the closet as nowhere else except the deathbed. Richard Baxter produced, as conclusive proof of her elect condi-

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tion, the spiritual diary of 25-year-old Jane Baker, for whom he preached a funeral sermon in 1659. For more politically engaged personages such as the earl of Warwick who died in 1658 and William Waller’s wife Anne who died in 1663, such written proof of holiness turns the funeral sermon into political oratory. The spiritual journal acquired particular significance after the Restoration, when so many practices of personal holiness surviving from the devotion of the pre-Civil War Church of England became the property of the persecuted Dissenting community. In the quest for truthful language, which is the negative inheritance of earlier preoccupations with classical rhetoric, such ‘closet-writing’ is seen to escape the sin of insincerity inherent in any discourse that has an audience. Ironically, it could also be used against the writer, as Archbishop Laud’s was by William Prynne, although his claim that sceptics could inspect the original, written in Laud’s own hand, was somewhat disingenuous, as Prynne had altered it. Two non-Puritan spiritual journals survive because their female authors clearly saw the potential of the form to achieve aims other than merely spiritual propaganda. Alice Thornton’s first ‘Book of Remembrances’ is dated 1668, and was part of an attempt to refute accusations of unchastity: ‘I sent my own Book of my Life, the collections of God’s dealings and mercies to me and all mine … to satisfy all my friends of my life and conversation … that it was not such as my deadly enemies suggested’ (Thornton 1873: 259). She offered a contents index to help her readers interpret this document, and reported a successful outcome. Anne Halkett’s wellknown autobiography, justifying her relationship with Colonel Bampfield, was composed in a break from writing her rather more extensive spiritual journal which was clearly perceived as a similar vindicatory project, although it is not clear what kind of audience she expected (National Library of Scotland, MSS 6489–6502). Agnes Beaumont’s manuscript account of a particular episode that took place near Biggleswade in Bedfordshire in 1674 exists in two copies in the British Library which give some idea of how widely her vindicatory account of her trial for murder of her father circulated: MS Egerton 2, 128 was copied from a manuscript that belonged to a Hampshire woman. These manuscript ‘defences’ are clearly a variant of the spiritual journal, which Isaac Ambrose saw as a kind of ‘evidence’ of salvation. At least these documents by their very nature give more details of the subject’s environment and daily life. It is tempting to see the general lack of concern with external occurrences in the spiritual journal in terms of class, as Margaret Spufford does (Spufford 1979: 408): details of families and places could be seen as more important to aristocrats like Anne Clifford with genealogy and inheritance to consider, while the most important element in the Kent nonconformist Elizabeth Turner’s life was her relationship with Christ (Kent Archives Office, MS F. 27). The gendered politics of the seventeenth century, which demanded higher levels of holiness from women, is probably one reason why fewer women’s secular diaries survive. In any case, in this period, women’s literacy rate was well below men’s. Different communities will have found value in different kinds of document, which is why spiritual writings rather than secular diaries will have been preserved from a particular religious context, such as the Presbyterian or Independent

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denominations who were dominant during the Interregnum and then became the core of the Dissenting constituency in the Restoration. However, our perceptions are probably skewed by the low survival rate of manuscripts outside an aristocratic context, where the stately home would have proved a safe repository for the family papers. Documents are still found in these private houses: Elizabeth Mordaunt’s fascinating spiritual journal, with poems often linked to dates, was found in the mid-nineteenth century. The diary of Elizabeth, countess of Burlington, recently came to light at Chatsworth, uncatalogued in the Lismore Papers. One male artisan’s diary does survive, however, and it challenges the priority of the spiritual journal in lower-class contexts. Roger Lowe was a passionate Presbyterian, but the interest driving his diary was clearly romance: he records his courting of various women (sometimes simultaneously), and after his marriage the diary tails off rather quickly. His interest in diarywriting might stem from his acquaintance with the more famous diarist Adam Martindale, who offered to find him a wife. Despite the categories posited in this chapter, it is probably a misrepresentation of early modern manuscript practice to assume that a writer consciously chose between the spiritual journal and the secular diary. Where substantial manuscripts survive, as with Grace Mildmay’s papers, there is evidence of different kinds of documents being compiled simultaneously: sometimes a brief secular diary is later rewritten into a spiritual journal, as Samuel Sewall’s was. A recent British Academy project on the two autobiographical manuscripts of Elizabeth Isham, of both of which the Academy has done online editions, has come to some interesting conclusions.2 One manuscript is a presentation copy, a long account of her life with well-developed spiritual content, apparently written to explain to her family why she never married: one, in different inks and in a carefully folded and dated vade mecum (a reference book that could be carried about) looks like a chronologically composed record of her activities, and is described as her diary in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. In fact, the team has concluded that Elizabeth Isham, who kept all kinds of drafts of her writing, started composing the ‘diary’ in 1638, at the same time as the other autobiographical manuscript, as a kind of aide-memoire for her life-writing. It is difficult to make any generalisations about a manuscript form, either because of eccentric patterns of survival, or because of writing practices that are alien to the modern reader. Nevertheless we have to thank the antiquarians of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for the diaries that were printed, despite their common practice of editing out material they did not consider ‘interesting’ – and to continue to search in record offices and stately homes for manuscripts that throw light on this common but elusive autobiographical writing practice of the early modern period. Notes 1

A transcription of the diary is gradually being completed online at .

2

See .

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Ambrose, I. (1650). Prima, Media, Ultima. London. Booy, D. (2002). Personal Disclosures: An Anthology of Self-Writing from the Seventeenth Century. Aldershot: Ashgate. Bourcier, E. (1976). Les Journaux privés en Angleterre de 1600 à 1660. [Personal Diaries in England from 1600 to 1660]. Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne. Clifford, A. (1992). The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford, ed. D. J. H. Clifford. Stroud: Sutton Publishing. Crawford, P. (1988). ‘Katherine and Philip Henry and their children: a case study in family ideology’. Transactions of the Historical Study of Lancashire and Cheshire, 134, 39–74. Halkett, A. (2007). Selected Self-Writings, ed. Suzanne Trill. Aldershot: Ashgate. Halsey Thomas, M. (ed.) (1973). The Diary of Samuel Sewall, 1674–1729. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Knappen, M. (ed.) (1933). Two Elizabethan Puritan Diaries by Richard Rogers and Samuel Ward. Chicago: American Society of Church History. Macfarlane, A. (ed.) (1976). The Diary of Ralph Josselin 1616–83. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mendelsson, S. H. (1987). The Mental World of Stuart Women: Three Studies. Brighton: Harvester. Mordaunt, E. (1856). The Private Diarie of Elizabeth, Viscountess Mordaunt, ed. E. Macrory. Duncairn.

Mullan, D. G. (2003). Women’s Life Writing in Early Modern Scotland. Aldershot: Ashgate. Pollock, L. (1993). With Faith and Physic: The Life of a Tudor Gentlewoman. London: Collins & Brown. Ponsonby, A. (1923). English Diaries: A Review of English Diaries from the Sixteenth to the Twentieth Century. London: Methuen. Ponsonby, A. (1927). More English Diaries: Further Reviews of Diaries from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century. London: Methuen. Rogers, R. (1603). Seven Treatises, Containing such Direction as is Gathered out of the Holy Scriptures. London. Seaver, P. S. (1985). Wallington’s World: A Puritan Artisan in Seventeenth-Century London. London: Methuen. Seelig. S. C. (2006). Autobiography and Gender in Early Modern Literature: Reading Women’s Lives, 1660–1680. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sherman, S. (1986). Telling Time: Clocks, Diaries and English Diurnal Form, 1660–1785. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smyth, Adam (2008). ‘Almanacs, annotators, and life-writing in early modern England’. English Literary Renaissance, 38, 200–44. Spufford, M. (1979). ‘First steps in literacy: the reading and writing experiences of the humblest spiritual autobiographers’ Social History, 4, 407–35. Thornton, A. (1873). The Autobiography of Mrs Alice Thornton. Edinburgh: Surtees Society 62.

73

Letters Jonathan Gibson

Letters were ubiquitous in the early modern period: indeed, the letter is the only textual form we can be sure was deployed by all the writers mentioned in this Companion. Thousands of examples survive: from parents and children, husbands, wives, and lovers; from courtiers, prisoners, and spies; from and on behalf of the monarch; letters of recommendation, consolation and advice; passionate, angry, and coy love letters.1 Many of these texts can also be described as ‘news letters’, as ‘news’ of all kinds, of varying degrees of intimacy, secrecy, and political import, travelled promiscuously between friends and family, from servant to master (as a form of service) and from ambassadors to central government. From the 1590s, professional writers of newsletters such as John Chamberlain produced personalised letters for several clients simultaneously, paving the way for the circulation of news by a less personalised system in the seventeenth century (Schneider 2005: ch. 4). An equally important topic was day-to-day business: the purchase and sale of goods, the ins and outs of household management. In many cases, of course, a letter would deal with more than one type of subject matter; at least as many, however, had no obvious topic at all, their main purpose being to establish, register, and consolidate ties of affection and/or duty between individuals – the equivalent of a quick phone call or text message (Whigham 1981). Inevitably, letter-writing was a crucial component of the professional and private identities of many early modern men. For many women, similarly, it offered the opportunity not only to engage in respectable ‘literary’ activity, but also to explore religious belief and devotional practice, to issue commands to servants and others lower in the social scale, to negotiate political and household business, to make risqué jokes, to exchange court news, to describe foreign countries and customs, to fight lawsuits, and to shape the terms of their relationships (whether equal, subordinate, or dominant) with family, friends, and strangers (Couchman and Crabb 2005; Daybell 2001, 2006b). Correspondents of both sexes kept manuscript collections of letters, often put together in association with a secretary or scribe. These ‘letter-books’ varied

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greatly, often lumping together several different types of letter – letters received, copies of letters sent, form letters, and copies of interesting letters attributed to famous people (Braunmuller 1983; Harris 1998). Such a high volume of vernacular correspondence was a new phenomenon in the sixteenth century and an important element in the overall increase in literacy in the period. It was also a development with a political dimension, for the growth in the number of government agents and contacts in frequent touch with the centre during the reign of Henry VIII meant that letters in English rapidly became an essential part of the Tudor regime (Schneider 2005: 37–40). The letter form’s notional restriction to two people (writer and addressee), meanwhile, mirrored the key part played in that regime by two-person (‘dyadic’) relationships, in particular by the patronage system. Much of the smooth running of day-to-day life was dependent on the personal relationships between powerful patrons and their dependents, or ‘clients’. Accordingly, many mundane transactions, such as job applications, legal appeals, and applications for state funding, lived, moved, and had their being within the simultaneously ‘public’ and ‘private’ exchange of letters between individuals with varying levels of power and influence (Whigham 1981). As Gary Schneider has pointed out, ‘a sense of anxiety was inherent in early modern epistolary communication’ (2005: 31). At the heart of this anxiety was an idealised vision of what the exchange of letters might be, deriving in large part from the humanist revival of the ancient idea that letters should be ‘familiar’: loosely structured, free of strict rhetorical rules, and inspired by selfless amicitia (friendship). Theoretically, the aim of a ‘familiar letter’ was twofold: to transmute into emotional presence the absence of writer and addressee, and to strengthen the bonds of friendship. In pursuit of this ideal, letters by Cicero, Pliny the Younger, and Seneca were read and imitated throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The ideal of the familiar letter formed part of a composite early modern theory of letter-writing (Chartier et al. 1997; Hornbeak 1934; Robertson 1942) which was promulgated in many early modern epistolographies, or letter-writing manuals, such as William Fulwood’s The Enemy of Idleness (1571) and Angel Day’s The English Secretary (1586) and was made up of three interrelated traditions: 1 2

The ideal of the familiar letter. The medieval ars dictaminis (‘art of letter-writing’), a simplified application of classical rhetoric to epistolary composition. Central to this tradition was the careful demarcation of hierarchical relationships, particularly the writer’s and recipient’s relative status. 3 Early modern rhetorical theory, an elaborate set of guidelines for textual composition that was at the heart of the early modern educational system.

The medieval emphasis on hierarchy was adapted and expanded in the early modern period (Hornbeak 1934: 1–29; Magnusson 1999; Robertson 1942: 9–24),

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affecting, among other things, the physical layout of letters: the more space left between the last line of a letter, the subscription (the equivalent of ‘yours sincerely’), and the signature, and the further over to the right the signature and the subscription were put, the greater the writer’s deference to the addressee (Gibson 1997). Also carried over was the set order for parts of a letter, which the ars dictaminis had adapted from ancient rhetorical models for the structure of a speech (Henderson 1983): 1 2 3 4

Exordium (an introduction consisting of a salutation (salutatio) and a section currying favour with the addressee (captatio benevolentiae) Narratio (background narration) Petitio (request) Peroratio (conclusion)

The medieval innovation was the presence of petitio in this scheme, a tweak that registered the importance in a hierarchical society of requests made by the less powerful to their betters. The centrality of the patronage system in early modern life meant that this rather schematic letter structure continued to be important and was used as an armature for many early modern letters. Early modern epistolography supplemented the ars dictaminis with numerous elaborate prescriptions adapted from newly discovered classical texts such as Quintilian’s De institutione oratoria (Chartier et al. 1997; Henderson 1983, 1993). At the same time, early modern theorists, influenced by fresh approaches to ancient classical literature, brought to letter-writing a stronger sense of the individual writer’s potential for rhetorical power. The link between letter-writing and rhetoric highlights the importance of letter-writing for the early modern educational system as a whole. Throughout the period, the composition of Latin letters, guided by handbooks such as Erasmus’s De conscribendis epistolis (‘On the Writing of Letters’; Erasmus 1985) and others played a crucial role in the (exclusively male) humanist grammar-school curriculum. Because letter-writing was introduced to boys at the important transition between ‘lower school’ grammar lessons and ‘upper school’ lessons in rhetoric, the letter was the first extended rhetorical form most schoolboys were taught. For many it was also the last, as some schools chose not to make pupils compose orations (Baldwin 1944: vol. I; Mack 2002: 24–7). The early modern letter-writer was pulled in three directions by these different approaches. The joker in the pack was the ideal of the familiar letter, opposed, in essence, both to the application of elaborate rhetorical rules to letter-writing and, in its emphasis on friendship between equals, to the highlighting of social hierarchies. Much Renaissance epistolography – Erasmus’ book is a key example – attempted, with varying degrees of success, to pull these traditions together, and the influence of all three can be detected in early modern letters written in English: throughout the period, English letter-writers struggled to find ways to balance epistolary ‘familiarity’, social deference, and rhetorical power.

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This set of tensions gave rise to some very odd pieces of writing. Particularly striking is a glut of excessively melancholic patronage letters written by courtiers in the 1590s, including Sir Walter Ralegh (Ralegh 1999), the earl of Essex (Ioppolo 2007b), and Lady Arabella Stuart (Stuart 1994): here, the pressure on letter-writers to demonstrate their sincerity (or ‘familiarity’) leads to a startling inflation in the emotional temperature of business correspondence. A related phenomenon is the frequently expressed feeling of many early modern correspondents that the written word is not enough – that no letter can come close to embodying the ‘familiar’ bond between writer and addressee. Donne is arguably the master of this trope (Donne 1977, 2005; Targoff 2008: ch. 1). All three of the epistolographical models described above – the theory of the familiar letter, the ars dictaminis, and early modern rhetoric – assume that letters are ‘dyadic’ – that they are essentially communications between two people, writer and addressee. Early modern letter-writing practice was, however, in many ways not dyadic: at its heart was an awareness (sometimes optimistic, sometimes fatalistic) of the likelihood that people other than the writer and addressee would have access to letters (Schneider 2005: ch. 2). In fact, two categories of third party were often involved in the epistolary process: 1 Secretaries – sometimes they composed their employer’s letters for them; sometimes they ‘worked up’ rough authorial drafts; sometimes they just took dictation. (The importance of scribes in the system meant that writing a letter in one’s own hand implicitly stressed informality and closeness to the addressee.) 2 The messengers who, in the absence before 1680 of an assured public postal service, delivered the letters. Recent scholarship has made much of complex homosocial relationships between early modern secretaries and the employers to whose ‘secrets’ they were privy (Rambuss 1993; Stewart 1997). Messengers, though, and other people involved in letter delivery, were equally important: like secretaries, they could function as extensions – and sometimes treacherous perverters – of the will of the letter-writer.2 Carriers transporting goods from one part of the country to another often delivered letters. They were also often delivered by means of the sequence of ‘post horses’ (with guides) available for hire along major routes at regular intervals (or ‘stages’) (Brayshay 1991a, 1991b). Messengers and couriers on important government business were able to hire post horses at a special rate and also had the right to requisition them. Increasingly, postmasters appointed to manage this system arranged for their ‘post-boys’ to deliver royal messages from stage to stage, as well as – increasingly – private (or ‘bye’) letters. From these beginnings grew, in the later part of the early modern period, a national system of letter delivery. Many letters, both official and private, were, however, delivered, for reasons of privacy and security, by private messengers. The ideal messenger was someone close to the writer – a friend or close personal servant whose presence could go some way towards compensating for the writer’s absence and who could

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be trusted. Confiding one’s text to the wrong messenger could have perilous repercussions. In such circumstances it is unsurprising that letter-delivery is discussed at length in many Renaissance letters. Uncertainty about the reliability of delivery meant that many early modern letter writers were very cagey about what they committed to paper: when secret letters miscarried, the effects could be devastating, as both Mary Queen of Scots and Charles I discovered. One way of circumventing the problem of delivery was simply not to write down the most important part of the message, leaving it instead for the trusted messenger to whom the letter had been confided to give orally. Many letters from the period in fact say very little: the important message was left to the messenger to give by word of mouth. Anxiety about these factors recurs constantly in early modern correspondence: worries about whether letters had arrived or would arrive, apologies about handwriting, concern about the trustworthiness of the messenger (or ‘bearer’), and so on, an anxiety highlighted by the increased importance during the period of the ideal of the familiar letter, which in turn influenced the development of a range of devices for ensuring privacy, such as the use of ciphers. Behind early modern letters, then, are complicated secret histories – elaborately terraced negotiations, oral and written, often involving a surprisingly large number of people. Letters were frequently deliberately written to be passed on, composed with the intention that they be read out and glossed by a ‘primary addressee’ to a ‘secondary addressee’. Many ‘letters’, meanwhile, such as Sidney’s letter to Queen Elizabeth on the French match or Penelope Rich’s about the treatment of her brother Essex (Ioppolo 2007a), were deliberately circulated more widely than this, functioning, in effect, as ‘published’ manuscript treatises. This practice had a long history, dating back to antiquity and persisting throughout the Middle Ages: most medieval letters had been, in Giles Constable’s words, ‘self-conscious, quasi-public literary documents, often written with an eye to future collection and publication’ (1976: 11). ‘Epistolary’ circulation of this type was a central plank in early modern ‘manuscript culture’ and arguably underpinned the early modern literary system as a whole. For early modern readers, the letter, addressed from one individual to another, was the paradigmatic form of written communication, and the prism through which literary texts were read. Accordingly, early modern printed books repeatedly (and often voyeuristically: see Lerer 1997) invoked the comforting ghosts of specific addressees. Letters – dedicatory epistles – prefaced most books printed in the early modern period, and printed books in many genres – reports on foreign wars; polemics, learned tracts, religious consolation – took an epistolary form. Letters abound in early modern prose fiction (a genre that overlaps significantly with the genre of the epistolary formulary: see Robertson 1942), and in drama (Goldberg 1988; Stewart 2009). The verse epistle, meanwhile, enjoyed two periods of great popularity: in the first half of the sixteenth century (influenced by Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyede: see Lerer 1997) and in the 1590s to 1630s (see Marotti 2006).

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Despite – or perhaps because of – the tendency to read a wide range of texts within an epistolary ‘radical of presentation’ (Guillén 1986), the letter in itself does not seem to have been thought of as a literary genre in itself, for, in contrast to the practice in France and Italy, single-author collections of original letters in English were not much printed until the end of the period covered by this Companion, in the 1640s (Scheider 2005: ch. 6). Pioneering examples of the genre include Joseph Hall’s Senecan meditations (1608–10) and, in reaction against the preciosity manifest across the Channel in the letters of Monsieur de Balzac (Jean-Louis Guez), James Howell’s newsy Epistolae Ho-Elianae of 1645–55 (Guez 1654; Patterson 1984: 203–32). Sir John Suckling’s witty, French-influenced, letters were published posthumously in 1646. Collections such as these had, since antiquity, fictionalised some of their contents to give the best possible impression of the author, a tradition reaching its apogee in the published letters of humanists such as Erasmus (Jardine 1993). Howell’s book follows in the same tradition as, with a difference, do the collections of John Donne’s letters made by his son in 1651 and 1660. Donne the Younger altered the names of the addressees of many of his father’s letters to names of more important people primarily to gain favour for himself with his patron. Less obviously falsifying, the Spenser–Harvey correspondence (1580; Harvey 1884) is nevertheless a close and interesting anglicisation of self-puffing Latin humanist epistles. Letters written in the first half of the sixteenth century tend to use simpler rhetorical strategies than letters written later on, a stylistic shift particularly noticeable in exordia, and linked to the increasing dominance of the ideal of the familiar letter – a development spurred on by the epistolographies of Juan Luis Vives and Justus Lipsius, both of which advocated the writing of flexible, non-rhetorical letters (paradoxically providing rules for the practice: see Jardine 1996; Lipsius 1996; Vives 1989). This shift has been linked to changes in the way in which people thought about their private ‘selves’ or identities and their personal relationships, though the extent to which it involves a genuine change in interiority rather than simply a change in generic emphasis is difficult to gauge (Bound 2002; Daybell 2006b; see also Chapter 74, Identity). As we have seen, the middle of the seventeenth century saw a new influence on familiar letters: the witty, ‘précieux’ style pioneered in France by Jean Guez de Balzac and codified in the epistolographies of Jean Puget de la Serre (Chartier et al. 1997; Hornbeak 1934: 50–76), the inspiration for extravagantly witty letters and unusual, fanciful imagery. In her famous love letters to William Temple (1652–4), unpublished until the nineteenth century, Dorothy Osborne cultivated a plain style in reaction against this French fashion (Lerch-Davis 1978; Osborne 2002). In recent years, early modern letters have been the focus of much scholarly activity (Daybell 2005, 2006a), spearheaded by the work of Daybell and Schneider. It seems certain that such work will deepen and grow, as letters provide uniquely valuable opportunities to unpick some of the most challenging binary oppositions – public/ private; orality/literacy; fact/fiction; sincerity/deception – at the heart of our experience of early modern culture.

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Notes 1

There is an excellent list of printed sources in Watson 1976 and a more up-to-date one, though oddly arranged, in Schneider 2005. See Stewart and Wolfe 2004 for a stimulating anthology of facsimiles and transcriptions.

2

Since the appearance of the first edition of this Companion, more work has appeared on the role of messengers in early modern correspondence (Daybell 2001; Schneider 2005; Stewart and Wolfe 2004).

References and Further Reading Baldwin, T. W. (1944). William Shakespere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greeke, 2 vols. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Bound, F. (2002). ‘Writing the self? Love and the letter in England, c.1660–1760’. Literature and History, 3rd ser., 11, 1–19. Braunmuller, A. R. (1981). ‘Editing Elizabethan letters’. Text, 1, 185–99. Braunmuller, A. R. (ed.) (1983). A SeventeenthCentury Letter-Book: A Facsimile of Folger MS. V.a. 321. Newark, DE: University of Delaware Press. Brayshay, M. (1991a). ‘Royal post-horse routes in England and Wales: the evolution of the network in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth century’. Journal of Historical Geography, 17, 373–89. Brayshay, M. (1991b). ‘Royal post-horse routes in south west England in the reigns of Elizabeth I and James I’. Transactions of the Devonshire Association for the Advancement of Science, 123, 79–103. Chartier, R., A. Boureau, A. Dauphin, and C. Dauphin (1997). Correspondence: Models of LetterWriting from the Middle Ages to the Nineteenth Century, trans. C. Woodall. Cambridge: Polity. Constable, G. (1976). Letters and Letter-Collections. Turnhout: Brepols. Couchman, J. and A. Crabb (eds.) (2005). Women’s Letters across Europe: Form and Persuasion. Aldershot: Ashgate. Daybell, J. (ed.) (2001). Early Modern Women’s Letter Writing, 1450–1700. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Daybell, J. (2005). ‘Recent studies in sixteenthcentury letters’. English Literary Renaissance, 35, 331–62. Daybell, J. (2006a). ‘Recent studies in seventeenth-century letters’. English Literary Renaissance, 36, 135–70.

Daybell, J. (2006b). Women Letter-Writers in Tudor England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Donne, J. (1977). Letters to Severall Persons of Honour (1651). A Facsimile Reproduction, ed. M. T. Hester. Delmar: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints. Donne, J. (2005). John Donne’s Marriage Letters in the Folger Shakespeare Library, ed. M. T. Hester, D. Flynn, and R. P. Sorlien. Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library. Erasmus, D. (1985). Collected Works of Erasmus: Literary and Educational Writings, vol. 25, ed. J. K. Sowards. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Gibson, J. (1997). ‘Significant space in manuscript letters’. The Seventeenth Century, 12, 1–9. Goldberg, J. (1988). ‘Rebel letters: postal effects from Richard II to Henry IV’. Renaissance Drama, ns 19, 3–28. Goldberg, J. (1990). Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Guez, Jean-Louis, Sieur de Balzac (1654). Letters of Mounsieur de Balzac, 1, 2, 3, and 4th parts; translated out of French into English, trans. Sir Richard Baker. London. Guillén, C. (1986). ‘Notes toward the study of the Renaissance letter’. In B. K. Lewalski (ed.), Renaissance Genres: Essays in Theory, History and Interpretation (pp. 70–101). Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Harris, F. (1998). ‘The letterbooks of Mary Evelyn’. English Manuscript Studies 1100–1700, 7, 202–15. Harvey, Gabriel (1884). Letter-book of Gabriel Harvey, A.D. 1573–1580, ed. E. J. L. Scott. London: Camden Society.

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Henderson, J. R. (1983). ‘Erasmus on the art of letter-writing’. In J. J. Murphy (ed.), Renaissance Eloquence: Studies in the Theory and Practice of Renaissance Rhetoric. (pp. 331–55). Berkeley: University of California Press. Henderson, J. R. (1993). On reading the rhetoric of the Renaissance letter. In H. F. Plett (ed.), Renaissance-Rhetorik / Renaissance Rhetoric (pp. 143–62). Berlin: De Gruyter. Hornbeak, K. G. (1934). The Complete Letter-Writer in English, 1568–1800. Northampton, Mass.: Smith College. Ioppolo, G. (2007a). ‘ “I desire to be helde in your memory”: reading Penelope Rich through her letters’. In D. Callaghan (ed.), The Impact of Feminism in English Renaissance Studies (pp. 299– 325). Basingstoke: Palgrave-Macmillan. Ioppolo, G. (2007b). ‘ “Your Majesties most humble faythfullest and most affectionate seruant”: the earl of Essex constructs himself and his queen in the Hulton letters’. In P. Beal and G. Ioppolo (eds.), Elizabeth I and the Culture of Writing (pp. 43–69). London: British Library. Jardine, L. (1993). Erasmus, Man of Letters: The Construction of Charisma in Print. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Jardine, L. (1996). ‘Reading and the technology of textual affect: Erasmus’s familiar letters and Shakespeare’s King Lear’. In L. Jardine, Reading Shakespeare Historically (pp. 78–97). London: Routledge. Lerch-Davis, G. S. (1978). ‘Rebellion against public prose: the letters of Dorothy Osborne to William Temple (1652–4)’. Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 20, 386–415. Lerer, S. (1997). Courtly Letters in the Age of Henry VIII: Literary Culture and the Arts of Deceit. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lipsius, J. (1996). Principles of Letter-Writing: A Bilingual Text of Justi Lipsi ‘Epistolica institutio’, ed. R. V. Young and M. T. Hester. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press. Mack, P. (2002). Elizabethan Rhetoric: Theory and Practice. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Magnusson, L. (1999). Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Marotti, Arthur F. (2006). ‘The social context and nature of Donne’s writings: occasional verse and letters’. In A. Guibbory (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to John Donne (pp. 35–48). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Osborne, Dorothy (2002). Dorothy Osborne: Letters to Sir William Temple, 1652–54: Observations on Love, Literature, Politics, and Religion, ed. K. Parker. Aldershot: Ashgate. Patterson, A. (1984). Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Ralegh, W. (1999), The Letters of Sir Walter Ralegh, ed. A. Latham and J. Youings. Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Rambuss, R. (1993). Spenser’s Secret Career. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Robertson, J. (1942). The Art of Letter Writing: An Essay on the Handbooks Published in England during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries. London: University Press of Liverpool. Schneider, G. (2005). The Culture of Epistolarity: Vernacular Letters and Letter Writing in Early Modern England, 1500–1700. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Stewart, A. (1997). Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Stewart, A. (2009). Shakespeare’s Letters. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stewart, A. and H. Wolfe (2004). Letterwriting in Renaissance England. Washington, DC: Folger Shakespeare Library. Stuart, A., Lady (1994). The Letters of Lady Arabella Stuart, ed. S. J. Steen. New York: Oxford University Press. Targoff, R. (2008). John Donne, Body and Soul. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Vives, J. L.(1989). De conscribendis epistolis, trans. C. Fantazzi. Leiden: Brill. Watson, G. (1976). The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (I). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Whigham, Frank (1981). ‘The rhetoric of Elizabethan suitors’ letters’. PMLA, 96, 864–82.

Part Three

Issues and Debates

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Identity A. J. Piesse

We are all framed of flaps and patches and of so shapeless and divers a contexture, that every piece and every moment playeth his part. And there is as much difference between us and ourselves, as there is between ourselves and others. (Montaigne 1634: 187)

Current Theory: Individuality and Subjectivity It has been argued that humankind became conscious of its own innate diversity long before Montaigne articulated his assimilated, piecemeal sense of self. Before Sidney realised in Astrophil and Stella (published 1591) that study was a ‘step-dame’, an unnatural parent, and proposed instead to ‘look in [his] heart and write’, there are signs of different degrees of self-consciousness in English literature. The closing decades of the twentieth century and the beginnings of the twenty-first have seen a proliferation of writing on the nature of identity in the early modern period. There are four or five recurrent themes: the notion of the individual, the construction of the subject, ideas of nationhood, the self and gender, and the role of the ruler of the state. As early as 1020, Colin Morris has pointed out, portraits differentiate between types and individual representation, and devotional writing in the first person exhorts the examination of an interior self (Morris 1972: 33, 65). But the critical trends of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century tend to site the emergence of what Richard Hillman has called ‘the self-speaking subject’ in the later Middle Ages at the earliest, insisting further that the notion of self-interrogation in anything other than the religious sense flourishes across a range of disciplines only from the beginning of the sixteenth century (Hillman 1997: 2–3). Morris’s investigations of individuality, and the works that corresponded to or furthered his thesis (Brandt 1966; Hanning 1977; Ullman 1967, 1977), become sidelined by a continual redefinition of what constitutes the individual, with Belsey (1985), Greenblatt (1980), and Dollimore

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(1984) ‘substantially displac[ing] earlier arguments (based on very different theoretical premises) that the Western European individual or self dates from around the twelfth century’ (Hillman 1997: 3). More recently, an increasing interest in (in Judith Butler’s terms) performative masculinity as a subject free of the binds of its binary ‘other’, has seen kinds of masculinity being ‘subjected to the same critical scrutiny as femininity’ (Smith 2000: 2). In a similar vein, Tom MacFaul has used classical and early modern differentiations between kinds of male friendship to draw attention to difference and individuation rather than homogeneity. ‘It is in difference [sic] between men’, says MacFaul, ‘that people come to themselves’, and continues: the Humanist ideal of friendship tries to promote a notion of individual integrity, but it is in the recognition of the varieties of human connectedness – and their arbitrariness – that … men come to recognise themselves; they recognise their own variety, and the arbitrariness of being themselves. (MacFaul 2007: 196–7)

In a different kind of distinction, the role of children as nascent individuals in society has drawn some useful connections between the humanist use of the classics in the education of children and the manipulation of performative individual identity. Darryll Grantley pointed out that ‘as a mode of discourse and representation, classicism is not innocent of ideological and social implication’ (Grantley 2000: 82), and connected social to dramatic practice with the observation that if education enabled individuals to acquire the values, manners and modes of speech that were coming to constitute the outward signs of membership of the gentle class, then drama also had a significant part to play in inculcating a sense of what defined elite identity. (Grantley 2001: 49)

Late twentieth-century annexation of psychology and social history to the practice of literary criticism has led to fundamental rereadings of literary texts, and it is where these two disciplines meet that this newly defined history of individuality emerges. Since the huge impact created by Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980) and Catherine Belsey’s The Subject of Tragedy (1985), the notion of the individual has come under pressure from a competing idea, that of the early modern subject. Belsey’s formulation of the subject rests on a particular degree of self-consciousness: To be a subject is to have access to signifying practice, to identify with the ‘I’ of utterance and the ‘I’ who speaks. The subject is held in place in a specific discourse, a specific knowledge, by the meanings available there. In so far as signifying practice always precedes the individual, is always learned, the subject is a subjected being, an effect of the meanings it seems to possess. Subjectivity is discursively produced and is constrained by the range of subject positions defined by the discourses in which the concrete individual participates … existing discourses determine not only what can be said and understood, but the nature of subjectivity itself, what it is possible to be. (Belsey 1985: 5)

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Belsey and Greenblatt have each argued that any formulation of individuality must be seen in the light of cultural context, that any exposition of self is a manifestation of a series of options, rather than something intrinsically different from anything else. John Martin, in a comprehensive grand tour of the recent intellectual history of the individual that visits Burckhardt,1 Belsey, Greenblatt, and Montrose, invokes direct analysis of some of the writers the critics summoned in order to nuance some of the more excessive claims of the historicist and new historicist movements, and concludes that the history of the making of our modern identities is after all far from a trivial matter; it goes to core questions of ethics, literature, philosophy, and religion – questions that have emerged as central in many of the current discussions of both the value and the limits of individualism. (Martin 1997: 1342)

Charles Taylor’s Sources of the Self (1989), on the other hand, traces a fascinating development in Western thought from the tensions between the Platonic and Aristotelian versions of the individual’s relationship both to context and to interior self. Plato valorises theoria, contemplation of the unchanging order, a philosophical gaze focused on things exterior to the self. Aristotle, though, prefers phronesis, a practical wisdom, ‘an understanding of the ever-changing, in which particular cases and predicaments are never exhaustively characterised in general rules’ (Taylor 1989: 125): in other words, a philosophical gaze that turns inward to the possibility of an individual account of Plato’s theoria. Taylor goes on to explain how this distinction is refined through the work of Augustine, whom he credits with ‘the proto-cogito’ (Taylor 1989: 132), an early version of Descartes’ famous cogito ergo sum (‘I think, therefore I am’), upon which dictum most accounts of modern individuality are based. This is vital to an understanding of individuality in the early modern period, since it is to the classical philosophers that sixteenth-century scholars return with the arrival of Erasmian humanism in England. Erasmus’ idea that proper investigation of any subject depended on going ad fontes et ad res – to the source and to the thing itself – urged a new way of seeing, relying simultaneously on knowledge – which we might equate loosely with Plato’s theoria – and on experience.

Identifying the Issues Whether we accept a self-conscious subject that is ready to construct itself and to be constructed by its context, or look instead for a subject whose image of self is the product of a more coherent connection between the inward and the outward gaze, it is easy to see that notions of the parameters of self are bound to change significantly if the context in which one lives undergoes a series of rapid changes. The sixteenth century is a period that sees a huge expansion of access to knowledge and experience. For example, it is recognised that the earth is not the centre of the known universe,

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which raises questions about humankind’s place in relation to God (Copernicus, De Revolutionibus, 1530, published 1543). The establishment of the first printing presses in London (1476) begins a process by which texts are released to a wider audience; as the century progresses, the notion of the value of the printed text changes precisely because of its general availability (Davies 1976; Eisenstein 1979). Expansion in travel and trade routes reveals hitherto unthought-of cultures and races, which in turn forces Western cultures to reassess their own developments and practices, and their notions of nationhood (Campbell 1992; Hadfield 1998; Read 1992). The expansion of trade brings wealth to the mercantile classes, and those classes begin to ponder their own role in society, especially with the foundation of grammar schools and the consequent rise of a formally educated class outside the nobility (Gunn 1995: 18–21). Issues of nobility itself, especially the question of whether nobility is inborn or acquired, are investigated with a renewed enthusiasm and urgency. Reaction against the Catholic Church in relation to the Reformation brings about a reassessment of the individual’s relationship to both God and the church, in both spiritual and temporal terms, fanning the already fiercely glowing embers of the tensions between ecclesiastical and temporal authority (Axton 1977; Davies 1976; Kantorowicz 1957; Tyndale 1528). This debate brings with it questions about the appropriate language in which to pursue and express one’s religious thoughts, especially in relation to the Bible, and the notion of an individuality in religion brings to the fore the need for a redefinition of the idea of conscience, especially in relation to the idea of self-consciousness. As The Oxford English Dictionary records, the two concepts initially share a single word: ‘Conscience 1. Privity of knowledge, knowledge within oneself, consciousness, conscience’. Citing Hamlet (1602), ‘Thus conscience doth make cowards of us all’ (3.1.83), the dictionary continues, The word is etymologically, as its form shows, a noun of condition or function … and as such had no plural: a man or a people had more or less conscience. But in sense 4 [‘the internal acknowledgement or recognition of the quality of one’s motives and actions] it came gradually to be thought of as an individual entity … was understood to mean no longer our respective shares or amounts of the common quality conscience, but to be two individual consciences, mine and yours.

It seems to me that this shift in meaning parallels Taylor’s account of the movement from theoria to phronesis as outlined above. The investigation of appropriate hierarchical structures cannot leave unmoved the contingent question of the relative hierarchy of male and female, and debate around appropriate gender roles is continually aired, especially in the pamphlet war at the end of the sixteenth and beginning of the seventeenth century (Aughterson 1995; Shepherd 1985); and, as Bruce Smith (2000) and Robin Headlam Wells (2000) have recently shown, there is as much diversity between men and men as there is between men and women. The ultimate tension between the interior and the exterior worlds must be to do with the working of the individual human frame, a more physical drive towards interior knowledge that culminates in

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experimental autopsy and a sophisticated relationship between the physical and metaphysical notions of interiority (Aughterson 1995; Barker 1984; Hanson 1998; Neill 1997; Sawday 1995). Exterior pressures such as these, whether macrocosmic (to do with universal ideas or contexts), or microcosmic (to do with local or personal change), necessarily enforce a realignment of one’s view of self, and sometimes conflicting views of self compete. As David Read has observed, new situations and perceptions require new expressions: ‘the unconscious mind depends on a previous defined language, and definitions are not in every instance available. On the historical field the actors do not always know what they want because their desires have yet to find a form in language’ (Read 1992: 173). The unconscious mind sometimes operates on more than just a linguistic register, though. A text like Ralegh’s The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana (1596) reveals the writer’s sense of a conflicted self: Elizabeth’s conquistador at odds with the scholar-historian revelling in the newness of it all. Moments of wonder at the society encountered (Ralegh 1997: 133–4, 157–8) and the sheer unspoiled beauty of the landscape (which he finds it hard to believe has not been landscaped, and represents, as if it were, a country park – 1997: 162–3) are continually being reined in, and the view realigned to focus on matters of political pointscoring against the Spanish (1997: 172, 174) or practical profit (1997: 198–9). There is also the issue of the truth trope in this kind of text: the exact physical geography of the land is measured in detail not only to prove the possibility of profit, but to establish the basic fact of the writer’s presence in the location. This might seem odd, but the social and political issues dealt with in a text like The Discoverie are not entirely alien to those constituted fictitiously by More’s Utopia (1516; English translation 1551), where the detailed account of a newly discovered territory is fabulous – perhaps a kind of intellectual voyage of discovery – but carefully constructed, with its establishment of the narrator, its attendant letters, and reference to genuine historical figures, as fact (Fox 1983). Bacon would use the voyage of discovery as overt intellectual metaphor in The New Atlantis (published 1627). There is an intrinsic connection here between the expansion of physical and intellectual, even spiritual, limits. While the texts of geographical discovery are looking outwards, other prose texts turn the gaze inwards. Tyndale’s Obedience of a Christian Man (1528) operates in part as an apology for his work in translating the Bible into English not from the Vulgate of Jerome, the version produced by and for the Catholic Church and interpreted through the Church Fathers throughout the history of the church, but from the Hebrew and Greek sources (see Daniell 1992, 1994; Hammond 1982). The Obedience is especially interesting in its urging of the importance of the availability of Scripture in the vernacular, so that the individual might have direct access to the Word, and also in its voicing of the concern that the individual be conscious of differentiating between ways of knowing. At a broader level it also summarises some early modern concerns about the ways in which certain methods of education can be obfuscatory as

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well as revelatory, because prescriptive systems of education bring with them a certain conformity of mind. Tyndale’s writing is splendidly mimetic as he pours scorn on learning without real understanding: Ye drive them from God’s word and will let no man come there to until he have been two years Master of Art. First they nuzzle them in sophistry and in benefundatii [sure foundations], And there corrupt they their judgements with apparent arguments and with alleging unto them texts of logic of natural philautia [self-love – a savage pun on philosophy, love of truth] of metaphysic and moral philosophy and of all manner books of Aristotle and of all manner doctors which they yet never saw. Moreover, one holdeth this, another that. One is a real, another a nominal. What wonderful dreams have they of their predicaments universal, second intentions, quiddities [‘what-ness’], haeccaeities [‘just-this-ness’], and relatives. And whether species fundata in chimera be vera species [things founded in the imagination are true things]. And whether this proposition be true: non ens est aliquid. Whether ens be equivocum or univocii. Ens is a voice only say some. Ens is univocum saith another and descendeth in to ens creatum and into ens increatum per modos intrinsecos, when they have this wise brawled eight, ten, or twelve or more years and after that their judgements are utterly corrupt: then they begin their divinity. Not at the scripture: but every man taketh a sundry doctor, which doctors are as sundry and as divers the one contrary unto the other as there are divers factions and monstrous shapes none like another among our sects of religion. (Tyndale 1528: fo. xviiiv)

As David Daniell has pointed out, as the passage progresses Tyndale provides ‘a farrago of some of the barbarous terms used by the quibbling schoolmen. The barely discernible sense seems to be, roughly, whether something imaginary can be said to not-exist, and whether being is ambiguous and not-created, and generates itself. Tyndale intends the reader to give up’ (Daniell 2000: 209). Richard Lanham’s Motives of Eloquence (1976) draws attention to the restrictions that a rhetorical education of the type Tyndale criticises might bring with it. He makes plain the constructedness of the resulting mindset, remarking how young scholars are taught ‘a minute concentration on the word, how to write it, speak it, remember it … memory in a massive, almost brutalizing way … far in advance of conceptual understanding’. The Renaissance schoolmaster would ‘require no original thought’ but would ‘demand instead an agile marshalling of the proverbial wisdom on any issue’ (Lanham 1976: 2). As we have already seen, Grantley (2001) has shown how the introduction of the classical method and the idea of performing the self through the drama provides a particular kind of performative child; Michael Witmore (2007) goes one step further to suggest that the idea of the performative child quite precisely affects the function of the child on stage and in society. This sort of evaluation of the early modern scholar – whether senior or junior – brings home clearly the tensions between Belsey’s and Greenblatt’s ‘subject’ and the competing notion of the self-searching individual. If the early modern subject is ‘made of flaps and patches’ to this degree, how is it possible for him or her to entertain an original thought? Is it possible for an assimilation of the classical and the English

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traditions of writing to bring about a newly directed gaze? What is the relationship between the process of assimilation and the process of creation? Even though the best examples of Renaissance practice in these areas produce ‘something quite different from reproduction and translation … in no sense a copy of the old but rather a larger, denser … transformation of it’ (Jones 1977: 20), it seems to me that these issues lay bare the methodologies that identify the processes and the problems of both the public and the private struggle towards knowledge of self and an expression of that knowledge.

Constructed Selves, Representation and Self-Speaking In Deloney’s Jack of Newbury (1597), an episodic recital of the apprentice clothmaker’s rise to high civic status, the overarching metaphor of the clothmaker as definer of identity is paralleled by the explicit construction of a point of view. Unapologetic generic shifts draw attention to the literary figuring forth of a character, from narrative peppered with near-dramatic episodes to allegorical representation, with notional art galleries inviting the gaze, balladic interludes insisting on aural attention, and episodes of fabliau suggesting that the early modern self-made subject is firmly rooted in the forms of its nation’s earlier writings. Similarly, Sidney’s Old Arcadia (?1577/80), a sustained narrative with a traceable linear plot, is dialectic in its representation, the five sections of the narrative, significantly labelled ‘Acts’, being interspersed with pastoral eclogues, suggesting that kinds of literature represent kinds of levels of society, and that a debate between the court and the pastoral life must be represented generically as well as in terms of its characters. But if the tension between the socially constructed character and the self-conscious individual is ultimately to do with the tension between theoria and phronesis, then the critic in search of sixteenth-century identity inevitably returns to the idea of the interior voice, to the irresistible idea of the possibility of self-speaking, and therefore most obviously to the stage. It is quite possible to construct a more or less linear journey into the interior in the early modern drama, and along the way to observe both the shifting preoccupations among the contemporary issues sketched out above and the jostling between the traditional English forms and the alternatives offered by classical and continental forms. Medwall’s Fulgens and Lucres (1497), a moral interlude played during a banquet for the household of Cardinal Morton, is the first secular play in English, deriving from an Italian prose debate on the subject of nobility. Throughout the play, notions of the true characters of the suitors, of the ability of language to communicate properly, and of the nature of drama itself, are examined, with reference to establishment of behaviour, representation of self through clothing, and the matter at the heart of the play, whether or not a person can be truly represented by the way he performs in a rhetorical debate. There is no attempt at interiority in this play; rather, character is revealed by an examination of the external signs that indicate the nature of the person within.

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Bale’s King Johan (1538–60) is also a moral play, but has utterly different concerns. There is an examination of the roles of kingship, Johan being concerned both ‘to declare’ how his power derives from God through Scripture and ‘to show what I am’ by insisting on his right to rule through lineal descent. At issue within Bale’s play are the tensions between secular and ecclesiastical power, with Johan’s fight against the malpractices of the Roman Church, especially in regard to the suppression of vernacular Scripture, being valorised by his consultation, in the proper order, with the secular powers within his realm, and by his insistence that he is obedient to God rather than to the church. Again, the debate is not represented as being within the character: rather, Johan is created as the historical ‘real’ site of a contradiction that is in the main fought out between allegorical figures. The most important of these is Sedition, who for part of the play inhabits the character of Stephen Langton, historically the archbishop who brings about Johan’s downfall. The idea of a characteristic inhabiting a ‘real’ character in this way, the rapprochement of allegory, history, and mimetic representation, is a fundamental step towards the interrogation of particular traits of character determining behaviour. Udall’s Jack Juggler (1553–8), on the other hand, examines explicitly the ways in which a person might know who he is, by the simple method of having Jack Juggler (a name with overtones of conjuring as well as simple sleight of hand) convince Jenkin Care-Away that he, Jack, is Jenkin, and that Jenkin is therefore nobody. Taking Plautus’ Amphitruo as his source, Udall shows how reliance on exterior forms of knowledge of oneself – physical features, behaviour, dress, belonging to a particular household that one recognises by dint of the fact the master beats one black and blue – can result very quickly in loss of one’s own identity. Although the play is about the identity crisis of a specific character, undoubtedly ‘the confusion of identity presented from the inside in wholly secular terms’ (Axton 1982: 17), the language – (‘But I marvel greatly, by our lord Jesus / How he I escaped, I me beat me thus. / And is not he I an unkind knave / That will no more pity on myself have?’, 917–20) posits a logical rather than an emotional crisis. In Pyckeryng’s Horestes (?1567), we see how the methods of assimilation of classical drama into the English tradition might reveal a gradual process of interiorisation. The chorus of classical drama is replaced by the self-proclaiming allegorical figure of Revenge, who fulfils the role of the Vice, and who also at one stage introduces himself as Master Patience. The alignment of the role of traditional classical truth-teller (the Chorus) with the traditionally subversive role in the English drama (the Vice) immediately creates a dichotomy. Is Horestes’ allegorical adviser reliable or not? Revenge is doubly unstable as he exists in the play both as a character (affecting Horestes from the outside) and as a word, a notion, thus affecting his thoughts. The play is a hugely important moment of transition, explicitly addressing the relationship between competing external influences and the process of internalisation. The idea of competing versions of self being metaphorically externalised does not necessarily require utterly different characters. Shakespeare twice takes on the notion of self-questioning, competing selves through the motif of twinning, in The Comedy

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of Errors (1592) (which shares a source with Jack Juggler) and in Twelfth Night (1600). He also writes about the need for a strong sense of self to resist the constructions of identity imposed by others, especially in the case of women. In Measure for Measure, Isabella struggles against externalised competing male accounts of herself (2.2), but her strength is demonstrated by her rhetorical manipulation of Angelo, whose own struggle between the public and private sense of self is voiced through a soliloquy riven with rhetorical questions, the medium that most clearly represents one side of self questioning another (2.3). Webster also uses issues of imposed external representation (‘This is flesh and blood, sir, / ’Tis not the figure cut in alabaster / Kneels at my husband’s tomb’, The Duchess of Malfi 1.2.72–4) and the manipulation of public rhetoric (Vittoria’s trial scene in The White Devil) to interrogate the struggle to determine the public self among his women characters. As the canon progresses, Shakespeare works more and more towards this process of the internalisation of dissenting voices. The insidious working of Iago on Othello, for example, is in part conveyed by the way in which Othello increasingly assimilates Iago’s mode of repetitive speech. Lear is ultimately riven asunder by the competing roles he has played to satisfy the demands of the body natural and the body politic; his ‘Who is it that can tell me who I am?’ remains largely unanswered precisely because the competing versions of self remain unreconciled. But it is in Hamlet, with all its instability of language, its ultimate assimilation of the notion of revenge into complete consonance with the central protagonist, and the relentless self-questioning, that ‘self-speaking’ most clearly reveals the spiritual tangle created by the proximity of ‘conscience’ to ‘consciousness’, of theoria and phronesis. In the shift from the public to the private sense of ‘conscience’, the constructed subject and the self-speaking subject can clearly be seen to be simultaneously present and in opposition.

Summary The investigation of early modern identity is a multi-disciplinary issue (see Chapter 36, Reading the Body), and it is impossible even to begin to deal with it in so small a space as this. The philosophical limits of an appropriate investigation still need to be set, and although the important work of a handful of literary critics has until recently influenced the academy in a particular direction, a narrower chronological sweep with a wider view of which issues are pertinent, especially in terms of kinds of subjects, kinds of language, and kinds of texts, characterises the most recent work cited here. Notes 1

Burckhardt’s Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy was first published in 1860.

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Aughterson, K. (1995). Renaissance Women: A Sourcebook. Constructions of Femininity in England. London: Routledge. Axton, M. (1977). The Queen’s Two Bodies: Drama and the Elizabethan Succession. London: Royal Historical Society. Axton, M. (1982). Three Tudor Classical Interludes. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer. Barker, F. (1984). The Tremulous Private Body: Essays on Subjection. London: Methuen. Belsey, C. (1985). The Subject of Tragedy. London: Methuen. Brandt, W. J. (1966). The Shape of Medieval History: Studies in Modes of Perception. New Haven: Yale University Press. Burckhardt, Jacob (1960 edn.). The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore. London: Phaidon. Campbell, M. B. (1992). ‘The illustrated travel book and the birth of ethnography: Part I of de Bry’s America’. In D. G. Allen and R. A. White (eds.), The Work of Dissimilitude (pp. 177–95). Newark: University of Delaware Press. Daniell, David (1992). Tyndale’s Old Testament: being the Pentateuch of 1530, Joshua to 2 Chronicles of 1537 and Jonah. New Haven: Yale University Press. Daniell, David (1994). William Tyndale: A Biography. New Haven: Yale University Press. Daniell, David (2000). The Obedience of a Christian Man. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Davies, C. S. L. (1976). Peace, Print and Protestantism 1450–1558. London: Hart-Davis MacGibbon. Dear, P. (2001). Revolutionising the Sciences: European Knowledge and its Ambitions, 1500–1700. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Dollimore, J. (1984). Radical Tragedy: Religion, Ideology and Power in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries. Brighton: Harvester. Eisenstein, Elizabeth (1979). The Printing Press as an Agent of Change, 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fox, A. (1983). Thomas More, History and Providence. New Haven: Yale University Press. The relevant section is reprinted as ‘An intricate, intimate compromise’ in R. M. Adams (ed.), Utopia

(154–69). New York: W. W. Norton (2nd edn. 1992). Grantley, Darryll (2000). Wit’s Pilgrimage: Drama and the Social Impact of Education in Early Modern England. Aldershot: Ashgate. Greenblatt, S. (1980). Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gunn, S. J. (1995). Early Tudor Government, 1485– 1558. London: Macmillan. Hadfield, A. (1998). Literature, Travel, and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hammond, G. (1982). The Making of the English Bible. Manchester: Carcanet. Hanning, Robert W. (1977). The Individual in Twelfth-Century Romance. New Haven: Yale University Press. Hanson, Elizabeth (1998). Discovering the Subject in Renaissance England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Headlam Wells, R. (2000). Shakespeare on Masculinity Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Healy, Thomas (1995). ‘Selves, states, and sectarianism in early modern England’. English, 44, 193–213. Hillman, R. (1997). Self-Speaking in Medieval and Early Modern English Drama. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Hunter, G. K. (1980). ‘Flatcaps and bluecoats: visual signals on the Elizabethan stage’. Essays and Studies, ns 33, 16–47. Jones, E. (1977). The Origins of Shakespeare. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kantorowicz, E. (1957). The King’s Two Bodies. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Kinney, A. (1999). Renaissance Drama: An Anthology of Plays and Entertainments. Oxford: Blackwell. Lanham, R. (1976). The Motives of Eloquence. New Haven: Yale University Press. MacFaul, T. (2007). Male Friendship in Shakespeare and his Contemporaries. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Martin, J. (1997). ‘Inventing sincerity, refashioning prudence: the discovery of the individual in Renaissance Europe’. The American Historical Review, 102/5, 1309–42.

Identity Maus, Katharine Eisaman (1995). Inwardness and Theater in the English Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Montaigne, Michel de (1634). The Essays, trans. J. Florio. London. Montrose, L. (1996). The Purpose of Playing: Shakespeare and the Cultural Politics of the Elizabethan Theatre. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Morris, C. (1972). The Discovery of the Individual 1050–1200. London: SPCK. Neill, Michael (1997). Issues of Death: Mortality and Identity in English Renaissance Tragedy. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Orgel, S. (1996; repr. 1997). Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ralegh, W. (1997). The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana, ed. N. L. Whitehead. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Read, D. (1992). ‘Ralegh’s Discoverie of Guiana and the Elizabethan model of empire.’ In D. G. Allen and R. A. White (eds.), The Work of Dissimilitude (pp. 166–76). Newark: University of Delaware Press. Sawday, J. (1995). The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture. London: Routledge.

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Sharpe, Kevin and Steven N. Zwicker (eds.) (2008). Writing Lives: Biography and Textuality, Identity and Representation in Early Modern England. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shepherd, S. (1985). ‘The Women’s Sharpe Revenge’: Five Women Pamphlets from the Renaissance. London: Fourth Estate. Smith, B. R. (2000). Shakespeare and Masculinity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stone, L. (1977). The Family Sex and Marriage in England 1500–1800. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Taylor, C. (1989). Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tyndale, William (1528). Obedience of a Christian Man. London. Ullman, Walter (1967). The Individual and Society in the Middle Ages, paperback edn. London: Methuen. Ullman, Walter (1977). Medieval Foundations of Renaissance Humanism. London: Paul Elek. Witmore, M. (2007). Pretty Creatures: Children and Fiction in the English Renaissance. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

75

Sexuality: A Renaissance Category? James Knowles

Come live with me, and be my love, And we will all the pleasures prove That valleys, groves, hills and fields, Woods, or steepy mountain yields. And we will sit upon the rocks, Seeing the shepherds feed their flocks By shallow rivers, to whose falls Melodious birds sing madrigals. And I will make thee beds of roses, And a thousand fragrant poesies, A cap of flowers, and a kirtle, Embroidered all with leaves of myrtle. A gown made of the finest wool Which from our pretty lambs we pull, Fair lined slippers for the cold: With buckles of the purest gold A belt of straw, and ivy-buds, With coral clasps and amber studs, And if these pleasures may thee move, Come live with me, and be my love. The shepherd swains shall dance and sing, For thy delight each May morning. If these delights thy mind may move; Then live with me, and be my love.

