Redefining Elizabethan Literature

REDEF INING ELIZABETHAN LITERATURE

Redefining Elizabethan Literature examines the new definitions of literature and authorship that emerged in one of the most remarkable decades in English literary history, the 1590s. Georgia Brown analyzes the period’s obsession with shame as both a literary theme and a conscious authorial position. She explores the related obsession of this generation of authors with fragmentary and marginal forms of expression, such as the epyllion, paradoxical encomium, sonnet sequence and complaint. Combining recent developments in literary theory with close readings of a wide range of Elizabethan texts, Brown casts new light on the wholesale eroticization of Elizabethan literary culture, the form and meaning of Englishness, the function of gender and sexuality in establishing literary authority, and the contexts of the works of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser and Sidney. This study will be of great interest to scholars of Renaissance literature as well as cultural history and gender studies. g e org i a b row n has been a lecturer at Lincoln College, Oxford, and Fellow and Director of Studies in English at Queens’ College, Cambridge. She has lectured at universities in Greece, Switzerland, Poland and the United States, and has published essays on Marlowe, Spenser, Queen Elizabeth I, Renaissance embroidery and teaching the epyllion.

REDEFINING E L I Z A B E T H A N L I T E R AT U R E GEORGIA BROWN

cambridge university press Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, São Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge cb2 2ru, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521831239 © Georgia E. Brown 2004 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provision of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published in print format 2004 isbn-13

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Contents

Acknowledgements

page vii

1 Introduction

1

The generation of shame Theories of shame Excess, superfluity and redundancy: redefining the function of prodigality in cultural reform Registering change in the formal interests of texts Ornamentality and literariness Rereading Ovid in the 1590s

2 Generating waste: Thomas Nashe and the production of professional authorship Waste paper Redefining waste The “out-landish Chronicler” Esprit de corps The most literary of literary forms: the paradoxical encomium Restructuring reading in the generation of shame Shame and the anxieties of the subject Conclusion

3 Literature as fetish

1 6 18 26 32 36

53 53 60 65 75 81 86 92 97

102

The epyllion and the eroticization of Elizabethan literary culture Shaping a sense of literary community Rites of passage The politics of the “Brothell Muse” Sexual transgression and the mapping of aesthetic space Effeminized authority Blushing and the defense of publication Conclusion

v

102 109 116 129 134 154 166 174

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Contents

4 Shame and the subject of history Recovering the particularities of England The problem of proper English style Plaining, counter-history and aesthetics Laureates of shame: defining public and private space Epistolary form and the interrogation of the poetics of shame Conclusion

Epilogue Forms of the little and late Elizabethan culture

Bibliography Index

178 178 184 192 207 213 222

224 224

234 254

Acknowledgements

Many people proved invaluable during the conception of this book and I suspect that some of them do not know what an important impact they had. Lecturing can seem a thankless task, but my interest in the 1590s was first awakened by lectures given by Professor Emrys Jones in whose debt I will always remain. Over the years a range of colleagues and students have read, questioned and probed many of the ideas advanced in this book. I am extremely grateful to all of them. In particular, Dr. Diana Altegoer, Dr. Tom Betteridge, Dr. L. G. Black, Professor Rick Bowers, Dr. Michael Brennan, Professor Dympna Callaghan, Dr. Hero Chalmers, Professor Patrick Cheney, Dr. Katie Coombs, Dr. Katherine Craik, Dr. Jonathan Gibson, Professor John Kerrigan, Dr. Katherine Moore, Dr. C. Moseley, Dr. R.-C. Rothschild, Dr. A. Sen and Professor Richard Wilson all generously answered questions or discussed parts of the project in ways that benefited me enormously. Professor Don McKenzie strove to keep me precise, and Professor Lynn Enterline saved me from many mistakes with dazzling acuity. I was fortunate to be blessed with two exceptional readers for the Press. They both gave up their time and shared their tremendous knowledge and insight without any benefit to themselves. I am profoundly grateful to both of them. My editor, Dr. Victoria Cooper, not only made the process of production a pleasure, her intellectual rigor also made this a much better book. Dr. Philippa Berry, Dr. Juliet Fleming and Dr. Adam Smith were friends who valiantly plowed through substantial parts of the manuscript when it was unfit for human consumption. Their input was absolutely crucial to this project, and can never be adequately repaid, except with total admiration. Sadly, two friends who were equally instrumental in producing this work died during the long process of its completion. It will always be a source of infinite regret that neither my supervisor, Dr. Dennis Kay, nor my colleague, Professor John Holloway, lived to see this book. Nothing would have made me prouder than to have been able to show vii

viii

Acknowledgements

it to them. They taught me how to think, but they also taught me about friendship. I was lucky enough to know them. The book is dedicated to my parents, with my admiration. In quoting from Elizabethan texts, I have normalized the use of i/j, and u/v.

chap t e r 1

Introduction

the generation of shame History has been hard on Gabriel Harvey. For all his intellectual gifts, the Elizabethan academic and commentator never quite managed to master the rituals of courtly sophistication, and a series of social blunders eventually consigned him to the role of Elizabethan buffoon. What is more, Harvey took on Thomas Nashe in a highly public quarrel in the early 1590s and, while it is unlikely that any Elizabethan could have emerged with dignity from an encounter with Nashe, Harvey’s contribution to the quarrel only served to consolidate his image as a pompous pedant. Yet Harvey was an astute critic of Elizabethan culture, and in Pierce’s Supererogation (1593) he not only turns a skeptical eye on Nashe, but on his own contribution to the quarrel. For Harvey, the danger for both writers lies in the fact that their dispute generates its own rhetorical momentum, forcing both of them to produce impure, ephemeral, vacuous rubbish, as they spawn words about words: What fonder businesse then to troble the Printe with Pamphlets, that cannot possibly live whiles the Basiliske hisseth death? Was I woont to jest at Eldertons ballatinge, Gascoignes sonnettinge, Greenes pamphletting, Martins libelling, Holinsheads engrosing, some-bodies abridging, and whatchicaltes translating, & shall I now become a scribling Creature with fragmentes of shame, that might long sethence have beene a fresh writer with discourses of applause? The very whole matter, what but a thinge of nothinge? the Methode, what but a hotch-pott for a gallymafry? by the one or other, what hope of publike use or private credite?1

Harvey’s quarrel with Nashe was a quarrel over the status of professional authorship, which was played out in the public arena of print, and it marks an important development in emerging discourses of literary professionalization, but what interests me about the quarrel is that Harvey associates 1

Gabriel Harvey, Pierce’s Supererogation, in G. Gregory Smith, ed., Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2 vols. (1904; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950), ii, p. 253.

1

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Redefining Elizabethan Literature

certain kinds of literary and economic productivity with shame. In this passage from Pierce’s Supererogation, he figures the author as “a scribling Creature with fragmentes of shame,” as a cultural agent whose identity is pieced together from disparate little elements that bring disgrace. Ironically, Harvey’s attack exemplifies what he despises, as it spawns matter out of the kind of facile verbal dalliance that draws the word “thinge” from “nothinge,” at the same time as it eroticizes verbal wit, and unleashes the bawdy associations implicit in “thinge” and “nothinge.”2 Harvey is repelled by the hybrid nature of the texts generated by his quarrel with Nashe, “what but a hotch-pott for a gallymafry,” and his attack elides structural and moral criteria, by implying that the smallness that characterizes the fragmentary components of mixed forms consigns them to ethical and philosophical marginality. Harvey is disturbed by moral and artistic degeneration, and his analysis deflects attention from the privileged and uncontested forms of thought in Elizabethan literary culture. It turns our attention away from those objects he calls “the discourses of applause,” and prompts a reconsideration of the roles played by shame, fragmentariness and marginality in late Elizabethan literary culture. This book is about shame and the pivotal role it played in the changing writing practices of late Elizabethan England. From The Faerie Queene (1590 and 1596) to Donne’s “Elegies” (written around 1598), from A Midsummer Night’s Dream (performed in 1595/6) to the prose narratives that rework the motif of the prodigal son, texts produced in the 1590s self-consciously deal in the shameful. Such texts may draw attention to the slightness of their form, or the indecency of their content, or they may parade a style that signals itself to be excessively ornamental. They may undermine their own narrative and ideological priorities by wandering off into marginal areas in ostentatious digressions, or they may subvert their own modes of representation by mixing genre with counter-genre. Such texts draw attention to their shamefulness, frequently exaggerating it in shameless gestures of self-promotion. Shame shades into shamelessness when fear of cultural sanctions modulates into contempt for those very sanctions. Shamelessness is a form of self-display which gives the illusion of autonomy and independence, by proclaiming the individual’s power to rise above criticism and ignore the rules. The shamelessness of these texts is a strategy of authorial self-promotion, a paradoxical way of turning the negative potential of 2

It is equally characteristic of late Elizabethan habits of thought that Harvey’s criticism associates new forms of authorship with eroticism: “nothinge” and “thinge” are Elizabethan slang for male and female pudenda.

Introduction

3

literature into something productive. The writers who burst on to the literary scene in the 1590s can justifiably be said to constitute “a generation of shame.” Not only do they identify themselves in opposition to the cultural and political status quo which seemed to have become entrenched around the aged queen, but they also actively produce, or generate, shame. In other words, they pursue, exaggerate and luxuriate in strategies that bring structural, stylistic and moral disgrace.3 Late sixteenth-century England witnessed a dramatic extension and intensification of literary activity – of reading, writing and debate about the function of literature. To a certain extent, this explosion was the product of the political tensions of the 1590s, which propelled writers to explore alternative forms of textual authority, but it was also consumer-led, as new kinds of patron, and new sorts of reader, required new forms of authorship. Sir Philip Sidney and Sir Walter Ralegh made literature part of the symbolic capital of the court, and where the court led, socially ambitious Elizabethans followed. Indeed, Sidney’s own prose romance, the Arcadia, which had been written for courtly readers, found new audiences in the middling sort, when Robert Waldegrave brought out a cheaper edition in 1599 which undercut William Ponsonby’s 1598 folio of Sidney’s Works, and made the text available to a new range of readers.4 Literary activity spread through a range of social and geographical locations. For example, writers such as George Wither and Nicholas Breton started to elaborate 3

4

The study that established the idea of a conflict of generations in late Elizabeth England is Anthony Esler’s The Aspiring Mind of the Elizabethan Younger Generation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1966). Richard Helgerson brilliantly takes up Esler’s lead in The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976) in which he analyzes the ways generational conflict was mediated through the prodigal son fiction. While my study is indebted to Elizabethan Prodigals, and to Helgerson’s development of his model of the Elizabethan literary system in Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton and the Literary System (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), I identify different functions for the Elizabethan trope of prodigality, functions which will be outlined later in the introduction. The publishing history of the Arcadia raises the complex issues of profitability, and the disjunction between the cost of a text and its value in cultural terms. For an extremely interesting discussion of these issues see Alexandra Halasz, The Marketplace of Print: Pamphlets and the Public Sphere in Early Modern England, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 17 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Thomas Nashe’s games with the word “credit,” which raise the issue of cost and value, will be explored in chapter 2. Lars Engle, Shakespearean Pragmatism: Market of His Time (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993) also discusses issues of worth, price and value, in the context of competing ideological-economic practices in the Renaissance. Taking specific examples, such as the ascription of value to the beloved, the ascription of timelessness to poetry and the definition of something as obscene, Engle argues that Shakespeare demonstrates the contingent nature of value, as it arises from the needs of communities, rather than from some source of certainty beyond community. Although my study focuses on changing aesthetic and intellectual tropes, the work of critics like Halasz and Engle is a constant reminder of the determinative power of economics on the formation of such tropes.

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meritocratic ideals, in a bid to appeal to the middle classes whose patronage they sought to exploit, while the increasing economic and political pre-eminence of towns had already enabled writers, like Thomas Churchyard, to explore new forms of laureateship by casting himself as an urban laureate in Church-yardes Charge (1580).5 The 1590s were characterized by the expansion of literary activity, but the revolution that took place in the decade was also conceptual, as writers and readers started to express a changing sense of the forms and functions of literature. In particular, literature started to be conceived as a valuable activity in its own right, with its own personnel, rules, history and conventions. What has frequently been overlooked, however, is that change and marginality enjoy a mutually productive relationship in the late sixteenthcentury network of obsessions. One of the most striking characteristics of the 1590s is the centrality of marginal forms. Indeed, the innovations which characterize literary activity in the period often took place in marginal forms, and the most characteristic genres of the period – including the epyllion, the complaint, the sonnet sequence and the verse epistle – all explore threshold states and points of coming into being. They preserve and re-enact the experience of transformation, whether this involves, for example, change from youth to maturity, from solitude to society, or from one genre to another. The relationship between the periphery and the center seems to be an obsession of twentieth-century cultural theory, from cultural anthropologists, such as Marcel Mauss, who argued in the 1920s that what is peripheral in a society is often symbolically central, through 5

For Wither’s later experiments in authorship, see Michelle O’Callaghan, The “shepheard’s nation”: Jacobean Spenserians and Early Stuart Political Culture, 1612–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), pp. 26–62 and 147–87; and Richard Helgerson’s brief, but suggestive, comments in Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992) pp. 129– 31. The final poem in Church-yardes Charge (D3v–D4v) is dedicated to Sir Nicholas Woodroffe, Lord Mayor of London, and celebrates London’s antiquity, while it warns the city against immorality. His verse captures the bustle of the metropolis: see ll. 23–32. Apart from Spenser, Churchyard was the only poet to receive a pension from Elizabeth, but there has been very little work on his function in Elizabethan culture. However, see M. H. Goldwyn, “Notes on the Biography of Thomas Churchyard,” RES ns 17 (1966): 1–15; Goldwyn, “A Note on Thomas Churchyard’s Pension,” N&Q ns 21 (1974): 89; and Dennis Kay, “The English Funeral Elegy in the Reigns of Elizabeth I and James I,” D.Phil., Oxford University, 1980, pp. 33–8. Various critics have challenged the metropolitan bias of readings of Renaissance culture in ways that give a more accurate picture of the undoubted cultural dominance of London. For example, Michael Brennan, Literary Patronage in the English Renaissance: The Pembroke Family (London: Routledge, 1988) analyzes cultural activity at Wilton; Claire McEachern, The Poetics of English Nationhood 1590–1612, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 13 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) reads Drayton’s Poly-Olbion as “an aggressively local poem, with respect to both time and place” (p. 139); and Gerald Maclean, Donna Landry and Joseph P. Ward, eds., The Country and the City Revisited: England and the Politics of Culture 1550–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 1–23, give a particularly careful account of the fluid interactions between city and country cultures.

Introduction

5

Foucault’s theories of the interdependence of authority and transgression, to Fredric Jameson and postmodernism.6 To a certain degree, it is this extended debate that makes these issues so compelling, but this book does not start with theory, but with the particular nature of the 1590s. Shame is not only produced by late Elizabethan literary culture, it actually produces late Elizabethan literary culture. The elements that define a text as literary in the 1590s are precisely those elements that shocked sixteenth-century readers, like Harvey, and have been overlooked by his critical successors.7 Nevertheless, the generation of shame was pursued to define ways of thinking specific to literary process, and became the engine for transforming contemporary conceptions of literary use and value. Of course the sense of literary renewal in the 1590s is coupled with the persistence of conservative attitudes towards literature. Critics continued to attack literature as a superficial pursuit that diverted readers and writers from serious employment and Christian morality, and the constant theme of such attacks is that literature is marginal and encourages triviality; that, in Russell Fraser’s terms, it “turns the reader’s attention from primary to secondary business.”8 The triviality of literary activity, and its association with pastime and matters peripheral to the state, is preserved in Francis Meres’ account of the etymology of the term “poet”: “In the infancy of Greece they that handled in the audience of the people grave and necessary matters were called wise men or eloquent men, which they ment by 6

7

8

Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies, trans. Ian Cunnison, intr. E. E. Evans-Pritchard (1925; London: Routledge, 1974); Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (1975; New York: Random House, 1979); Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Volume I: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (1976; New York: Random House, 1980); Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, ed. Hal Foster (Port Townsend, WA: Bay Press, 1983), pp. 111–25; Fredric Jameson, “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review 146 (1984): 53–92. The importance of the 1590s, and their relative neglect, are highlighted by Emrys Jones in his introduction to The New Oxford Book of Sixteenth Century Verse, ed. Jones (1991; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), p. xxxviii: “The 1590s have a claim to be considered the most remarkable decade in English literary history. This is not simply because they see the arrival of Shakespeare – though that might be thought distinction enough. Shakespeare, however, is only one of many new voices . . . So little known indeed are some of them that this culminating Elizabethan decade, despite its conventionally acknowledged achievements, might in reality be called one of the least explored regions of English poetry.” Taking “culminating” in the sense of last, I broadly agree with Jones’ assessment. On the 1590s and fin-de-si`ecle anxiety, see Margreta de Grazia, “Fin de Si`ecle Renaissance England,” in Fins de Si`ecle: English Poetry in 1590, 1690, 1790, 1890, 1990, ed. Elaine Scarry (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp. 37–63. Russell Fraser, The War Against Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 4. From an extensive study of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century attacks on literature, Fraser concludes that, although these attacks were made for a variety of political, social, economic and moral reasons, they all present literature as a triviality.

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Vates: so the rest, which sang of love matters, or other lighter devises alluring unto pleasure and delight, were called Poets or makers.”9 Prior to the 1590s, writers tend to defend literature in humanist terms, by arguing that it held a kernel of political or moral truth, but such defenses do not recognize advantages that are specific to literary discourse, and the didactic and allegorical character of a text remains more important than its literary or fictional qualities. In the 1590s a new kind of defense becomes popular, one which does not deny the traditional association of literature with the trivial and transgressive, but capitalizes upon it to uncover the paradoxical value of marginality, error, ornamentality and excess. By exploiting shame, these texts set limits on literature, defining it as a thing apart, with its own rules, personnel and history, and challenge the idea that literature is primarily the vehicle for historical, political or religious truth. Literature continued to be these things, but this book traces an important epistemological shift in the culture of late sixteenth-century England, as writers started to redraw the boundaries of intellectual activity. theories of shame Shame is a slippery term. For Freud it is one of those words, along with Latin terms such as altus, which means both high and deep, and sacer, which means both sacred and accursed, that preserve antithetical meanings, and hence relate us to our primal experience of learning by comparison.10 Antithetical meanings are also encompassed by sixteenth-century uses of the term shame. On the one hand, the term has negative associations, and can mean disgrace, guilt, humiliation, self-contempt, sexual violation and loss of chastity. On the other hand, in contradistinction to all of these meanings, it has positive associations, and can also mean modesty. Thus, in the sixteenth century, the term can refer to negative moral states, and to the positive state of modesty. It can refer to the violent loss of chastity, and to the state of mind that would preserve chastity. Shame and its related terms are explored in The Faerie Queene (1590 and 1596), which analyzes the varied, even contradictory, roles played by shame in social, political and cultural self-definition. The positive cognates of shame are frequently used to indicate proper, modest female behavior. For 9 10

Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia (1598), reprinted in Smith, ed., Elizabethan Critical Essays, II, p. 313. Sigmund Freud, “The Antithetical Meaning of Primal Words”(1910), reprinted in The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. and ed. James Strachey, 23 vols. (London: Hogarth Press and The Institute of Psycho-analysis, 1957), XI, p. 159. An English example of an antithetical term would be the verb “to cleave.”

Introduction

7

instance, wicked, lascivious Fidessa knows precisely how to entrap the Red Cross Knight by giving the impression of modesty, or shamefastness: “With chaunge of chear the seeming simple maid / Let fall her eien, as shamefast to the earth” (I.II.27).11 Contrasted with Fidessa’s show of false modesty is, what could be termed, a show of false immodesty, when, under pressure from the magic of Archimago, Red Cross dreams of a sexually provocative Una. In fact, Una is the embodiment of integrity and sexual continence, and she remains modest, but Red Cross’ dream generates a fantasy of sexual contact with Una as the eroticized figure of female authority. The dream is an indictment of his own lust, and a test of his own faith, but Red Cross is unable to interpret it properly, and the immodest behavior of the dreamUna, with “her shamelesse guise” (I.I.50), provokes his unjust rage against the real, consistently pure Una. In The Faerie Queene, shame and the related term, disgrace, also describe the knight who has failed to fulfill the standards of courtliness. As Calidore explains in Book VI, shame is the consequence of defaming “noble armes and gentle curtesie”: Much was the Knight abashed at that word; Yet answerd thus; Not unto me the shame, But to the shamefull doer it afford. Bloud is no blemish; for it is no blame To punish those, that doe deserve the same; But they that breake bands of civilitie, And wicked customes make, those doe defame Both noble armes and gentle curtesie. No greater shame to man then inhumanitie. (VI.I.26)

The ethical, social and nationalistic ideals that are defined by Spenserian courtesy involve a particular sensitivity to shame, which controls the interactions between individuals, and generates order. For example, it is fear of shame that drives Red Cross into his heroic encounter with Error (I.I.24), and it is fear of “bashfulnesse” (VI.VIII.5), the term Spenser uses to describe the mortification caused by shame, that repeatedly impels the processes through which the knightly ideal is elaborated in the poem. The terrible consequences of disgrace for a knight are realized in the career of Timias who is rejected by his beloved lady Belphoebe, because she suspects him of unfaithfulness with Amoret (IV.VII.24–IV.VIII.18). Although her suspicions are largely unjustified, Belphoebe’s total rejection of Timias drives 11

All quotations are from Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A. C. Hamilton, Hiroshi Yamashita and Toshiyuki Suzuki, Longman Annotated English Poets (London: Pearson Education, 2001).

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him into distraction. Shame reduces Timias to a state of anonymity and emasculation in which he is not only silenced, but is also de-faced, as he becomes unrecognizable both to his squire, Arthur, and to Belphoebe. Timias’ fate figures the realities of Sir Walter Ralegh’s relationship with the Queen, especially after the discovery of his secret marriage to Elizabeth Throckmorton, one of her ladies-in-waiting, in 1592, which led to Ralegh’s exile from the court. However, Ralegh, like Spenser, was well-versed in the politics of shame, and he campaigned for social, political and cultural reinclusion through a series of staged enactments of his shame and grief, which included his extended lyric fragment, “The Booke of the Ocean to Scinthia,” and Sir Arthur Gorges’ famous account of Ralegh’s distraction on seeing Elizabeth pass by in her barge, when he was confined to his house.12 The cultivation of shame is a courtly gesture that is encompassed by the ideals of sprezzatura, and, while the verses of “The Booke of the Ocean” are clearly a gesture of submission, the rituals of self-abasement staged by the poem give Ralegh access to courtly forms of exchange, and offer him the means to reinsert himself into the collective consciousness through gestures of spectacular self-abasement in which the cultivation of shame becomes productive. Shame plays an important role in mediating the transactions between individuals in Spenser’s text. It defines an emergent and vulnerable space of privacy that is usually figured by a female body that needs to be shielded from the indulgences of voyeurism. To the extent that excessive desire is figured as “shamefull lust” (IV.VII.12), sensitivity to shame also preserves a sense of measure and guards against dangerous extremes.13 However, the ordered society generated by shame in The Faerie Queene produces its own perversions and is extremely vulnerable to slander which inflicts disgrace on its victims. For instance, the Blatant Beast deals in ignominy and violation and, like the figure of Sclaunder in Book IV, canto VIII, the 12

13

Gorges’ account of Ralegh’s dramatic re-enactment of Orlando Furioso is discussed by Stephen Greenblatt, Sir Walter Ralegh: The Renaissance Man and His Roles (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1973), pp. 76–7; by Helen Estabrook Sandison, “Arthur Gorges: Spenser’s Alcyon,” PMLA 43 (1928): 657–8; and by Stephen Coote, A Play of Passion: The Life of Sir Walter Ralegh (London: Macmillan, 1993), pp. 199–201. Theresa M. Krier, Gazing on Secret Sights: Spenser, Classical Imitation, and the Decorums of Vision (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1990), is an acute analysis of the dynamics of desire, secrecy and vulnerability, and the ways the imitation of Virgil and Ovid mediates these issues for Spenser. She relates Spenser’s analyses of vision to class and gender, and to his developing relationship with the Queen. Krier is interested in the ethical and representational problems of how to show hiddenness without violating it. For a brief, but stimulating, analysis of reading as a form of sexual aggression, see Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986) p. 250.

Introduction

9

Beast derives its power from a system that is hypersensitive to shame and places great store on good name. The culture of shame in The Faerie Queene empowers language and the imagination, but in dangerously negative ways, as it exposes individuals to the perils of the bad mouth, conjecture and rumor. The significance accorded shame, in the social structures explored by The Faerie Queene, leaves individuals uncomfortably suspended between the desire to preserve honor, and the ease with which they can fall into dishonor. The easy interchangeability between the two states is preserved in the associations of Timias’ name, which suggest the Greek word timi, meaning honor, and the Italian word timidezza, meaning bashfulness.14 In fact, the social formations analyzed by The Faerie Queene also betray a further weakness, and for all Spenser’s attempts to merge the social e´lite with an ethical e´lite, shame cannot escape an association with privileged e´litism. It is related to terms which reflect an acute concern with social distinctions, terms such as “disparagement” (IV.VII.16), which describes the disgrace caused by Aemylia’s marriage to her social inferior, the so-called “Squire of low degree” (IV.VII.15). In spite of the frequent condemnation of things that bring shame, Spenser derives cultural capital from his shameful material. For example, his text pursues the pleasures of voyeurism in an explicit description of Serena’s body, at the same time as it condemns the savages for abducting Serena and exposing all her “daintie parts” (st. 43) to profane sight (VI.VIII.39–43). Similarly, while the Bower of Bliss, in Book II, canto XII, is condemned for moral laxity, the description of the Bower is a tour de force of Spenser’s poetic imagination. The description celebrates Spenser’s artistry in a highly ornamental passage that digresses, both structurally and morally, from the narrative of courtly endeavor, and it is only destroyed in a belated act of shamefast iconoclasm. Spenser’s assertion of literary power in the context of marginality, in the Bower of Bliss, is highly characteristic of late Elizabethan culture, where a particular form of literary canonicity, of literary excellence, is coterminous with, and inseparable from, marginality. On the one hand, 14

See A. C. Hamilton’s commentary on Timias’ name (III.I.18), in his earlier edition of The Faerie Queene, Longman Annotated English Poets (London: Longman, 1980). The new (2001) edition only glosses “Timias” as “honoured.” Many critics have illuminated the relationship between Timias and Ralegh including: Walter Oakeshott, The Queen and The Poet (London: Faber, 1960), pp. 93– 8; Jonathan Goldberg, Endlesse Worke: Spenser and the Structures of Discourse (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), pp. 49–56; Jeffrey Knapp, An Empire Nowhere: England, America, and Literature from Utopia to The Tempest, The New Historicism: Studies in Cultural Poetics 16 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992) pp. 177–87; J. R. Brink, “The Masque of the Nine Muses: Sir John Davies’s Unpublished ‘Epithalamium’ and the ‘Belphoebe-Ruby’ Episode in The Faerie Queene,” RES ns 23 (1972): 445–7; and Patrick Cheney, Spenser’s Famous Flight: A Renaissance Idea of a Literary Career (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993), pp. 111–48.