Marlowe’s ‘Come live with me and be my love’ is one of the most evocative and notorious lyrics of the late sixteenth century (Marlowe 1971: 211).1 First published

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in 1599 (six years after Marlowe’s death) snatches of the text appear in The Merry Wives of Windsor and The Jew of Malta, and the poem occasioned many responses, including Ralegh’s ‘The Nymph’s Reply’ and Donne’s ‘The Bait’ (Forsythe 1925: 701; Marlowe 1971: appendix). It is suffused with teasing sexual allure, made even more explicit in Ralegh’s reply, where the nymph rejects ‘folly ripe’ and ‘reason rotten’, and in Donne’s images of lovers like fishes caught by ‘curious traitors’ (nets). Clearly contemporary readers understood the poem’s ‘delights’ as moving far more than the mind. So, Marlowe’s poem supposes sex, but does it, therefore, require ‘sexuality’? This is more problematic, as the term ‘sexuality’ appears in the language in the nineteenth century only as an accompaniment to the developing science of sexology and the classificatory desires that instituted terms such as ‘homosexuality’ and ‘heterosexuality (Halperin 1991: 37–53, 482 n.2).2 As part of the broader project to discipline and control individuals through their identity, nineteenth-century medical discourses catalogued and named identities, describing some as perversions and others as acceptable and ‘normal’, Michel Foucault argues that the process of the ‘incorporation of perversions’ and the ‘specification of individuals’ created a new kind of identity (based on sexual object choice), and installed sexuality at the centre of modern senses of the self and as the primary targets of modern modes of social discipline. Foucault outlines an important distinction between acts and identities, using the creation of, first, the ‘homosexual’, then homosexuality, as his model: As defined by the ancient civil or canonical codes, sodomy was a category of forbidden acts; their perpetrator was nothing more than the juridical subject of them. The nineteenth-century homosexual became a personage, a past, a case history, and a childhood, in addition to being a type of life, a life form, and a morphology, with an indiscreet anatomy and possibly a mysterious physiology … The sodomite had been a temporary aberration; the homosexual was now a species. (Foucault 1978: 43)

This important distinction between acts (the temporary aberration of sodomy) and identity (the homosexual as a separate, defined species) has shaped recent histories of sexuality. Some critics argue that the institution of sexual differences as ‘identities’ creates the modern subject. Indeed, Eve Sedgwick extends the argument, regarding the prior creation of the homosexual as a foundational moment in the constitution of the modern Western heterosexual subject and the sexual binaries that have oppressed both men and women (Sedgwick 1990: 8–11, 67–90). Foucault’s reading of sexual history has several important ramifications, First, Foucault disrupts any sense of continuity with the past: we cannot look for gay or homosexual histories because none exist. It also powerfully challenges any simple notion of identity, directing research towards historically specific categories and discourses, based on particular societies and eras, rather than broad generalisations and transhistorical ideas (universals). Perhaps most importantly, Foucault places same-sex relations and their description and interpretation at the heart of any attempt to under-

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stand any sexuality. Foucault’s argument provides an important impetus to the consideration not only of how different oppressions of sexual minorities (for instance, prostitutes and sodomites) operate in connected ways, but of how sexuality operates in a more ‘unversalising’ manner in society, so that reading the position of erotic minorities no longer represents a marginal and minoritarian concern, but underpins how all forms of sexuality are conceptualised (Bly 2000: 17–18, 153 n.83). Taking a lead in this respect from Foucault’s approach, the rest of this chapter will explore the issue of same-sex relations to expose how a wider sexuality might, or might not, have existed and operated in the early modern period.

Acts, Identity, and Sodomy For early modern historians Foucault’s interest in acts has focused attention on the most prominent and strident concepts associated with inter-male relations: sodomy and the sodomite. Foucault described sodomy as an ‘utterly confused category’ partly because, despite the constant reiteration of its horrors, the term evades precise definition. Alan Bray has extended this account, showing how sodomy was mobilised as a catchall crime against those who threatened social order, including heretics (especially Catholics and Jesuits), witches, demons, and werewolves (Bray 1994; Foucault 1976: 101; Goldberg 1985: 1–26). It was an idea more akin to modern debauchery, and was thus less a sexual than a political and religious crime, its definition less precise, more shifting and mobile, more thoroughly contradictory, and more potentially inclusive of a whole range of sexual and non-sexual behaviours than modern sexual identities that have been mapped onto its varied terrain (Smith 1991: 42–53). Yet, paradoxically, alongside this repressive rhetoric of absolute prohibition of behaviours that might include same-sex desires and possibly acts stands the extensive and highly contradictory evidence of tolerance of male societies and relations, especially male friendship, sometimes labelled ‘homosocial’ bonds by later historians, in the central institutions of society (Bray 1990: 40–51).3 Thus historians and writers on sexuality have noticed, perhaps because the rhetoric surrounding sodomy was both so extreme and harsh and yet also so vague, that the basic male bonds that held this society together, and which demanded a male intimacy which might easily fall within the purlieu of this crime, seem rarely to have been considered in those terms (DiGangi 1997: 16–23). Indeed, there was a relative scarcity of prosecutions for sodomy, except in moments of political and social crisis when the potency of sodomy as a catchall came into force, and when male–male relations may have been a trigger or metaphor for wider social concerns and disruptions. Foucault’s powerful and compelling arguments have enabled a whole new field of sexual history, and have drawn attention to the insufficiencies of our assumption of sexuality as a ‘distinct and constitutive’ element of human nature (Halperin 1990: 26; DiGangi 1997: 2). Yet if the more stringent implications of a division between acts and identities are considered, does this necessarily mean that we must imagine a

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society entirely without any sense of sexuality, that there can be ‘no gay history, and that we are stuck with a hetero-normative past and a queer modernity’ (Boswell 1989: 20; Fradenburg and Frecero 1996: xiii–xxiv)? Marlowe’s ‘Come live with me’ troubles these arguments in a number of ways. We might accept that the poem is about ‘sex’, but that is itself an equivocal term: does it refer to the sexual act (to have sex) or to gender difference (to have a sex)? In fact, only the second of these senses was current in the 1590s,4 yet even that is not unambiguous within the poem as the gender of the addressee is far from obvious (see below). Moreover, the teasing opacity of the poem and our unwillingness to speak sex plainly hides but also (potentially) reveals a much wider range of sexual possibilities than those proposed by modern historians of sexuality, who primarily study official discourses (law, theology, medicine, and science) rather than the more subversive discourses of literary texts. Linguistic utterances, especially complex texts, may act as imaginative, temporary, spaces beyond the control of the sex police (Hammond 1996; Smith 1991). ‘Come live with me and be my love’ problematises sex in another sense, which bears out the subversive potential of texts. Perhaps acknowledging the force of Marlowe’s model, Catullus’ vivamus mea Lesbia, the responses from Ralegh and Donne onwards all assume that the addressee is female (Forsythe 1925: 695).5 One anonymous version praises the shepherd’s ‘summer queen’, another gives the nymph a name (‘Clarinda’), and Isaac Walton translates the poem into ‘The Milkmaid’s song’. These responses illustrate how quickly the apparently neutral term ‘sex’ shades into areas which we would place under the headings of gender and sexuality. Thus, the seductive attitude and the proffered gifts are as much about gender roles and the power relations they embody as they are about the sex of the speaker and addressee. Men seduce women with gifts, demonstrating their manliness through their wealth obtained through activity (work), women show their femininity through their passive acceptance and the adoration offered by men. Yet the responses are revealing in another way, in that they suggest a certain anxiety about the teasing, alluring eroticism of the poem, writing about and rewriting it in a resolutely sexed fashion. All the revisions assume that Marlowe writes about sex between different sexes, when the text is more equivocal. At no point is the sex/ gender of the addressee actually given, nor, indeed, of the speaker (which facilitates Walton’s female ventriloquism). Following Catullus, Ralegh may assume the addressee to be a nymph, and the other anonymous response in England’s Helicon may believe the object is ‘summer’s queen’. However, the poem offers us only ambiguity, and indeed, it remains very possible that awareness of the intertext highlighted this absence of clear sex identity. The matter turns on the term ‘kirtle’, which may (as in Hero and Leander) be a woman’s gown, or sometimes outer coat, or, as here, also a man’s tunic, especially a shepherd’s smock (OED, ‘kirtle’, 1, 2, and 2b). Genre may offer us another approach. As a pastoral or georgic poem, concerned with the idealised lives of rural shepherds, ‘Come live with me’ draws on a range of symbolically significant ideas and models in Renaissance culture, and the genre could be inflected and appropriated for various purposes, including political commentary,

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and the exploration of eroticism in amatory or sexual dalliance. At least one version of early modern pastoral allows that it might speak of those desires between men, and one of the best-known poem sequences in the Renaissance, Virgil’s Eclogues, includes the famous story of Corydon’s love for Alexis, the beautiful shepherd boy: Formosum pastor Corydon ardebat Alexin / delicias domini (Virgil 1979: 96). Modern commentators note that not only is Alexis the puer delicatus (favourite slave) of his master, hence Corydon’s frustration, but that Delicia domini may have more overt sexual senses, as deliciae (delights) implies sexual pleasures (Adams 1982: 196–7). The classically educated Marlowe certainly knew this poem and, indeed, Hero and Leander associates pastoral with the homoerotic in the tale of the ‘shepherd sitting in a vale / [Playing] with a boy so fair and kind’, told by Neptune to seduce a reluctant Leander (Marlowe 1987: lines 678–9). The sexual associations of pastoral were widely recognised in the period. In The Shepheardes Calender Spenser uses Virgil’s shepherd as the model for Hobbinol, who is enamoured of Colin, while in The Affectionate Shepherd (1594) Barnfield describes the love of Daphnis for Ganymede. In the commentary to The Shepheardes Calender written by ‘E.K.’ (opinions are divided whether this persona conceals Spenser or Gabriel Harvey), Hobbinol’s desire for Colin is glossed as ‘paederastice’, which is carefully differentiated from sodomy (‘disorderly love’) and also from ‘gynerastice’, the love of women, which is also defined as degenerate (‘Januarye’, gloss to line 59, in Spenser 1990: 33–4). This choice of such ‘learned’ terms may in itself be revealing and suggests that at least some sixteenth-century readers saw male–male relations in terms of the sexual (pederastic) patterns of classical society. This would dovetail with another aspect of the poem’s genre since, as a lower and simpler genre, pastoral was regarded as a suitable adolescent or apprentice piece for the poet who would then aspire to higher forms, such as epic. This educational frame places both the text and the relations it imagines within a recognised site of accepted homoerotic relations (Smith 1991: 82–3). Genre, context, and intertext might indeed then point towards a pattern of neoclassical sexual behaviour, used to explore and explain ideas and feelings beyond the condemnatory discourses of the church. Classical examples provide authoritative, culturally valued analogues and languages to describe, suggest, and even disguise emotions and desires for which there were no readily available categories or vocabularies. Indeed, although we cannot be certain how early modern people understood their sex acts and, perhaps, how those shaped any sense of identity, the historical record provides ample evidence of same-sex sexual activity, especially in continental cities such as Florence and Venice (Ruggiero 1985: 109–45). In Florence, recent research suggests that up to 17,000 individuals (of whom 3,000 were convicted) were incriminated for sodomy during a seventy-year period, in a city of roughly 40,000 inhabitants (Rocke 1996: 4). Italy’s sexual reputation was so notorious that it erupted in commonplace sayings and proverbs, such as ‘back-doored Italian’, or the German synonym for buggery, Florenzen (Dekker, The Honest Whore (1604), 2.1.353 (cit. Williams 1994: s.v. ‘back door’; Rocke 1996: 3). The continental evidence may provide the faint traces of sexual subcultures, while texts like Marlowe’s suggest that it was possible to

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imagine eroticism between men, and even that texts provided an imaginary space where those relations could be depicted in relative safety. Barnfield certainly suggests this in his dedicatory epistle to Cynthia (1595): Some there were that did interpret The Affectionate Shepherd otherwise than, in truth, I meant, couching the subject thereof, to wit, the love of a shepherd to a boy – a fault, the which I will not excuse, because I never made. Only this: I will unshadow my conceit, being nothing else but an imitation of Virgil, in the second eclogue of Alexis. (Barnfield 1990: 115–16)

Barnfield stages a most offensive defence. On one hand, the dangerous and sodomitical implications are rejected and turned back on the reader (their interpretation sees sodomy where there is none, or perhaps only E.K.’s ‘pederasty’). Indeed, Barnfield claims merely to imitate the pious and highly respectable Virgil. Yet in drawing attention to the potential sexual subtext Barnfield also gives another kind of reader a handy signpost ‘the love of a shepherd to a boy’ which some might see (and have seen) as sexual. Far from ‘unshadow[ing] his conceit’ Barnfield deftly cloaks it while alerting readers to the possible sexual subtexts. A careful reading of Marlowe’s poem leaves us, then, with several, sometimes contradictory, notions. On one hand, there is a sense of the distance between our conceptions of sex and, especially, gender (which must impact upon our understanding of the sexual and sexuality in the period). This is perhaps compounded by our unfamiliarity with the subtexts of the poem, especially the literary intertext and how to interpret its potential sexual meanings. Montaigne’s ‘On Some Verses of Virgil’ comments how ‘we beat it [sex] by circumlocution and picture’, and this opacity is only compounded in a world where we have lost the ability to read what might be complex, sub-cultural symbols and signs that allow the text’s ‘conceit’ to be unshadowed to a knowing reader (Smith 1991: 4–5) But, even by conceding that the poem shows an awareness of sex and sexual roles, as well as a certain sexual consciousness that lies akin to sexuality, if we accept the post-Foucauldian argument that there are only sexual acts and no concept of sexual identity, how can we read the relations between men in the poem? Indeed, more broadly, how do we understand the sexuality of an era that lacks that category of thought and where the evidence is so partial and contradictory? What sexual topography can we discern for the early modern period? The first, clearest, difference lies in the conceptions of sex and gender, the boundaries of the former being more fluid, the latter more rigid. Sexual knowledge in the period revolved round two overlapping medical traditions, the Galenic and the Aristotelian (Park and Nye 1991: 53–7). The two traditions focused their discussion of sex around two key issues: the nature of the male and female sexes and the process of generation, or reproduction (Laqueur 1990). Although there were considerable variations and contradictions within the explanations offered for the aetiology of gender, many subscribed to the idea of homology between the sexes, that is, that male and female were not so much different sexes, bur rather variations of a unitary species

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(Orgel 1996: 19–30 stresses the variations and contradictions in these medical models). In this explanation female genitals were regarded merely as simple inversions of the male genitals, internal rather than external: Axiomatic to medical theory was that women were weaker. Man was the measure of all things, so woman’s body was explained by the male model … her ovaries were termed ‘the female testes’ or testicles, and her reproductive organs were described as ‘no other than those of a man reversed, or turned inward’. Belief in the primacy of the male over the female informed explanations of reproduction: the male foetus was perfect earlier than the female, received a soul sooner, and was born sooner. (Crawford 1994: 91)

Here the process of generation assumes its main significance in early modern sexual theories. Aristotelian tradition created women as primarily incubators, while men produced the material necessary for the seed (almost an echo of the female body/male soul binary), arguing that conception did not require either female seed or orgasm. However, another powerful tradition countered that sexual generation required both male and female seed and male and female orgasm.6 Jane Sharp, the seventeenthcentury midwife, argued that ‘man in the act of procreation is the agent and tiller and sower of the ground, woman is the patient or ground to be tilled’, an interestingly metaphorical passage which bestows on the uterus (the ground) an almost autonomous status (The Midwives Book (1671), cit. Sawday 1995: 214). Most importantly, the boundaries between the sexes were regarded as more fragile, and since, in a humoral economy, men were seen as hot, women as moist, examples were often cited of women who became men through the generation of excessive heat (Jones and Stallybrass 1994: 85). If sex boundaries were more fluid, gender ones were more heavily demarcated, although they too seem to have been more easily permeated. The ultimate authority for this demarcation was taken from biblical texts such as Ephesians: Wives, submit yourselves unto your husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the saviour of the body. Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be in every thing. (Ephesians, 5:22–5)

Biology even informed the division of labour, along with medical ‘science’, arguing: Women were made to stay at home and look after household employments … accompanied without any vehemence stirring of the body … therefore hath provident Nature assigned them their monthly courses, that by the benefit of these evacuations, the feculent [fetid] and corrupt blood might be purified, which otherwise, being that purest part of blood, would turn to rank poison. (The Complete Doctress, cit. Martenson 1994: 107–33)

As one contemporary proverb expressed it, ‘men are deeds, women they are words’. Yet although such views insisted upon clear differences between genders, determined

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by biology, a counter-discourse stressed the fragility of manliness so that, as Orgel suggests, ‘manhood was not a natural condition but a quality that had to be striven for and maintained only through constant vigilance’ (Orgel 1996: 19). The main male deed, indeed, was performing manliness. This effort included the careful shaping of the manly body and behaviour towards suitable deportment through physical exercise, and the cultivation of qualities such as grace and civility. This was the subject of numerous manuals, from the courtesy books of Elyot (The Book of the Governor) and Castiglione (The Book of the Courtier), through to the more practical manuals such as Cleland’s Hero-Paidea (1607) and Peacham’s The Complete Gentleman (1622). The aim of these texts was to fashion a civilised manliness while avoiding the possible fall into effeminacy. In the cases of both sex and gender the ability of man to transform himself or be transformed was both a danger and a goal. On one hand, Pico della Mirandola argued that it was precisely man’s transformative abilities that defined his place between the divine and animal: Whatever seed each man cultivates will grow to maturity and bear in him their own fruit. If they be vegetative, he will be like a plant. If sensitive, he will become brutish. If rational, he will grow into a heavenly being. If intellectual, he will be an angel and the son of God. And if, happy in the lot of no created thing, he withdraw into the centre of his won unity, his spirit, made one with God, in the solitary darkness of God, who is set above all things, shall surpass them all. Who would not admire this our chameleon? … It is a man who Asclepius of Athens, arguing from his mutability of character and from his self-transforming nature, on just grounds says was symbolized by Proteus in the mysteries. (Kristeller et al. 1948: 223–6)

On the other hand, these transformative abilities also endangered man, as the boundaries of his gender, although strongly marked, could easily be dissolved. As Thomas Wright commented: ‘a personable body is so linked with a penitent soul; a valiant captain in the field for the most part is infected with an effeminate affection at home’ (The Passions of the Mind in General, cit, Orgel 1996: 25). Despite the implication of much early modern generative theory that all foetuses start as female, and despite the constant concern focused upon the regulation of female sexuality, the central sex and gender was male. Relations between males dominated social ordering, and everyone was defined in relation with other males, either fathers and brothers (for men) and fathers and husbands (for women). All the major institutions were entirely male, the social structure was built round systems of patronage and clientage between men, and many institutions, such as schools and universities, required men to share domestic space, and especially beds. The relations of master– servant, master–secretary, patron–client, and tutor–pupil were all central to society and were often couched in terms of an idealised friendship (Bray and Rey 1999: 65–84). These relations were, then, sites of most intense affective bonds, which may gloss E.K.’s preference for pederastice to gynerastice.

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The dual emphasis upon the importance of manliness as a performed role and the centrality of inter-male relations as the basis of social order places men and the male body at the centre of society in a way totally alien to modern thinking (which certainly for most of the twentieth century has erased the male body). Take, for example, William Laud (later archbishop of Canterbury) recording a dream in his diary: 21 August 1625 Sunday. I preached at Brecknock; where I stayed two days, very busy in performing some business. That night, in my sleep, it seemed to me that the Duke of Buckingham came into bed to me; where he behaved himself with great kindness towards me, after that rest wherewith wearied persons are wont to solace themselves. Many also seemed to me to enter the chamber who saw this. (Laud 1847–60: III, 170)

The dream recounts a fantasy of power for Laud, as the duke shows him favour by sharing his bed (it is important that this is seen by those who entered the chamber), but it also raises the issue of whether such bed-sharing and the opaque ‘great kindness’ also contained sexual elements. The lack of concern in the rest of the diary (contrast this with how an early twentieth-century writer might have responded to an earlier dream of bed-sharing) suggests that Laud regarded the situation as non-erotic, or that he was unwilling to commit any troubling erotic potential to paper. Yet might not the situation be erotic, and might this have been so commonplace that the absence of commentary marks its normativity? We are faced here with a situation parallel to that raised by the viewing of male portraits in Renaissance art. Among the numerous male portraits of the period which appear as highly erotic, one of the most striking is Bronzino’s depiction of a young, nude Lorenzo de Medici as Orpheus (Philadelphia Museum of Art), which was altered during its composition to accentuate Lorenzo’s nudity and foreground the model for Orpheus/Medici’s body, the ‘Torso Belvedere’ (Strehlke 2004: 130–3). Patricia Simons articulates the difficulties of describing this world of political manliness and male affectivity: The social circumstances, sexual practices, written languages and visual discourses of male bonding suggest that charged, erotic elements often informed the formation and performance of Renaissance masculinity. Whether or not bodily contact occurred, or would satisfy criteria of the ‘sexual’ kind for twentieth-century observers, Renaissance men addressed each other in affective ways which were so often tinged with the arousal of desire, that they were erotic. Male sexuality was performed across a wider spectrum of sensualities than modern standards usually allow, collapsing any clear boundaries between essential ‘gayness’ and a straightforward ‘heterosexuality’. (Simons 1997: 29)

This ‘wider spectrum of sensualities’ complicates the ways in which we might frame our understanding of sexuality in this period, since modern binarisations of the sexual and erotic occlude some of the complex modes of male affectivity and contain the

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desire we associate with the sexual, even if it might seem impossible to label them sexual in a post-Freudian sense. A literary analogue, Lewis Machin’s poem on Apollo and Hyacinth, from his Eclogues (1607), prompts one critic to observe that the ‘intensity of desire’ expressed in the language of dalliance (toying, playing, and sporting suffuse the poem), and the overlapping terms of ‘friends’ and ‘paramours’, complicates what bodily acts count as ‘sexual’, and the possibility that acts we regard as less erotic or sexual may have presented greater threats and more subversive potentials in early modern patriarchal culture (DiGangi 1997: 10–11). Simons raises indirectly one of the most difficult issues in understanding earlier sexualities, not simply the boundaries of the sexual, but whether this consciousness of ‘a wider spectrum of sensualities’ created the kind of consciousness necessary for sexuality to exist, even if not articulated through the exact term. Her description of the complex and multiple viewing positions of Renaissance male portraits implies the necessary sexual consciousness but also a complex pattern of sexual responses, differently defined from ours and, largely, operating outside the heterosexual–homosexual dichotomy (Simons 1997: 40). Indeed, historians of sexuality argue that the period was filled with all kinds of advice, usually couched within either religious or medical discourses, which recognised the importance of sex and sexual satisfaction (for both men and women) and displayed a striking ease with the idea of the erotic (Crawford 1994: 84–90).

Beyond Acts and Identities: The Possibility of Early Modern Sexuality Given this context and the complexities of the evidence, some recent scholarship has started to question the rigid Foucauldian division of acts and identity (DiGangi 2006). For instance, identities can often be said to be made by acts, so how did people who repeated these interdicted acts understand themselves and their motivations (Gaunt 1996)? As part of a wider revisionist reading of Foucault’s engagement with the conceptualisation of sex and sexuality, David Halperin has suggested that pre-modern individuals might well have made connections between ‘specific sexual acts’ and ‘the particular ethos, or sexual style, or sexual subjectivity of those who performed them’ (Halperin 2002: 32, cit. DiGangi, 2006: 130). Moreover, if we insist upon an understanding of sexuality and identity only as concepts created by ideology rather than by other, more diffuse kinds of experience, we risk privileging the sodomy paradigm above all others and seriously obscuring the potential varieties of discourses and experience that may have shaped any putative early modern sexuality. Mario DiGangi has argued precisely this: the sodomy paradigm appeals to scholars because of their ‘immersion in modern sexual ideology’ that treats all forms of homoerotic desire as socially transgressive or deviant (DiGangi 1997: 13, 16–17). These arguments raise the possibility that there might have been kinds of identity that are not based on our modern, autonomous, and self-contained sense of selfhood,

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and as such cannot easily be read or recognised by modern scholars. Foucault’s own language is revealing here: when he describes the nineteenth-century discovery of the homosexual as a ‘species’ he implies a whole raft of biological and medical ideas as defining identity, concepts which simply have no place in this period.7 Moreover, even within Foucault’s own periodisation, different and even incoherent ideas of sexual identity coexisted which might be in tension with the moral, legal, and medical conceptualisation of an abnormal sexual type (DiGangi 1997: 2–3). Models based on sexual inversion coexisted with homoerotic passionate comradeship, and even where sexual acts are involved among emerging sexual communities, such as in early twentieth-century New York, complex sexual taxonomies existed that were not synonymous with the homosexual/heterosexual binary (Chauncey 1994: 14; Cocks 2001: 191–223). The post-Foucauldian ‘assumption that unless we can find the subject as he is inscribed in our own language, then we cannot find him at all’ is complicated not only at the putative moment of the emergence of the homosexual species by the multiplicity of discourses available and the variable dissemination of the unified, binarised model, but also by the very possibility of other cultural constructs of (homo)sexuality beyond the arbitrary and contingent nature of the hetero/homo binary (Bredbeck 1994, cit. Bly 2000: 18; Cocks 2006: 1213–14). Interestingly, in contrast to early modern scholars, many medievalists dispute the Foucauldian depiction of sexuality as an ‘exclusively modern concept’ (Matter 1992: 2). Simon Gaunt, writing of medieval romance, insists upon the plurality of gay identities, arguing that a ‘similar though not identical’ homo/hetero dialectic operates in those texts (Gaunt, 1996: 157). The potential offered by these historicist but more diverse accounts of sexuality can be seen in two recent studies. Mario DiGangi’s The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama (1997) establishes, against the exclusive sodomy paradigm, the idea of an ‘orderly homoeroticism’, while carefully refusing to map this homoeroticism simply onto homosexuality, distinguishing early modern and modern senses of the sexual and sexual acts, and showing how same-sex desire in this period could not constitute a sexual minority as society separated men and women on gender lines, but also because the dynamic of power in these relations radically differentiated them, with men engaged in hierarchical relations (service, patronage), while women’s relationships were more equalised (premarital friendship) (DiGangi 1997: 12, 16, 26). In contrast to this avowedly universalising model, Mary Bly has taken the repertoire of one theatre company, and argued that the insistent sexual punning in the plays of the Whitefriars boys was designed to appeal to a community constituted from an erotic minority of those interested by and invested in homoerotic desires, where the representation of shared desires cements the community of spectators and readers. Concentration on the possibility of community leads to the suggestion that although individual ‘subjectivity defined by erotic choice’ may not exist, we can see a community ‘cognizant’ of shared desires. For Bly, ‘a lack of fixed labels need not imply a lack of association’ (Bly 2000: 17–18). An example that illustrates the difficulties in discerning and understanding early modern sexuality is the case of Sir Francis Bacon, who was impeached for corruption

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while Lord Chancellor.8 The diarist Simonds D’Ewes commented at length on his fall, but also on the sexual mores of the Bacon household: His most abominable and darling sin I should rather bury in silence then mention it; were it not a most admirable instance how men are enflamed by wickedness and held captive by the devil … [Bacon] would not relinquish the practice of his most horrible and secret sin of sodomy, keeping still one Godrick, a very effeminate-faced youth, to be his catamite and bedfellow – although he had discharged the most of his other household servants which was the more to be admired because men generally, after his fall, began to discourse of that unnatural crime which he had practised many years, deserting the bed of his lady (which he accounted as the Italians and Turks do, a poor and mean pleasure in respect of the other). And it was thought by some that he should have been tried at the bar of justice for it, and have satisfied the law most severe against that horrible villainy with the price of his blood. (Simonds D’Ewes, ‘Life’, British Library MS Harleian 646, fo. 59v)

Superficially, the D’Ewes’ account fulfils all the elements of the sodomy discourse (political motivation, foreign vice, other crimes in which sex is only a minor component), and Bacon’s ‘secret sin of sodomy’ fits what Alan Stewart has called the ‘crisis model’ whereby sodomy, or more properly the accusation of sodomy, only emerges after Bacon’s fall as part of his political disgrace.9 Thus far the D’Ewes account follows the pattern whereby sodomy accusations were levelled as adjuncts to other charges and symbolised how far individuals had transgressed the law (Bray 1994: 41). Yet the second part of the diary continues: [Bacon] never came to any public trial for his crime; nor did ever, that I could hear, forbear his old custom of making his servants his bedfellows, so to avoid the scandal was raised of him. (British Library MS Harleian 646, fo. 59v)

Among the striking elements in this account is Bacon’s continuation of his ‘old custom’ and the reported insistence not only on its ‘pleasure’ but its superiority to sex with his wife. In some ways, the diary seems to suggest a model which is close to E.K.’s image of pederasty and, interestingly, John Aubrey in Brief Lives described Bacon as ‘paiderastos’, claiming his ‘Ganymedes and favourites took bribes’ (Aubrey 1898: I, 71). The emphasis in the account upon the serving boys (‘one Godrick, a very effeminate-faced youth … his catamite and bedfellow’) also meshes with the patterns of sexual behaviour charted in many accusations, where the sexual relations shadow the power relations of master and servant, Indeed, to this extent, the Bacon case seems to echo the kinds of classical pattern outlined by critics like Foucault and David Halperin, whereby relationships depended upon a ‘structured inequality’ and a clear hierarchy (Halperin 1990: 47). Halperin, describing Athenian sexuality, argues that the essence of this lies in ‘a single, undifferentiated phallic “sexuality” of penetration and domination, a socio-sexual discourse whose basic terms are phallus and non-phallus’. In terms that could equally be applied to early modern society he further comments:

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Sexual penetration, and sexual activity in general, are … thematized as domination: the relation between the ‘active’ and the ‘passive’ sexual partner is thought of as the same kind of relation between that obtaining between social superior and inferior, between master and servant. (Halperin 1989: 49–51)

Although it is tempting to argue that the use of classical terms, images, and myths which pervaded early modern society may suggest that similar patterns of sexual mores operated, in fact a careful examination of the Bacon passage suggests that slightly different issues are raised within the hierarchy of the relationship. The insistence upon both pleasure and continuation, despite the threat of discovery, suggests a lack of control, which, in fact, threads throughout the narrative. D’Ewes, for instance, tells how a libel was thrown into Bacon’s home, York House, an act of symbolic penetration which furthers the impression of lack of control, while the poem which he reproduces claims: Within this sty a hog doth lie, That must bee hanged for sodomy.

A marginal note adds: ‘Alluding both to his surname of Bacon and to that swinish abominable sin’. Although the pig image clearly draws upon the association of sodomy and bestiality, it also insinuates ideas of prodigality. Indeed, one of the many accusations levelled at Bacon and his followers was their extravagance and immoderation, and interestingly some versions of the poem substitute ‘bribery’, the symbol of his immoderate desire for money, for sodomy. Like the ‘continuance’ of his catamitic connection and the description of Bacon ‘enflamed’ with lust and pursuing ‘pleasure’ irrespective of its moral rectitude, the juxtaposition of bribery and sodomy seems to suggest that lack of self-control is the issue. Interestingly, it is precisely this point that has been used to articulate a critique of the Foucault/Halperin reading of ancient sexuality. In Courtesans and Fishcakes, James Davidson has argued, forcibly, that penetration is not the issue in Greek culture (he associates this obsession much more with Christian and modern cultures) but rather insatiability and incontinence, which makes a man effeminate, that is, like the ‘leaky vessels’ that are women (Davidson 1998: 175–7). Failure in self-control is the problem (as in the Baconian exemplar), suggesting an ‘economic rather than absolute’ system of morals, which required moderation and restraint as central qualities (Davidson 1998: 314). These, too, are issues stressed in early modern tracts on manliness. The similarities of this model to Bacon’s incontinence are very suggestive, although it might also be said that the diary seems to combine elements of both the concern over penetration and the lack of self-control. Importantly for our main interest in sexuality, Davidson’s reading undermines the simpler versions of the acts/identities dichotomy because it suggests a reciprocity and a pleasure in sexual acts which the Foucault/Halperin model denies (or downplays), and which, in turn, implies a

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different type of sexual consciousness and, therefore, sexuality. Moreover, as we study early modern sexual behaviour we can see a combination of both the penetration/power model and the imperative towards self-control, along with more obviously Christian concerns about bodily integrity and, of course, an entirely different moral and juridical system built on ideas of sin and vice. If this reading is correct and early modern sexuality consists of an overlaying of several differing systems, often not entirely consistent with each other, this might explain the strange texture of early modern sexual discourses to modern perceptions. In particular, the incontinence model might explain how such a large range of sexual and other crimes become linked together under one label (sodomy), and also how men loving men and the behaviour of women are connected. The supposed ‘effeminacy’ of men may have nothing to do with passivity, a modern obsession, but rather with a lack of self-control. They, literally, become like women in gender discourse: This discourse inscribes women as leaky vessels by isolating one element of the female body’s material expressiveness – its production of fluids – as excessive, hence, either disturbing or shameful. It also characteristically links this liquid expressiveness to excessive verbal fluency. In both formations, the issue is women’s bodily self-control or, more precisely, the representation of a particular kind of uncontrol as a function of gender. (Paster 1993: 25)

This returns us to the interconnections between sexualities and a much more modern perception of the interconnection between oppressions rooted in gender and sexual identity. If modern historians of sexuality now stress how modern (sexual) identity is complicated by its heritage and a variety of categories of difference (class, race, nation, location, gender), early modern historians of sexuality have often acquiesced in a myth of lesbian invisibility (Cocks 2006: 1214). Yet one of the most powerful texts – strongly suggestive of an intense eroticism and an equally powerfully understood sense of sexual self (even if not a modern sexual identity) – is the lyric known as Poem XLIX from the Maitland MS (Farnsworth 1996: 57–7210). Drawing upon classical and biblical exemplars of male friendship (Achilles and Patroclus, David and Jonathan), the lyric also invokes female comradeship (Naomi and Ruth), but conceives of – or imagines – a ‘perfyte amitie for euer’ based on the ‘mair constancie in our sex’. The poem’s central conceit lies in a prayer for metamorphosis when the speaker imagines a marriage in which she assumes ‘your brutus pairt’, that is, she will take on the role of her friend’s Brutus (husband). The evocation of same-sex desire as marriage is complicated by the undertow not only of desire in which subjection and ravishment are described (‘Ye weild me holie at your will’), but also in the insistent sexual punning: to wish for the ‘brutus pairt’ is also to wish to be endowed with the male ‘part’ (penis). Poem XLIX brings together the two discourses of Renaissance lesbianism that have been traced by scholars like Valerie Traub, the learned and classical tradition of female

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friendship, of those she terms ‘femmes’ bound by traditional codes of gendered behaviour and appearance, and the more alarming ‘medico-satirical’ figure of the Tribade (Traub 2002: 8). Traub suggests that the increasing awareness of this latter figure – the female equivalent of the male sodomite – assisted by growing medical knowledge of female pleasure and especially of the clitoris, led in the latter part of the seventeenth century to a growing visibility of female same-sex relations which, in part, stimulated greater suspicion of relations of female amity that had hitherto been unsuspected (Traub 2002: 218). Yet, here, the evocation of the ‘brutus pairt’ acts to imagine a role for women within culture: ‘this lyric insists on the right of women to form a socially and religiously legitimized pair’ (Traub 2002: 290). Normally, perhaps because of the ‘palpable femininity’ of the women involved, such desires would go unchallenged unless they threatened to disrupt marriage and reproduction, or even offer the possibility of the real institution of a separate female community, but in this instance such a possibility is clearly envisioned without any of the sense of threat or rhetoric of opprobrium (Traub 2002: 182). Although Traub and other scholars are careful to note that these relations cannot be mapped onto modern lesbianism, the recovery of large numbers of texts and images suggests that such desires were far from invisible and, indeed, became the subject of medical and moral concern as awareness of the possibilities of female intimacy developed. It is fitting that a poem that has existed on the margins of the public world, anonymous and therefore oblique to the literary discourse of canonicity and authorship, preserved in manuscript, omitted from the early printed edition of the Maitland MS, and belonging to a tradition of national poetry that is itself often marginalised by accounts of the ‘English’ Renaissance, should become a central text in understanding the potential of early modern women to voice their desires. The conscious drawing together of literary traditions, and the subtle development of the erotic possibilities of Ovidian metamorphosis not only illustrate the ‘sapience superlative’ of the ‘learned Pallas redivue’ who produced the text, but also suggest the possibility of a cognizance of sexual pleasure, of female sexual desire, and even the glimmerings of the kind of sexual self-consciousness that might contribute to a sexual identity. Sex is, ultimately, one of the things we cannot recover about the past. What happened in intimate moments between men, between men and women, and between women is inaccessible. Sexuality, or the sense of sexual selfhood, is less unknowable. In a period where gender identity is so crucial, where being a man (or woman) has such profound meanings, and where those roles were heavily discussed, it seems improbable that there was not a sense of sexual consciousness, even if that cognizance of an engagement in acts, association with others, or the recognition of pleasure does not map simply or comfortably onto modern ideas of the autonomous and coherent sexual self. Within that, even if modern ideas of sexuality, especially the ways in which we insist on the hetero/homo binarism, did not exist, different patterns, some of which we have not yet learned how to read, may yet be traced. What is important, however, is that we have begun to discuss the possibility of sexual histories, sexual categories, and even sexualities, so that new interpretations are constantly revealed to

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us as new case histories are uncovered and, in turn, new and important questions are thus posed about our own categories and ideas.

Notes 1

This is the five-stanza version, first printed in England’s Helicon (1600). A four-stanza version, which may be an earlier draft, appeared in The Passionate Pilgrim (1599): see Marlowe 1987. 2 Halperin (1990) discusses the origins of these terms, which he traces to a pamphlet published in Leipzig in 1869. The terms became current through Kraft Ebbing’s Psychopathia Sexualis (1887), which was translated into English in 1892. 3 For an interesting application of these ideas to Timon of Athens, see Greene 1994. 4 OED attributes the first usage of ‘to have sex’ to D. H. Lawrence in 1929. 5 Forsythe (1925) argues that the poem cannot owe anything to Virgil’s Eclogues 2, because, he assumes and implies, it must be addressed to a woman.

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Children were supposedly formed from the active principle in male sperm shaping the female matter of menstrual blood according to some versions: see Crawford 1994: 92. The French of the passage reads ‘Le sodomite était un relaps, l’homosexuel est maintenant une espèce’: see La Volonté de savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976), 59. The English translation as ‘species’ emphasises the zoological sense, while ‘une espèce’ can also simply mean a type, sort, or kind. ‘Type’, ‘sort’, and ‘kind’ lack the biological implications of ‘species’. For an overlapping approach to Bacon’s fall, see Stewart 2001. We might note there are strong implications that this information has previously circulated with no official response or sanction. All citations are from the transcription given in this essay.

References and Further Reading Adams, J. N. (1982). The Latin Sexual Vocabulary. London: Duckworth. Aubrey, J. (1898). Brief Lives, ed. A. Clark, 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Barnfield, R. (1990). The Complete Poems, ed. G. Klawitter. Toronto: Associated University Presses. Bly, M. (2000). Queer Virgins and Virgin Queans on the Early Modern Stage New York: Oxford University Press. Boswell, J. (1980). Christianity, Social Tolerance. and Christianity: Gay People in Western Europe from the Beginning of the Christian Era. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Boswell, J. (1989). ‘Revolution, universals and sexual categories’, In M. Duberman, M. Vicinus, and G. Chauncey (eds.), Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (pp. 17–36). Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Bray, A. (1982; 1988). Homosexuality in Renaissance England. London: Gay Men’s Press. Bray, A. (1994). ‘Homosexuality and the signs of male friendship in Elizabethan England’. In J. Goldberg (ed.), Queering the Renaissance (pp. 40–61). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Bray, A. and M. Rey (1999). ‘The body of the friend’. In T. Hitchcock and M. Cohen (eds.), English Masculinities, 1660–1800 (pp. 65–84). Harlow: Longman. Bredbeck, G. W. (1992). ‘Tradition and the individual sodomite: Barnfield, Shakespeare, and subjective desire’. In Claude J. Summers (ed.), Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment England: Literary Representations in Historical Context (pp. 41–68). New York: Harrington Park. Brown, J. (1986). Immodest Acts: The Life of a Lesbian Nun in Renaissance Italy. New York: Oxford University Press.

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Brown, J. (1989). ‘Lesbian sexuality in medieval and early modern Europe’. In M. Duberman, M. Vicinus, and G. Chauncey (eds.), Hidden From History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (pp. 67–75). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Chauncey, G. (1994). Gay New York: The Making of the Gay Male World, 1890–1940. London: HarperCollins. Cocks, H. (2001). ‘Calamus in Bolton: spirituality and homosexual desire in late Victorian England’. Gender and History, 13, 191–223. Cocks, H. (2006). ‘Modernity and the self in the history of sexuality’. Historical Journal, 49, 1211–27, Crawford, P. (1994). ‘Sexual knowledge in England, 1500–1750’. In R. Porter and M. Teich (eds.), Sexual Knowledge, Sexual Science (pp. 82–106). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davidson, J. (1998). Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens. London: Fontana. DiGangi, M. (1997). The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. DiGangi, M. (2006). ‘Queer theory, historicism, and early modern sexualities’. Criticism, 48, 129–42 Farnsworth, J. (1996). ‘Voicing female desire in “Poem XLIX” ’. SEL: Studies in English Literature, 36, 57–72. Forsythe, R. S. (1925). ‘ “The Passionate Shepherd” and English poetry’. PMLA, 40, 692–742. Foucault, M. (1976; 1987). The History of Sexuality, esp. vol. 1: An Introduction (1976); and vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure (1987). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Foucault, M. (1978). The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans R. Hurley, vol. 1. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Fradenberg, L. and C. Freccero (eds.) (1996). Premodern Sexualities. London: Routledge. Gaunt, S. (1996). ‘Straight minds “queer” wishes in Old French hagiography’. In L. Fradenburg and C. Freccero (eds.), Premodern Sexualities (pp. 155–73). London: Routledge. Gerard, K. and G. Hekma (eds.) (1989). The Pursuit of Sodomy: Male Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe. New York: Harrington Books.

Goldberg, J. (1985). Sodometries: Renaissance Texts. Modern Sexualities. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Greene, J. (1994). ‘ “You must eat men”: the sodomitic economy of Renaissance patronage’. Gay and Lesbian Quarterly, 1, 163–97. Halperin, D. (1989). ‘Sex before sexuality: pederasty, politics and power in classical Athens’. In M. Duberman, M. Vicinus, and G. Chauncey (eds.), Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past (pp. 37–53). Harmondsworth: Penguin. Halperin, D. (1990). ‘Homosexuality: a cultural construct’. In D. Halperin, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (pp. 41–53). London: Routledge. Hammond, P. (1996). Love Between Men in English Literature. Basingstoke: Macmillan. Hekma, G. (1994). ‘The homosexual, the queen and models of gay history’. Perversions, 3, 119–38. Jones, A. R. and P. Stallybrass (1994). ‘Fetishizing gender: constructing the hermaphrodite in Renaissance Europe’. In J. Epstein and K. Straub (eds.), Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity (pp. 80–111). New York: Routledge. Kristeller, P. O., J. H. Randall, and E. Cassirer (eds.) (1948). The Renaissance Philosophy of Man. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Laqueur, T. (1990). Making Sex: The Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Laud, W. (1847–60). The Works of Archbishop Laud, ed. W. Scot, and P. Bliss, 7 vols.; vol. 3: Devotions, Diary and History (1853). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Marlowe, C. (1971). The Complete Poems and Translations, ed. S. Orgel. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Marlowe, C. (1987). The Complete Works of Christopher Marlowe, ed. Roma Gill et al., vol. 1: Translations. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Martenson, R. (1994). ‘The transformation of Eve: women’s bodies, medicine and culture in early modern England’. In R. Porter and M. Teich (eds.), Sexual Knowledge, Sexual Science (pp. 82– 106). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Matter, A. (1992). ‘Introduction’. Medieval Feminist Newsletter, 13, 2. Orgel, S. (1988). ‘Nobody’s perfect: or why did the English stage take boys for women?’ In R.

Sexuality Butters et al. (eds.), Displacing Homophobia: Gay Male Perspectives in Literature and Culture. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Orgel, S. (1996). Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Park, K. and R. A. Nye (1991). ‘Destiny is anatomy’. The New Republic, 18 February, 53–7. Paster, G. K. (1993). The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Rocke, M. (1996). Forbidden Friendships: Homosexuality and Male Culture in Renaissance Florence. New York: Oxford University Press. Ruggiero, G. (1985). The Boundaries of Eros: Sex Crime and Sexuality in Renaissance Venice. New York: Oxford University Press. Sawday, J. (1995). The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture. London: Routledge. Sedgwick, E. K. (1985). Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia University Press. Sedgwick, E. K. (1990). Epistemology of the Closet. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Shepherd, S. (1992). ‘What’s so funny about ladies’ tailors? A survey of some male (homo)sexual types in the Renaissance’. Textual Practice, 6, 17–30. Simons, P. (1997). ‘Homosociality and erotics in Italian Renaissance portraiture’. In J. Woodall

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(ed.), Portraiture: Facing the Subject (pp. 29–51). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Sinfield, A. (1994). Cultural Politics: Queer Reading. London: Routledge. Smith, B. R. (1991). Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare’s England: A Cultural Poetics. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Stewart, A. (1995). ‘The early modern closet discovered’. Representations, 50, 76–100. Stewart, A. (2001). ‘Bribery, buggery, and the fall of Lord Chancellor Bacon’. In V. Kahn and L. Hutson (eds.), Rhetoric and Law in Early Modern Europe pp. 125–42. New Haven: Yale University Press. Strehlke, C. B. (2004). Pontormo, Bronzino, and the Medici: The Transformation of the Renaissance Portrait in Florence. Philadelphia: Museum of Art. Summers, C. (ed.) (1992). Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment England. New York: Harrington Books. Traub, V. (1994). ‘The (in)significance of “lesbian” desire in early modern England’. In J. Goldberg (ed.), Queering the Renaissance (pp. 62–83). Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Traub, V. (2002). The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Virgil (1979). The Eclogues and Georgics, ed. R. D. Williams. Bristol: Bristol Classical Press. Williams, G. (1994). A Dictionary of Sexual Language and Imagery in Shakespearean and Stuart Literature, 3 vols. London: Athlone Press.

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Terminology matters in trying to make sense of a question like the one posed by the title of this essay. Several decades ago Joan Kelly asked a provocative question – ‘Was there a Renaissance for women?’ – that induced a new self-consciousness about the inclusiveness of the term ‘Renaissance’ (Kelly 1977). If there had been a ‘rebirth’ of classical culture in the fourteenth, fifteenth, and sixteenth centuries in many parts of Europe, and if for some this had included a sense of expanding horizons and opportunities, exactly who had gotten to participate in this process of revival and ebullient expansion? In particular, had women? Kelly, dealing primarily with elite women, felt that the answer was a qualified ‘No’. Most importantly, she successfully called attention to the gender blindness that can surround the use of a word like ‘Renaissance’ so that the experience of the privileged sex comes to stand for the experience of everyone. Of course, calling attention to the problematics of one term does not necessarily eradicate all difficulties with the alternative. When critics of English texts began to use the term ‘early modern’, which they borrowed from social historians, to describe the period stretching roughly from the reign of Henry VIII to the Restoration, they were critiqued for implying too sharp a break between the medieval and the early modern and for homogenising a period in which older and emergent elements of culture coexisted. Nonetheless, the debate over these terms is important for the problem at hand. In attempting to discern an early modern feminism, are we to focus on the large social transformations that the historians emphasise when they speak of the early modern? In other words, was there something in the inaugural moments of modernity that enabled a recognisable feminism to emerge? Or, conversely, are we looking in a more limited way at the domain of culture and asking whether the renewal of interest in classical literatures and the flourishing of vernacular ones were themselves the enablers of a feminism? Before circling back to this question, however, I need to address the equally complicated issue of feminism itself. What would count as feminism in the early modern

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moment? Certainly no one called herself a feminist in this period, any more than people called themselves homosexuals, though in the latter case scholars have shown that that does not mean there were no varieties of same-sex affection and erotic practice in the sixteenth century (Goldberg 1992). While today definitions of feminism vary, most would agree that dominant versions of liberal feminism since at least the time of Mary Wollstonecraft have been committed to the goal of gender equality and have often used a post-Lockean language of ‘rights’ in which to make the case for such equality.1 As a social movement, feminism has taken its actions in the name of a group, women, assumed to be subject to systematic oppression and exploitation on the basis of their sex. Moments of politicisation have occurred around struggles over specific issues such as the right of women to vote, to divorce, or to have legal abortions. At first blush, not much of what I have just described maps easily or without acts of translation onto the social world of sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, a time prior to Locke and the emergence of a discourse of rights and in which there is little evidence of political action carried on specifically in the name of women for the alleviation of women’s oppression. So how is it possible that we have books, and good ones, published with titles such as Renaissance Feminism (Jordan 1990)? What is being referenced? Most often, when literary critics speak of Renaissance feminism, they point first to the many texts that constitute explicit defences of women or play a role in the ongoing debate over the nature of woman, her proper role in marriage, and the education appropriate to her sex. In a groundbreaking book of 1984 Linda Woodbridge argued that what she calls the formal controversy over women had medieval origins, but that Renaissance humanism altered the tradition by adding classical materials to the exempla found in medieval treatises and by shaping the debates as often elegant examples of humanist logic and rhetoric. She asserted, however, that this formal controversy had little relationship to ‘real life’; that is, it neither expressed the actual views of its authors nor bore much relationship to existing social structures or beliefs. Instead, in her view the formal controversy was mostly a high-spirited game in which both male and female writers displayed their wit and their argumentative skills. Only in the more popular venue of the pamphlet wars involving cross-dressing in the decade before 1620 did aspects of the debate about women more closely approximate ‘real’ social concerns (Woodbridge 1984). By contrast, Constance Jordan (1990), in a comprehensive account of English and continental texts on ‘the woman question’, argues that this literature was a place where serious philosophical and religious debate occurred, some of it laying the groundwork for the emergence later in the seventeenth century of a rights-based discourse premised on the equality of persons. She finds particularly important the emphasis in many of the texts of the controversy on the spiritual equality of men and women, since from an assertion of such equality could eventually follow a critique of men’s presumptive dominance in other domains. Jordan is not bothered by the fact that she finds little evidence that actual women undertook collective political action

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to improve women’s lot or that much of the period’s pro-woman discourse focused on the merit of exceptional individuals. Rather, she sees the debates about women’s nature preparing the way for later arguments about representative government and the limits that should be placed both on magisterial and on patriarchal authority (Jordan 1990: 27). Jordan’s work raises the discussion of this debate literature to a new level. I disagree with the elastic and unselfconscious way in which she uses the term ‘feminist’ to describe many writings that, while ‘pro-woman’ in the sense of refuting the worst attacks of misogynist writers, nonetheless often accept the subordinate status of women and do not argue for their equality, spiritual or otherwise. I think it is clearer to reserve the word feminist for Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment contexts and to speak, regarding earlier periods, of proto-feminisms. Nonetheless, Jordan’s work demonstrates that the flourishing of print publication in what we once unselfconsciously called ‘the literary Renaissance’ allowed the debate on women to develop exponentially and to be widely disseminated. Moreover, that literature developed certain arguments that, in the long run, helped to produce a feminism more recognisable to modern eyes. This was so, paradoxically, despite the regressive nature of some of the arguments put forward in this controversy, and despite the fact that most of the writers, humanist or otherwise, who participated in this debate during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, were men. Besides their emphasis on female spiritual equality, the writings that comprise the debate on women are marked by productive contradictions that unsettle the idea of women’s natural and inevitable subordination. The paradox of women’s spiritual equality but social and political subservience to men is only the first of such contradictions, but one that could contribute both to the development of resistance theory (i.e. a wife should not obey her husband in cases where doing so would contravene her obedience to God) and also to the development of claims to the rights of all citizens as equal beings before the law. But contradictions also surround the woman’s place as parent and manager of household servants and, sometimes, apprentices. Often these tracts acknowledge that woman’s social place as wife and mother put her in a position of authority over subordinated men and made her the effective substitute for her husband in many daily matters. Hence the many pleas to respect the dignity of women and not, for example, to beat them as one would beat a slave (Fletcher 1995: 198–201). Such liberal rhetoric about treating women better is not exactly revolutionary. Often it does not insist on an alternation of social relations, only greater kindness to subordinated subjects. However, the contradictions surrounding women’s position in the household expose fault lines in patriarchal culture that could be exploited in subsequent political struggles. The Renaissance as a literary phenomenon thus indirectly contributed to a Renaissance proto-feminism – if by that claim we mean that the process of proliferating printed texts on the woman question helped to materialise a body of discourse that not only voiced the contradictions of the existing gender system but could also provide a stockpile of raw materials for subsequent moments of political struggle.

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Moreover, certain of the writings about women, such as the cross-dressing tracts and debates about the conventional nature of men’s and women’s gender roles, had powerful denaturalising potential. In the Haec Vir tract of 1620, for example, the mannish woman, nattily dressed in the clothing of the opposite sex, holds forth at length about the way in which custom, rather than nature, determines not only what clothing should be worn by each sex, but also in what activities each should engage. Her argument culminates with the resounding assertion that ‘Custom is an Idiot!’ (Henderson and McManus 1985: 284). Such a sentiment has unpredictable consequences. Even though this tract backs down from its more radical implications by averring, ultimately, that women would be more womanly if men were only more manly, and hence reaffirming conventional gender roles, the ending of the narrative does not cancel the more subversive middle, whatever the intentions of the author. A final point to be made about the ‘feminist’ implications of the debate about women has to do with the possibility that some key texts in this tradition were actually catalysts for the politicisation of women as subjects whose gender could be a point of alliance with other women in the struggle against patriarchal oppression. Foucault pointed out that discourse could breed counter-discourse and resistance. For example, in the mid-sixteenth century John Knox’s infamous attack on the legitimacy of Mary Tudor as queen of England produced a spate of defences of women that rolled on for the ensuing fifty years. Perhaps of greater interest is the way in which Joseph Swetnam’s 1615 pamphlet, Arraignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward, and Unconstant Women, provoked a stinging rebuttal, a play entitled Swetnam the Woman-hater Arraigned by Women. In this case, a scurrilous attack on women led to the representation of women’s imagined politicisation. Though it is not known whether this play was authored by a man or a woman, Valerie Wayne (Frye and Robertson 1999: 221–40) interestingly argues that the gender of the writer is not as important as the way in which a violently anti-feminist polemic provoked a strong counter-discourse that imagined a collectivity of women bringing Swetnam into a court of law to indict him for crimes against women. The anonymity of the play ironically reveals the performativity of gender in that the outraged ‘feminist’ point of view articulated in the drama is not secured by the biological identity of the writer but by the successful manipulation of rhetorical counters. At the same time the play reveals that gender – at least imaginatively – could be a recognised rallying point for political action. The women who dominate the play are depicted as a collectivity who use political and juridical institutions to defend their sex against slander. Whether ‘real’ women actually could and did act in this way is partly beside the point. What the Swetnam controversy reveals is the possibility of the debate about women producing a discourse of collective female action in defence of themselves as an oppressed social class. And, as I have argued elsewhere, it is inconceivable that such a response could have taken shape as it did without both a flourishing popular print and theatrical culture in the city of London and also a pre-existing discursive tradition of debate on the woman question (see Howard, in Frye and Robertson 1999: 308–9). These provide the conditions of possibility for the

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emergence of a play that records the fantasy of women banding together to use a central cultural institution, a court of law, to indict a man for crimes against the female sex. This, I would argue, is a distinctly feminist fantasy, no matter what the intent of the person who was its author. My first argument, then, is that what has been referred to as the debate about women, despite all its contradictions, is part of the prehistory of modern feminism, especially when it moves beyond the praise of exceptional women, or praise of women’s virtue and modesty, to identify all women as a class of subjects unjustly subordinated because of their sex. The language in which ‘feminist’ arguments are cast, however, can sound quite unlike the secular terms in which claims for women’s rights have been articulated from the eighteenth century on. Much discourse about equality and women’s worthiness is couched in a religious register. For example, in response to Joseph Swetnam’s misogynous attack on women, a 1617 pamphlet entitled Esther hath hanged Haman, bearing the name Esther Sowernam (probably a pseudonym), drew on Scripture to mount its defence of women. Laying out her argument, the speaker promises to explain: first, what incomparable and most excellent prerogatives God hath bestowed upon women in honour of them and their creation; secondly, what choice God hath made of women in using them as instruments to work his most gracious and glorious designs for the general benefit of mankind both during the law of Nature and of Moses; thirdly, what excellent and divine graces have been bestowed upon our sex in the law of Grace and the work of Redemption; with a conclusion that, to manifest the worthiness of women, they have been chosen to perform and publish the most happy and joyful benefits which ever came to mankind. (Henderson and McManus 1985: 223)

It is the spiritual equality of women in the eyes of God, and only to a lesser extent arguments about their actual power in the household and the family, that constituted the principal terms upon which discursive struggles against men’s systematic privilege could be voiced. In considering the proto-feminism of the period, it is also important to recognise just how many early modern women were themselves authors or writers, whether or not they were penning defences of women. Many of the best-known of these writers such as Mary Wroth, Aemelia Lanyer, or Katherine Philips, were elite women, and while the content of what they wrote could not always be called ‘feminist’ or even pro-woman, some of it contributed to discourses praising women’s friendship and women’s erotic ties with one another (Traub 2002). These and a host of less elite women writers helped to form a tradition of female authorship, which, in the eighteenth century, would so flourish that the race of ‘scribbling women’ would come under repeated attacks for the ‘unchaste’ nature of their public voice. By writing, and in some cases by publishing their texts, women authors were usurping a masculine subject position, though they seldom did so for overtly subversive purposes. But

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separating effect from intentions, we can see that the increasing number of women writers created the conditions of possibility for women’s voices, including feminist ones, to be a part of the emerging public sphere of print. At this point, however, I wish to turn from literary production to the social world of seventeenth-century England. While most literary discussions about Renaissance feminism start with the issue of the woman writer and with the formal debate about the nature of women, a debate which I would characterise as part of the efflorescence of vernacular literatures from the fourteenth to the sixteenth centuries, the relationship between this debate and actual social actions on behalf of women is more occluded and complex. It is somewhat naive, of course, to talk about discourse and ‘real life’ as if nothing has happened when ‘mere’ words and narratives are let loose upon the world. That, I think, is the fundamental flaw in Woodbridge’s approach to the formal controversy about women. She assumes that texts, unaccompanied by documented evidence of organised political actions, are mere sport without social consequence, rather than discursive events that can prepare for and indeed precipitate events in the political or economic realms. When we turn to those realms, much more evidence is now available than we possessed even two decades ago about women as social actors in the early modern period. And here I do self-consciously shift to the historians’ term, early modern, to discuss the panoply of social, political, and economic factors that affected women’s situation and structured their possible ‘feminism’. For me the benefit of the term early modern lies, first, in indicating that the genealogy of many of the institutions we associate with the modern era – the supposed separation of private from public spheres, the break-up of Catholic hegemony in Europe, the rise to cultural pre-eminence of the bourgeoisie, the emergence of capitalism – can be traced to the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in much of northern Europe, though not all these events or phenomena came to fruition in these centuries. The adjective ‘early’ indicates that fact: namely, that we are dealing with a period of transition in which there has as yet been no sharp break with many aspects of medieval culture and in which emergent elements of modernity are hardly recognisable as such. One major consequence of the intensive study of early modern women in the last two decades has been the recognition that in this transitional period women were much more active social agents than the prescriptive literature on the desirability of their chastity, silence, and obedience would indicate (Rackin 2005). Whether one examines women’s roles as active litigants defending themselves against charges of slander in the church courts (Gowing 1996), their role in arranging marriages for their children (Ezell 1987), their role in enforcing community norms through charivaris and other forms of discipline (Underdown 1985), their participation in the management of property (Erickson 1993), their role in pawnbroking activities in relation to the London public theatres (Korda, in Harris and Korda 2002: 202–29), their participation in radical religious sects (Hinds 1996), their role in cultural performances in great houses and popular venues (Brown 2003; Brown and Parolin 2005), the agency in household management (Wall 2002), or their participation in early

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modern imperial and colonialist practices (Ferguson 2003; Hall, in Traub, Kaplan, and Callaghan 1996: 168–90), scholars have increasingly found evidence that early modern women exercised a sometimes surprising degree of power within the household, the community, and the nation. They may not have been vested with formal authority within patriarchal structures, but they nonetheless found ways to exert influence and exercise agency in the interstices of those structures. The literature of the period often bears traces of their struggles to do so. If ordinary and elite early modern women were more active social agents than the prescriptive literature may have led earlier generations of scholars to believe,2 the political upheavals of the mid-seventeenth century intensified women’s overtly political activities and brought them to greater cultural visibility, especially within the radical religious sects where women often assumed public roles once reserved for men. Quaker women, women who were part of the Fifth Monarchist movement, women who were part of Digger communities – all of them were active participants in spiritual and political movements (and the two were inseparable in the period) that led to a general loosening of the strict bonds of social hierarchy that had not only maintained a monarchy but a patriarchy as well (Weisner 1993: 203–10). As James Holstun has argued, while none of the radical sects actually preached the social equality of women, in practice female members of these sects functioned as preachers, prophets, and spiritual leaders, finding in the lived praxis of daily activity new and revolutionary possibilities for female agency and political efficacy (Holstun 2000). In the Civil War period, women repeatedly petitioned Parliament on issues such as the end of debt laws, the release of John Lilburne from prison, and the end of martial law. The 1649 petition on the latter subject contained the following language: ‘Since we are assured of our creation in the image of God, and of an interest in Christ, equal unto men, as also of a proportionable share in the freedoms of this commonwealth …’ (Weisner 1993: 245). Asserting equality with men before God and as members of the commonwealth, these women asserted their political right to petition their Parliament. A growing body of evidence suggests that through these and similar actions a large number of women participated in daily religious-political struggle of a sort that for a time effectively altered the terms of the gender system. The case of Anna Trapnel is instructive. A member of the Fifth Monarchist movement, Trapnel gained a considerable notoriety in the 1650s as an opponent of Cromwell. The Fifth Monarchists were a millenarian sect that believed the kingdom of God was soon to be established on earth. They took their name from Daniel’s vision of an everlasting kingdom that was to follow the four great monarchies of the world. After the collapse of the Barebones Parliament in 1653 and Cromwell’s assumption of the protectorship, the Fifth Monarchists were steadfast in their opposition to his rule. Trapnel was a member of this movement, an unmarried woman whose economic position as the sole child of a fairly wealthy widow provided the material basis for her remarkable independence, even as the radical London churches with which she was associated in the 1640s prepared her for the role of public prophecy and spiritual leadership she was soon to assume. Supported by groups of Puritan women, among

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whose households she was a frequent visitor, Trapnel undertook fasts and foretold, among other things, the collapse of the Rump Parliament. When, in fury, Cromwell imprisoned many male Fifth Monarchists at the beginning of his protectorate, Trapnel assumed a more public role. From an inn in Whitehall – at Cromwell’s very doorstep – she fasted and uttered prayers and prophecies that were heard and discussed by many people (London preachers, Fifth Monarchists and others) who thronged to her chamber. Eventually two large books containing her prophecies were published, widely disseminating her plans for Christ’s kingdom on earth and her subversive threats against Cromwell’s authority. The point is not that Trapnel was another ‘exceptional woman’ but rather that, though she is atypical in the notoriety that came to surround her, her practical role in the radical sects appears not to have been so very anomalous. Radical women’s participation in religious and political struggles of the mid-seventeenth century in effect eventuated in altered gender possibilities within the social communities where the sects flourished. This did not constitute a feminism that proclaimed itself in the terms of later middle-class languages of right and rationality. In fact, the irrational, visionary excesses of a Trapnel would probably have deeply offended an Enlightenment feminist such as Mary Wollstonecraft. Nonetheless, the praxis of such women, justified in religious terms, constituted a de facto proto-feminism of a fairly impressive order. Ironically, however, it is not these radical women but their middle-class sisters who came to dominate what has been perceived as the main strand of modern feminism. Affected by the enormous changes wrought by the transition to capitalism, the middling sort of women increasingly were pushed from roles in productive trades and became guardians of the domestic sphere, a story that has often been told (Clark 1919). It was from that domestic sphere that women who were largely excluded from public life began to make claims to education and treatment as rational beings, often arguing that they would be better mothers, wives, and companions if granted the education befitting the dignity and importance of these roles. Later, demands for the right to divorce, to vote, to hold property while married, to have access to contraception and abortions, to gain entry to all-male institutions, and to achieve equal pay for equal work unfolded. So was there a Renaissance feminism that inaugurated this later history? As I hope I have demonstrated, the answer to this question cannot be simple. The literary Renaissance produced what I have called particular proto-feminist effects. The debate about women, sometimes regressive in its politics, nonetheless widely circulated the idea of women as men’s spiritual equals, denaturalised inherited notions of gender difference, and articulated the possibility of women uniting as an oppressed social class to demand redress from patriarchal oppression. In addition, a limited number of mostly elite women accrued cultural capital by participating in the efflorescence of writing that marked the Renaissance emergence of vernacular literatures. At the same time, social changes of an enormous sort were giving rise to two separate kinds of ‘feminist’ activity. On the one hand, the religious and political ferment of the mid-

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century, itself very much part of an early modern transformation of society, spawned a radical religious politics in which women played a new and important role that for a time, effectively rather than theoretically, transformed gender practices within particular segments of English society. But the mid-century upheavals also produced the eventual triumph of bourgeois forces, a triumph that has ironically occluded most of the vestiges of the radicalism of the mid-century, including the radicalism of lowerclass women. It also produced, however, the conditions of possibility for a middle-class feminism to emerge, a feminism that was gradually constituted in relationship to a more fully articulated and absolute separation of private and public domains and on the elevation of domesticity within the nuclear family as women’s primary vocation. This kind of distinctly modern feminism hardly can be said to exist before the bourgeois era, in part because the lives of early modern women did not conform to the templates for women’s lives that emerged during the Enlightenment. As I have suggested, however, there were forms of gender subordination prevalent in the early modern period and forms of early modern gender struggle, both discursive and material, through which resistance to gendered forms of oppression was articulated. If these struggles did not always look like Enlightenment versions of feminism, they were nonetheless there, and the inadequacies of our terminology should not erase them.

Notes 1

2

For a complex discussion of the consequences, for women, of Locke’s interventions in seventeenth-century political discourse and their attendant gender implications see Pateman 1988. For example, Lena Cowen Orlin (2007) has recently published a remarkable account of a

woman named Alice Barnham who, in the first half of the sixteenth century, participated in many of the religious and commercial concerns of her time and whose life can be re-created and documented entirely through what we now think of as public records.

References and Further Reading Brown, P. A. (2003). Better a Shrew than a Sheep: Women, Drama, and the Culture of Jest in Early Modern England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Brown, P. A. and P. Parolin (eds.) (2005). Women Players in England, 1500–1660. Aldershot: Ashgate. Charles, L. and L. Duffin (eds.) (1985). Women and Work in Pre-Industrial England. London: Croom Helm. Clark, A. (1919; repr.1982). The Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century, ed. M. Chaytor and J. Lewis. London: Routledge.

Erickson, A. L. (1993). Women and Property in Early Modern England. London; Routledge. Ezell, M. J. M. (1987). The Patriarch’s Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. Ferguson, M. (2003). Dido’s Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Ferguson, M., M. Quilligan, and N. J. Vickers (eds.) (1986). Rewriting the Renaissance: The Discourses of Sexual Difference in Early Modern Europe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Was There a Renaissance Feminism? Fletcher, A. (1995). Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500–1800. New Haven: Yale University Press. Frye, S. and K. Robertson (eds.) (1999). Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens: Women’s Alliances in Early Modern England. New York: Oxford University Press. Goldberg, J. (1992). Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Gowing, L. (1996). Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harris, J. G. and N. Korda (eds.) (2002). Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Henderson, K. U. and B. F. McManus (eds.) (1985). Half Humankind: Contexts and Texts of the Controversy about Women in England, 1540–1640. Urbana: University of Chicago Press. Hinds, H. (1996). God’s Englishwomen: SeventeenthCentury Radical Sectarian Writing and Feminist Criticism. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Holstun, J. (2000). Ehud’s Dagger: Class Struggle in the English Revolution. London: Verso Books. Hufton, O. (1998). The Prospect Before Her: A History of Women in Western Europe 1500–1800. New York: Vintage. Hull, S. (1982). Chaste, Silent, and Obedient: English Books for Women 1475–1640. San Marino: Huntington Library. Jordan, C. (1990). Renaissance Feminism: Literary Texts and Political Models. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Kegl, R. (1994). The Rhetoric of Concealment: Figuring Gender and Class in Renaissance Literature. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

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Kelly, J. (1977). ‘Did women have a Renaissance?’ In R. Bridenthal and C. Koonz (eds.), Becoming Visible: Women in European History (pp. 139–64). Boston: Houghton Mifflin,. Mendelson, S. and P. Crawford (1998). Women in Early Modern England, 1550–1720. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Orlin, Lena Cowen (2007). Locating Privacy in Tudor London. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pateman, C. (1988). The Sexual Contract. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Prest, W. R. (1991). ‘Law and women’s rights in early modern England’. The Seventeenth Century, 6/2, 169–87. Rackin, P. (2005). Shakespeare and Women. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sanders, E. R. (1998). Gender and Literacy on Stage in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Traub, V., M. L. Kaplan, and D. Callaghan (eds.) (1996). Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Traub, V. (2002). The Renaissance of Lesbianism in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Underdown, D. E. (1985). Revel, Riot, and Rebellion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wall, W. (2002). Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Weisner, M. E. (1993). Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Woodbridge, L. (1984). Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540–1620. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

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Drama as Text and Performance Andrea Stevens

The straightforward title of this essay conceals a host of complex issues, beginning with the relationship between an early modern text and an early modern performance. Given the relative scarcity of information about the staging of early modern plays, the earliest printed plays often constitute our most significant source of information about early modern theatrical practice. However, as many critics have noted with caution, the play in print form is not equivalent to the play in performance, nor are private reading and public watching necessarily commensurate pursuits. The early printed plays themselves often emphasised this difference between reading and playgoing. In his preface addressed ‘To the Reader’ in The Fawn (1606) John Marston claimed: ‘Comedies are writ to be spoken, not read: remember the life of these things consists in action.’ The publisher’s note to Richard Brome’s Five New Plays (1659) expresses regret that the reader is encountering this collection in the study rather than in the theatre: ‘these comedies exactly being dressed for the stage’. Ben Jonson was perhaps unusual in his appreciation of his plays’ literary, rather than theatrical, potential. In some remarks attached to the 1631 octavo edition of The New Inn, Jonson hopes print will deliver the failed play to a more appreciative audience of discerning readers. Whereas The New Inn was ‘negligently played, by some, the King’s Servants’, print will set his creation ‘at liberty to the readers, His Majesty’s Servants and subjects, to be judged’. This seeming opposition between page and stage has shaped the criticism of early modern drama. The ‘new critics’ of the first half of the twentieth century largely excluded theatrical forms from their consideration of plays as verbal icons; within the last twenty years or so, however, it has become increasingly common for critics to engage more directly with performance and also to debate the relationship between theatrical and literary analysis as complementary – or potentially incompatible – modes of enquiry (Dawson 1991; Foakes 2005; Kidnie 2000). Barbara Hodgdon and others (including theatre practitioners) argue that texts contain within themselves traces of an ‘ideal’ or authentic performance that careful reading can recover (Hodgdon

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1980; see also Tucker 2002). W. B. Worthen dissents from this view of textual authority, maintaining that theatre ‘operate[s] in a given social and historical horizon’ and that every performance changes the text into ‘something else … not captive to the designs of the text’ (Worthen 1997: 180). Jonathan Miller similarly views ‘the afterlife’ of a play ‘as a process of emergent evolution, during which meanings and emphases develop that might not have been apparent at the time of writing, even to the author’ (Miller 1986: 13). Steering this discussion in a new and fruitful direction altogether (and reinvigorating notions of authorial intention), some critics have recently come to question the ways in which certain playwrights consciously sought to translate the theatrical aspect of their work into print; Holger Schott Syme’s recent account of the ways in which playwrights like Jonson and Marston ‘found ways of making the book a theater’ is an excellent example of such an approach (Syme 2008: 144; see also Erne 2008; Peters 2000). This essay begins by describing the processes by which a dramatic script became a printed ‘book’ for sale to a reading public. Next, it considers recent research into the material conditions of early modern theatre, noting how performance-oriented critics weigh this evidence against the texts of early printed plays in order to speculate about what early modern playgoers might have seen. My assumption here is that text and performance need not be regarded as ‘mutually exclusive territories’ (Syme 2008: 142); early play-texts undoubtedly suggest particular modes of dramaturgy of interest to academics, editors, and readers. What contemporary directors wish to make of these suggestions – how these insights ought to inform the present-day performances of Shakespeare, for example – is a matter for separate consideration.

Drama as Text: Early Printed Play-Texts There is no doubt that printed plays were a familiar part of English literary culture. We must bear in mind, however, that of the professional plays that were performed in England between 1576 and 1642, fewer than a fifth were ever printed, and of that number not all survive today. Plays made up a relatively small percentage of the overall book trade and did not enjoy the same literary status as poetry, sermons, philosophical treatises, or even classical drama. Thomas Bodley banned printed plays: cheap quarto editions he dismissed, as ‘riff-raff ’ and ‘baggage books’, from his library at Oxford. Those writers with ‘literary’ aspirations worked in other genres; again, the self-promoting Jonson was unusual in that he oversaw the publication of his plays in the 1616 folio Works, an endeavour for which he was roundly mocked (the anonymous epigram ‘To Mr Ben Jonson’ teasingly enquires ‘pray tell me, Ben, where doth the mystery lurk / what others call a play, you call a work’). His action nevertheless set the precedent for Heminges and Condell to do the same with Shakespeare’s plays in the 1623 Folio. By contrast, Shakespeare himself had nothing to do with the printing of the eighteen of his plays that appeared in quarto editions in his own lifetime (Kastan 1999: 77; for a dissenting view see Erne 2008).

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As most critics frame it, to an early modern playwright, ‘publication’ implied performance on stage, and not printing in a book. Theatre companies commissioned or purchased plays from playwrights. There was no early modern equivalent to our proprietary notions of intellectual copyright, and authors did not retain any rights as such over their creations. The person entitled to print a play for public sale was quite simply the person who, after acquiring a script from the playhouse or through some other means, registered the title in the Stationers’ Register – usually, but not always, after the play had been performed and thus had come to the attention of the public (Blayney 1997; see also Lesser 2004). Publishers would not have cared about authorial intention or consent, since neither had anything to do with legal publication. Plays from the period often survive in multiple versions, and it has been the task of later editors and critics to determine which of these variations is the most authoritative. One view that has dogged Shakespeare criticism is the notion of piracy: it used to be considered that unscrupulous individuals would steal plays from hapless acting companies and then illicitly print them for profit. Piracy was thought to explain the origins of ‘bad’ quartos such as the Q1 Hamlet, with its infamous ‘to be, or not to be; aye, there’s the point’. Companies anxious to recoup their losses might respond by issuing ‘good’ quartos or more accurate, authoritative versions of the play: ‘to be, or not to be; that is the question’. In an essay in A New History of Early English Drama, Peter Blayney argues persuasively that this old saw of piracy depends upon an anachronistic view of authorship and of the legalities of the book trade – and also overestimates the profit to be had in printing plays at all. The non-dramatic works of the period proved consistently more popular than the dramatic ones; Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, for example, outsold his best-selling play, 1 Henry IV, by four editions (Blayney 1997: 388). Blayney outlines a variety of reasons for the publication of plays, including – provocatively – advance publicity. The reopening of the theatres after periods of closure often coincided with larger numbers of plays registered for printing; Blayney speculates that these printed texts were intended to whet the public’s appetite for seeing plays (Blayney 1997: 386). This would make the relationship between publication and performance mutually sustaining rather than mutually exclusive: reading plays perhaps excited, rather than extinguished, the desire to see them performed. Ultimately, the explanation for the existence of plays in different versions can be attributed to the fluid nature of the script itself. At the risk of oversimplifying a complex and variable process involving multiple hands, the dramatic text would, before its first performance, exist in three different forms and would be open to revision at nearly every stage. The dramatist would have submitted a handwritten manuscript (‘foul’ papers) to a scribe for transcription, and this ‘fair copy’ would then be delivered to the theatre company (Werstine 2004). Scribes had to do more than simply copy manuscripts in good; they had to make sense out of what might have been illegible or otherwise confusing material. A member of the theatre company – usually the book-holder or prompter – would make adjustments to the fair copy, adding, clarifying, and deleting material. This prompter was an important figure who supervised

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the timing of performances and ensured actors met their exits and entrances. Plays were often cut to reduce playing time; the title page of a 1623 edition of The Duchess of Malfi, for example, announces it includes scenes never before performed because ‘the length of the play would not bear in presentment’ (cit. Rasmussen 1997: 442). The cut or marked-up text became the ‘book of the play’ and, from the point of view of the theatre company, the text’s most valuable form. The play would also have been subject to censorship (Dutton 2000). Many factors influenced the shape of the play: prompters’ cuts, censorship, to say nothing of the exigencies of live performance. In Making Shakespeare Tiffany Stern succinctly describes these various stages in the life of a play-text: The playwright’s foul papers may have been written up in fair copy by a scribe who would then also have made scribal alterations to the text; the neat text will have been given to the prompter who would have made prompter’s alterations as well as censoring the play – and possibly both; that censored, scribal text will have been given to the Master of the Revels for final censoring and corrections before the play was returned to the playhouse and the actors’ parts were created. In other words, even by the time actors received their parts, the text could be far removed from what the author had written. (Stern 2004: 145)

Stern also argues that plays often underwent revision based on what happened during the first performance. Any one of these versions – the author’s manuscript draft, a scribal copy, a transcript made by an actor, a collation of the actors’ parts – could have found its way from publisher to printer and from thence to a reading public. As Blayney puts it, ‘any kind of manuscript playbook that can conceivably have existed could conceivably have found its way into print’ (Blayney 1997: 393). Moreover, additional changes to the text could take place at the printing stage itself: misreadings, inadvertent omissions, improvisational substitutions. The 1600 quarto of The Merchant of Venice prints a heated exchange between Bassanio and Shylock curiously punctuated by question marks: ‘Every offence is not a hate at first?’ Stern suggests this is because the compositor simply ran low on periods, and so substituted one form of end punctuation for another (Stern 2004: 152–3).1 A better understanding of the physical manufacture of books illustrates the danger in approaching ‘Shakespeare’s punctuation as rhetorical stage direction’, the title of a recent article. Perhaps early modern punctuation can be viewed as a species of stage direction, most reasonably as a guide to speaking dialogue according to period conventions of pausing and breath: the direction might not, however, be authorial. As we consider the relationship between text and performance, we must also bear in mind that certain aspects of the theatrical process probably remained oral. Playwrights would have prepared their dramatic scripts for a particular company of players rather than for a general readership or, to borrow a phrase from the sonnets, for ‘the eyes of all posterity’. Gary Taylor suggests someone like Shakespeare, a sharer in the theatre company for which he wrote, would understand that his first readers would be ‘a particular group of actors, his professional colleagues and personal friends, who

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would in turn communicate the plays through performance to a wider public’ (Taylor 1987: 2). The induction to Cynthia’s Revels satirises this practice. The play begins with two child actors praising Jonson for his restraint in contrast to the over-zealous interference of other writers: 3 child: 2 child:

… but I would speak with your author: where is he? We are not so officiously befriended by him, as to have his presence in the tiring-house, to prompt us aloud, stamp at the book-holder, swear for our properties, curse the poor tire-man, rail the music out of tune, and sweat for every venial trespass we commit.

Given what we know of Jonson’s temperament, this might be Jonson poking fun at himself. The joke nonetheless indicates that it was not unusual for playwrights to make suggestions – tactful or not – about the performance of their plays. Important information about staging could have taken place collaboratively and orally, at the play’s first collective reading, or during rehearsal (see Stern 2000). Sometimes a play’s dialogue clearly implies particular actions; in cases where an aspect of stage business is less clear, the playwright (if present) might have explained what he had in mind, or the actors might have decided for themselves, or indeed the actors might simply have followed prevailing theatrical conventions so entrenched they did not need to be spelled out in writing. Taylor describes these unrecorded negotiations as ‘an invisible life-support system of stage directions’ (Taylor 1987: 2). In other words, the performance of plays drew upon a common ‘theatrical vocabulary’ that might not be obvious to us now. Knowing more about these ‘unrecorded negotiations’, for example, would certainly clarify the puzzling Soliman and Perseda play within a play in Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy (1587). The revenger Hieronimo announces that this show is to be performed ‘in sundry languages’, but the surviving text prints the play in English. Did the play’s original audience see Solimon and Perseda unfold in Latin, Greek, French, and Italian; in some sort of made-up ‘theatre’ language Kyd invented for its impressive sound; or indeed in English, with the actors merely playing the fiction of multilingualism in the same way they played the fiction that it was ‘dark’ when they discovered Horatio’s body hanged in the ‘arbour’? The foregoing account should make clear that early modern plays were collaboratively produced and subject to various forms of mediation as they moved from dramatic script to live performance to print. Theatrical professionals made important decisions about performance together – with or without the guidance of the author – and these decisions may or may not be evident from printed play-texts. Moreover, multiple versions of the same play survive (conspicuously so, in the case of the Hamlets). Critics still passionately debate the nature of these textual variations, especially when it comes to competing Shakespeare texts (Menzer 2008). Which surviving text tells us more about the author’s intent? Which about theatrical practice? Which about irregularities in terms of the printing or licensing of plays? Which set of beliefs

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about authorship, playhouse practice, and print culture best explains the relationships among texts – and among texts and performances? Since these beliefs necessarily undergo revision as we find new evidence about early modern theatrical practice (and as we reappraise familiar ‘facts’), critics must settle for the dissonance of doubt rather than the ring of certainty.

Drama as Performance: The Evidence for Spectacle It is widely known that the acting companies of the early modern period were allmale, that roles were doubled, that background scenery was not used, and that the physical features of the outdoor amphitheatres and the indoor playhouses influenced the shape and execution of plays (see Chapter 42, Playhouses, Performances, and the Role of Drama). But beyond these basic insights not a lot of primary evidence survives to help us visualise the plays as they were originally performed. Alan Dessen describes the situation rather bleakly: ‘Most of the relevant evidence, including many things so obvious to players and playgoers in the 1590s and early 1600s as to be taken for granted, has been lost’ (Dessen 1995: 6). For some critics, especially for those whose own Shakespearean aesthetic is one of minimalism, this lack of evidence perhaps does not much matter. For some time the prevailing view of the early modern stage has been one of flexible emptiness (see Brook 1968). Granting the use of emblematic costumes and a few key props, language was exalted as the most important element of early modern drama, not spectacle. Lexis was held to supersede opsis; verbal descriptions created time, atmosphere, and place. Thus the guards in the first moments of Hamlet set the scene by announcing that it is cold and dark, and by observing that the three witches melt ‘into the air … as breath into the wind’, Macbeth turns their exit into a supernatural ‘vanishing’. As Andrew Gurr so authoritatively phrased it, people spoke of going to ‘hear’ early modern theatre, rather than to see it (Gurr 1996). Jonson would approve of this sentiment; in the prologue to Cynthia’s Revels he exhorts his audience to heed ‘Words, above action; matter, above words’. Jonson is, however, describing his ideal rather than his actual audience, with the clear implication that he resents competing with those aspects of drama outside the realm of his authorship. While it is certain that early modern plays relied upon the imaginative participation of spectators to ‘eke out performance’, as the chorus of Henry V suggests, spectacle was undoubtedly a crucial part of drama’s appeal. A survey of the period’s stage directions reveals shag-haired devils with squibs in their mouths; bleeding hearts upon daggers; gods descending in stage machinery amid the noise of thunder and lightning; tombstones that ‘fly open’ to ‘emit a great light’.2 The early modern stage made more use of significant objects than traditional criticism has assumed – from metonymic props, to rich costumes, to decorated stage hangings, to actors’ painted bodies. These visual signs were often read symbolically, as was the space of the playhouse itself with its overarching ‘heavens’ and its trap-

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door signifying hell (Stern 2004). Indeed, although only one drawing of a playhouse survives from the period (the de Witt sketch of the Swan Theatre) we are coming to know more about the shape and layout of early modern theatrical playhouses and amphitheatres, especially after such lucky finds as the discovery in 1989 of the foundations of the Rose playhouse. In the last ten years increasing attention has been paid to the material conditions of early modern drama, for example Peter Stallybrass and Ann Rosalind Jones on clothing (2000); Natasha Korda, Jonathan Gil Harris, and Andrew Sofer on stage properties (Harris and Korda 2002; Sofer 2003); Farah Karim-Cooper on cosmetics (2006); and Will Fisher on the prosthetic materials of gender (2006). These theory-savvy discussions of theatrical materials cast new light on what early modern audiences might have seen when they went to the playhouse. The ‘diary’ of theatre entrepreneur and owner of the Rose playhouse, Philip Henslowe (1550–1616), is one of the most frequently cited repositories of external evidence about early modern performance. Henslowe’s papers include records of payments made to writers, box-office takings, repertory schedules, and property inventories for the Lord Admiral’s Men (items include a ‘Dido’s tomb’, a ‘hell mouth’, and a ‘cauldron for the Jew’ for use in The Jew of Malta). Henslowe’s inventory is not exhaustive, but it does provide information about the company’s more durable or important props, some of which were literal objects, others symbolic or metonymic tokens (such as a robe ‘for to go invisible’). If this inventory tells us something about the nature of objects used onstage, Henslowe’s payments to writers for ‘altering’ or ‘mending’ plays written by others further confirms the collaborative nature of early modern authorship, as well as reminding us that early modern theatre was first and foremost a moneymaking venture. A handful of eyewitness accounts also survive. The Swiss traveller Thomas Platter (1574–1628), for example, visited London in 1599 and wrote about attending the theatre. In his journal, Platter emphasises the layout of the outdoor amphitheatres and the actors’ rich clothing: Thus daily at two in the afternoon, London has two, sometimes three plays running in different places, competing with each other, and those which play best obtain most spectators. The playhouses are so constructed that they play on a raised platform, so that everyone has a good view. There are different galleries and places, however, where the seating is better and more comfortable and therefore more expensive … And during the performance food and drink are carried round the audience, so that for what one cares to pay one may also have refreshment. The actors are most expensively and elaborately costumed; for it is the English usage for eminent lords or knights at their decease to bequeath and leave almost the best of their clothes to their serving men, which it is unseemly for the latter to wear, so that they offer them then for sale for a small sum to the actors.3

The astrologer, occultist, and medicine man Simon Forman (1552–1611) kept a Book of Plays which mentions four shows he saw at the Globe in 1611: Macbeth, The

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Winter’s Tale, Cymbeline, and Richard II (not Shakespeare’s). Unfortunately for us, Forman does not really provide a detailed description of stage business, acting style, or materials, although he makes the following suggestive observation about the appearance of Banquo’s ghost in the banquet scene in Macbeth: The next night, being at supper with his noblemen whom he had bid to a feast to the which Banquo should have come, he began to speak of noble Banquo, and to wish that he were there. And as he thus did, standing up to drink a carouse to him, the ghost of Banquo came and sat down in his chair behind him. And he, turning about to sit down again, saw the ghost of Banquo, which fronted him so, that he fell into a great passion of fear and fury …4

One of the most important long-term studies of early English drama ever undertaken is the Records of Early English Drama project. An internationally coordinated project headquartered at the University of Toronto, REED gathers, publishes, and interprets a range of data about medieval and early modern performance across England. The project is not limited to the performance of professional plays in London; in their own words, REED ‘examines the historical MSS that provide external evidence of drama, secular music, and other communal entertainment and ceremony from the Middle Ages until 1642’. Some of the best of this information comes in the form of basic financial records, for example the accounts of the craft guilds responsible for staging the medieval mystery plays. The York Mercers’ indenture of 1433 lists payments for a gilded mask and diadem (‘a diademe with a veserne gilted’). We know the Mercers put on The Last Judgment, a pageant that included speaking parts for both ‘God the Father’ and ‘God the Son’; this and other entries suggest the use of gold face paint, gold masks, or both to signal God’s radiance. Other REED records tell us about the materials (‘peynt’ or more homely ingredients such as soot) used in early English blackface performance, information that helps us contextualise blackface on the English public stage (see Twycross and Carpenter 2002). Notwithstanding the questions of textual authority and stability summarised above, and in contrast to those who believe that scripts cannot encode performance, certain influential critics suggest that the earliest printed plays still count as our best guide to what playgoers might have seen when they went to the theatre. In his seminal Recovering Shakespeare’s Theatrical Vocabulary (1995), Alan Dessen examines the 600 or so surviving texts of plays performed between the 1580s and the early 1640s. He focuses in particular on the stage directions found in these plays, cues that are either authorial or that originated in theatrical practice – and that must be distinguished from those stage directions supplied by modern editors. The virtue of Dessen’s approach is his impressive breadth. His familiarity with nearly every extant play from the period enables him to point out habits of theatrical practice that might otherwise have escaped our attention. To cite one brief example, if we examine the many circumstances in which stage directions call for ‘nightgowns’ we will see that, aside

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from functioning literally to establish time (night) or place (as from a bedroom), nightgowns were also used to convey a sense of unreadiness, unease, or a ‘troubled conscience’. This latter context clarifies what might otherwise seem like a puzzling cue in the Q1 Hamlet: ‘enter the Ghost in his night gown’ (Dessen 1995; see also Dessen and Thomson 1999: 150). These stage directions are not, of course, transparent. Dessen points out that it is difficult to determine whether a stage direction implies the use of a specific visual effect or some combination of dialogue and mimed action: ‘interpretations today, whether on the page or on the stage, can therefore be skewed if the interpreter invokes an elaborate object or effect that was not there in the original (a tree, a tomb, a bed) and at the same time buries some object or effect that would have been obvious, even italicized for the original playgoer’ (1995: 196). Of enduring interest to critics is the vexed question of whether, or to what degree, Elizabethan and Jacobean audiences expected to see anything like ‘realistic’ effects. Consider various cues for blood: ‘Envy, his arms naked besmeared with blood’; ‘bloodies himself with Sueno’s blood, and falls down as dead’; ‘his wounds gaping and after him Lucrece undressed, holding a dagger fixed in his bleeding bosom’ (for a list of such visual cues see Dessen and Thomson 1999: 32–3). Were these bodies bloodied in ways that we would consider verisimilar? Or was the blood (as has once been suggested) ‘laid on in metaphor only’, or indeed indicated with non-‘naturalistic’ signs or tokens? Costumes were among a theatre company’s most expensive resources. We can imagine theatre professionals hesitating to spoil their property with messy blood effects. Bloodied bodies would also have posed a challenge when it came to continuous staging and the doubling of parts – a bloodied actor is an actor who cannot immediately regroup to perform in a subsequent scene. On the other hand, we take for granted that medieval theatre was full of gruesomely literal blood effects; why, then, would the plays of the London professional theatre be so different? Indeed, evidence indicates that paint, trick bladders, red-soaked sponges, and even animal entrails were used to represent violence and bodily injury, The Battle of Alcazar (1591) apparently employing ‘3 vials of blood and a sheep’s gather’ for one especially gory battle scene (Reynolds 1940: 40, ‘gather’ or ‘pluck’ meaning heart and liver). Evidently blood, then as now, had commercial appeal. In attempting to reconstruct early modern performance we cannot impose our own aesthetic values or theatrical practices on the period, whether that imposition takes the form of assuming a Brooksian ‘emptiness’, operating with anachronistic notions of ‘realism’ or ‘stylisation’, or conjuring or ruling out special effects with insufficient warrant (see also Miller 1986). Perhaps it is safest to assume that the earliest printed plays – if approached in the right spirit – can indeed yield valuable information about Elizabethan and Jacobean theatrical convention, and that words, bodies, voices, sound, and literal and symbolic visual signs combined to create complex clusters of signs in ways that might now surprise us. How else to view the following description of the apotheosis of Hercules from Heywood’s The Brazen Age, performed at the Red Bull in 1611, but as a mix of all of these elements?

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Enter Hercules from a rock above, tearing down trees … All the princes break down the trees and make a fire, in which Hercules placeth himself … Jupiter above strikes him with a thunder-bolt, his body sinks, and from the heavens descends a hand in a cloud that from the place where Hercules was burnt, brings up a star, and fixeth it in the firmament.

Notes 1

2

Although question marks and exclamation marks were interchangeable in the period (Simpson 1911: 85). See respectively Christopher Marlowe’s Dr Faustus; John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore; Thomas Heywood’s The Silver Age; and Thomas Middleton’s The Second Maiden’s Tragedy.

3 4

The Journals of Two Travellers in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England (Razell 1995: 26). The quotation from Forman’s Book of Plays is taken from William C. Carroll’s edition of Macbeth (Shakespeare 1999: 155).

References and Further Reading Blayney, Peter (1997). ‘The publication of playbooks’. In John Cox and David Scott Kastan (eds.), A New History of Early English Drama. (pp. 383–422). New York: Columbia University Press. Brook, Peter (1968). The Empty Space. New York: Avon. Dawson, Anthony (1991). ‘The impasse over the stage’. English Literary Renaissance, 21, 309–27. De Grazia, Margreta, Maureen Quilligan, and Peter Stallybrass (eds.) (1996). Subject and Object in Renaissance Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dessen, Alan (1995). Recovering Shakespeare’s Theatrical Vocabulary. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dessen, Alan and Leslie Thomson (1999). A Dictionary of Stage Directions in English Drama, 1580–1642. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dutton, Richard (2000). Licensing, Censorship, and Authorship in Early Modern England. Basingstoke: Palgrave. Erne, Lukas (2008). Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Fisher, Will (2006). Materializing Gender in Early Modern English Literature and Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Foakes, R. A. (ed.) (2002). Henslowe’s Diary, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Foakes, R. A. (2005). ‘Performance and text: King Lear’. Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England: An Annual Gathering of Research, Criticism and Reviews, 17, 86–98. Gurr, Andrew (1992). The Shakespearean Stage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gurr, Andrew (1996). Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, 2nd edn. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gurr, Andrew and Mariko Ichikawa (2000). Staging in Shakespeare’s Theatres. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harris, Jonathan Gil and Natasha Korda (2002). Staged Properties in Early Modern English Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hodgdon, Barbara (1980). ‘Shakespeare’s directorial eye: a look at the early history plays’. In Sidney Homan (ed.), Shakespeare’s ‘More than Words can Witness’: Essays on Visual and Nonverbal Enactment in the Plays (pp. 115–29). Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press. Jones, Ann Rosalind and Peter Stallybrass (2000). Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Karim-Cooper, Farah (2006). Cosmetics in Shakespearean and Renaissance Drama. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Kastan, David (1999). Shakespeare after Theory. New York: Routledge. Kidnie, Margaret Jane (2000). ‘Text, performance, and the editors: staging Shakespeare’s drama’. Shakespeare Quarterly, 51, 456–73. Lesser, Zachary (2004). Renaissance Drama and the Politics of Publication: Readings in the English Book Trade. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lopez, Jeremy (2003). Theatrical Convention and Audience Response in Early Modern Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Love, Genevieve (2003). ‘ “As from the waste of Sophonisba”: or, what’s sexy about stage directions’. Renaissance Drama, 32, 3–31. Menzer, Paul (2008). The Hamlets: Cues, Qs, and Remembered Texts. Newark: University of Delaware Press. Miller, Jonathan (1986). Subsequent Performances. New York: Viking. Peters, Julie Stone (2000). Theatre of the Book, 1480–1880: Print, Text, and Performance in Europe. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rasmussen, Eric (1997). ‘The revision of scripts’. In John D. Cox and David Scott Kastan (eds.), A New History of Early English Drama (pp. 441– 60). New York: Columbia University Press Razell, Peter (ed.) (1995). The Journals of Two Travellers in Elizabethan and Early Stuart England: Thomas Platter and Horatio Busino. London: Caliban Books. Reynolds, George Fullmer (1940). The Staging of Elizabethan Plays at the Red Bull Theater. New York: Modern Language Association.

Shakespeare, William (1999). Macbeth, ed. William C. Carroll. Boston and New York: Bedford/St Martin’s Press. Simpson, Percy (1911). Shakespearian Punctuation. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sofer, Andrew (2003). The Stage Life of Props. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Stern, Tiffany and Simon Palfrey (2007). Shakespeare in Parts. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stern, Tiffany (2000). Rehearsal from Shakespeare to Sheridan. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stern, Tiffany (2004). Making Shakespeare: From Page to Stage. London: Routledge. Syme, Holger Scott (2008). ‘Unediting the margin: Jonson, Marston, and the theatrical page’. English Literary Renaissance, 38/1, 142–71. Taylor, Gary (1987). General Introduction to William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Tucker, Patrick (2002). Secrets of Acting Shakespeare: The Original Approach. New York: Routledge/ Theatre Arts. Twycross, Meg and Sarah Carpenter (2002). Masks and Masking in Medieval and Early Tudor England. Aldershot: Ashgate. Werstine, Paul (2004). ‘Narratives about printed Shakespeare texts: “foul papers” and “bad” quartos’. In R. McDonald (ed.), Shakespeare: An Anthology of Criticism and Theory 1945–2000 (pp. 296–317). Oxford: Blackwell. Worthen, W. B (1989). ‘Deeper meanings and theatrical technique: the rhetoric of performance criticism’. Shakespeare Quarterly, 40, 441–55. Worthen, W. B (1997). Shakespeare and the Authority of Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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The Debate on Witchcraft James Sharpe

One of the more remarkable features of the early modem period was the European witch craze. Much written about and much misunderstood, the witch craze remains a fascinating subject that continually attracts the attention of both academic and popular writers. Briefly, between about 1450, when the witch stereotype really emerged, and about 1750, when Enlightenment thinkers derided witch-persecution and most states removed witchcraft as an offence from their law codes, large numbers of people, including many very intelligent and very educated people, believed in witchcraft, and in almost all European states witchcraft was regarded as a criminal offence. Gaps in the records make precision impossible, but current thinking suggests that, despite some much wilder estimates, in the 300 years after 1450 some 100,000 people were accused of witchcraft before a court of law, of whom 40,000 were executed, women witches forming some 80 per cent of this total. Despite the attention devoted to the subject, its causes remain debatable: early modern witch-hunting has been variously attributed to the Reformation, the Counter-Reformation, the intolerance of the church more generally, the rise of the early modern state, the spread of rural capitalism and the break-up of the village community, patriarchy and misogyny, and, less certainly in the opinion of most scholars, to the use of hallucinogenic drugs or the shock that syphilis gave to Europe’s moral system. In England witchcraft became a legally defined offence punishable by death. The first English witchcraft statute was passed in 1542, but was repealed in 1547, not due to any lessening belief in witchcraft, but rather as part of a clearing operation preceding a projected reform of a range of Henrician legislation. New statutes came in 1563 and 1604, these being repealed in 1736. Many of the relevant court records are missing, but a reasonable estimate would be that a maximum of 500 people were hanged for witchcraft in England. The subject has inspired much good historical work. There were some excellent early pioneering studies, but for a generation or so thinking on the history of witchcraft in England was dominated by the approach enshrined by two books, those

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published by Alan Macfarlane in 1970 and Keith Thomas in 1971. This approach interprets English witchcraft from the perspective of neighbourly disputes and peasant beliefs and sets it in the context of the socio-economic changes of the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods. Witchcraft accusations, on this model, were characteristically launched by richer against poorer villagers, and could be interpreted as reactions to population pressure, worsening relations between comfortably off and poor villagers, and the erosion of communal solidarity. Macfarlane’s and Thomas’s work constituted a completely new approach to the history of witchcraft. No longer could popular thinking about witchcraft in the early modern period be written off as peasant superstition or ignorance. Their emphasis did, however, lead to a downgrading of what might be described as the intellectual history of witchcraft, of how the phenomenon looked to members of the educated elite. More recently historians have returned to this issue, their interest in many ways paralleled by recent work on witchcraft by literary scholars. Thus in this essay I hope to examine some of the ideas expressed in print about witchcraft in England in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. My starting point will be 1566, when the first English witchcraft trial pamphlet was published. I shall end in 1634, with the publication of Heywood and Brome’s The Late Lancashire Witches, a play based on an actual incident whose handling by central government symbolised an important shift in official thinking. One of the peculiarities of English witchcraft history is that the first full-scale text written on the subject, Reginald Scot’s Discovery of Witchcraft of 1584, was unrelentingly sceptical. Scot was an obscure Kentish gentleman, his only other known publication being, as befits a native of Kent, on hop cultivation. His Discovery is a major achievement, pursuing a coherent and well-structured argument over several hundred pages, and in the process citing over 200 foreign and thirty-eight English works. Scot was clearly aware of local beliefs, and his book in fact opens with a classic exposition of the ‘charity refused’ model of a witchcraft accusation that was to become central to Macfarlane’s and Thomas’s interpretation. But his main objective was to challenge the assumptions of learned authors. That famous witchcraft treatise, the Malleus Maleficarum, published by two Dominican friars in 1487 and noteworthy for both its virulence against witches and its misogyny, was ruthlessly attacked, as was Jean Bodin’s De la Démonomanie des Sorcières, published in 1580 and the most respected work on demonology in the late sixteenth century. Scot’s tract was obviously widely known. Playwrights used it, and it was frequently excoriated by demonologists, while there is an unsubstantiated but instructive tradition that James VI and I ordered it to be burnt by the common hangman. Scot has attracted considerable praise from recent writers, who have tended to see him as an early rationalist, a thinker clearly ahead of his time. He was certainly guided by a rough common sense, which led him to regard much of what witches were meant to do as patently absurd. But his more philosophical objections are, in fact, founded on a clear and, in some respects at least, orthodox religious position. It should be noted, however, that Scot’s personal religious beliefs have recently become a matter

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of some speculation. David Wootton, for example, has advanced the argument that Scot was attracted to the ethos of the Family of Love (Wootton 2001). Scot was undeniably very hostile to Roman Catholicism: while not actually equating Catholicism with witchcraft, he frequently affirms (and this view was held by other English Protestant writers) that the type of superstitions which encouraged witch-hunting were very similar to what Scot regarded as the superstitious excrescences of the Catholic Church. More importantly, Scot’s writing demonstrates a major sceptical position of the period: uncritical belief in witchcraft gave too much agency to the Devil and his human agents, and consequently downgraded the importance of God. Scot argued that the popular tendency to attribute misfortunes to witchcraft demonstrated an imperfect grasp of God’s purposes: the problems attributed to witchcraft were, in fact, the outcome of divine providence, not of demonic agency combined with human malice. Scot also opened a theme that was to become common among sceptics when he claimed that the scriptural references so often adduced by demonological writers were mistranslations or misinterpretations of the Hebrew of the original texts. Scot, therefore, was not a precocious proto-rationalist, but somebody, although his exact position might be a matter of opinion, firmly located in the intellectual world of his time. His Discovery demonstrates clearly that, despite the modem predisposition to regard witch-hunting as a metaphor for the unthinking bigotry of past ages, there were a number of intellectual positions that could be held on witchcraft, and the subject was one that was a matter for debate rather than something on which opinion was hegemonic. Much the same is true of the writings of another author who has been claimed as an early rationalist by some modern commentators, George Gifford. Gifford (c.1548–1620) was a Church of England clergyman, educated at Cambridge, and minister of the small Essex port of Maldon. A man of advanced Protestant views, he was deprived of his living in 1584, but was so highly regarded by the townsfolk of Maldon that they retained his services as a lecturer. Gifford was obviously a dedicated spreader of God’s word, and wrote a number of tracts on how to bring right religion to the populace. His books on witchcraft, published in 1587 and 1593, are unusual in demonstrating a keen interest in and informed knowledge of the popular beliefs and folklore of the locality. This has led to him being described as a Tudor anthropologist (Macfarlane 1977). Yet once again a contextualised reading of Gifford’s works demonstrates that he was not some proto-rationalist or early ethnographer, but rather that his writings too reflected the religious concerns of his period. Gifford describes popular thinking on witchcraft in southern Essex with sensitivity, but uses this description to demonstrate the popular superstition and ignorance that had to be combated and overcome if a godly commonwealth were to be erected in England. It was not the abstract possibility of witchcraft, but rather the widely held beliefs that obscured correct thinking on the subject, which Gifford attacked. And, like Scot, Gifford was insistent that these beliefs, by attributing too much agency to the Devil and his human minions, detracted from divine providence and God’s glory. When men ascribed ‘so much to the power

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and to the anger of witches’, wrote Gifford, they neglected ‘the high sovereignty and providence of God over all things’ (Gifford 1593: sig M2v). The attention focused on Scot and Gifford by those looking for early symptoms of modernity has clouded our understanding of these two authors. It has also obscured the development, from the late sixteenth century, of a distinctive body of English demonological writing. This began with Henry Holland’s A Treatise against Witchcraft, published in 1590. Holland (d. 1604) was another Cambridge-educated clergyman and was author of several other religious works. His Treatise was entirely conventional, informed by the writings of Jean Bodin, the important French Protestant theologian Lambert Daneau, and the Danish demonologist Neils Hemmingsen, and also contained what was to become a standard feature of English demonological writing, a refutation of Reginald Scot. Holland was a respected clergyman and controversialist, but the next major work on witchcraft came from the most celebrated English theologian of the period, William Perkins (1558–1602). Perkins’ A Discourse of the Damned Art of Witchcraft, published posthumously in 1608, apparently originated as a series of sermons. The work is again very conventional, but it is lengthy, and remarkable for the solidity of its scriptural foundations. Its major significance is that it was written by somebody of Perkins’ standing: the fact that such a major figure supported witch-hunting was still thought to be worth bringing forward in 1692 when New England clergymen were justifying the Salem witch trials. And, of course, English witchcraft writers could also derive considerable comfort from the Daemonologie written by James VI and I, first published at Edinburgh in 1597. Other works followed that of Perkins. James Mason, an obscure figure, published his Anatomy of Sorcery in 1612. In 1616 John Cotta, a Cambridge-trained physician, published The Trial of Witchcraft (a second edition with a different title came in 1625), a work which, as was appropriate, concentrated on the medical aspects of witchcraft cases. Also in 1616, Alexander Roberts, an obscure clergyman living at King’s Lynn in Norfolk, published A Treatise of Witchcraft, in which a short exposition of demonological thinking was followed by an account of an actual incident of witchcraft in that town. The year 1617 witnessed the publication of The Mystery of Witchcraft, written by another clergyman, in this instance Oxford-educated, Thomas Cooper. And, finally, there appeared in 1627 a treatise that summed up this period of English demonological writing, Richard Bernard’s A Guide to Grand-Jury Men with respect to Witches. Bernard was another of those clerical writers and controversialists who enjoyed considerable respect in their own time, and who managed to maintain a formidable publication rate while ministering very effectively to his flock in the Somerset village of Batcombe. His Guide, which was republished in 1629, demonstrates the range of materials from which an English demonology could be constructed by the time of its writing. Bernard was working within the established Protestant demonological framework, but he referred to continental Catholic works, notably Bodin’s Démonomanie and another treatise of major importance, Martin Del Rio’s Disquisitionum Magicarum Libri Sex of 1599. He was fully conversant with the relevant English writers, and was,

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moreover, happy to illustrate or buttress arguments with evidence from pamphlet descriptions of English trials. These demonological tracts varied slightly in their emphasis, length, and profundity of scholarship, but there were a number of areas in which they broadly agreed. Despite their use of continental, and more specifically continental Catholic, authors, there was little by way of sexual prurience, concern over sexual intercourse between human beings and animals, and the absurd obscenities of the sabbath (it is noteworthy that the Malleus Maleficarum, despite the extravagant claims which have been made for its importance, was very rarely cited by these English Protestant writers). There was a strong emphasis on the demonic pact, and witches were clearly identified as agents of Satan, locked into a cosmic struggle between good and evil. The wickedness of malefic (evil-doing) witches, and the need to extirpate them, were therefore clearly set out. There was, despite the attention that modem scholars have devoted to the theme, little discussion of the connection between women and witchcraft, which was obviously regarded as a marginal and unproblematic issue. These treatises were written by clerical authors who were accustomed to see the planting of right religion and the eradication of superstitious errors as a key objective of the reformed church. Accordingly, they sometimes devoted many pages to decrying folkloric countermeasures against witches, and the widespread recourse to ‘good’ witches, or cunning folk. Good Christians who thought themselves bewitched should have recourse to fasting, prayer, or going to the magistrate: using charms against witchcraft, scratching suspected witches, burning supposedly bewitched animals, or going to the cunning man or woman were prohibited. These practices were seen as unjustified by Scripture, as contrary to true religion, and coming from a pact with the Devil as surely as did the powers of the malefic witch. Cunning folk, the ‘good’ witches whose services were so frequently sought by the ill-informed populace, came in for special opprobrium: they derived their powers from the Devil as much as did malefic witches, while the fact that they pretended to do good made them even more reprehensible. ‘Death therefore’, declared William Perkins, ‘is the just and deserved portion of the good witch’ (Perkins 1608: 257). In England major works of demonology started late, in 1590, But by that date there was another printed genre where the literate could learn about witchcraft, the pamphlet literature devoted to describing, contextualising, and sensationalising witch trials. From the early Elizabethan period there had developed what might be described as ‘wonder literature’, short and accessible works at once sensationalist and moralistic, sometimes clearly aimed at a wide audience, and usually concerned with describing an unusual event and employing it to demonstrate God’s providence on earth (see Chapter 65, Folk Legends and Wonder Tales). Thus cases of witchcraft were recorded and their significance pondered along with monstrous births, earthquakes, floods, whales washed up on beaches, cities destroyed by fire, and frogs rained down on the earth from the heavens. The first such tract to survive which describes a witchcraft trial, dating from 1566, is concerned with the trial of three witches at Essex. Court documents also survive for this case.

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A steady trickle of such publications followed, of which we shall note only the most important. In 1582 a lengthy tract was published describing the trial of a number of witches at St Osyth in Essex. This is a detailed work that contains much information on broader popular beliefs about witches, and was possibly written by Brian D’Arcy, the justice of the peace who carried out the initial interrogations. Another tract came in 1593, a very full narrative of the events that led to the execution in that year of three witches from Warboys in Huntingdonshire. In 1613 one of the most celebrated local witch-hunts in English history, the 1612 trials of the Pendle witches, was commemorated in a tract written by Thomas Potts, who had been clerk of the court which had tried the witches, and sentenced ten of them to death (an alleged confederate of the Pendle witches was executed after a separate trial in Yorkshire). And, the last in this particular series, comes The Wonderful Discovery of Elizabeth Sawyer, published in 1621. This was written by Henry Goodcole, a London clergyman who ministered to prisoners in Newgate, and who wrote a number of crime pamphlets based on the offences of some of those he had prepared spiritually for execution. This tract formed the basis for the dramatisation of Sawyer’s case by the team that put together The Witch of Edmonton, one of the very few English plays which took a quasidocumentary approach to witchcraft.1 The witchcraft tracts varied in length, depth of scholarship, and tone, and many of them, like other items of ‘wonder literature’, were clearly sensationalist. Yet most of them were anxious to set witchcraft in the context of the cosmic struggle between good and evil, between God and the Devil. The tone was set by the epistle to the reader of a tract dealing with a witchcraft trial at Windsor in 1579, which had resulted in the execution of four alleged witches. The ‘swarms of witches and enchanters’ to be found in England were interpreted as one of ‘the punishments which the Lord God hath laid upon us, for the manifest impiety and careless contempt of His word abounding in these our desperate days’. ‘The old serpent Satan’ was at work, and in matters of witchcraft it was he ‘that doeth all, that plagueth with sickness, that maimeth, murdereth, and robbeth, and at his lust restoreth. The witch beareth the name, but the devil dispatcheth the deeds.’ The epistle declared that witches should be done to death, according to both ‘the law of the Lord of life’ and ‘the law of this land’ and, in a brief flourish of classical learning, noted Cicero’s opinion that witches ‘are to be rather shut up in prison and tied with fetters, than moved to amend with council and persuasions, only afterwards suffered to escape’. Moreover, readers were warned, in the spirit of the major works of demonology, against going to cunning folk (cit. Rosen 1969: 84). There was, therefore, a noteworthy body of works published on witchcraft in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, and many of these works were portraying the problem of witchcraft as an element in the broader struggle between reformed Christianity and the agents and snares of the Devil. Yet, despite these works, witch-hunting was, in the years around 1600, being challenged from the very top of the Church of England. The basic issue was the related problem of demonic possession and exorcism. The Church of England, like other Protestant churches,

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Image not available in the electronic edition

Figure 36 Title page to William Rowley, Thomas Dekker, and John Ford, The Witch of Edmonton (London, 1658). The Devil, here in the form of a dog, arrives opportunistically, like Mephistopheles in Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus, when he hears a witch abjuring the name of God. Cuddy Banks is a rustic clown almost drowned after following a spirit which takes the form of his beloved Katherine Carter, daughter of a rich yeoman. British Library, London

rejected exorcism as a meaningless piece of popish superstition, which left the way open for Catholic priests to demonstrate that theirs was the true church by exorcising those thought to be demonically possessed (Protestants recommended prayer and fasting as the correct remedies). In 1585–6 a group of Catholic priests, headed by a Jesuit named William Weston, carried out a series of exorcisms in a propaganda exercise, which were thought to have brought in 4,000 or 5,000 converts. As if this were not bad enough, the church authorities became worried about over-enthusiastic dispossessions, in effect Protestant exorcisms, notably those performed in the north and the Midlands by a young Puritan preacher named John Darrell. In 1600 Darrell was hauled before Richard Bancroft, bishop of London, and severely censured. The affair provoked a literary war, with Darrell and his associates defending their actions, Bancroft’s chaplain, Samuel Harsnett, attacking them. (A book by Harsnett, A Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures (London, 1603) was one of Shakespeare’s sources for King Lear.)