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Redefining Elizabethan Literature

Spenser’s laureate ambitions were sanctioned by the pension he received from Elizabeth I in 1591, and The Faerie Queene is indeed England’s epic. However, at the same time, it is a quintessential late Elizabethan text which deals in trivial, scandalous material. It gives generous space to light subjects, and it makes matter out of marginality, as it wanders through the productive digressions of its form.15 In the Rhetoric, Aristotle attempts his own definition of the terms shame and shamelessness: “let shame then be defined as a kind of pain or uneasiness in respect of misdeeds, past or present, or future, which seem to tend to bring dishonour, and shamelessness as contempt and indifference in regard to these same things.”16 Aristotle’s definition of shame is relatively clear, but his definition of shamelessness is less so. Does the condition of being shameless, of being without shame, indicate rejection of the things that bring shame, and hence a kind of purity: or does being without shame indicate contempt for the rules of behavior and indifference to dishonor? Aristotle goes on to list the things that cause shame, and among the sources of dishonor are illicit relations and what he terms “making profit out of what is petty or disgraceful.” Aristotle’s definition of shame is made in the context of a discussion of social and psychological identity, but the phrase, “making profit out of what is petty or disgraceful,” offers an uncannily accurate description of one of the most characteristic strategies of late Elizabethan literary culture, which also contrives to “mak[e] profit out of what is petty or disgraceful.” Moreover, Aristotle’s intimation of the complex and unpredictable interactions between shame and different sorts of capital, including the forms of cultural, moral and monetary capital implied in the phrase “making profit,” suggests why the generation of shame should prove such a particularly productive trope for writers who were in the process of redefining literary use and value. It would seem that shame is one of our contemporary cultural obsessions. Indeed, since the 1950s, social history, psychology and moral philosophy have been interested in the role played by shame in the development of individuals and societies. Psychologists have elaborated a psychology of shame as part of a project that aims to analyze feelings and their role in 15 16

The association of ecphrasis, artistry and marginality will be pursued in chapter 3. Aristotle, The Art of Rhetoric, trans. John Henry Freese, The Loeb Classical Library (1926; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), II, vi, p. 211. The Rhetoric was included in theoretical systems for teaching logic and rhetoric in the Renaissance. See T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latine and Lesse Greek, 2 vols. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1944), I, p. 106 and II, p. 28.

Introduction

11

psychological development.17 For psychologists such as Silvan Tomkins, a focus on affects, including shame, distinguishes them from the Freudian and Lacanian schools, which, they allege, ignore feelings, and privilege drives as the primary motivational system.18 In his ambitious study, Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, Tomkins identifies nine basic affects that play a major role in psychological development, including the complex of shame-humiliation. Shame is particularly interesting for Tomkins because it is highly visible in the blush or the downcast look, and is an experience where the internal very clearly becomes external. For Tomkins, the self is located on the face because the face, not language, is the primary site of affect, and he pursues his analysis of the relationship between shame, shyness and guilt, concluding that shame is “the affect of indignity, of defeat, of transgression and of alienation”(p. 118).19 In a sense, Tomkins’ criticism of Freud and Lacan for privileging language, and for setting inner processes against external experience, is echoed in the challenge which the study of material culture has presented to Renaissance studies. In an important study of early modern material psychology, Michael Schoenfeldt demonstrates that inwardness is determined by physiological materiality. The persistent influence of Galenic medicine in the Renaissance ascribes psychological states to the actions of physical liquids, or humors, and undermines the inner–outer dichotomy which locates psychological essence in an inner core, which precedes the processes of externalization.20 Although Schoenfeldt does not concentrate on shame, the experience of shame involves an eternal traffic between internal sanctions and social prohibitions, and between internal feeling 17

18

19

20

See, for example, Silvan Tomkins, Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, 2 vols. (New York: Springer, 1962 and 1963), and Leon Wurmser, The Mask of Shame (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981). Tomkins, Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, I, pp. 3–27. While Lacan does not analyze the workings of shame, pace Tomkins, his theories do leave space for the workings of affect. See, for example, Lacan’s analysis of the role of guilt in paranoid behavior, where even Lacan’s choice of words is highly emotive: “This is a mortal passion, and one that ends by killing itself. Aim´ee strikes out at the brilliant being whom she hates, precisely because this being represents the ideal she has of herself. This need for self-punishment, this enormous feeling of guilt, can also be read in the actions of the Papin sisters . . .” De la psychose parano¨ıaque dans ses rapports avec la personnalit´e. Premiers ´ecrits sur la parano¨ıa (Paris: Seuil, 1975), p. 397; translation by Douglas Brick, taken from Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan: The Absolute Master, trans. Brick (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991) p. 31. Tomkins, Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, II, p. 118. In The Rape of Lucrece, Shakespeare anticipates the idea that the self is located on the face. See, for example, ll. 56–77 and 99–105. I am grateful to Patrick Cheney for drawing my attention to this parallel. All quotations from Shakespeare’s texts are from William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Peter Alexander (1951; London: Collins, 1989). Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert, and Milton, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 34 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 11.

12

Redefining Elizabethan Literature

and physical experience, which argues for the imbrication of inwardness and materiality in late sixteenth-century culture. In shame, the physical, in, for example, the physical sensation of blushing, is both sign and substance simultaneously, both the external somatic sign of internal feeling, and part of the very experience of those feelings.21 Feelings of shame would seem to be a recognition of the validity of a cultural system. They are an internalization of that system. Individuals feel shame when they present a self that is not appropriate to a particular occasion, so that shame is part of orderly social behavior. As Erving Goffman explains: By showing embarrassment when he can be neither of two people, the individual leaves open the possibility that in the future he may effectively be either. His role in the current interaction may be sacrificed and even the encounter itself, but he demonstrates that, while he cannot present a sustainable and coherent self on this occasion, he is at least disturbed by the fact and may prove worthy at another time. To this extent, embarrassment is not an irrational impulse braking through socially prescribed behavior but part of this orderly behavior itself.22

This would, by contrast, make shamelessness a denial of orderly behavior, a challenge to ideas of propriety, and to the social and cultural systems that determine what is appropriate behavior. In such a definition, shamelessness would be a way of breaking free from such constraints, and of asserting control over one’s actions. Shame and shamelessness are interrelated ways of figuring the relationship between the self and society, the subject and its context. Yet twentiethcentury theories have generally been preoccupied with keeping these affects separate, with the consequence that the paradoxical and productive interactions between shame and shamelessness in late sixteenth-century culture have become difficult for us to read. In modern psychological theory, shame inhibits both voyeurism and exhibitionism, by curbing interest and enjoyment, thereby reducing further exploration or self-exposure. By contrast, the mechanisms of shame analyzed in this book frequently work in exactly 21

22

The relationship between body and language is one of the central thematic obsessions of the 1590s, as my discussion of the blush in chapter 3, and of somatic language in chapter 4 will argue. In a highly important discussion of the influence of Ovid’s Metamorphoses on Elizabethan culture, The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 35 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), Lynn Enterline demonstrates how the myth of Philomela is paradigmatic of Ovid’s understanding of the body as a place where representation, materiality and action collide (pp. 1–12). Ovid, she argues, refuses any distinction between language and the body, or between ideas and matter. My study has been greatly enriched by Enterline’s work, and is in constant, sometimes explicit, sometimes implicit, dialogue with her conclusions. Erving Goffman, Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-to-Face Behaviour (London: Allen Lane, 1972), p. 111.

Introduction

13

the opposite way to that described by modern theorists such as Goffman, and serve to stimulate interest and enjoyment. Pace Goffman, maintaining order on a basis of shame is a precarious political practice. As Spenser acknowledges in The Faerie Queene, in his description of Fidessa’s deceptive ploys, shame can serve to stimulate desire, and the assertion of modesty can be sexually arousing: “So forth they rode, he feigning seemely merth, / And she coy lookes: so dainty they say maketh derth” (I.II.27). As the narrator points out, “dainty,” or reticence, “maketh derth,” stimulating need, and therefore desire, in ways that have the potential to undo the ordered universe. The blush indicates the internalization of external rules, at the same time as it serves as a visual and physical sign of internal feeling, and an externalization of the internal. Indeed, English preserves the relationship between the blush and visual activity until the late medieval period, as the verb “to blush” also meant “to glance.” The late Elizabethan texts analyzed in this book are concerned with modes of seeing and being seen, with exhibitionistic and voyeuristic readers and authors. They are concerned with eyes that both read and emit desire. For Freud, this desire is sexual, but more recent studies of shame, including those by Leon Wurmser and Silvan Tomkins, link shame to epistemology and to our desire to know. As Wurmser notes, shame is “a basic protection mechanism in the areas of perception and expression, a protection in the sense of preventing overstimulation in these two areas, as well as ‘drive restraint’ in the form of preventing dangerous impulses of curiosity and self-exposure.”23 In the sixteenth century, to know is both an epistemological and a sexual activity. Indeed, as this study goes on to argue in chapter 3, the links between textual knowledge and sexuality are explored in late Elizabethan erotic narratives that define a specifically literary mode of knowledge through the exploitation of sex and shame. The cultural significance of shame also interests social historians, most notably Norbert Elias, who argues that the operation of shame defines and maintains our status as civilized beings.24 The spread of shame in the sixteenth century is, according to Elias, a defining moment in the 23

24

Leon Wurmser, “Shame: the Veiled Companion of Narcissism,” quoted from Joseph Adamson, Melville, Shame and the Evil Eye (New York: State University of New York Press, 1997), p. 13. Adamson’s book is an exciting and illuminating study of shame as the source of Melville’s creative power, but its rigorously psychoanalytical approach differs from my own, more catholic, approach to the issue of shame. Norbert Elias, The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners (1939), trans. Edmund Jephcott, 2 vols. (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, I, 1978; II, 1982). Elias aims to demonstrate “the decisive role played in this civilizing process by a very specific change in the feelings of shame and delicacy. The standard of what society demands and prohibits changes; in conjunction with this, the threshold of socially instilled displeasure and fear moves; and the question of sociogenic fears thus emerges as one of

14

Redefining Elizabethan Literature

process of Western civilization, as increasing emphasis was placed on bodily and emotional control and politeness, so that the threshold of shame was lowered. Consequently, shame serves to establish social hierarchies, as those who are more refined, and therefore more likely to feel shame, come to form the social e´lite. Importantly, given the tendency of some psychological analyses to homogenize shame, Elias emphasizes that the experience and the significance of shame vary according to historical situation, but he fails to pursue one of the implications of his work which is that shame serves to define the difference between public and private experience in the sixteenth century, as it separates activities that can be seen by others, from activities that decorum demands should remain hidden. Indeed the experience of shame, with its differing social valences, as explored by Elias, also argues that the experience of privacy differs according to class. Elias’ approach to shame as a historically specific mode intersects with current critical interest in writing about the body, in Gail Kern Paster’s study of Renaissance drama, The Body Embarrassed.25 This particular contribution to our understanding of shame argues that shame is used to establish gender differentiation, as well as social differentiation. Paster analyzes some of the ways shame conditions understandings and representations of the body, and of the self within that body, in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century drama. She invokes the theory of the humors as the means to link Bakhtin’s theory of the grotesque body, as the instrument of political critique, both to Elias’ history of civilization, and to the history of the subject. Paster breaks down the separation of the material and figurative in highly suggestive ways, and both Elias and Paster uncover the ways in which changing canons of bodily propriety sensitized late sixteenth-century culture to the issue of shame. However, while Paster and Elias argue that canonicity is associated with bodily control, my exploration of the ways shame and shamelessness come to be exploited as modes of cultural change in the late sixteenth century argues for much more unpredictable interactions between changing canons of bodily propriety and changing definitions of the literary canon.26 Literary canonicity in the texts that form the basis of my study is not

25 26

the central problems of the civilizing process” (I: p. xiii). For Elias, it is impossible to understand the psychogenesis of adult make-up in civilized society independently of the sociogenesis of our civilization. Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). I argue that a “poetics of shame,” in late Elizabethan culture, provided the mechanisms and structures through which change could be effected. For other studies that argue that shame, or more specifically embarrassment, is an integral part of creativity, one must look outside Renaissance studies to Christopher Ricks’ Keats and Embarrassment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974). Ricks argues that Keats is “sensitive to embarrassment, not insensitive to prurience” (p. 15), and that his interest in

Introduction

15

predicated on the classical, controlled and civilized body, nor, more controversially perhaps, is it predicated on an idealized masculine body, but on a body that is driven by powerful desires and cannot control the rush of humors and fluids that constitute somatic identity. Moreover, Paster’s argument that the body as leaky vessel is a source of social embarrassment has been challenged by Michael Schoenfeldt’s revolutionary approach to Bakhtin, which has shifted the locus of shame in Renaissance culture. Schoenfeldt points out that Galen considered the obstructed body to be the source of disease. Therefore, the ideal of Renaissance medicine was “the careful maintenance of constitutional solubility,” through the balancing of ingestion and various kinds of excretion.27 In other words, Bakhtin’s classical body, which is closed off to the world, was not idealized, and nor was the leaky body necessarily a source of shame. As Schoenfeldt demonstrates, regulation does not necessarily equal victimization, as the self-regulatory regimes offered by Galenic medicine empowered the individual who thus managed to free the self from the deterministic power of a preponderant humor. Twentieth-century theorists of shame are, by and large, obsessed with the need to separate shame from guilt, an obsession which is derived from Freud. In any case, guilt is much more interesting to Freud than shame, as it is the product of the interminable conflict between the ego and the insatiable superego which “observes, directs and threatens the ego.”28 For Freud, the development of civilization is comparable to the process of maturation in an individual, and both processes produce shame as individuals learn to cover their bodies. As Freud recognizes, in this comparison, shame has everything to do with the definition of private and public spaces, and largely because of Freud, theorists have ascribed shame to the public and external world, and guilt to the private and internal world. Developing this comparison,

27

28

shame expresses the delicacy of his humane morality. This is virtually the opposite of the process I identify in the 1590s, where texts capitalize on prurience. Moreover, Ricks associates embarrassment with defencelessness, suggesting that in embarrassment one relinquishes control (p. 13), whereas in generating shame, writers in the 1590s play rather more unstable games with power and powerlessness, as they try to ground the illusion of control on the magnification of negativity. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves, p. 15. It could be argued that Thomas Nashe takes a Galenic view of economic production, as he attacks monopolizations of capital as a kind of bunging up that prevents the productive, free flow of money, honor and ideas. Nashe’s representations of the literary system will be discussed in chapter 2. Lecture 31, “The Dissection of the Psychical Personality,” New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, trans. James Strachey, ed. James Strachey and Angela Richards, Pelican Freud Library (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988), II, pp. 88–112. In the lecture on femininity, Freud notes that shame is supposed to be a feminine characteristic that arises from penis envy and aims at the concealment of genital deficiency. However, he also warns that it is difficult to distinguish what should be ascribed to the influence of the sexual function, from what should be ascribed to social breeding. See Lecture 33, “Femininity,” p. 166.

16

Redefining Elizabethan Literature

twentieth-century anthropology elaborated the theory of shame cultures and guilt cultures. A shame culture is motivated by fear of external sanctions, while a guilt culture relies on internal sanctions provided by the individual conscience. The theory is ascribed to Margaret Mead, but it was formalized and elaborated by Ruth Benedict, in her study, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: “True shame cultures rely on external sanctions for good behaviour, not, as true guilt cultures do, on an internalised conviction of sin. Shame is a reaction to other people’s criticism . . . it requires an audience or at least a man’s fantasy of an audience. Guilt does not.”29 Shame is the emotion of a world in which the public supersedes the private, while guilt is the product of a world in which the private supersedes the public. For anthropologists, shame and guilt are emotions, but they also designate contrasting social structures. Nevertheless, this book does not claim that late sixteenth-century culture is a shame culture, as defined by twentieth-century anthropology, because the division between shame cultures and guilt cultures, and even between shame and guilt, is over-schematic when applied to an analysis of Renaissance culture where conceptions of internal and external, private and public experience, are not stable and are in the process of being defined. Indeed, it may be a schematic distinction in any culture. Shame is an internalization of society’s values, as well as an exteriorization of affect in blushing or the downcast eye, and, as such, it blurs the boundaries between inner and outer experience. Twentieth-century theorists have tried to separate shame and guilt in a number of ways. For instance, Bernard Williams argues that shame arouses contempt and avoidance in the onlooker, while guilt arouses anger and resentment. Like John Rawls, Williams also posits that shame is concerned with what kind of person one is, while guilt is concerned with what one does, although this begs the question of whether it is possible to separate what we are from what we do.30 In anthropology, sociology and moral philosophy, the use of the term shame is quite specific, but such kinds of precision are not available in the sixteenth century given the uncertain boundaries between internal and external, and the fluid interrelationships between terms such as guilt, shame and embarrassment. 29

30

Margaret Mead, ed., Cooperation and Competition Among Primitive Peoples (New York: McGrawHill, 1937), pp. 493–5. The quotation is from Ruth Benedict, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture (London: Secker & Warburg, 1947), p. 223. For an astute analysis of the limitations of the theory of shame cultures and guilt cultures, see Douglas L. Cairns, Aidos: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993). Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity, Sather Classical Lectures 57 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), pp. 89–94; John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), pp. 442–6 and 483–4. For Rawls guilt also invokes the concept of right, while shame invokes the concept of goodness (p. 483).

Introduction

17

The implication of theories of shame has always been that shame is something despicable. For Kant, shame is associated with the trivial values that lead to losing face.31 Indeed for some theorists, shame is primitive and undemocratic, and guilt is less superficial than shame because it relies on the sanctions of internal conscience. For example, Agnes Heller describes the modern Western world as a superficial shame-collectivity – a world where morality has been replaced by public opinion. Such a society breeds conformity and produces individuals who no longer follow a system of moral conduct but only act on the basis of their fear of shame. In this kind of society, there is conformity, but not morality, and shame becomes a permanent state of undifferentiated anxiety which is not provoked by a specific action, or any specific moral apprehension.32 I would suggest that shame cannot be separated from guilt because shame forces the individual to focus on the self with a critical eye and this is not a simple external judgement. As Bernard Williams has pointed out, culture is nothing if not the internalization of external rules.33 The operation of shame raises ethical issues such as the extent to which one should be swayed by others, and the authority of private systems, issues that interest contemporary moral philosophers, and the writers of late Elizabethan culture, who do not necessarily see the self as a source of truth, but perhaps as a potential source of solipsism and duplicity. Essentially, shame is a socializing emotion, one which conveys an assessment of what one is, and how one is related to others. In spite of their differences, all theories of shame share the view that shame links the moral and the social, with the constitution of the subject. It is an emotion that raises fundamental questions about the decorum of vision, about the relationship between private and public spheres, and about the authority and nature of the self. Shame turns attention to the self, and blushing is an expression of heightened self-consciousness. The texts that exploit shame in late sixteenth-century culture tend to make the processes of reading and writing highly self-conscious. They also frequently deploy shame in a highly competitive context: indeed, the idea of competition is preserved in the phrase “to put to shame,” which means to outshine or eclipse. Cultural ambition and authorial competitiveness are characteristically articulated in 31

32

33

See, for example, The Critique of Practical Reason (1788), Part II, in Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy, trans. and ed. Mary J. Gregor, introduction by Allen Wood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) p. 261. Agnes Heller, The Power of Shame: A Rational Perspective (London: Routledge, 1985), pp. 45–6. By contrast Tomkins, Affect, Imagery, Consciousness, II, pp. 140–1, sees shame as characteristic of democracies, because all participants in the experience of shame, both the subject and the onlooker, are equal, while guilt arouses feelings of contempt among onlookers and undermines solidarity. Shame and Necessity, pp. 46–9.

18

Redefining Elizabethan Literature

transgressive and often highly eroticized contexts that excite shame, so that a specifically literary subject is made in and through disgrace. excess, super fluit y and red undancy: redefining t he fun ction of prod igalit y in cult ural reform Shame is a form of anagnorisis, or recognition, and it marks a shift from ignorance to knowledge, which is often expressed through sudden blushing and embarrassment.34 Anagnorisis delivers a shock to readers and, as the sudden apprehension of unexpected knowledge, anagnorisis has a particular affinity with literary modes of thought. Indeed, the moments of recognition, and the strange coincidences, in texts such as Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors, Robert Greene’s Pandosto or Sidney’s Arcadia, are the most contrived elements of the narrative. The scenes where a character’s true identity is suddenly unmasked, or those long thought to be dead miraculously return to the living, are so artful that they threaten the plausibility of the text. Yet the very elements that beggar belief are precisely those elements that draw attention to the text as textual construct, and to its nature as an artefact. As Terence Cave points out, anagnorisis operates in a very different way from rational cognition. It works “surreptitiously . . . and often perversely, seizing on precisely those details that from a rational point of view seem trivial.”35 The literature of the 1590s often works in perverse and apparently haphazard ways. In their outlandish narratives and anecdotes, writers such as Spenser, Nashe or the authors of the erotic narratives that flourished in the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign exploit the relationship between error and the marvelous suggested by the homophones to wander and wonder. These writers shamelessly court disbelief, but the incredibilities of their texts nevertheless impart certain forms of knowledge and experience which are inaccessible to other kinds of writing, or are, at least, not as readily accessible to other structures of thought. Thus the ability to arouse wonder not only becomes an attribute of literariness, it also grounds the claim that literature is a special and useful activity in its own right. As a form of anagnorisis, shame leads the reader into different kinds of intellectual experience, into a mode of apprehension which involves thinking through coincidence, excess, deviation and ornamentality. This kind of thought 34

35

The OED defines anagnorisis as the literary term for the dramatic d´enouement. Terence Cave, Recognitions: A Study in Poetics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988), esp. pp. 1–4 and 55–83, identifies anagnorisis as the very essence of fiction, and emphasizes its associations with scandalousness and peripeteia (or wandering). Cave, Recognitions, p. 3.

Introduction

19

process is aesthetic in the fullest sense of the word, as it combines sense perception with intellectual perception. By exploiting shame, writers redefine literary activity as an alternative epistemological process, one that is no longer justified by reference to privileged modes of thought and the privileged modes of rationality.36 The emphasis on wonder as an essential component of literature inevitably draws attention to the reader’s role, and extends interpretive experience to include feelings of shock and disorientation. The 1590s are characterized by new forms of reading, as well as new forms of writing. Writers question the idea that readers are passive vessels, although this also means that they become increasingly uneasy about the reader’s power over the text, and often come to see the reader as a threat to their own authority.37 The presentation of creation as a collaboration between writer and reader is part of a general process of subjectification at work in the 1590s, which promotes both the individuality of the author, and the individuality of the reader, and this process of subjectification is stimulated by new understandings of history and the origin of meaning. To give an example of how wonder, shame and subjectification might work together, I turn to Sir Walter Ralegh. In fact, subjectification was forced on Ralegh’s authorial persona by political and social isolation, and 36

37

In the essay entitled, “The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking,” Martin Heidegger reminds us of the possibility that “there is a thinking that is more sober-minded than the incessant frenzy of rationalization and the intoxicating quality of cybernetics. Perhaps there is a thinking outside of the distinction of rational and irrational” (“The End of Philosophy and the Task of Thinking” [1969], reprinted in Martin Heidegger, Basic Writings, ed. David Farrell Krell [London: Routledge, 1993], p. 449. Krell uses the translation by Joan Stambaugh first printed in On Time and Being [New York: Harper & Row, 1972], pp. 55–73). “Cybernetics” is Heidegger’s term for the arrangements of a scientific-technological world, and the new kind of thinking he posits would result in the surrender of previous kinds of thinking. Heidegger wants to protect the interplay of concealment and unconcealment in thinking (“The End of Philosophy,” Basic Writings, pp. 446–8). This is a difficult idea. As it exists, thinking in metaphysics and science is the projection of the thinking subject on to an object. Heidegger wants to combine this kind of understanding, or unconcealment, with understanding as the apprehension of the pure presence of the object of thought, which would give a sense of the thing as strange, as different from us and as its own thing. He wants to understand the things our pre-established systems of thought leave hidden and to understand the impulse to hide. Krell suggests that Heidegger sees wonder as a mode that preserves the interplay of concealment and unconcealment, Basic Writings, pp. 428–30. Compare Eugene Kintgen, “Reconstructing Elizabethan reading,” SEL 30 (1990:): 7, who discusses the contemporary redefinition of reading as “an active, constructive act.” Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984) argues that active reading is also the consequence of “functional ambiguity” (p. 18), which is rendered necessary by the threat of censorship. In an important study of early modern lyricism, Post-Petrarchanism: Origins and Innovations of the Western Lyric Sequence (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), pp. 5–15 and 63–89, Roland Greene analyzes reading as a commerce between individual personalities. His observations serve as a context for, and corrective to, my own brief reading of reading.

20

Redefining Elizabethan Literature

in response, he adopted behavior that aroused wonder, and even bordered on madness, as a peculiar form of self-defense and self-promotion. In The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana (1596), Sir Walter Ralegh cultivates irrationality, in the context of personal disgrace, for the most serious of purposes. The tract was written during Ralegh’s period of disgrace following his marriage to Elizabeth Throckmorton in 1592, and it demonstrates his industry, thereby providing him with the means to insinuate his way into important debates about England’s foreign policy. The land of Guiana is a substitute for Elizabeth and for Ralegh. On the one hand, it is the object of wish-fulfillment, making up for the satisfactions he lost through his injudicious marriage.38 Images of the Golden Age, which were invoked by Ralegh, in other contexts, to describe his relationship with Elizabeth, are now applied to Guiana which is a state beyond time, a place where blossom, leaves and fruit appear together on the trees, and promise and fulfillment exist simultaneously (K4r).39 On the other hand, Guiana is a substitute for Ralegh precisely because its appeal is imaginary. A new world land on the very limits of geographical knowledge, a land whose appeal is imaginative, rather than substantive, is the means by which Ralegh tries to argue his way back into a position of power. The Discoverie was dedicated to Admiral Charles Howard, and Robert Cecil, the Secretary of State, and through them its contents would presumably have found passage to Elizabeth, and yet, rather surprisingly, the factual status of Guiana is always at issue. Ironically, the truth about Guiana is not only constructed out of Ralegh’s experience of travail and expense, but also out of fables and travelers’ reports. Often the truth of the text is established by the most unorthodox criteria, by hearsay, for example, and by the sheer weight of superstition, as the narrator acknowledges: “yet for mine owne part I am resolved it is true, because every child in the provinces of Arromaia and Canuri affirme the same” (K3r–v). The text repeatedly courts disbelief, as if to test the reader’s imaginative commitment and, in this way, it brings the issue of interpretation to the fore. The Discoverie of Guiana is a defense of the imagination, a defense of the reader’s ability to suspend judgement and entertain the fantastic. Among the many wonders Ralegh encounters or hears about in Guiana are the Ewaipanoma, a race who “are reported to have their eyes in their shoulders, 38

39

All quotations are from Sir Walter Raleigh A Report of the Truth of the Fight About the Iles of the Acores. The Discoverie of the Large, Rich, and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana, Scolar Press Facsimiles (Leeds: Scolar Press, 1967). For example, compare the lyric, “Praisd be Dianas faire and harmless light,” first published in The Phoenix Nest in 1593, which applies images of the Golden Age to the description of the Queen.