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In 1602, just as the dust from the Darrell affair had settled, Bancroft found himself involved in another case, this time involving a 14-year-old girl called Mary Glover. Bancroft was heavily involved in mobilising support for the woman accused of bewitching Glover, and in particular orchestrated medical evidence which attempted to prove that the girl’s afflictions were the result of natural causes, and not of witchcraft. A number of clergymen who took the rival position were subsequently disciplined. In 1605 a similar case occurred, this time involving a girl aged about 20, named Anne Gunter. Anne’s afflictions had led to two women being accused of witchcraft at Abingdon in March of that year. The two women were acquitted, but Anne’s father Brian Gunter, who had strong connections with Oxford University, attempted to reopen the case with James I when the monarch visited Oxford later that year. James was sceptical, and asked Bancroft, now archbishop of Canterbury, to investigate the case. Bancroft in turn entrusted the girl to Samuel Harsnett, who soon had her confessing that she had simulated being possessed and bewitched at her father’s direction, with the result that Brian and Anne Gunter were tried at Star Chamber for false accusation. In the meantime Harsnett had, in 1603, published his Declaration of Egregious Popish Impostures, a work which, although focusing on the Catholic exorcisms of 1585–6, also took a few swipes at Protestant dispossessions, and came very near to denying the reality of witchcraft, at least as it was understood by most of Harsnett’s compatriots. Obviously witch trials, notably those in Lancaster in 1612, continued after this flurry of incidents, but both the frequency of trials and the probability of conviction declined. The precise reasons for this are still uncertain, but two major elements must have been the development of scepticism among the judiciary and the arrival of that new religious tendency which historians describe as Arminianism. At the very least, central authority during the reign of Charles I seems to have been very cautious about witchcraft. This caution was demonstrated in 1633–4, when another body of witchcraft accusations arose from the Pendle area of Lancashire. At the centre of the accusations lay an 11-year-old boy, Edmund Robinson, who claimed that he had been taken to the sabbath by a witch, and gave a vivid description of what he had witnessed there which implicated a number of local women. The judge trying the initial batch of witches sensed that a major witch panic was brewing, and informed Westminster. The bishop of Chester was instructed to investigate the accusations, and subsequently Edmund Robinson, his father, and several of the supposed witches were brought down to London. The accusations were exploded. Young Robinson confessed that he made up the story about witchcraft and being taken to the sabbath because he was late getting the cattle home, and was fearful of chastisement from his mother, while the suspected witches were examined by a medical team headed by William Harvey, and it was declared that the supposed witches’ marks they carried were in fact of natural origin. The incident thus provoked an actively sceptical response from officialdom. It also, intriguingly, served as the basis for a witchcraft play, Heywood and Brome’s The Late Lancashire Witches. Plays incorporating witchcraft themes had flourished in the years

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around 1600, although they had been in abeyance since The Witch of Edmonton of 1621. Heywood and Brome’s play was, therefore, the last of a series, and it is a curious work deserving detailed analysis. Yet, even on an initial reading, the work demonstrates a duality about witchcraft that was well established in educated circles by the 1630s. Although The Late Lancashire Witches ends with a confirmation of the existence of witchcraft, contrary to the authorities’ decisions in 1634, the reality of the phenomenon is contested throughout the play. There are numerous references to contemporary folklore about witchcraft, as well as to Macbeth and Ovid’s Metamorphoses, but there is also a humorous tone, while the playwrights’ decision to write much of the dialogue in an excruciating pastiche of a Lancashire accent must have helped distance the play’s theme from London audiences. Both the government’s treatment of the 1633–4 Lancashire witch scare and the play the affair spawned demonstrate how complex attitudes to witch accusations had become. By the 1630s it therefore seemed that England was one of those European states where witchcraft, although still a crime, and although still a phenomenon whose reality few would have been able to deny absolutely, had been to a large extent marginalised among officialdom and the educated. Prosecutions at the court were few, executions almost unknown, no demonological tracts or trial pamphlets were published in that decade, the upper reaches of the Church of England were sceptical and, as the handling of the Lancashire affair demonstrated, central government was willing to intervene to suppress witch-hunts. But in 1642 the Civil Wars began, and as a by-product of the religious fervour and dilution of authority which those wars produced, witch-hunting began again, most infamously through the mass trials associated with Matthew Hopkins (Gaskill 2005). Trial pamphlets revived popular interest in the issue, and witchcraft again became a matter of intellectual speculation. Although large-scale witch-hunts did not occur after the Restoration, the trials continued, as did the publication of learned tracts denying or supporting the reality of witchcraft: the last known execution came in 1685, the last conviction (overturned by the judge) in 1712, the last learned debate a few years later. But all this is another story, one that few could have foreseen in 1634.

Notes 1

The relevant tracts are: A true and just Recorde, of the Information, Examination and Confession of all the Witches taken at S. Osies in the Countie of Essex, whereof some were executed, and some entreated according to the Determination of the Lawe (London, 1582); The most strange and admirable Discoverie of the three Witches at Warboys arraigned, convicted and executed at the last Assizes in Huntingdon (London, 1593); Thomas Potts,

The wonderfull Discoverie of Witches in the Countie of Lancaster. With the Arraignment and Triall of nineteene notorious Witches, at the Assizes and generall Gaole Deliverie, holden at the Castle of Lancaster, upon Munday the seventeenth of August last, 1612 (London, 1613); and Henry Goodcole, The wonderfull Discoverie of Elizabeth Sawyer a Witch, late of Edmonton, her Conviction and Condemnation and Death (London, 1621).

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Ewen, Cecil l’Estrange (1929). Witch Hunting and Witch Trials: The Indictments for Witchcraft from the Records of 1373 Assizes Held for the Home Circuit A.D. 1559–1736. London: Kegan, Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.; repr. London: Frederick Muller, 1971. Ewen, Cecil L’Estrange (1933). Witchcraft and Semonianism: A Concise Account Derived from Sworn Depositions and Confessions Obtained in the Courts of England and Wales. London: Heath Cranton. Gaskill, Malcolm (2005). Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy. London: John Murray. Gibson, Marion (1999). Reading Witchcraft: Stories of Early English Witches. London: Routledge. Gifford, George (1593). A Dialogue concerning Witches and Witchcrafts. In which it is laid open how craftily the Devil deceiveth not only the Witches but many other and so leadeth them aury into many great Errors. London. Harris, Anthony (1980). Night’s Black Agents: Witchcraft and Magic in Seventeenth-Century English Drama. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Johnstone, Nathan (2006). The Devil and Demonism in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kittredge, G. L. (1929). Witchcraft in Old and New England. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press; repr. New York: Russell & Russell 1956. MacDonald, Michael (1990). Witchcraft and Hysteria in Elizabethan London: Edward Jorden and the Mary Glover Case. London: Routledge. Macfarlane, Alan (1970). Witchcraft in Tudor and Stuart England: A Regional and Comparative Study. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul; reissued, introd. James Sharpe, London: Routledge, 1999.

Macfarlane, Alan (1977). ‘A Tudor anthropologist: George Gifford’s Discourse and Dialogue’. In Sidney Anglo (ed.), The Damned Art: Essays in the Literature of Witchcraft (140–55). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Notestein, Wallace (1911). A History of Witchcraft in England from 1558 to 1718. Washington, DC; repr. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1968. Perkins, William (1608). A Discourse of the damned Art of Witchcraft. So far forth as it is revealed in the Scriptures, and manifest by true Experience. Cambridge. Polle, Robert (ed.) (2002). The Lancashire Witches: Histories and Stories. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Purkiss, Diane (1996). The Witch in History: Early Modern and Twentieth-Century Representations. London: Routledge. Rosen, Barbara (1969). Witchcraft. London: Edward Arnold. Sharpe, James (1996). Instruments of Darkness: Witchcraft in England 1550–1750. London: Hamish Hamilton. Sharpe, James (1999). The Bewitching of Anne Gunter: A Horrible and True Story of Football, Witchcraft, Murder and the King of England. London: Profile Books. Thomas, Keith (1971). Religion and the Decline of Magic: Studies in Popular Beliefs in Sixteenth and Seventeenth-Century England. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson. Willis, Deborah (1995). Malevolent Nurture: WitchHunting and Maternal Power in Early Modern England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Wootton, David (2001). ‘Reginald Scot/Abraham Fleming/The Family of Love’. In Stuart Clark (ed.), Languages of Witchcraft: Narrative, Ideology and Meaning in Early Modern Culture (119–38). Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press.

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Reconstructing the Past: History, Historicism, Histories James R. Siemon

All history is only half-made because it is always being made. (Homi K. Bhabha, Nation and Narration)

In an exchange rich with implications for Renaissance historiography as well as for current historicising approaches to Renaissance texts, Shakespeare’s young Prince Edward responds to the claim that Julius Caesar constructed the Tower of London. First, Edward boldly proclaims that ‘the truth’ will survive independently of its discursive embodiment whether in written ‘record’ or oral ‘report’: But say, my lord, it were not registered, Methinks the truth should live from age to age, As ’twere retailed to all posterity, Even to the general all-ending day. (Richard III 3.3.75–8)

This affirmation of the enduring power of the truth prompts Richard of Gloucester’s notoriously equivocal assent – ‘I say, without characters fame lives long’ – which in turn, causes the prince to reverse himself and acclaim language, and, even more specifically, the written word as the guarantor of immortality: That Julius Caesar was a famous man; With what his valour did enrich his wit, His wit set down to make his valour live. Death makes no conquest of this conqueror, For now he lives in fame, though not in life. (3.1.84–8)

At the very least, these exchanges convey the variety of what could count as ‘history’ in the Renaissance (Werstine 1998: 71). History could be embodied in monuments,

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institutional records, chronicles, oral reports, and memoirs, as well as in the historical poem (e.g. The Mirror for Magistrates) or drama. The passages also raise the possibility of an apparent contradiction between a faith in the truth and an investment in the power of verbal self-fashioning, suggesting interest in the longstanding problem of the relationship between history and language, a relation that continues to appear problematic in discussions of historicism. Some three decades after the emergence of new historicism, and despite ongoing internal divisions and revisions (see Howard 1987; Kamps 1995; Tricomi 1996; Veeser 1989; R. Wilson 1993), the broad historicist imperative in early modern, and especially early modern literary, studies continues to make itself felt almost universally. As Hugh Grady notes, historicism has become ‘virtually an unrivalled paradigm for professional writing’ to the point of being ‘taken for granted’ (Grady 2002: 1). Naturally, contrary voices have called for alternatives (see Fernie 2005); but it is worth stressing the variety of historicisms as well as the central fact that historicist enquiries have broadly communicated the insight that the history of cultural production and reproduction should be presumed to be plural, to consist of histories (Belsey 1991: 29–31; Werstine 1998). Even if the label ‘new historicism’ never possessed ‘an adequate referent’ (Veeser 1989: x) in the form of a clearly defined, monolithic movement, it is nevertheless true that a basic ‘historical orientation’ (Montrose 1992: 406) has communicated itself very broadly to literary studies. Initially, despite new historicism’s compelling interest in archival materials and social issues that once seemed to belong to the province of the historian, historicising literary theory and practice occasioned scrutiny for associations with post-structuralism. Such connections were, in fact, never secret (see Montrose’s declared interest in ‘the history of texts’ and the ‘textuality of history’: Veeser 1989: 20), but it is striking that scholars from different disciplinary and ideological perspectives offered remarkably similar warnings. Francis Barker denounced new historicists, and especially Stephen Greenblatt, for ‘turning society more or less wholly into discourse’ and reducing the ‘coercive pressures of actual social power’ to de-realised figuration (Barker 1993: 157, 162; cf. Porter 1988: 781). D. R. Woolf warned that ‘deconstruction and post-modernism threaten to undermine the “reality” of the past by turning everything into discourse, reducing all “fact” to rhetorical and social construction’ (Woolf 1999: 193). Whatever the merits of their attempts to prioritise ‘actual social power’ and ‘fact’, the stress of such attacks on new historicist enquiry for its interest in the discursive and the rhetorical is worth recalling, especially given recent demands by some literary critics for ‘presentism’ (Fernie 2005) and, from another quarter, recent studies by social historians that focus on language. Concern with discursive elements may now be better seen, even by many historians, as a focus of positive enquiry rather than as a threat to the real, however defined. The general new historicist impetus to recover the disparate, the anecdotal, the ancillary site, the marginal, silenced, or resistant group has demonstrated its virtues. What Hayden White called new historicism’s ‘distinctively poetic’ nature – i.e. the yoking

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together of the (seemingly) unrelated instance and event to enable the recovery of relations and codes (Veeser 1989: 300) – need imply neither quietism, cognitive nihilism, nor ignorance of fact. Nor, for that matter, does attention to the pastness of the past lessen its implication for the present. Instead of ‘aestheticis[ing] history’ (R. Wilson 1993: 18), historicist practices have encouraged attempts at the politicised recovery of the conflictual reality that M. M. Bakhtin described under the term ‘social heteroglossia’, in the ‘aesthetic’ text as well as in the archive. But crucially, that heteroglot reality of the text emerges, as Bakhtin insisted, only from within an ongoing dialogue with the pressing interests of the present. Barker’s own informed critique of historicism invoked Foucault to propose a conflictual model of historical understanding in place of the linguistic model that Barker found informing historicist enterprises. Foucault writes: I believe that it is not to the great model of signs and language [la langue] that reference should be made, but to war and battle. The history which bears and determines us is war-like, not language-like. Relations of power, not relations of sense. History has no ‘sense’, which is not to say that it is absurd or incoherent. On the contrary, it is intelligible and should be able to be analysed down to the slightest detail: but according to the intelligibility of struggles, of strategies and tactics. (Barker 1993: 233 n.)

One may agree with Foucault’s priorities, but modelling historical enquiry on struggle hardly diminishes the importance of discursive phenomena, as Foucault himself insisted (Foucault 1981). Foucault’s resistance to the structuralist model of langue with its attendant senses of system, order, and stasis, sounds precisely the note of the Bakhtin Circle’s translinguistics. M. M. Bakhtin, P. Medvedev, and V. N. Voloshinov understand language as a site of constant struggle and contention among languages – rather than as an order defined by the stable polarities of la langue – and make that understanding central to their social analyses. Voloshinov insists that it is expression that organises experience, rather than the other way around, and every word, every signifying practice, indeed every aspect of human reality, from complex cultural productions such as works of art or historiography down to apparently simple physical sensations (Voloshinov 1986: 86–9), is riven by historical relations of contention and agreement among social groups, their values, and the orientations of their behavioural ideologies. In heteroglot utterance, the Bakhtin Circle found the great model and first instance of this pervasive dialogical struggle and contention: The internal stratification of any single national language into social dialects, characteristic group behaviour, professional jargons, generic languages, languages of generations and age groups, tendentious languages, languages of the authorities, of various circles, and of passing fashions, languages that serve the specific socio-political purposes of the day, even of the hour (each day has its own slogan, its own vocabulary, its own emphases) – this internal stratification [is] present in every language at any given moment of its historical existence. (Bakhtin 1981: 262–3)

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Such a dialogical understanding may result in social or literary analyses that are less orderly than those provided by classical materialist dialectics, but it is no less conflictual, no less material, and no less historical for its stress on language(s). And no less a part of the present, for, as Voloshinov insists, any utterance, and supremely the work of verbal art, acquires meaning only in the ongoing process of response, can speak at all only to the degree that it admits association with the behavioural ideology of a given period and social group (Voloshinov 1986: 91). Given this dialogical sense of the constitutive role of socio-linguistic discord, division, and conflict, the great enemies of historical consciousness for Bakhtin and Voloshinov are the centripetal tendencies manifested in monological forms of signifying practice: official pronouncements, orthodox creeds, sanctioned histories, ritualised forms of ideological domination by one class or group that assume the aspect of universality and thus may go – almost – without saying. Writing largely under the monological imperatives of Stalinism’s drive to rewrite the past, present, and future according to one all-determining, unified ‘history’, the Bakhtin Circle championed voices that did not fit the plan. Famously, Bakhtin found those voices aloud in popular carnival, but he also detected their presence written in the carnivalesque aspects of Menippean satire, in Rabelais, in Dostoevsky, and in Shakespeare. For Bakhtin the early modern period was a time when the centrifugal tendencies of language exerted a particularly powerful shaping presence, but ultimately he found traces of heteroglot orientation in all utterance, not just in the laughter, sorrow, and anger of the oppressed, but also in the signifying practices of the dominant – even if only in the harsh accents, the strained hyperboles, the complacent indifferences, the evident formal distortions and strategic silences that repressive monologism adopts in exercising its hegemony (cf. Voloshinov 1986: 72). For a brief but significant moment, the historical enterprise in sixteenth-century England exhibited a particularly centripetal form and content that both literary critics (e.g. Rackin) and historians (Woolf) have characterized in terms that would be monological in Bakhtin’s sense. Of course, the chronicle histories that loom so large in their effects on early modern literature and historiography got some of their unifying impetus from the presentist demands of Tudor national and religious consolidation (Woolf 1990). This meant that ‘the truth’ supposedly derived from, and certainly applied to, history often amounted to the same repeated clichés. D. R. Woolf has claimed that ‘All Tudor and early Stuart historical writing … reflects a conservative ideology of obedience, duty, and deference to social and political hierarchy. Historians used the past to sanction certain types of behaviour and to deplore others; they also used it to justify the authority structures of their present, structures which in turn shaped and coloured what they said about the past’ (Woolf 1990: xiii). Under such pressure, the various histories of past reigns tended to turn into one history; and, since E. M. W. Tillyard, scholarship has often identified that totalised history with the ideology of early modern history plays (Kamps 1996: 52). One reaction has been a scholarly counter-tradition opposing Shakespeare to his chronicle sources. Eloquently epitomising this view, Phyllis Rackin employs Bakhtin’s vocabulary to contrast the

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‘polyphonic form’ of Shakespeare’s theatrically enacted history to the ‘univocal form of history writing’ found in the chronicles, wherein ‘a single authorial voice’ often obscures a ‘plurality’ of sources and contributors (Rackin 1990: 24–5). This stress on polyphony may be accurate concerning early modern history plays, but unfair to their historical sources. Sixteenth-century history writing betrays some significant limits to its centripetal, monological trends. If few scholars still credit F. Smith Fussner’s account of a ‘historical revolution’ during the period, recent studies suggest what Bakhtin would have predicted: the chronicles themselves amply betray traces of centrifugal, counter- or hetero-orientations (Patterson 1994: 7). In Holinshed, for example, many have pointed out the discrepancies between the appended morals and the evidence provided by the inclusion of diverse pamphlets and manuscript sources. In such cases, it is precisely the discursive and social construction of history that is revealed, not as instancing postmodern drift or slippage avant la lettre but as registering – even when the compilers are attempting to resist it – the heteroglot contentions of groups, classes, and interests (and here one might remember the group and class significance of micro-narratives in Jean-François Lyotard’s accounts of postmodernity). Although Holinshed’s inclusion of primary documents and anecdotes was characterised negatively by F. J. Levy as history ‘by agglomeration’ (Levy 1967: 183–4), it constitutes a source of obvious usefulness for historicising studies. But even single-author histories devoted to the most ideologically unified subjects display revealing traces of socially heteroglot struggle and contention. Accounts of Richard III offer particularly telling examples: in portraying the most ‘persistently vilified of all English kings’ (Ross 1981: 227), the chronicles might be expected to display an untroubled Tudor unanimity, yet the discourse(s) that embody that history reveal traces of different histories. The basics were established early and handed along, sometimes verbatim, from Bernard André and Polydore Vergil to Sir Thomas More to Grafton, Halle, Hardyng, Stow, and Holinshed. Yet the articulation of Richard’s history betrays remarkable fissures. In his relation of what might appear to qualify precisely as an opportunity for Tudor monologue, André, the first official Tudor historian and Henry VII’s poet laureate and family tutor (Hanham 1975: 21), falters and ends up providing a strange non-account of the battle of Bosworth that ended Richard’s life and reign. Since military victories constitute a generic staple of ‘king and battle’ history and offer opportunities for the panegyric rhetoric often preferred by official historiography, André’s reticence is striking as both history and rhetoric. Writing in 1502, a mere seven years after the battle, and ostensibly for Bosworth’s victor, André dramatically breaks off his account with a blank page and a strangely worded explanation: I have heard something of the battle by oral report, but the eye is a safer judge than the ear in such a matter. Therefore I pass over the date, the place, and the order of battle, rather than assert anything rashly; for as I have said before, I lack clear sight. And so until I obtain more knowledge of this debatable field, I leave both it and this page a blank. (Hanham 1975: 53)

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In the context of a discussion of discursive elements in historiography, André’s pun on the term ‘field’ is revealing: Et pro tam bellico campo, donec plenius instructus fuero, campum quoque latum hoc in albo relinquo (André 1858: 32). As Hanham points out, campus here punningly equates ‘field of battle’, ‘subject of debate’ and ‘blank space in a manuscript’ (Hanham 1975: 54). For reasons that are not now immediately apparent, and that were not apparent to André’s successors among early modern writers of history, basic factual matters – dates, places, and events – occasion a reticence which signals, according to André’s trope, their charged nature as contentious fields of utterance, as sites of battle. What sort of battle this might be is suggested by further – specifically discursive – dimensions to this passage. André himself was physically blind, so nothing that he reported could ever answer the demand that the historian report only what had been experienced with ‘clear sight’. Yet the joke is not aimed simply at himself, for his witty rejection of hearsay in favour of that which is known with clear sight also mocks the demand for a direct relation between history and truth that will come to be famously formulated in Sidney’s denigration of historians in his Defence of Poesy for constructing their so-called ‘truth’ upon other histories which are based ultimately on a ‘notable foundation of hearsay’. Perhaps not surprisingly, one of the earliest historians to respond explicitly to André’s gaps seems to miss these ironies at the expense of his own discipline. In 1611 John Speed takes the blank spaces to signify simple lapses of knowledge occasioned by André’s physical blindness, while praising his history as otherwise noteworthy for its discursive aspirations: having as well the title of poet laureate as of the king’s historiographer (how hardly soever those two faculties meet with honour in the same person), [André] meant to have historified and poetised the acts of this king, but (for want of competent and attended instructions in many places of chief importance) left his labour full of wilde breaches and unfinished, yet in such points as he hath professed to know not unworthy to be vouched, for there is in him a great deal of clear elocution and defecated [purified] conceit above the ordinary of that age. (Speed 1611: 728)

Speed seems not to notice that this collapse of André’s otherwise ‘clear elocution and defecated conceit’, occurs at a point of considerable historical conflict. In fact, a ‘historified and poetised’ account of Bosworth remained potentially problematic well after the event because the battle was at once a dynastic watershed and also a potential source of reproach for survivors (and their families). Noteworthy among those whose role at Bosworth remained controversial well into the Tudor period was the earl of Northumberland, about whose activities completely contradictory claims were made (Hanham 1975). Even after Northumberland’s death in 1489, a statement of ‘fact’ could be highly inflammatory, given the implications for heirs and allies as well as Henry’s own tenuous grip on the crown. By the time André wrote, England’s noble families had their own insecurities dramatically compounded by the extraordinary financial demands that Henry made upon them as testimony of their

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loyalty (Chrimes 1972: 215). Thus André’s witty gap registers the unsettled nature of the royal hegemony and a climate of continuing royal insecurity that lasted throughout Henry’s reign (Chrimes 1972: 68–94). Even a writer that Erasmus characterised as a ‘blind sycophant … but also the worst sort of backbiter’ (Carlson 1991: 264) might forgo a rhetorical opportunity for panegyric if stating ‘facts’ meant risking the possibility of saying the wrong things in such a charged climate of utterance. Informed by histories such as André’s and probably Polydore Vergil’s manuscript for the Anglica Historica, Sir Thomas More constructed his own highly influential history of Richard III. More’s account does not extend to Bosworth, but odd suggestions of conflict and struggle are evident enough throughout the work. Despite its original and resolutely polemical reduction of Richard to a premeditative, hunchbacked murderer, More’s text often creates a bizarre sense of tentativeness about its assertions. Much is attributed to what ‘wise men say’ or is ‘for truth reported’ by others, but such discursive self-qualification takes especially extreme form in More’s account of Richard’s role in the murder of his brother, Clarence: Some wise men also ween, that his drift covertly conveyed, lacked not in helping forth his brother of Clarence to his death, which he resisted openly, howbeit somewhat (as men deemed) more faintly than he that were heartily minded to his wealth. And they that thus deem, think that he long time in king Edward’s life forethought to be king in case that the king his brother (whose life he looked that evil diet should shorten) should happen to decease (as indeed he did) while his children were young. And they deem that for this intent he was glad of his brother’s death, the Duke of Clarence, whose life must needs have hindered him so intending, whether the same Duke of Clarence had kept him true to his nephew the young king, or enterprised to be king himself. But of all this point is there no certainty, and who so divineth upon conjectures may as well shoot too far as too short. (More 1964: 8–9)

In phrasing that mocks the diction of other historians (Hanham 1975: 15; cf. Ross 1981: xxxix), More first reports what he then proceeds to take back, or seems to. Hedging to the edge of self-cancellation, he drags in reporters and wise men to attest to claims that eventually he drops as conjectural anyway. Furthermore, immediately after this passage More betrays all its cautions: Howbeit this have I by credible information learned, that the self night in which King Edward died, one Mystelbrooke long ere morning, came in great haste to the house of one Pottyer dwelling in Redcross street without Cripplegate; and when he was with hasty rapping quickly let in, he showed unto Pottyer that king Edward was departed. ‘By my troth’, man, quoth Pottyer, ‘then will my master the Duke of Gloucester be king.’ What cause he had so to think, hard it is to say, whether he being toward him, any thing knew that he such thing purposed, or otherwise had any inkling thereof, for he was not likely to speak it of nought. (More 1964: 9)

What is one to make of all this? How credit the merely ‘likely’ so soon after stern cautions against conjecture? In light of the self-cancelling nature of such passages, it

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may seem ironic that More provided the principal backbone of later historiography, and that these very passages, so larded with cancellations and self-contradictions, first offer the subsequently repeated notion that Richard for a ‘long time … forethought to be king’ (More 1964: lxxix). As in the case of his Utopia, which More says ‘includes nothing false and omits nothing true’ (More 1965: 43), the History of Richard III performs handsprings of irony around its assertions, giving with one hand, taking back with the other. Although such formal features might recall the witty self-mockery characteristic of the Lucianic discourse that More appreciated and elsewhere imitated, there is reason to resist the judgement dating back to the eighteenth century that More offers, in Horace Walpole’s words, ‘a fabric of fiction’ rather than a history written in a highly contested socio-historical context (Ross 1981: xxvi). After all, as Hanham notes, such passages target the language of the chroniclers, mocking their characteristic locutions, while also making fun of their frequently unacknowledged self-contradictions by making More’s own dodges so laughably obvious. With what intention is not clear, but to what effect is perhaps less mysterious: the discursive form in fact parallels More’s content. Again and again, More recounts the ironies produced by the limited knowledge and self-knowledge of human agents; Shakespeare, like Hall and Holinshed before him, remains true to More’s moral for Hastings: ‘O good God, the blindness of our mortal nature, when [Hastings] most feared he was in good surety: when he reckoned himself surest, he lost his life, and that within two hours after’ (More 1964: 52). Orthodox enough in matter, such a Christian truism is yet in its form, in its mode of discourse, suggestive of a less orthodox purpose: registering that this account is written by an author who violates expectations and rules – of logical and tonal self-consistency, of clarity, of genre – but does so boldly and knowingly, wittily rather than from limitation or ignorance. When seen in an early modern context, such a gesture against decorum repays consideration for its social construction. Whatever its positive emulation of classical models like Sallust and Tacitus, it also conveys a negative message of authorial distinction and difference from the dull-witted and earnest among More’s contemporaries. More reproduces, in other words, a humanist, academic version of a key prejudice of the courtly milieu, which, according to Castiglione’s recommendations, should value apparently effortless achievements of sprezzatura and wit over manifestations of dull application. More’s prefatory letter to Peter Giles suggests the discursive equivalence of this social opposition by contrasting those who are ‘dull-minded’ or ‘who approve only of what is old’ to the ‘careless simplicity’ of Raphael, the ostensible narrator of Utopia (More 1965: 45, 39). These terms may reintroduce the social dimensions of the discussion between Shakespeare’s Richard and his nephew concerning the Tower and the potential role of ‘wit’ in the survival of ‘truth’. Meditating on history and discourse, Shakespeare’s little prince first proclaims his conviction that ‘truth’ is more substantial and enduring than any discursive vehicle that might chance to convey it. Subsequently, he significantly modifies this claim and in fact appears to reverse himself. The terms of this early modern discussion bear

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directly on concerns about the reduction of history to language and social construction. As if in unwitting recognition of the fact that the opaque witticisms of his uncle will outlive the clichés of his own idealism, Shakespeare’s little victim refers to Caesar’s immortality in a very different – and more characteristically Shakespearean – light. In response to Richard’s assertion that fame may survive without written ‘characters’, the prince appears to contradict his earlier denigration of writing by maintaining that it is precisely Caesar’s ‘wit’ as ‘set down’ in his writings that ensures eternal survival: ‘That Julius Caesar was a famous man; / With what his valour did enrich his wit, / His wit set down to make his valour live. / Death makes no conquest of this conqueror, / For now he lives in fame, though not in life.’ There is a ‘witty’ double meaning here that repays attention. The claim that Caesar’s ‘wit’ in writing about his exploits enabled the valour of those exploits to outlive his material body makes sense, but, as the puzzlement of generations of editors recorded in the Variorum edition suggests, it is less clear how his valour could be said to ‘enrich’ Caesar’s wit. The term in the earliest quartos (Ql, Q2) is not ‘valour’ but ‘valure’, a word with at least three possible senses: ‘battlefield valour’, ‘value in a clearly material sense’, or ‘value in a more general abstract sense of worth’ (OED). Thus, the prince’s remark invokes the worth of Caesar, his value in some vague undefined sense, without tying that value to a specific quality such as martial bravery. The one certainty here is that ‘valure’ is manifested in ‘wit’ and that the survival of wit is itself dependent on its mode of articulation, on being ‘set down’ in writing. Far from being merely amusing, this conceited witticism sits uneasily astride a historical conflict of social groups and values that registered itself discursively in polemical exchanges exactly contemporary with Shakespeare’s play: the social conflict between pen and sword, between the bureaucratic practices and values of the so-called new men and the values of a traditional military, honour culture (see James 1986). Caesar was an interesting figure for both sides of this contention, for, if he was known as a martial conqueror, he was also, as Thomas Wilson notes, famous among ‘wits’ for his discursive capacities: ‘Julius Caesar is reported that he could read, hear, and tell one what he should write, so fast as his pen could run, and indite letters himself altogether at one time’ (T. Wilson 1553: 237). Another, less elevated, version of the interrelations among value, wit, and discursive capacity occurs in a later passage of the play in which Richard himself perversely returns to the prince’s terms in attempting to woo the murdered prince’s grieving mother into surrendering her daughter to his keeping. Richard defines how Queen Elizabeth should speak the unspeakable by rhetorically characterising his own incestuous and thoroughly politic desire: And when this arm of mine hath chastised The petty rebel, dull-brained Buckingham, Bound with triumphant garlands will I come And lead thy daughter to a conqueror’s bed;

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Here again, the value of wit is presumed: the ‘petty rebel’ Buckingham mocked for the contrast between his puny, ‘dull-brained’ efforts and the grandeur of Richard’s own ongoing ‘conquest’ of kingdom, law, order, family, and religion. Once more, a conqueror’s fame will be ‘retailed’, but this time not so grandly, unto ‘the general all-ending day’. Rather, Richard recycles the prince’s sweeping language to portray a repulsive conjugal scenario in terms that mock the prince’s inflated sense of truth’s substantiality and Caesar’s singular glory. Furthermore, Richard inflates his own rhetorical capacities by speaking as if bedding his own niece would require what would be for him no more than a little small-scale verbal retailing. Here discursive capacity is portrayed with a mercenary pettiness of scale that belittles the value of great Caesar’s golden victories and martial fame by reducing its terms to figures for a little incestuous foreplay. The specific social dimensions of the ironies suggested by the use of ‘retail’ here are clearer in the overt mockery aimed at small-scale wit in Love’s Labour’s Lost. Berowne mocks ‘honey-tongued Boyet’ as ‘the ape of form’, comparing him to a retailer who elaborately over-packages a very little wit: He is wit’s peddler, and retails his wares At wakes and wassails, meetings, markets, fairs; And we that sell by gross, the Lord doth know, Have not the grace to grace it with such show. This gallant pins the wenches on his sleeve. Had he been Adam, he had tempted Eve. ’A can carve too, and lisp. Why, this is he That kissed his hand away in courtesy. This is the ape of form, Monsieur the Nice. (LLL 5.2.318–26)

Show, form, courtesy, grace – the standard qualities of courtliness here appear depicted as commodified and improperly appropriated by a smallholder who retails them for what appear to be from the perspective of the courtly observers distinctly minor-league amatory profits. The point of these examples is twofold. On the one hand, early modern ‘history’ is as riddled with discursive traces of socially defined conflicts about what matters and what is to be taken for real as is early modern literature; on the other, histories of courtly or professional distinction, with their oppositions of pen to sword or of wholesale to retail, have things to reveal about early modern literary discourses. One might usefully quarrel with the various forms of new historicism on many grounds – for focusing on canonical works (Holstun 1989); for stressing recuperation and stasis rather than change and agency (Howard 1994: 11–12); for recurring to a

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limited number of opponents to stand for diverse intellectual traditions (Tricomi 1996: 157 n.); for totalising, despite its claims to the contrary (Porter 1988) – but the dangers of turning the real into discourse and social construction or of ignoring present concerns seem to me to pale beside the benefits of the historical orientation in generating multiple histories that offer opportunity for fuller encounters with the pastness as well as the presentness of the past. In this vein, recent work by social historians of the early modern period following their own discipline’s ‘linguistic turn’ (Braddick and Walter 2000: 3–5) display a wide and lively engagement with language, social discourse, and the complexities of expression and appropriation – for example studies by Craig Muldrew on credit (1998), Laura Gowing on gender and sexuality (1996), Peter Lake on Protestantism and players (Lake and Questier 2002), Adam Fox on orality and literacy (2002), and Andy Wood on class formation (2006). Meanwhile excellent recent studies by scholars of early modern literature – for example Emily Bartels on early modern race and cross-cultural relations (2008), Karen Britland on courtly drama (2006), and Theodore Leinwand (1999) on theatre and finance (among many others) – continue to set a high standard for historically oriented enquiry.

References and Further Reading André, Bernard (1858). Historia Regis Henrici Septimi, ed. James Gairdner. Rolls Series 10. London: Longman. Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist, trans. Michael Holquist and Caryl Emerson. Austin: University of Texas Press. Barker, Francis (1993). The Culture of Violence: Essays on Tragedy and History. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bartels, Emily C. (2008). Speaking of the Moor: From Alcazar to Othello. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania University Press. Belsey, Catherine (1991). ‘Making histories then and now: Shakespeare from Richard II to Henry V’. In Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iverson (eds.), Uses of History: Marxism, Postmodernism and the Renaissance (pp. 24–46). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Braddick, M. J. and John Walter (eds.) (2000). Negotiating Power in Early Modern Society: Order, Hierarchy, and Subordination in Britain and Ireland. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Britland, Karen (2006). Drama at the Court of Queen Henrietta Maria. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Carlson, David R. (1991). ‘Royal tutors in the reign of Henry VII’. Sixteenth-Century Journal, 22, 253–79. Chrimes, S. B. (1972). Henry VII. Berkeley: University of California Press. Colebrook, Claire (1997). New Literary Histories. New Historicism and Contemporary Criticism. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Fernie, Ewan (2005). ‘Shakespeare and the prospect of presentism’. Shakespeare Survey, 58, 169–84. Foucault, Michel (1981). ‘The order of discourse’. In Robert Young (ed.), Untying the Text: A Poststructuralist Reader (pp. 48–78). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Fox, Adam (2002). Oral and Literate Culture in England 1500–1700. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Gallagher, Catherine and Stephen Greenblatt (2000). Practicing New Historicism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gowing, Laura (1996). Domestic Dangers: Women, Words, and Sex in Early Modern London. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grady, Hugh (2002). Shakespeare, Machiavelli and Montaigne: Power and Subjectivity from Richard II to Hamlet. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Greenblatt, Stephen (1988). Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Berkeley: University of California Press. Hanham, Alison (1975). Richard III and his Early Historians 1483–1535. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Holstun, James (1989). ‘Ranting at the new historicism’. English Literary Renaissance, 19, 189–225. Howard, Jean E. (1987). ‘The new historicism in Renaissance studies’. In Dan S. Collins and Arthur F. Kinney (eds.), Renaissance Historicism (pp. 3–31). Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press. Howard, Jean E. (1994). The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England. London: Routledge. James, Mervyn (1986). Society, Politics, Culture: Studies in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kamps, Ivo (ed.) (1995). Materialist Shakespeare: A History. New York: Verso. Kamps, Ivo (1996). Historiography and Ideology in Stuart Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lake, Peter and Michael Questier (2002). The Antichrist’s Lewd Hat: Protestants, Papists and Players in Post-Reformation England. New Haven: Yale University Press. Leinwand, Theodore B. (1999). Theatre, Finance, and Society in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levy, F. J. (1967). Tudor Historical Thought. San Marino, Calif.: Huntington Library. Montrose, Louis A. (1989). ‘Professing the Renaissance: the poetics and politics of culture’. In H. Aram Veeser (ed.), The New Historicism (pp. 15–36). London: Routledge. Montrose, Louis A. (1992). ‘New historicisms’. In Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn (eds.), Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies (pp. 392– 418). New York: Modern Language Association. More, Thomas (1964). The Complete Works of St Thomas More, vol. 2, ed. Richard S. Sylvester. New Haven: Yale University Press. More, Thomas (1965). The Complete Works of St Thomas More, vol. 4, ed. Edward Surtz and J. H. Hexter. New Haven: Yale University Press.

Muldrew, Craig (1998). The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England. London: Macmillan. Patterson, Annabel (1994). Reading Holinshed’s ‘Chronicles’. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Porter, Carolyn (1988). ‘Are we being historical yet?’ South Atlantic Quarterly, 87, 743–86. Rackin, Phyllis (1990). Stages of History: Shakespeare’s English Chronicles. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Ross, Charles (1981). Richard III. Berkeley: University of California Press. Speed, John (1611). The History of Great Britain. London. Tricomi, Albert H. (1996). Reading Tudor-Stuart Texts through Cultural Historicism. Gainesville: University Press of Florida. Veeser, H. Aram (ed.) (1989). The New Historicism. London: Routledge. Voloshinov, V. N. (1986). Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, trans. Ladislav Matejka and I. R. Titunik. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Werstine, Paul (1998). ‘ “Is it upon record?”: the reduction of the history play to history’. In W. Speed Hill (ed.), New Ways with Old Texts II: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1992–1996 (pp. 71–82). Binghamton, NY: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies. Wilson, Richard (1993). Will Power: Essays on Shakespearean Authority. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. Wilson, Richard and Richard Dutton (eds.) (1992). New Historicism and Renaissance Drama. London: Longman. Wilson, Thomas (1553; 1962). The Arte of Rhetorique, introd. Robert Hood Bowers. Gainesville, Fla.: Scholars’ Facsimiles. Wood, Andy (2006). ‘Fear, hatred and the hidden injuries of class in early modern England’. Journal of Social History, 39, 803–26. Woolf, Daniel R. (1990). The Idea of History in Early Stuart England. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Woolf, Daniel R. (1999). ‘The shapes of history’. In David Scott Kastan (ed.), A Companion to Shakespeare (pp. 186–205). London: Blackwell.

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Race: A Renaissance Category? Margo Hendricks

In the beginning was the word, and the word was race.

For a four-letter word that has preoccupied and defined Anglo-American societies for nearly 400 years, the term ‘race’ remained until recently a somewhat undertheorised epistemological category within Renaissance English studies. Despite the inroads made by historians, literary scholars, students of cultural studies, sociologists, and philosophers, our knowledge of the complex and often problematic ways in which Renaissance England defined and understood the concept of race remains somewhat tenuous. On the one hand, this tenuous hold can be explained in part by the extraordinary semiotic malleability of the word ‘race’: it can mean whatever a social formation wants it to mean. In its literature, philosophy, art, theological debates, and politics, Renaissance England made use of the word ‘race’ to both define and differentiate itself from the rest of the world. The word was borrowed from French in the first half of the sixteenth century: it had appeared in various Romance languages and dialects as early as 1300. Its etymology is disputed – it seems that the word originally had to do with the breeding of horses (see OED s.v. n6). Given that the OED distinguishes eight primary meanings and eighteen secondary meanings that had emerged by 1612, it is not surprising that ‘race’ provided English writers with a certain flexibility of meaning as they classified and ordered English society. The OED (s.v. 2a) cites John Foxe’s Acts and Monuments as an example of one of the earliest uses of ‘race’ and, as the dictionary notes, the meaning of the term, for Foxe, principally denoted genealogy or lineage: ‘Thus was the outward race and stock of Abraham after flesh refused.’ ‘Race’ also was used to differentiate the sexes: men and women were frequently described as being different races. The word ‘race’ is used seventeen times in the whole of Shakespeare’s canon: with two exceptions, he uses it to refer to a person’s genealogy, or their lineage in terms of social status. The exceptions occur in The Tempest (when Miranda refers to Caliban’s ‘vile race’, 1.2.358) and

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Macbeth (‘Duncan’s horses – a thing most strange certain – / Beauteous and swift, the minions of their race’, 2.4.14–15). Over the course of the latter half of the sixteenth century and the first half of the seventeenth, however, the idea of race and the word’s usage suffered a semiotic seachange. As we shall see, this alteration in meaning occurred in large measure because of the ease with which the governing precepts behind a concept of race can be linguistically corrupted, disestablished, or rendered ambiguous. Moreover, it is obvious that the word was understood to be malleable as a signifier of classificatory hierarchy, particularly within human societies. And, I will argue, it is this malleability that generated increasing anxiety about the nature and meaning of race. This essay does not aim to provide a comprehensive historical study of the complex origins of race in early modern cultures; rather, it seeks to offer a brief overview of race through the two conceptual threads that contributed to the formation of the Renaissance concept: the philological history of the word ‘race’ from its entry into the English language, and the Renaissance theory of ‘generation’, which attempts to explain away the problematics that surface in relation to the use of ‘race’ as a category of social identity. I have chosen this approach, rather than discussing the concept of ‘colour’, for a number of reasons. First, an abundant body of scholarship tracing the significance of race as colour in Renaissance English literature and culture already exists (for general studies dealing with the matter of colour as a racialising feature see Gillis 1995; Hall 1996; and Macdonald 1997). Second, shifts in semantics, semiotics, and usage are often shaped by the specific socio-economic and cultural needs of a given society, and the lexical history of the word ‘race’ appears to reflect just such a process. Finally, the Renaissance concept of race is based on an elaborate system of metaphors and synonyms whose rhetorical and interpretative strength lies in its fluidity and, as I hope to illustrate, Renaissance medicine and Renaissance philology are inextricably linked to the conceptualisation of race in Renaissance English culture.

Genealogy The origins of the word ‘race’ are as ambiguous as the term itself. ‘Race’ appears to have entered written English sometime during the first half of the sixteenth century, though it is likely that its oral history can be traced to the Crusades. Even the word’s etymological genesis is open to debate: some argue for a Latin etymology via Italian (ratio or generatio), others contend that the word is Germanic, and still others argue for a Spanish or Moorish heritage. Whatever the source, ‘race’ quickly became instantiated in the English tongue and culture by the end of the sixteenth century. Notably, it seems that the word was culturally significant enough to warrant inclusion in a number of Renaissance English dictionaries, both monolingual and bilingual. For example, John Florio, in his World of Words (1590) offers the following entry for the Italian term for race: ‘Razza, Raza, as Raggia, a kind, a race, a brood, a blood, a stock, a name, a pedigree’ (p. 309).

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Richard Percyvale’s Biblioteca Hispanica on the other hand, does not provide a separate entry for the Spanish term raza and the English equivalent ‘race’ (Percyvale 1591). It does, however, incorporate the term in other Spanish word entries – casta, abolengo, and abolorio – as a synonym. When Percyvale turns to English, however, not only does he include the English term ‘race’, but he also provides a list of synonyms: ‘a race, a lineage, a breed, genus’. The absence of an entry for raza may be explained by looking to the word’s problematic semantics in Spain. As a number of critics have shown, in Renaissance Spain raza already signified a complex (and often contradictory) classification system, which included ethnicity and phenotype (see Stolcke 1994; Smith 1992). For some unknown reason Percyvale deems a separate entry for the word raza unnecessary. After Percyvale’s death, John Minsheu revised and expanded the Biblioteca Hispanica. Though Minsheu’s ‘augmentation’ was not quantitatively substantial, careful scrutiny reveals that his additions are nonetheless far more significant entries to the Biblioteca Hispanica than his title page suggests (Minsheu 1613). In his dictionary, Minsheu includes not only an entry for raza but also one for another term which would come to have major ideological consequences, mestizo. Minsheu’s handling of the Spanish raza and English ‘race’ does indeed ‘enlarge’ on what is missing from Percyvale. For example, in the Spanish–English section, the entry for raza (or raca) is defined as ‘a ray or beam shining through a hole. Also a race, stock, kind or breed’. Additionally, in the English–Spanish section, Minsheu writes, ‘line or race – vide Casta, Raca’, and under the entry ‘race or stock’ he directs the reader to ‘Raca, caste, Abolorio, Abolengo’. In doing so, Minsheu creates a dictionary which offers its users as much information as they will need to comprehend all the vagaries of the Spanish language and its racial lexicon, even going so far as to provide definitions for subsets within entries. Yet every entry seems to reiterate a prevailing semantics; whatever Spanish word one uses – caste, raza, abolorio, abolengo – it will inevitably signify in English ‘a race, a lineage, a breed, issue of one’s body, a progeny, a stock an offspring’ or ‘pedigree, stock, or descent of kindred’. The sudden florescence of dictionaries offering similar or exact English versions of this meaning of ‘race’ – John Baret’s An Alvearie or Triple Dictionarie (1573, 1580), Claudius Holyband’s A Dictionarie French and English (1570/1), and Thomas Wilson’s A Christian Dictionary (1612) – suggests how pervasive the link between the word ‘race’ and the idea of Christian nobility was in English Renaissance culture: ‘Race. The course of Christianity and godliness. Let us run [with patience] the race [that is set before us. Heb. 12:1, Geneva Bible]’ (Wilson 1612: I, 387). These careful attempts to delineate (and limit) the meaning of race are not a coincidence. On the contrary, these dictionaries contribute to a major recalibration of the semantic possibilities of the word ‘race’ in the face of expanding internationalism within and beyond England, as well as of the growing social and economic power of a mercantile class. Between 1560 and 1660 England’s political economy and social institutions underwent a radical realignment. Works such as William Harrison’s A Description of England and John Stowe’s A Geographical History testify to the gradual alteration of the English social hierarchy. Merchants, lawyers, and other professionals (especially as civil

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servants) were an important defining presence in Renaissance English culture. Though a portion of the merchants and financiers came from the nobility or the gentry (younger sons), the majority of this class were ‘commoners’. The increased wealth of this emergent class produced fundamental changes in a social fabric once thought immutable. Money enabled these ‘commoners’ to live in a manner once thought solely the privilege of the nobility, to acquire the trappings of ‘civility’ (land, education, luxury goods), and, more importantly, to procure titles (either through service, purchase, or marriage). In other words, economic changes effectively forced the redrawing of the taxonomic boundaries of one form of racial classification. It is, perhaps, this social and cultural reformation which may have prompted sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English lexicographers such as Percyvale, Minsheu, and Florio (among others) to undertake the onerous task of constructing a taxonomic system for the word ‘race’ that would be, paradoxically, exclusive but also, when necessary, inclusive. In this way early modern writers could deploy the word in a variety of ways without once having to evince concern for the ideological contradictions that may surface. Race, it seems was a semiotic category, best dealt with in ambiguities.

Familial Ties For most individuals in Renaissance England, use of the word ‘race’ was tied to both ancestry (see OED s.v. 1a) and social status. For example, in an anonymous elegy on the death of Sir Philip Sidney, the poet describes Sidney in the following way: Drawn was thy race aright from princely line Nor less than such (by gifts that Nature gave The common mother that all creatures have) Doth virtue show, and princely lineage shine. (from Rollins 1954)

In his ‘Verse in Praise of Lord Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey’ George Tuberville similarly deploys the term: Though want of skill to silence me procures I write of him whose fame for aye endures A worthy wight, a noble for his race, A learned lord that had an earl’s place. (from Rollins 1954)

Strikingly, the rhetoric of race becomes localised in key words: worth, learning, honour, valour, and courtesy. As James Casey notes, ‘the cornerstone of nobility is religion, honour, talent and valour’ (Casey 1989: 9) – to which we might also add loyalty, magnanimity, and courtesy. In addition, these attributes were considered

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transmittable from father to child (or, in those problematic situations, from mother to child) and would make themselves known at every instance. What is readily apparent in the usage of the word race is that both word and concept become a crucial category of identity in Renaissance England because English patriarchy ‘depends on the principle of inheritance in which the father’s identity – his property, name, his authority is transmitted from father to son. … But this transmission from father to son can take place only insofar as both father and son pass through the body of a woman’ (Adelman 1992: 106). Furthermore, ‘the insistence on chastity and virtue for wives as a condition for the economic strength of the … family was also closely connected with the concern about lineage. Since noble birth was crucial feature of knighthood, only true-born sons would be brave and worthy of their families … Confusion of blood produced unreliable men’ (Abercrombie, Hill, and Turner 1980: 80). It is especially significant that, according to Huet, ‘in a political culture where the notions of inheritance, name, title, and lineage [i.e. race] were reinforced by multiple rights (birthrights, rights to inheritance, entails, and so forth), the question of paternity had considerable urgency. The uncertainty of legitimacy also explains the success of a theory that attributed a lack of resemblance to the power of the mother’s imagination’; this theory was called ‘generation’ (Huet 1993: 34). Since Aristotle propounded his theory of generation in De Generatione Animalium, physicians and natural philosophers have debated one of the theory’s central paradoxes: why it is that, occasionally, children do not resemble their fathers. Within Renaissance medical and scientific discourses, explanations were as varied as the people providing them – we find historians, poets, philosophers, and physicians all contributing to the discourse of generation. Without question the most influential Renaissance voice in this ongoing debate was the sixteenth-century French physician Ambroise Paré. Paré’s De la chirurgie (1585) quickly became an encyclopaedic reference for English physicians and medical practitioners,1 such as Helkiah Crooke. Like Paré’s Des monstres et prodiges (1573), portions of Crooke’s Microcosmographia (1613) are intended to provide an explanation for one of the more troubling anomalies in generation, the problem of resemblance. Aristotelian tradition held that, by virtue of the male seed’s ‘natural’ superiority, a man’s offspring should resemble him. Not surprisingly, all types of difficulties arose when a child bore little or no resemblance to the father – questions of legitimacy in particular. If the male seed was dominant (as Aristotelian theory held), then how was it possible for a man’s offspring to resemble him neither in appearance nor sex? Either his wife had committed adultery or, if she was virtuous, then the answer lay elsewhere. Not surprisingly, theorists looked to Aristotle’s concept of the malleability of ‘seed’ after conception to explain this conundrum. In his discussion of the matter of resemblance, Helkiah Crooke implicitly seeks to assure the anxious father that the causes for the absence of paternal resemblance are both explicable and natural: The infant sometimes is altogether like the mother, sometimes altogether like the father, other sometimes like them both, that is, in some parts resembling the mother, in others

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the father. Oftentimes he resembleth neither the father nor the mother, but the grandfather or the great grandfather, sometimes he will be like an unknown friend, as for example, an Ethiopian or such like who never had hand in his generation. Of all these similitudes we have many examples in authors of approved credit. (Microcosmographia, Book 5, 26)

While Crooke alludes to classical authors such Herodotus, Pliny, and Aristotle as sources for his commentary, it is clear that he is deeply indebted to Ambroise Paré’s Des monstres et prodiges. Paré’s text similarly draws upon ‘many examples in authors of approved credit’ in its efforts to address the problematics of resemblance (Paré 1982: xv). However, there is a marked difference between Paré’s and Crooke’s handling of the matter. Paré begins by adumbrating the difference between ‘monsters’ and ‘marvels’: ‘Monsters are things that appear outside the course of nature (and are usually signs of some forthcoming misfortune), such as a child who is born with one arm, another who will have two heads, and additional members over and above the ordinary’ (Paré 1982: 3). Prodigies, or ‘marvels’, on the other hand, are ‘things which happened that are complete against Nature as when a woman will give birth to a serpent, or a dog, or some other thing that is totally against Nature’ (1982: 3). In perhaps an unconscious parody of the Ten Commandments, Paré provides his readers with a list of the ‘several things that cause monsters’: the ‘glory’ or the ‘wrath’ of God; too much or too little ‘seed’, ‘imagination’, ‘posture’, ‘hereditary or accidental illnesses’, ‘rotten or corrupt seed’, or ‘through mixture or mingling of seed’ (1982: 4). For Paré, as for Crooke, the principal causes of monsters and marvels is the human imagination, which Paré identifies as the ‘fifth cause of monstrosity’. As part of his explanation, Paré first turns to Heliodorus’ Aethiopica and an explanation that we would immediately recognise as racial in its semiotic register. According to Paré, Heliodorus ‘writes that Persina, the Queen of Ethiopia, conceived by King Hidustes – both of them being Ethiopian – a daughter who was white and this [occurred] because of the appearance of the beautiful Andromeda that she [Persina] summoned up in her imagination, for she had a painting of her before her eyes during the embraces from which she became pregnant’ (Paré 1982: 38). Paré then tells the story of Hippocrates saving the life of ‘a princess accused of adultery, because she had given birth to a child as black as a Moor, her husband and she both having white skin; which woman was absolved upon Hippocrates’ persuasion that it was [caused by] the portrait of a Moor, similar to the child, which was customarily attached to her bed’ (Paré 1982: 38). Paré cites these examples as ‘true accounts’ of the extraordinary power of the female imagination, and advises that ‘it is necessary that women – at the hour of conception and when the child is not yet formed (which takes thirty to thirty-five days for males and forty or forty-two, as Hippocrates says, for females – not be forced to look at or to imagine monstrous things’ (Paré 1982: 39–40). Paré’s examples, of course, illuminate more than just an ancient belief. In reiterating Herodotus’ tales of imaginative

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miscegenation, Paré highlights the impossibility of completely alleviating male anxiety about the legitimacy of his offspring. Race as lineage proved too permeable, too malleable a term for a society undergoing social and cultural change.