Introduction

21

and their mouths in the middle of their breasts” (K3v). Ralegh goes on to use this nation as the basis of an argument for suspending judgement: Such a nation was written of by Maundevile, whose reportes were held for fables many yeares, and yet since the East Indies were discovered, wee finde his relations true of such thinges as heeretofore were held incredible: whether it be true or no the matter is not great, neither can there be any profit in the imagination, for mine owne part I saw them not, but I am resolved that so many people did not all combine, or forethinke to make the report. (K3v)

The sheer number of believers, who may well have all been extremely gullible, is invoked to guarantee the “truth” of the report. This is a curious argument that actually leaves the issue of reality in confusion: “whether it be true or no the matter is not great.” The Discoverie of Guiana is a liminal text, one that operates at the very limits between fact and fiction. It deals in things “not else where to be found” (G1v), and attests to Ralegh’s interest in the limits of the thinkable. It deals in probabilities and promises, as well as certainties, and tempts the reader with the richness to be discovered, if only he/she can keep an open mind. Ralegh’s difficulties over his marriage were the result of what he saw as Elizabeth’s misinterpretation of his motives and her over-hasty judgement, and in this context, a text that argues for the value of postponing judgement has personal resonance for Ralegh. Yet the suggestion that there is profit to be gained from indulging the imagination is particularly appropriate to Ralegh. Ralegh’s power had no real basis, it was not even based on the claims of high birth, instead it worked through, and on, the imagination. Ralegh’s power was imaginary and imaginative. It depended on a variety of skills, including his ability to create and sustain an illusion, his ability to write poetry, and his ability to satisfy the imaginative needs of his contemporaries, especially the Queen. The Discoverie of Guiana is a text that confounds categories and traditional expectations, as it wanders through time and space, suspending judgement, and traveling into unexplored territories. In this text, the marginal acquires authority, and Ralegh presents his discussion of the poison used by the Aroras as “a digression not unnecessary” (I2r), a phrase that could describe Ralegh’s tract, and even his own career. The value of wandering, as Ralegh sails across the globe to an uncertain destination, in order to regain Elizabeth’s favor, is linked to the value of wondering as the reader’s readiness to believe the marvelous stories of Guiana, that strain belief, promises not only imaginative, but also material, gain.40 Like the prodigal son, Ralegh 40

Stephen Greenblatt, Sir Walter Ralegh, p. 107, identifies elements of romance in The Discoverie. As Patricia Parker points out in Inescapable Romance: Studies in the Poetics of a Mode (Princeton:

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Redefining Elizabethan Literature

wanders far from home, but, unlike the prodigal son, his travels generate riches, not loss. Ralegh’s authorial identity was not exclusively structured according to the principles of Christian humanism, but also employed a different aesthetic which found value in the valueless. His career asserts the value of gratuitous acts, things done on the spur of the moment, or without apparent need, and such acts create the illusion of complete autonomy, because to have a motive is to be in need and, therefore, contingent. Gratuitous acts, like the exaggerated ornamentality of a prodigal style, and the irrational expenditure of prodigality, assert one’s self-hood and make frivolity, excess and redundancy significant.41 Ralegh’s image is constructed on a series of flamboyant gestures, and the conspicuous consumption of his own wealth. From his exotic and expensive costumes, to his brief lyrics and fragments of poetry, Ralegh managed to capitalize on the ideas of prodigal expenditure, marginality and ornamentality. Typically, in The Discoverie of Guiana, Ralegh confounds opposites, specifically the opposites of loss and gain in his self-justification. The pain of this voyage is transformed into a purgative surfeit of deprivation, a modern form of “pilgrimage” (A3r). “Too much travel and expence” (A3r–v) is cast as the means to recover the paradoxical delights of “the moderation of excesse, and the least tast [sic] of the greatest plentie formerly possessed” (A2v–A3r). Gain is linked to loss, and loss to gain, just as the Indians’ prodigality and their sheer wastefulness is presented as the sign of their wealth (C2r–v). This is a very Elizabethan form of prodigality, one which is profitable because it overspends. In a strategy that is reminiscent of other late sixteenth-century writers, including Nashe, Ralegh sees the positive nature of excess, setting it up not only as a desirable goal, “the greatest plentie,” but also as the means to achieve that goal, through an orgy of deprivation and hyperbolical selfdenial. Richard Helgerson and Arthur Kinney, have been responsible for focusing our attention on one of the fundamental paradigms in Elizabethan

41

Princeton University Press, 1979), pp. 7–8 and 37–9, there are positive aspects to error in romance. While Ralegh erred from his duty to Elizabeth, in marrying Throckmorton, The Discoverie proves that error can be fruitful. I am particularly interested in the way authority, in The Discoverie, is based on marginal, errant and prodigal experience. As a piece of authorial self-defense, the tract articulates authorship in ways that were characteristic of the 1590s. For an extremely suggestive analysis of Ralegh’s modes of self-presentation in the context of England’s conception of its own powerful immateriality, see Jeffrey Knapp, An Empire Nowhere, pp. 1–17 and 175–219. See John Freccero, “Autobiography and Narrative,” in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality, and the Self in Western Thought, ed. Thomas C. Heller et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), pp. 22–4, for a brilliant analysis of gratuitousness.

Introduction

23

literature: the story of the prodigal son.42 According to Helgerson, fictional patterns of admonition, rebellion and repentance were concentrated in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, and did not only provide subject matter for fiction, but were also used to structure authorial careers. Thus writers such as George Gascoigne, John Lyly and Sir Philip Sidney used the scheme to reconcile humanist principles with their taste for literature (Elizabethan Prodigals, pp. 11–12). By accepting the association of authorship with youth, triviality and sin, which is implicit in the prodigal son narrative, they could present the writer as a lovesick youth who would eventually acquire the wisdom to reject the folly of literary fiction, just as in the parable of the prodigal son, the son repents, returns to his father’s house, and is forgiven.43 In what he terms “didactic” texts (p. 1), the narrative of rebellion and repentance is invoked to warn writers against squandering their talents in the useless and/or immoral byways of literature, while what he terms “romantic” texts (p. 1) focus on the period of rebellion as a period to be indulged and celebrated. The prodigal paradigm focuses attention on the conflict between precept and experience, and identifies that conflict with a struggle between the generations. Helgerson identifies three phases in the history of the prodigal son fiction, the last of which starts in 1590, with the publication of Robert Greene’s Mourning Garment, Farewell to Folly, Groatsworth of Wit and Repentance, and is characterized by the reassertion of the conservative prodigal son paradigm, and an atmosphere of sober retrenchment expressed in texts such as Books V and VI of The Faerie Queene. Helgerson’s pessimistic view of the 1590s is echoed by Arthur Kinney in his study of Elizabethan prose fiction, in which he describes the 1590s as a “dark grim age” which witnesses the decline of humanism and Tudor power.44 For Kinney, the conflict between precept and experience is figured through a debate over the value of humanism. Elizabethan writers interrogate humanism’s ability to provide a workable model for living, in the face of increasing moral bankruptcy. Writers of the 1590s, like Thomas Nashe and Thomas Lodge, lose their faith in eloquence and in the educability of humanity, and respond to the crisis of values with satire and apocalyptic sermonizing (Humanist Poetics, pp. 295–423). 42

43

44

Richard Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals; Arthur Kinney, Humanist Poetics: Thought, Rhetoric, and Fiction in Sixteenth Century England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), esp. pp. 295–362. Helgerson summarizes his analysis on pp. 1–15. For the parable of the prodigal son, see Luke 15:11–32. However, Helgerson argues that Elizabethan writers are much less interested in forgiveness than in rebellion. Kinney, Humanist Poetics, p. 303. For Helgerson’s assessment of the 1590s, see Elizabethan Prodigals, pp. 14–15.

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The 1590s were indeed a period of faltering expectations, retrenchment and constriction, but they were also a time of dynamic growth and experiment. The loosening of the conceptual framework as the nation anticipated change after more than thirty years of female rule finds expression in the loosening of the generic system which made space for new forms of authorship and new conceptions of literary value. While some authors reinvoked the comforting scheme of rebellion and repentance in the 1590s, others developed forms of authorship defined by their opposition to the status quo and the principles of humanist morality. They challenged the linear narratives of the prodigal son model, and subverted the kind of moralized reading on which it is based, by promoting the recreative pleasures of interpretation. While any study of shame in Elizabethan culture is indebted to Arthur Kinney, and especially to Richard Helgerson, they set the complex of shame within a Christian humanist framework, which the Elizabethan narratives of prodigality either confirm or resist, but do not rewrite. It seems to me that in those texts that indulge in prodigality, a more profound, complex and paradoxical process is going on than even Helgerson acknowledges. Loss and gain become interdependent, and even mutually productive principles, and expenditure needs to be reckoned as a kind of profit.45 Prodigality is itself an instance of the shameless indulgence in the shameful, but it is more than a momentary and controlled bout of bad behavior, because, as the following chapters will argue, the very negative aspects that define it as reprehensible, such as peripherality and ornamentality, are explored as ways of articulating change and of rewriting inherited hierarchies of value. Shame can work in a variety of ways. For instance, Wendy Wall argues that shame is associated with the anxieties of exposure and is exploited by Renaissance texts to articulate the dangers specific to publication. In her highly productive reading, shame interacts with Elizabethan gender conventions to produce authorship as a masculine activity.46 However, Wall, like Helgerson and Kinney before her, tends to focus on prodigality as thematic content, but prodigality is not just a thematic obsession in late sixteenth-century culture, it is also articulated stylistically and structurally. As a consequence, and partly from a desire to reformulate the relationship between prodigality and Christian humanism, and partly from a desire to 45 46

A similar point is elegantly made by Lars Engle, Shakespearean Pragmatism, p. 2. Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), esp. pp. 169–226. Rather more tendentiously, because conspicuous expenditure seems to be part of aristocratic behavior, Lawrence Manley suggests that prodigality undermines a status system based on land ownership, and produces a situation of debt and credit that is characteristic of the capital city and of capitalism. See Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 308.

Introduction

25

reorient prodigality to structural and stylistic issues, I prefer terms such as excess, superfluity and even redundancy, to the term prodigality. Prodigality is also expressed in the exaggeration of ornamental effects, or in hyperconventionality, or in repeated digressiveness and the overstepping of structural limits. Prodigality is related to wandering and its homophone wondering, through its over-stepping of boundaries, and to excessive ornamentality, and even to parody, which exaggerates the conventional elements of a style or genre. The structural implications of prodigality as a process of wandering bring us back once again to the issue of transgression, or of over-stepping, from the Latin trans, meaning across, and gressus, the participle from the verb “to step or walk.” In the culture of the 1590s, newness is inseparable from transgression. For example, in Michael Drayton’s sonnet sequence, Idea (1599), the personal vision of the poet-lover is presented as deliberately eccentric, as the vision of a madman, who is also a poet who cannot find a consistent form of lyric expression. The poet’s uniqueness is described in terms such as “wanton,” “wilde,” “madding,” “jocond” and “irreguler” (sonnet 3), terms that imply criticism as well as celebration.47 The experimental space of this sonnet is both a source of freedom, creativity and copious wit, and the place of transgression. Sonnet sequences generally define themselves as distracted and distracting, and present themselves as the consequence of the erring and even lunatic experiences of the poet-lover.48 Sonnet 34 of Idea (1599) connects the theme of error to the newness of its invention. As the sequence wanders through a variety of unexpected forms, styles and tones, its ability to wander becomes a source of wonder, and its particular form of over-stretched inventiveness is praised: Mervaile not Love, though I thy power admire, Though my conceite I farther seeme to bend, Then possibly invention can extend, And yet am onely starv’d in my desire; If thou wilt wonder, heers the wonder love, That this to mee doth yet no wonder prove. Idea (1599) sonnet 34 47

48

All quotations from the different versions of Drayton’s sonnet sequence are from Cyril Brett ed., Minor Poems of Michael Drayton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1907), and are checked against the contemporary editions. I have used Brett’s rather ancient edition, for all its limitations, because he is the only “modern” editor to print the different versions of Idea in a single, accessible format. For the sonnet sequence as the expression of lunacy, compare Drayton’s Idea (1599), sonnet 23, and Idea (1602), sonnet 12. Examples of sonnets which talk about the errant nature of authorial experience include Thomas Lodge, Phillis, sonnets 38 and 40; William Smith, Chloris, sonnet 16; and Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella, sonnets 4, 67 and 106.

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Redefining Elizabethan Literature

Invention is quite literally transgressive in this sonnet as it transgresses, steps over, and goes beyond the normal forms of invention.49 Yet the transgressive nature of invention is the source of the author’s originality and difference, so that the sonnet is transformed into a place of testing which is both negative and positive, both disabling and enabling. This sonnet reveals that the sequence’s transgressions, and its newness, derive from the same source. They originate in its tendency for hyperbole and amplification, in what could be termed the sequence’s hyper-conventionality, in the way it is more inventive than invention, and in the way it exaggerates the conventions it inherits. Paradoxically, the newness and individuality of sonnet 34 are the product of its hyperconventionality and the highly familiar sonneteering language which is poured on to the page with prodigal excess. In a famous analysis of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, Patricia Parker discusses the implications of error and deviation for both the writer and the reader of Ariosto’s unconventional epic.50 She notes that error becomes the principle that connects the diverse elements of the poem, and that Ariosto draws attention to its varied forms. Error also serves as an alternative principle of connection in late Elizabethan texts, and this understanding of error draws heavily on contemporary readings of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a text which deviates from epic norms, while it promotes metamorphosis as its principle of connection. Error arouses feelings of guiltiness or shame in the errant party, and the experience of shame is compounded by reference to the Metamorphoses which, as a later section of the introduction will argue, is a text that is powerfully associated with feelings of guilt in the 1590s. But neither Ovid, nor the metamorphic wits of the 1590s, attempt to conceal their errors, instead they capitalize upon them. In the context of the 1590s, error is the concomitant of literariness which, in humanist terms, is by its very nature deviant. Error is also the concomitant of individuality, as writers affirm their newness through their deviations from established models. reg istering change in the f ormal int erests of t exts In The Arte of English Poesie, George Puttenham calls the rhetorical paradox “the Wondrer,” and paradox has affinities with both wondering and 49

50

The association between newness and madness is also made in Ralegh’s “Booke of the Ocean to Scinthia.” The poem exploits a link between productivity and despair in its melancholic narrator. At the same time, it articulates the novelty and strangeness of the narrator’s lonely situation and the difficulty of finding a style appropriate to it. The relationship between productivity and despair is discussed by Raymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosphy, Religion and Art (London: Nelson, 1964) esp. pp. 134–53 and 217–74. Patricia Parker, Inescapable Romance, pp. 16–53.

Introduction

27

wandering.51 This study uncovers a logic of paradox in late Elizabethan culture which enables change, and gives access to new ideas and new forms. Paradox is a structure that is very amenable to the 1590s because etymologically and conceptually it encapsulates marginality, novelty, absurdity, prodigality and glorification, and the origins of the term preserve the apparent contradiction of self-glorification through marginality. The term paradox derives from two Greek words: para and doxa. As a preposition, para has a range of meanings: with the genitive it means from the side of; with the dative it means by the side of; and with the accusative it means beside, near, along, beyond. It also carries the metaphorical sense of in transgression, or violation of something. Thus para is a preposition of marginality, which means beside, contrary to, or beyond. It is also an adverb of comparison or intensity, in such phrases as para poly, which means by far, or by much. Doxa means good repute or glory, as well as a notion, opinion or expectation.52 On the one hand, competitiveness and the desire to increase glory are inscribed in the compound. Indeed, in ancient Greek, the adjective paradoxos not only describes something that is contrary to expectation, it is also the title that was given to distinguished athletes or artists. However, at the same time as the paradox enters the arsenal of epideictic rhetoric, it also inscribes the shameful and the idiotic, by its reference to things that are contrary to opinion and to good repute.53 Moreover, the paradox undermines the logic of presence, by its eternal equivocations. A paradox, such as Berowne’s observation in Love’s Labour’s Lost: “No face is faire that is not full so blacke” (IV.iii.253), is differential and has the power to hold back, postpone and conserve what would be lost in the moment of immediate apprehension. It suggests likeness and difference simultaneously.54 51 52 53

54

Puttenham associates “the Wondrer” with the marvelous. See The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (1936; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 225–6. For the Greek meanings, see A Greek–English Lexicon, compiled by Henry George Liddell and Robert Scott, revised by Henry Stuart Jones with Roderick McKenzie (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1925–1932). In the Renaissance, as Richard A. Lanham points out, paradox was also known as synoeciosis, or the wondrer. Lanham defines a paradox as “a seemingly self-contradictory statement which is yet shown to be (sometimes in a surprising way) true,” in A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968), p. 71. Shakespeare’s extended meditation on the paradox, or cross-couple, in the sonnets, is analyzed with dazzling intellectual fertility, by Joel Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986). This understanding of a paradoxical logic in late Elizabethan culture lies at the heart of my disagreement with Clark Hulse. I am strongly indebted to Hulse’s book, Metamorphic Verse: The Elizabethan Minor Epic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), but Hulse sees the metamorphic image as extinguishing unlikeness. By contrast, I see late Elizabethan culture as more unstable, and I argue that the characteristically paradoxical processes of the 1590s preserve difference in likeness, and likeness in difference, and do not allow them to become crystallized in opposition or identity. Berowne’s paradox is one of the examples of paradox cited by the OED. The most famous body of paradoxes in Renaissance culture are the Beatitudes, from the Sermon on the Mount, Matthew 5:3–12.

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A paradox is a statement contrary to received opinion, or a statement seemingly absurd though essentially true.55 As a consequence, all Elizabethan defenses of literature can be classified as forms of rhetorical paradox as they defend the indefensible, and represent the absurdity of literary practice as something that nonetheless possesses value. They are also forms of epideixis which display the skill of the author who can argue the unarguable, and they shock by their unexpectedness. Paradox is linked to many of the themes that will be explored in this study. It is a dialectical form that requires active engagement from its readers in order to overturn it and discover its full ironies. Paradox functions like the mixed genres and other forms of distorted self-reflexion that were so popular in the 1590s. It questions traditional frameworks of apprehension by turning established categories into new formulations that nevertheless have their roots in those old categories. Liminal forms, such as paradox, that work on the endless dialectic of statement and counter-statement are ways of extending thought whilst still remaining within the limits of the thinkable. As Rosalie Colie has argued, the paradox is a way of accessing knowledge that is inaccessible to other kinds of epistemological structure. It is a way of discussing what is not.56 Moreover, it is a perversion of an argument, that draws truth from error, and links with the themes of scandalousness and shame, as well as the structural and thematic implications of wandering, or errant, behavior. The texts which form the basis of this study convey a sense that they come at a time of profound conceptual and stylistic change and they register their awareness of periodization in their formal interests, and in a preference for paradox, parody, hybridity and fragmentariness. Late Elizabethan culture invokes the modes of paradox, and the related strategies of generic mixture and parody, to extend the boundaries of inherited thought. These are some of the ways change is conceived, and the unabashed triviality of such texts is the source of their importance to the culture of the 1590s as they insinuate change in oblique ways. Generic mixture, like paradox, destabilizes formal categories and questions the inherited frameworks that give experience its shape and form. Sonnet sequences, for example, combine the sonnet with other forms such as satire, epigram, complaint and epistle, but this 55

56

Sister M. Geraldine, C. S. J., “Erasmus and the Tradition of Paradox,” SP 61 (1964): 41–63, discusses various examples of the paradoxical encomium including Sir John Harington’s Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596) and Donne’s Paradoxes (written in the early 1590s?). A. E. Malloch, “The Techniques and Function of Renaissance Paradox,” SP 53 (1956): 191–203, is an excellent analysis of the implications of the trope. The classic study of the paradoxical encomium is Walter Kaiser, Praisers of Folly: Erasmus, Rabelais, Shakespeare (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963). Rosalie Colie, Paradoxia Epidemica: The Renaissance Tradition of Paradox (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 13. Colie’s seminal work is the foundation for my work on paradox.

Introduction

29

formal self-marginalization and self-trivialization is a source of strength which renovates and extends old forms. The texts studied in this book are characterized by generic instability, and contain elements of anti-genre which question and undermine their own assumptions, as one perspective is played off against another.57 The relationship between genre and antigenre is a kind of rhetorical inversion which functions like paradox in late sixteenth-century culture, equivocating between frames of understanding which are never relinquished. At the same time, generic mixture is both a way of indicating the plenitude of the writer’s imagination, and a way of indicating the diverse plenitude of experience.58 Generic mixture and parody, even self-parody, as the text revisits the poet’s corpus, are the components of Ralegh’s poem, “The Booke of the Ocean to Scinthia.” In writing this poem on the brink of social and metaphysical oblivion, Ralegh is fully aware of the strangeness and novelty of his situation and of the difficulties of giving it proper expression. This is writing in the dust, something which the poet acknowledges is very different from his former style which is now out of date: Shee cares not for thy prayse, who knowes not thers; Its now an Idell labor, and a tale Tolde out of tyme that dulls the heerers eares; A marchandise wherof ther is no sale. 21st Booke II. 356–959

The problem Ralegh’s situation poses is also a problem of style. What sort of poetry is he to write in the aftermath of youth, when he has come to see the limitations of Petrarchanism?60 Before his disgrace, Ralegh adapted the conventions of Petrarchanism to a celebration of the sovereign. However, 57

58

59

60

Joel Fineman, Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye, p. 121, calls these elements “resistances,” places where writing resists the limits of an integrated world. His analysis complements Rosalie Colie’s brilliant work on “genera mista” in The Resources of Kind: Genre-Theory in the Renaissance, ed. B. K. Lewalski (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). Both Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), p. 175; and Claudio Guill´en, Literature as System (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), pp. 146–58, emphasize an antithetical relationship between genres, but the relationship between genres is not necessarily one of straightforward negation. Enterline, The Rhetoric of the Body, pp. 1–37, emphasizes the Ovidian sources of the thematics and stylistics of dismemberment. Sexuality almost always involves some sort of violence in Ovid, and she records how the thematic disruption of myths of sexual satisfaction and subjective wholeness in Ovid is reflected in stylistic and poetic fragmentation. The Poems of Sir Walter Ralegh, The Muses Library, ed. Agnes Latham (London: Routledge, 1962). However, I follow most scholars in reading the numerals in the title as 21 and 22, and in omitting Latham’s stanza divisions. The reasons for these changes are detailed by Philip Edwards, Sir Walter Ralegh (London: Longman, 1953), pp. 96–102. “The Booke of the Ocean to Scinthia” is another text written after Ralegh’s indiscreet marriage to Elizabeth Throckmorton.

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Ralegh’s new style does not stand in a simple relation of opposition to Petrarchanism, rather it is the trace of passing Petrarchanism, “This was of all forpast the sadd effect” (21st Booke l. 335). The present, and such a future as can be imagined, are pre-scribed in the past. The paradoxical movement of literary history is a movement forwards which is blocked, and, at the same time, enabled, by the obsessive recollection of the past, “So wrate I once, and my mishapp fortolde” (21st Booke l. 124). Ralegh’s new style is in some sense beyond his control, as it is the consequence of the passage of literary history, as well as personal and political history. Not only does Ralegh expose Elizabeth’s abuses of the court through his new style, he also registers the dynamic of history as the reordering of the relationships between different genres and styles. Parody, both of the literary past, and of Ralegh’s own past, is explored as a way of articulating change. In The Light in Troy, Thomas Greene demonstrates that Renaissance ideas of newness and individuality are paradoxically dependent on imitation, and so change is conceptualized through conservatism, by invoking well-established models and structures. Change is articulated through the difference between the present and past, and takes the form of an inescapable nostalgia for a past whose invocation is a constant reminder of what has been lost.61 The peculiarly retrospective nature of late Elizabethan cultural change, as exemplified in “The Booke of the Ocean,” may help to make sense of those late Elizabethan texts that strike us as hopelessly clich´ed and over-cooked. It may, for example, help us to understand why the sonnet sequence was so appealing to late Elizabethan culture in spite of the fact that it creaks under the strain of hyper-Petrarchan flourish. Redundancy and repetition can convey meanings that are indicated, but not clearly explored, by verbal residue.62 Cultural renewal may take the form of hyperconventionality, as style, and the particular understanding of experience it articulates, are 61

62

Thomas M. Greene, The Light in Troy: Imitation and Discovery in Renaissance Poetry, The Elizabethan Club Series 7 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 28–53. Greene’s observation seems to me to complicate the emotional perspective of late Elizabethan anti-Petrarchanism. Anti-Petrarchanism was an expression of anti-courtliness, as Daniel Javitch, Poetry and Courtliness in Renaissance England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1978) pp. 107–40, and Douglas L. Peterson, The English Lyric from Wyatt to Donne: A History of the Plain and Eloquent Styles (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 164–211, among others, both describe. But like all forms of parody, anti-Petrarchanism combines attack with celebration, the desire for change with nostalgia, and the literary dynamic modifies the political dynamic, so that anti-Petrarchanism is not the expression of straightforward anti-courtly values. Harry Berger makes a similar point about the functioning of imagery in The Faerie Queene, in The Allegorical Temper: Vision and Reality in Book II of Spenser’s Faerie Queene (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1957), p. 154. Any study of redundancy in the Renaissance will need to absorb the argument of Berger’s brilliant study of Spenser’s “Technique of Conspicuous Irrelevance” (p. 122). Berger notes that Spenser frequently exploits the differences between image and idea in his allegory,

Introduction

31

reformulated through exaggeration and parody which are both retrospective and creative, both celebratory and critical, both predetermined and liberating. In The Archaeology of Knowledge, Michel Foucault emphasizes the importance of the disjunctive through his advocacy of the term archaeology over the term history. He argues that history represents a totalizing impulse and that critics should not look for connections between events to forge totalities and unities, but should describe separations and dispersions and should give due weight to difference and discontinuity.63 His observations on the interpretative drive for integrity and totality also serve as a warning on the level of the structural interpretation of texts. Hybridity does not guarantee stylistic unity and so the hybrid texts of the 1590s are not endowed with the kind of integrated author-function that guarantees respect and has ensured entry into modern canons of literature. This book is indebted to those theorists, like Foucault, who have redirected attention to the marginal.64 It tries to decenter the 1590s in order to reveal particular strategies at work in late Elizabethan culture and although this project has parallels with Fredric Jameson’s decentering of culture, it differs in key ways from Jameson’s conclusions. Jameson argues that postmodernism takes the minor and marginal elements in modernism and transforms them into the central features of cultural production. The texts I study never lose or hide their marginality, but claim significance through forms of triviality, transgression and paradox. He also laments the demise of unity and the emptying out of content in pastiche, but the marginal, the fragmentary

63 64

but it is not a question of how the vehicle (image) explains the tenor (idea), but rather what meanings are generated when two different perspectives confront each other. See especially pp. 120–60. Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, World of Man Series, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (1969; London: Tavistock Publications, 1972), pp. 3–17. Several studies of marginality in the early modern period inform my analysis. David Lee Miller, The Poem’s Two Bodies: The Poetics of the 1590 Faerie Queene (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), explores the “internal iconoclasm that makes [Spenser’s] poetry a perpetually self-displacing mode of discourse”(p. 12). Miller greatly enriched my understanding of error through his analysis of retraction, and helped me engage with Derrida’s meditation on self-marginalization in his essay, “Freud and the Scene of Writing” (1967), reprinted in Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), pp. 196–231. Steven Mullaney, The Place of the Stage: License, Play, and Power in Renaissance England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988) is a provocative exploration of the ideological consequences of the geographical marginality of the Elizabethan stage; and Valerie Traub, Desire and Anxiety: Circulations of Sexuality in Shakespearean Drama (London: Routledge, 1992) powerfully analyzes how Shakespeare’s plays transgress binary oppositions and emphasize “the provisional, polymorphous creativity of the pursuit of pleasure” (p. 17). Subsequent studies of marginality in the Renaissance, following in the footsteps of critics such as Traub, Mullaney or Walter Cohen, Drama of a Nation: Public Theatre in Renaissance England and Spain (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), have tended to make drama the privileged site of cultural resistance, but chapters 3 and 4 of this study suggest that lyric also offers important paradigms of cultural resistance.

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and the shameful do not necessarily have negative implications, and they do not necessarily embody reduction and loss.65 Parody and self-conscious intertextuality are indeed characteristics of late Elizabethan culture, but they are not proof of the emptying out of value, and the irresistible attenuation of forms, but ways of addressing one’s relationship to history, and to cultural, national and gender ideals: moreover, they are ways of suggesting connections and of framing the audacities of thought. ornamentalit y and literariness Generic mixture tends to fragmentation as varied elements are brought together which run the risk of producing “a hotch-pott or gallymafry,” to invoke Gabriel Harvey’s warning in Pierce’s Supererogation, quoted at the very beginning of this introduction. However, ornamentality also exerts its own pressures on the structure of texts and tends towards fragmentation. Ornamentality is not a specifically courtly style in the late sixteenth century and, although there were courtly figures who cultivated the ornamental, the ornamental was also explored and exploited by middle-class writers such as Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Nashe.66 Ornamentality exerts a fragmentary force on texts as narrative flow is interrupted by tropological fancy. An ornament is in some senses a superfluous deviation imposed on discourse, and an ornamental style is made up of smaller forms embedded in larger structures that disrupt the consistency of those larger structures. In The Arte of English Poesie (1589), Puttenham compares figures of speech to flowers, objects ready to be anthologized, and made into garlands of quotations which preserve cultures as recombinations of disintegrated remains. But Puttenham also describes rhetorical ornaments as abuses and as trespasses of speech that stray into the margins beyond the areas of normalized linguistic experience: As figures be the instruments of ornament in every language, so be they also in a sorte abuses or rather trespasses in speach, because they passe the ordinary limits of common utterance, and be occupied of purpose to deceive the eare and also 65

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Jameson sets out his theory of the postmodern in “Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” NLR 146 (1984): 53–92, and “Postmodernism and Consumer Society,” in The AntiAesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture, pp. 111–25. Julian Pefanis, Heterology and the Postmodern: Bataille, Baudrillard, and Lyotard (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), pp. 2–3, highlights the importance of anthropological thought to postmodern critiques of totality. See my discussion of Marlowe’s ornamentality in “Gender and Voice in Hero and Leander,” in Constructing Christopher Marlowe, ed. J. A. Downie and J. T. Parnell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) pp. 148–63.

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the minde, drawing it from plainnesse and simplicitie to a certaine doublenesse, whereby our talke is the more guilefull & abusing.67

In the texts studied in the following chapters, decorative excesses define a specifically literary self, but as a consequence the literary persona thereby defined is deviant as well as fragmented. Although this persona lays claim to authority, it is not the integrated subjectivity that we might expect, and neither is it fully present to itself. Like the texts in which it finds expression, it is fragmentary, disjunctive and self-subverting. Diversionary and oblique constructions are the very stuff of literature, but they are also the most accurate way of articulating subjectivities that are themselves liminal and do not occupy a clearly defined psychological, social or philosophical space.68 Surprisingly, fragmentariness is not opposed to subjectivity, rather it is the very medium of its coming into being. In other words, I reverse Fredric Jameson’s logic of fullness deteriorating into fragmentation, because the authorial subject is not de-formed or de-natured by fragments, but is constructed in the processes of fragmentation. The texts I study in the following chapters base their claim to authority on the extravagance of their style or behavior and exalt decorative and recreative activities. Thus their self-promotion is based on the unashamed promotion of the trivial, negative and peripheral aspects of authorial occupation. A potential relationship between truth, ornament and marginality is preserved in the Greek word kosmos which means both ornament and world-order. It can be translated as decoration or universe, and simultaneously refers both to something trivial, and to something significant.69 As Angus Fletcher notes in his seminal study of allegory, kosmos refers to a large-scale order, 67 68

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The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Willcock and Walker, p. 154. Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theatre in Anglo-American Thought, 1550– 1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), argues that early modern subjects experience themselves, not as secure states, but as thresholds. I agree with this point. However, he ascribes this state of psychological and sociological fluidity to a new economic system that produced the dissolution of social identity, as if, at some point in say 1490, or perhaps 1540, social identity was fixed. Perhaps things always seem firmer in retrospect, but I would argue that social identities, like all kinds of identity, are unstable, fluid, inconsistent and self-contradictory in all periods. This may help to explain the frustration historians encounter when they try to identify, let alone understand, Elizabeth I’s religious beliefs. It seems that even the most celebrated, central and socially acknowledged identities are fluctuating, and are produced in response to ever-changing contingencies. They are liminal. My interpretation of the term kosmos is indebted to Angus Fletcher’s seminal work, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964), esp. chapter 2, “The Cosmic Image,” pp. 70–146. Fletcher’s exploration of allegory involves an analysis of the relationship between metaphor, as a constitutive element of allegory, and allegory itself. This meditation on the relationship between part and whole leads to his reflections on the kosmos, the root of our terms cosmic and cosmetic. Liddell and Scott, A Greek–English Lexicon, note that Pythagoras was the first to use kosmos in the sense of universe. The verb kosmeo means to order, arrange or rule; as well as to adorn, equip or dress up, and is especially used of women.

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and to the small-scale sign of that order, although this association of ideas derives from an ideological universe that is unfamiliar to us. The term kosmos carries the idea of something fitting, of small-scale and large-scale order. It implies propriety and decorum and, in Greek, it can also mean a magistrate or lawgiver. In the relationships between the cosmetic and the cosmos, the part implies the whole, and equally importantly, the whole implies the part, and the fragment stands in a mutually complementary relationship with the whole.70 To illustrate his point, Fletcher identifies synecdoche and metonymy as examples of teleologically controlled tropes which mediate the relationship between part and whole. Metonymy deals with relationships of cause and effect and so labels dynamic interactions between part and whole. An example of metonymy, as defined by Fletcher, would be the term Petrarchanism, where the name of the author (or cause) has come to stand for a whole style. Synecdoche labels static relationships between part and whole, and Fletcher cites Quintilian’s observation that synecdoche “let[s] us understand the plural from the singular, the whole from a part, a genus from the species, something following from something preceding; and vice versa.”71 In Fletcher’s analysis, kosmos is “a symbol that implies a rank in a hierarchy” (p. 109), and so he preserves the idea of place, of the cosmetic and its specific placement in relation to structure, and it is the fact that the cosmetic always stands in relation to something that gives it meaning. My divergence from Fletcher stems from his repeated emphasis on the kosmos as the expression of systems of status that do not allow the free play of the imagination. As a consequence, he only allows ornament the power to elevate or denigrate, whereas I claim that the texts studied in the following chapters mobilize ornament to frame new ways of thinking. The ornamental and the marginal are not simply secondary or residual, they do not necessarily oppose some imagined or pre-existent reality or totality, but adumbrate knowledge that is apprehended through, determines and is determined by, the fragmentary form of ornament. The connection between the center and the margin, or between significance and ornamentality, is not one of simple inversion or negation, but one that is mediated through paradox. The importance of ornamentality and apparent inconsequentialities in establishing a social e´lite provides a model for the self-promotion of a literary 70

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See Fletcher, Allegory, pp. 110–17. Berger, The Allegorical Temper, p. 154, suggests that in Spenser’s allegory, image and idea, part and whole, are examples of Spenser’s balance. The relationship between them is not only an example of temperance, but is also an example of “the broad harmony inherited from Platonic sophrosyne.” Fletcher, Allegory, p. 85, The quotation is from the definition of synecdoche in Quintilian’s Institutes, Bk. VIII, ch. 6.

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community whose products had long been dismissed as trivial.72 In her study of what she terms “the trivial self-hood of the aristocracy,” Patricia Fumerton has explored some of the ways ornamental trifles, such as jewels and sonnets, were used to establish and perpetuate aristocratic communities.73 Decorative aristocratic identity complicates ideas of triviality and seriousness because the aristocrat (usually) enjoyed economic and political power. Admittedly, Fumerton’s argument that ornaments “allude to a world of cultural value that could not otherwise be represented except by means of oblique, allusive adornment” (p. 22) needs more careful articulation, since Elizabeth’s sumptuously embroidered costumes, to take a specific example, allude to a world of sovereign values that are also represented in treatises on kingship, the structure of the Church of England, and the common law, and they suggest national, personal and religious allegiances. However, ornament can certainly be explained philosophically, and the strength of Fumerton’s analysis is that she is one of the very few critics to attempt to do this, but ornament can also emphasize or obscure, and it has a crucial emotive power which makes it a powerful social tactic. The status of ornament is a complicated issue in Renaissance culture, partly because, in certain contexts, Renaissance culture encouraged extravagance, partly because jewels and ornamented clothes may strike the viewer as having great intrinsic value, and partly because ornament has (frequently negative) gender associations.74 Nevertheless, Fumerton’s analysis is important because it suggests a different approach to the relationship between center and margin, positing the paradoxical truth that knowledge can be annexed by peripheral fragments, to which I would add the caveat that the reliance of 72

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Marcel Mauss’ synthesis of anthropological studies of the Melanesian “kula” and the Chinook “potlach,” in The Gift, develops a similar system, in which prestige and rank are based on the irrational principle of the destruction of wealth. Patricia Fumerton, Cultural Aesthetics: Renaissance Literature and the Practice of Social Ornament (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 1. Richard A. Lanham, in his highly important study of the appetite for rhetorical ornament, The Motives of Eloquence: Literary Rhetoric in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976), reminds us that reality need not be exclusively identified with clarity (pp. 20–32). Lanham’s work is particularly important to my study because he links the rhetorical view of reality to interpretations of Ovid (pp. 48–64 and 82–110). His work offers an important analysis of the function of Ovid in Renaissance culture and my own study of Ovid in the 1590s, in the following section of the introduction, is indebted to his work. Naomi Schor analyzes the links between ornamentality and feminization in her profound and elegant study, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York and London: Methuen, 1987). I will return to the gendering of ornament in chapter 3. David Kuchta, “The Semiotics of Early Modern Masculinity in Renaissance England,” in James Grantham Turner, ed., Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 233–46, is a very careful reading of fancy male clothing that makes the crucial point that the meaning of ornament depends on the amount of ornament and what is deemed to be excessive in a particular context.

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completion and full knowledge on peripheral fragments undermines their status as either full or complete. reread ing ovid in the 1590s Earlier in the introduction, I argued that any claim to modernity in Renaissance culture is simultaneously both an act of anticipation and one of retrospection which seeks authority in the classical past. In the 1590s, Ovid is repeatedly invoked to provide the classical sanction for self-proclaimed modernity. The reinterpretation of Ovid is the catalyst for cultural change in the 1590s, and in exploring the role Ovid plays in redefining late Elizabethan literary practice, this study is less interested in verbal echoes and lines of influence, and more interested in what an identification with Ovid might signify in late Elizabethan culture. In Jonathan Culler’s words, “Intertextuality is less a name for a work’s relation to particular prior texts than an assertion of a work’s participation in a discursive space and its relation to the codes which are the potential formalizations of that space.”75 According to W. R. Johnson, Ovid demonstrates “a counter-classical sensibility” and rejects the struggle for control over reality, for grand identity and order, through the pursuit of hazard, deformation and a mordant sense of human weakness. In late Elizabethan culture, the invocation of Ovid frames an alternative to the authoritative Virgilian cultural archetype, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses is the principal text in this counter-tradition. Heather James and Patrick Cheney have analyzed different aspects of this Virgilian– Ovidian dialectic.76 Cheney has suggested that an Ovidian cursus is used by 75

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Jonathan Culler, “Presupposition and Intertextuality,” MLN 91 (1976): 1382. Surprisingly few studies of the function of Ovid in Renaissance culture actually go beyond the business of identifying sources, but there are a few very important studies that are exceptions to this rule: Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), esp. pp. 1–82; Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986); Lynn Enterline, The Tears of Narcissus: Melancholia and Masculinity in Early Modern Writing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995); Enterline, The Rhetoric of the Body; and Richard Halpern, “‘Pining their Maws’. Female Readers and the Erotic Ontology of the Text in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis,” in Venus and Adonis: Critical Essays, ed. Philip C. Kolin, Garland Reference Library of the Humanities. Shakespeare Criticism 16 (New York: Garland, 1997), pp. 377–88. Ovid’s role in the English Renaissance is crucial, but is only just beginning to receive due attention. My work follows in the footsteps of these pioneering critics. Patrick Cheney, Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession: Ovid, Spenser, Counter-Nationhood (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997); Heather James, Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, Politics, and the Translation of Empire, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 22 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). On the Metamorphoses as anti-epic, see Leo C. Curran, “Transformation and Anti-Augustanism in Ovid’s Metamorphoses,” Arethusa 5 (1972): 71–92; and W. R. Johnson, “The Problem of the Counter-Classical Sensibility,” California Studies in Classical Antiquity 3 (1970): 123–50.

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Marlowe to structure a literary career in contradistinction to the Virgilian– Spenserian model with its particular moral and generic investments, and James has turned attention to the competing forms of literary and political authority offered by the Virgilian and Ovidian models. As she points out, in the early modern period, the panegyrical tradition is mostly known as Virgilian, and the interrogative tradition as Ovidian, although this irons out the ironies in Virgil’s text. I will address the issue of Ovidian career paths in chapter 3, but James’ analysis of the political investments made by writers who imitated Virgil and Ovid is an important context for the present discussion of Ovid in relation to structural issues and to eroticism. The promotion of the marginal in late Elizabethan culture is inspired by readings of the Metamorphoses, a text which is constructed out of the elaboration of peripheral narrative material. Moreover, rereadings of Ovid produce an association between verbal facility, imagination and guilt which is crucial to the development of the poetics of shame. The unholy trinity of Ovid, literariness and shame surfaces and resurfaces in the texts that will be analyzed in the following chapters, texts which, in various ways, are all obsessed with the erotic. This book is in the tradition of recent work that has taken the truism that Ovid and the Metamorphoses play a crucial role in late Elizabethan literature, and finally subjected it to critical interrogation. In addition to Cheney and James, the most important work on the significance and function of Ovid in Elizabethan culture is that of Leonard Barkan, Jonathan Bate, Richard Halpern and Lynn Enterline. In brief, I argue that the interest in Ovid both explains and expresses the curious phenomenon that is the wholesale sexualization of the processes and structures of late Elizabethan culture. This argument is anticipated by Halpern’s work on Venus and Adonis in which he notes the association of literariness and sex. For Halpern, Shakespeare’s Ovidian narrative, in this poem, is an allegory of reading which exposes the impotence of the work of art through misogynistic humor. My disagreements with Halpern will be discussed in the analysis of the epyllion in chapter 3, but we agree that Venus and Adonis traces the birth of the aesthetic from the sexual. However, the following chapters not only broaden Halpern’s conclusions to encompass the epyllion as a genre that is concerned with the representation of the aesthetic through the erotic, but trace a widespread cultural obsession with the relationship between the sexual and the aesthetic. Like Bate, Enterline traces the internalization of Ovidian narrative in the sixteenth century, but unlike Bate, she pursues the epistemological and ontological implications of internalizing Ovid’s narratives of ceaseless displacements. Enterline’s and Halpern’s

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analyses are complementary in that Enterline unpacks the rhetorical concerns that Ovid made available to the Renaissance, an issue that Halpern approaches through a specific focus on Venus and Adonis. For Enterline, Ovid focuses on language as a mode of representation, and as a mode of action, whose effects exceed intention, as they do in the tales of Actaeon and Cephalus, for example. As a consequence, Ovidian narrative dismantles the empiricist conception of voice and offers the Renaissance an acute analysis of the connections between body and voice, rhetoric and sexuality. Ovidian tropes for the voice, which are mediated through Petrarchanism, determine the mode of early modern poetry, but at the same time, as Enterline notes, they disrupt its representations of the self and of the erotic life. Enterline is particularly interested in the violence that subtends the discursive production of sexual difference in Ovidian myths, and how this violent Ovidian legacy influences Renaissance understandings of aesthetic form, a theme that I will discuss in chapter 4. One of the functions Ovid serves in late Elizabethan culture is articulated by Thomas Lodge. Lodge inaugurated the epyllion vogue that swept through England in the 1590s, but his earliest surviving work is a polemical piece whose title establishes both its dialectical context and its aims: A Reply to Stephen Gosson’s Schoole of Abuse in Defence of Poetry Musick and Stage Plays. The Reply was probably written in 1579, when Lodge was about twenty-two years old, and had recently arrived at the Inns of Court from Oxford University.77 For his part, Stephen Gosson was one of the most prominent of the Protestant poet-whippers, and he castigates idle forms of entertainment in two texts: The School of Abuse and the Apology, both of which were published in 1579.78 Lodge’s defense of literature, in his Reply to Gosson, is also a defense of Ovid, which links literariness, especially imaginative facility, with Ovid and also, therefore, with guilt. Lodge praises Ovid’s “promptnes” and associates this with literariness: “who liketh not of the promptnes of Ovid? who not unworthely cold bost of himself thus Quicquid conabar dicere versus erat [everything I tried to say was verse]. who 77

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William Ringler, “The Source of Lodge’s Reply to Gosson,” RES 15 (1939): 164, and Arthur Kinney, Markets of Bawdrie: The Dramatic Criticism of Stephen Gosson (Salzburg: University of Salzburg Press, 1974), p. 17, date the Reply to 1579. All quotations from the Reply are from The Complete Works of Thomas Lodge, The Hunterian Club, 4 vols. (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963) I, pp. 1–48. (Each text is separately paginated but the Reply is the first text in vol. I.) Both of Gosson’s tracts are dedicated to Sidney. Arthur F. Kinney, “Parody and its Implications in Sydney’s Defense of Poesie,” SEL 12 (1972): 1–19, suggests that Sidney’s Defence burlesques The Schoole of Abuse. On the interrelationships between criticism and practice in the late sixteenth century, see Elizabeth Story Donno, “The Epyllion,” in English Poetry and Prose 1540–1674, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Sphere Books, 1970), pp. 82–98. Renaissance attacks on literature, more generally, are discussed by Russell Fraser, The War Against Poetry (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970).

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then doothe not wonder at poetry?” (1: 11).79 “Promptnes” describes Ovid’s facility and he was widely admired for his sharp mind and witty style. For example, in the preface to his translation of the Metamorphoses (1565–7), Arthur Golding highlights the “fyne inventions” (l. 189) and the “darke and secret misteries” (l. 187) of Ovid’s style.80 In the 1590s, the Metamorphoses came to epitomize literary creativity through its association with the metamorphic power of wit as writers acknowledged a parallel between the principle of transformation and the literary imagination. The relationship between metamorphosis and imagination is satirized in Sir John Harington’s poem, The Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596), which draws a parallel between a project to redesign a toilet, also known as a jakes, and literary composition, which is figured as classicizing metamorphosis.81 However, while Ovid was famed for his imagination and facility, he was an equivocal source of authority, as his texts were also notorious for indecency, particularly the Ars amatoria. Lodge tries to defend Ovid against Gosson’s accusations of lecherousness, but his defense nonetheless implies criticism: “I must arme my self now, for here is the greatest bob I can gather out of your booke forsoth Ovids abuses, in descrybing whereof you labour very vehementlye termi[n]g him letcher, & 79

80

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This Latin phrase also appears in Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia (1598), and was generally associated with Ovid. See G. Gregory Smith, ed., Elizabethan Critical Essays, II, p. 323 and I, p. 196, footnote to l. 14. The word “promptness,” which means readiness or quickness to action, may itself have erotic connotations. See Troilus and Cressida, V.ii.172. I am grateful to Juliet Fleming for drawing my attention to this possibility. Ovid’s Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation 1567, The Classics of Greece and Rome, ed. John Frederick Nims (New York: Macmillan, 1965). The 1567 edition was the first to include all fifteen books of the Metamorphoses. In a discussion of the preliminaries to Shakespeare’s first folio, Margreta de Grazia notes that a clean page was prized as evidence of fluency of thought and expression, and it was thought that neither Cicero nor Ovid blotted their page. See Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), p. 58. As introductions to Ovid, I found Brooks Otis, Ovid as an Epic Poet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), and G. Karl Galinsky, Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”: An Introduction to the Basic Aspects (Oxford: Blackwell, 1975) to be particularly useful. Renaissance Ovid is a polyglot text, and is always read through other texts, including commentaries, as well as subsequent adaptations of Ovid, like Petrarch’s Canzoniere. Renaissance editions of Ovid, with their commentaries, are discussed by Don Cameron Allen, Mysteriously Meant: The Rediscovery of Pagan Symbolism and Allegorical Interpretation in the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), pp. 163–99. Elizabethan interpretations of Ovid are analyzed by Gerald Snare in his excellent, but neglected, essay, “Chapman’s Ovid,” SP 75 (1978): 430–50. In Harington, building a privy is compared to making metaphors, and metamorphosing a jakes is presented as the ironic equivalent of writing books. The Metamorphosis of Ajax is discussed more extensively by Elizabeth Story Donno, ed., Sir John Harington’s A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, Called The Metamorphosis of Ajax (London: Routledge, 1962), pp. 17–23. Jason Scott-Warren, Sir John Harington and the Book as Gift (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 56–98, discusses how Harington adapted The Metamorphosis to a variety of recipients, and circulated it for politico-religious ends to carve out a space for himself that was both aristocratic and humanistic.

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in his person dispraise all poems, but shall on [sic] mans follye destroye a univerlsal [sic] com[m]odity” (I, p. 19). Elizabethan admiration for Ovid’s style was coupled with a sense of guilt when confronted with his eroticism. As a consequence, literariness, verbal fluency and imaginative facility come to be associated with guiltiness and even with wantonness, through the Ovidian model, yet it is precisely this sense of guilt which is explored and exposed in the 1590s where what is taboo inspires creation.82 The Metamorphoses intersperse curious stories of mythological transformation with traditional elements of Virgilian epic. The very opening of the poem juxtaposes claims to novelty and individuality with the paradoxical claim that the poem is part of the unbroken epic tradition with its roots in the mysteries of prehistory: In nova fert animus mutatas dicere formas corpora; di, coeptis (nam vos mutastis et illas) adspirate meis primaque ab origine mundi ad mea perpetuum deducite tempora carmen! Bk.1, ll. 1–4

(My mind is bent to tell of bodies changed into new forms. Ye gods, for you yourselves have wrought the changes, breathe on these my undertakings, and bring down my song in unbroken strains from the world’s very beginning even unto the present time.)83

The text presents itself as a particular sort of writing which is self-consciously modern, in that it deviates from the established Virgilian model, and is determined to deal with “new forms,” so that the unity of epic is deliberately undercut by the episodic structure of the Metamorphoses. The narrative of the myth of Narcissus in Book III of the Metamorphoses exemplifies the characteristic movement of Ovid’s epic parody. The story of Narcissus is a digression within the debate between Jove and Juno over whether men or women enjoy sex more. In order to settle their argument, the king and queen of the gods ask the seer Tiresias for his opinion. The narrator then reminds us that the first person to consult Tiresias 82

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Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Tristia, Fasti and Heroides were all standard schoolroom texts in the sixteenth century. See T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latine & Lesse Greeke, II, pp. 417–55. The influence of the Amores and the Ars amatoria is discussed by John Carey, “The Ovidian Love Elegy in England,” D.Phil., Oxford University, 1960; and more recently by M. L. Stapleton, Harmful Eloquence: Ovid’s Amores from Antiquity to Shakespeare (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), who brings out the association between sexual explicitness and poetic fame which was inherited from the Ovidian model. Text and translation from Metamorphoses, trans. Frank Justus Miller, The Loeb Classical Library, 3rd edn. rev. G. P. Goold, 2 vols. (1916; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).

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was Liriope, the mother of Narcissus, and this is the cue for the story of her vain son. However, the myth of Narcissus is actually only one of a series of related myths and is demoted by the narrative which begins with the story of Echo, proceeds to the story of Narcissus, and then modulates into the story of Pentheus and Bacchus. The tale of Pentheus and Bacchus is an etiological myth which explains why the Thebans worship Bacchus, and it takes the reader to the end of Book III. Epic devices, such as digression and oration, are no longer subordinated to the main narrative, but colonize the narrative space, and the unpredictable variety of existence, with its paradoxes and inconsistencies, is expressed by a text which eschews the search for consistent meaning and propels itself into unpredictable areas. The poet of the Metamorphoses is free to treat each episode as they wish, so the text becomes an anthology of styles and narrative techniques. Any claims to consistent moral values are sidetracked by the ceaseless turns of the narrative and its fundamental preoccupation with movement. The digressions and the instabilities of the narrative, as one story modulates into another, and as one being modulates into another, present experience as a “perpetuum carmen,” a ceaseless song. Life is a process of ceaseless movement and uncontrollable plenitude as unexpected forms are spawned by the narrative, but these forms also fragment and deflect the narrative, and the “perpetuum carmen” is both heroic and ironic, both a sign of indomitable creativity, continuity and plenitude, and a sign of failure to reach the end. For the authors of the 1590s, who sought to defend writing against restrictive and formulaic criticism, Ovid became an important model, one which valorized authorial individuality, flexibility and technical skill. Ovid’s compendious epic suggested ways in which competing values could be brought together to challenge existing conceptions of literature, and his luxuriant wantonness challenged the simplicity of conventional moral judgements based on the denial of sensual experience, by insinuating a connection between poetic creativity and sexual desire which made literary morality a chimerical goal and eventually freed literature from the necessity to be didactic. Even more importantly, not only does Ovid supply narrative material, Ovidian metamorphosis functions like paradox and generic mixture, in that it breaks down existing categories and offers structures of thought through which new ideas can be conceptualized. In Clark Hulse’s words, “the metamorphic [image] is integral, minimizing differences. It may suggest the ecstasy or terror of the flesh made free to move across the categories of substance, and of the mind to move across the categories of thought.