Race: A Renaissance Category? I want to conclude by returning to John Minsheu’s ‘augmentation’ of Percyvale’s Bibliotheca Hispanica. As I noted earlier, the Bibliotheca does not provide entries for most of the Spanish racialising lexicon (raza, mestizo, mulatto). Minsheu adds two of the three; interestingly enough, he includes mestizo but not mulatto. Moreover, in his definition of mestizo Minsheu does not cross-reference other Spanish terms or offer English equivalents. Instead, he writes, ‘mestizo, m. that which is come or sprung of a mixture of two kinds, as a black Moor and a Christian, a mongrel dog or beast’. What Minsheu’s definition elides, or more accurately what it misrepresents, is that the word was coined to describe offspring of Spanish and American Indian unions and was rarely applied to anyone born of the sexual relations between African (or Moor) and Christian. Moreover, mestizo was not used to describe non-human animals. What Minsheu does to create his definition is to combine a number of different terms in the Spanish racial lexicon (mestizo, mestico, mulatto, and morisco) and offer his English readers a hybrid explanation. As Minsheu constitutes it, mestizo functions as a less than desirable term of reference. To categorise a person as a mestizo, then, is not only to point to a problematic genealogy but also to deny that individual a ‘racial’ history. Ultimately, it was England’s pursuit of power in the Americas that triggered the kind of redefinition reflected in Minsheu’s translation of the Spanish racial lexicon.2 Engendered by a combination of political unrest, economic dearth, and political oppression, the migration of Englishmen to the emerging colonies in the Americas wrought unexpected changes in the English social consciousness. In this brave new world, the aristocratic ideology that had given rise to the word ‘race’, and its social legitimacy, proved inadequate as a method of categorising in the colonial space. Sexual and marital unions across ethnic, social, and geographical lines created a group of individuals whose identities threatened to undermine the conceptualisation of race as solely based on patrilineal descent tied to social status. Moreover, those people born in the colonies who could claim an English father posed a singular difficulty for the prevailing discourse of race: what exactly was the race of the mulatto or mestizo if the father was ‘nobly born’? Certainly, the most significant factor in the changing definition of race as a category of identity during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries was the impact of colonialism and the African slave trade. The shift in race’s meaning can be mapped in those Renaissance texts whose methodological impulses we would now classify as constitutive of cultural anthropology and physical anthropology: travel narratives, ethnographic writings, and writings that included specific references to Africa, America, and Asia. Texts such as Ralegh’s The Discoverie of Guiana, Leo Africanus’ The

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Geographical History of Africa, Richard Hakluyt’s Voyages and Discoveries, and the myriad plays, ballads, official reports, and personal letters associated with the mercantile and colonising project signalled a radical change in the English consciousness. No longer looking inward, Renaissance England cast its gaze to the world and discovered that the world was decidedly not English. In the end, the Renaissance usage of the word ‘race’ reveals a multiplicity of loci, of axes of determinism, as well as metaphorical systems to aid and abet its deployment across a variety of boundaries in the making (Hendricks 1996). As an expression of fundamental distinctions, race’s meaning varied depending upon whether a writer wanted to specify difference born of a class-based concept of genealogy, a psychological (and essentialised) nature, or group typology. Nonetheless, in all these variations, race is envisioned as something fundamental, something immutable, knowable, and recognisable, yet it can only be ‘seen’ when its boundaries are violated, and thus race is also, paradoxically, mysterious, illusory, and mutable. As a classificatory category the Renaissance concept of race, it turns out, was riven with fault-lines, which human beings proved quite adept at exploiting. Over the course of the sixteenth century race proved itself a useful social category. In its linguistic and ideological permutations, it allowed for the classification of all humankind, but with distinct variants according to political and cultural needs. A Renaissance category that once defined a person’s ability to claim a noble heritage, race quickly proved useful as a generic typological term. Depending on context, audience, and gender, Renaissance writers moved freely between phrases such as ‘the English race’, ‘the Irish race’, ‘race of women’, ‘black race’, and ‘white race’. Race became divorced from its strict genealogical semiotics and became increasingly associated with a colour-based taxonomy (‘black race’ or ‘white race’). Furthermore, nationstates and continents became tied to this taxonomy, and lineage took on a different importance. Racial descent was no longer defined solely through the father, and ‘seed’ no longer determined the contours of racial identity. Although it would take two centuries for the word ‘race’ to be defined solely in terms of colour, it is in Renaissance English culture that the first steps were taken towards establishing race as an unquestioned detail of cultural identity. Race, indeed, is a Renaissance category.

Notes This essay was revised by the editor. 1 Finally, translated into English in 1634 as The Works of that Famous Chirugeon Ambrose Parey., the writings of Ambroise Paré were quite influential in the medical community in England throughout the late sixteenth century and all of the seventeenth century, those most late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century readers read either the French or Latin versions.

2

The edition of Paré’s work cited in this essay was translated by Thomas Johnson and published in London in 1634. See Allen 1997 for an excellent discussion of the links between early modern England’s political economy, colonialism, and the emergence of whiteness as a definition of the notion of race.

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References and Further Reading Abercrombie, Nicholas, Stephen Hill, and Bryan S. Turner (1980). Dominant Ideology Thesis. London: George Allen & Unwin. Adelman, Janet (1992). Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays, Hamlet to The Tempest. New York: Routledge. Allen, Theodore W. (1997). The Invention of The White Race: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America, 2 vols. London: Verso. Bartels, Emily C. (2008). Speaking of the Moor: From Alcazar to Othello. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Barthelemy, Anthony Gerard (1987). Black Face, Maligned Race: The Representation of Blacks in English Drama from Shakespeare to Southerne. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press. Bovilsky, Lara (2008). Barbarous Play: Race on the English Renaissance Stage. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Callaghan, Dympna (2000). Shakespeare Without Women: Representing Gender and Race on the Renaissance Stage. London: Routledge. Casey, James (1989). The History of the Family. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Erickson, Peter and Clark Hulse (2000). Early Modern Visual Culture: Representation, Race, Empire in Renaissance England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Floyd-Wilson, M. (2003). English Ethnicity and Race in Early Modern Drama. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gillis, John (1995). Shakespeare and the Geography of Difference. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Goldberg, David (1993). Racist Culture: Philosophy and the Politics of Meaning. Oxford: Blackwell. Goldenberg, David M. (2003). The Curse of Ham: Race and Slavery in Early Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hall, Kim (1996). Things of Darkness: Economies of Race and Gender in Early Modern England. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Hendricks, Margo (1996). ‘Obscured by dreams: race, empire, and Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream’. Shakespeare Quarterly, 47, 37–60.

Hendricks, Margo and Patricia Parker (eds.) (1994). Women. ‘Race’ and Writing in the Early Modern Period. London: Routledge. Horowitz, Maryanne Cline (1992). Race, Gender, and Rank: Early Modern Ideas of Humanity. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. Huet, Marie-Helene (1993). Monstrous Imagination. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Hutner, Heidi (2001). Colonial Women: Race and Culture in Stuart Drama. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Iyengar, Sujata (2005). Shades of Difference: Mythologies of Skin Color in Early Modern England. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Jaffary, Nora E. (2007). Gender, Race and Religion in the Colonization of the Americas. Aldershot: Ashgate. Loomba, Ania (1992). Gender, Race, Renaissance Drama, 2nd edn. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Loomba, Ania (2001). ‘The colour of patriarchy: critical difference, cultural difference and Renaissance drama’. In K. Chedgzoy (ed.), Shakespeare, Feminism and Gender (pp. 235–55). Basingstoke: Palgrave. Loomba, Ania (2002). Shakespeare, Race, and Colonialism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Loomba, Ania and Jonathan Burton (eds.) (2007). Race in Early Modern England: A Documentary Companion. Houndmills: Palgrave. Macdonald, Joyce Greene (1997). Race, Ethnicity, and Power in the Renaissance. Delaware: University of Delaware Press. Macdonald, Joyce Greene (2002). Women and Race in Early Modern Texts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Minsheu, John (1613). A Dictionary in Spanish and English. London. Paré, Ambroise (1982). On Monsters and Marvels, trans. Janis L. Pallister. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Percyvale, Richard (1591). Bibliotheca Hispanica, Containing a Grammar, with a Dictionary in Spanish, English and Latin. London. Rollins, Hyder (ed.) (1954). The Renaissance in England: Non-Dramatic Prose and Verse of the Sixteenth Century. Lexington, Mass.: D. C. Heath.

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Singh, Jyotsna G. (ed.) (2009). A Companion to the Global Renaissance: English Literature and Culture in the Era of Expansion. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Smith, Paul Julian (1992). Representing the Other: ‘Race’, Text and Gender in Spanish and Spanish American Narrative. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Sollors, Werner (1997). Neither Black Nor White, Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature. New York: Oxford University Press.

Stolcke, Verena (1994). ‘Invade women: gender, race, and class in the formation of colonial society’. In Margo Hendricks and Patricia Parker (eds.), Women. ‘Race’ and Writing in the Early Modern Period (pp. 272–86). London: Routledge. Wilson, Thomas (1612). A Christian Dictionary, 2 parts. London.

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Writing the Nations Nicola Royan

In 1469 the Scottish Parliament declared that the Scottish king had ‘full jurisdiction and free empire within his realm’. In practice this meant that he could appoint bishops and other church dignitaries without reference to Rome; it also marked a new point in Scottish self-conceptions. To reach the same stage, some sixty years later, the English required a change of dynasty and a divorce, but the Scots had always been precocious in matters of national identity. Despite the discrepancy in timing of this particular gesture, however, the years between 1469 and 1625 saw huge changes in the ways both the Scots and the English presented themselves, whether in response to external political pressures or to more scholarly and intellectual concerns. The aim of this essay is to highlight some of the elements underpinning the national identities of the independent realms of Scotland and England, and how these were refigured during the sixteenth century; there is not space to address the related and equally problematic question of Welsh and Irish identities during the same period. It will also consider the relationship between Scottish and English historiographical traditions, which were parallel yet responsive to each other, and how this relationship was affected by the Union of the Crowns in 1603. Modern critics of nationalism sometimes question whether the terms ‘nationhood’ and ‘national identity’ are appropriate to the early modern period (Hadfield 1994: 1–22; Mason 1998: 78–103; Smith 1999: 110–18). In strictly sociological terms, it is correct to question whether the sixteenth-century inhabitants of Scotland and England viewed their governments and their communities in a manner comparable to that of their twenty-first-century successors. Yet it cannot be denied that notions of ethnic identity – what it is to be Scots or to be English – were discussed in a variety of texts, nor that these same notions of ethnic identity correspond to features of modern national identity. With the proviso that the discussion here relates only to early modern Scotland and England, I propose to use the terms ‘nation’ and ‘national identity’, rather than struggle for unfamiliar alternatives.

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Many different circumstances made the early modern transformations of national identity particularly dynamic and particularly long-lasting. First, the political circumstances of each realm demanded attention. The Tudors, as a new dynasty, required justification and support, both of which can be found in both chronicle and poem. The Scots retained the Stewarts as their royal dynasty: despite a succession of minorities, James III’s violent death after Sauchieburn (1488), and Mary’s deposition (1568), the Stewart hold on the crown was never really challenged. However, the frequent lack of an adult male ruler made the realm peculiarly vulnerable to outside influence, and much ink was spent on asserting independence either from France or from England. This was especially true in the mid-sixteenth century, when the propaganda wars between Scotland and England were at their fiercest: two important Scottish prose treatises, The Complaynt of Scotland and Ane Resonyng of Ane Scottish and Inglis merchand Betuix Rowand and Lionis, date from this period. The absorption of humanist ideas at the beginning of the sixteenth century brought many changes. In the first place, a realm with aspirations towards a sovereign identity required a humanist history: this would be written in an elegant Latin style and demonstrating cause and effect, copious speeches, and an interest in character (Cochrane 1981; Kelley 1970; Levy 1967: 124–66). Later, history and story began to diverge, as the influence of humanism became a matter of scholarship more than a matter of style, as interests turned to the study of manuscripts and artefacts. This fostered the development of antiquarianism and was supported by the development of mapmaking and a geographical sense of identity, most strikingly exemplified by the work of William Camden. The reformation of the church also affected the presentation of national identity: in brief, not only was the Apocalypse approaching, it was approaching in English. Vernacular bibles were essential to Protestantism; so were vernacular descriptions, histories, and definitions of the saved (Patterson 1994: ix–x). Aided by the printing press, chronicles and other writings were disseminated through a wider population than before (Anderson 1991: 20–5). Religion, patriotism, and the printing press had come together before the Reformation, in such efforts as the production of the Aberdeen Breviary (1510), designed to replace the Sarum Use in Scotland with a calendar of Scottish saints, but its influence was slight compared to the rhetoric of salvation and dissent introduced by the reformers. The basic criteria for ethnic, and hence in the terms of this essay, national, identity had been well established for some time amongst the Scots and the English at the beginning of the early modern period (Smith 1999: 3–27). Regular outbreaks of war between their sovereigns meant that there was a common name for each people, and although the border between them was not entirely fixed, there was a clear understanding of native territory. Most of Europe had also grasped the difference between the Scots and the English, doubtless aided by the opposing alliances undertaken by each realm. So much is established by political circumstance. However, a substantial part of national identity remained open to reworking, namely the images and narra-

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tives which displayed it, such as the myths of origin and ancestry, myths of national heroes, myths of place, and myths of regeneration and government, which look towards the future. These are where the figuring of nationhood takes place (Smith 1999: 62–70).

Myths of Origin and Ancestry The most memorable myth of antiquity from this period is to be found in Hector Boece’s Scotorum historia a prima gentis origine (1527). His introduction retells the story of the Greek Gathelos and his Egyptian wife Scota, whose wanderings in exile lead them to Portugal, and their descendants first to Ireland and then to Scotland. This story challenges the British myth of Brutus, the Trojan refugee, and places the Scots in possession of their territory before the arrival of the British. However, Boece confines his narrative of origin to his introduction; his primary concern is the unbroken line of kings from Fergus mac Ferquhard, inaugurated in 330 BC, to his own day and James V. Although both the origin-myth and the date of the first royal inauguration are part of a long tradition in Scottish historiography, no one prior to Boece had named all forty kings between Fergus mac Ferquhard and Fergus mac Erc (Broun 1999: 195–200). The historicity of Boece’s account is a complicated matter, but not of primary importance to this essay since, for Boece’s audience, his line of kings is mesmerising because of its statement about the Scots rather than for any of its implications for his historical methods (Mason 1998: 95–6). The line of kings asserts Scottish independence and civilisation from the earliest times: the Scots were a people with established government and clear sovereignty over themselves, who were at no time subject to the Britons, Romans, Saxons, Vikings, or English. At the one point at which the Scots are nearly subjugated, they and their king choose exile over surrender; two generations later, the new king leads them to reconquer their lands (Boece 1527: fos. 114–22). The emphasis in this view of identity is on the people, not on the territory, and on the king as a representative of the people. As well as asserting the independence of the realm, the foregrounding of the king also helped to distract attention from the continuing division between the Gaelic-speaking and Scots-speaking peoples. To admit such troublesome diversity within a nation was problematic, since it challenged several assumptions of nationhood, such as shared language and shared history. Other Scottish historiographers are blunt in their attitude towards the Gaels: in his Historia Maioris Britanniae (1521), John Mair refers to them as Scoti montani, ‘wild Scots’, a traditional designation that denies them participation in his own civilised culture and its conceptions of national identity (Mair 1521: bk. 1, ch. 8; Mair 1892: 47–50); George Buchanan, a Gaelic-speaker himself, chooses to favour Latin over all the Celtic languages, and thus to undermine claims to rival civilisations (Buchanan 1582: bk. 1, chs. 15–16; Buchanan 1827: I, 87–90). Boece ties to integrate the Gael into Scottish history, and thus to offer an inclusive identity; through his emphasis on kingship,

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he is by and large successful, for both peoples could share a symbol, if not a language. Boece’s view of national identity became authoritative, whether challenged, by proponents of the British myth, or accepted by his fellow-Scots and by other English chroniclers, notably Holinshed. The propagation of his view was helped tremendously by the translations commissioned from John Bellenden by James V, since the vernacular found an even broader audience within Britain. As well as suggesting unassailable independence and courage, in the context of contemporary as well as past English aggression, the line of kins also offered excellent opportunities for political precedent. Thus were the benefits reaped by two later writers, John Lesley and George Buchanan. Lesley, bishop of Ross, was a supporter of Mary Queen of Scots, accompanying her into exile in England. De origine, moribus et gestis Scotorum (1578) was his second attempt at historiography. His first, vernacular account merely supplemented the Scotorum historia from 1437 until his own day, and it was designed to provide an explanation of Mary’s deposition, and to allocate blame to her rebellious subjects. When it became apparent that Mary’s restoration would require international support, he rewrote his history in Latin, summarising Boece’s narrative with his own gloss, highlighting the Scots’ long support for kingship and their movement towards inheritance and away from deposition. Only four years later, George Buchanan offered a diametrically opposed view of Scottish kingship, finding instead in Boece’s early narrative proof for his arguments in De Iure Regni apud Scotos (1579), that the Scots not only had a tradition of electing their monarchs, but also of deposing them when they were unsatisfactory. For Buchanan, then, part of Scottish national identity was a nonsacramental view of kingship and government, and a figuring of the monarch as a (dispensable) servant of the realm. While Buchanan’s interpretation is probably nearer to Boece’s austere vision of successful monarchy, however, that two radically different readings of political identity should emerge from the Scotorum historia is striking. Neither Buchanan nor Lesley rejects the core of Boece’s presentation, that the Scots were forever independent and valiant; they are instead able to attribute the maintenance of that independence to entirely different political causes. The English also had their myth of antiquity, the British myth. Like the Scottish myth, it was medieval in origin, propagated first and most successfully by Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century, and also pervasive in earlier accounts of the realm. Whereas the Scottish myth asserted only independence, the British myth claimed supremacy for the kings of Loegria (identified with England), the descendants of Locrinus, over all the realms of Britain, and championed a pre-Saxon identity, later reaffirmed in the person of Arthur. For the Scots, such assertions were alarming: despite the origin of this as a British myth, the English read it as giving them authority over the Scots, hence the Scottish insistence on their prior claims to Scotland and their perpetual independence. The myths are entirely incompatible: either one or the other must be accepted, or neither. Clearly, Boece and his followers took the Scottish line, and some of the English writers took the British line, but at least two writers in the early years of the century chose to accept neither. As part of his argument that

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the Scots and the English should unite as equals, John Mair was forced to deny both narratives, since either one would have betokened supremacy (Mair 1521: bk. 1, chs. 1 and 9; Mair 1892: 1–3, 51–3). Polydore Vergil found both ridiculous on scholarly grounds, and says as much in the Historia Anglica (1534). Of the two, he gives primacy to the British myth, as might be expected in a history of England. The Scottish myth only appears, according to Vergil, as the result of pressure brought to bear on him by Gavin Douglas, who was perturbed by the printing of Mair’s view of national origins. This incident neatly dissociated Vergil from any credence in the tale; it also demonstrates the importance of these myths to national identity. Douglas was a friend of Mair’s and no fool, but to him, to weaken the Scottish case for independence was foolhardy. As it happens, Vergil maintains the argument derived from the British myths, namely that of supremacy over the Scots, but he finds his evidence for it in later, more verifiable, narratives. His interpretation lacks only the sense of permanence granted by the myths of origin.

Myths of National Heroes In discounting the British myth, Polydore Vergil stood on some ardently British toes. While it was possible to survive without Brutus, as it was possible to survive without Gathelos, to lose Arthur was to inflict too much damage on the myth of identity. A devoted Christian, a noble warrior, and the ‘once and future king’, Arthur was crucial to the British narrative. As one of the Nine Worthies, as the king who had repelled the Saxon invasions, and also as the reputed conqueror of most of western Europe, Arthur was an essential part of English identity. His British origins made his appeal all the more certain, for in returning to Arthur as a focus it was possible to ignore the three intervening invasions, of the Saxons, of the Danes, and finally of the Normans. Arthur’s heroic status allowed the mongrel nature of the English people to be rendered invisible, and the Scots’ claims to independence less disturbing. Polydore Vergil has a similar attitude to Arthur as he has to the rest of the British myth. For him, certainty in the English realm begins really with the Normans, for at that point he is able to structure his work on the reigns of single, definite kings, rather than the heptarchies and confusions of the Saxon period. Vergil places English identity in statues and formal arrangements rather than in heroes, a representation that displaced the older myths gradually but significantly by the beginning of the seventeenth century. Vergil’s reduction of Arthur to a warrior-king limited to the boundaries of his kingdom was part of his humanist scholarship in checking other sources, for there is simply no reference to Arthur’s continental conquests in any of the European chronicles. Boece happily points this out as well, although for the Scots, like the challenge of the king-lists, Arthur’s diminution is also political: if he was indeed acknowledged as the conqueror of Europe, then they too had been subject to his dominion, and they were one of the most obvious targets for future English imperialism. To deny Arthur was one means of attempting to keep such desires in check.

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Arthur’s political importance is best shown by Henry VII’s naming of his eldest son after the king, an action repeated in Scotland by James IV, whose son was then briefly heir presumptive to the English throne. Henry had allowed himself through his Welsh origins to be associated with Arthur, as a bringer of peace, if not quite the return of the ‘once and future king’. It is perhaps not surprising therefore that the reaction against Vergil’s descriptions was so vocal. John Leland went so far as to pen a defence of Arthur (and an attack on Vergil), Assertio inclytissimi Arthurii Regis Britanniae, published in 1544. As the century progressed, however, although he continued to be defended as a genuine historical figure, Arthur gradually slipped from his previous status into the realm of symbol and legend (Kendrick 1950: 78–133). That he was effective there is most easily demonstrated by his use by Spenser in the Faerie Queene; his power as a model of good kingship and knighthood and as a symbol of a happy reign was unaffected by the change. However, a historical champion was still required. Fortunately, the English did not have to search too far. In place of Arthur appeared his fellow-Welshman Henry VII. Henry brought an end to the Plantagenet dynasty and to a long civil war, and cemented his victory by marriage with Elizabeth of York. In accounts of his reign, the marriage takes equal precedence with the battle of Bosworth, not least because it legitimated Henry’s claim to the throne, since after the deaths of her brothers, Elizabeth was heir to Edward IV. Edward Halle, for instance, foregrounds the marriage in the title of and the introduction to The Union of the Two Noble and Illustre Families of Lancastre and Yorke (1548; Halle 1809: 1–2). Since Henry was technically a usurper from the Lancastrian house of usurpers, such legitimation was essential. Hence the aggressive vilification of his enemy, for while Thomas More’s Richard III is probably the most sophisticated account of the king, other writers concur with his opinion: Richard is unnatural, inadequate, evil. On Bosworth Field, in Halle’s account, Richard demonstrates all these in his speech before battle. His main means of encouragement is to emphasise Henry’s obscurity and his Welshness, while asking forgiveness for his crimes. His defeat is assured, and the triumph of the Tudor dynasty guaranteed (Halle 1809: 415–16). While the English initially favoured a liberator from violence as their most recent hero, the Scots continued to favour a liberator by violence. In the preface to the Scotorum historia, Boece mentions a succession of national heroes: Calgacus and Galdus, who repelled the Romances, Fergus mac Erc, who re-establishes the realm after exile, and Gregor, who resists the Danes. Nevertheless, Robert Bruce and William Wallace stand out. Like Arthur, they liberated their people from a foreign aggressor; unlike Arthur, they were undoubtedly real, and also were without the stain of illegitimacy or association with wizardry. Bruce is the acknowledged hero of the humanist histories, for he is both part of the legitimate kingship and also the choice of the people, nicely combining election and inheritance (Boece 1527: fos. 314–16; Buchanan 1827: II, 400–14; Mair 1892: 209–24; see also Williamson 1979: 112–13). In that way, it is possible to compare his portrayal with that of Henry Tudor, although Bruce has the advantage in that his enemies can be figured as foreigners. He is also, however,

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an ambiguous figure, for he had sworn fealty to Edward I in his early years, and he changes allegiance several times before leading the Scots to victory. While this can be presented as a demonstration of his true conversion to the Scottish cause, it can also leave the suspicion of a self-seeking hunger for power. Wallace, on the other hand, is an unchallenged hero. Mair especially goes to some lengths to refute what he describes as Caxton’s lies about the Scottish hero to present an unblemished fighter for freedom (Mair 1892: 191–206). Some of Mair’s argument was based on Hary’s Wallace, the source of Wallace’s continued reputation: this poem, composed around 1475, was printed three times during the next century (c.1509, 1570, 1594) and another two times (1601, 1611) in the one following. It is possible to read the Wallace as a racist text, for it dehumanises the English as ‘Sotheron’ and also revels in its hero’s violence. At the same time, it offers acute perspectives on Scottish nationhood, sharper than those of the more diffuse historiographers. First, the Wallace removes national identity from the person of the king: the realm and the people still recognise themselves as Scottish, even under English domination and without an active monarch. Furthermore, the privilege to determine Scottishness is attributed not to the aristocracy but to the barony – Wallace is not a peasant, but in the conventions of romance and even historiography, he might as well be. Secondly, however unpleasant the implications of dehumanising the English, there is no denying the unmistakable difference drawn between the English and the Scots, in both language and character. These differences are reinforced by various other witnesses: William Harrison, for example, talks of having to translate John Bellenden’s preface to the Chronicles of Scotland into English, while the Complaynt of Scotland insists that the Scots and the English as like as ‘scheip and voluis’ (sheep and wolves) (Holinshed 1808: V, preface; Wedderburn 1979: 84). Yet ultimately, Wallace’s story is a narrative loss: the victor is Bruce, who succeeds in returning Scotland to independence, yet is also the one who gains personal advantage for his endeavours. Wallace fought only for the realm, and died for his loyalty. The poem may therefore be read both as a critique of royal government and as an assertion that true national piety lies with the people and not with the king or his aristocracy. At the time of the poem’s composition, there were specific political circumstances to which it seems to draw attention, but the frequency of its printing around the time of the Union of the Crowns suggests that it also spoke to another Scottish anxiety of identity. Despite the benefits held out by Mair, it would seem that some Scots at least were not entirely sure about the merits of the Union. One particular argument for the Union, however, was irrefutable: no matter how fast-flowing the Tweed, it was no match for the North Sea as a boundary. As mapmaking grew more proficient and the history of place attracted more attention, the geographical unity of Great Britain became less easy to ignore. The Union of the Crowns in 1603 gave this development political edge, as James entitled himself King of Great Britain. However, even where inclusion seemed to be invoked by a title, such as William Camden’s Britannia or Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion, there was reluctance to cross Hadrian’s Wall; on the Scottish side, Timothy Pont’s maps were also con-

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cerned with Scotland rather than Britain. Geographical reality still needed ideological commitment to be culturally acceptable.

Myths of Regeneration One possibility for a united identity arose from the Reformation, since the most striking myth of regeneration of this period is the return to a golden age of Christendom. The reformers began as small groups whom others joined, and their vision was of conversion rather than conquest, a return to simple practices and true faith. Scottish and English reformers regarded each other as allies, and as the relationship between government and reform was frequently uneasy in both realms, so reformers sometimes found refuge in the other realm after impolitic utterance. Protestant identity, therefore, often focuses on the righteous, regardless of nation and geography, rather than the corruptible monarch. This can be seen clearly in John Knox’s rejection of accusations of ‘tumult and rebellion’, for he and his confederates seek primarily to preach the gospel, and only secondarily to defend Scotland from the ‘bondage and tumult of strangers’, by which he means France (Knox 1949: 1, 146) Later, once Protestant religious settlements had been achieved, a different historiographical model appeared. In Foxe’s view, for example, Elizabeth could be figured as Constantine and himself as Eusebius, in celebration of a righteous settlement (see Chapter 79, Reconstructing the Past: History, Historicism, Histories; Mason 1998: 202–5, 261–6). The choice of models is revealing, for Constantine is a British emperor, and so the figuring here is very close to a reassertion of the British myth, even without Arthur. Against such rhetoric, Buchanan’s line of kings and Knox’s search for Scottish proto-Protestants and martyrs seem to have had no power to promulgate a Scottish perspective. What began as apocalyptic visions in which the union of all Protestants across national borders is to be welcomed becomes a movement towards political absorption; even the militant Presbyterianism of the Scots becomes viewed as something only to be corrected by proper English control (Williamson 1979: 85–96).

Myths of Union That there could have been an identity equally reflective of Scotland and England in 1603 seems impossible. The sheer strength of each tradition made it so, and even those who tried were defeated (Hardin 1973: 65–7). The myths of origin were incompatible; the heroes likewise, for the English could not have accepted either Wallace or Bruce any more than the Scots could accept Arthur. The myth of supremacy was too ingrained in English tradition to be eradicated easily. So when a combined history of Scotland, England, and Ireland is offered in Holinshed’s Chronicles (1577, revised 1587), the histories are not integrated but rather presented serially. In his preface to

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the reader attached to the History of Scotland, Holinshed says: ‘I meant rather to deliver what I found in their own histories extant, than correct them by others … so that whatsoever ye read in the same, consider that a Scotishman writ it’ (Holinshed 1808: II, vi). While this shows an understanding of the Scots’ position, nonetheless it does not give the Scots’ view any authority, for as the narrative is welcomed by a Scot, it may be despised by an Englishman. While Holinshed refers to Edward I’s presence in Scotland as bondage in the History of Scotland, following Bellenden’s lead, William Harrison in his Description of Britain, which leads seamlessly into his Description of England, is asserting English dominance over the Scots (Holinshed 1808: I, 195–214). Henry V bears this out: men of all four nations of Britain and Ireland join to fight for a king of England on a project of conquering an ally of one of the other nations (Maley 1997: 96–101). Mair’s vision of a union of equals had come to nought, and the English had won the historiographical race.

References and Further Reading Anderson, Benedict (1991). Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, 2nd edn. London: Verso. Baker, David J. and Willy Maley (eds.) (2002). British Identities and English Renaissance Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bellenden, John (1821). The Histories and Chronicles of Scotland, 2 vols. Edinburgh: W. & C. Tait. Boece, Hector (1527). Scotorum Historia a prima gentis origine. Paris: Badius Ascensius. Broun, Dauvit (1999). The Irish Identity of the Kingdom of the Scots in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries, Studies in Celtic History 18. Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer. Buchanan, George (1582). Historia Rerum Scoticarum. Edinburgh: Alexander Arbuthnet. Buchanan, George (1827). The History of Scotland, trans. James Aikman, 4 vols. Glasgow: Blackie. Cochrane, Eric (1981). Historians and Historiography in the Italian Renaissance. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hadfield, Andrew (1994). Literature, Politics and National Identity: Reformation to Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hadfield, Andrew (2000). ‘Spenser, Drayton and the question of Britain’. Review of English Studies, ns 51, 582–99. Halle, Edward (1809). Halle’s Chronicle, ed. H. Ellis. London: n.p.

Hardin, Richard F. (1973). Michael Drayton and the Passing of Elizabethan England. Lawrence: University of Kansas Press. Hary (1968–9). Hary’s Wallace, ed. M. P. McDiarmid, 2 vols. Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society. Helgerson, Richard (1992). Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Highley, C. (2008). Catholic Writing the Nation in Early Modern Britain and Ireland Oxford: Oxford University Press. Holinshed, Raphael (1808). Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, 6 vols. London: J. Johnson. Kelley, Donald R. (1970). Foundations of Modern Historical Scholarship: Language, Law and History in the French Renaissance. New York: Columbia University Press. Kendrick, T. D. (1950). British Antiquity. London: Methuen. Knapp, James A. (2003). Illustrating the Past: The Representation of History in Printed Books. Aldershot: Ashgate. Knox, John (1949). John Knox’s Historie of the Reformation, ed. W. C. Dickinson, 2 vols. Edinburgh: Nelson. Levy, F. J. (1967). Tudor Historical Thought. San Marino: Huntington Library. Mair, John (1521). Historia Maioris Britanniae, tam Angliae quam Scotiae. Paris: Badius Ascensius.

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Mair, John (1892). A History of Greater Britain, England as well as Scotland, trans. A. Constable. Edinburgh: Scottish History Society. Maley, Willy (1997). ‘ “This sceptr’d isle”: Shakespeare and the British problem’. In J. Joughlin (ed.), Shakespeare and National Culture (pp. 83– 108). Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mason, Roger A. (1998). Kingship and the Commonweal: Political Thought in Renaissance and Reformation Scotland. East Linton: Tuckwell Press. McEachern, Claire (1996). The Poetics of English Nationhood, 1590–1612. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Parry, Graham (1995). The Trophies of Time: English Antiquarians of the Seventeenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Patterson, Annabel (1994). Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Smith, Anthony D. (1999). Myths and Memories of the Nation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wedderburn, Robert (1979). The Complaynt of Scotland, ed. A. M. Stewart. Edinburgh: Scottish Text Society. Williamson, Arthur H. (1979). Scottish National Consciousness in the Age of James VI: Apocalypse, the Union and the Shaping of Scotland’s Popular Culture. Edinburgh: John Donald.

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Early Modern Ecology Ken Hiltner

When confronted with Victorian descriptions of environmental devastation, such as images of urban air pollution in Dickens’s novels, many readers are promptly persuaded that our present environmental crisis has its roots in the nineteenth century. Moreover, If we push back before the so-called ‘Industrial Revolution’ to the time of Shakespeare and Milton, many of the same readers are often sceptical that the crisis could have roots so deep, much less be making an appearance in the literature of the day. Nonetheless, if we take as our subject a poem that was enormously popular in seventeenth-century England, Sir John Denham’s Cooper’s Hill, it quickly becomes apparent that urban air pollution, acid rain, deforestation, endangered species, wetland loss, and rampant consumerism were all timely issues in 1642. Moreover, the crowning image in Cooper’s Hill alludes to the now forgotten, though at the time widespread, environmental protests of the 1620s to 1640s that played a surprising role in helping to bring about England’s Civil War. For more three decades now, there has been extraordinary critical interest in ‘culture’, which in many quarters has become the academic buzzword. Although the fact that culture has moved out of the margins of academic discourse is no doubt positive, what if this focus has marginalised something else? For example, as critics have made clear in the past few decades, Cooper’s Hill, which was repeatedly revised during the turbulent 1640s and 1650s, can certainly be read as revealing much about the contemporary political and cultural landscape. However, if we focus too much on the political scene allegorised in the poem, we risk marginalising the very literal landscape it lavishly draws. In the present essay I will be using Cooper’s Hill as a case study in ecocriticism in order to show that even works that have special significance politically and allegorically can also be fruitfully read for their environmental import. Cooper’s Hill has had a strange history with readers. Having put the poem through five major revisions from 1642 to 1655, Denham so graphically imagines a hunted stag, ‘Like a declining statesman, left forlorn / To his friends’ pity’ (1642: 275–61), that readers in 1642 would have known that this was no longer a metaphor, but rather

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a literal description of the recently beheaded statesman Thomas Wentworth – and then, in the 1655 edition, of Charles I, who suffered the same fate. Similarly, as I will argue directly, when the speaker of Cooper’s Hill explains that ‘I see the City [London] in a thicker cloud / Of business than of smoke’ (1642: 28–9), readers would have at once recognised this as a literal description of an environmental crisis already centuries in the making. Surprisingly, Denham’s poem contains no literal description of Cooper’s Hill. Instead, the speaker lays out for the reader the landscape of the Thames Valley, visible from the hill. Beginning with a view of St Paul’s Cathedral, we move to London, then to Windsor Castle, St Anne’s Hill, a section of the Thames, Windsor Forest, a stag hunt on a wash-land (subject to flooding) meadow adjacent to the forest, and then conclude with the Thames overflowing its banks. True, Denham does open by comparing the hill to the Greek Mount Parnassus, but this is merely to name it as the home of his Muse. The descriptions of landscape must wait until line 13, when ‘Exalted to this height, I first look down / On Paul’s’ (1642: 13–14). As historians and critics have noted, the restoration of St Paul’s Cathedral in London was a politically charged issue from at least as early as the 1620s, with Charles I being a leading proponent for restoring a church that many found far too lavish. Consequently, it is hardly surprising that royalist Denham should praise in Cooper’s Hill the church that was ‘Preserved from ruin by the best of kings’ (1642: 20). What critics have ignored, however, is why the restoration of St Paul’s was necessary in the first place. As Sir William Dugdale noted in his The History of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London (1658), Charles I believed (correctly, as we now know) that the ‘decayed fabric’ of St Paul’s was caused ‘by the corroding quality of the coal smoke, especially in moist weather, whereunto it had been so long subject’ (Dugdale 1658: 134). The burning of coal with high sulphur content – the only type that was readily available in pre-modern London – releases large quantities of sulphur dioxide and nitrogen oxide into the atmosphere, both of which are highly caustic when they settle on building surfaces. As the seventeenth century opened, London had a serious problem with air pollution, which was not just eroding buildings but was also known to be killing plants, fish, and animals. Moreover, by the 1660s, respiratory illness caused by urban air pollution was already believed by the most celebrated statistician of the day to be second only to the plague as the leading cause of death in the city. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, London’s air-pollution problem first emerged centuries before Denham’s time. Because of increased deforestation and the availability of cheap coal, known as ‘sea-coal’ (so called either because it had been exposed by marine denudation or because it was shipped to London from the coast), many of London’s industries, such as dyers, began switching from wood use to coal as early as the thirteenth century. It was already known, however, that sea-coal smoke was particularly dangerous to human beings. As a result, as early as 1307 a proclamation made burning sea-coal in certain parts of the city illegal, as it created an ‘intolerable smell’ that diffused itself ‘throughout the neighbourhood places’ causing the air to be ‘greatly infected, to the annoyance of the magistrates, citizens, and others dwelling

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there and to the injury of their bodily health’ (Calendar of Close Rolls, Edward I, 5.537). By the end of the sixteenth century, with firewood generally no longer available in London and its surroundings, sea-coal use had become widespread. As Sir William Cecil noted in 1596, ‘London and all other towns near the sea … are mostly driven to burn coal … for most of the woods are consumed’ (cit. Perlin 1989: 158). Consequently, by the time that Shakespeare was writing his plays, Londoners were almost exclusively relying on an energy source that for nearly three centuries had been known to be dangerous. However, it was not until 1665 that the enormity of the problem became clear when John Graunt, whose statistical analysis of the London Bills of Mortality laid the groundwork for modern demography, noticed an increased death rate in London: ‘Little more than one of fifty dies in the country, whereas in London it seems manifest that about one in thirty two dies, over and above what dies in the plague’ (Petty 1899: 393). As many of these deaths came from respiratory illness, Graunt concluded that London was ‘more unhealthful … partly for that it is more populous, but chiefly because … sea-coals … [are now] … universally used’. Consequently, some people ‘cannot at all endure the smoke of London, not only for its unpleasantness but for the suffocations it causes’ (Petty 1899: 394). In the same decade that Graunt came to his startling conclusion about the danger of sea-coal smoke, John Evelyn penned the first modern work to take as its subject urban air pollution: Fumifugium or The Inconvenience of the Air and Smoke of London Dissipated. Together with some Remedies Humbly Proposed. By 1661 the problem had reached such a crisis level that Evelyn appealed directly to Charles II for immediate action because, thanks to a perpetual cloud of sea-coal smoke, ‘the city of London [now] resembles the face rather of Mount Etna, the court of Vulcan … or the suburbs of Hell, than an assembly of rational creatures’ (Evelyn 1661: 6). More than just playing on the popular notion that the burning of sea-coal had made London hellish, John Evelyn’s Fumifugium systematically undertakes both to describe London’s air pollution problem and to offer up solutions. ‘For when in all other places the air is most serene and pure, it is here [in London] eclipsed with such a cloud of sulphur as the sun itself … is hardly able to penetrate’ (1661: 6). Although sea-coal was in widespread use both industrially and residentially, Evelyn places the blame for air pollution squarely with industry: ‘Sea-coals alone in the city of London exposes it to one of the lowest Inconveniences and reproaches … [which comes] … but from some few and particular tunnels and issues, belonging only to brewers, dyers, lime-burners, salt-, and soap-boilers’ (1661: 6). Because a legal precedent dating from the fourteenth century had attempted to mitigate the smoke problem by requiring large-scale sea-coal burners to construct increasingly tall chimneys (in order to discharge the smoke away from irritated neighbours), these smokestacks, what Evelyn calls smoke ‘tunnels’, were by the middle of the seventeenth century becoming towering icons of air pollution. The reason Evelyn felt so strongly about the pollution problem was twofold. First, he was concerned about the effect that sea-coal smoke was having on human beings. ‘Those who repair to London, no sooner enter it but they find a universal alteration

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to their bodies’ (Evelyn 1661: 9). Indeed, he professes that he undertook to write the Fumifugium in part because the new king’s sister, ‘the Duchess of Orleans … did in my hearing, complain of the effects of this smoke both in her breast and lungs’ (1661: The Epistle). However, Evelyn had a second reason for undertaking the project. Although he never finished his proposed great work, Elysium Britannicum, he devoted much of his energies to horticultural reform. Through his interest in gardening, he realised that smoke from sea-coal ‘kills our bees and flowers abroad, suffering nothing in our gardens to bud, display themselves, or ripen; so as our anemones and many other choicest flowers, will by no industry be made to grow in London’ (1661: 7). But if the smoke was removed, as was by many observed … in the year when Newcastle was besieged and blocked up in our late wars, so as through the great dearth and scarcity of coals, those fumous works, many of them, were either left off or spent but few coals in comparison to what they now use: divers gardens and orchards planted even in the heart of London … were observed to bear such plentiful and infinite quantities of fruits as they never produced the like before or since, to their great astonishment. (Evelyn 1661: 7)

It had long been known that sea-coal smoke was at least harmful to plants, but Evelyn was persuaded from his experience as a gardener that it had indeed led to the local extinction of a variety of species. Returning to Cooper’s Hill, and our speaker’s ‘first look down / On Paul’s’ (1642: 14–15), we are now in a position to understand the context of Sir William Dugdale’s 1658 statement in The History of St Paul’s Cathedral in London. In the 1620s Charles’s ‘princely heart was moved with such compassion to this decayed fabric that for prevention of its near approaching ruin (by the corroding quality of the coal smoke, especially in moist weather, whereunto it had been so long subject) considering with himself how vast the charge would be’, nonetheless spearheaded the drive to finance its reconstruction (parenthetical comment by Dugdale 1658: 134). As mentioned earlier, the burning of coal with a high sulphur content releases sulphur dioxide into the atmosphere, which is highly caustic to building surfaces. As Evelyn concisely states in 1659, it is this ‘cloud of sea-coal … this pestilent smoke, which corrodes the very iron’ of buildings (Evelyn 1659: 29–30). Unfortunately, given the prevailing winds and the location of London’s early modern industry, St Paul’s was directly in the path of a sulphurous cloud of industrial air pollution. As Evelyn explains the situation in 1661, ‘when the wind blows southern, [it] dilates it self all over … the opposite part of London, especially about St Paul’s, poisoning the air with so dark and thick a fog as I have been hardly been able to pass through it’ (Evelyn 1661: 8). Although not identifying it as St Paul’s, in 1659 Evelyn writes: ‘I have been in a spacious church where I could not discern the minister for the smoke; nor hear him from the peoples barking’, the smoke ‘so fatally seizing on the lungs … that the cough and consumption spare no man’ (Evelyn 1659: 30). This problem was further exacerbated by the particular meteorological inversion

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characteristic of the Thames Valley, which causes London’s distinctive fog. Because both fog and smoke tend not to readily dissipate over London, it sets up near-perfectly moist conditions for caustic interaction between sulphur dioxide and building materials. (Although not coined until centuries later, the word ‘smog’ enters the English language as a contraction specifically intended to describe the meteorological condition whereby an amalgam of ‘smoke-fog’ hung over London.2) In an intriguing turn of events, the damage St Paul’s Cathedral received from seacoal smoke played a role in one of the many scandals of the day. Although, as Dugdale noted, Charles’s ‘princely heart was moved’ to undertake St Paul’s restoration, initially he was able to raise only £5,500 for the purpose. However, when William Laud was made bishop of London in 1628, the situation changed dramatically, as Laud immediately began levying a host of fines in order to finance the restoration. Although it was one of the smaller fines he enforced, by April 1635 Laud alone was able to obtain twice what Charles I originally raised for St Paul’s restoration – £11,000 – by heavily fining sea-coal burners.3 Beginning in the fourteenth century, those burning sea-coal faced being subject to ‘heavy forfeiture’, but as London in the seventeenth century was increasingly dependent on sea-coal’s cheap appeal, this was rarely enforced (Calendar of Close Rolls, Edward I, 5.537). While it helped make Laud enormously unpopular, levying fines against polluters in order to remedy the damage they had caused was well ahead of its time. Denham’s second landscape description, the image of London as engulfed in a cloud of air pollution, follows that of St Paul’s in Cooper’s Hill. After imagining himself raised well into the ‘air, secure from danger and fear’ (1642: 26), the speaker describes London: So raised above the tumult and the crowd I see the city in a thicker cloud Of business than of smoke; where men like ants Toil to prevent imaginary wants; Yet all in vain, increasing with their store, Their vast desires but make their wants the more. As food to unsound bodies, though it please The appetite, feeds only the disease; Where with like haste, though several ways they run: Some to undo, and some to be undone. … In tumults seek their peace, their heaven in hell, Oh happiness of sweet retired content! (1642: 27–47)

Readers familiar with Thoreau’s Walden will immediately recognise presaged here the central argument of the opening ‘Economy’ chapter – and indeed of the work itself. ‘The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation’, argues Thoreau (1971: 7), because, as Denham had already realised, ‘Their vast desires, but make their wants the more.’ As we have no knowledge that Thoreau read Cooper’s Hill, the similarity of the two

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works may stem from the fact that both Denham and Thoreau are writing in the pastoral tradition. Basking in the ‘sweet retired content’ of country life, while contrasting it with the complexities of a contemporaneous ‘modern world’, has been a commonplace of pastoral at least since the Greek poet Theocritus first penned his Idylls. Ironically, what distinguishes the reception of Cooper’s Hill from that of Walden is that while Denham’s poem (which criticises an increasingly modern, capitalist world) has been taken by some critics to be traditional pastoral, until recently other critics, focusing largely on Thoreau’s assessment of modernity, have overlooked the fact that Walden is thoroughly in the pastoral tradition. What distinguishes both Cooper’s Hill and Walden from the pastoral that came before them is that the criticisms they offer of their ‘modern world’ also apply to our own capitalist, consumer society. This has, of course, long been noted of Walden, but perhaps because in the popular imagination the growth of large-scale capital remains very much a nineteenth-century phenomenon, the critique of consumerism offered in Cooper’s Hill has largely escaped the attention of critics. Few historians today would agree with Engels’s purely material claim that ‘The history of the proletariat in England begins [in the middle of the eighteenth century] with the invention of the steam-engine and of machinery for working cotton’ (Engels 1958: 1). Instead, a variety of cultural factors are also indicated in the growth of large-scale industry. As E. P. Thompson famously stated (apparently as a response to Engels, although not referring directly to him): ‘In the end, it is the political context as much as the steam-engine, which had the most influence upon the shaping consciousness and institutions of the working class’ (Thompson 1963: 197). While in proto-industrial cultures, such as seventeenth-century London, large-scale machinery had not yet arrived on the scene, cultural changes, along with the growth of capital, nonetheless moved many trades out of the cottage and into the proto-factory. The ending of Thomas Deloney’s 1597 proto-novel The Gentle Craft, Part 1, for example, depicts how 200 apprentices working for a single well-capitalised silk-weaver triumphantly turned the tide of war. Although fanciful in its plot, The Gentle Craft is realistic in depicting how the growth of capital consolidated industries and established proto-factories that employed literally hundreds of workers long before the steam engine ever came into common industrial use. This led, not surprisingly, not only to an explosion of consumer goods, but to what Denham saw as unnecessary ‘Toil to prevent imaginary wants’ elicited by all those products. Moving from the description of London to that of Windsor Castle, royalist Denham pens several lines praising the king before next describing the Thames itself. By the end of the eighteenth century, the river meandering through the distant valley in the hill poem was generally depicted as a picturesque brook or clear stream, as it is in William Crowe’s 1788 Lewesdon Hill: chief with thy clear stream, Thou nameless rivulet, who, from the side Of Lewesdon softly welling forth, dost trip

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Adown the valley, wandering sportively. Alas, how soon thy little course will end! (Crowe 1788: 29–33)

As we shall see, aside from the unabashed portrayal of the stream as bucolic, the striking contrast between Lewesdon Hill and Denham’s poem lies in the pains that Crowe takes to make clear that the stream ‘flows along / Untainted with the commerce of the world’ (136–7). Much has been made of the arrival of the railroad as a symbol of modernity in nineteenth-century fiction. It appears as such, for example, in Middlemarch, Émile Zola’s La Bête humaine, and, of course, Walden; although perhaps Dickens most vividly and famously describes it as a vehicle of commerce in Dombey and Son: ‘Crowds of people and mountains of goods, departing and arriving scores of times in every fourand-twenty hour, produced a fermentation in the place that was always in action’ (Dickens 1970: 218). But what the railway was to the nineteenth century, the river was to the seventeenth. As historian Frank Dix notes, ‘following the exploratory voyages of Drake and Ralegh’, shipping on the ‘Thames trebled and quadrupled’; it ‘must truly have looked like a “forest of masts”, and the activity of loading and unloading must have been intense’ (Dix 1985: 23). Aside from the international trade, as London’s population doubled from 1560 to 1600 alone, the river was already choked with the movement of local goods. (Not surprisingly, sea-coal was the most common local commodity shipped on the Thames.) Far from being a babbling brook, the Thames in the seventeenth century was perhaps the single greatest artery of commerce that the Western world had ever known, moving more goods than any railway ever would. For this reason, in Cooper’s Hill, the Thames’s blessings are not to his banks confined, But free and common as the sea or wind; When he to boast or to disperse his stores, Full of the tributes of his grateful shores, Visits the world, and in his flying towers Brings home to us, and makes both Indies ours; Finds wealth where ’tis, bestows it where it wants, Cities in deserts [empty tracts of land], woods in cities plants. So that to us no thing, no place is strange, While his fair bosom is the world’s exchange. (1655: 179–88)

The ‘flying towers’ are of course the masts of ships. But not only the ocean-going galleons, carracks, and caravels of the colonial trade that made ‘both [East and West] Indies ours’, but the far more common two-masted local barges; the largest, designed for transporting sea-coal, carrying upwards of 170 tons each. Such effective vehicles of commerce could literally supply all the needs of ‘cities in deserts’, or bring an entire forest’s worth of lumber to a city (‘woods in cities plants’). Indeed, after London’s

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horrific fire of 1666, given that the surrounding area had long before been deforested, whole forests of imported wood were in fact shipped in to literally rebuild the city. In contrast to Crowe in Lewesdon Hill, Denham makes no attempt to describe the Thames as a ‘clear stream … who … softly welling forth, dost trip /Adown the valley’. Rather, he accurately depicts the unprecedented, astonishing spectacle before him. This is not to say that Denham felt the same uneasiness regarding commerce as he did consumerism – on the contrary, it is clear that he is enthralled by it. It is curious that while critical of Londoners’ ‘increasing with their store, / Their vast desires’ (1642: 31–32), Denham does not fault the Thames for transporting the scores of imported consumers goods which helped generate and feed these desires. But, returned to its context, this unwavering faith in England’s international trade is hardly unusual. Francis Bacon, for example, considered the nautical compass that made such trade possibly one of humanity’s three greatest inventions. Moreover, in a work intended to praise his king, criticising petty consumerism was one thing; attacking the source of England’s international power was quite another. Moving directly from the Thames, Denham next brings into view Windsor Forest. Given the advanced state of deforestation in the Thames Valley in the mid-seventeenth century, it might seem surprising to find such an old-growth forest so close to London. Given the political controversy surrounding deforestation, however, Denham likely makes an issue of Windsor Forest for this very reason. While the question of royal forests had been discussed throughout the 1640s, the issue exploded on the scene in April 1649 with the scandal that royalists had nearly decimated the Forest of Dean. Although the accusation was true, its timing was clearly meant to rouse anti-royalist sentiment. Consequently, the 1649 Act for the Sale of Crown Lands temporarily excluded the cutting and sale of royal forests, while debate on their management continued into the next decade. Clearly an exaggeration, in 1653, in his Common Good; Or, the Improvement of Commons, Forests, and Chases by Enclosure, Sylvanus Taylor boldly declared ‘all men’s eyes were upon the forests’ (V.II, cit. Thirsk 1985: 310). Still, this proved little more than anti-royalist rhetoric; once royalists had been expelled, a report encouraging the mass deforestation of what had been royalist holdings resulted in the passing of the Act for the Deforestation, Sale, and Improvements of the Forests in November 1653. In bringing our attention to Windsor Forest in the early drafts of Cooper’s Hill, Denham offers a dramatic counter-image to that of forests decimated by royalists; perhaps some of these forests had been mismanaged, but the king’s own still stood in all its primordial glory. Although Denham deleted or reduced many passages in the 1655 draft of Cooper’s Hill in order to double the space allotted to a stag hunt that now stood for the murder of his king, he did not reduce the size of the Windsor Forest section – perhaps because it too served a new purpose in 1655. With royal forests now in the midst of destruction resulting from Parliament’s 1653 Act for Deforestation, Denham’s exquisite description of a pristine royal forest carried with it the suggestion that England lost with its king the much-needed, wise steward of its resources.

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The manner by which Denham describes Windsor Forest in Cooper’s Hill points to another environmental controversy of the time. Following the collapse of England’s grain-producing economy in the fourteenth century, landowners, unable to make farming profitable, increasingly began to lease their property to tenant farmers, many of whom, as a consequence, could barely maintain a subsistence living. However, as the economy rebounded in the sixteenth century, landowners gradually took back their lands to farm themselves. This led to what one critic, Anthony Low, has called the early modern ‘georgic revolution’ (Low 1985). Facilitating this revolution was a flood of husbandry manuals, starting in 1523 with the publication of the Book of Husbandry by John Fitzherbert, and followed by works from Thomas Tusser, Barnabe Googe, Andrew Yarranton, and many others. To varying degrees, all of these works argued that dramatic increases in agricultural yield would come if indigenous plants were replaced by introduced species such as rye grass, clover, trefoil, carrots, turnips, and sainfoin. However, by the seventeenth century, anxiety over these new agricultural practices began to emerge. For example, while Andrew Marvell in his ‘The Mower against gardens’ wonders why ‘the world was searched, through oceans new’ for exotic plants (Marvell 2000: 858) in his poem ‘Man’, George Herbert considers the far-reaching implications of losing indigenous species: ‘More servants wait on man / Than he’ll take notice of; in every path / He treads down that which doth befriend him, / When sickness makes him pale and wan’ (Herbert 2000: 43). Herbert’s point is that even the seemingly insignificant plants we marginalise might be the ‘Herbs [which] gladly cure our flesh’ in time of sickness (2000: 43). This notion, that the plants in our path that we destroy may be medicinal herbs that might one day save us, presages modern environmental arguments in favour of the preservation of wilderness and plant diversity. Seen in this context, it is clear that, in Cooper’s Hill, the description of Windsor Forest similarly praises diversity: Here Nature, whether more intent to please Us or herself with strange varieties, (For things of wonder give no less delight To the wise Maker’s, than beholder’s sight. Though these delights from several causes move, For so our children, thus our friends we love) Wisely she knew, the harmony of things. (1655: 197–203)

In some sense, in Cooper’s Hill, Denham avoids taking what amounts to an anthropocentric turn in Herbert’s poem. To not destroy indigenous plants merely because they may be of use to human beings is a questionable environmental ethic. Denham, however, unclear whether Nature is ‘more intent to please / Us or herself ’, instead focuses not only on how ‘Wisely she knew, the harmony of things’ (by having set up what we would call today a densely interwoven bionetwork), but also on how human beings presumably wisely understand it as such.