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Indeed, it may call into question our ability to categorize experience at all.”84 In his counterblast to Gosson, Lodge expresses many of the tones and attitudes which were to become characteristic of the 1590s. Perhaps most surprising of all is the fact that the new writer’s confidence in his own intellectual superiority now grounds his claim to social superiority, rather than the reverse. He rehearses the traditional humanist defense of poetry on allegorical and utilitarian grounds, but combines this with grandiose claims about the poetic imagination. He asserts the dignity of the poetic vocation and assigns poets divine powers through the conviction that: “Poetrye commeth from above from a heavenly seate of a glorious God unto an excellent creature man, an orator is but made by exercise” (I, p. 13). Lodge invokes the example of Homer, whom he calls “Humanus Deus” (I, p. 2) and explains that the poetic imagination is a divine gift sent to special mortals. He then warns the reader against reading texts “litterallye” (I, p. 16) and develops a concept of poetry which, although still allegorical, requires an active and creative participation with the text from the reader.85 Lodge’s radical interpretations of Ovid may be seen as expressions of a more general change in reading habits that took hold in the late sixteenth century.86 Two readings of Ovid competed for prominence, one allegorical and the other historical. In allegorical readings, the truth of the text is determined by reference to transcendent truth. Every text is related to the same divine source and every aspect of human experience, whether physical or spiritual, external or internal, is related through the analogies which structure God’s universe. In such readings, transcendent universal truth is the ultimate source of textual authority, and the particular nature of the author and the particular nature of the text itself are relatively unimportant. Moreover, since Christian truth is held to be unchanging, even texts from 84 85

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Clark Hulse, Metamorphic Verse: The Elizabethan Minor Epic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), p. 7. The OED defines “literal” as: (1) of, or pertaining to the letters of the alphabet; (2) representing the very words of the original, verbally exact; (3) in theology, referring to the primary sense of any word in its natural and customary meaning, as distinguished from its allegorical or mystical meaning. Lodge’s ideas about Ovid and the nature of literature are developed in Scillaes Metamorphosis (1589), the poem that inaugurated the new form of erotic narrative that was to become so fashionable in the 1590s, which will be discussed in chapter 3. For a discussion of changing interpretations of Ovid in the context of Renaissance attitudes to homoeroticism, see Claude J. Summers, “Hero and Leander: The Arbitrariness of Desire,” in Constructing Christopher Marlowe, ed. J. A. Downie and J. T. Parnell, pp. 133–47. As Thomas Greene observes in The Light in Troy, pp. 28–53, Renaissance conceptions of novelty are dependent on the imitation of existing models. While I argue that Ovid was annexed by an Elizabethan literary avant-garde in the 1590s, Ovid could also serve different cultural and ontological functions, some of which are outlined in The Light in Troy, pp. 127–46.

Introduction

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radically different periods come to mean the same thing. This sort of reading is exemplified in Thomas Howell’s Fable of Ovid Treting of Narcissus (1560), an allegorical reading of Book III of the Metamorphoses, which concludes with a long moral commentary identifying Narcissus as an example of pride, and Echo as an example of flattery: Whiche Ovid now this Poete sure devine Doth collour in so wonderfull a sorte That suche as twyse, refuse to reade a lyne Wyth good advice, to make there wytte resorte To reasons schole, their Lessons to reporte Shall never gather Ovids meanyng straunge That wysdome hydeth, with some pleasaunt chaunge.87

Such readings emphasize sameness rather than difference and do not take historical change into consideration. An allegorical reading of the Metamorphoses, such as the medieval Ovide moralis´e, which was still popular in the sixteenth century, could interpret Ovid’s text as a Christian text because it sees all periods of history as fully present to each other and to God.88 This type of allegorization coexists in the late sixteenth century with a historical reading of Ovid which emphasizes his artistic achievements. The 87

88

The Fable of Ovid Treting of Narcissus, in Elizabethan Narrative Verse, The Stratford-upon-Avon Library 3, ed. Nigel Alexander (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968). However, Alexander does not include the section entitled “The Moralization of the Fable,” and the quotation is from the original edition of 1560 (B1r). On Renaissance translations of Ovid, and some very useful remarks on Golding’s translation of The Metamorphoses, and on contemporary translations of The Heroides, see Lee T. Pearcy, The Mediated Muse: English Translations of Ovid 1560–1700 (Hamden: Archon-Shoe String Press, 1984), pp. 1–36. Pearcy disputes Howell’s authorship of The Fable of Ovid (p. 1). Changes in the interpretation of the Metamorphoses in the Middle Ages are discussed by Lester K. Born, “Ovid and Allegory,” Speculum 9 (1934): 362–79. In fact, concepts of allegory were undergoing their own redefinition in the late sixteenth century. The type of allegory Howell represents here, which presents the text as a transparent medium of truth, coexisted with interpretations of allegory that emphasized its ambiguity. For example, in chapter 18 of The Arte of English Poesie (1589), George Puttenham defines the figure of “Allegoria” or “false semblant” as a courtly figure because its ambiguity makes it an efficient and safe way of expressing criticism of the ruler. This form of allegory makes interpretation difficult and marks a movement towards a more active sort of reading which I identify as characteristic of the 1590s. See The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Willcock and Walker, pp. 186–7. Theories of allegory are also discussed by Angus Fletcher, Allegory, and by Michael Murrin, The Veil of Allegory: Some Notes Towards a Theory of Allegorical Rhetoric in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), esp. pp. 167–98. Although I disagree with Murrin’s assessment of individual authors like Lodge (p. 169), we agree about “the transitional character”(p. 184) of the late sixteenth century. Murrin identifies a Platonic notion of allegory that located the excellence of a work in its idea of “fore conceit,” not in the text itself, but this was gradually being replaced by a rhetorical notion of allegory that showed “a craftsmanlike concern for the finished product – without the metaphysics”(p. 176). For the Ovide moralis´e, see Ovide moralis´e, ed. Cornelis de Boer (Amsterdam: Verhandelingen der Koninklijke Nederlandse Akademie van Wetenschappen, 1954) which reproduces a fifteenth-century version of the text, although the text was also in circulation in the fourteenth century.

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champion of this poetic Ovid is Giraldi Cintio, who defends the romances of Ariosto and Boiardo in his treatise Discorso intorno al comporre dei romanzi (1554) and compares them favorably with the epics of Homer and Virgil. The model Cintio invokes to justify the use of multiple plots by Ariosto and Boiardo, and to give respectability to their combination of high and low matter, is Ovid. For Cintio, Ovid is the most modern of the ancients, and so the one most suitable for imitation by modern writers, precisely because he mixes high and low styles, elements of romance with epic and combines this mixture with a powerful sense of the marvelous. As well as praising Ovid’s powerful imagination, Cintio also highlights his licentiousness, and these are the two elements that form the focus of reinterpretations of Ovid in late sixteenth-century English culture, as they do in Lodge’s reading of Ovid in the Reply.89 David Quint has argued that a new historical consciousness was developing in the Renaissance which led to a re-examination of the source of the text’s authority.90 The author’s originality started to replace a transcendent allegorical origin as the text’s principal criterion of truth and the sort of unhistoricized, allegorical reading practiced in the Fable of Ovid and the Ovide moralis´e was challenged by historicized readings which interpreted the text as the creation of a historical human author.91 At the same time, humanist pedagogical practice encouraged the internalization of classical models as pupils learned to model, not only their rhetoric, but also their feelings on canonical models. Ovid’s poems, like other classical texts, were admired as repositories of forms of emotion and were read and sold as poems that readers could adapt to their own emotional purposes.92 The growth in historical self-awareness, and the internalization of classical texts at school, 89

90 91

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Judith Lee examines the use of the marvelous and the ways in which it is used to modify romance and epic, by comparing Harington’s translation of Orlando Furioso with Ariosto’s original in “The English Ariosto: The Elizabethan Poet and the Marvellous,” SP 80 (1983): 277–99. David Quint, Epic and Empire: Politics and Generic Form from Virgil to Milton (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993), pp. 179–81, notes that the runaway success of Orlando Furioso inspired critics, like Cintio, to develop a poetics of romance as an independent genre. See also Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance, 2 vols. (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1961), I, pp. 433–77 and II, pp. 954–1073. David Quint, Origin and Originality in Renaissance Literature: Versions of the Source (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. ix–xi and pp. 1–31, esp. pp. 22–4. Compare Lawrence Manley’s thesis that in the later sixteenth century attitudes towards convention become more pragmatic as the “tradition of moral prescription increasingly gave way to the individual’s critical and comparative engagement with the varieties of experience,” in Convention 1500–1750 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), p. 126. In Lynn Enterline’s words: “The Elizabethan reception of Ovid is, therefore, not merely a matter of the waning of allegory in favour of psychological readings, but touches on the formative power of rhetoric in the grammar school’s material practice” (The Rhetoric of the Body, p. 25). The internalization of the classics is discussed in greater detail by Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation:

Introduction

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help explain a process of subjectification which characterizes the literature of the 1590s, where texts emphasize the individuality of authors and readers, and the value and irreducibility of personal experience, whether it is the experience of the author, or that of the reader, which grounds textual claims to truth. The author starts to base the claim to authority in the self, in the truth of experience and the fidelity of the text to its subject. As the importance of the author increases, the text threatens to become an autonomous discourse, a self-confirming artefact that refers to nothing beyond itself.93 The production of meaning from the point of view of both author and reader is rendered self-conscious, and the text becomes an opaque medium, rather than the transparent incarnation of pre-existent Truth, as language and style turn back on themselves and explore their own origins, history and conventions. Changing understandings of historicity not only lead to the subjectification of certain kinds of writing, and the valorization of the skill of the poet and the labor of the reader, they also raise the status of poetic invention.94 The traditional rhetorical definition of invention refers primarily to the discovery of an idea that already existed, and not to a creation ex nihilo.95 The orator finds an idea or image, rather than makes one up, and this image is a copy of an idea or image which already exists, both in the mind and in the universe. The mind can only comprehend objects with which it is familiar and the process of knowledge is the discovery of resemblances. Invention is not conceived as the discovery of something completely new because there is no room for novelty in a world where everything points to everything else. Novelty, originality and what we understand as invention would rupture the continuities of the analogical universe. But in the writing of Nashe and the perverse individuality of certain kinds of erotic and historical writing, a different interpretation of invention finds expression, one which promotes what is novel in a text and finds value in the ways in which the text diverges

93 94

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English Renaissance Culture and the Genealogy of Capital (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 19–60. The idolatrous implications of authorial self-promotion are isolated by Quint, Origin and Originality, pp. 207–20. Arthur Marotti discusses the commercial importance of an author’s name in “Shakespeare’s Sonnets as Literary Property,” in Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth Century English Poetry, ed. Elizabeth D. Harvey and Katharine Eisaman Maus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 143–73. Other texts also promote the value of labor. In The Faerie Queene, Spenser figures bad art as the art of the Bower of Bliss, which hides the effort that went into its construction (II.XII.42–87). On the valorization of labor in the drama, see Donald K. Hedrick, “Cooking for the Anthropagi: Jonson and his Audience,” SEL 17 (1977): 233–45. For the traditional rhetorical definition of invention see Brian Vickers, Classical Rhetoric in English Poetry (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), pp. 61–5.

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from its predecessors and contemporaries. As a consequence, newness carries associations of transgression, as it involves deviation from the norm and offers the potential for deviancy, in all senses of the term. Moreover, change and self-proclaimed modernity are not articulated as a complete break with the rules, but through self-conscious transgression of those rules, as they are in the erotic narratives that will be discussed in chapter 3, or through self-conscious hyperbole and amplification of existing conventions, as they are in the unashamedly hackneyed poetry of the sonnet sequences.96 In the highly conventionalized texts of sonnet sequences, individuality lies in what is added on and exaggerated. It lies in redundancy and superfluity, and the highly clich´ed nature of sonnet sequences suggests that redundancy has meaning in late Elizabethan culture. From one point of view, hyperbole and self-consciously exaggerated ornament may be redundant, but they may be the stylistic indicators of ownership, as well as the markers of literariness. Each of the following chapters focuses on a writer, or genre, which is central to the 1590s: Thomas Nashe, the epyllion, and the fictional verse epistle and asks some simple questions. Why were Nashe, the epyllion and fictional verse epistle so popular in the 1590s? What do they offer writers and readers? What cultural, social, ideological and political work do they do in their own culture? In addressing these questions, certain styles, structures and tropes of thought started to reappear. These included exaggerated ornamentality, parody, digressiveness, eroticism, paradox and the self-conscious promotion of marginality. It became clear that all these texts invoke shame in productive, varied and frequently surprising ways, and that shame offered a mode of apprehension through which cultural transformation could be conceived and effected. Although each chapter has a different focus, the argument of the book is accretive, and each chapter builds on and supplements the others. For example, chapter 2 is based on a study of Nashe, but his exploitation of the erotic responds to and also determines the erotic strategies of the epyllion, which are explored in chapter 3. Meanwhile, the association of marginality with national consciousness, which is made by Nashe, is also explored in much more detail in the verse epistle, which is the focus of chapter 4. Thomas Nashe was a pivotal figure in the final decade of Elizabeth’s reign, and one of the most, if not the most, important literary critics of his 96

Ullrich Langer discusses the transgressive connotations of the new understanding of invention in Invention, Death and Self-Definitions in the Poetry of Pierre de Ronsard, Stanford French and Italian Studies 45 (Saratoga, CA: Anma Libri, 1986). He argues that modern invention results in the separation of the self from the world and is a source of anxiety which finds its characteristic expression, in Renaissance texts, in the myth of Narcissus (pp. 39–55).

Introduction

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generation, whose own texts had a profound influence on his contemporaries, and whose career quickly acquired iconic status for the contemporary literary community. One of the aims of my study of Nashe, in chapter 2, is to explore how the trope of self-promotion through deficiency intersects with emergent discourses of literary professionalization. As a study of the Elizabethan literary system, this book is indebted to the work of Richard Helgerson, but in fundamental ways it differs from Helgerson, and these differences are clearly illustrated in my study of Nashe. Most studies of Elizabethan authorship set up strict oppositions between the terms amateur and professional, and associated terms such as manuscript, playfulness and privacy, which are linked with amateurism, and terms such as print, seriousness and public, which are linked with professionalism. Although Helgerson adds the category of laureate to amateur and professional models of authorship, this strict demarcation between amateur and professional, and their related terms, is as true for Helgerson, as it is for other important analyses of the Elizabethan literary system, such as Lorna Hutson’s Thomas Nashe in Context.97 However, Nashe’s career is a mixture of patronage and the exploitation of print; of coterie manuscript production in “The Choice of Valentines,” and of government-sponsored tract in the Marprelate controversy; of marginalization at the hands of the censors, and of board, lodging and protection from such embodiments of Elizabethan authority as the Governor of the Isle of Wight and the Archbishop of Canterbury. Nashe rewrites the relationship between the periphery and the center in late Elizabethan culture, defining authority through self-consciously marginalizing forms of authorship. Recasting the writer as a suppliant to the devil in Pierce Penilesse, or as a jester in Summers Last Will and Testament, or as an exile in Lenten Stuff, his experiments in writing shame have the most profound consequences for the reordering of literature in the 1590s where Nashe’s prodigious mobilization of shame stands as an inspiration and a warning to his peers. His self-conscious pursuit of shame in content, structure and style, alters the relationship between writer and reader, and leads to a process of subjectification that threatens the authority that it was meant to establish. While Nashe is excited by the redefinition of literature as a special activity in its own right, which offers access to different kinds of knowledge through anagnorisis and paradox (indeed his livelihood depends on it), he also registers the ontological threat posed to anyone who bases their identity in language. 97

Lorna Hutson, Thomas Nashe in Context, Oxford English Monographs (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).

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Chapters 3 and 4 deal with two genres that were highly characteristic of the 1590s: the epyllion and the fictional verse epistle, and explore why they should have become such fashionable and productive forms for both writers and readers in that decade. The choice of genre defines a writer’s interpretation of authorship, and their attitude towards literature, but the role played by genre in mediating the forces of tradition and change in the 1590s has largely been ignored. The period marks the growth of the idea of a literary community, and while I acknowledge the dangers of a generic approach and its tendency to highlight conventionality at the expense of individuality, a generic approach reflects this sense of community, and reinserts authors into the networks of fashion and contemporary rivalry. Other genres, such as the sonnet sequence, are equally characteristic of the 1590s, and also pursue a poetics of shame, but the epyllion and the fictional verse epistle were chosen because they also address two further, fundamental aspects of late Elizabethan culture. The epyllion provides the perfect context in which to explore the curious phenomenon of the wholesale sexualization of literary culture. The fictional verse epistle addresses the imbrication of the political and the aesthetic in the 1590s, which was given urgency by contemporary debates over the nature of the nation and the proper form for its expression. Through a study of the epyllion which ranges from Thomas Lodge’s Scillaes Metamorphosis, which inaugurated the vogue in 1589, to John Weever’s Faunus and Melliflora published in 1600, chapter 3 analyses a form that expresses and produces Elizabethan culture’s linking of the erotic and the aesthetic. This chapter traces how classicism and, specifically, a particular reading of Ovid, enabled the production of radically new ideas about the nature and value of literature which became the catalyst for the formation of a literary community and a literary canon in late Elizabethan England. The epyllion constructs a self-consciously modern, specifically literary persona, which is associated with wantonness, ornament and excess. Ovid clearly plays a catalytic role in the 1590s and a small, but important, group of critics are beginning to address this issue. My study intersects with Patrick Cheney’s analysis of the role Ovid played in establishing an alternative poetic career to Virgil’s, and with Lynn Enterline’s and Richard Halpern’s more wide-ranging studies of Ovid as a model for exploring the relationship between subject and language, art and gender.98 The epyllion perhaps provides the most scandalous, titillating and dirty texts in 98

Cheney, Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession; Enterline, The Tears of Narcissus and The Rhetoric of the Body; Halpern, “‘Pining their Maws.’”

Introduction

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the book, and provides an ideal context in which to unpack the shameful processes of eroticism with all their libidinal, aesthetic and intellectual consequences. In the epyllion, the exploitation of shame, in the breaking of sexual and gender taboos, exposes the mutually constitutive relationship between aesthetic ideals, and gender and sexual ideals, but not necessarily in the ways that contemporary critics have outlined. Enterline, Wendy Wall and Halpern describe early modern definitions of authorship that are grounded on idealized masculinity, but the particular definition of authorship outlined in the epyllion associates writing with femininity, and even with hermaphroditism.99 The feminization of culture is taken up and explored with some anxiety in the fictional verse epistle, which treats the relationship between rhetoric and gender with a far greater degree of suspicion than the epyllion. Chapter 4 is based on a study of poems, including The Complaint of Rosamond (1594) and Englands Heroicall Epistles (1597, 1598 and 1599), that mix three forms of writing that were very popular in the 1590s: the complaint, based on the Ovidian model of The Heroides; narratives of English history; and the epistle. These poems are also experiments in writing history which foreground the ideological and political implications of the aesthetic issues that are privileged in the epyllion. They focus attention on the relationship betweem shame and national identity. Michael Drayton’s series of complaints, Englands Heroicall Epistles, covers the period from Henry II to Lady Jane Grey, and Samuel Daniel’s Complaint of Rosamond deals with Henry II’s liaison with Rosamond Clifford. Issues of national identity are pressed on the 1590s by fears over what would happen after Elizabeth’s death, and by the conflicts that surrounded the tentative beginnings of an empire. The verse epistle exposes the sexual politics of certain modes of historical representation and the aesthetic presuppositions they entail. The kind of authorship defined by the fictional verse epistle has profound consequences for the definition of Englishness, and challenges the stoic ideal of heroic masculinity that acquired a quasi-official status in Elizabethan thinking. These poems are profoundly concerned with the problems of investing identity in writing. These are problems that not only confront those who identify themselves as authors, but also confront the Elizabethan nation more generally, as it seeks to write itself into being. Lyric is central to the 1590s, and has a tendency to invade and modify non-lyric forms, but as chapter 4, in particular, demonstrates, lyric can be the form of resistance 99

Enterline, The Rhetoric of the Body; Wall, The Imprint of Gender; Halpern, “‘Pining their Maws.’” For a detailed discussion of this issue see chapter 3.

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and alterity, and it is profoundly distorting to read lyric exclusively as the vehicle of conservatism. The 1590s have long been recognized to be one of the most important decades in English literary history, but, at the same time, the phenomenon of the 1590s has largely been ignored by criticism. The following chapters suggest that this neglect is due to the culture’s perversity. For instance, the decade witnessed the widespread sexualization of literary activity, to the extent that literary production at the end of Elizabeth’s reign is, quite simply, dirty. In addition, while Renaissance theory followed Aristotle in setting the grand and ample form of epic at the top of the hierarchy of genres, in practice, the 1590s exhibited a taste for triviality and small forms, which is celebrated and satirized in texts like A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Moreover, the period demonstrated an embarrassing imperviousness to clich´e, and actually valued the hackneyed and dandified sonnet sequence, a form that is constructed out of linguistic redundancy and outrageous hyperconventionality. Of course, C. S. Lewis found a way to address the 1590s by ignoring its most salient characteristic: its perversity. His construction of the 1590s as “a golden age” that strengthened the meanings of the words English and aristocratic has cast a long shadow over criticism of the early modern period.100 While dramatic criticism is finding its own ways of revivifying the 1590s, criticism of poetry, and of the lyric in particular, has been hampered by political distaste. In the twentieth century, critical resistance to the snobbish, authoritarian values implicit in Lewis’ criticism found theoretical support in Mikhail Bakhtin’s definition of lyric as a monological discourse that was characteristic of monological societies, in other words of authoritarian societies that only sanction one way of thinking.101 Rather 100

101

C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1954). The famous characterization of late Elizabethan culture as a “Golden Age” appears on p. 1. Lewis goes on to explain that this culture was “to enrich the meanings of the words England and Aristocracy” (p. 64). Studies of the 1590s which privilege the center betray the persistent influence of C. S. Lewis. By contrast, historians have been much more aware of the acute social and political tensions of the 1590s. For example, the essays collected by John Guy, ed., The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) deromanticize the 1590s and trace a shift away from a humanist consensus. Jeffrey Knapp’s An Empire Nowhere is an example of literary criticism that avoids the trap of conventional hierarchies. He argues that England’s conception of its own powerful immateriality appealed to poets who also located value in “apparent deficiency” (p. 5) and that the perceived identity between national and poetic selfdefinition accounts for the literary renaissance of late sixteenth-century England. However, the relationship between self-trivializing texts and nationalist ideology is more complex and anxious than Knapp suggests and will be discussed in chapter 4. Theodor Adorno basically accepts the idea that lyric is monological, but treats it more generously. He argues that lyric is “stuck in the accidentals of naked, isolated existence,” but is nonetheless a form of political discourse because it reflects our atomistic society: “the loneliness of the lyric

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than representing the period as a decade of ossified perfection, the following chapters explore the ways writers in the 1590s effected change through the exploitation of shame. Post-structuralism and new historicism have problematized the nature of literature, by blurring the distinctions between literary and non-literary texts. One way of approaching the vexed question of the nature of literariness is to study a period in which the idea of literature was tentatively being elaborated. By examining some of the origins of this idea, this book does not make a claim for literature as a stable, universally recognized entity that conveys mystical truths across the generations, rather it reveals that “the literary” is constructed and reconstructed in response to particular social, political, economic and cultural situations. Nor does this book claim that the 1590s is the origin of this idea. Indeed, the particular forms of authorship studied in this book are only some of many different interpretations of authorial function available in the 1590s. The idea of the literary has a discontinuous history, indeed it has many points of origin, and comes into prominence at a variety of junctures and for a variety of reasons, in the reign of Richard II, for example, as well as in late Elizabethan England. Rather than essentializing aesthetic standards, the following chapters analyze the conditions of their possibility at a particular cultural moment that proves to have great resonance for us. The habits of thought already outlined in this chapter not only registered profound conceptual and stylistic change, they also helped produce it. The exploitation of peripherality, excess and transgression became the paradoxical means by which a generation of writers established their credibility and the credibility of literary practice. Taken together, the following chapters force us to redraw our model of the late Elizabethan literary system, to renegotiate our understanding of the relationship between amateur and professional, triviality and seriousness, novelty and tradition, public and private, and to revise our understanding of prodigality and of the role played by forms of negativity and deficiency in effecting cultural change. They suggest that our search for the fully integrated subjectivity of liberal humanism, or for the fully disintegrated subjectivity of post-structuralism, the straw dogs of modern criticism, have both been misguided, as it forces us to reconsider the role of fragmentariness, disjunction and paradox in representation, in other words how something can be indicated through expression itself is latent in our individualistic and, ultimately, atomistic society.” Lyric’s tendency towards utopianism is also political for Adorno, because the desire for escape implies a protest against a society. Lyric’s utopian autonomy represents a refusal to give in. See “Lyric Poetry and Society” (1957), trans. Bruce Mayo, Telos 20 (1974): 57.

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its undoing, just as Ralegh communicates a sense of self in the “Booke of the Ocean” at the moment of its disintegration. The texts studied in this book are unashamedly self-marginalizing and self-subverting, but they promote the value of the author’s deviant behavior as a way of annexing different conceptions of literary value and authorial function. They base their authority on the extravagance of their style or behavior and exalt decorative and recreative activities. Their self-promotion is based on the unashamed assertion of the trivial, negative and peripheral aspects of authorial occupation, on precisely those things that conventional criticism has condemned or ignored.

chap t e r 2

Generating waste: Thomas Nashe and the production of professional authorship

waste paper From one point of view, the production of printed texts is nothing but the production of waste paper. In Gabriel Harvey’s opinion, the breed of professional writers who emerged in the 1590s were as inconsequential as their texts. In Foure Letters (1592), he dismisses professionals, such as Robert Greene and Thomas Nashe, who had just published Pierce Penilesse, as little more than insects, and admits that it irritates him to have to discuss such silly matters: Alas, he is pitifully bestead, that in an Age of Pollicy, and in a world of Industry, (wherein the greatest matters of Governement, and Valour, seeme small to aspiring capacities) is constrained to make woeful Greene, and beggarly Pierce Pennylesse, (as it were a Grashopper, and a Cricket, two pretty musitians, but silly creatures) the argumente of his stile.1

For Harvey, professional writing is a trifling waste of time, but the terrible wastefulness of print was also the consequence of technical progress in late sixteenth-century England. Quantity was not necessarily matched by quality and, compared to manuscript production, the printing press could churn out large numbers of books. Shorter printed books and pamphlets were ephemeral commodities and, however serious their content, they suffered the disintegrative effects of time and use. Printed paper was recycled and put to a number of uses, so that printed texts were often destined to a demeaning passage through material reality. Nashe’s texts shamelessly draw attention to the potential debasement of printed text. At the beginning of The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), for example, the narrator introduces the hero, Jack Wilton, to the readers. Jack is a page in the court of King Henry VIII, and he is also a page, in that 1

Gabriel Harvey Foure Letters and Certeine Sonnets 1592, ed. G. B. Harrison, The Bodley Head Quartos (London: Bodley Head, 1922), Fourth Letter, p. 72.