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Leaving Windsor Forest, Denham moves first to the now famous stag hunt on a wash-land meadow adjacent to the forest, then concludes by describing the flooding Thames – which is flooding in spite of the fact that ‘the husbandmen with high-raised banks’ (1655: 351) have attempted to contain it with earthen embankments. As has been widely noted by critics, in the 1642 version of Cooper’s Hill, the Thames stands for the king’s rule, which, like a force of nature, cannot be contained by Parliament. In contrast, in 1655, the river symbolises the mob rule that now floods the countryside: When a calm river raised with sudden rains Or snows dissolved, o’erflows th’adjoining plains, The husbandmen with high-raised banks secure Their greedy hopes, and this he can endure. But if with bays and dams they strive to force His channel to a new or narrow course, No longer then within his banks he dwells: First to a torrent, then a deluge swells; Stronger, and fiercer by restraint he roars, And knows no bound, but makes his power his shores. (1655: 349–58)

To many readers in the mid-seventeenth century, however, an allusion to the failure of ‘the husbandmen with high-raised banks’, who ‘with bays and dams … strive to’ control flooding, would have been immediately associated with the massive attempts of the time to drain England’s wetlands. Like air pollution from sea-coal, the draining of England’s vast areas of marshes and fens had been an issue for centuries. In this case, it officially emerges in 1258 with the establishment of the first Commission of the Sewers in order to mediate over wetlands. It had long been understood that hundreds of thousands of acres could be brought under cultivation if England’s fens and marshes could be drained. Prior to the year 1600, drainage efforts were, for the most part, private initiatives on a rather small scale, but in 1600 the General Draining Act was passed ‘for the recovery of many hundred thousand Acres of Marshes’ (cit. Darby 1956: 29). Because there was no funding for the projects, a call went out to those with sufficient capital to ‘undertake’ the work – who were for this reason known as ‘undertakers’. While in some areas the king himself became undertaker, such as in the Hatfield Level (the first of the seventeenth century’s major drainage projects, which contained 70,000 acres), in other cases the job fell to well-capitalised undertakers who were to give the king a portion of the reclaimed land. Although ultimately Charles I received less, in 1621, when the Great Level project began, James was to take delivery of 120,000 acres of this reclaimed land. Similarly, Charles I was to receive 21,500 acres of the Lindsey Level. In short, the king had much to gain from the draining of the fens. As the chief engineer in charge for a number of the projects, Sir Cornelius Vermuyden, suggested to Charles I in 1638, regarding still undrained fenland, ‘these

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lands being a continent of about 400,000 acres, which being made winter ground would be an unexpected benefit to the commonwealth of six hundred thousand pounds per annum and upwards’ (Vermuyden 1642: 2). Not surprisingly, the political fallout of these projects was soon felt. As historian Keith Lindley explains: The urgent fiscal needs of early Stuart governments gave birth to a number of moneymaking expedients that directly challenged established property rights and ultimately raised wider constitutional issues. A series of ambitious drainage schemes initiated or encouraged by the King, which impinged upon the livelihood of the inhabitants of approximately 1430 square miles of fenland in eastern England, exposed an entire region of the kingdom to such a challenge. The large-scale enclosure of previously commonable [owned in common] fens, which accompanied these schemes, falls into the same category as ship money and other expedients that undermined property rights and demonstrated absolutist tendencies in central government. (Lindley 1982: 1)

To some, as Sir John Wray argued in the House of Commons in May 1640, England faced three major problems: the ship money tax, not maintaining an adequate army, and the situation whereby ‘we stand not ensured of our Terra Firma, for the fen-drainers have entered our lands, and not only made waste of them, but also have disseised [dispossessed] us of part of our soil and freehold’ (cit. Lindley 1982: 109). Although issues such as ship money are often cited as leading up to the Civil War, as Lindley correctly suggests, the fen situation played its own role. However, Lindley’s contention that this issue centred principally on property rights is misleading. For centuries the enclosure movement in England, whereby large tracts of previously common land were privatised, did indeed, as Lindley suggests, ‘directly challenge established property rights’. But the fen situation also had an environmental component. The issue was not merely that the fens were moving from common ownership to private property, but rather that a unique ecosystem – and with it a way of life – was under assault. Since long before the Middle Ages, fens provided not only seasonal grazing for cows and other animals, but fisheries, reeds, and rushes (for roofing), game birds, peat, salt-pans (near the coast), and a variety of other resources that enabled a distinctive fenland way of life. As William Camden says in 1607, the people living in fens are called ‘Upland-men, who stalking, upon high stilts, apply their minds to grassing [grazing], fishing, and fowling … Great plenty it hath … of reed also to thatch their houses, yea and of alders, besides other watery shrubs. But chiefly it bringeth forth exceeding stores of willows’ (Camden 1607: 491). In 1622 Michael Drayton describes a similar scene in his Polyolbion: The toiling fisher here is towing of his net; The fowler is employed his limèd twigs to set. One underneath his horse, to get a shoot, doth stalk; Another over dykes upon his stilts doth walk.

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In draining the fens, much of this would be lost. Had the undertakers and the king merely wished to assert that the fens were their property, and then leased them back to the people whose lives depended on the distinctive fen ecosystem, it is difficult to know what the outcome would have been, but as the intent was to destroy the fen ecosystem, it led to widespread riots. Although the General Draining Act of 1600 provided the legal basis for the drainage projects, little work was actually done during the rule of either Elizabeth or James. However, as the pace of work stepped up under Charles, the first of the major seventeenth-century fenland riots took place over the Hatfield Level in 1627. Not long after, in August 1628, the much larger Isle of Axholme riots broke out. Such riots became increasingly common (and bloody) up until the Civil War. None of this, of course, helped Charles’s popularity. While rights of property were certainly at issue, as a ‘fenlander’ song from the period (later published by Sir William Dugdale in 1662) reveals, the loss of property rights was often ignored, as the focus shifted to a fear that the life of ‘boats and rudder … boots and scatches [stilts] … Stilt-makers … and tanners’ was being destroyed to ‘give place’ for cattle (Dugdale 1662: 391–2). To certain modern environmental thinkers, arguing for the preservation of wilderness solely on the basis of its value to human beings will seem hopelessly anthropocentric and misguided. However, it is important to distinguish between one culture intent on destroying a unique ecosystem so that it might be remade to entirely serve human needs, and another which fought for its preservation, its people having adapted themselves over the centuries to the unique character of the place. While the fenland environmental protests continued throughout the 1630s, the people of the fens also took their case to court. As Sir Philip Warwick noted in his Memoirs of the Reign of King Charles I, in a surprising turn of events, a figure who would come to play a singular role in the coming revolution emerged to defend the fenlanders in 1638: principal gentlemen, whose habitations confined upon [bordered onto] the Fens … whether it was public spirit or private advantage … a stranger cannot determine; they made propositions unto the King to issue out commissions of sewers to drain those lands, and offer a proportion to be freely given the Crown for its countenance and authority therein … And now the King is declared the principal undertaker for the draining; and by this time the vulgar are grown clamorous against the popular lords and undertakers; though they had much better provisions for them than their interest ever was before: and the commissioners must by multitudes and clamours be withstood; and as the head of this faction, Mr Cromwell in the year 1638 at Huntington appears. (Warwick 1701: 250)

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We further know from a 1637 report that ‘Mr Cromwell of Ely hath undertaken – they [the fenlanders] paying him a groat for every cow they have upon the common – to hold the drainers in suit of law for five years and that in the meantime they should enjoy every foot of their common’ (cit. Lindley 1982: 95). It would, of course, be misleading to suggest that the environmental protests and lawsuits of the fenlanders played too great a role in the events leading up to the Civil War, though they did play their part. Denham’s view from Cooper’s Hill is hardly a green one. And even when he depicts a scene, as for example in his description of Windsor Forest, it signals the loss and absence, not the presence, of a green world. Had Denham wished to portray such a world, he need only have turned away from the emerging modernity of the Thames Valley to the rural English countryside at his back – and thus performed the signature turn of the Romantics. In parts of rural England, air pollution, loss of wetlands, rampant consumerism, and many other environmental problems did not emerge as significant issues until well into the nineteenth century. But Denham refused to turn away, as did so many poets after him. Yet the desire to recoil from emerging environmental problems proved so strong that the near-ubiquitous bucolic representations that these poets created have been taken by many modern readers to be accurate descriptions of the ecological state of England in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. So successful was this project of misrepresentation that it has long distorted how we view a surprising amount of the poetry from the period.

Notes 1

2

All references to Cooper’s Hill are cited parenthetically in the text by line number with reference to the year of the edition being quoted. The word ‘smog’ was coined in 1905 by H. A. Des Voeux while delivering a paper entitled ‘Smoke and Fog’: see OED, ‘smog’ 1a.

3

For Laud’s fines on sea-coal burning, see Extraordinary Monies Paid into the Receipt of His Majesty’s Exchequer (Anon. 1643: 4).

References and Further Reading Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, Charles I (1627–8). Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, Elizabeth I (1578). Calendar of Close Rolls, Edward I (1302–7). Anon. (1643). Extraordinary Monies paid into the Receipt of His Maiesty’s Exchequer, since the beginning of His Reign, till April 1635. London. Camden, William (1607). Britannia. London.

Crowe, William (1788). Lewesdon Hill. Oxford. Darby, H. C. (1956). The Draining of the Fens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Deloney, Thomas (1961). The Gentle Craft: Part 1 in The Novels of Thomas Deloney, ed. Merritt E. Lewis. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Denham, John (1969). Cooper’s Hill. In Expans’d Hieroglyphicks: A Critical Edition of Sir John Denham’s ‘Cooper’s Hill’, ed. Brendan O’Hehir. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Dickens, Charles (1970). Dombey and Son. New York: Penguin. Dix, Frank (1985). Royal River Highway: A History of the Passenger Boats and Services on the River Thames. London: David and Charles Press. Drayton, Michael (1622). The Second Part, or a Continuance of Polyolbion. London. Dugdale, William (1658). The History of St Paul’s Cathedral in London. London. Dugdale, William (1662). History of Embanking and Draining of divers fens and marshes. London. Engels, Friedrich (1958). The Condition of the English Working Class in England in 1844. New York: Macmillan. Evelyn, John (1659). A Character of London. London. Evelyn, John (1661). Fumifugium or The Inconvenience of the Air and Smoke of London Dissipated. London. Herbert, George (2000). The Broadview Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Literature, ed. Alan Rudrum et al. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview. Leapman, Michael (1991). London’s River: A History of the Thames. London: Pavilion Books. Lindley, Keith (1982). Fenland Riots and the English Revolution. London: Heinemann. Low, Anthony (1985). The Georgic Revolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Marvell, Andrew (2000). The Broadview Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Literature, ed. Alan Rudrum et al. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview.

Milton, John (1998). The Riverside Milton, ed. Roy Flannagan. New York: Houghton Mifflin. Nef, John E. (1932). The Rise of the British Coal Industry. New York: George Routledge & Son. Perlin, John (1989). A Forest Journey: The Role of Wood in the Development of Civilization. New York: Harper & Row. Petty, William (1899). The Economic Writings of Sir William Petty. Together with the Observations upon the Bills of Mortality, more probably by Captain John Graunt, ed. C. H. Hull. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rudrum, Alan, et al. (eds.) (2000). The Broadview Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Literature. Peterborough, Ontario: Broadview. Thirsk, Joan (1985). ‘Agricultural policy: public debate and legislation’. In Joan Thirsk (ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales (pp. 298–388). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Thompson, E. P. (1963). The Making of the English Working Class. London: Camelot. Thoreau, Henry David (1971). Walden, ed. J. Lyndon Shanley. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Vermuyden, Cornelius (1642). A Discourse touching the Draining of the Fens. London. Warwick, Philip (1701). Memoirs of the Reign of King Charles I. London.

Index of Names, Topics, and Institutions

Space does not allow the listing of places (except the constituent nations of the British Isles) or of individual texts. References to Shakespeare are so numerous that a list here would have been singularly unhelpful. Members of the nobility are listed under their surnames, and saints are listed by their names, not as ‘St’. Abbot, Robert, I: 446 abbreviations, I: 181–3 Abraham, II: 535 absolutism, II: 110–11, 114, 119–20, 151–2, 157, 158, 281 accent, II: 23–4, 253, 273, 281, 284–6 Achilles, II: 112 Act to Restrain the Abuses of the Players, II: 51, 191 Act for the Sale of Crown Lands, II: 562 Act of Six Articles, I: 441 Act of Supremacy, I: 283, 439 Act of Uniformity, I: 397, 439, 547, 550 Actaeon, II: 307 active life, I: 325 actors, I: 513, 570, 583, 584 acts and debates of Parliament, II: 16 Acts of Uniformity, I: 403 adages, II: 374 Adam, II: 17, 393, 400 Adamantius, I: 586 Admonition Controversy, I: 411 Adonis, I: 138, 143, 145 adultery, II: 117, 168, 169, 172, 176, 322, 427, 539–40

advice book, I: 330 Ady, Thomas, II: 376 Aeneas, I: 68, 352, 383, 384; II: 5, 37, 112 Aesop, I: 494, 508; II: 331, 334, 541 agency, II: 497, 498 Agricola, Rodolphus, I: 95, 98 Agrippa, Henry Cornelius, I: 114, 152 Alabaster, William, I: 456; II: 384, 414–15, 420 Alain de Lille, I: 112 Alamanni, Luigi, II: 330 Albertus Magnus, I: 586 alchemy, I: 150, 230; II: 388, 398, 399 Alciati, Andrea, I: 138, 368 Aldine Press, I: 93, 94 alehouses, II: 331, 332 Alençon, II: 128, 222, 246, 430, 431 Alexander the Great, I: 321, 322, 323, 324, 325, 326, 327; II: 271, 339, 348, 362 Alexander, William, II: 156 Alexander of Ville-Dieu, I: 121 alexandrines, II: 255 Alfield, Thomas, I: 453 Alford, Francis, I: 58 Alfred, King, I: 409

570

Index

Allde, John, II: 371 allegiance, I: 228, 249, 250 allegory, I: 136, 139, 141, 144, 263, 270, 306, 312–14, 338, 347, 356, 358, 360, 382–3, 400, 435, 453, 456, 495, 512–13, 530, 535, 537, 547, 587; II: 6, 7, 22, 24, 30, 42, 47, 52, 53, 71–2, 74, 76, 78, 89, 159, 161, 214–24, 226, 228, 231–2, 239, 251, 258, 285, 326–8, 330–1, 334–6, 338, 395, 425, 432, 470 Allen, William, I: 442, 443, 451, 453 Alleyn, Edward, I: 179, 184–5, 187–8, 243; II: 45 alliteration, II: 281, 285, 326, 333, 364, 412 almanacs, I: 339; II: 447–8 almsgiving, I: 450, 552 amateur productions, II: 62 Amazons, II: 112, 244, 431 ambassadors, II: 453 ambiguity, II: 217 Ambrose, Isaac, II: 448, 449, 450 Ambrose, St, I: 276, 291; II: 449 Ammianus Marcellinus, I: 123 Amphion, II: 15–17 amphitheatre playhouses, II: 42, 172, 219, 507–8 Amyot, Jean, I: 108, 124 Anabaptists, I: 267, 362, 441, 521; II: 434 anachronism, I: 4, 5, 57, 59, 66, 323 anagogy, II: 323 analogies, I: 323, 558, 560, 561, 587; II: 219, 222 anamorphoses, I: 504; II: 222 anatomy, I: 501, 513, 540, 558, 560–1, 563, 564, 567, 577, 578, 585; II: 475 Anaxagoras, I: 276 ancestry, II: 538, 547 André, Bernard, I: 96; II: 527, 528, 529 Andrewes, Lancelot, I: 296, 430–7, 446 androgyny, II: 302, 420 angels, I: 599, 601; II: 321, 322, 338, 377 anger, II: 440 Anger, Jane, II: 295

Anglicanism, I: 226, 397, 409, 411–12, 420, 462–3 Anglo-Saxon texts, I: 409 Anjou, duke of, I: 398; II: 221 Anne of Denmark, Queen, I: 315, 358, 373, 607; II: 107, 108, 109, 111, 112, 113, 114, 120, 168, 193, 233, 280, 286 Anselm, St, I: 276 answer-poetry, II: 390 anthologies, I: 191–202, 207, 212, 213 Anthony, St, II: 407 anthropology, II: 441, 541 anthropomorphism, II: 235 anthropophagi, I: 527, 528 Antichrist, I: 290, 404, 443, 521, 547, 550 anticlericalism, II: 328, 333, 338 antimasques, II: 111, 112, 113, 234, 272 antinomianism, I: 463; II: 391 antiquarianism, I: 58, 59, 349, 448 antiquities, II: 341 anti-theatrical writings, I: 569, 570; II: 220 Antonio de Molina, I: 454 anxiety, II: 238 Apelles, I: 321, 324, 326, 327 aphorisms, I: 156, 331, 332, 427; II: 285, 330, 441, 442 apocalypse, I: 404, 406, 443, 514, 550; II: 78, 331, 338, 377, 399, 552 Apollo, I: 140, 221, 222; II: 303, 483 apostasy, I: 414, 552, 554 apparel, I: 573, 574, 575, 601 apprentices, I: 354; II: 53, 54, 82 Apuleius, I: 146; II: 423 Aquinas, Thomas I: 265, 276, 277, 278, 281, 282, 284 Aramaic, I: 82, 420, 431 arbours, I: 513 Arcadia, I: 367; II: 230, 235, 243, 428, 432 Arcesilas, I: 113 archaism, II: 34, 66, 326, 334, 338 archery, II: 437, 438 arches, II: 108–9 architecture, I: 370, 373; II: 107, 111, 220

Index Arcimboldo, Giuseppe, I: 504, 594 Areopagus, II: 23 Aretino, Pietro, I: 199, 518; II: 301–2, 305, 309, 312, 313 arguments in utramque partem, I: 43, 100, 252 Ariadne, II: 295 Arion, II: 272 Ariosto, I: 141, 194, 384; II: 7, 24, 35–9, 97, 218, 239 aristocracy, II: 107, 551 Aristophanes, I: 35, 223; II: 208 Aristotle, I: 35, 40, 46–8, 55, 56, 93, 106–8, 110, 112, 114, 152, 154, 265, 276, 277, 284, 291, 321, 324, 512, 582, 586, 587; II: 5, 7, 8–10, 12, 16–17, 19–20, 21, 23–4, 30, 35–6, 95, 157, 214, 239, 442, 465, 468, 479–80, 539–40 Armada, I: 507, 512, 552; II: 168, 433 Arminius, Jacobus, I: 446, 509; II: 520 armour, I: 270, 271, 312 army, II: 565 ars dictaminis, II: 454, 455, 456 art, II: 16, 17, 19, 20, 21, 22 Artemidorus, I: 606 Arthur, King, I: 36, 59, 68, 140, 249, 264; II: 113, 239, 247, 348, 548–50 Arthur, Prince, I: 97, 140 artifice, II: 303, 309 artisans, I: 509; II: 451 Ascham, Roger, I: 31, 34, 94, 101, 103, 110–11, 121–2, 124; II: 23, 427–8, 437 Asclepius, II: 481 Ash Wednesday, II: 184 Ashmole, Elias, II: 448 Ashton, John, II: 448 asides, II: 64 Askew, Anne, I: 404, 439, 453 Astraea, I: 265, 266, 268; II: 20 astrology, I: 152, 588; II: 447 astronomy, I: 152, 558, 563 ataraxia, I: 113 Aubrey, John, I: 63, 430, 431, 600, 605, 607; II: 188, 345, 348, 352–3, 485

571

audiences, I: 15, 22, 27, 33, 38, 40, 43, 47–9, 67, 70, 75, 80, 106–8, 110, 129, 13; II: 44, 46, 53–4, 56, 60, 61, 64–5, 67, 87, 508, 510 Augustine, of Canterbury, St, I: 408, 451, 452 Augustine of Hippo, St, I: 5, 6, 10, 221, 276, 279, 280–4, 453; II: 215, 407, 414, 465 Augustus Caesar, I: 127, 255, 256, 333; II: 109 aurality, II: 54 Austen, Katherine, I: 375, 376; II: 449 author, concept of, I: 3, 121, 122, 127, 143, 161–3, 166–9, 182, 183, 185–7, 191, 193–4, 206–7, 215–16, 226, 229, 232–3, 235, 239, 260, 344, 412, 464–5, 473; II: 114, 135–7, 141–2, 301, 306, 355, 488, 496, 504, 507–8 authority, I: 141, 143, 151–2, 154, 155, 161, 166–8, 173, 208, 222–3, 225, 229, 250–7, 259–60, 266, 274, 282–6, 290–6, 299–301, 304, 315, 322, 326, 333, 355, 359; II: 5, 11, 20, 30–3, 47–9, 88–90, 90–1, 301, 305, 442, 466, 480, 494, 498–9, 520–1, 526, 539, 548 autobiography, I: 463, 465, 487, 585; II: 251, 254, 259, 271, 291, 414, 448, 450 autopsy, II: 467 Averroes, I: 281, 282, 586 Avicenna, I: 586 Awdeley, John, I: 339, 341, 355 Aylmer, John, II: 334 Babel, II: 77 Bacchus, I: 515 Bacon, Anne, I: 442 Bacon, Edward, I: 332 Bacon, Sir Francis, I: 30, 35, 57–8, 107, 109, 117, 130, 151–8, 200, 252, 264, 315, 329–35, 392–3, 409, 412, 423, 584, 586, 590–1; II: 16, 25, 209, 437–44, 467, 484–6, 562

572

Index

Bacon, Nicholas, I: 102–3, 397, 442–3 Baïf, Antoine de, II: 272, 273 Baildon, John, I: 177, 180, 188 Baillie, Robert, I: 298 Baker, Jane, II: 450 Baldwin, William, I: 32–3, 43, 67, 101, 108; II: 331, 353, 423–6 Bale, John, I: 404–5, 439, 443, 451; II: 66, 334, 470 Bales, Peter, I: 179 ballads, I: 144, 165, 412, 448–9, 481, 490, 497, 499, 509, 514, 518–19, 522; II: 49, 250, 254–5, 265–8, 271, 275, 284–5, 290, 341, 343, 348, 360–1, 368, 371–2, 376, 386, 392, 469, 542 Balzac, Monsieur de, II: 458 Bamfield, Colonel, II: 450 Bancroft, Bishop Richard, I: 412, 421, 445; II: 519–20 Bandello, Matteo, II: 424, 427 Bankside, II: 45, 47–8, 102 banquets, I: 513; II: 42, 176–7, 179, 199, 404 baptism, I: 565, 566 Baptists, I: 461, 462, 467 Barclay, Alexander, I: 120–1; II: 225, 229 Barclay, John, II: 432 Barclay, William, I: 451 Barebones Parliament, II: 498 Baret, John, II: 537 Barlow, William, I: 291, 445, 446 Barnabas, St, I: 452 Barnes, Barnabe, II: 256 Barnes, Robert, I: 438–9, 451 Barnes, Thomas, I: 110 Barnfield, Richard, II: 259, 478, 479 Baro, Peter, I: 446 barony, II: 551 Baroque, I: 456, 459; II: 66, 390 Barra, Jan, I: 482 Barrett, William, I: 446 barriers, II: 112, 113 Barthlet, John, I: 515 Bashe, William, I: 200 Basile, Giambattista, II: 346, 351

Bastard, Thomas, I: 202 bastards, II: 168, 172 Bathsheba, II: 21 Bathurst, Theodore, II: 208 Batman, I: 136, 144 Battle of Lepanto, I: 547 bawdry, I: 145; II: 301, 372, 375 Baxter, Richard, II: 449 Beale, Robert, I: 444 bear-baiting, II: 42, 47–8 Beare, Philip O’Sullivan, I: 452, 460 beast fable, II: 327, 334–5, 425 Beau Chesne, John de, I: 177, 180, 188 Beaufort, Henry, I: 96 Beaumont, Agnes, II: 450 Beaumont, Francis, I: 19, 193, 196, 197, 308; II: 12, 53, 55, 80, 82, 84, 86, 98, 100–3, 106, 114–16, 118, 150–1, 163 Beaumont, John, I: 456 beauty, I: 590–1; II: 307 Becket, Thomas, I: 452 bedchamber, II: 107, 110 Bede, I: 63, 407, 408, 443, 450–1 Bedell, Williiam, I: 292 Bedford, Lucy, countess of, I: 120, 227, 238, 239, 240, 241 Bedlam, I: 350 Bedwell, William, I: 544 beehives, I: 369 bees, I: 479, 480 beggars, I: 341, 343, 495; II: 171 behaviour, I: 305, 306; II: 469, 470, 478, 481, 485, 487, 488 Behn, Aphra, II: 169, 259, 260 Bellarmine, Robert, Cardinal, I: 285, 446, 450–1, 453 Bellasis, Margaret, I: 203 Bellay, Joachim du, I: 112 Belleforest, II: 424 Bellenden, John, II: 548, 551, 553 bells, II: 196 Bembo, Pietro, I: 93, 112 Benedict, St, II: 408 beneficence, II: 197 benefit of clergy, I: 28, 125

Index bergomasks, II: 189 Bernard, Richard, II: 516 Bersuire, Pierre, I: 137 Bessarion, Cardinal, I: 111 bestiality, I: 145–6; II: 116 Bettes, John, I: 513 bezants, II: 197 Bible, I: 7, 8, 27, 30, 32, 60, 97, 124, 373, 398, 399–409, 419–29, 431–6, 450, 464, 466–8, 472, 513; II: 215, 267, 285, 329, 332, 438, 466–7 biblical verse, II: 382 Biddle, Ester, I: 389, 464 bifolia, I: 186, 187, 191 Billingsley, Martin, I: 177 Bilney, Thomas, I: 438, 445 binary structure, II: 344, 458, 464, 480, 484, 488 biography, I: 453; II: 249 Biondo, Flavio, I: 69 bisexualism, I: 321 bishops, I: 274, 295, 296, 297, 299; II: 545 Bishops’ Wars, I: 295; II: 448 Blackfriars playhouse, I: 147, 320, 364, 578–9; II: 10, 44, 53, 80–5, 106, 119, 123, 128–9, 267 Blackwell, George, I: 446 blackwork embroidery, II: 370 blank verse, II: 256 blason populaire, II: 376 blazons, II: 292, 299, 303, 319, 393 blood, II: 480, 510, 539 Blount, Charles, duke of Devonshire, I: 197 Blunt, Edward, II: 301 Boadicea, II: 112 Boar’s Head, II: 60 Boccaccio, Giovanni, I: 93, 135, 136; II: 214, 343, 427 Bodin, Jean, I: 60; II: 514, 516 Bodleian Library, I: 111, 153, 194, 196, 205, 210 Bodley, Thomas, II: 503 body, I: 557–81; II: 176–9, 181, 221, 294, 308–9, 385, 391, 394–5 body natural, II: 221

573

Boece, Hector, II: 547–50 Boethius, I: 112 Boiardo, Matteo Maria, I: 141 Boleyn, Anne, I: 101, 310, 311, 406, 452; II: 280, 286, 365 Bonaventure, I: 276 bonfires, I: 518, 547; II: 191, 193 Boniface VIII, Pope, I: 282, 284 Book of Common Prayer, I: 19, 276, 292, 403–4, 411, 425, 440, 444; II: 267, 402 Book of Hours, II: 376 book trade, I: 60, 163, 165, 167, 171, 338, 398; II: 503–4 bookbinders, I: 165 book-holders, I: 179; II: 54, 504, 506 bookkeeping, I: 1, 78, 84 booth theatre, II: 47 Borromeo, St Charles, I: 399 Bosch, Hieronymus, I: 495 Bosse, Abraham, I: 488, 494 Botticelli, Sandro, I: 137; II: 303 bounty, I: 304, 305 Bourchier, John, Lord Berners, I: 141 bourgeoisie, II: 497 bowers, II: 190, 307 boy players, II: 11, 42, 44, 52–5, 62, 80–93, 123, 125, 127, 129, 155 Boyle, Robert, I: 151 Bracciolini, Poggio, I: 93, 96 branding, I: 341 Brant, Sebastian, I: 121 Brathwaite, Richard, II: 232, 246, 368 brazen world, II: 20, 21, 22, 25 breeches, I: 483, 487, 488, 504, 519 Brend, Thomas, II: 370 Breton, Nicholas, I: 192; II: 360 bribery, I: 267; II: 486 bridal procession, II: 194 bride-ales, II: 265 Bridewell, I: 343, 363 Bridges, John, I: 412, 444 Bright, Timothy, I: 585 Brinsley, John, I: 33, 130 Britain, I: 8, 9 British empire, I: 538

574

Index

broadsheets, I: 398, 511, 570 broadsides, I: 450, 478–526; II: 265, 367 Brome, Richard, I: 223; II: 166–7, 169–72, 502 Bronzino, II: 482 Brooke, Christopher, I: 227, 233; II: 232 brothels, I: 355; II: 47–8, 312–13, 331, 426 Broughton, Hugh, I: 420 Brown, Lancelot ‘Capability’, I: 394 Browne, Thomas, I: 592 Browne, William, II: 227, 232, 338 brownies, II: 347, 354 Bruce, Robert, II: 550–2 Bruegel, Pieter, I: 1, 499, 501–3; II: 379 Bruni, Leonardo, I: 93, 111 Bruno, Giordano, I: 155 Brutus, I: 52, 68–9, 140; II: 547, 549 Bry, Theodor, I: 487 Bryskett, Ludovyck, I: 125 Buchanan, George, I: 608; II: 547–8, 550, 552 bucolic, I: 392; II: 561, 514 Budé, Guillaume, I: 94 buggery, II: 478 Bull, Henry, I: 413 Bull Tavern, II: 49 Bullein, William, II: 373 Bullinger, Henry, I: 439 Bulstrode, Cecilia, I: 230 Bunny, Edmund, I: 414, 454 Bunyan, John, I: 462, 466–7, 470–1; II: 222 Burbage, James, II: 42, 55 Burbage, Richard, I: 584; II: 60 Burckhardt, Jacob, I: 1, 6, 585 Burghe, Nicholas, I: 194, 196, 212 Burghley, William Cecil, Lord, I: 58, 102, 153, 155; II: 130 burlesque, II: 327 Burlington, Elizabeth, countess of, II: 451 Burton, Henry, I: 510; II: 449 Burton, Richard, I: 110 Burton, Robert, I: 496, 497, 498, 585, 594; II: 343, 374 Busleiden, Jerome, I: 94

butchers, II: 155, 188 Butler, Samuel, I: 412 Butteris, Simon, I: 207 Byam, Henry, I: 552 Byrd, William, II: 266 cabbala, II: 16 cabinet councils, I: 332 Cadwallader, King, I: 140 caesura, II: 285 calendrical festivals, II: 111 Calfe, Peter, I: 194, 201, 209, 212 Callisthenes, I: 323 Calvin, Jean, I: 94, 118, 226, 275–6, 279, 399, 402, 413, 421, 445–6, 452, 462, 466, 468, 565–6, 570; II: 159, 161, 337, 384, 386, 402, 409, 416 Cambridge Platonists, I: 112 Camden, William, I: 56–62, 64, 67–70, 213, 237, 446; II: 353, 546, 551, 565 Camilla, queen of the Volscians, II: 112 Campion, Edmund, I: 413, 443, 447, 449, 453, 460 Campion, Thomas, II: 23–4, 272–6, 317 Candlemas, II: 187 cannibals, I: 529, 530; II: 441 canon, II: 163, 393 canting, I: 340, 344, 347 capaciousness, II: 238, 239 capitalisation, I: 182, 184 capitalism, II: 497, 499, 513 Cardan, Jerome, II: 438 Carew, Richard, I: 69, 70 Carew, Thomas, I: 199, 211, 213–14, 221–2, 224, 234, 315–16, 367, 376; II: 17, 205, 210–11, 259 Carey, Lady, I: 191, 239 Carlell, Lodovick, I: 306, 548 Carleton, Dudley, I: 356; II: 107 Carneades, I: 113 carnival, I: 337, 499, 502–3, 517, 538, 572; II: 185, 189, 379, 526 Caroline culture, II: 106, 110 Caroline drama, II: 166–75 carpets, I: 543, 551

Index Carr, Robert, earl of Somerset, I: 200, 236, 239, 242, 314; II: 110, 158–9 carriages, II: 259 Cartari, Vicenzo, I: 136 cartography, I: 69 Cartwright, Thomas, I: 275, 285, 411, 444 Cartwright, William, I: 224 Cary, Elizabeth, II: 135–8, 156, 163 Cary, Mary, I: 464, 465, 471 Cary, Lucius, Viscount Falkland, II: 167 Case, John, II: 265 Castelvetro, Lodovico, II: 157 Castiglione, Baldassare, I: 31, 108, 110–12, 124, 306, 584, 591; II: 219, 271, 481, 530 catamites, II: 485 catch-phrases, II: 55 catechism, I: 32, 33, 34 Catesby, Robert, I: 356 catharsis, II: 5, 10 Catherine of Aragon, I: 127, 226, 310, 452 Catherine de Medici, I: 606 cats, II: 425–6 catterning, II: 195 Catullus, I: 128, 145, 223, 367; II: 477 causation, I: 567 Cavalier, II: 391, 168 Cavendish, George, I: 65 Cavendish, Margaret, I: 152 Cavendish, Sir William, I: 193 Cawdrey, Robert, I: 127 Caxton, William, I: 65, 122, 161 Cecil, Robert, I: 153, 184, 185, 197, 200, 312, 372, 443; II: 114 Cecil, William, I: 372–3, 442, 453; II: 557 Celtis, Conrad, I: 69 censorship, I: 66, 171–3, 390, 439, 444, 464, 483, 518; II: 44, 48, 106, 110, 112, 144, 219, 251, 300, 331, 336, 505 ceremonies, I: 84, 444, 445; II: 111, 220, 303, 306 Cervantes, Miguel de, I: 4, 124, 412 chain lines, I: 186 Chaloner, Sir Thomas, I: 114 Chamberlain, John, I: 236, 237

575

Channel, Elinor, I: 470 chapbooks, I: 339; II: 356 Chapel Royal, I: 320, 441; II: 270 Chapman, George, I: 35, 60, 117, 123, 127, 223, 308; II: 29, 31–5, 39, 80–1, 82, 86–91, 100, 114–18, 124, 155–9, 162–3, 300, 303, 306–7, 320, 360 character, I: 40, 42–3, 45, 47–9, 55, 57, 63, 78, 83, 100, 201, 582–3, 587, 592–3, 598; II: 469 characterisation, II: 161 charactery, II: 438 charity, I: 349, 401, 424, 450; II: 514 charivaris, II: 497 Charles I, I: 58, 63, 233, 243, 295, 315, 488, 504, 511, 550, 599, 607; II: 110–11, 120, 166–9, 172, 174, 235, 246, 417, 448, 457, 520, 556, 559, 564, 566 Charles, I, Prince, I: 125, 358 Charles II, I: 317, 394; II: 557 Charles V, I: 139, 153, 607 charms, II: 377 Charron, Pierre, I: 117 chastity, I: 140, 163, 263, 312; II: 168, 233–4, 258, 303, 311, 450, 497, 539 chasubles, I: 83 Chaucer, Geoffrey, I: 322, 352, 380, 401; II: 24, 101–2, 208, 229, 251, 330–1, 333, 457 Cheke, Sir John, I: 31, 101, 111 Cheke, Lady Mary, I: 210 chemists, I: 152 Chettle, Henry, I: 185, 186, 346 chiaroscuro, II: 302 Chidley, Katherine, I: 463, 465 children, II: 126, 133, 155, 188, 352–3, 377, 395, 405, 428, 453, 464, 497, 539–40 Children of the Queen’s Revels, II: 113, 115 chimeras, II: 19 chiromancy, I: 588 chivalry, I: 315, 368; II: 112, 113, 229, 238, 243–6 choirs, II: 267, 269

576

Index

choric, II: 72 chorography, I: 69 chorus, II: 52, 470 Christendom, I: 510, 538, 543, 547–9, 554 Christian IV, I: 510, 511 Christmas, II: 184, 186–7, 189, 199, 200, 265, 449 chronicles, I: 61, 63–8, 339; II: 425, 524, 526–7, 546, 549 chronologers, I: 355–6 chronotopes, II: 29, 46, 283 Chrysostom, St John, II: 265 church ales, II: 62, 186, 191, 198 Church of England, I: 275, 292, 358 church papistry, I: 292 Churchyard, II: 438, 439 Churchyard, Thomas, II: 332, 437, 438, 439 Chute, Sir Walter, I: 193, 196, 199, 232 Cicero, I: 32–4, 39, 55–6, 59, 79–81, 92–3, 107–9, 111, 113–18, 139, 223, 331–2, 569; II: 6, 10, 30, 115, 437, 442–3, 454, 518 Cinthio, II: 424, 427 Cinzi, Iovambatista Giraldi, II: 35 ciphers, I: 182 circles, I: 456 circumcision, I: 553 citizen values, II: 161 city comedies, I: 574–5; II: 218 civic theatre, II: 62, 63 Civil War, I: 3, 28, 30, 62, 201; II: 106, 146, 151–2, 166, 185, 235, 389, 448, 450, 498, 514, 521, 555, 565–6 civilisation, II: 15 civility, II: 538 Clarke, Elizabeth, I: 170, 203 Clarke, Hugh, II: 125 Clarkson, Lawrence, I: 463–4 class, I: 573–4; II: 141, 450, 533, 537, 542 Claudian, II: 167 Cleland, James, II: 481 Clement of Alexandria, I: 141, 276 Clement VII, I: 7 clementing, II: 195 clergy, I: 7, 27, 28, 29, 35, 99

Clerico, II: 179 Clerke, Bartholomew, I: 108 Cleveland, John, I: 211; II: 205 Clifford, Lady Anne, I: 314, 608; II: 450 Clifford, Margaret, countess of Cumberland, I: 373, 608 climate, I: 559 Clinton, Edward, earl of Lincoln, II: 364 Clitherow, Margaret, I: 453, 460 Clitus, I: 323 closet drama, I: 307 closet-writing, II: 449, 450 clothing, II: 495 clowns, II: 4, 51 coaches, II: 171, 441 Cocke, John, II: 119 Cocker, Edward, I: 178–80, 182, 188 Cockpit at Court, II: 107 Cockson, Thomas, I: 506, 510 Coke, Sir Edward, I: 128, 200, 252–3, 257, 445 Cole, Mary, I: 472 Colet, John, I: 95, 97–9, 111 collaboration, II: 159 College of Controversy, I: 409 Collingbourn, William, II: 365 Collins, An, II: 391, 394 colloquies, I: 379, 381, 385 colonialism, I: 125, 157, 368, 372–3, 384, 452, 532–3, 539–40; II: 17, 321, 439, 498, 541–2 Colonna, Vittoria, II: 258 colour, II: 536, 542 Columbus, Ferdinand, I: 485 comedy, II: 8, 10, 11, 12, 21, 31, 45, 62, 97–8, 159, 163, 170, 288 Comenian, I: 153 comets, I: 598 commedia dell’arte, I: 503; II: 10, 11, 50, 55 commendatory verses, I: 537 commentary, II: 215, 222, 226, 265, 285 commerce, I: 306, 337, 355 Commission of the Sewers, II: 564 commodification, I: 576, 578 common law, I: 251–4, 257–8

Index commoners, II: 538 commonplace books, I: 192, 211; II: 240, 254, 375, 391, 439 commonplaces, I: 7, 34, 43, 95, 103; II: 403 Commons Petition, I: 201 commonwealth, I: 61, 274, 277, 282, 284–6, 306, 322, 345, 369–70, 372, 391, 531, 550, 563; II: 15, 430, 498 community, I: 349, 367–8, 370–1, 373, 375–7, 443, 445, 469 community theatre, II: 185, 190 Company of Stationers, I: 167 compilers, I: 191, 195, 201–2, 205, 206, 212, 215–16, 224 complaint, II: 216, 226, 228, 232, 245, 326–40, 349, 412, 413 complexions, I: 492–3, 558, 563, 585 compliment, II: 108, 117 composers, II: 256, 266–7, 269–71, 275 composition, I: 40, 43–4, 58, 94–5, 101 compositors, I: 185–6 conceits, I: 222, 225, 248, 257–8, 312–13, 570, 577; II: 389, 395, 416 conception, II: 539–40 Condell, II: 206, 503 conduct, II: 250 conduct books, I: 584; II: 138 conformity, I: 440, 443, 445–6, 451 Congregationalists, I: 462 conies, II: 371 Coningsby, Humphrey, I: 194, 205, 212 conjurers, II: 350 connoisseurship, I: 216 conquest, II: 246 conscience, I: 275–6, 291, 293–4, 297–9, 300, 354, 362, 451, 466; II: 162, 466, 471, 510 Constable, Henry, I: 456; II: 256 constancy, II: 22, 443 Constantine, I: 61, 68; II: 20, 552 consumerism, II: 555, 560, 562 consumption, II: 558 containment, II: 113 Contarini, Gasparo, I: 60 contests, II: 192

577

Conti, Natale, I: 136 convention, II: 16, 21, 46, 48, 66, 76, 315 conversation, II: 225, 244, 341 conversion, I: 291, 295, 356, 444, 456, 465, 468, 544, 552–3, 554, 571; II: 390, 407–22 cony-catching pamphlets, I: 339, 341–3, 345, 347–8 Cook, John, I: 599 Cooke, Sir Anthony, I: 102 Cooke sisters, I: 128 cookery, I: 171; II: 16 Cooper, Thomas, I: 444, 598, 602; II: 516 Copernicus, Nicolaus, I: 151–2, 558, 563; II: 466 copiousness, I: 95, 99, 101 Copland, William, II: 192 Copley, Anthony, I: 456 Coppe, Abiezer, I: 464, 470 Coppin, Richard, I: 464 copyright, I: 167–8, 171, 306, 344, 346; II: 504 Corbett, Richard, I: 196–7, 199, 201, 210–11, 214, 225 Corbinelli, Jacopo, I: 331 Cornwallis, Anne, I: 203, 205, 210 Cornwallis, Sir William, II: 347, 437, 443 Corpus Christi, II: 62, 63, 67, 197 corruption, I: 264, 267, 305, 314, 355, 358; II: 107, 116–17, 155, 159, 177, 409, 430, 440, 484 Cortez, Hernando, I: 534 Coryate, Thomas, I: 161, 167, 233, 537, 538 Cosin, Richard, I: 439 cosmetics, I: 569, 578, 589; II: 508 cosmography, I: 532; II: 270, 385 cosmologies, I: 151 costumes, II: 45, 52–3, 55, 82, 87, 174, 507, 510 coteries, I: 221–47, 291, 304–19; II: 210, 234, 255 Cotgrave, Randle, I: 495, 501 Cotta, John, II: 516 Cotton, Richard, I: 367–9, 446, 449, 465, 472

578

Index

Cotton, Priscilla, I: 472 Council of Trent, I: 442, 458; II: 13, 411 counsel, I: 320, 321, 326, 327; II: 109, 113–14, 430, 433, 439, 440, 442 counter-discourse, II: 495 Counter-Reformations, I: 335, 396–7, 414; II: 10, 390, 513 counterfeiting, I: 85 country, II: 106, 118, 331 country houses, I: 171, 224, 367–78; II: 235 couplets, II: 35, 211, 299, 303, 319, 322–3, 336, 338–9, 365, 368–9, 372, 374, 376, 383, 410–11, 417 couriers, II: 456 court of Chancery, I: 254, 259 court culture, II: 217 court drama, II: 105–22, 126, 533 court factions, I: 310, 311 courtesy, II: 118–19, 199–201, 532, 538 courtesy books, I: 306; II: 438 courtly love, II: 429 courtroom scenes, I: 251 courts, I: 164, 191, 195, 304–19, 325; II: 42–3, 105, 107, 110, 151, 154, 217, 219, 233, 246, 249, 331, 438, 440, 532 courts of law, II: 495, 496 courtship, I: 312, 320; II: 243, 252, 258, 401 Coverdale, Miles, I: 413, 423 covering, II: 323 Cowley, Abraham, I: 153; II: 205 Cox, Captain, II: 373 Cox, Richard, I: 101 Cox, Samuel, II: 161, 184, 186 Cradock, John, the elder, II: 363 craft guilds, II: 509 Cranach, Lucas, I: 137 Crane, Ralph, I: 179, 183, 204, 329 Cranmer, Thomas, I: 7, 82–3, 84, 392, 403, 423, 425, 439, 440–1, 453; II: 402 Crashaw, Richard, I: 203, 414, 459–60; II: 205, 389, 390, 391, 395, 413, 417–18, 419, 420 credit, I: 166, 168, 170; II: 533

Creed Play, II: 63 cressets, II: 47 crime, I: 28, 264, 266, 300, 340–4, 347, 353–5; II: 176 criminalities, II: 243 critical elegies, II: 204–13 Cromwell, Sir Henry, I: 603 Cromwell, Oliver, I: 296, 461, 463, 469, 509, 600; II: 186, 498, 499, 566, 521 Cromwell, Richard, I: 298 Cromwell, Thomas, earl of Essex, I: 7, 99, 310, 439 Crooke, Helkiah, I: 84, 85, 560, 561, 564, 579; II: 539–40 Cross, Thomas, I: 491, 492 cross-dressing, I: 355, 575; II: 11, 53, 85, 86, 91, 493, 495 Crowe, William, II: 560, 561, 562 Crowley, Robert, I: 404, 410; II: 331, 332, 333 cruelty, I: 264, 265, 268, 269, 272, 347, 364; II: 427 Crusades, I: 544–6; II: 536 cuckolds, I: 481–2, 490, 515; II: 168, 170, 172, 361, 363 Cudworth, Ralph, I: 112–13 Culpeper, Nicholas, I: 598, 604, 607 cultural capital, I: 99; II: 301, 499 cultural production, II: 107 culture, I: 8, 74–90 Culverwell, Nathaniel, I: 112–13 cunning folk, II: 517, 518 Cupid, I: 3, 137, 138, 145; II: 291, 292, 294, 318 curricula, I: 27, 31–3, 35, 39, 92, 96, 98–9, 101, 116 Curtain playhouse, II: 42, 60 Cyclops, II: 19 Cynthia, II: 20, 39, 85 Cyril of Alexandria, I: 276 Cyrus, II: 19 Daborne, Robert, I: 15–16, 553 Daedalus, II: 21 dalliance, II: 478, 483

Index dance, II: 42, 52, 54, 84, 111–12, 116, 167, 173–4, 192–4, 199 Daneau, Lambert, II: 516 Daniel, Samuel, I: 48–9, 53, 67, 195, 214, 227, 238–9, 241, 307, 313, 315; II: 23, 24, 34, 82, 89, 107–8, 114, 156–7, 233, 256 Dante, II: 251, 252, 292, 409, 420 D’Arcy, Brian, II: 518 Darrell, John, II: 519–20 Davenant, Sir William, I: 234, 306, 315; II: 166, 169, 413 Davies, Sir John, I: 226, 235, 499, 503, 586, 589, 595; II: 251 Davies, John, of Hereford, II: 337–8, 366 Davila, I: 331–2 Day, Angel, II: 454 Day, John, I: 404, 441 De Vere, Edward, earl of Oxford, I: 210, 320 death, I: 128, 196, 212, 231, 507, 513, 608; II: 116–17, 123–4, 126, 128–39, 144, 147, 149, 151, 155, 157, 159, 162, 167, 178–9, 187, 192, 200, 204–5, 208, 210–11, 440–1, 513, 518, 528–9, 537, 538, 546, 556–7 death-drive, II: 123–4, 126 debates, I: 39, 40, 55, 57; II: 466, 469–70, 493–7, 499, 506 Deborah, II: 143 debt, I: 170, 232, 251, 258, 259; II: 498 decadence, II: 106, 115, 120; II: 218, 221 Decembrio, Pier Candido, I: 111 deconstructionism, II: 222, 524 decorum, I: 5, 40, 44, 309, 314, 316, 326, 584; II: 4, 7, 11, 12, 44, 47, 51, 217, 227, 229, 334, 530 dedications, II: 105, 218, 393–4, 457, 479 dedicatory epistles, I: 307 deduction, II: 442 Dee, John, I: 152; II: 219 deer, II: 235, 252, 257–8, 280, 282–3, 285, 310 defamation, I: 129, 172 defence of the stage, II: 167 defences of women, II: 496

579

deforestation, II: 555–6, 562 deformity, I: 578, 591 degeneration, I: 265 Dekker, Thomas, I: 9, 184, 243, 338, 346–8, 353, 412, 483, 561–4, 575, 577–9; II: 66, 108, 109, 519 Del Rio, Martin, II: 516 deliberation, II: 115 delight, II: 4, 6, 10–11, 18–19, 22–4, 30, 36, 96, 98, 231, 238, 243–4, 254, 261, 268–9, 282, 302, 304 Della Porta, Giambattista, I: 586–7, 589, 590 Deloney, II: 242, 264, 265, 266, 354, 376, 434, 469 demigods, II: 19 democracy, I: 39 demography, I: 339, 348; II: 557 demonic pacts, II: 517 demonic possession, II: 159 demonology, I: 141; II: 476, 514–18, 521 demons, II: 476 Demosthenes, I: 34, 59, 122 demystification, II: 141 Denham, Sir John, II: 555–6, 559–64 Denny, Sir Edward, II: 432 Dent, Arthur, I: 413 Dering, Edward, I: 413 derogation, II: 112 Descartes, René, I: 113, 118, 152; II: 465 descriptions, II: 29 desire, I: 122, 125, 134, 136, 138, 143–6, 151, 157, 208–9, 230, 240, 312; II: 115, 123, 126–7, 129, 130, 132–3, 135, 146, 149, 155, 160–1, 170, 180, 219, 228, 238, 241, 244–5, 249–2, 254–9, 269, 282, 291–3, 295, 299, 303, 309–10, 314–15, 323, 409, 415, 417, 439, 478, 482–3, 484, 486–8, 531 determinism, I: 115 Devere, Edward, earl of Oxford, I: 320, 323 Devereux, Frances, I: 184 Devereux, Penelope, I: 197; II: 181

580

Index

Devereux, Robert, earl of Essex, I: 57, 103, 182, 184–5, 193, 200, 205, 227, 239, 305, 311, 315, 334; II: 34, 49, 89, 112, 114, 143, 147, 155, 157–8, 456–7 devils, I: 126–9, 141, 251, 405, 448, 478, 504, 507, 513–15, 520–1, 588, 601–2, 604; II: 507, 515, 517, 518 devotions, I: 74, 102, 447, 450; II: 408, 453 D’Ewes, Simonds, II: 485, 486 Dey, Richard, I: 512 dialectic, I: 39, 95–6, 98, 112 dialects, I: 17, 18, 20, 24–5; II: 525, 535 dialogism, II: 29, 32, 40, 525, 526 dialogue, I: 42, 63, 100, 107, 109, 111, 116 Diana, I: 135, 140, 146, 147, 389, 390; II: 20, 100 diaries, I: 602; II: 447–51, 482, 485–6, 508 dictation, II: 456 dictionaries, I: 24, 76; II: 443 didacticism, II: 21, 34 Dido, II: 5, 39, 85 Digby, Everard, I: 112 Digby, Kenelm, I: 152 Digby, Venetia, I: 214 Diggers, II: 498 Digges, Leonard and Thomas, I: 152 dildo, II: 312, 313, 375 Diogenes, I: 322, 324–7, 347 Diogenes Laertius, I: 113, 115 Dionysius the Aereopagite, I: 112 discovery, I: 153; II: 437, 444, 467, 484 discovery spaces, II: 51 disenchantment, I: 558, 566 disguises, I: 508, 569; II: 127, 129 disguisings, II: 188–9 dismemberments, II: 179 display, II: 48, 70, 83 dispraise, II: 8 disputations, I: 152, 155–6 dissent, II: 169, 390, 391, 450 dissimulation, I: 329–35, 342–3, 358, 574, 584–8; II: 217, 440

distaffs, I: 481, 482, 483, 488 diurnals, II: 448 divine right, I: 281, 286 divorce, I: 297, 298; II: 135, 169, 499 Dod, John, II: 138 Donatus, Aelius, II: 326 Donne, Henry, I: 228 Donne, John, I: 3, 49, 74–5, 81, 84, 115, 162–3, 186, 191–5, 197, 199, 201, 206–9, 212–15, 221–47, 256, 289– 303, 308, 315, 400, 414, 423, 446, 460, 462, 482–3, 486, 563–4, 577; II: 8, 9, 48, 205, 209–11, 249, 253, 260–1, 276, 289, 317–25, 336–7, 383–6, 390, 393–5, 413, 415–18, 420, 456, 458, 475, 477 doom paintings, I: 405 Dorman, Thomas, I: 442 doubling, II: 54, 507 doubt, II: 416 Douglas, Gavin, I: 123, 168; II: 549 Douglas, Margaret, I: 195, 203 dragons, I: 605; II: 44, 52 drainage, II: 564–6 Drake, Sir Francis, I: 62, 130; II: 561 drama, I: 18, 28, 40, 67, 117, 125, 251; II: 42–59, 502–12 dramatic framework, II: 72 dramatists, I: 548, 570 dramaturgy, II: 64, 66, 503 Drapers, II: 125 Drayton, Michael, I: 69, 70, 112, 214, 233, 238, 241, 315, 338; II: 24, 34, 83, 232, 235, 256, 259, 261, 551, 565–6 dream vision, II: 216, 425 dreams, I: 469, 598–610; II: 292, 482 Droeshout, John, I: 490, 511 Droeshout, Martin, I: 494, 497, 513, 595 Droeshout, Michael, I: 490, 507, 511 Drummond of Hawthornden, I: 221–3, 227, 237–8, 241–3; II: 206, 208 Drury, Elizabeth, I: 162 Drury, Sir Robert, I: 237 Dryden, John, I: 49, 121, 230; II: 204, 339, 413

Index du Bellay, II: 252 Du Plessis Mornay, I: 110 Dudley, Robert, earl of Leicester, I: 103, 122, 305, 308, 522; II: 112, 128–30, 383, 428 Dugdale, Sir William, II: 556, 558, 559, 566 Dulwich College, I: 184, 185 dumb-shows, I: 553, 601; II: 43, 70, 96 Duns Scotus, I: 276, 512 Dürer, Albrecht, I: 137–8 d’Urfé, Honoré, I: 112 Dyer, Sir Edward, I: 210, 214, 215; II: 23 Dymoke, Talboys, II: 363 Earle, John, I: 59 early modern, I: 5; II: 492, 496, 497, 500 earthly paradise, I: 374, 391 Easter, II: 449 eclogue, II: 21, 167, 226–8, 230, 234, 236, 333–4, 336, 338–9, 431, 469, 478, 483 ecocriticism, II: 236, 555 ecology, II: 555–68 economic exchange, I: 74, 85 economics, I: 78 economy, II: 405 ecstasy, II: 395 ecumenism, I: 291 Eden, I: 391, 393, 394; II: 320 Eden, Richard, I: 529 edification, II: 10 education, I: 3, 8, 15, 19, 23, 27–39, 43, 51, 68, 76, 92, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 101, 102, 103, 108; II: 258, 382, 439, 442, 454–5, 464, 467–8, 478, 493, 499 Edward I, II: 551, 553, 557, 559 Edward IV, II: 168 Edward VI, I: 57, 82, 99, 101, 311, 439–41, 504; II: 185, 330, 331, 332, 425, 448 Edwardes, Elizabeth, I: 488 Edwards, Thomas, I: 297, 298, 463, 472 effeminacy, I: 482, 570, 574; II: 132, 169, 481, 487

581

Egerton, John, earl of Bridgewater, I: 193, 194, 195, 226, 228, 236 Egerton, Lady, I: 233; II: 173 ejaculations, II: 386, 388, 391 ekphrasis, I: 137, 138; II: 240 Elderton, William, II: 266 elect nation, I: 62, 406, 443, 451; II: 45 elegies, I: 168, 194, 196–7, 199, 212, 214, 222, 226, 228–30, 235, 255; II: 7, 8, 9, 101, 162, 204–13, 228, 231–2, 234–6, 249, 251, 300, 317–18, 323–4, 337, 385, 538 elements, I: 482, 484–6, 529, 558, 560–1, 563, 567 Eleutherius, I: 452 elitism, II: 43, 105, 106, 113, 115, 118, 119, 124, 173, 186, 199, 394 elixir, II: 386, 398–403, 405 Elizabeth, Princess, queen of Bohemia, I: 197, 207, 373 Elizabeth I, I: 28, 31, 35, 56–8, 61, 64, 66, 78, 99, 101, 102, 103, 111, 121, 123, 128, 138, 139–41, 153, 171–2, 182, 184, 191, 201, 204, 210, 226, 228, 237, 239, 249, 265, 296, 304–5, 308, 310–14, 320–1, 327, 337, 338, 347, 352, 373, 388, 391–2, 396–8, 409, 412–13, 420, 430, 440–3, 447, 449, 451–2, 456, 488, 522, 531, 543–7, 550–2, 573–5, 589, 601, 608; II: 20, 34, 39, 83, 64, 66, 91, 96, 100, 109, 114, 124–5, 128, 129–32, 137, 143, 155–7, 168, 193, 195–6, 221, 229, 246, 249, 321, 326, 330, 332, 334–5, 355, 382, 414, 428, 430, 438, 447, 457, 467, 566 Elizabethan Settlement, I: 274–6, 277, 282, 397, 409–11 elocution, I: 109; II: 10 eloquence, I: 33, 39, 41, 45, 46, 49–50, 52, 103, 107–9, 569, 570; II: 4, 12, 16, 22, 391, 442 Elstrack, Renold, I: 495 elves, II: 347, 354 Elyot, Sir Thomas, I: 31, 94, 101, 109, 111, 309; II: 481