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his character only has existence in the pages of Nashe’s text, just as Nashe, the professional author, exists through the pages of his own texts. Jack’s profession is the page, in the sense that it contains what he does and what he professes, both his actions and his thoughts, but this page does not expect to be treated with respect, as the narrator points out in the dedication to the Earl of Southampton: A proper fellow Page of yours called Jack Wilton by me commends him unto you, and hath bequeathed for wast paper here amongst you certaine pages of his misfortunes. In anie case keepe them preciously as a privie token of his good will towardes you. If there bee some better than other, he craves you would honor them in theyr death so much as to drie & kindle Tobacco with them: for a need he permits you to wrap velvet pantofles in them also, so they bee not woe begone at the heeles, or weather-beaten, lyke a blacke head with graie hayres, or mangie at the toes, lyke an Ape about the mouth.2

This text is not only destined to serve as kindling and packaging, it is also destined to supply the material for the luxury of toilet paper, as it will serve as “a privie token” of Jack’s good will. The printed text is doubly wasteful.3 Not only does it create waste as it is transformed into the by-products of daily existence, but it also squanders paper, a commodity which had once been highly valuable. Indeed, although the price of paper stabilized in the 1560s, white paper remained an expensive commodity. In the first half of the sixteenth century, printers had tended to use it conservatively, cramming as much print as possible on to the page.4 The special nature of text was further undermined by the production of brown paper for wrapping and, although this was produced by separate mills, it contaminated the ideal of its purer, whiter, cousin, contributing to paper’s scatological descent. All this raised the attractive possibility that the printed page could be used as toilet paper, instead of the rags, moss and hands that had traditionally 2

3

4

The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow, rev. F. P. Wilson, 5 vols. (1904–10; Oxford: Blackwell, 1966), II, p. 207. All quotations from Nashe are from this edition and will be identified by volume and page number in the text. The equivalence of literary text and toilet paper is also pointed out by Sir John Harington in A New Discourse of a Stale Subject, Called the Metamorphosis of Ajax (1596), ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (London: Routledge, 1962), “Misacmos’ answer to the letter,” p. 64. D. C. Coleman, The British Paper Industry 1495–1860: A Study in Industrial Growth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958), p. 354, argues that paper prices stabilized between the 1560s and 1620s. Although she acknowledges the limitations imposed by imperfect records, Coleman notes (p. 4) that it was not until the last decades of the sixteenth century that the foundations of an English paper-making industry were truly laid. These commercial and technical developments may have helped stabilize prices. Joseph Hall laments the terrible waste of paper in Virgidemiarum (1597), Book 2, Satire 1, ll. 9–10: “Lo what it is that makes white rags so deare, / That men must give a teston for a queare.” The Collected Poems of Joseph Hall Bishop of Exeter and Norwich, ed. A. Davenport, Liverpool English Texts and Studies (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1949).

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served that purpose.5 Manuscripts were perhaps more likely to escape this fate. Script is a constant and immediate reminder of the manual labor that went into the manuscript’s production, and manuscripts were passed on from generation to generation, or around networks of friends, and derived value from the social relationships they inscribed. Although printed texts could be used to mediate social relationships, and writers and readers were developing ways of personalizing printed texts, which included such simple means as the addition of the reader’s signature, the production of the text in the relatively more anonymous sphere of emergent industrial practices deprived the text of certain forms of symbolic value. Professional writers in late Elizabethan England were not only demeaning themselves socially by working for a living, they were also quite literally producing rubbish. Thomas Nashe’s contribution to the poetics of shame is perhaps more productive, extensive and influential than that of any other writer of his generation, and his importance to the culture of the 1590s stems not only from his pioneering practices as a professional author, but also from his sustained exploration of transgression and marginality as modes of cultural renewal. Indeed, in the 1590s, Nashe epitomizes the association of literariness, scandalousness and marginality. Although my reading of Nashe is indebted to Richard Helgerson’s studies of the Elizabethan literary system, and to the more specific studies of Nashe by Jonathan Crewe, Lorna Hutson, Peter Holbrook and Alexandra Halasz, my conclusions diverge from theirs in significant ways.6 This chapter focuses on the ways Nashe exploits liminality, and on how he understands displacement and peripherality. These issues certainly involve the question of his socio-economic status, which has been ably explored by Holbrook and Halasz, in particular, but my focus is on Nashe’s role in redefining a literary canon, and his perverse tactic of self-undermining in order to achieve self-promotion. Nashe’s experiments in authorial practice are not adequately explained by the models of amateur and professional authorship that are usually applied to the Elizabethan literary system. Helgerson and Hutson tend to oppose amateur to professional 5 6

I am very grateful to Dr. Katherine Moore for sharing her knowledge of Elizabethan hygiene (or otherwise) with me. Richard Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals (1976), Self-Crowned Laureates (1983); Jonathan Crewe, Unredeemed Rhetoric: Thomas Nashe and the Scandal of Authorship (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982); Lorna Hutson, “Thomas Nashe’s Literary Exploitation of Festive Wit in its Social Context,” D.Phil., Oxford University, 1983; Hutson, Thomas Nashe in Context; Peter Holbrook, Literature and Degree in Renaissance England: Nashe, Bourgeois Tragedy, Shakespeare (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1994); Alexandra Halasz, The Marketplace of Print (1997). The best biography of Nashe is Charles Nicholl, A Cup of News: The Life of Thomas Nashe (London: Routledge, 1984), which is particularly interesting on Nashe’s socio-literary networks (pp. 1–10).

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models of authorship while Nashe, and late sixteenth-century culture more generally, tend to confound where we try to distinguish. In a period when professional authorship is still in its infancy, a professional writer is much more likely to equivocate between various, even incompatible, models. Helgerson and Hutson tend to read backwards from a position where professionalization is a given fact, with established practices, rights and expectations.7 They tend to take certain hierarchies for granted, setting reason above passion, gravity over levity, the central over the peripheral, and professional over amateur, while Nashe undertakes a particularly productive exploration of peripherality and paradox in his texts, in which he creates new possibilities of thought through self-conscious triviality and the playful, but simultaneously meaningful, gestures of paradox. Nashe’s texts effect change through the exploitation of shame, but philosophical and aesthetic radicalism have a complex relationship with political and theological radicalism. While Nashe exploits transgression and peripherality in the service of the episcopacy and conservative political forces, in the Marprelate controversy, I resist the pull of Jonathan Crewe’s groundbreaking study of Nashe because he cannot, in the end, bring himself to address the untidy mixture of conservative and revolutionary in Nashe.8 Traditional paradigms of literary value tend to be based on a structure of antithetical postulates, which establish strict oppositions between concepts such as major and minor, center and margin, playfulness and seriousness, amateur and professional, conservative and radical. Such paradigms ignore the importance of marginal forms in reordering the Elizabethan status quo, and are blind to the ways in which the whole spectrum of late Elizabethan writers exploit and reassess liminality. The deliberately self-marginalizing texts of the 1590s, with their pursuit of all kinds of contamination, are inevitably devalued by any critical paradigm, like that of C. S. Lewis, which associates literary canonicity and excellence with grandeur, scope, morality and integrity, but they are also misconstrued by any kind of approach, like Crewe’s, that tries to keep things clean. The hybrid products of the 1590s probe the tactics of idealization, and the mutually determining relationships between aesthetic ideals, and moral, social and gender ideals, in ways that a diverse spectrum of critics may find uncongenial. 7

8

Our apparently persistent need to oppose print to manuscript cultures has received trenchant criticism from Halasz, Marketplace of Print, esp. pp. 82–113, and Arthur Marotti, Manuscript, Print and the English Renaissance Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1995), among others. I would argue that the opposition of print to manuscript produces, and is produced by, a misunderstanding of the relationship between public and private realms which are, in fact, mutually constitutive modes of being in the sixteenth century. Crewe, Unredeemed Rhetoric.

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From the sixteenth century onwards, criticism has produced Thomas Nashe as the quintessential professional writer. This is the function he serves in Lawrence Manley’s study of late Elizabethan urban culture, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (1995), just as it is the function Nashe serves in John Bodenham’s Belvedere (1600), which associates Nashe with Marlowe, Peele and Greene, as “Moderne and extant Poets, that have liv’d togither.”9 Nashe is central to any study of the 1590s, not only because he produced texts that engage in particularly complex and fruitful ways with the potential of shame, ornament and marginality, but also because he is a voracious critic and an intimate observer of late Elizabethan culture. Moreover, he played a key role in disseminating Sidney’s influence. The phenomenon of the 1590s is the product of many forces, but the Sidney myth played a crucial role in making literary activity socially acceptable. Sir Philip Sidney’s death at Zutphen in 1586, and the extravagant displays of public grief in the spate of commemorative volumes that followed, turned Sidney into a Protestant hero and cultural superstar whose charismatic appeal for the Elizabethans surpassed even that of the Earl of Surrey.10 In many respects, the 1590s were a Sidneian revolution and Thomas Nashe served as its midwife. He was the first critic to recognize the literary significance of Sidney’s achievements. In his preface to the first, albeit pirated, edition of Astrophel and Stella (1591), Nashe not only publishes Sidney’s example, but also casts himself as the instrument through which the Sidneian revolution will be achieved. The preface typically addresses issues of central importance obliquely, through playfulness and apparent carelessness, and it imitates aristocratic sprezzatura through its nonchalant title, “Somewhat to reade for them that list” (III, p. 329). According to Nashe, the publication of Astrophel and Stella has inaugurated a new intellectual 9 10

All the early allusions to Nashe, quoted in this section, are taken from The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. McKerrow, pp. 142–57. See also Manley, Literature and Culture in Early Modern London, pp. 320–40. Acutely responsive to the trends in his own culture, Nashe probes the heroic status of the Earl of Surrey in The Unfortunate Traveller (1594). Analyses of Sidney’s influence include Dennis Kay’s introduction to Sir Philip Sidney: An Anthology of Recent Criticism, ed. Kay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), pp. 3–41; Alan Hager, “The Exemplary Mirage: Fabrication of Sir Philip Sidney’s Biographical Image and the Sidney Reader,” ibid., pp. 45–60; Michael Brennan, Literary Patronage in the English Renaissance, pp. 38–54; and Richard McCoy, The Rites of Knighthood: The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989) pp. 55–78. With a few exceptions, notably Kay’s introduction, scholars have tended to privilege individuals such as the Countess of Pembroke, the Earl of Leicester and the Earl of Essex, who had familial, political and aesthetic reasons for promoting the Sidney myth, and have tended to ignore the importance of Nashe in establishing Sidney’s cultural significance, partly from a reluctance to acknowledge the permeability of amateur and professional activity, and partly from an implicit adherence to a top-down model of Elizabethan England, in which all important developments have their exclusive origin in the court.

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era which has made existing cultural forms untenable: “so endes the Sceane of Idiots, and enter Astrophel in pompe” (III, p. 329). Of course, by praising his intellectual patron, Nashe proves his own judgement and modernity, and although he “may be taxt with a margent note of presumption, for offering to put up any motion of applause in the behalfe of so excellent a Poet” (III, p. 329), he asserts the integrity of his motives through plainspeaking independence: “Onely I can Keepe pace with Gravesend barge, and care not if I have water enough to lande my ship of fooles with the Tearme (the tyde I shoulde say)” (III, p. 332). For Nashe, the publication of Sidney’s example becomes the means of liberating the literary community from the restrictions of the age, with its ossified styles and opinions. Literary criticism remained a prominent component of Nashe’s more overtly fictional texts, while his own personality and texts became a contemporary cultural obsession. It is possible that Shakespeare draws on Nashe’s prose style for the new kind of dramatic comedy he develops in Henry IV (composed 1596/97 and 1598), which is urban, contemporary and gritty, rather than romantic; while Nashe has been identified as the model for Moth in Love’s Labour’s Lost (largely composed around 1595), but whatever the truth of the relationship between Shakespeare and Nashe, contemporary writers repeatedly comment on, and respond to, Nashe.11 He is one of the pivotal figures in late Elizabethan culture, one whose frequent clashes with the authorities made him a source of anxiety and scandal for his contemporaries. Nashe becomes the embodiment of the scandalous, self-trivializing processes of the poetics of shame, as he not only writes shamefully, but lives shamefully. In many respects, Nashe epitomizes shame in late sixteenthcentury culture. He is, to use Gabriel Harvey’s phrase, “a scribling Creature with fragmentes of shame.”12 For his contemporaries, Nashe was the epitome of wit married with gall. He was considered to be one of the sharpest satirists, and was famously said to carry “the deadly stockado in his pen.”13 One of the sources of Nashe’s scandalousness lies in the reckless nature of his acerbic wit, and his disregard for propriety, which prompted his identification with Pietro Aretino, 11

12

13

On the Shakespeare–Nashe link in Love’s Labour’s Lost, which also leads critics to read either Holofernes, or Armado, as Gabriel Harvey, see H. R. Woudhuysen, ed., Love’s Labour’s Lost, The Arden Shakespeare, 3rd series (Walton-on-Thames: Thomas Nelson, 1998), pp. 70–2; and Charles Nicholl, A Cup of News, pp. 209–12. Gabriel Harvey, Pierce’s Supererogation, in G. Gregory Smith, ed., Elizabethan Critical Essays, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press), II, p. 253. For a discussion of this passage, see above, chapter 1, pp. 1–2. The Second Part of the Return from Parnassus (1602?), ll. 311–13, in The Three Parnassus Plays, 1598–1601, ed. James Blair Leishman (London: Ivor Nicholson and Watson, 1949).

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the notorious sixteenth-century satirist and self-styled “scourge of princes.” In fact, the identification was so strong that, in The Unfortunate Traveller, Thomas Nashe not only details Aretino’s achievements, but also acknowledges the very special debt owed to the Italian satirist by all men who share the name Thomas: “All the Thomasos have cause to love him [Aretino], because hee hath dilated so magnificently of the lyfe of Saint Thomas.”14 Yet, while Nashe was associated with the unbridled excesses of satirical wit, he was also the personification of a particular kind of literariness, of an easy and highly productive relationship with words. For his contemporaries, Nashe was, as Thomas Dekker claims in News from Hell (1606), “ingenious, ingenuous, fluent, facetious, T.Nash.” He was the epitome of verbal facility and quick wit, who came to be identified with a particular kind of literary value so that, when Dekker wants to complain about the state of contemporary literature, in A Knight’s Conjuring (1607), he does so through the ghost of Thomas Nashe, now imagined as the spokesperson for the literary community. What is peculiar about the constructions and self-constructions of Thomas Nashe is that, while Renaissance and modern critics both reproduce Nashe as the acknowledged voice and champion of professionalism, they also simultaneously reproduce him as a victim. It seems that Nashe is destined to be patronized, as his contemporary Thomas Heywood observes in The Hierarchy of the Blessed Angels (1635): “Tom.Nash (in his time of no small esteeme) / Could not a second syllable redeeme.” According to Heywood, Nashe was always called Tom Nashe, and never Thomas Nashe. This paradoxical association of heroism with powerlessness is, it will be argued, the consequence of Nashe’s sustained meditation on marginality, but there are other reasons for this curious marriage of hero and victim in Nashe’s reputation. In sixteenth-century culture, his victimization may have served to mitigate the demeaning associations of print, because, by sentimentalizing his biography and turning him into a victim of fortune, publication could be recast as a necessity for this impoverished writer, and not a choice. In our own culture, the story of Nashe’s sorry career serves prejudices against patronage, rather than prejudices against print. It corroborates the prevalent interpretation of patronage as a corrupting and stifling survival of feudalism.15 Unlike Nashe himself, modern critics are reluctant 14

15

Aretino appears in The Unfortunate Traveller (1594), ed. McKerrow, II. pp. 263–6. The quotation is from p. 266. Aretino cultivated infamy as a way of establishing the literary professional as a force in public affairs, a model Nashe tried to adapt. See William Kerrigan’s and Gordon Braden’s suggestive comments in The Idea of the Renaissance (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1989), pp. 23–7. This is not to deny that Nashe lead an increasingly precarious existence towards the end of his career.

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to acknowledge his debts to patronage, and this is particularly true of Lorna Hutson, because this would disrupt modern concepts of professionalism which are implicitly bound up with anachronistic idealizations of market economics. For Ann Jones, to take another example, Nashe’s relations with his patrons were difficult, and in The Unfortunate Traveller he projects his consequent frustration on to a freer narrator-hero. The implication of her argument, which is otherwise very rich, is that the free market always rewards merit and would somehow have allowed Nashe to thrive.16 Apart from the fact that such establishment figures as George Whitgift and George Carey gave Nashe substantial material benefits and protection at various stages in his career, the implicit idea that patronage equals enslavement simplifies Nashe’s complex and dynamic relationship with different forms of authority. This chapter shows why Nashe was associated in the contemporary imagination with literariness, scandalousness and marginality, and why he was, as Heywood points out, always indicated by the diminutive – a diminutive that connotes the marginality that was characteristic of Nashe’s literary milieu, and of his curious, self-marginalizing modes of authorial self-promotion. redefining waste The process of professionalization in the sixteenth century is not only dependent on a new material order, it is also dependent on a new ideological order. Shame plays a crucial role in the production of this new order, in which the marginal is revealed to be socially, economically and culturally productive. In late Elizabethan culture, publication is re-presented as a facsimile of an idealized patronage system that is based on the ideals of generosity, gratitude and decorous exchange. In this idealized rereading, both patronage and publication establish mutually beneficial systems of circulation, in which the exchange of material and intellectual goods is the means to spread wealth, honor and inspiration throughout society. Prodigality is transformed into a form of fertile exchange, and the more that is spent in monetary or intellectual terms, the greater the benefit to society, so that excess becomes desirable. 16

Ann Rosalind Jones, “Inside the Outsider: Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller and Bakhtin’s Polyphonic Novel,” ELH 50 (1983): 61–81. An example of Hutson’s hostility to patronage, which colors her understanding of ornamentality, of marginalization, and of what may constitute productive capital in the late sixteenth century, comes in Thomas Nashe in Context, p. 67, where her attitude to patronage determines her assessment of the literary merits of Nashe’s Anatomie of Absurditie.

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Nashe’s texts force us to rethink our characterization of professional writing in late Elizabethan England and its relationship with other modes of cultural production. In particular, his definition of professional authorship reconfigures the associations of waste, and turns redundancy and excess into productive tactics. Nashe prides himself on the diversity of his writing, as he claims in Strange News, of the Intercepting of Certain Letters (1592): “I have written in all sorts of humors privately, I am perswaded, more than any yoong man of my age in England” (I, p. 320). This affirmation of authorial flexibility does not exclude manuscript transmission and patronage from Nashe’s self-definition. Manuscript and print existed in a continuum, with manuscript playing a much more important role in publicizing texts, even professional texts, than has often been acknowledged.17 Nashe invokes a cycle of gift-giving in which his texts play a gracious and even courtly part, although they are also printed texts which play a public role in the market system. Nashe’s association with Sir George Carey, the Governor of the Isle of Wight, probably dates from the autumn of 1593, and in the winter of that year Nashe stayed with the Careys to avoid the Lord Mayor of London’s anger over the publication of Christs Teares Over Jerusalem, which denounces London by comparing it to Jerusalem at the time of its destruction by the Romans.18 Christs Teares is dedicated to Sir George’s wife, Lady Elizabeth Carey, and The Terrors of the Night (1594), an analysis of dreams, is dedicated to their daughter, Elizabeth. In the dedication of Christs Teares, Nashe acknowledges that the nature of the patron determines the form of authorship, as Lady Carey’s reputation for piety has inspired him to produce a religious complaint: “To write in Divinitie I would not have adventured, if ought els might have consorted with the regenerate gravitie of your judgement” (II, p. 11). Yet the patron does not enjoy a monopoly of meaning as Christs Teares is also “a quintessence of holy complaint, extracted out of my [Nashe’s] true cause of condolement” (II, p. 10), and it expresses its author’s situation as it reflects its patron. Nashe fulfills the role of laureate to the Careys, a role first occupied by Edmund Spenser, so that service to this family becomes the medium for his most ambitious 17

18

The continuum of manuscript and print was noted some years ago by L. G. Black, “Studies in Some Related Manuscript Poetic Miscellanies of the 1580s,” 2 vols., D.Phil., Oxford University, 1970, I, pp. 2 and 77–82, in what remains one of the most important analyses of manuscript culture. Even Nashe’s relationship with the Stationers combined a business contract with elements of patronage. For example, in Have with You to Saffron-Walden, III, pp. 114–15, Nashe acknowledges a community of interest with his printer, John Danter, and confirms that he lodged with Danter. He also notes (pp. 90 and 102) that Gabriel Harvey, Barnabe Barnes, John Thorius and Anthony Chute all lodged with John Wolfe. See Have with You to Saffron-Walden, III, pp. 95–6, and C. G. Harlow, “Nashe’s Visit to the Isle of Wight and his Publications of 1592–94,” RES ns 14 (1963): 225–42.

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claims to parity with the English laureate.19 Thus Nashe bases his authority on his role as client, as well as professional author, and his dedications play out complicated relationships of humility and self-promotion, dependence and independence, convention and individuality, as he recodes the relationship between high and low, not only by mixing academic and popular forms, but also by confusing the demeaning associations of labor with the rarefied associations of aristocratic magnanimity. In Nashe’s redefinition of patronage, ornamentality is turned into a source of benefit and honor, while excessiveness becomes a source of pride. For example, in the dedication of The Terrors of the Night, Nashe praises Elizabeth Carey’s mother, claiming that her magnificence and high respect derive from her prodigality, from her willingness to spend her money: Ever honored may she be of the royallest breed of wits, whose purse is so open to her poore beadsmens distresses. Well may I say it, because I have tride it, never liv’d a more magnificent Ladie of her degree on this earth. (I, p. 342)20

Not only does Lady Carey’s aristocratic virtue, her magnificence, depend on her prodigality, as the dedication to Christs Teares also points out, her activities as a patron affirm the value of the decorative gesture and transform her into the ornament which is her family’s chief source of pride and honor: “Then you that high allied house hath not a more deere adopted ornament” (II, p. 10). Yet giving and receiving could also be construed as the fundamental condition of all commercial transactions, as Henry Chettle notes in Kind-Heart’s Dream (1592), “it is here as in the world, Donum a dando derivatur: where there is nothing to give, there is nothing to be got.”21 For Nashe, all forms of authority, whether social, political, economic or literary, are based on the paradoxical profit to be derived from loss and, since expenditure is a benefit, over-spending and excessive wastefulness become all the more desirable. Conventionally, the late sixteenth-century patronage system is supposed to be in a state of terminal decline and its workings are supposed to be hostile to professional ambitions. However, the patronage system was diversifying 19

20 21

Spenser dedicated Muiopotmos, published with the Complaints (1591), to Lady Carey, n´ee Spencer, who married George Carey in 1574. He also addressed the sixteenth dedicatory sonnet of The Faerie Queene (1590) to her. (Spenser claimed that he was related to the Spencers of Althorpe.) Compare the dedication of the Anatomie of Absurditie (1589) to Charles Blunt (I, pp. 7–8). Nashe praises Blunt, and compares him to Sidney, the model of heroic courtliness, which gives Nashe the opportunity to emulate Virgil and quote the opening phrase of The Aeneid, “Arma virumque cano” (I sing of arms and the man). Nashe rises as a new Virgil, on the shoulders of Blunt and Sidney. He goes on to compare her to the Indies, another source of material riches, only Lady Carey is a more dependable source. Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. McKerrow, V, p. 145.

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in response to new demands in the 1590s, and the situation is more complicated than the simple model of decline allows. As Michael Brennan has argued, in late Elizabethan England, patron–client relationships are rarely permanent or exclusive, and in the context of court patronage this fluidity merely reflects the shifting and complex structure of the court.22 In fact, the patronage system was not exclusively court-based. It was a diverse system which could accommodate a variety of forms of patron, such as livery companies and provincial towns, as well as a variety of forms of authorship, some of which could be critical of the government. Conventionally, the patronage system is seen to be hostile to professional ambitions because it locks the author in a position of servile dependence on the patron. For example, Lorna Hutson identifies patronage with the monopolization of wealth and exploitative practices that operate to the disadvantage of the author. While I draw on her acute understanding of the ways economics inform aesthetic practice and ideals, the emerging commercial economy of the late Elizabethan period often worked with official monopolies on interpretation, as the Stationers’ Company sometimes operated as an instrument of censorship, as it did following the Bishops’ Ban of June 1599. I have reservations about such statements as: “A general polemic against the monopolizing of wealth through the anachronism of patronage in a commercial economy has its bearing on the question of writing as a professional act which defies any official monopoly on interpretation,” because I am not convinced that late sixteenth-century provincial or metropolitan culture considered patronage to be an anachronism.23 Rather patronage seems to be a delicate negotiation of authority, governed by its own conventions, and authors like Nashe were used by patrons, but also used patrons to promote their own authority. Moreover, the sort of dedication that strikes us as fawning and subservient may be explained by the decorum of the gift, where the graceful bestowal of a gift demands gracious expressions of gratitude from the recipient and the return of the gift 22

23

Brennan, Literary Patronage, pp. 3–4. The view that patronage was in decline has its sources in Patricia Thomson’s influential essay, “The Literature of Patronage, 1580–1630,” EC 2 (1952): 267–84, and is argued by Alistair Fox, “The Complaint of Poetry for the Death of Liberality: The Decline of Literary Patronage in the 1590s,” in The Reign of Elizabeth I, ed. Guy, pp. 229–57. One of my reservations about Fox’s thesis is that he presents patronage as an exclusively aristocratic pursuit, whereas the sources and forms of patronage were diversifying as the middle classes began to assume patronage roles. The quotation is from Thomas Nashe in Context, p. 255. However, Hutson’s reading of the different kinds of patronage that Nashe receives in Yarmouth and London in the context of the Londonbased Merchant Adventurers’ attempt to maintain trading privileges, at the expense of provincial port towns, is extremely rich. Her hostility to patronage is also demonstrated in chapter 10, “Gabriel Harvey and the Politics of Publication,” pp. 197–214.

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with interest.24 The ostentatious praise of a patron that critics argue is a sign of the collapse of patronage, may actually function as proof of the author’s gentility and generosity as s/he makes or returns a gift of praise. The patronage system is based on principles of reciprocity that make it productive for authors as well as patrons. This model provides an alternative to the model of subservience and control, and it suggests how authors could negotiate independence and self-assertion through, not in spite of, existing institutions such as patronage.25 The entertainment Nashe wrote for Archbishop Whitgift, Summer’s Last Will and Testament (1600), redefines gain and loss as interdependent aspects of a single system where, for example, unthrifty Ver (spring) is countered, but also complemented, by the lack of Lent, and vice versa. In its account of the fruitful variety and productive interrelationships of a dynamic natural economy, Summer’s Last Will acknowledges the value of generative paradox, as Will says, in words that echo Chettle’s observations about economics in Kind-Heart’s Dream, which were quoted earlier in this section: “Verba dandi & reddendi goe together in the Grammer rule: there is no giving but with condition of restoring” (III, pp. 287–8).26 24

25

26

The rituals of prestation are discussed by Marcel Mauss, The Gift: Forms and Functions of Exchange in Archaic Societies (London: Routledge, 1974), and by Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice, Cambridge Studies in Social Anthropology 16 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 1–15 and 171–83. Bourdieu notes that exchange has to do with the issue of self-promotion and domination as each gift is also a challenge to its recipient (p. 14). Gift exchange is thus an example of what Bourdieu calls “symbolic capital” (p. 171) and transmutes the interested relations of work into “elective relations of reciprocity” (p. 171). I would argue that the anthropological model of prestation does not lock the client in servility partly because it blurs the distinction between giver and receiver, as it is incumbent upon the client to return, and even outdo, the gift in superfluous expressions of gratitude, that turn the client into the purveyor of gifts and the patron into the recipient, and so on in an endless cycle of giving and receiving that involves a competitive urge to outdo the previous gift. Nashe’s patronage relationships are discussed by McKerrow, Works of Thomas Nashe, V, pp. 19– 23. There is much debate over Nashe’s relationship to authority. For example, Arthur F. Kinney, Humanist Poetics: Thought, Rhetoric, and Fiction in Sixteenth-Century England (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986), p. 359, argues that Nashe is a conservative worried by the dissolution of humanist values. By contrast, Crewe, Unredeemed Rhetoric, p. 22, argues that Nashe deconstructs the status quo, but he does not explore what sort of authority Nashe puts in its place, such as the claims to gentility, learning and the invocation of a specifically literary kind of authority. For Kinney, Nashe confirms inherited precepts, for Crewe, he denies them, but neither critic gives sufficient weight to how Nashe uses paradox to create new possibilities of thought that transcend simple confirmation or denial. In some of the most interesting work on this neglected entertainment, Marie Axton identifies the toyfulness of Nashe’s text and relates it to contemporary debates about the status of revels. The 1590s were marked by fears that the tradition of reveling was about to end, under pressure from Protestant reformers, and one of the defenders of the festive year was Archbishop Whitgift. See Marie Axton, “Summer’s Last Will and Testament: Revels’ End,” in The Reign of Elizabeth I, ed. Guy, pp. 258–73. Michael Bristol, Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance

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Nashe’s texts constitute a defense of redundancy and excess which bridges the gap between print and patronage and makes literary wastefulness the reflection of idealized aristocratic magnanimity. The prodigal texts of the professional writer enter a free-flowing gift system in which the writer’s overflowing wit supplies substance for other authors who will in turn resupply him/her with the inspirational superfluities of their own imaginations. Publication is the most efficient way to achieve this exchange of intellectual goods because it reaches the largest audience. The transition from patronage to professional pride, from generosity to productivity, is suggested by the pun implicit in the Latin root of the term generosity, which derives from the Latin verb genere, meaning to produce. Thus the abundant generosity of Nashe’s patrons, including Archbishop Whitgift and the Careys, inspires the abundant resourcefulness of Nashe’s style and makes Nashe both generous and productive, as his texts inspire other authors and propagate his authorial image.27 t he “out-l and ish chronicler” Hyperbole, panegyric, parody and paradox are related in the late sixteenthcentury imagination through prodigality. Prodigality is not only built into the Elizabethan understanding of panegyric, which aspires to be superlative praise, but also into the understanding of paradox, as literally something that runs beyond (para) the norm, or the given (doxa). Out-running or over-running is integral to Nashe’s conception of authorship, as he asserts in The Anatomie of Absurditie “I am a professed Peripatician, mixing profit with pleasure, and precepts of doctrine with delightful invention” (I, p. 27), and his texts spill over limits, and wander beyond expectations, into areas which are frequently conceived in terms of geographical marginality. Lenten Stuff (1599) is Nashe’s most sustained celebration of the values of redundancy, wastefulness and excess. This narrative made up of red herrings was written when Nashe had fled to Great Yarmouth to escape imprisonment for his part in the play, The Isle of Dogs, written in collaboration

27

England (New York: Methuen, 1985), pp. 83–4, interprets Summer’s Last Will as a defense of festive, aristocratic generosity, although the basis for his thesis is his adherence to Bakhtinian theories of the carnivalesque, rather than the historical specifics that substantiate Axton’s thesis. Lorna Hutson, “Thomas Nashe’s Literary Exploitation of Festive Wit in its Social Context,” pp. 33– 55, relates Nashe’s defense of prodigality to the background of a tightening of discipline and an increasing emphasis on thriftiness between 1558 and 1585. She argues that such ideals are antagonistic to literary originality (pp. 46–55). However, I argue that the relationship between thriftiness and literary originality is not one of simple negation or opposition, as Nashe discovers productivity in accepting and exaggerating condemnation.

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with Ben Jonson. Grateful for the refuge he found in the outlands of Yarmouth, far away from London, Nashe praises what he presents as the town’s generous protection which elicits his thanks in the “vast corpulent volumes of immortality” which include Lenten Stuff (III, p. 155). These fat volumes will in turn fatten the seven liberal sciences which, Nashe claims, have been licked thin by sensuality (III, p. 149), and so the author is turned into a national resource whose generous productions will contribute to cultural increase. Of course, the more copious the writer is, the more wasteful they are. Such thriftlessness and over-spending are not only figured in the subject matter of Lenten Stuff, they are also represented stylistically by the exaggeration of effects and the over-spending of imaginative resources.28 In the discourses of the generation of shame, professional literary culture is associated with exaggeration, and this association is sometimes figured as addictive behavior. For example, in Palladis Tamia (1598), in which Francis Meres surveys English Renaissance culture, and maps the parallels with classical culture, the quintessential professional writers, Robert Greene and Thomas Nashe, epitomize surfeit and excess: “As Archesilaus Prytanoeus perished by wine at a drunken feast, as Hermippus testifieth in Diogenes: so Robert Greene died of a surfet taken at pickeld herrings and Rhenish wine, as witnesseth Thomas Nash, who was at the fatall banquet.”29 In one sense, excess is an economic necessity for professional writers. At a period when there was no legal recognition of authorial rights, the insistence on stylistic individuality and the exaggeration of particular stylistic effects associated with a particular author, are an implicit acknowledgement of individual intellectual property. Style is the professional writer’s marketable commodity, the characteristic that separates one writer from another, and one of the attributes that draws the consumer to buy one book rather than another. The insistent individuality that characterizes professional writers, and generates styles such as Lyly’s euphuism, as well as the perverse pleasures and tropological redundancies of Nashe’s style, is the product of commercial pressures. Endless resourcefulness and recognizable 28

29

The extremity of Nashe’s methods has been noted by many critics. For example, A. K. Croston, “The Use of Imagery in Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller,” RES 24 (1948): 90–101; and Neil Rhodes, Elizabethan Grotesque (London: Routledge, 1980), pp. 3–62. Nashe’s over-the-top texts are parodies of the ideal of copia, analyzed by Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979). The prodigality of Nashe’s effects draws attention to writing as writing, as Cave notes, “mere repetition will appear as gratuitous, an emptying out of meaning” (p. 325). By piling it on, Nashe draws attention to the tricks of writing and to the text as artefact. Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia (1598), in G. Gregory Smith, ed., Elizabethan Critical Essays, II, p. 324.

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individual style, or styles, are what a professional writer sells because they need to push a product which cannot be found elsewhere, so that individuality is generated by economics, although there is, in the end, no protection from imitators. Individuality is also, of course, a product of parody. With their blend of recklessness and conservatism, Nashe’s texts are characteristic products of the closing years of Elizabeth’s reign. The late sixteenth century was particularly aware of the dynamic of history since the impending death of the Queen forced the inevitability of change on the collective consciousness. Culturally, the obsolescence of forms is registered in parody and generic mixture. In the words of The Faerie Queene “formes are variable and decay” (III.VI.38), a fact that is both a source of freedom and a source of anxiety. In late Elizabethan culture the movement forward through history combines dismissal with nostalgia, just as Nashe’s parodies ridicule styles that have worn themselves thin, at the same time as they serve as a constant reminder of what has been lost. Nashe’s texts are examples of the mixed genres popular in the 1590s and they create new conventions of thought out of the fragments of inherited forms brought together in unexpected contexts and novel combinations. Mixed forms show a keen awareness of the process of history and the ways in which writing can outplay its usefulness. By mixing genres these texts undermine any necessary connection between form and matter. However, while Nashe’s style develops out of the internalized competition between inherited styles and genres, he also perfects and celebrates his stylistic targets through the lavish exaggeration of their own effects. Nashe’s parody is a form of epideixis, another form that works on the surplus of its elements, as both parody and epideixis aspire to be more than mere praise.30 Nashe’s exaggeration of stylistic effects undermines, at the same time as it promotes, a particular form and parades Nashe’s excellent technique. For example, Nashe’s religious complaint Christs Teares Over Jerusalem compounds pathos with satire, grotesque violence with didacticism, and overworks the tendencies 30

Compare Have With You, III, p. 114, where Nashe offers Harvey not just comedy, but “Comedie upon Comedie.” David Norbrook, “The Panegyric of the Monarch and its Social Context under Elizabeth I and James I,” D.Phil., Oxford University, 1978, p. 92, notes that prodigality was built into the concept of praise, as no praise could do justice to the Queen, and so the more poets praised her, the more they had to do. Most famously and productively, Joel Fineman notes the surplus in the idea of epideixis, in Shakespeare’s Perjured Eye: The Invention of Poetic Subjectivity in the Sonnets (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 5–6. He argues that surplus foregrounds its own rhetoricity, which is why, for Fineman, praise is “the paradigmatic genre of poetical or literary language per se” (p. 6). As I will argue later in this chapter, the paradigmatic literary genre of the 1590s is the paradoxical encomium.

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that Nashe identifies in biblical complaints.31 In this way, he exploits his own brand of mannerism, making method, as much as matter, the focus of his texts, and exploiting hyperbole, deliberate inconsistency and all the resources of his over-wrought style to draw attention to his individuality.32 The process by which marginal subjects and activities acquire significance is the subject of what has become Nashe’s most popular text, The Unfortunate Traveller (1594). In the course of his travels through Europe, Jack Wilton, a resourceful page in the court of Henry VIII and the eponymous hero of the story, meets the Earl of Surrey, courtier, poet and amateur cultural model par excellence. Jack and the Earl play out complex and entertaining relationships of mastery and service, which include swapping roles. The Earl becomes a page, and the page becomes a substitute Earl who temporarily enjoys social and political authority. Although the two Englishmen become separated, Jack continues to lord it in the guise of the Earl of Surrey, until the real Earl catches up with him while he is dining in Florence with his courtesan, “lyke Anthonie and Cleopatra” (II, p. 267). Jack’s defense of his imposture is based on the political and social value of expenditure, on the power to be derived from squandering one’s resources. Jack informs Surrey, by way of an excuse, that by impersonating him and throwing his money around he has in fact contributed to the fame of Surrey’s noble munificence: “No English-man would I have renowmed for bountie, magnificence, and curtesie but you; under your colours all my meritorious workes I was desirous to shroud. Deeme it no insolence to adde increase to your fame . . . If you can reprehend me of anie one illiberall licentious action I have disparaged your name with, heape shame on me prodigally, I beg no pardon or pittie” (II, pp. 268–9). Jack’s confession is proof that he has behaved in a manner befitting the Earl, and his orotund cadences turn the confession itself into an instance of his own aristocratic grace, and offer a compliment to Surrey. 31

32

The processes of cultural change are structured in curiously conservative ways, in the late sixteenth century, in that a writer must invoke and repeat old styles to define something new. The new can also be defined through hyperconventionality and in a highly familiar language which is exaggerated beyond expectations. The parodies of chivalric romance and Petrarchanism in The Unfortunate Traveller have been the subject of detailed studies: for example, Agnes Latham, “Satire on Literary Themes and Modes in Nashe’s Unfortunate Traveller,” E & S ns 1 (1948): 85–100; Dorothy Jones, “An Example of Anti-Petrarchan Satire in Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller,” YES 1 (1971): 48–54; David Kaula, “The Low Style in Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller,” SEL 6 (1966): 43–57; and Katherine Duncan-Jones, “Nashe and Sidney: The Tournament in The Unfortunate Traveller,” MLR 63 (1968): 3–6. Raymond Stephanson, “The Epistemological Challenge of Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveller,” SEL 23 (1983): 21–36, argues that distortion is the technique and subject of a text which challenges our epistemological and critical limits.

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However, in the light of Jack’s developing meditation on the implications of displacement and ornamentality in The Unfortunate Traveller, his behavior is both a compliment and a complement to Surrey, as Jack provides the material out of which Surrey is himself constructed. Jack’s self-defense is an ironic defense of the page, in its double sense of servant and written text. At the beginning of his tale, Jack acknowledges that he is only a marginal figure, a mere “appendix or page” (II, p. 209), but his story is the record of a powerful peripherality as, for a time, the young page schemes and gets the better of various figures who represent various forms of economic, military and cultural authority, including a cider merchant, a captain, the Earl of Surrey and the reader. Jack goes on to explain to Surrey that the power of nobles lies in the number and quality of their retainers. He devises a theory of the mutually beneficial relationship between masters and retainers, power and ornamentality, as authority repeatedly displaces itself on to peripheralities which are then no longer merely trivial.33 As Jack points out, great men reveal their power by displacing signs of their power on to their servants, whose clothes they embellish with sumptuous ornaments, while the masters themselves are plainly dressed: I have knowen many Earles my selfe that in their owne persons would go verie plaine, but delighted to have one that belonged to them (being loden with jewels, apparelled in cloth of golde and al the rich imbroderie that might be) to stand bare headed unto him; arguing thus much, that if the greatest men went not more sumptuous, how more great than the greatest was he that could com[m]and one going so sumptuous. A noble mans glory appeareth in nothing so much as in the pompe of his attendants. (II, pp. 268–9)34

The nobleman’s social sufficiency and status are constituted out of his own deficiency. As Ann Jones and Peter Stallybrass have demonstrated, clothes were of paramount importance when it came to the construction of e´lite subjects in the Renaissance. So much so, in fact, that in Renaissance portraiture, time and money were spent on detailing clothes, rather than faces, because it was the clothes that provided specificity, and defined and located the sitter, rather than the face.35 Jack’s examples are strange because the signs 33 34

35

Jack’s argument recalls Angus Fletcher’s proposal that there is a real and important relationship between the kosmos and the cosmetic. See my discussion of this issue in chapter 1, pp. 32–4. The dedication of The Unfortunate Traveller to the Earl of Southampton (II, p. 202) also develops the theory of mutual benefit for author and patron. The text is presented as the equivalent of the leaves of a tree, which needs the support of Southampton, figured as the tree’s branches and nourishing sap. Of course, while the leaves live on the tree, the tree also lives through its leaves. This dedication was probably speculative. Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

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of nobility are displaced on to inferiors. Surprisingly, the exaggerated prodigality that lavishes money on servants’ clothes is an oblique and, therefore, more emphatic allusion to the nobleman’s privilege. Privileged identity is created by, permeates and is permeated by, networks of individuals and practices. It is constructed out of displacement and even kinds of deficiency. In Jack’s experience, power and marginality do not operate in separable spheres of existence. In The Unfortunate Traveller, kingly power is revealed through exorbitant acts of wastefulness. In the battle between the French and the Swiss, the human wastage of war fills battlefields with a superfluity of dismembered arms and legs, turning the plain into “a quagmyre” of bodies that guarantees the French King’s victory (II, pp. 231–2). By analogy with the systems of patronage and politics, Nashe establishes the power of the author, a power which capitalizes on its apparent defects, embracing the accusation that it is mere trifling and a prodigal waste of time. Such exaggerated wastefulness is reconstructed as a sign of power, just as it is for the King of France, and the limitations of the author’s ostensible weaknesses are transformed into the source of authority. Spending, wastefulness and superfluity become paradoxical sources of wealth and the key to a vibrant literary culture, as merchants, aristocrats and poets must use their wealth and keep it flowing. The sanction for this paradox of gain through loss is found in Christianity, where to give is to receive, as Nashe points out in Christs Teares, “A ritch man treasures up no more of his ritches then he giveth in almes” (II, p. 101).36 Not only does Nashe legitimize prodigality by recasting it as generosity and the free flow of the material and intellectual goods necessary to maintain the literary community, but he also challenges the assumptions on which the negative evaluation of prodigality rests. The prodigal son scheme associates literary

36

2000), pp. 34–58. They point out (p. 49) that identity exists in objects rather than subjects, and in what they term “prostheses.” The retainers and nobleman, in Jack’s example, are defined by a kind of prosthetic relationship. Although the idea that an oblique indication is more emphatic than a direct indication may strike us as strange, Quintilian notes that one way to draw attention to a subject is to signal it in a covert way, so that reticence and indirection are forms of emphasis: “Est emphasis etiam inter figuras, cum ex aliquo dicto latens aliquid eruitur” (“Emphasis is a Figure too, when a hidden meaning is extracted from a phrase”). See Quintilian The Orator’s Education, The Loeb Classical Library, ed. and trans. Donald A. Russell (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), Bk. IX, ch. 2, pp. 72–3, the definition of emphasis. Compare the parable of the talents in Matthew 25: 14–30, where the servants who trade with their talents make more talents and receive praise, but the one who saves his talents is condemned. I do not agree with Crewe, Unredeemed Rhetoric, p. 65, that Nashe’s rhetorical strategies are opposed to Christianity. This section of Christs Teares (II, pp. 101–2) explores the value of expenditure and loss as sources of gain, and draws on familiar Christian paradoxes. Hutson, Thomas Nashe in Context, identifies the importance of expenditure to Nashe and I found her discussion of Lenten Stuff (pp. 245–68) particularly suggestive, but she sees patronage as inimical to positive expenditure.

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activity with youth, a period of sinfulness and poor judgement, but Pierce Penilesse (1592) defines old age as the period most prone to squandering and moral laxity: “Lightly, hee is an olde man (for those yeares are most wayward and teatish) . . .” (I, p. 188).37 Moreover, in Strange News, Nashe even goes so far as to argue that authors are authorized by being unthrifty and that their matter is authenticated by prodigality, as he makes matter out of the various senses of the phrase “being in credit”: Heare what I say; a Gentleman is never throughly entred into credit till he hath beene there; & that Poet or novice, be hee what he will, ought to suspect his wit, and remaine halfe in doubt that it is not authenticall, till it hath beene seene and allowd in un-thrifts consistory. (I, p. 310)

In this case, authors lose money to gain credit, so that the source of shame becomes a source of authority. Nashe brazenly proclaims that he has experienced poverty as a consequence of his unthriftiness and this guarantees the value of his text. Personal experience becomes the ground of truth, and the fact that authors have squandered their income among the temptations of urban life makes their texts believable and even more creditable. Although writing is condemned to moral and geographical marginality and forced, as Nashe notes elsewhere, to “wander in backe lanes and the out-shiftes of the Citie” (Pierce Penilesse, I, p. 204), it is this very marginality that guarantees its authority.38 Nashe’s tales of prodigality do not lead to repentance. In The Unfortunate Traveller, it is even unclear whether a prodigal who is as exhausted by his experience as Jack Wilton, ever repents, and Jack’s narrative invokes the 37 38

“Teatish” means peevish, irritable or fretful. Puttenham, Arte of English Poesie, “Of ornament,” chapter 4, “Of language,” Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. Smith, II, pp. 149–50, argues that a writer’s language should “be naturall, pure, and the most usuall of all his countrey; and for the same purpose rather that which is spoken in the kings Court, or in the good townes and Cities within the land, then in the marches and frontiers, or in port townes, where straungers haunt for traffike sake, or yet in Universities where Schollers use much peevish affectation of words out of the primative languages, or finally, in any uplandish village or corner of a Realme, where is no resort but of poore rustical or uncivill people.” By Puttenham’s standards, Nashe’s very language is marginal because it includes elements of the language spoken in “port townes” such as Yarmouth, as well as elements of specialized or popular discourse. Nashe’s language resists the centralizing force of a nationalistic ideal that aims for homogeneity and class-conscious civility, although his texts are imbued with patriotism. For John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), the canonical status of literary works depends, to a large degree, on their ability to produce an effect of linguistic distinction between what he terms “credentialed and uncredentialed speech” (p. 63). The vernacular canon establishes national traditions and ideologies, and standardizes the vernacular, but its political and social consequences are complex and unpredictable, as canonical texts can appeal to different social groups in various ways and standardization allows some users to move up the ladder.

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pattern of the prodigal son only to undermine it. Ostensibly, the disorientating violence of Italian justice in its dealings with the arch criminals Cutwolfe and Esdras, at the end of the tale, prompts Jack to repent and return home: To such straight life did it thence forward incite me that ere I went out of Bolognia I married my curtizan, performed many almes deedes; and hasted so fast out of the Sodom of Italy, that within fortie daies I arrived at the king of Englands campe twixt Ardes and Guines in France . . . (II, p. 327)

However, the status of Jack’s repentance and the nature of the “straight life” are questioned by the fact that Jack returns to a situation which is very like that at the start of his story, as Henry’s court has left England to return to France, which is where the tale began. Home is in fact a peripatetic location for Jack. Thus The Unfortunate Traveller challenges the paradigmatic linear narrative of sin, repentance and reform which structures the prodigal son scheme as a straight life, and proposes a cyclical model for experience in a narrative whose end is a return to its beginning.39 Jack’s “out-landish” chronicle (II, p. 328) has displaced the court, revealing it to be an errant institution which is the home of mischief, and by returning to his origins, the possibility is raised that Jack does not repent, but husbands his mischievous resources until he feels strong enough to produce more of the same: All the conclusive epilogue I wil [sic] make is this; that if herein I have pleased anie, it shall animat mee to more paines in this kind. Otherwise I will sweare upon an English Chronicle never to bee out-landish Chronicler, more while I live. Farewell as many as wish me well. (II, p. 328)40

In Jack’s valediction to the readers, prodigality and errant narrative are associated with imaginative excess in the figure of an “out-landish Chronicler” 39

40

Jack’s tale confirms neither precept nor experience, and does not conform to either the “didactic” or the “romantic” kinds of prodigal fiction identified by Helgerson, Elizabethan Prodigals, pp. 1– 3. While the tale constantly undercuts didacticism, it also undercuts experience in its equivocal attitude to travel. Perhaps the message to the readers is that it is better to avoid the dangers of travel, stay at home, and buy the book instead. Madelon S. Gohlke, “Wits Wantonness: The Unfortunate Traveller as Picaresque,” SP 73 (1976): 397–413, also argues that the tale is “didactic,” a warning against indulging wit, but I read the tale as ambivalent. The end of Jack’s tale is discussed by Hutson, Thomas Nashe in Context, pp. 234–5. She notes an emphasis on culpability at the end of the tale which she ascribes to the threat of censorship. I pursue another explanation for the atmosphere of culpability that lies in the poetics of shame. The link between center and margin is profoundly disturbing, at the end of The Unfortunate Traveller, where divine justice works through criminals, such as Cutwolfe. Compare Margaret Ferguson, “The Unfortunate Traveller: The ‘Newes of the Maker’ Game,” ELR 11 (1981): 165–82, who notes that God proves his authority by the very men who challenge his authority (pp. 175–7).

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who tells stories that are fantastic, at the same time as they are stories about losing one’s place. Imaginative fertility is produced by and produces various forms of physical, social and cultural displacement.41 Jack’s prodigality does not confirm or deny humanist precepts, to invoke Helgerson’s terms, but constructs a symbiotic relationship in which the opposition of center and margin becomes confused.42 However, Nashe’s most shameless attack on the prodigal son scheme is made in “The Choice of Valentines,” which mocks George Gascoigne, the father of the prodigal fiction. “The Choice of Valentines” is an Ovidian erotic poem which ostentatiously re-eroticizes Gascoigne’s short story, The Adventures of Master F. J., by elaborating a tale of impotence and erotic substitution.43 In 1575, Gascoigne publicly recanted his youthful erotic works and reoriented himself towards public duty by revising A Hundreth Sundrie Flowers into the much less racy Posies.44 The Posies include the second edition of the Adventures of Master F. J. in which the eroticism of the original 1573 edition is toned down, and any details that could be interpreted as allusions to Elizabeth’s court are expunged. Nashe’s brief poem, “The Choice of Valentines,” describes a sexual encounter between the narrator and his beloved mistress, Frances, which should result in mutual sexual 41

42 43

44

The consequences of such strategies are not always positive for Nashe. Nashe draws on popular culture, but the association of the canon with the products of upper-class culture encouraged contemporaries to stigmatize Nashe for forms of social displacement. See, for example, the attack on professional writers for mixing learning with the ale-house, in The Second Part of the Return From Parnassus (1602?), ll. 151–62, in The Three Parnassus Plays, ed. Leishman. The association of canonicity with social e´litism is discussed by Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, The Politics and Poetics of Transgression (London: Methuen, 1986). The link between heightened imaginative processes and marginality is enacted in Othello. Othello is not only full of stories, he is also “an extravagant and wheeling stranger” (I.i.137). Othello’s marginality is of course the consequence of his race, but in the play, imagination also seems to impose marginality on the subject and is interpreted as sexually provocative, scandalous and negative. See, for example, I.iii.60–4; I.iii.158–69; II.i.218–21. Stephen Greenblatt notes that the marvellous (or the outlandish) “is bound up with the excessive,” in Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 177. Elizabethan Prodigals, pp. 1–3. In Virgidemiarum (1597), Book 1, satire 9, which is an attack on lascivious poetry and “Teaching experimentall Baudery” (l. 10), Joseph Hall picks out both Pierce Penilesse and “The Choice of Valentines” for condemnation (ll. 35–6). References are to The Collected Poems of Joseph Hall, ed. Davenport. See Sandford M. Salyer, “Hall’s Satires and the Harvey–Nashe Controversy,” SP 25 (1928): 149–70; and Richard A. McCabe, Joseph Hall: A Study in Satire and Meditation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982) pp. 29–72. “The Choice of Valentines” was never published in Nashe’s lifetime, but circulated in manuscript. Nashe’s texts are dialectical, and he tailors his arguments to the point in hand. Hence his criticism of Gascoigne’s old-fashioned narrative is not incompatible with his praise of Gascoigne’s achievement, in his preface to Greene’s Menaphon (1589) (III, p. 319). Contrast Crewe, Unredeemed Rhetoric, p. 32, who argues for consistency in Nashe’s positions. A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, ed. C. T. Prouty (Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press, 1942), pp. 47–106. For the revised version of F. J. see The Complete Works of George Gascoigne, ed. John W. Cunliffe, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907–10), I, pp. 383–453.

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satisfaction. Unfortunately, from Frances’ point of view, the narrator’s sexual performance fluctuates in a most frustrating manner. At first he is too eager, and when he eventually starts to satisfy her, she finds that he is too tired to continue, and so, in exasperation, Frances satisfies herself with a dildo. There are two heroines in Gascoigne’s tale, the rapacious lady Elinor, and the pure Frances. Nashe transforms Frances, the chaste heroine of Gascoigne’s tale, into Frances, the voracious prostitute, whose dildo makes her chaste because it means she abstains from intercourse with a man. The pornographic wit of “The Choice of Valentines” mocks Petrarchanism, with its continuous postponement of consummation, and the idealizations of neoplatonism and pastoral. Not only does Nashe elaborate a story of unsuccessful male sexuality, he eroticizes and urbanizes conventional pastoral images, in the story of the young lover who sought his “bonnie Bell” (III, p. 406) in “the merie moneth of Februarie” (III, p. 403), only to find her in a city brothel. Nashe reverses Gascoigne’s self-censorship, rearticulating Gascoigne’s original innuendo with comic excess. Gascoigne’s Elinor has a lover who is also her secretary. Nashe parodies this detail when he defines Frances’ dildo as “this womans secretarie” (III, p. 413), in other words, as the instrument that does her business for her, so that Gascoigne’s suggestion that writing is a form of sexual activity is exaggerated with shameless clarity. By diverting Gascoigne’s text into pornographic excess, Nashe produces a poem whose very surplus points to the failures and hypocrisy of the prodigal son scheme. In “The Choice of Valentines” Nashe invokes the Ovidian form of the “wanton Elegie” (III, p. 403) to undermine inherited forms, such as pastoral, complaint and sonnet. In the dedication to the mysterious aristocrat, known only as Lord S., the poem declares that it breaks taboos, by “painting forth the things that hidden are.” As the dedication goes on to explain, “The Choice of Valentines” uses its transgressive subject matter to promote the author’s originality, because love’s actual physical pleasures constitute a new subject, “But of loves pleasure’s none did ever write / That hath succeeded in theis latter times.”45 Yet these lines simultaneously raise the possibility 45

The Bodleian Library copy of “The Choice of Valentines” (MS. Rawl. Poet 216) is bound with a translation of Ovid’s Ars amatoria. Another manuscript of the poem, in the National Art Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, London (MS. Dyce 44), plays with the pleasures of revelation in another way as it is written in code. Nashe’s poem is preoccupied by the erotics of post-lapsarian sex and of falling in its most bawdy senses, and, although it is not preoccupied with the spiritual Fall, it nonetheless participates in a poetic tradition that includes Paradise Lost, Book 9, ll. 1034–189, Donne’s “Farewell to Love,” Aphra Behn’s “The Disappointment,” and the Earl of Rochester’s lyric, “The Imperfect Enjoyment.” Nicholl, A Cup of News, p. 93, suggests that “The Choice of Valentines” is a response to Marlowe’s translation of Ovid’s Elegies which may have been written when Marlowe was still a student between 1581 and 1584.