582

Index

emblems, I: 367–8, 370, 372, 375–6, 487, 507–8, 513, 530, 537; II: 75, 76, 78, 160, 177, 218–21, 323, 394 emotion, I: 38, 44–5, 47 Empedocles, I: 561 empire, II: 545 empiricism, II: 16 enargia, II: 21 enclosure, I: 267, 353; II: 565 encomium, II: 438 encounters, II: 193, 195, 198, 201 encyclopaedism, II: 240, 245–6 English language, I: 15–26; II: 70, 204, 207, 209–10, 250, 429, 431–2, 437 English Revolution, I: 462, 473 Englishness, II: 430 engravings, I: 478, 481, 484–6, 488, 490–2, 494–8, 503–4, 506–15, 518, 520–2, 566; II: 109 Enlightenment, I: 5, 118; II: 494, 499, 500, 513 Ennius, I: 139 Enterprise of England (Jesuit mission), I: 443 entertainments, I: 309, 310, 311, 312, 316, 353, 355 enthusiasm, I: 473 entries, II: 108, 144, 185, 188, 194, 196, 199, 220 epic, I: 3, 40, 69, 124, 134, 141, 379, 456, 460, 532; II: 5–8, 21, 28–41, 45, 62, 156, 216, 227, 238, 251, 258, 307, 319, 327, 335, 338, 414 epicede, I: 222 Epictetus, I: 108, 115, 116; II: 374 epigram, II: 8, 180, 303, 330–1, 336, 366, 389–90, 395 epiphany, II: 407 episcopacy, I: 276, 296, 298, 439, 444, 446 epistolographies, II: 454–5, 458 epitaphs, I: 177, 196–7, 201, 212, 214, 225, 243; II: 8, 129, 211, 372 epithalamia, I: 222, 235, 242 epyllia, I: 123, 143; II: 299, 301, 312 equality, II: 493–4, 496, 498 equity, I: 252, 254, 258, 264, 269

equivocation, II: 338 Erasmus, Desiderius, I: 31, 83, 93–5, 97, 98–103, 107–9, 111, 114, 116, 118, 381–3, 385, 401–2, 423, 450, 538, 549, 584; II: 131, 332, 424, 455, 458, 465, 529 Erastianism, I: 274, 281 eroticism, I: 123, 136–7, 142–4, 199, 229, 239, 257–9, 308, 316, 380, 386, 388, 390, 459, 483, 518–19, 602; II: 7, 85, 127–31, 133, 155, 178, 209, 211, 228, 230, 233, 241, 243–4, 253, 257–61, 299–304, 306–10, 312, 314–15, 318, 372, 378, 386, 394–5, 409, 416–20, 476–9, 482–4, 487–8, 493, 496 Erskine, Sir Thomas, I: 314 essays, I:, 25, 64, 85, 92, 102, 109, 115, 117, 329–30, 332, 334; II: 437–46 essentialism, II: 16 Essex rebellion, II: 114 estates, I: 367–76 estates satires, II: 331, 335 Estienne, Henri, I: 113 Estienne, Robert, I: 77, 111, 114 eternal law, I: 278, 279, 280 ethnic identity, II: 545 ethos, I: 40, 46–9, 52 Eton College, I: 124, 153, 235 ettins, II: 349–50 etymology, I: 332; II: 20, 215 Eucharist, I: 74, 81–3, 85, 435, 447, 456, 458, 566; II: 328, 400 Euhemerus, I: 139 eunuchs, II: 313 euphuism, I: 307, 320, 324; II: 48, 424, 428, 431–2 Euripides, I: 35, 128; II: 131 Eusebius, I: 61–2, 276; II: 552 evangelism, I: 399 Eve, II: 393 Evelyn, John, II: 448, 557, 558 Everyman, II: 65 excess, II: 154, 155, 157, 162, 328, 336, 337 excommunication, I: 551

Index execution, I: 443, 446, 450, 453; II: 163, 166, 177, 265, 280, 330, 332, 336, 354, 434, 448, 513, 518, 521, 391, 521 exegesis, I: 147; II: 215 exorcisms, I: 448; II: 518, 519 experiments, I: 154, 155, 156, 253; II: 442 exploration, II: 240, 252 eye(s), I: 587; II: 307, 308, 311 fables, I: 122, 135, 140, 142–4, 156–7; II: 22, 143 fabliau, II: 427 faces, I: 582, 590 facetie, II: 356 factionalism, II: 44, 155 factories, II: 560 faerie, I: 135, 141, 530; II: 218, 240, 247 Fairfax, Edward, II: 28, 29, 37 fairgrounds, II: 43 fairies, II: 342, 345, 347–9, 354–5 fairy tales, II: 342–3, 345–7, 348–9 faith, I: 5, 32, 83, 99, 107, 115; II: 408 Falkland, Lord, I: 224 Fall, I: 279, 299 fame, II: 112–13, 143, 147, 523, 531–2, 538 familiar spirit, II: 354 familiarity, II: 455, 456, 509 family, II: 539 Family of Love, II: 515 Fanshawe, Sir Richard, II: 234, 235 fantasy, II: 424 farces, II: 42, 443 fashion, I: 306, 488–9, 508, 531, 569–72; II: 144, 145 fasting, I: 470 favour, I: 267, 281, 290–1, 300–1, 304, 310–12, 320, 333 favourites, I: 305, 306, 308, 310, 311, 314 favouritism, II: 156 Fawkes, Guy, I: 356, 446 Feake, Christopher, I: 461 feigning, II: 16, 17 Felltham, Owen, I: 235 felony, I: 256

583

female behaviour, II: 118 female characters, II: 37, 38, 85–6 female culture, II: 345 female heroism, II: 113, 234 female honour, II: 118, 163 female lament, II: 71 female storytellers, II: 345 female transgressions, II: 56 female virtue, II: 112 femininity, II: 125, 131, 135, 137, 221, 259 feminism, II: 382, 393, 492, 499, 501 feminist criticism, II: 290 feminist scholarship, II: 393 Fenner, Dudley, I: 444; II: 323 fens, fenland, II: 564, 565, 566 Fenton, Geoffrey, I: 125; II: 423, 427 Ferdinando, Lord Strange, II: 301 Fergus mac Erc, II: 547, 550 Fergus mac Ferquhard, II: 547 Ferrand, Jacques, I: 602 festivals, I: 337; II: 62, 67, 264 fetishism, II: 258, 261 feudalism, I: 368, 573 Ficino, Marsilio, I: 93, 108, 110–13; II: 16 fiction, I: 264–5, 267, 311–13, 343, 345; II: 114, 143, 218, 288, 391, 423–36, 530 fictiveness, II: 327 Field, John, I: 411, 456 Field, Nathan, II: 123–4, 128, 134 Field, Nathaniel, I: 223 Fifth Monarchists, I: 462, 469; II: 498 figures, I: 28–9, 34, 40–2, 44–5, 53, 74, 76, 80, 82, 94, 97, 101–2; II: 18, 214, 215, 217, 399, 412, 327 finance, II: 533 fines, II: 559 firewood, II: 557 fireworks, II: 52 Fish, Simon, I: 439 Fisher, John, I: 406, 453 Fitzherbert, John, II: 563 Fitzjeffrey, Francis, I: 202 Fitzroy, Henry, I: 381 Flacius, Matthias, I: 451

584

Index

Fleetwood, William, I: 349 Fletcher, Elizabeth, I: 464 Fletcher, Giles, I: 63, 530–1, 535 Fletcher, John, I: 65; II: 12, 44, 80, 82, 86, 101, 106, 115–16, 118–19, 150–1, 156, 163, 178, 187, 191, 205, 215, 233 Fletcher, Phineas, II: 338 Florio, John, I: 35, 78, 115, 120, 125; II: 437, 443, 536, 538 flowers, I: 371, 374, 382–4, 386, 391–4, 454, 458 Fludd, Robert, I: 152, 562 flyting, II: 50 folk culture, II: 62, 185, 343, 346, 347, 357, 514 folk legends, II: 341–59 folk songs, II: 250 folk tales, II: 341, 342, 345–6, 348 folklore, II: 186, 200, 345, 347, 356, 378, 515, 517, 521 fools, I: 484, 505, 509, 538; II: 9, 52, 53, 55, 89, 95, 192 football, II: 193 Ford, Emmanuel, II: 241, 244 Ford, John, I: 308; II: 156, 166, 167, 176–84, 519 foreigners, I: 492 forests, II: 48, 49, 52, 76, 562 Forman, Simon, I: 152; II: 508–9 fornication, II: 176, 238 Fortune, II: 60, 114, 116, 294 Fortune playhouse, II: 45 foul papers, I: 185; II: 504 fountains, I: 376, 380, 383–4, 387, 388–9, 391, 393–4 fourteener, II: 34, 62, 411 Fowler, Constance Aston, I: 203 Fox, George, I: 463–5, 468–70, 472 Foxe, John, I: 6–7, 56, 61–4, 66–8, 124, 161, 398–9, 404–7, 413, 424, 442–5, 451–2, 456, 514–15, 521, 550; II: 20, 535 François, duke of Anjou, I: 321 François I, I: 137, 310 François of Valois, duke of Alençon, I: 522

Fraunce, Abraham, I: 42, 128, 136, 144; II: 4, 12, 233, 243, 273 freedom of religion, I: 289, 295, 300 freedoms, II: 498 Freeman, Thomas, I: 202 French Academy of Poetry and Music, II: 272 French court, II: 116 friars, I: 99, 391, 514, 515, 517 friendship, I: 263, 316; II: 228, 232, 234, 440–1, 454, 455, 464, 476, 481, 484, 487, 488, 496 Frith, John, I: 438, 439 Froben, Johann, I: 93, 94 Frobisher, Martin, I: 130 fugue, II: 273 Fulgentius, I: 136 Fulke, William, I: 409 Fuller, Thomas, II: 376 Fulwood, William, II: 454 funeral sermons, II: 449 furies, II: 19, 117, 118 Gaelic, II: 547 gag, II: 55 Gaisford, Thomas, I: 63 Galen, I: 558, 586; II: 479 Galilei, Galileo, I: 151, 152, 155, 295 gambling, I: 490 gambols, II: 187, 188 games, II: 45, 47, 48, 75, 261 Ganymede, I: 146; II: 395, 485 gardens, I: 371, 379–95, 441, 599; II: 216, 235, 241, 274, 432, 558 Gardiner, Bishop, I: 82, 83, 516; II: 334, 379 Gargill, Anne, I: 464 Garnet, Henry, I: 446 Garnet, Stephen, I: 507 Garnier, Robert, I: 128; II: 123 Garofolo, see Tisi garter celebrations, II: 111 Gascoigne, George, I: 214; II: 18, 23, 24, 240, 244, 253–5, 333, 423, 428–9, 433 Gassendi, Pierre, I: 152

Index Gathelos, II: 547, 549 gatherings, II: 192 Gaultier, Léonard, I: 512, 513 Gayton, Edmund, I: 224 gaze, II: 465, 467, 469 gematria, II: 16 gender, I: 554, 559–61, 570, 572, 574–5; II: 118, 133, 141, 173, 244–6, 258, 281, 283, 299, 302, 309–10, 315, 348, 383, 392–6, 429, 432, 450, 463, 466, 477, 479, 480–1, 484, 487–8, 492–5, 498–500, 508, 533, 542 genealogy, II: 535, 541, 542 General Draining Act, II: 564, 566 generation, II: 536, 539, 540 generosity, I: 371 genius, I: 2, 4, 5 genre, II: 3–14, 21, 28, 29, 35, 36, 52, 62, 66, 70, 83, 91, 217, 427 Gentillet, Innocent, I: 332 Gentleman of the Bedchamber, I: 313, 314 gentlemen, I: 574; II: 167, 172, 174, 218 Geoffrey of Monmouth, I: 68, 69, 140, 352; II: 247, 343, 548 georgics, I: 368, 373; II: 28, 30–1, 226–7, 229, 477 Gerard, Hohn, I: 382, 447 Geuffroy, Antoine, I: 546, 547 ghosts, II: 71, 72, 155, 348 Giambattista della Porta, I: 586 giants, II: 194 Gifford, George, II: 515, 516 Gilbert, Sir Humphrey, I: 36, 539–40 Gilbert, William, I: 151, 155 Giles, Peter, II: 352, 424, 530 Giovanni de Grassi, I: 592 Giovanni della Casa, I: 584 Giovio, Paolo, I: 546 Giraldi, I: 136 Girolamo da Treviso, I: 6, 8 Giulio Romano, I: 199 Gladman, John, II: 189 globalisation, I: 24

585

Globe playhouse, I: 356, 358, 364, 584; II: 20, 45, 51, 55, 56, 60, 91, 119, 149, 155, 166, 219, 265 Globe playhouse, second II: 174 Gloriana, I: 140–1; II: 20, 218 Glorious Revolution, I: 317 glory, II: 29, 34 Gloucester, Humphrey, duke of, I: 96, 111 Glover, George, I: 492, 497 Glover, Mary, II: 520 Goddard, John, I: 512 Godolphin, II: 205, 211 gold, I: 533; II: 424 golden age, I: 265, 367, 384, 530, 534–5, 577; II: 20–2, 226–8, 233, 235, 256, 552 Golding, Arthur, I: 36, 110, 122–3, 136, 142, 143–4, 146; II: 300 goldsmiths, II: 125 Golgotha, II: 386 Goltzius, I: 492 Gondomar, Count, I: 357, 358, 359, 360, 507; II: 149 Gonzalo, I: 599, 604, 606, 607 Goodcole, Henry, II: 518 Goodman, Cardell, II: 391 Goodman, Christopher, I: 402 Goodwin, Philip, I: 598, 601–2 Goodwin, Thomas, I: 463, 465 Goodyer, Sir Henry, I: 192, 227, 230, 233, 236, 239, 240, 291 Googe, Barnabe, I: 125; II: 254, 563 Gorges, Sir Arthur, I: 194, 214, 215; II: 251 gospellers, I: 410 Gough, Richard, II: 353 government, II: 430 Gowrie conspiracy, I: 431 grace, I: 269–70, 280–2, 284, 293–4, 299, 301, 326, 375, 420, 438, 454, 458, 463, 465, 467, 471–2; II: 329, 330, 400, 402, 404, 408–12, 415, 532 graffiti, II: 374 Grafton, Richard, I: 55–6, 60, 65–6, 68, 101, 440, 547; II: 527 Grafton, Thomas, I: 439

586

Index

grammar, I: 18, 25, 27, 30, 33–5, 59, 76–7, 97–9, 103, 108, 121, 134, 152, 170; II: 209, 400 grammar schools, I: 27, 30, 33, 121; II: 466 Grammarians’ War, I: 98, 101 Grange, John, I: 210 Graunt, John, II: 557 Gray’s Inn, I: 249, 250, 251, 254 Great Controversy, I: 409 Great Fire of 1666, II: 562 great halls, II: 115, 119, 144, 187, 188 Great Level project, II: 564 Great Vowel Shift, I: 17 Greek Anthology, II: 389 Greene, Robert, I: 185, 307, 341, 343–8; II: 233, 243, 423, 430 Gregory, Pope, I: 408, 452 Gregory of Nyssa, I: 276 Greuter, Matthaus, I: 519 Greville, Fulke, I: 214, 215, 307, 312, 334; II: 23, 156, 229, 256, 384, 409–10, 412 Grey, Lady Jane, I: 103, 124 Grey de Wilton, Arthur, Lord, I: 272 Grimald, Nicholas, II: 284 Grindal, Archbishop Edmund, II: 334 grocers, II: 125 Grocyn, William, I: 97 grotesques, II: 192 groundlings, II: 43, 49 Guarini, Battista, II: 11, 12 Guarini, Guarino, I: 93; II: 233, 234, 235 Guarino da Verona, I: 96 Guicciardini, Francesco, I: 331–3 guidebooks, II: 440 guildhalls, II: 43 guilds, II: 62, 63, 186 Guilpin, Edward, II: 336 Guilpin, Everard, I: 226 guilt, I: 598 Gunpowder Plot, I: 290, 356, 431, 445, 446, 507, 519, 521 Gunter, Anne, II: 520 Gunter, Elizabeth, I: 203

Gustavus Adolphus, king of Sweden, I: 511 Gutenberg, Johannes, I: 160, 191, 592 Habington, William, I: 213, 222 hagiography, I: 455 Hakewill, George, I: 153 Hakluyt, Richard, I: 64, 531–3, 538–9, 545, 551; II: 542 Halkett, Anne, II: 450 Hall, Joseph, I: 118, 130, 226, 234, 292, 296, 482, 529, 535, 536, 600; II: 336, 337, 366, 458 Halle, Edward, I: 65; II: 527, 530, 550 Hampton Court Conference, I: 420, 445 handwriting, I: 177–89 Harborne, William, I: 551, 552 Harding, Thomas, I: 409, 411, 442, 450 Hardyng, John, II: 527 Harflete, Lady, I: 203 Harington, Lucy, I: 241 Harington, Sir John of Exton, I: 191, 193, 194, 202, 207, 210, 214, 238, 522; II: 24, 28, 38–9, 336 Harington, Sir John of Stepney, I: 194 Harman, Thomas, I: 339, 341, 342, 343, 344, 345, 355 harmony, I: 316, 349, 561; II: 15, 24, 270, 272, 275 Harpsfield, Nicholas, I: 62, 406–7, 443 Harrington, Lady Anne, I: 120 Harrington, Sir James, I:, 120, 125, 207, 299, 300, 301, 312 Harrison, Stephen, I: 338; II: 109 Harrison, William, I: 30, 31, 66; II: 23, 430, 537, 551, 553 Harrowing of Hell, II: 62, 67 Harsnett, Samuel, II: 519–20 Hartlib, Samuel, I: 153, 156 harvest homes, II: 188 Harvey, Christopher, II: 388 Harvey, Gabriel, I: 60, 123, 151, 226, 481; II: 23, 458, 478 Harvey, William, I: 151; II: 520 Hary (blind), II: 551 Hasleton, Richard, I: 552 Hatton, Sir Christopher, II: 184

Index Hawkins, Henry, I: 456 Hay, Lord James, II: 110 Hayes, Edward, I: 539, 540 Hayward, Sir John, I: 56, 57 Head, Richard, II: 434 hearing, I: 399; II: 56 Hector, II: 348 Heliodorus, II: 238, 423, 540 hell, II: 62, 508 Heminges, John, II: 125, 206, 503 Hemmingsen, Neils, II: 516 Heneage, Sir Thomas, I: 210 Henri II, I: 606 Henri III, I: 331; II: 116 Henri IV, I: 270, 332, 510, 511; II: 157 Henrietta Maria, I: 315, 316; II: 120, 174, 417, 419 Henry, Prince, I: 161, 167, 193, 197, 315, 330, 355, 537, 607; II: 107–9, 111–13, 157–8, 193 Henry, Sarah, II: 449 Henry IV, I: 56, 57, 96, 286; II: 143 Henry VI, I: 391; II: 143, 199 Henry VII, I: 58, 65, 96, 99, 100, 101, 140, 156, 309, 310; II: 167, 527, 550 Henry VIII, I: 6–8, 29, 32–3, 63, 65, 69, 78, 82, 96–7, 99–101, 226–7, 304, 309–10, 311, 314, 352, 369, 381, 392, 401–2, 404, 406, 423, 425, 439–41, 447, 452, 545, 550, 573; II: 168, 199, 225, 252–3, 280, 286, 327, 329, 330–2, 365, 433, 454, 492 Henryson, Robert, II: 251 Henslowe, Philip, I: 16, 28, 184–5, 187, 228, 243; II: 43, 45, 52, 53, 508 heptarchies, II: 549 Heracleitus, I: 276 herbals, I: 379, 393 Herbert, Sir Edward, I: 194, 233 Herbert, George, I: 32, 41, 52–3, 84, 194, 211, 213, 215, 234, 462, 471; II: 110, 180, 245, 290, 291, 383–90, 398– 405, 409–12, 420, 432, 563 Herbert, Mary, countess of Pembroke, I: 425, 426; II: 123, 180

587

Herbert, William earl of Pembroke, I: 237 Herbert of Cherbury, Lord, I: 193 Hercules, I: 136, 153; II: 132, 349, 510, 438 heresy, I: 62, 400, 406, 439, 453, 550, 551; II: 332 heritage, II: 536, 542 hermaphrodites, I: 512 hermeneutic, II: 388 Hermes Trismegistus, II: 16 hermetic thought, I: 152 Herodotus, II: 540 heroics, II: 5, 6, 12, 19, 28–9, 31, 34, 38–9, 109, 112, 114, 116–17, 132, 155–8, 218, 230, 234, 305, 309, 351, 432 Herrick, Robert, I: 214, 224, 225, 316; II: 19, 259, 390–1 Hervet, Gentian, I: 114 Hesiodus, I: 127 Hesperides, II: 305 heteroglossia, II: 31, 33 hexameter, II: 8 Heywood, Jasper, I: 228 Heywood, John, I: 102, 228; II: 61, 64, 330 Heywood, Thomas, I: 63, 184, 185, 338, 481, 497, 518, 553, 584, 601, 602; II: 66, 115, 125, 126, 134, 135, 169, 172, 514, 520–1 hierarchy, I: 536, 548, 572, 574; II: 12, 13, 53, 242, 331, 454–6, 484–6, 498, 526, 536–7 Higden, Ranulph, I: 65 Higgons, Theophilus, II: 418 Hill, Nicholas, I: 172, 234 Hill, Thomas, I: 582–3, 585, 586–7, 589, 606–7 Hippocrates, II: 540 Hippolytus, II: 304 historicism, I: 1; II: 119, 523–34, 552 historiography, I: 57, 62, 100, 396, 443; II: 143, 147, 156, 523, 525–8, 530, 545, 547–8, 551–3

588

Index

history, I: 1, 55–73, 100, 116, 119, 128, 140, 151–2, 155, 157, 160, 215, 225, 236, 249, 263–6, 269–70, 272, 311, 316, 321, 338, 348–9, 355, 409, 443, 452; II: 29, 47, 143, 152, 238–9, 247, 438, 448, 470, 513–14, 518, 523–34, 541–2, 546–9, 551–2, 556, 558, 560 history plays, see political plays Hobbes, Thomas, I: 31, 36, 108, 112, 124, 152, 306, 563 hobby-horses, II: 192, 194 hobgoblins, II: 347, 348 Hoby, Edward, II: 417–18 Hoby, Margaret, II: 267 hock-cart, II: 194 hodening, II: 195 Holbein, Hans, I: 309; II: 222 holiness, I: 263 Holinshed, Raphael, I: 30, 64, 66–8, 70; II: 376, 527, 530, 548, 551, 552, 553 Holland, Abraham, I: 499 Holland, Henry, II: 516 Holland, Hugh, I: 234 Holland, Philemon, I: 70, 109, 116, 123 Hollar, Wenceslas, I: 361, 494–5, 509 Holles, Gervase, I: 608 Holles, Henrietta, I: 203–4 Hollybush, John, I: 448 Holme, Randle, II: 378 Holocaust, II: 162 holy legend plays, II: 185 Holy Spirit, I: 299 Holyband, Claudius, II: 537 Homer, I: 35, 60, 123, 127, 128, 528; II: 112, 218, 239 homiletic tragedy, II: 64 homilies, I: 135, 347, 401, 440, 544, 573; II: 216 homoeroticism, II: 127, 234, 302 homosexuality, I: 146; II: 475, 483, 484, 493 homosociality, II: 456, 476

honour, I: 577; II: 117–18, 151, 157, 167, 323, 326, 360, 427, 531, 538 Hooke, Robert, I: 151 Hooker, Richard, I: 6, 112, 274–88, 292, 403, 411–12, 445 Hoole, Charles, I: 33, 34, 35 Hooper, John, I: 439 Hope playhouse, II: 42 Hopkins, John, I: 426; II: 267, 382 Hopkins, Matthew, II: 521 Horace, I: 3, 35, 48, 109, 222, 223, 226, 243, 255, 367, 381, 383; II: 4, 5, 8, 10, 12, 30, 108, 243, 326–7, 330, 336–7 Horman, William, I: 98 horns, II: 362 horoscopes, I: 152 Hoskins, John, I: 80, 81, 201; II: 4, 12, 373 Hoskyns, John, I: 222, 234 hospitality, I: 367, 368, 371, 373; II: 399, 400, 404, 405 household drama, II: 126 household management, I: 171; II: 403, 453, 497 households, II: 112, 126, 131, 134, 172, 184, 185, 187, 188, 193, 199, 201 housekeeping, I: 367, 373 house-visits, II: 195, 198, 199, 200, 201 Howard, Frances, I: 200; II: 158–9 Howard, Henry, earl of Northampton, I: 164, 172, 225, 446 Howard, Henry, earl of Surrey, I: 123–4, 190, 200, 214, 239, 242, 309–11, 380, 446; II: 252–4, 257, 283, 330, 538 Howard, Henry, earl of Northampton, I: 147 Howard, Philip, I: 449, 457 Howard, Lord Thomas, I: 203 Howell, James, I: 224, 234; II: 375, 376, 458 Howes, Edmund, I: 66 Huarte, Juan, I: 586; II: 17 Hughes, Thomas, I: 249 human right, I: 281, 286

Index humanism, I: 3, 4, 23, 30–3, 39, 91–109, 111, 114, 116, 118–22, 127–8, 134, 161, 165, 166, 167, 242, 330, 331, 379, 381, 423; II: 4, 6, 10, 12, 16, 23, 64, 230, 240, 247, 251, 255, 333, 423, 427, 430, 433, 434, 439, 442, 454, 455, 458, 464, 493, 494 humility topos, I: 122, 166 humours, I: 492, 535, 540, 558–62, 585, 598 Hundred Years War, II: 44 hunting, II: 240, 252, 257–8, 268, 278–81, 283, 285, 309, 311, 328, 331, 556, 562, 564 husbandmen, II: 564 husbandry, I: 400 husbandry manuals, II: 563 husbands, II: 113–14, 124–5, 127, 134–5, 137–8, 159, 168–70, 173, 198, 453, 480–1 Huss, Jan, I: 452 Hutchinson, Lucy, I: 35 Hyacinth, II: 483 Hyde, Edward, earl of Clarendon, I: 64, 224, 234 hydraulics, II: 241 hymns, I: 222; II: 338, 384, 387, 392, 399, 411, 425 hypocrisy, II: 335 Hyrde, Richard, I: 127 Icarus, I: 143 Iceni, II: 112 iconoclasm, I: 373, 398, 550; II: 49, 336 iconography, I: 372, 458; II: 113, 178, 219, 373 iconology, I: 587; II: 128, 136 iconophobia, II: 49 icons, II: 38, 48, 178, 220 ideas, II: 18–20, 22 identity, I: 2, 4, 120, 126, 182, 251, 268–71, 294, 301, 358, 362, 471, 472, 537, 543, 545, 554, 570, 574, 575, 577, 578; II: 126, 453, 463–73, 475, 477–9, 483–4, 487–8, 495, 536, 539, 541–2, 545–9, 551–2

589

ideology, I: 6, 147, 341, 349, 368, 406, 540; II: 37, 49, 60, 141–2, 246, 464, 483, 526, 541 idolatry, I: 135, 136, 438, 448, 566, 569, 570 ignorance, II: 113 illusion, II: 45, 46, 47, 50, 52, 77, 174, 302 images, I: 348, 373, 407, 430, 438, 441, 443, 481, 497, 502, 509, 515, 518, 521, 534, 558, 565, 570, 576; II: 6, 18–22, 25, 49, 177, 179, 292, 390, 392, 395, 440 imagination, I: 534, 536, 543, 598; II: 20, 539, 540 imitation, I: 33, 106, 109; II: 19, 20–1, 23, 29, 31, 33, 36, 38, 51, 218, 302, 317 imperialism, I: 406, 543, 546, 549; II: 108, 109, 498 impersonation, II: 217 improvisation, II: 49, 55, 505 incarnation, I: 565 incest, I: 142, 143, 145; II: 176, 181, 305, 531, 532 incontinence, II: 486–7 incubi, I: 604, 605 Independents, I: 462, 463; II: 391, 450 individualism, I: 367; II: 157, 158, 447–9, 455, 457, 463–9, 484 individuality, see identity individualization, I: 167 indoor playhouses, II: 42, 49, 507 induction logic, I: 156 inductions, II: 218 indulgences, I: 399, 544 industries, II: 556, 560 inflation, I: 267, 341 Ingelond, II: 61 ingles, II: 53, 85 inheritance, I: 264; II: 539 ink, I: 186, 188 inn-signs, I: 481, 545 inn-yards, II: 62 Inner Temple, I: 249, 251

590

Index

Inns of Court, I: 35, 170, 191, 195, 196, 197, 201, 203, 222, 233, 234, 241, 249, 251, 274, 308; II: 42, 45, 94–104, 187, 200 Inns of Court drama, II: 94–104 innuendo, II: 327, 332, 371, 372 inspiration, II: 386, 392 instruction, II: 244 integumentum, II: 215 intention, I: 252, 564–5, 570 interceptions, II: 194, 197 interiority, see inwardness interludes, II: 42, 62, 63, 65, 71, 174, 184, 188–9, 191, 201 intermeddlings, II: 239 internationalism, I: 309 interpretation, I: 385, 402, 435, 462–3, 465–6, 468–70, 473 Interregnum, I: 298; II: 186, 388 intertextuality, II: 78, 231, 283, 284–5, 477, 478, 479 intolerance, II: 513 invective, I: 296; II: 8, 326, 327 invention, I: 98, 137, 160, 192, 194, 221, 248; II: 18, 19, 20 inversion, II: 171, 214 investiture, II: 48 invocations, II: 29 involucrum, II: 215 inwardness, II: 55, 245, 458, 467, 469 Ireland, I: 66, 78, 125, 224, 232, 263, 264, 268, 271, 272, 356, 357, 452; II: 221, 423, 425, 426, 542, 547, 552, 553 irony, II: 64, 177, 214, 215, 217, 326, 430 Isham, Elizabeth, II: 451 Isis, I: 269, 270 Islam, I: 5, 294, 531, 543–56; II: 438 Isocrates, I: 122; II: 374 Israel, I: 61, 62, 291–2 italic, I: 177–82, 185–6, 193 Ivan the Terrible, I: 535 Jack-of-Lent, II: 194 Jackson, Thomas, I: 112 Jacobean court, II: 106, 109, 112, 114, 120 Jacobean tragedy, II: 154–65

James I, I: 30, 58–9, 64, 130, 154, 162, 169, 182, 196–7, 200, 207, 241–3, 290–4, 300, 304, 313–15, 337, 338, 353, 356, 357, 358, 388, 391, 420–1, 430, 434, 445, 510–11, 520, 544, 547, 566–7, 573, 575, 577, 589, 607–8; II: 45, 105, 107–14, 154, 168, 200, 232, 234, 246, 382, 394, 516, 520, 564, 566 James III, II: 546 James IV, II: 550 James V, II: 348, 547, 548 James V1, 514 Jekyll, Elizabeth, II: 448, 449 Jenichen, Balthasar, I: 485, 486 Jennings, Nicholas, I: 342, 343 Jerome, St, I: 95, 276; II: 323, 467 jesters, II: 443 Jesuits, I: 271, 291, 292, 357–8, 360, 407, 408, 413, 414, 443, 445, 447, 450, 453, 456, 457, 495, 507, 509, 510, 520–1; II: 149, 335, 338, 408, 412, 413, 414, 476, 519 Jewel, John, I: 7, 409, 411, 442, 450; II: 267 Jews, I: 298, 301, 553, 554; II: 434 jigs, II: 56, 193 Joan, Pope, I: 511 John, King, I: 452 Johnson, Henry, I: 430, 468 Johnson, Richard, II: 266, 267 Jones, Inigo, I: 4, 233–4, 315; II: 129, 199 Jonson, Ben, I: 2–3, 9, 28, 33–4, 56, 109, 112, 117, 126, 147, 166–8, 185, 193, 195, 209, 211–12, 214, 221–47, 254–7, 260, 314, 315, 338, 352–68, 370, 371–3, 375–6, 412, 457, 460, 494, 504, 518, 561, 575, 577–9, 588, 595; II: 8, 9, 11, 48, 52–3, 80, 82, 85–6, 89, 105, 107–9, 111–15, 117, 119–20, 123–4, 146–7, 155–6, 162, 166, 170, 199–200, 205–12, 234, 249, 265, 276, 288–9, 293, 336, 369, 373, 375, 413, 441–2, 502–3, 506–7 Joseph of Arimathea, I: 453, 454 Josselin, Ralph, I: 599, 600; II: 448–9

Index journals, II: 391, 447–52 Jove, I: 265, 266 Judaism, I: 299 jug, II: 370 Julius Caesar, I: 334, 561, 579; II: 43, 112, 348, 523, 531 Julius II, Pope, I: 95 Jupiter, I: 136, 139, 146, 147 jurisdiction, I: 248–62, 274, 280, 282–6, 355 jurisprudence, I: 250 justice, I: 263–73, 280, 294–5, 300–1, 342, 531, 567–8, 570; II: 109, 336, 430 justification by faith, I: 441; II: 390, 409–12 Justin Martyr, I: 276, 291 Justinian, I: 94 Juvenal, I: 3, 223, 508, 583; II: 326, 327, 336, 337 Juxon, Elizabeth, II: 449 Juxon, William, I: 197 Kemp, William, I: 147, 537 Kempe, Margery, I: 544 Kendal, William, I: 187 Kepler, Johannes, I: 152 Ker, Sir Robert, I: 221, 237 Ketton, Robert, I: 545 Killigrew, Thomas, II: 166, 168 King, Henry, I: 196, 211–12, 214, 234; II: 205, 209, 251 King James Bible, I: 19 King’s Men, II: 44–5, 53, 90–1, 102, 115, 119, 124–5, 200, 266–7, 502 kingship, I: 286, 314, 327; II: 113, 146, 432, 470, 547, 548, 550 kinship, II: 117 Kip, William, II: 109 kisses, II: 307 knife-handles, II: 369 Knight, Edward, I: 179 knighthoods, I: 313, 356, 574; II: 539, 550 Knolles, Richard, I: 544, 548 Knollys, Lettice, II: 130 Knox, John, II: 495, 552

591

Kyd, Thomas, I: 390, 553, 593; II: 70–9, 142, 154, 506 Kynaston, Sir Francis, II: 208 La Perrière, Guillaume, I: 508 Labé, Louise, II: 258 labour, II: 401 labyrinths, II: 245, 288, 295 Lady Elizabeth’s Company, II: 124 Lambarde, William, I: 56, 69, 70; II: 353 Lambeth Articles, I: 446 lampoons, II: 331 landlords, I: 442 landscape, I: 4, 24, 63, 69, 379, 380, 382, 388, 394; II: 20, 226–8, 231, 234–5, 247, 250, 253, 299, 307, 310, 312, 320, 467, 555–6, 559 Langdale, Alban, I: 451 Langham, Robert, I: 388, 389, 393 Langland, William, I: 404, 410; II: 216, 326, 327, 331, 333 Langton, Stephen, II: 470 language, I: 126, 402; II: 16–18, 20, 23, 24, 77, 524, 533 Lanyer, Aemilia, I: 171, 203, 224, 367–8, 373, 375–6; II: 393–4, 496 largesse, I: 313 Latimer, Hugh, I: 404, 406, 438, 441, 442, 449, 453, 521 Laud, William, I: 65, 295, 509, 510; II: 388–90, 449, 450, 482, 559 laughter, II: 526 Lavater, Johann Caspar, I: 588, 591 Lavater, Ludwig, I: 601, 604 law, I: 15, 23, 34–5, 44, 59, 76, 78, 84, 85, 99, 146, 223, 226–7, 235–6, 248–62, 274–88, 293–4, 327, 346, 355, 358; II: 9, 15, 16, 108, 143, 477, 537 law courts, II: 337 law suits, II: 449, 453 Lawes, William, II: 173 lawyers, I: 517 laybooks, II: 505 Lazarillo de Tormes, II: 433 lazzi, II: 55

592

Index

Leach, Francis, I: 517 lecturers, I: 461; II: 515 Lefèvre d’Étaples, Jacques, I: 94 legal reports, I: 252 legends, II: 342, 347, 348, 351–7, 371, 375 legitimacy, II: 246, 539, 541 legitimation crisis, II: 113 Leicester’s Men, II: 43 Leland, John, I: 68, 69; II: 247, 353, 550 Lemnius, Levinus, I: 585 Lent, I: 499, 500, 501, 502, 503, 517; II: 189, 194, 330, 379, 404 Leo Africanus, 541 Leonardo da Vinci, I: 137, 562 lesbianism, I: 321; II: 127, 487–8 Lesley, John, II: 548 L’Estrange, Roger, I: 483 letters, I: 17, 33, 39, 94–5, 97, 106, 115, 134, 153, 161–2, 165, 177–86, 192, 213, 227, 230, 239, 241, 309, 314; II: 214, 245, 279, 285, 301, 393, 429, 447, 453–61, 467, 542 Levant Company, I: 551 levelling, I: 267, 268; II: 171 lexis, I: 22 Ley, John, II: 449 libels, I: 164, 172–3, 199–200, 308, 309, 314, 412, 509; II: 148, 193, 360–2, 486 liberal arts, I: 31, 249 liberties, II: 43 libertines, I: 508; II: 168, 170, 173 liberty, I: 136, 173, 249, 250; II: 106, 111, 114, 155 Liberty of the Clink, II: 45 liberty of conscience, I: 289–303 libraries, I: 39, 69, 74, 93, 96, 108 licence, II: 108, 110, 321 licensing, I: 172, 483 life-likeness, II: 241 lighting, II: 46, 47, 53, 174 Lilburne, John, II: 498 Lilliat, John, I: 212 liminality, II: 71, 72, 75, 123, 126, 134–5, 141–2

Linacre, Thomas, I: 97 Lincoln’s Inn, I: 227, 228, 229, 249, 308 Lindsay, Sir David, II: 348, 349 lineage, II: 535, 537, 538, 539, 541, 542 Lipsius, Justus, I: 116, 117, 330, 331, 333, 334; II: 458 listening, II: 43, 54, 65 litany, I: 440 literacy, I: 27–37, 121, 164–5, 171, 241, 545, 586, 595; II: 343, 356, 448, 450, 454, 458, 533 literary history, I: 205, 215–16 literary kinds, II: 8 literary piracy, II: 504 ‘literature’, I: 1–2, 3, 8, 15, 27, 36, 38–40, 42–4, 47, 52, 63–4, 67, 92–3, 98, 103, 111, 112; II: 215, 220, 477 Lithgow, William, I: 536, 537, 538 liturgy, I: 276, 295, 403, 425, 431, 432, 435, 439, 453; II: 329, 382 Livy, I: 3, 56, 60, 123; II: 427 Llwyd, Morgan, II: 392 Loarte, Gaspare, I: 454 local drama, II: 184–203 localisation, theatrical, II: 49 Locher, Jacob, I: 121 Locke, John, I: 300, 301, 427; II: 493 locus amoenus, I: 374–5, 380, 386, 393; II: 49 Lodge, Thomas, II: 15, 49, 66, 240–1, 300–1, 336, 423, 430–1 logic, I: 40, 92, 95, 98, 367, 432 logos theology, I: 40, 46, 52, 276–8 Lollards, I: 398, 422 Long Parliament, I: 297 Longinus, I: 44 Longus, II: 423 Lord Admiral’s Men, II: 45, 508 Lord Chamberlain’s Men, II: 45 Lord Mayor of London, II: 43–4, 46, 168, 185, 194, 196 Lord Mayor’s show, II: 185, 194 Lord Strange’s Men, II: 43 lords of misrule, II: 187, 194 Lorenzo de Medici, II: 482 Louis XIV, I: 140

Index love poetry, II: 249–63 Lovelace, Richard, I: 224, 316, 376; II: 205 Lowe, Roger, II: 451 Loyola, Ignatius, I: 357, 413, 454; II: 384, 386 Lüber, Thomas (‘Erastus’), I: 287 Lucan, I: 35, 124; II: 28, 30, 112 Lucian, I: 110, 137, 223; II: 423, 530 Lucilius, II: 326, 336 Lucretius, I: 35 Luis de Granada, I: 454 Lumley, Lady Jane, I: 128; II: 131, 134, 139 Lumley, Lord John, I: 389 lunatics, II: 272 Lupset, Thomas, I: 102 lute songs, II: 253 lutes, II: 129, 253, 269, 271, 274 Luther, Martin, I: 82–3, 95, 276, 398–9, 401–2, 409, 423, 438–9, 448, 451, 467, 521, 549–51, 565; II: 332, 408, 409 Lydgate, John, I: 67; II: 199 Lyly, John, I: 307, 313, 320–8, 353, 412, 444; II: 10, 12, 81, 84, 88, 102, 125, 126, 127, 128, 130, 239, 243, 424, 429, 430 Lyly, William, I: 33, 98, 320 lyrics, I: 124, 190–1, 194, 203, 207–10, 212, 214–15, 222, 228, 230, 238, 258–9, 307, 309, 313, 379, 380, 381, 425, 427; II: 8, 7, 21, 216, 225, 231, 245, 250, 252, 253, 258, 259, 265, 270, 274, 276, 284, 285, 317, 383–91, 394, 395–6, 399–400, 402, 409 Lyttelton, Elizabeth, I: 203 Mab, Queen, II: 347 macaronics, II: 332 Machiavelli, Niccolò, I: 3, 31, 58, 60, 93, 100, 331, 332, 359, 584; II: 151, 154, 217, 443 Machin, Lewis, II: 483 Machyn, Henry, II: 190, 194, 199

593

Macrobius, I: 112 macrocosm, I: 560, 569, 575; II: 20, 219 madness, I: 497; II: 5, 53, 76 madrigals, II: 269–70 magic, I: 528, 602, 607; II: 29, 168, 173, 197, 200, 240, 242, 243, 349, 353, 355, 377 magistrates, II: 326 magnanimity, II: 243, 247, 538 magnificence, I: 137, 306, 309, 311, 312, 353; II: 112, 221, 239, 329 Mahomet, II: 321 Mair, John, II: 547, 549, 550, 551, 553 Maisse, Monsieur de, II: 130 make-up, II: 174 malcontents, II: 329, 332, 336 Maldon, William, I: 424 maleficence, II: 197, 198, 517 Malynes, Gerard de, I: 84, 85 Mammon, II: 241 Mandeville, Sir John, I: 529, 545 mankind, II: 65 manliness, II: 477, 481, 482, 486, 495 Manne, Thomas, I: 202, 203 mannerism, I: 306; II: 302, 390 Manningham, John, I: 241; II: 369 mansions, I: 325 Mantuan, II: 333 manuscript culture, II: 447 manuscript poets, II: 390 manuscripts, I: 4, 9, 35, 59, 65, 93–4, 96, 111, 113–14, 128, 135, 156, 160–77, 183, 185–8, 190–220, 224, 226, 228–30, 232, 236, 238, 291, 308, 309, 314, 407, 449, 453, 456–7, 460; II: 54, 66, 98, 253, 288, 289, 290, 292, 295, 296, 317, 337, 382, 390–4, 431, 449, 451, 457 maps, I: 339 marginality, II: 281 Marguerite of Navarre, I: 128; II: 258 Marie de Medici, I: 331 Markham, Gervase, I: 393 Markham, Lady, I: 197, 230

594

Index

Marlowe, Christopher, I: 2–3, 7, 50–1, 103, 123, 143, 197, 210, 212, 226, 230, 305, 462, 552, 554, 594; II: 8, 44–5, 49, 55, 64–5, 85, 102, 144, 154, 184, 216, 227, 231, 235, 251, 259, 300–8, 312–13, 317–18, 443, 474–5, 477–9, 519 Marmion, Shackerley, II: 170 marriage, I: 398, 400, 446, 483, 494, 572, 573, 606, 608; II: 111, 168–70, 172, 234, 244–6, 249, 251, 257, 260, 306, 322–4, 366–7, 382, 395, 430, 493 marriage play, II: 168 Marriot, John, I: 168 Mars, I: 268; II: 309 Marshall, William, I: 231, 492–4, 508–9, 512–13 marshes, II: 564 Marsilius of Padua, I: 282 Marston, John, I: 117, 136, 222–3, 226, 308; II: 155, 156, 162, 300–1, 313–14, 336–7, 502, 503 Martial, I: 35, 202, 223, 240, 367; II: 389 martial law, II: 498 Martiall, John, I: 442 Martin, Gregory, I: 398, 412, 438, 441, 443, 450 Martin, Richard, I: 130, 165, 173, 177, 233, 234 Martin Marprelate, I: 173, 412, 444; II: 191 Martindale, Adam, II: 451 Martire d’Anghiera, Pietro, I: 529 martyrdom, I: 61, 405, 407, 439, 443, 446, 448, 450, 451–3, 456, 515, 521; II: 66, 185, 134, 292, 552 martyrology, I: 404 Marvell, Andrew, I: 4, 49, 51, 113, 224, 367, 379, 383, 393, 394, 395; II: 235, 260, 339, 383, 387, 413, 563 marvels, II: 240, 241, 308, 540 Mary I, I: 227, 311, 389, 396, 406, 407, 408, 409, 410, 425, 426, 440, 441, 442, 443, 448, 449, 451, 453, 456, 471, 573; II: 330, 336, 425, 495 Mary, Queen of Scots, I: 249, 270, 357, 389, 407–8; II: 336, 457, 546, 548

Mary Magdalene, II: 285 masculinity, I: 560; II: 132, 464, 482 masking, II: 160, 195 Mason, James, II: 516 masques, I: 4, 65, 112, 134, 143, 166, 237, 238, 241, 251, 306, 315, 316, 338, 353, 355, 356, 372, 430; II: 46, 94, 100–1, 105–22, 145, 159, 172, 173, 168, 185, 199, 200, 201, 216–18, 234, 242, 272, 275–6, 293 Masquing House, II: 174 Mass, I: 439, 442, 447; II: 16, 328, 331–2, 335, 336, 338, 426 Massacre of St Bartholomew, I: 330 Massinger, Philip, I: 117, 234, 553; II: 66, 110, 115, 148–9, 155–6, 159, 163, 167–70 Master of the Revels, I: 172, 173; II: 44, 48, 94, 106, 110, 143, 424 masterless men, I: 339, 354 Masters of the Horse, I: 305 mathematicians, I: 152 Matthew, Toby, I: 409–10, 423, 433, 439, 443–4, 455 Maurice of Nassau, I: 510 May, Thomas, I: 124 May games, Maying, II: 190, 191, 333 maypoles, II: 186, 190, 356 Mecca, I: 536 mechanicals, II: 189 mechanics, I: 152 Medici, the, I: 92, 110 medicinal herbs, II: 563 medicine, I: 35, 77, 152, 171, 192–3, 202, 251, 588; II: 448, 477, 536, 539 medieval drama, II: 60–9 meditation, I: 383, 454, 457, 459, 466; II: 383, 384, 385, 388–9 Medwall, Henry, II: 64, 188, 469 Mehmed III, I: 543, 546, 548 melancholy, I: 490, 497, 558, 560, 563, 598, 602, 604, 605; II: 250, 253, 274, 290, 336, 371, 374 melody, II: 265–6, 271–5 memoirs, II: 524

Index memorial brasses 352 memory, I: 538, 540, 546, 569, 593–4, 608 Mendoza, Luisa Carvajal y, II: 221 Menippus, II: 526 mercantile class, II: 537, 542 Merchant Taylors, I: 315, 348 Merchant Taylors’ School, I: 27, 31, 33 merchants, I: 24, 31, 77, 85, 543, 544, 551, 574; II: 244, 269, 537, 538, 542 Mercury, I: 535; II: 304 Meres, Francis, I: 320; II: 301 Merlin, II: 247 Merry England, I: 6 Mersenne, I: 152 messengers, II: 456–77 mestizo, II: 537, 541 metamorphic, II: 307 metamorphosis, I: 126, 146; II: 116, 299, 305, 307, 312, 487, 488 metanoia, II: 407, 411, 413, 420 metaphor, I: 1, 8, 41, 45, 52, 53, 74–90, 113, 561; II: 76, 178, 383, 385–6, 388, 391, 401–2, 413, 536 metaphysics, I: 112, 276, 277, 279, 281, 282; II: 216, 249, 260, 389 metatheatricality, I: 129; II: 48, 75, 84 metempsychosis, I: 320 meteors, I: 598 metonymy, I: 74, 367; II: 144, 385, 507, 508 metre, II: 23, 24, 253 Meurisse, Martin, I: 512 Michelangelo, I: 137, 407; II: 259, 302 microcosm, I: 557–8, 561, 563, 564, 579, 586; II: 20, 219 Middle Temple, I: 249, 308 Middleton, Thomas, I: 9, 145, 183, 184, 185, 337–8, 352–67, 483, 491, 494, 497, 498, 575, 576, 577, 579; II: 44, 80–3, 86, 88, 100, 108, 149, 156, 159–61, 366 Midsummer Eve, II: 190 midwifery, I: 171 Mildmay, Grace, II: 451 Mildmay, Sir Humphrey, II: 449 militarism, I: 315; II: 246, 433, 527, 531

595

millenarian, II: 498 Millenary Petition, I: 445 Milles, Thomas, I: 85 Milton, John, I: 3, 32, 41, 43, 52, 77, 103, 107, 113, 118, 123, 173, 215, 269, 289–303, 363, 424, 460, 462; II: 28, 169, 173, 209, 232, 234–5, 276, 327, 331, 337, 338, 342, 366, 438, 555 mind, II: 437–8, 441, 443–4, 467–8, 474–5, 503, 506 Minerva, II: 20 Minikin, George, I: 479, 481 minions, I: 310, 311; II: 145, 158 Minsheu, John, II: 537, 538, 541 minstrels, II: 42, 95 Minturno, Antonio, II: 6 miracles, I: 399, 407, 451, 566; II: 62, 63, 185, 355 mirrors, II: 25, 120, 430, 432 miscellanies, II: 356, 391, 427 misogamist, II: 169 misogyny, I: 197, 199, 202, 478; II: 8, 124, 136, 161, 172, 233, 249, 304, 368, 428, 494, 513, 514 misprision, I: 256 mnemonics, II: 375, 376 mock-heroic, I: 412 mockery, II: 215 modality, I: 19 modernity, I: 301; II: 442, 492, 497 Moguls, I: 536 Mompesson, Sir Giles, I: 509 monarchy, I: 274–88, 291, 292, 294, 304, 305, 306, 312, 317, 337, 402, 463; II: 28, 49, 106, 108, 109, 110, 118, 143, 152, 156, 186, 211, 322, 428 monasteries, I: 449; II: 332, 365 money, I: 1, 2, 75, 78, 84–5, 490–2, 508, 538, 575, 576; II: 538 moneylending, II: 439 monks, I: 507, 510–12, 515, 517, 519–21 Monmouth Rebellion, II: 391 monologicism, II: 526, 527 monopolies, I: 167, 361, 509 monstrosity, II: 540

596

Index

monstrous births, I: 570 Montagu, Richard, I: 446 Montaigne, Michel de, I: 34, 36, 94, 109, 114, 115, 117, 118, 120, 330, 332, 402, 530, 531, 586, 588; II: 437–44, 463, 479 Montemayor, Jorge de, II: 255 monuments, II: 523 moonrakers, II: 377 moots, I: 249 moral philosophy, I: 150, 152 moralism, II: 8, 337 morality plays, I: 263, 265, 331, 360, 362, 363; II: 42, 61, 62–5, 71, 149, 216, 443, 470 Mordaunt, Elizabeth, II: 448, 451 More, Anne, I: 232, 238 More, Gertrude, I: 456 More, Henry, I: 7, 112, 113 More, Sir Thomas, I: 3, 6, 30–1, 36, 65, 68, 94–5, 97, 99–102, 108, 127, 185, 228, 254, 259, 291, 309–10, 354, 379, 381, 400, 402, 423, 438, 450, 453, 456, 549; II: 61, 374, 424, 467, 527, 529–30 Morice, James, I: 444 morisco, II: 541 Morley, George, I: 124, 195, 197 Morley, Thomas, II: 266, 269, 271 morris dancers, II: 188, 190–4 mortality, II: 126, 128, 132, 133, 136 Morton, Cardinal John, I: 99; II: 61, 424, 469 Moryson, Fynes, I: 543, 544, 546 Mosaic law, I: 300 mothers, II: 494, 539 mourning, II: 8, 71 Mowle, Peter, I: 450 Muggletonians, I: 462 Muhammad, I: 544, 549, 550 mulatto, II: 541 Mulcaster, Richard, I: 31, 59 mummings, I: 337; II: 42, 195, 199–201 Munday, Anthony, I: 184, 307, 338, 569, 570; II: 60, 61, 268, 429 muniments, I: 177, 179, 186

Murad III, I: 551 murder, I: 566; II: 155, 162, 238, 243, 265, 311 Musaeus, I: 124; II: 304, 307 Muses, I: 125, 198, 204, 209, 213–14, 221–2, 239, 249; II: 24, 29, 31, 35, 241, 309 Mush, John, I: 453 music, I: 3, 4, 10, 23, 35, 50; II: 15, 23, 24, 42, 46, 47, 53, 54, 78, 84, 91, 100, 111, 119, 220, 250, 252–3, 264–7, 506, 509 music books, II: 271 Muslims, I: 295, 543, 544–6, 552, 553 musters, II: 190 mutability, I: 265, 268 mystery cycles, II: 62–3, 64, 66–7, 186, 197, 509 mythology, I: 122–3, 128, 134–49, 223, 263, 265, 271, 338; II: 29, 33, 36, 46, 49, 113, 185, 300 mythopoea, I: 269 names, I: 266, 268, 282, 297, 301, 313, 315, 333, 342, 345, 357, 360, 362, 365; II: 16–18 narcissism, II: 252 narrative, I: 3, 8, 42, 43, 100, 533; II: 29, 238, 341, 34–8, 350, 353–6, 403, 409, 414, 420, 424, 431–3 narrative voice, I: 344, 345 narrators, II: 241, 244, 285, 295, 299, 304–5, 307, 312, 341, 425, 467 Nashe, Thomas, I: 2–3, 38, 64, 166, 167, 169, 198, 226, 229, 412, 444, 497, 588, 598; II: 22, 49–50, 85, 102, 143–5, 191, 220, 244, 255, 300, 305, 312–13, 337, 423, 433–4 nation-building, I: 135, 140 nation-state, II: 17, 542 national destiny, II: 6 national identity, II: 545–9, 551 nationalism, I: 250, 338, 406 nationality, II: 141 nations, II: 463, 466, 542, 545–54 natural law, I: 274, 279–81, 283, 295

Index natural philosophy, I: 150–4, 156, 158, 251; II: 442 naturalism, II: 16 navigation, I: 152 Nayler, James, I: 464 Needham, Marchamont, I: 461, 464 needlework, I: 31 negotiation, II: 440 neighbourly disputes, II: 514 neologisms, I: 79; II: 443 Neoplatonism, I: 277–9, 316; II: 6, 16, 251, 256, 393 Neopythagoreanism, I: 152 Neptune, II: 127, 128, 251, 304, 305, 307 Nero, I: 509; II: 290 Nethersole, Sir Francis, II: 322–3 New Exchange, I: 367, 372 new historicism, II: 390, 395, 396 New Testament, I: 32, 77, 82, 94–5, 97, 399, 401, 420–4, 438, 443, 450, 468, 544; II: 399 New World, II: 241, 319, 541 Newgate, II: 518 newsbooks, I: 66 newsletters, I: 450; II: 356, 453 news-sheets, I: 499 Newton, Isaac, I: 150, 151; II: 438 Newton, Thomas, I: 117 Nicholas of Cusa, I: 93 Nicols, Thomas, I: 603, 605 nightgowns, II: 509–10 nightmares, I: 602, 604–5, 609 Nine Worthies, II: 549 Niobe, II: 307 nobility, II: 441, 466, 469, 537, 538 nonconformity, I: 411, 463; II: 450 nonsense verse, II: 379 Norden, John, I: 69 Norman Conquest, I: 57, 67 North, Dudley, Lord, I: 194; II: 389 North, Sir Thomas, I: 35, 60, 108, 124, 194 Northumberland, earl of, II: 188 Northwest Passage, I: 533 Norton, George, I: 168 Norwood, Richard, I: 468

597

nostalgia, I: 317, 349 notarikon, II: 16 novelle, I: 135 novels, II: 423, 426, 433, 434 nudity, II: 482 numerology, II: 257, 273 nuns, I: 515, 517–19 Nuremberg, I: 137 nursery rhymes, II: 372 nymphs, II: 233, 234, 310 Oath of Allegiance, I: 226, 290, 445, 446 oaths, II: 51, 75, 433 obedience, II: 442, 494, 497, 526 objectivity, II: 302 obscenity, I: 197–9, 202, 518; II: 194, 300, 301, 314, 320, 337, 362, 378, 517 obscurity, II: 22, 218 occasional, I: 178, 190, 215 occultism, I: 567, 586, 588, 589 Oecolampadius, Johannes, I: 82 Old Testament, I: 137, 401, 419, 420, 423, 435, 443, 463, 468, 550 old wives’ tales, II: 347–8 Oldcastle, Sir John, I: 439, 452; II: 66 optics, I: 152 optimism, I: 100 oral literature, II: 342 oral reports, II: 527 oral tradition, II: 265, 341, 343–6, 349, 352–3, 356, 373 orality, I: 192; II: 119, 377, 533 oration, II: 18, 114, 115 oratory, I: 34, 38–40, 42–3, 45, 49, 52, 569 organs, II: 267 orgasm, II: 480 Origen, I: 276; II: 214 original sin, II: 383 origins, II: 225 Orleans, duchess of, II: 558 ornament, II: 18 Orpheus, I: 143, 222; II: 15–17, 241, 272, 482 orthography, I: 15, 16, 17 Ortuñez de Calahorra, Diego, I: 128

598

Index

Osborne, Dorothy, II: 458 Osborne, Edward, I: 551 Overbury, Sir Thomas, I: 200, 213, 241, 242, 314; II: 158, 159 Overton, Robert, II: 389 Ovid, I: 3, 34, 36, 46, 48–50, 121–3, 125, 127–8, 134, 142, 144, 145–7, 197, 222–3, 226, 255, 256–7, 320, 323, 388, 389; II: 8, 61, 102, 240, 251, 256, 259, 292, 299–318, 320–1, 521 Owen, Jane, I: 452 Owen, John, I: 202 pace-egging, II: 195 pacifism, I: 315, 357; II: 105, 109, 113–14 paganism, I: 92, 95, 107, 110, 135, 146, 147, 271; II: 300, 302–3 pageants, I: 306, 312–13, 337, 338, 348–9, 353, 356, 379, 391–2; II: 47, 62, 67, 109, 185, 189–90, 194, 196, 197, 374, 509 painted cloths, II: 369, 373, 374 Painter, William, I: 548; II: 427–8 painting, II: 220–1, 302, 307, 540 palaces, II: 42 Palatine’s or Palsgrave’s Men, II: 45 Palladio, Andrea, I: 367 Palmer, Herbert, I: 268, 297 Palmer, Julia, II: 392 palmistry, I: 588, 589 pamphlets, I: 66, 144, 165, 169, 173, 346, 398, 412, 464, 503, 533, 550, 561, 575, 603; II: 17, 447, 493, 495, 514, 517–18, 521 Pan, II: 234 panegyric, II: 107, 108, 229, 232, 234–5, 527, 529 Panke, William, I: 179 papacy, I: 290, 292–4, 398, 409, 442, 443, 446, 451–3, 504, 509, 510, 514, 515, 520, 521, 543, 547, 550; II: 20, 186 papal supremacy, I: 282 paper, I: 181, 186, 188 papistry, II: 314

Paracelsus, Philippus Aureolus, I: 152, 592 parades, II: 167, 190, 193–9 Paradin, Claude, I: 508 paradox, I: 334, 456, 457; II: 399, 402, 419, 420, 429, 438 paragone, I: 134 paranoia, II: 426, 433 paraphrase, II: 382–3 parasites, I: 339 paratext, I: 144, 166, 167, 170; II: 243, 301 parchment, I: 186, 191, 260 Paré, Ambroise, II: 539–40 parish churches, II: 43 parish drama, II: 63, 64 Parker, Henry, I: 124 Parker, Martin, I: 497 Parker, Matthew, I: 61, 64, 409, 410, 443 Parliament, I: 283, 296, 298, 317, 356, 410, 439, 445, 446, 447, 463, 465, 506, 509; II: 106, 440, 498 Parmenio, I: 323 parody, I: 267, 347, 535, 536; II: 70, 83, 90, 155, 177, 230, 254, 327–8, 331, 335, 337, 360, 362, 364, 386 Parrot, Henry, I: 213 Parsons, Robert, see Persons, Robert participation, I: 277 passion, II: 384 passions, I: 559–60, 582, 584–5, 587–8, 590, 592, 595 pastiche, II: 48, 55, 61, 244 pastoral, I: 136, 209, 230, 275, 307, 313, 368, 373, 375, 432–3; II: 7–9, 11–12, 28, 30–1, 52, 143, 216, 225–38, 241, 256, 270, 275, 333–4, 336, 338, 387, 389, 469, 477–8, 560 patenting, II: 107 pathetic fallacy, II: 228, 235 pathos, I: 40, 46, 52 patriarchy, I: 264; II: 135, 137, 244–5, 494–5, 498–9, 513, 539 patrilineality, II: 136, 541 patriotism, I: 67, 407

Index patronage, I: 1, 93, 96, 97, 122, 125, 128, 129–30, 137, 161–3, 166–7, 169, 171, 179, 185, 191, 193, 204, 221–47, 233, 235, 237–43, 304–8, 314, 315, 320, 322, 346, 355, 367–8, 373, 375; II: 8–9, 35, 43, 63, 81–3, 90, 105, 107–10, 113, 124, 158, 216, 259, 300–1, 309, 312, 393, 454–66, 481, 484 Paul IV, I: 588 Paul, St, II: 407 Paul’s Cross, I: 243, 409, 441–2, 444 Paulet, Sir Amias, I: 331 pawnbroking, II: 497 Peacham, Henry, I: 41, 80, 508–9; II: 22, 269, 481 pederasty, II: 478–9, 485 pedlars, II: 265 Peele, George, I: 391, 548; II: 348, 349, 350 Peere, Lot, I: 211 pegmes (for James I’s pageant), I: 338 penance, I: 518, 545; II: 322 penetration, II: 485–7 penitence, II: 407, 411–13 Penn, Sir William, II: 356 Penry, John, I: 444 pens, I: 177–9, 181, 186 pentameter, II: 8 Penthesilea, II: 112 Pepys, Samuel, II: 356, 448 Perceval, Sir John, I: 208, 211, 212 Percy, Henry, earl of Northumberland, II: 528 Percyvale, Richard, II: 537–8, 541 performances, II: 42–6, 51–4, 56, 60, 62, 67, 81–2, 84, 86, 89, 91–2, 96, 99, 102, 464, 468, 482, 495, 502–12 periodisation, II: 154 periphrasis, II: 215, 432 Perkins, William, I: 413, 445–6; II: 516, 517 Perry, Hugh, I: 483, 486 Perseus, II: 112, 326, 336–7 Persius, I: 35

599

personae, I: 534, 583; II: 74, 290, 292–3, 306 personality, II: 437, 440 personation, II: 55 Persons, Robert, I: 228, 291, 407, 414, 443, 445–6, 449, 450–2, 454–5, 460 perspective(s), I: 504; II: 17, 21, 46, 51, 222, 302, 308 perversions, II: 475 Peter the Venerable, I: 545 Petrarca, Francesco, I: 93, 101, 103, 107, 108, 112, 113, 116, 124, 128, 137, 190, 209, 213, 239, 313, 375, 380, 381, 457; II: 8, 48, 178, 180–1, 228, 230, 251–9, 270, 278, 281–6, 289, 292, 294–5, 299, 301–2, 314–15, 327, 330, 333, 409, 429 Petronius, I: 223 Petrus a Merica, I: 510 Pettie, George, II: 427 petty schools, I: 31–3, 35 philautia, II: 468 Philip II, I: 311; II: 221 Philips, Katherine, I: 203; II: 205, 258, 260–1, 364, 496 philology, II: 536 Philomela, I: 46, 145 philosophers’ stone, II: 399 philosophy, I: 5, 38–9, 92, 97, 106–12, 114–19, 325, 588; II: 20, 22, 29, 30, 148 Philostratus, I: 137 phronesis, II: 465–6, 469, 471 physiognomy, I: 582–97 picaresque, II: 423, 426, 433, 434 Pickeringe, John, I: 519 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni, I: 93, 111; II: 16, 481 pictorialism, II: 220–1 Pietro d’Abano, I: 586 Pigna, Giovanni, II: 35 pilgrimage, I: 399–400, 455, 527, 529, 536–8, 545 Pilgrimage of Grace, I: 441 pillory, I: 342 Pindar, I: 35, 40

600

Index

Pinnell, Henry, II: 391 piracy, I: 539, 553, 552 Pius V, I: 551 Pizarro, Franciso, I: 534 place, II: 227, 235, 352, 384 plagiarism, I: 348 plague, I: 346, 355; II: 44, 300, 556, 557 plain style, I: 403, 404, 471; II: 327, 330, 333, 442, 458 plaint, I: 46 Plato, I: 3, 5, 33, 39, 55, 93, 106–19, 127, 152, 223, 233, 276, 291, 321–2, 593; II: 8, 6, 16, 20, 24, 170, 465 Platonic love, I: 3, 111, 112 Platter, Thomas, II: 52, 56, 508 Plautus, I: 35, 360; II: 208, 470 play within the play, II: 77, 149, 172 playbooks, I: 173, 179, 339; II: 48, 503, 506 players, I: 570; II: 106, 107, 110, 142, 144, 148, 184–5, 206, 533 players’ parts, I: 179; II: 54, 455, 492, 505, 510 playhouse galleries, II: 42, 47, 49 playhouses, I: 355, 554, 584, 589; II: 42–59, 63, 81, 83 playhouses, closing of the, II: 60, 106, 152, 174 playwrights, I: 173, 241, 252; II: 60, 62, 64, 503 pleasance, II: 49 Pléiade, I: 112; II: 252, 256 Pliny, I: 123, 154, 324, 326, 327, 367, 381; II: 130, 144, 239, 540 Pliny the Younger, II: 454 plots, I: 179, 187; II: 54 Plough Monday, II: 201 plough-trailing, II: 185, 201 Plowden, Edmund, I: 252, 253, 257 Plutarch, I: 3, 35, 60, 108, 109, 115, 116, 118, 123, 124; II: 374, 437 poet laureate, II: 109, 527, 528 poetical miscellanies, I: 190 poetics, I: 120, 152; II: 15–28, 40 poke-dial, II: 369 Pole, Reginald, I: 102, 396, 550

polemics, I: 3, 7, 99, 397, 399, 402, 403, 406–7, 409–11, 413, 424, 438–50, 453, 465, 514, 517, 521, 545, 547, 550–1; II: 332, 334, 338–9, 413, 414, 416, 457 Polemon, I: 586 political plays, I: 63, 66–7; II: 141–53, 167 politics, I: 5, 9, 23, 52, 57–8, 67, 78, 196, 259, 263–73, 277, 295, 309–10, 312, 321, 325, 327, 330–2, 334–5, 360, 376, 384, 393, 411, 421, 445, 462, 510, 554, 563; II: 28, 31, 44, 47, 48, 106–7, 113, 115–16, 118, 120, 129, 141–3, 145–6, 148, 150, 152, 166, 168, 170–1, 186, 217, 219, 239, 242, 246, 302, 307, 382, 477 Poliziano, Angelo, I: 93 pollution, I: 353; II: 514, 555–9, 564 Polybius, I: 331 polygamy, I: 297 polyphony, II: 527 polysemy, II: 215, 217 polytheism, I: 135 Pont, Timothy, II: 551 Ponticianus, II: 407 Poole, Walton, I: 214 popular drama, II: 184–203, 216 popular verse, II: 359–81 population, II: 514, 546, 561 pornography, II: 314, 337, 395 Porte (the Ottoman court), I: 544, 551 portents, I: 497 Porter, Endymion, I: 235 portraits, I: 4, 239, 585; II: 220, 221, 463, 482, 483 posies, II: 366, 368–70, 373, 375 possession, II: 518 post-horses, II: 456 postmasters, II: 456 postmodernism, II: 524 Potts, Thomas, II: 518 Pounde, Thomas, I: 456 poverty, I: 267, 309, 339, 341, 342, 348, 353, 356, 503, 531; II: 331, 332–3, 343, 349, 377, 404, 423, 541 pox, II: 362

Index praise, II: 7, 8–9, 37, 95–6 prayer in playhouses, II: 46, 56 prayers, II: 127, 197, 402, 404, 409, 411 praying, I: 32 preaching, I: 221, 234, 243, 399, 410, 411, 430, 438, 441–2, 441, 446, 461–2; II: 114, 498, 499 precedence, II: 197 predestination, I: 396, 413, 441, 446, 462, 467; II: 161 preferment, I: 306, 548; II: 427 pregnancy, II: 322–3, 383 prerogative, I: 143, 172, 249; II: 158 Presbyterianism, I: 295, 296, 297, 298, 411, 440, 444, 463; II: 450, 451, 552 presentation, II: 188, 201 presentism, II: 524, 526 Preston, Thomas, II: 61 priesthood, I: 83, 84 priests, I: 271, 520, 521; II: 426, 519 Primaticcio, Francesco, I: 137, 138 Primaudaye, Pierre de la, I: 564, 565, 567, 586 Prince’s Men, II: 45 print, I: 4, 17, 94, 123, 138, 144, 160, 160–76, 187, 190–1, 206, 214, 216, 236, 238, 243, 308, 397–400, 402, 407, 409, 411–12, 422, 449–50, 460, 463, 471, 592, 593; II: 63, 204, 206, 240, 253, 288, 289, 292, 296, 346, 356–7, 361, 466, 494, 503 prints, I: 138, 478–526 Priscian, I: 121, 167 privacy, I: 163–4 private playhouses, II: 106 privateers, II: 321 Privy Chamber, I: 305, 310, 312, 313; II: 107, 448 Privy Council, I: 84, 172, 173, 225, 234, 242, 274, 356, 360, 449; II: 43, 44, 46, 114, 142, 147, 300, 440 processions, II: 112 proclamations, I: 127, 163, 172, 173, 558, 573, 574; II: 16 procreation, II: 480

601

prodigies, I: 497; II: 540 prodigy houses, I: 371 prognostication, I: 605 progresses, II: 107, 108, 193, 195, 220, 442 progymnasmata, I: 43 prompt-books, I: 179 prompters, II: 504–5 pronouns, I: 18, 20–1 pronunciation, I: 17, 78, 183, 184 propaganda, I: 399, 406, 440, 519, 546; II: 107, 109, 114, 120, 430 properties, II: 54, 83, 87, 506, 508 Propertius, I: 128, 145, 255 prophecies, I: 61, 392, 443, 461, 464–5, 468–70, 548, 586, 588, 589, 606–8; II: 29, 331, 338, 365, 394, 498 proportion, II: 18, 23, 24, 309 prose, II: 442–3 prose fiction, I: 43; II: 423–36, 457 prosody, I: 310; II: 56, 90, 123, 171, 193, 285, 301, 312, 336, 362–3, 377, 449, 476 prostitution, I: 348, 355, 577 Protectorate, I: 77 Protestantism, I: 62, 83, 94, 99, 123, 128, 135, 160–1, 164, 201, 276, 279, 280, 290–1, 294–5, 298, 301, 311, 315, 355–8, 377, 396–9, 403–4, 406, 408–9, 413–14, 438–40, 442–3, 446–7, 451–3, 456, 458, 466, 469, 514, 521, 547, 549, 550–1, 565; II: 66, 78, 256, 289, 302, 318, 328, 330, 333, 355–6, 382–3, 400, 413, 448–9, 515, 533, 546 Protestation Oath, I: 29 Proteus, II: 481 proverbs, II: 425, 443 providence, I: 398, 460, 468, 539, 561, 564, 566, 574; II: 12, 71, 141, 449, 515, 516, 517 prudence, I: 334 Prynne, William, I: 518, 521; II: 450 Psalms, I: 399, 411, 423, 424, 425, 426, 427, 440, 456; II: 267–8, 382 psalters, II: 383, 393, 400, 411

602

Index

psychoanalytic criticism, II: 395 psychology, II: 17 psychomachia, II: 65 Ptolemy, I: 532 public sphere, I: 171, 173, 289, 301 publication, I: 160–76, 399; II: 504 publishers, I: 190, 191 pulpits, I: 406, 409, 430 Pulter, Lady Hester, I: 194, II: 394 punctuation, I: 16, 183; II: 284, 289, 505 puns, II: 215, 222, 290, 307, 327, 328 Purchas, Samuel, I: 64, 532 purgatory, I: 414, 441, 450 Puritanism, I: 24, 27, 35, 61, 173, 201, 210, 356, 397, 399, 403, 410–13, 420–1, 426–7, 430, 444–5, 462, 468, 472, 518, 598, 599, 608; II: 6, 48, 106, 170, 174, 185, 191, 199, 267, 334, 355, 362, 377, 383, 385, 389, 391, 401, 417, 448, 498 Purvey, Nicholas, I: 400 Puttenham, George, I: 42, 44, 59, 63, 80, 81, 209, 307; II: 15–18, 20–4, 188, 214, 215, 217, 225–6, 265, 326, 327, 331, 333, 366, 415 Pyckeryng, John, II: 470 Pygmalion, II: 300, 313, 314 Pyrrho of Elis, I: 113 Pyrrhonism, see sceptism Quakerism, I: 298, 462, 463, 464, 468, 472; II: 498 quantitative metres, II: 272–3, 284 Quarles, Francis, II: 392 quest, II: 198, 201, 222, 242, 289, 342 Quintilian, I: 39, 44, 47, 79, 80, 81; II: 214, 218, 265, 455 quotations, II: 71 Qur’an, I: 295, 544, 545, 551 Rabelais, François, I: 114; II: 526 race, II: 141, 487, 496, 533, 535–44, 553 railing, II: 154, 327, 333, 336, 360 Raimondi, Marcantonio, I: 138, 199, 518 Rainolds, John, I: 409, 521

Rainolds, William, I: 550; II: 414 Ralegh, Sir Walter, I: 17, 20, 36, 64, 114, 130, 191, 195, 200, 207, 210, 214–15, 230, 242, 264, 306, 308, 313, 357, 532–6, 540; II: 6, 147, 218, 220, 231, 239, 243, 245, 247, 249, 253, 260, 448, 456, 467, 475, 477, 541, 561 Ramsey, John, I: 192, 209 Ramus, Petrus, I: 94, 113, 114 Randolph, Thomas, I: 211, 214, 224, 235 Rankins, William, I: 570 Ranters, I: 462, 463 rape, II: 395 Raphael, I: 123, 138 Rastell, John, I: 68, 102; II: 374, 379 Ratcliffe, Jane, II: 449 ratio, I: 76 rationalism, II: 499, 514–15 Ravenscroft, Thomas, II: 379 ravishment, II: 238, 239, 246 Rawden, Marmaduke, I: 195, 213 Rawley, William, I: 157 Ray, John, II: 377 reading, I: 15, 22, 27–8, 31–2, 34, 36, 43, 59, 60, 62, 65, 67, 84, 92, 100–1, 110–11, 116, 166, 385, 469, 473, 557–81, 593, 595; II: 217, 238, 243, 257, 299, 301–2, 437, 439, 441, 443 realism, II: 20 reason, I: 5, 266, 274, 276, 277, 279, 286, 289, 295, 323, 326, 341, 342, 356 rebellion, I: 173; II: 34, 44, 49, 355, 432, 439 rebirth, II: 241 rebuses, II: 369 recreation, II: 24, 46, 48, 49, 100 recusancy, I: 290, 292, 294, 295, 397; II: 43, 335, 417 Red Bull, I: 129; II: 60, 115 Red Lion, II: 42, 60 Redford, John, II: 60 referentiality, II: 70, 76

Index Reformations, I: 5–7, 27, 32, 63, 81–3, 91, 95, 99, 108, 112, 114, 135, 147, 160, 251, 253, 274–5, 294, 296–8, 335–6, 396–419, 423, 431, 441–2, 448, 450, 452, 460, 466, 514, 521, 545, 548–9, 551, 558, 565, 568; II: 63, 66, 185, 267, 331, 351, 382, 395, 408, 466, 513, 552 regalia, II: 52 regicide, II: 151 regionalism, I: 9, 17, 18, 21, 22, 69 rehearsal, II: 54, 55, 125, 266, 271, 506 relics, I: 135, 399, 441, 558 religion, I: 135, 139, 146, 240 religious liberty, I: 289 religious plays, I: 337 religious verse, II: 382–97 renegades, I: 552 repentance, II: 408 repertories, II: 45, 54, 61–2, 81, 83, 89, 91 representation, II: 19, 42, 74, 77, 111, 112, 470 republicanism, II: 28, 331, 427 republics, I: 45 resistance theory, II: 494 Restoration, the, I: 317, 376, 421, 427, 473; II: 60, 186, 450, 492, 521 retinues, II: 107 retirement, I: 368, 376 revelation, I: 274, 279 revels, II: 46, 187–8, 192, 193, 199, 201 revenge, I: 566; II: 44, 71, 74, 88, 117–18, 151, 154–5, 160–1, 177, 428, 470 revolt, II: 118 Reynes, Robert, II: 191 Reynolds, Henry, I: 210, 211 Rhazes, I: 586 rhetoric, I: 3, 24, 33, 38–40, 42–53, 55–6, 59, 74, 76, 78, 80–2, 92, 98–100, 106–7, 121, 129, 134, 152–4, 158, 192, 248, 252, 343, 431, 443, 584; II: 16, 21–2, 54, 70, 72–3, 109, 113, 116, 155, 158, 167, 215–18, 221, 261, 382–7, 390, 393, 395, 433, 450, 454–5, 458, 468–9, 471, 495, 505, 527, 532, 538, 546, 552, 562

603

rhyme, II: 18, 23, 111, 284, 376, 377 rhyme royal, II: 253, 329 rhythm, II: 284 Rich, Mary, countess of Warwick, II: 449 Rich, Penelope, I: 182, 197, 239; II: 457 Rich, Robert, earl of Warwick, II: 450 Richard II, I: 286, 352, 356; II: 44, 48–9, 52, 54, 143–4 Richard III, I: 65, 100; II: 343, 365, 523, 527, 529, 530, 550 riddles, I: 515, 517; II: 214, 215, 374, 377, 378 Ridgeway, Cecily, II: 393 ridings, II: 167, 187, 190, 198 Ridley, Nicholas, I: 406, 453, 521 rights, II: 493, 494, 496, 499 rings, II: 344, 369 Ripa, Cesare, I: 136 rivers, II: 354, 376 Rivière, Paul, I: 121 Robarts, Henry, II: 244 Roberts, Alexander, II: 516 Roberts, Nicholas, I: 547 Robin Hood, I: 63, 121; II: 62, 191–2, 198, 268, 353 Robinson, Edmund, II: 520 Robinson, Ralph, II: 424 Rogers, John, I: 465, 471 Rogers, Richard, I: 400, 413, 469; II: 448 rogues, I: 339, 340, 341, 343, 345; II: 433 Roman Catholic clergy, I: 478, 514 Roman Catholic spirituality, II: 384 Roman Catholicism, I: 6, 7, 62–3, 70, 75, 82, 95, 99, 135, 140, 146–7, 173, 191, 205, 226, 228, 230, 234, 249, 285, 290–1, 294, 299, 311, 356–8, 396–9, 404, 406–10, 413, 438–9, 442–63, 507, 515, 517, 519, 520–1, 539, 547–51, 565; II: 108, 109, 113, 117, 155, 330–1, 332–3, 335, 337–8, 384, 390, 408, 413, 417, 425–6, 434, 466, 467, 515 Roman hand, I: 178, 179

604

Index

romance, I: 4, 55, 112, 124, 128, 141, 145–6, 263, 265–6, 268–9, 307, 322, 338–9, 379, 383–5, 390; II: 7, 31, 35–7, 39–40, 49, 61–2, 66, 113, 115–16, 118–19, 125, 143, 180, 226–7, 229, 230, 233–4, 236, 238–48, 250, 255, 281, 288–9, 353, 394, 423–4, 427, 429, 431–2 Ronsard, Pierre de, I: 190; II: 252 Roper, Margaret, I: 21, 102, 128 Roper, William, II: 61 rosary, I: 450 Rose playhouse, I: 167, 228; II: 45, 54, 60, 508 Rose, John, I: 394 Rosseter, Philip, II: 273 Rowlands, Samuel, II: 266, 159, 519 royal household, II: 107, 109, 111 Royal Society, I: 151, 153, 157 royal supremacy, I: 276 royalism, II: 169, 232, 234, 235, 390–1, 562 Rubens, Sir Peter Paul, I: 137, 315 Ruddier, Sir Benjamin, I: 208 Rudolf II, I: 137 Ruggle, George, I: 256 rule of three, II: 344 rulers, II: 463 rules, II: 21 Rump Parliament, II: 499 rush-bearing, II: 190 Russell, Lucy, countess of Bedford, I: 230, 236, 237, 239, 240, 242, 305, 315 Rutherford, Samuel, I: 297 rutters, I: 532 Rycaut, Paul, I: 548 sabbath, II: 355, 356, 517, 520 Sachs, Hans, II: 332 Sackville, Thomas, I: 67 sacraments, I: 292, 441, 446, 447, 453, 456, 565, 566; II: 449 saffron bag, I: 449 St German, Christopher, I: 102, 438, 439 St John, Anthony, I: 205

St Paul’s boys, I: 320 St Paul’s Cathedral, I: 165, 169, 231, 237, 243, 339, 355; II: 269, 270, 365, 556, 558, 559 St Paul’s churchyard, I: 165, 169 St Paul’s Cross, II: 267 St Paul’s School, I: 97, 98 saints, I: 438, 440, 441, 448–52, 454, 458, 468, 469, 558, 602; II: 63, 64, 66, 185 saints’ lives, II: 351 saints’ plays, II: 63, 66 Sallust, I: 60; II: 530 Salter, Thomas, I: 127, 145 Salusbury, Sir Thomas, II: 205 Salutati, Collucio, I: 93; II: 214, 215 same-sex desire, II: 127–8, 476, 477–8 samplers, II: 370 Sampson, II: 349 Samuel, Mother Alice, I: 507, 532, 548, 603 Sander, Nicholas, I: 407, 442, 450–2, 460 Sandys, Edwin, I: 125, 146, 547 Sansovino, Francesco, I: 331–2 Sapphics, II: 273 Satan, I: 52, 467, 469, 470, 589, 602, 604; II: 48, 64, 517, 518 satire, I: 164, 197, 201–2, 211, 222–3, 225–6, 234–6, 250, 256, 308, 332, 347, 356, 360, 363, 365, 411–12, 444, 478, 490, 495–7, 508–9, 549, 577, 578; II: 110, 116–18, 143, 149, 156, 170–1, 193, 198, 205, 217, 228, 232, 251, 278, 326–40 Saturn, I: 265 satyrs, II: 233, 326, 339 savagery, II: 441 Savile, Sir Henry, I: 57, 58, 60 Sawrey, John, I: 468 Sawyer, Elizabeth, II: 518 Saxton, Christopher, I: 69 scaffolds, II: 137, 194, 196–7 Scaliger, J. C., II: 6, 7 scatology, I: 495, 520; II: 332, 361, 378 scenery, II: 45, 46, 111, 174; II: 507 scenic properties, II: 52

Index scepticism, I: 5, 33, 106–19, 330; II: 16, 247, 253, 259, 442, 514–15, 520–1 schemes, I: 41, 76 schism, I: 404, 443, 452 scholasticism, I: 92, 98, 276, 277 schools, I: 30–1, 33–5, 76, 94, 97–9, 102, 106; II: 455, 481 science, I: 22–3, 57, 150–9, 329–30; II: 240, 260, 477 Scot, Michael, I: 586 Scot, Reginald, I: 567, 604, 606; II: 349, 514, 515, 516, 553 Scotland, I: 295, 297, 304, 313–14, 356, 426, 538, 543, 547, 607; II: 110, 114, 348, 349, 545–8, 550, 551–3 Scott, Thomas, I: 201, 357, 359 Scottish Parliament, II: 545 scourges of God, I: 547, 554 scribes, I: 163, 178–9, 183, 187, 193, 202, 205–6, 212–13; II: 453, 456, 504–5 scriptoria, I: 179 scripturalism, I: 400, 401, 411 sculpture, I: 338, 389, 459 sea-coal, II: 556–9, 561, 564 seasons, II: 229, 257 secretaries, II: 456 secretary hand, I: 177, 185 sectarianism, I: 445, 446, 461, 464–73; II: 497, 498, 499 secularisation, I: 2; II: 394–5 sedition, I: 173; II: 355 seduction, II: 173 seed, II: 539, 540 seeing, II: 302, 307, 308 seers, II: 20 Selden, John, I: 69, 236, 242, 545 self-consciousness, II: 131, 447, 463–4, 466, 488, 492 self-display, II: 382 self-examination, II: 448, 449 self-fashioning, I: 375, 537, 558, 570, 578, 584, 585, 589, 595; II: 48 self-knowledge, I: 592, 594, 595, 602 self-portrayal, II: 444 self-presentation, II: 108, 111

605

self-referentiality, II: 255 self-reflexivity, II: 215, 313 self-study, II: 443 Seneca, I: 35, 107–10, 115–18, 223, 228, 249, 307, 330; II: 71–2, 74, 158, 374, 437, 442–3, 454, 458 sententiae, I: 98, 110, 116; II: 114 Sergius of Arrian, I: 551 sermons, I: 274, 292, 315, 399, 404, 409, 430–7, 441–2, 446, 449, 460; II: 16, 43, 322–3, 516 Serres, Jean de, I: 111 servants, I: 312, 354, 356, 363; II: 344, 353, 401–2, 405 service, II: 327, 365, 399, 400, 401, 402, 403, 404, 405, 453 Servius, II: 226 Sewall, Samuel, II: 451 Sextus Empiricus, I: 108, 113, 114; II: 16, 22 sexuality, I: 48, 62, 78, 116, 127–9, 135, 138–9, 143, 145–7, 163–4, 196–200, 222–3, 229, 243, 270, 305, 321, 364; II: 123, 126–8, 141, 155, 167, 169, 171, 242, 244, 246, 249, 258, 260, 295, 299–302, 305, 309, 313–15, 317, 323, 394, 474–81, 483–5, 487, 492–3, 495–6, 517, 533 Seymour, Edward, duke of Somerset, I: 439 Shacklock, Richard, I: 442 Shakers, I: 509 Shakespeare, John, I: 28, 397 Shakespeare, William, I: passim shame, I: 572; II: 159 sharers, II: 43, 53–5, 81–2, 86, 91, 505 Sharp, Jane, II: 480 Sharpe, Richard, II: 125 Sheldon, Richard, I: 291, 446 Shelton, Thomas, I: 124 Shepherd, Luke, II: 331–3 shepherds, II: 349, 431 Sherry, Richard, I: 121 ship of fools, II: 327 ship money, II: 565 ships, II: 257, 561

606 Shirley, Lady Dorothy, I: 205 Shirley, James, I: 308; II: 166, 167, 169, 170, 174 Shirley, Thomas, I: 214 shrews, I: 478–9; II: 366, 367 Shrovetide, I: 499, 500, 501, 502, 517; II: 187, 189, 193, 379 Sidney, Mary, I: 128, 307; II: 123, 131, 133, 134, 135, 139, 180, 205, 234, 288, 382, 431 Sidney, Robert, I: 224, 307, 371; II: 295, 288 Sidney, Sir Philip, I: 2, 48, 53, 55–6, 60, 65, 81, 103, 109–10, 112, 130, 184, 192, 194, 213–14, 216, 224, 239, 241, 248–50, 254, 260, 264, 269, 306–8, 310, 312–13, 315, 371–2, 383–4, 386, 388, 393–4, 425; II: 4–12, 16–24, 29–30, 95–6, 134, 157, 180, 226–7, 229–31, 234, 239–41, 244–6, 254–7, 259–60, 264–5, 269, 273, 275, 289, 292, 326, 334–5, 382–3, 386, 393, 409, 424, 431–2, 457, 463, 469, 528, 538 sight, I: 557 signatures, I: 28; II: 455 signification, II: 307 signs, I: 472; II: 46, 70, 219, 323, 510 silence, II: 485, 497 simony, II: 328 Simplicianus, II: 407 Simpson, John, I: 402, 461, 463 simulation, I: 329–31, 333–5, 584 sincerity, I: 48, 52, 333, 334; II: 249 Sixtus V, I: 588 Skelton, John, I: 96, 101–2, 311; II: 65, 327–8, 331–3 skimmingtons, I: 482; II: 198, 363, 366 Skipwith family, I: 194–6, 212 skulls, II: 160 slander, II: 495, 497 slavery, I: 296, 527, 531, 552–4; II: 541 Slingsby, Sir Henry, II: 448 Smectymnuans, I: 296 Smith, John, I: 112

Index Smith, John of North Nibley, II: 326, 327, 331, 333, 334, 375 Smith, Miles, I: 421 Smith, Richard, I: 421, 423, 450 smoke, II: 556–9 smoking, I: 481, 482, 488 social distinction, I: 306 social types, I: 478, 494–5 Society of Antiquaries, I: 35, 59 sodomy, I: 305, 544; II: 475–9, 483–7 soldiering, II: 438 soliloquies, II: 55, 64 solipsism, II: 318, 321, 410, 442 Solomon, I: 266, 293; II: 114 Song of Songs, II: 393, 394, 395 songs, I: 518; II: 42, 54, 84, 100, 216, 225, 228, 231, 254, 256, 258, 264–6, 272–4, 276, 284, 288–90, 306–7, 317 sonnets, I: 47–8, 112, 194, 208, 212, 229–30, 232, 239–40, 257; II: 8, 178, 180–1, 219, 249–50, 252–3, 255–9, 278–80, 282–4, 288–90, 292, 295–6, 301, 304–5, 309, 311–12, 414–15, 420, 432 sophistry, I: 50; II: 16, 318, 468 Sophocles, I: 35; II: 5 soteriology, I: 281, 282 souling, II: 195 sound, II: 18, 23 Southwell, Lady Anne, I: 203; II: 392–4 Southwell, Robert, I: 214, 414, 447, 450–1, 453, 457, 460; II: 392–3, 412–13, 420 sovereignty, I: 274, 276, 277, 280, 281, 337 Sowernam, Esther, II: 496 speaking, II: 54, 291–3, 296, 317–23 spectacle, I: 146; II: 46, 49, 52, 100, 106, 111–12, 119, 177, 507 spectators, II: 46–50, 53, 55–6 speech, I: 565 Speed, John, II: 528 spelling, I: 183, 184, 185, 186; II: 289, 295, 393 Spencer, Gabriel, I: 234, 243, 356

Index Spenser, Edmund, I: 2, 6, 9, 27, 32, 36, 59, 78, 103, 112–13, 123, 138, 140–1, 173, 209, 213–14, 216, 229, 263–72, 313, 383–6, 388–90, 393–5, 404, 452, 456, 460, 530, 552; II: 4, 6, 7, 16, 20, 23, 24, 28, 30–1, 36–9, 101–2, 113, 208, 216, 218, 220, 225, 227–32, 234, 239–41, 243–7, 251, 256–60, 273, 289, 292, 326, 331, 333–6, 338–9, 342, 347, 360, 400, 458, 478, 550 spices, I: 543, 551 spies, II: 155, 162 spirits, I: 490, 577, 598, 604–5 spiritual autobiography, I: 462, 465, 466 spiritual journals, II: 447–51 spirituality, II: 388, 390, 391 sport, II: 215, 309 Sprat, Thomas, I: 153 sprezzatura, II: 22, 219, 231, 530 spying, II: 425–6 stage directions, II: 506–7, 509–10 stage hangings, II: 507 stage machinery, II: 507 staging, II: 502, 506, 509–10 stained glass, II: 400 standardisation, I: 15, 25 Stanford, Henry, I: 194, 212 Stanford, John, I: 108 Stanley, Elizabeth, I: 236 Stanley, Ferdinando, earl of Derby, I: 229 Stanley, Thomas, I: 119, 203 Stanyhurst, Richard, II: 273 Staper, Richard, I: 551 Stapleton, Thomas, I: 63, 407–8, 442–3, 451, 460 Star Chamber, I: 172; II: 520 Stationers’ Company, I: 167–9, 171–2, 503, 504 Stationers’ Register, II: 371, 379, 427, 504 Statius, I: 367 statutes, I: 172, 252, 573, 575; II: 16 Stent, Peter, I: 495, 498, 503–4, 513, 517–18, 520 Sternhold, Thomas, I: 426; II: 267, 268, 382, 411

607

Sterry, Peter, I: 113 Stewart, Adam, I: 297, 332 Stewart, Ludovic, duke of Lennox, II: 110 stichomythia, II: 73, 74, 75 stigma of print, I: 166, 190, 237; II: 390 stilts, II: 565–6 Stobaeus, I: 276 Stockton, Eleanor, II: 449 Stoicism, I: 33, 106, 107–10, 113–18, 152, 276, 330–1; II: 158, 159, 162, 440–1, 443 storytellers, II: 345 Stow, John, I: 66, 69, 348–50, 487, 522; II: 190–1, 527, 537 Strange, Ferdinando, Lord, II: 312 Straparola, Giovanni Francesco, II: 346, 351 street theatre, I: 337 Strode, William, I: 194, 208, 210, 214–15 structuralism, II: 341, 525 Stuart, Lady Arabella, II: 447, 456 Stubbe, Henry, I: 298 Stubbes, John, I: 321, 327, 398 Stubbes, Philip, I: 569 style, I: 6, 8, 16, 19, 32, 38, 40–1, 44, 49, 53, 80, 93, 97, 99, 101, 107–9, 115, 122, 170, 179, 226, 255–7, 306–7, 310, 314, 320, 330, 338, 344, 346–7, 403; II: 4, 8, 7, 12, 21, 28, 48, 50, 71, 83, 95, 226–7, 229, 252–3, 265, 275–6, 278, 281, 289, 296, 300, 309, 312–13, 510, 546 subjection, II: 146 subjectivity, II: 131, 141, 239, 252, 259, 299, 308, 314, 448, 464, 483, 484 subjects, II: 437–8, 440, 443–4, 448–9, 450, 453, 463–5, 468–9, 471, 475, 479, 481, 484, 488, 493, 496, 498, 505 subplots, II: 218 subscriptions, I: 538; II: 455 subversion, II: 329, 384, 425, 470, 477, 483, 495–6, 499 succession, II: 246 succubi, I: 604, 605, 607 Suckling, Sir John, I: 235, 238, 315, 488, 490; II: 166, 205, 259, 458

608

Index

Suetonius, I: 123 Suffolk, Susanna, countess of, II: 392 suicide, I: 291; II: 124, 131–2, 134, 151, 158 Suleyman, I: 546, 547 Sulpizio, Giovanni, I: 121 summer lords, II: 192 sumptuary laws, I: 78, 557–8, 573, 575; II: 48 supernatural, II: 45, 71, 347, 351, 354, 355 superstition, II: 514–15, 519 surprise, II: 35 Susenbrotus, II: 18 Sutcliffe, Matthew, I: 439, 445, 550 Swan playhouse, II: 51, 60, 508 Swetnam, Joseph, II: 495, 496 sword-dancing, II: 185 sword-fighting, II: 54 swords, I: 577 symbolism, I: 263, 267, 270, 312, 325, 338, 358, 379, 380, 390; II: 113, 160, 177, 179, 307 symbolum, II: 214 symmetry, I: 432; II: 296 synaesthesia, II: 315 syncopation, II: 273 syncretism, II: 16 Synod at Dort, I: 446 syntax, I: 401, 423; II: 319 syphilis, II: 513 Tacitus, I: 3, 56–8, 60, 65, 116, 225, 330, 331, 333–4; II: 158, 161, 442, 530 tailors, I: 575 tales, II: 334, 341–53, 355–6, 425, 427–8, 434 Talon, Omer, I: 113–15 Tansillo, Luigi, I: 458; II: 413 tapestries, II: 240, 373 Tarlton, Richard, II: 49, 50, 55, 361 Tasso, Torquato, I: 112, 141, 384; II: 30–1, 35–7, 218, 233, 239, 258 taste, I: 216, 229, 242, 305–6, 308, 313 taverns, I: 497, 509; II: 265–6 taxation, I: 264

Taylor, John, I: 124, 147, 167, 169, 256, 478, 499–503, 508, 537, 538; II: 208, 374, 379 Taylor, Sylvanus, II: 562 tears, I: 374, 454, 456, 458–9, 466; II: 177–8, 307, 404, 413 technology, II: 240, 241 temperance, I: 263, 269 Terence, I: 33, 34, 360; II: 208 Teresa, St, II: 395 Terrent, Jeramiel, I: 210 territory, II: 546, 547 Tertullian, I: 291 textual authority, II: 503, 509 textualisation, II: 218, 219, 222 textuality, I: 1, 215, 250, 252, 257, 349 Thavies Inn, I: 228 theatre, II: 148–9, 185 Theatre (playhouse), II: 42, 43, 44, 45, 49, 51 60, 142 theatre music, II: 264, 266, 301 theatricality, I: 134, 234; II: 206, 294 theatrum mundi, I: 583; II: 219 Thebes, II: 349 Themurah, II: 16 Theocritus, II: 225, 22, 560 theology, I: 5, 35, 59, 92, 274–7, 280, 282, 284–5, 431, 438–48, 472; II: 29, 186, 386, 388, 400, 402, 409, 411, 420, 477 theoria, II: 465, 466, 469, 471 Theseus, II: 295 Thibault, Joachim, II: 272 thieves, II: 425 Thirty-Nine Articles, I: 441; II: 409 Thomas, William, I: 3, 6, 30–1, 35–6, 38, 40, 56, 59, 63, 68, 109, 117 Thomas à Kempis, St, I: 453 Thornton, Alice, II: 450 Thou, Jacques-Auguste de, I: 57 thresholds, II: 196 Throckmorton, Job, I: 412, 444 Throckmorton, Robert, I: 603 thrones, II: 52 Thucydides, I: 124 Tiberius, I: 331, 333

Index Tibullus, I: 128, 145, 223, 257 Tichborne, Chidiock, I: 455 Tillinghast, John, I: 462, 465 Timberlake, Henry, I: 545 time, I: 479, 480 Timotheus, II: 272 tin, I: 551 tiring-houses, II: 47, 51, 54, 506 Tisi, Benvenuto, I: 3 Titans, I: 266, 268 Titian, I: 137; II: 302 titles, II: 538 tobacco, I: 339 toleration, I: 289, 290, 294–5, 298, 299, 301 Tomkins, Thomas, II: 270 Tomyris, II: 112 Topcliffe, Richard, I: 226, 228, 457 topics, II: 439 topography, I: 4, 347; II: 235, 236, 241, 260 Topsell, Edward, I: 605 torches, II: 46 Torkington, Richard, I: 544 torture, I: 567; II: 142, 155, 434 totalisation, II: 533 Tottel, Richard, I: 190, 213, 215, 310; II: 252, 253, 254, 260 tournaments, I: 268, 306, 309, 311–12; II: 244 Tourneur, Cyril, II: 156, 160, 163 Tower of London, II: 159, 523 town halls, II: 184 Townshend, Aurelian, II: 168 trade, II: 17, 466, 499 tradesmen, I: 494, 509 tragedy, I: 126, 134, 136, 142, 143, 225; II: 5, 6, 9, 10, 12, 21, 31, 56, 61, 65–6, 75, 78, 95, 97, 106, 114–15, 125, 133, 135, 141, 143, 151–2, 154–65, 167, 177, 208 tragi-comedy, II: 4, 12, 106, 115, 150, 159, 163, 167, 226, 233–5, 431, 519 Traherne, Thomas, I: 113, 214; II: 391, 395

609

translation, I: 27, 31–2, 34, 36, 49, 57, 60, 69–70, 74–6, 78, 80–2, 85, 92, 95, 101, 108, 110–18, 120–33, 400, 419–29; II: 16, 24, 31, 33–8, 208, 300, 382, 427 transubstantiation, I: 409, 439, 441, 451; II: 328, 331, 332 Trapnel, Anna, I: 461–2, 464, 465–71; II: 498–9 travel, I: 156, 527–42, 545; II: 433, 466, 541 Travers, Walter, I: 274, 275, 444 travesty, II: 327, 328 treason, I: 173, 225, 255, 256, 575; II: 425 Treaty of London, II: 109 Tree, Thomas, II: 356 Tregian, Francis, I: 455 trencher poetry, II: 366, 368 Tresille, John, I: 600 Trevilian, Thomas, I: 515, 516 tribadry, I: 229 tricksters, I: 339, 364; II: 243 trompe l’oeil, II: 302–3, 311 tropes, I: 34, 41, 50, 52, 56, 58, 74–90, 324, 344, 400; II: 18, 126, 208, 215, 218–19, 292, 395, 400, 402–4, 408, 420 tropology, I: 81, 82 Troynovant, I: 352 Trundle, John, I: 504 truth trope, II: 425, 467 Tryon, Thomas, I: 605–6 Tuberville, George, II: 538 Tuchet, Mervyn, earl of Castlehaven, I: 200 tumblers, II: 42 Tunstall, Cuthbert, I: 259–60, 516; II: 424 Turner, Elizabeth, II: 449, 450 Turner, Jane, I: 465–7, 469 Turner, William, I: 515, 516; II: 334 Tusser, Thomas, II: 367, 375, 563 Twelve Years Truce, I: 511 Twyne, Thomas, I: 116 Tyler, Margaret, I: 128; II: 243 Tyler, Wat, II: 44

610

Index

Tyndale, William, I: 124, 398, 400–3, 421–4, 438–9, 450, 549; II: 332, 466–8 types, II: 438 typography, II: 109 typology, I: 32; II: 388, 390, 394 tyrannicide, II: 149–50 tyranny, I: 60, 100, 270–1, 296, 324, 326, 331, 356, 404, 452, 535; II: 47, 67, 108, 128, 147–51, 159, 331, 426, 427–8, 430 Tyrrie, Joan, II: 355 Udall, John, I: 444 Udall, Nicholas, I: 404; II: 470 ugliness, I: 590 unconscious, II: 467 Underdowne, II: 238, 243 undertakers, II: 564, 566 underworld, I: 339–41, 344, 346–8, 354–5; II: 29, 39, 155 Union of England and Scotland, I: 234; II: 545, 550–2 unities, II: 9, 10, 36 universities, I: 30, 35, 97, 102, 111, 156, 170, 191, 195, 197, 203, 223, 241; II: 481 Ussher, James, I: 292 usury, II: 171 vagabonds, I: 340, 341, 354, 567, 573, 589; II: 43, 107 vagrancy, I: 267, 340–1, 343, 348–9, 354 Vair, Guillaume du, I: 117 Valla, Lorenzo, I: 68, 93, 97 valour, II: 22, 523, 531, 538 Van de Passe, Crispin, I: 494 Van Dyck, Anthony, I: 315; II: 166 Vane, Sir Henry, I: 296, 298, 299 Varchi, Benedetto, II: 6 Vasari, Giorgio, I: 4 Vaughan, Henry, II: 205, 235, 388 Vaughan, Robert, I: 492, 511 Vaughan, Thomas, I: 113; II: 388 Vaughan, William, I: 606 Vaux, Laurence, I: 453

Vaux, Thomas, Lord, II: 254 vellum, I: 186 venturing, I: 538 Venus, I: 50, 135–7, 143, 145, 198, 204, 211, 268, 383, 384; II: 2, 292, 294, 296, 300–3, 305–6, 308–14 verbal repetition, II: 344 Vergil, Polydore, I: 65, 68, 96; II: 247, 527, 529, 549, 550 verisimilitude, II: 510 Vermuyden, Sir Cornelius, II: 564, 565 vernacular, I: 15, 22, 34, 74, 76, 94–5, 101, 106, 108, 110, 117, 121–5, 128–9, 142, 153, 399, 400, 403, 422–4, 466; II: 23, 332–3, 341, 349, 354, 437–9, 454, 467, 470, 492, 497, 499 Verney, Sir Edmund, II: 167 verse-epistle, I: 222, 228, 235; II: 7, 8, 9, 48, 418, 420, 457 versification, II: 23 Verstegan, Richard, I: 63, 407–8, 440, 443, 448, 456 Vestiarian Controversy, 410 vestments, I: 74, 75, 79, 83, 84 Vicars, John, I: 514 vice figures, II: 64–5, 443, 470 Victorinus, II: 407 Villiers, George, duke of Buckingham, I: 200, 237, 242–3, 305, 314, 316, 330, 357, 358; II: 110, 158, 167, 168, 482 violence, II: 6, 47, 71, 73, 74, 98, 154, 159, 161, 234, 238, 441 viols 12, 269, 274 Virgil, I: 123, 128, 136, 140, 145, 222–3, 309, 352, 367; II: 6, 28, 30–1, 36, 39, 112, 218, 225–7, 239, 333, 478–9 Virgin Mary, I: 237, 373, 380, 440, 447–9, 454, 456, 459, 460; II: 186, 221, 390, 426 virgin sacrifice, II: 126, 131 virginity, II: 128, 171, 304–6 virtue, I: 326; II: 5, 6, 29, 218, 291 virtuosity, II: 302 visionary, II: 20 visions, I: 465, 468, 469, 470, 472

Index Visscher, Claes Jansz, I: 511, 521 Vitellius, I: 587 Vitruvius, I: 562; II: 219 Vittorino da Feltre, I: 96 Vives, Juan Luis, I: 111, 127, 128, 155; II: 458 vocation, II: 383, 401, 112 Voragine, Jacobus de, I: 453 voyeurism, II: 171, 180, 243, 301, 303–4, 307, 314, 457 Vulgate, I: 422, 443, 451 Vulson, Marc, I: 599, 606 Wager, Lewis, II: 63 Wager, William, II: 64, 66, 342, 373 waits, II: 54 wakes, II: 186, 187, 188, 189, 190 Wales, I: 127, 129, 130, 135, 140, 224 Walker, Gilbert, I: 320, 339, 341 Walker, Obadiah, II: 351 Walkington, Thomas, I: 558, 559 Wallace, William, II: 550, 551, 552 Waller, Anne, II: 450 Waller, Edmund, I: 316; II: 205, 208 Walsingham, Sir Francis, I: 58, 184, 455; II: 416 Walsingham, Sir Thomas, II: 301 Walton, Izaak, I: 210, 221, 233, 244; II: 209, 384 Wanley, Nicholas, II: 390 Warbeck, Perkin, II: 167 Ward, John, I: 507, 553–4 Ward, Samuel, I: 507 Warmington, William, I: 446 Wars of the Roses, I: 96; II: 44, 152 Warwick, Sir Philip, II: 566 Wase, Christopher, I: 31 wash-land, II: 556, 564 wassailing, II: 195 watermarks, I: 187 Watson, Thomas, I: 203, 213; II: 235, 255 Watson, William, I: 451 Watts, Isaac, II: 392 Wayman, Edward, I: 469 wealth, I: 367, 373, 438 Webb, John, II: 120

611

Webbe, William, II: 17–18, 21, 24 Webster, John, I: 126–9, 308, 338; II: 125, 155, 156, 161, 162, 163, 167, 378, 428, 471, 505 weddings, II: 124, 172, 173, 189, 198, 199 Weelkes, Thomas, II: 269, 270 Weever, John, II: 67, 372 Weiditz, Hans, I: 485 Wentworth, Lady Anne, I: 469, 471, 472, 609 Wentworth, Thomas, II: 556 Wentworth, Sir William, I: 600, 601 werewolves, II: 476 West, Richard, II: 209 Westminster Assembly, I: 296, 297 Weston, William, I: 447; II: 519 wetlands, II: 514, 555, 564 Wheare, Degory, I: 61 Whetstone, George, I: 354 whetstones, I: 494, 529 Whichcote, Benjamin, I: 112, 113 whipping, I: 341–2, 343, 354, 589 Whitacre, William, I: 409 White, Dorothy, I: 470 Whitechurch, Edward, I: 439 Whitefriars playhouse, II: 53, 80, 83, 116, 124, 484 Whitehall Palace, I: 304, 315, 320, 432, 435–6, 461, 470; II: 120, 174, 499 Whiteway, William, II: 448 Whitford, Richard, I: 399 Whitgift, John, I: 411, 444 Whitney, Geoffrey, I: 138, 170, 367–70, 508, 568 Whitney, Isabella, I: 169–71, 203 Whitsun, II: 189, 191, 197 Whittington, Richard, I: 98 Whore of Babylon, II: 336 Whythorne, Thomas, I: 487; II: 271 Wickham, II: 106, 119 widows, I: 375; II: 169, 170 Wigginton, Giles, I: 515 Wight, Sarah, I: 473 wigs, II: 53 Wilbye, John, II: 269 Wilcox, Thomas, I: 411

612

Index

Willett, Andrew, I: 409 William Browne of Tavistock, I: 194, 197, 214, 241 William Herbert, earl of Pembroke, I: 208 William of Orange, II: 221 Willis, R., II: 215, 216 Willoughby, Katherine, duchess of Suffolk, I: 441 Wilmot, Robert, II: 178 Wilson, Robert, I: 494, 553, 560, 584 Wilson, Thomas, I: 40, 41; II: 524, 525, 531, 537 Windsor Forest, II: 556, 562, 563, 564, 514 wine, I: 501, 551, 553, 605 Winthrop, John, II: 449 wit, I: 308, 332, 343, 344, 364; II: 17–19, 23–4, 48, 65, 313, 320, 324, 383, 389, 430, 438, 441, 493, 530, 532 witchcraft, I: 141, 314, 384, 386, 390, 527–8, 557, 566–7, 569, 573, 577, 588–9, 602–4, 607; II: 112–13, 169, 172–3, 347, 354, 373, 476, 507, 513–22 witchcraft statutes, II: 513 Wither, George, I: 168; II: 232, 338, 391 wives, II: 114, 118, 124, 128, 130, 134–5, 138, 160, 168–72, 177, 180, 194, 198, 453, 480, 499 Wolsey, Cardinal Thomas, I: 65, 99, 111, 305, 310, 311; II: 199, 328, 333, 365 women, I: 5, 19, 28–31, 33, 49, 59, 102, 127–9, 163, 164, 170–1, 178, 184, 193, 195, 198–9, 203, 204, 205–6, 211, 222–3, 230, 236, 241, 266, 268, 304–5, 309, 312, 321, 339, 353, 373–5, 387–8, 393, 464–5, 470–1, 478–9, 482, 483–4, 486, 488, 492, 519, 535–6, 543–4, 554, 560, 569–70, 577–8, 602, 604; II: 53, 112, 118–20, 123–31, 134, 136–7, 139, 144, 154, 161–2, 168–74, 187, 193, 244, 258, 265, 288, 292, 295–6, 304, 318–23, 354, 382, 392, 394, 405, 432, 450, 471, 480, 542; see also entries under female

women, defences of, II: 493 women, and drama, II: 123–40 women playgoers, II: 119 women writers, II: 432 wonder(s), I: 528, 564, 604; II: 35, 36, 38, 239–42, 246, 257, 261, 291 wonder literature, I: 517, 518 wonder tales, II: 341–58 woodcuts, I: 406–7, 478, 481, 485, 487, 490, 497, 503, 507–8, 513–15, 518 Woodrofe, Sir Nicholas, II: 43, 493 Woodward, Rowland, I: 229 wooing songs, II: 188 wool, I: 573, 574 Wootton, Thomas, I: 56 word order, I: 21 word-play, I: 33, 76; II: 75 Worde, Wynkyn de, I: 165; II: 240, 377 words, II: 16, 23 work-songs, II: 265 world upside down, I: 483, 488, 497, 508; II: 171, 366 Wotton, Sir Henry, I: 193, 195, 197, 207, 214, 227, 232, 233 wounds, II: 387, 415 Wray, Sir John, II: 565 Wren, Sir Christopher, I: 4, 600 Wright, Thomas, I: 559, 560, 585, 586, 590, 598; II: 481 Wriothsley, Henry, earl of Southampton, II: 301, 309 writing, I: 1, 5, 6, 15–20, 22, 23–4, 28, 31–2, 36, 39, 42, 44, 48, 53, 57, 61, 65, 75, 92, 94, 98–9, 101, 102–3, 109, 117; II: 346, 382, 387, 393, 396, 437, 441 Wroth, Lady Mary, countesss of Montgomery, I: 172, 194, 203, 241, 307; II: 134, 176–83, 234, 245–6, 256, 258, 288–98, 432–3, 496 Wroth, Sir Robert, I: 224, 367; II: 290

Index Wyatt, Sir Thomas, II: 252–4, 257–9, 278–87, 330, 331 Wyclif, John, I: 61, 398, 400, 422, 439, 452 xenophobia, I: 512 Xenophon, I: 109, 123; II: 423 Yarranton, Andrew, II: 563 Yonge, Nicholas, II: 269

613

Young, Bishop John, II: 334, 349 Young, Richard, I: 169, 228 Young, Thomas, I: 296 Zeuxes, II: 311, 312 zodiac, I: 266; II: 19, 21, 51 zoomorphism, I: 586, 587 Zopyros, I: 588 Zoroaster, II: 16 Zwingli, Huldrych, I: 82, 276, 438, 452