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that the poem will not succeed, because no one who has succeeded “in theis latter times” has actually written about “loves pleasures,” and the claim to originality is made through the paradoxical acknowledgement of failure. In a strategy that is not only typical of Nashe, but also of late Elizabethan literary culture more generally, “The Choice of Valentines” courts failure, by promoting its limitations and capitalizing on the negative.46 Of course, there are two kinds of failure at stake, the one sexual and the other literary, and in the dedication Nashe implies that he at least enjoys sexual potency, although in the context of mainstream Elizabethan culture, as he defines it, this precludes a claim to cultural potency. The reader is left wondering what kind of man can achieve canonical status. The poem presents itself as different and new, and inadequacy is not only inscribed in the very vehicle for Nashe’s social and economic advancement – the dedication to Lord S. – but also in the strategy pursued to achieve that advancement – the writer’s originality. esprit de corps By the 1590s, the literary world had become a marketable phenomenon in its own right, and money could be made from the internecine wranglings of its practitioners. Not only authors, but also Stationers, were discovering the value of writing about writing. Literature gains its own space in the territorial map of late Elizabethan culture in the Nashe–Harvey quarrel.47 Nashe’s quarrel was originally with Gabriel’s brother Richard, but his attacks on Richard Harvey in Pierce Penilesse were answered by Gabriel in Four Letters and Certain Sonnets (1592). This prompted a parodic riposte from Nashe, in Strange News, of the Intercepting Certain Letters (1592), which was answered by Harvey in Pierce’s Supererogation (1593). The last major text in the quarrel was Nashe’s Have With You to SaffronWalden or Gabriel Harvey’s Hunt is Up (1596). After this, all of Nashe’s and Harvey’s books were banned, and existing copies were called in, by order of the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London on 1 June 1599. The Nashe–Harvey quarrel helped establish the image of Nashe as an author who “carryed the deadly stockado in his pen, whose muse was armed 46

47

In his preface to Robert Greene’s Menaphon, III, p. 318, Nashe identifies his culture’s taste for the trivial, and attacks his own collusion with the trend which he defines as the “new fashion among our Nation, to vaunt the pride of contraction in every manuarie action.” Hallett Smith, Elizabethan Poetry: A Study in Conventions, Meaning, and Expression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), p. 229, argues that Joseph Hall’s satires are “the first body of English satire in which literary criticism is a major element.” However, the Nashe–Harvey quarrel has a prior claim to this title.

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with a gagtooth, and his pen possest with Hercules furies.”48 Like Aretino, Nashe turns his personality into a commodity and forces himself on the public imagination through his polemical image. Nashe’s satirical voice is the voice of Martin Marprelate. It is dynamic, inventive and irreverent, veering between passion and comedy, the concrete and the abstract, as it mixes slang, neologisms and the mannerisms of speech, with ostentatious learning and formality. The stylistic innovations of the Martinists liberated prose into more flexible forms, but they also raised the issue of style and its relationship to authority. While the style of the Martin Marprelate tracts is unruly and articulates positions hostile to church authority, the counter-attack organized by Richard Bancroft employed writers, like Nashe, who could match the popular stylistic unruliness of the Martinists and combine it, albeit in an unstable amalgam, with loyalty to episcopal authority.49 The quarrel between Nashe and Harvey was also a clever piece of publishing hype and it is possible that Harvey’s printer, John Wolfe, alarmed by the prospect of an end to the fight, with the publication of Nashe’s apology to Harvey in the first edition of Christs Teares (1593), may have pre-empted any reconciliation by publishing Harvey’s provocative New Letter prematurely, against Harvey’s wishes.50 If this was the case, then Elizabethan marketing exerted its own influence on authorship, a situation noted by the narrator of the satirical poem, Father Hubburd’s Tales: or the Ant, and the Nightingale (1604), in a comment on his own text: “here I began to rayle like Thom. Nash, against Gabriell Harvey; if you call that rayling, yet I thinke it was but the running a Tilt of wits in Bookesellers shops, on both sides 48 49

50

The Second Part of the Return from Parnassus (1602?), ll. 311–13, in The Three Parnassus Plays, ed. Leishman. For a discussion of the Nashe–Harvey quarrel in the context of the Marprelate controversy, see David Norbrook, “The Panegyric of the Monarch and its Social Context under Elizabeth I and James I,” D.Phil., Oxford University, 1978, pp. 112–14. He suggests that Harvey’s advocacy of public heroic poetry is more congenial to monarchy, while Nashe’s individualistic style is more appropriate to democracy. However, Nashe was politically conservative, at least in his support for the episcopacy. The Marprelate controversy is surveyed by McKerrow, Works of Nashe, V, pp. 34–65; Leland H. Carlson, Martin Marprelate, Gentleman: Master Job Throckmorton Laid Open in his Colors (San Marino, CA: Huntington Library, 1981); and by Patrick Collinson, “Ecclesiastical Vitriol: Religious Satire in the 1590s and the Invention of Puritanism,” in The Reign of Elizabeth I, ed. Guy, pp. 150–70. See McKerrow, Works of Nashe, V, pp. 102–3. For the relationship between Harvey and John Wolfe, see Harry R. Hoppe, “John Wolfe, Printer and Publisher, 1579–1601,” The Library, 4th ser., 14 (1933– 4): 267–9. Joseph Loewenstein, “For a History of Literary Property: John Wolfe’s Reformation,” ELR 18 (1988): 389–412, makes the interesting argument that Wolfe ushered in “a tradition of piracy” (p. 408) that indirectly helped establish the idea of authorial rights. However, his statement that modern copyright is the “direct descendant” (p. 392) of entrance in the Stationers’ Register begs more questions than it answers, given that legal rights belonged to the Stationer and not to the author.

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of John of Paules Churchyard: and I wonder how John scapt unhorsing.”51 For Harvey, literary activity is a means to an end, a way of advertising one’s skills in order to secure government employment. As Harvey notes in his marginalia, learning is not valued in itself, but for its practical applications: “Common Lerning, & ye name of A good schollar, was never so much contemn’d, & abjectid of princes, Pragmaticals, & common Gallants, as nowadayes; insomuch that it necessarily concernith, & importith ye lernid ether praesently to hate yr books; or actually to insinuate, & enforce themselves, by very special, & singular propertyes of emploiable, & necessary use.”52 Gabriel Harvey belonged to an older generation, one which shared many of the values of mid-century humanism, and his quarrel with Nashe was construed not only as a battle between the generations, with Nashe on the side of youth, but also as a quarrel over the status of the professional author.53 In answer to Harvey, Nashe defends the literary profession by arguing that writing involves discipline, skill and application and he appropriates the positive associations of industrious trade for literary activity. In Have With You to Saffron-Walden (III, p. 31), he compares writing to plowing, and in Strange News he attacks Harvey for being ashamed of his father’s trade because he was a ropemaker: “Had I a Ropemaker to my father, & somebody had cast it in my teeth, I would foorthwith have writ in praise of Ropemakers, & prov’d it by sou[n]d sillogistry to be one of the 7. liberal sciences” (I, p. 270). This is precisely what Nashe does in his defense of the literary profession, as he turns the unpraiseworthy into the praiseworthy and uncovers value in workmanlike effort. Central to both the description of Yarmouth and of authorship in Lenten Stuff, for example, is the idea of effort and strife. Yarmouth’s fishermen toil like the mythical “Mirmidons” (III, p. 185), and Nashe identifies himself with their “tost and weatherbeaten” state (III, p. 156). With their repeated references to paper, ink and 51

52 53

Quoted by McKerrow, Works of Nashe, V, p. 151. “John” may well refer to Harvey’s printer, John Wolfe. Although Harvey represents the forces of literary conservatism in his quarrel with Nashe, in other respects he was a forward-looking thinker. See David Perkins, “Issues and Motivations in the Nashe–Harvey Quarrel,” PQ 39 (1960): 233. Eleanor Rosenberg, Leicester Patron of Letters ( 1955; New York: Columbia University Press, 1958), pp. 323–36; H. R. Woudhuysen, “Leicester’s Literary Patronage: A Study of the English Court, 1578–1582,” D.Phil., Oxford University, 1980, pp. 90–8 and 132–81; and Lisa Jardine and Anthony Grafton, “‘Studied for Action’: How Gabriel Harvey Read his Livy,” Past and Present 129 (1990): 30–78, explore Harvey’s attitudes to cultural politics and self-advancement with more generosity than most critics, who are unduly influenced by Nashe, and consider Harvey to be a fool. Gabriel Harvey’s Marginalia, ed. G. C. Moore Smith (Stratford-upon-Avon: Shakespeare Head Press, 1913), p. 151. See, for example, Strange News, I, p. 320, ll. 18–20.

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the relationships between authors, Stationers and patrons, Nashe’s texts record the materials and structure of his emergent profession. Moreover, he is also at pains to emphasize the intellectual labor, and the learning, that go into his texts and give them value, by analogy with scholarly models, as he parades his reading and liberally peppers his texts with classical allusions and Latin quotations. He laments the fact that what we might term “symbolic value” is slighted because it has no economic value: “Learning . . . is rated after the value of the inke and paper: and a Scrivener better paid for an obligation, than a Scholler for the best Poeme he can make” (Pierce Penilesse I, pp. 158–9).54 However, Nashe is careful to distinguish intellectual labor and “Arte” from the low class associations of “other mechanicall Arte[s]” (Anatomie of Absurditie, I, p. 25), and he invokes the example of the industrious courtier, Sir Philip Sidney, to defend his professionalism against any ungentle associations with manual labor: “Gentle Sir Phillip Sidney, thou knewst what belongd to a Scholler, thou knewst what paines, what toyle, what travel, conduct to perfection . . .” (Pierce Penilesse I, p. 159). Harvey is skeptical about such arguments, and in Foure Letters he presses the issue of the professional writer’s authority. He insists that since Nashe writes idle works for money, he “must be content with the rewarde of a notable Lier, not to be credited, when he avoweth a trueth” because the exchange of money corrupts the author’s claims to authority or integrity.55 Nashe interprets Harvey’s attack on professionalism as nothing more than sour grapes, stemming from Harvey’s inability to exploit the rewards of the publishing industry. The professional system is governed by rules and decorums that Harvey has failed to observe. In Strange News, Nashe claims that, “wheras others have monie given them to suffer them selves to come in Print” (I, p. 258), Harvey’s books are so bad that he has to pay Wolfe to publish them. The accusation that Harvey is guilty of professional immorality is repeated in Have With You to Saffron-Walden, where Harvey is presented as a liar, fool and parasite. Not only has he failed Wolfe by recommending bad texts for publication, 54

55

Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988) offers a skeptical perspective on the kind of aesthetic value Nashe is defending here. She questions whether there is any real difference between aesthetic and non-aesthetic experience, and hence any real difference between aesthetic and non-aesthetic values. In Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983), pp. 138–40, Margaret Ferguson describes Sidney’s Defense of Poetry as “a work of quasi-autobiographical allegory” (p. 138), which combines forensic and epideictic rhetoric. Strange News and Have With You are similar mixtures of fact and outlandish fiction, of defense and self-display. Nashe adapts many of Sidney’s strategies and, like Sidney, offers the reader a choice, not between error and truth, but between error and the recognition of error. For Nashe, Harvey is guilty of hypocrisy because he does not recognize his own complicity in the very errors he attacks. Foure Letters and Certaine Sonnets 1592, ed. G. B. Harrison, Third Letter, p. 50.

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ones that merely defile the paper they are printed on (III, p. 90), he has also broken his promise to pay Wolfe for printing Pierce’s Supererogation and has, as a consequence, been arrested for debt. The description of Harvey’s behavior in Newgate prison (III, pp. 98–101) would sit comfortably among the scenes of The Unfortunate Traveller. By turning Harvey’s life into a rogue’s progress, Nashe not only debases his opponent, he also transforms his dry pedantry into comic matter, and through his comic chronicles of Harvey’s outlandish behavior, the structure and activities of the publishing industry find a place in the cultural imagination of the 1590s. In spite of the singularities of his style, when Nashe does battle with Harvey he does so on behalf of his generation and he derives his authority from their collective interests: “let us jointly invent some worthy subject to eternize him [Sidney], or let Warre call back Barbarisme from the Danes, Pictes, and Saxons, to suppres our frolicke spirits, and the least sparke of more elevated sence amongst us finally be quenched and die, ere we can set up brazen Pillers for our Names and Sciences, to preserve them from the Deluge of Ignorance” (Have With You to Saffron-Walden, III, p. 77). The proper medium for this collectivity is print, as literature has become a matter of public importance and Nashe’s discovery of the duty to publish merges personal profit with the common good.56 Publication is the means to advance English culture and national dignity, because it defends civilization against barbarity. Thus, while Harvey scorns Nashe because he derives his maintenance from printing, Nashe points out that the universities, as well as all other learned people, derive material and intellectual maintenance from print, which complements writing, and all the arts of civilization and scholarship: and for deriving my maintenaunce from the Printing-house, so doo both Universities, and whosoever they be that come up by Learning, out of Printed Bookes gathering all they have; and would not have furre to put in their gownes, if it, or writing, were not. (Have With You to Saffron-Walden, III, pp. 127–8)

Harvey argues that professionalism encourages a destabilizing proliferation of rhetoric and Nashe tries to counteract the accusation by asserting authorial integrity. The strategy Nashe employs to achieve self-knowledge is one of constant self-parody and self-subversion. Hence, in Have With You to Saffron-Walden, he frequently identifies himself with Harvey and underlines his own foolishness by exaggerating that of his adversary, while in The Terrors of the Night he contradicts himself repeatedly. In place of 56

Kenneth Friedenreich, “Nashe’s Strange Newes and the Case for Professional Writers,” SP 71 (1974): 467, argues that Nashe sets up an opposition between his “esprit de corps and Harvey’s solitary ineptitude.”

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inherited and unchanging meanings, Nashe promotes the endless process of criticism as the foundation of truth.57 Consequently, Harvey is criticized because he is incapable of self-criticism and therefore of self-knowledge: “somewhat hee mutters of defamation and just commendation . . . but I overslippe it as frivolous, because all the world knowes him better than he knowes himselfe” (Strange News, I p. 268). Nashe repeatedly defines good style as self-expression, as a style that bears the imprint of an authorial personality that has been trained by extensive reading and the practice of proper imitation, although the self thereby expressed is always elusive. For example, in Pierce Penilesse, Pierce attacks sermon writers for lack of originality: “no invention but heere is to bee noted, I stoale this note out of Beza or Marlorat: no wit to moove, no passion to urge, but onelye an ordinarie forme of preaching, blowne up by use of often hearing and speaking” (I, p. 192). They lack the particularity of self-expression that is the author’s main protection against dissolution among fragments and styles, and which is also the professional writer’s most marketable commodity. Nashe’s individualism is also fiercely patriotic. Gabriel Harvey is “the factor for the Fairies and night Urchins, in supplanting and setting aside the true children of the English, and suborning inkehorne changlings in their steade, the galimafrier of all stiles in one standish as imitating everie one, & having no seperate forme of writing of thy owne” (Strange News, I, p. 317). The proper comportment of the professional writer is a matter of national prestige as English is in competition with other vernaculars and with Latin. Harvey is guilty of stylistic prostitution, of over-receptiveness to external influences and of cultural miscegenation. Yet Nashe could himself be described as a “galimafrier of all stiles in one standish,” and Harvey represents Nashe’s anxieties about his own theories of authorship. In many ways, Harvey is a parody of Nashe. He reflects the negative potential of Nashe’s own style in ways which are both threatening and useful to Nashe. Nashe’s texts extol the value of originality, but are also aware that originality and self-expression can become dangerous forms of presumption 57

See for example, III, p. 68 and I, p. 369. Terrors is a parody of the search for meaning. Crewe, Unredeemed Rhetoric, pp. 22–9, concludes that Nashe deconstructs meaning through the unstoppable proliferation of rhetoric. Nevertheless, while truth is elusive, and does not exist prior to, or apart from, his textual practice, it remains a goal to which Nashe, the Christian humanist, aspires and his texts are obsessed with establishing the best form for its possible expression. Indeed, truth only exists textually, in the self-subverting processes of language which serve as a kind of reflux experiment. Crewe, like Hutson, reads characteristics such as fragmentation, marginality and various forms of self-subversion as denials, as destructive forces. The argument of this book is that they are constructive forces, although their product is not stable, integrated or finished off.

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which willfully give priority to the individual over external authorities. In Pierce Penilesse, the Knight of the Post, who is the devil’s intermediary and a parody of Marlowe’s Mephistopheles, sets a limit on originality by associating it with those creative devils who (like authors) exploit forms of anagnorisis and produce “wonders & prodigies” (I, p. 230). Moreover, he goes on to associate this type of creative presumption with the blasphemy that brought about the downfall of Sappho and Dioclesian: “such a spirit it was that possest the Libian Sapho, and the Emperor Dioclesian, who thought it the blessedest thing that might be, to be called God” (I, p. 230).58 Authorial self-promotion and originality incur spiritual risks as they threaten to supplant God as the origin and end of discourse. Nashe, like the authors of the sonnet sequences that were so popular in late Elizabethan culture, is aware of the transgressive potential in the redefinition of authorship, but in promoting the individuality of style and authorial perspective, he develops the idea of an author’s proprietary rights in a text and achieves propriety, in the now obsolete sense of proprietorship, through the improprieties of shameful activity. the most literary of literary forms: the paradox ical encomium The form which most clearly expresses the interrelationship between panegyric, parody and paradox is the paradoxical encomium. Of course, late Elizabethan culture privileges epic above all other forms, but the paradoxical encomium exists in complex relation to epic ideologies. It self-consciously engages in epic issues but through forms of displacement, trivialization and inversion. It is an inverted reflection of epic, and a complement to epic, rather than the discrete opposite to epic. In the generation of shame the paradoxical encomium is the ultimate test of literary prowess, the most literary of literary forms.59 Nashe’s contribution to his quarrel with Harvey constitutes a paradoxical encomium, a defense of the seemingly indefensible perversions of emergent literary practice. Pierce Penilesse and Lenten 58

59

Dr Faustus and Pierce Penilesse are both based on a supplication to the devil. For a parody of the debate between Faustus and Mephistopheles over the nature and location of hell in Dr Faustus A Text I.iii.75–84, and II.i.118–45; and B Text I.iii.72–81, and II.i.117–45, see Pierce Penilesse, I, pp. 217–19. The references to Dr Faustus are to Doctor Faustus A- and B-texts (1604, 1616), ed. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen, The Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993). Paradox forces the reader to become self-conscious about reading. Arthur Stanley Pease, “Things Without Honor,” Classical Philology 21 (1926): 31–2, relates the paradoxical encomium to the Alexandrian taste for “forms of the little” which included the epyllion, epigram, idyll, character and mime. The 1590s were also interested in “forms of the little,” and Alexandrian taste was transmitted to the Renaissance in the small forms and fragments collected in The Greek Anthology.

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Stuff are sustained explorations of the value of praising unworthy subjects, the devil and the red herring respectively. They are of course playful gestures of self-display which prove that Nashe’s wit is so flexible and copious that it can even do the impossible and praise the bad. They are also serious texts because, for Nashe, the truth can only be discovered, or perhaps more accurately adumbrated, obliquely, in digressions or selfcanceling forms, like the paradoxical encomium. God’s truth enters the soul through byways or “askance,” as Christ points out in his lamentation in Christs Teares (II, p. 55). The paradoxical encomium is the essence of Nashe’s self-justification as an author, because he defends his authority by transforming the negative into the positive, the trivial activity of literature into something praiseworthy. This is clearest in Lenten Stuff, a paradoxical tour de force, in which Nashe even turns the rejects of his own imaginative system into valuables. The word “lenten” has negative associations with fasting, dullness and restraint, and in The Terrors of the Night (1594), Nashe had already used the word to suggest deficiency, when he cuts short his description of Scandinavia with the words, “A poyson light on it, how come I to digresse to such a dull, Lenten, Northren [sic] Clyme, where there is nothing but stock-fish, whetstones, and cods-heads” (I, p. 360). However, in Lenten Stuff, he even manages to turn his own nothingness into productivity, spinning imaginative wealth out of his praise of the red herring. Nashe’s red herring is both red and read, a compilation of fragments drawn from Nashe’s literary experience. Lenten Stuff proclaims its modernity by moving into history and by opposing georgic to pastoral. The timeless ideals of pastoral, with its golden world free from change or toil, are challenged by a text that, while it invokes the golden age in its description of Yarmouth, also highlights work, change and restraint, especially the restraints imposed on freedom of speech by authority. As the narrator wanders through the byways of Yarmouth, he acknowledges the effects of time, politics and toil which disrupt the pastoral idyll and reveal it to be na¨ıve. The text becomes a facsimile of Yarmouth with its own narrative suburbs which are constructed out of the matter the narrator encounters on his wanderings: Nor, walking in her [Yarmouth’s] streetes so many weekes togither, could I meete with any of these swaggering captaines . . . or huftituftie youthfull ruffling comrades, wearing every one three yeardes of feather in his cap for his mistris favour, such as wee stumble on at each second step at Plimmouth, Southampton, and Portsmouth, but an universal marchantly formallity, in habitte, speech, gestures. (III, p. 174)

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This synthesis of mythography and geography binds professional writing to the specificities of time and place. Nashe’s text no longer embodies unchanging meanings and even his ideal, as figured in Yarmouth, is characterized by temporal and geographical particularity. Yet in praising Yarmouth, Nashe praises himself. The construction of Yarmouth, of the text and of the author become parodies of each other, as each strives to define and perpetuate an identity. In praising Yarmouth, Nashe claims to be a descendant of Homer whose grateful praise of the city which relieved his poverty provides the inspiration for Lenten Stuff (III, p. 155). Nevertheless, the insubstantiality of Nashe’s claim to authority parodies epic claims to truth and political significance. Lenten Stuff responds to the pressures of the Virgilian and Spenserian career models, with their exaltation of epic, by producing a modern form of heroic literature which is self-consciously trivial. In fact, the text is a parody of epic that finds its sanction in epic, as the Renaissance saw triviality as a complement to epic, and in this way Nashe can explore the significance of small and playful matters. As Erasmus points out in the preface to The Praise of Folly, Homer not only recorded the fall of Troy, and the wanderings of Odysseus, he also celebrated a battle of frogs and mice, while Virgil recorded the trials of Aeneas and the founding of Rome, but also wrote a poem about a gnat and a garlic salad.60 Lenten Stuff is an etiological narrative which deals with the origins of Yarmouth, as well as the coming of age of its narrator. The busy “spinners of thred, and net weavers,” who inhabit Yarmouth (III, p. 180), are associated with the endlessness of the creative process through the allusion to Penelope’s web. The unpredictable creative dynamic of Lenten Stuff succeeds in generating matter and turns Nashe’s story into a parody of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and their exploration of the endless etiological dynamic. Nashe’s Ovidianism impressed his contemporaries. When Francis Meres comes to discuss Nashe’s troubles with the censors over “The Isle of Dogs,” he compares him to Actaeon, who was torn apart by his own hounds as a punishment for prying into taboo subjects, a myth which was popularized in the Metamorphoses, Book III, ll. 198–259. Meres makes the connection 60

Praise of Folly and Letter to Martin Dorp 1515: Erasmus of Rotterdam, trans. Betty Radice, ed. A. H. T. Levi (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), p. 57 and note 5, pp. 57–8. Laureate career models and the privileged position of epic in the hierarchy of genres are discussed by Helgerson, with reference to Spenser, in Self-Crowned Laureates, pp. 55–100. However, Spenser is himself critical of this tradition, and its political and cultural presuppositions, and produces his own parody of Virgil’s apocryphal “Gnat” in a career that invokes, but also deviates from, the Virgilian trajectory of pastoral, georgic and epic. For an important discussion of the implications of Spenser’s particular career-map, see Patrick Cheney, Spenser’s Famous Flight: A Renaissance Idea of a Literary Career (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993).

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between Ovid and Nashe explicit when he points out that both authors were marginalized by authority, although Nashe’s punishment is only temporary, unlike the eternal political exile imposed on Ovid: As Actaeon was wooried of his owne hounds: so is Tom Nash of his Isle of Dogs. Dogges were the death of Euripedes; but bee not disconsolate, gallant young Juvenall, Linus, the sonne of Apollo, died the same death. Yet God forbid that so brave a witte should so basely perish! Thine are but paper dogges, neither is thy banishment like Ovid’s, eternally to converse with the barbarous Getoe.61

While Lenten Stuff over-goes its ancient models, its most pressing engagement is with contemporary English writers. Nashe’s attempts to lead the vanguard of literary professionalism come under particular threat from Christopher Marlowe, who is both an inspiration and a challenge to Nashe’s ambitions. When Nashe declares that Yarmouth is more worthy of praise than Helen of Troy (III, p. 184) the butt of the joke is Dr Faustus, as well as The Iliad. In particular, Nashe’s praise of Yarmouth as the “delicate paramour of Neptune” (III, p. 172) is challenged by Marlowe’s epyllion or little epic, Hero and Leander (1598), which describes a rival “paramour of Neptune” in a famous passage which presents the hapless Leander as the object of Neptune’s insistent desire.62 Marlowe’s poem draws heavily on Ovid’s Metamorphoses, and the competition for supremacy among professional Elizabethan authors is played out as a battle over Ovid’s inheritance. Nashe acknowledges Marlowe’s poem to be the work of “a diviner Muse” than Musaeus (III, p. 195) but, as a result, Hero and Leander threatens Nashe’s claims to supremacy, and the struggle for professional priority is translated into the comic rivalry of the red herring versus Leander, who is now transformed and deformed by Nashe into a blue-lipped sturgeon (III, p. 198). In McKerrow’s edition, Nashe’s witty “paraphrase” of Hero and Leander runs for six pages (III, pp. 195–201), and while it proclaims Nashe’s allegiance to the ideals of Marlowe, and those of the epyllion vogue of the 1590s, it also outdoes these erotic narratives at their own game by exaggerating such characteristic elements as the confusion of the sexes (p. 196), 61

62

Francis Meres, Palladis Tamia (1598), in G. Gregory Smith, ed., Elizabethan Critical Essays, II, p. 324. The myth of Diana and Actaeon could also symbolize the terrible fate awaiting those who defied the monarch’s wishes. See David Norbrook, Poetry and Politics in the English Renaissance (1984; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 135. Hero and Leander was published in 1598, but circulated in manuscript before then. Neptune’s love for Leander is described in ll. 639–710. See Hero and Leander, ed. Louis L. Martz, The Folger Facsimiles (Washington, D.C.: The Folger Shakespeare Library, 1972). Nashe’s review of contemporary literature combines the mythological erotic narrative with allusions to the sonnet sequence vogue, and he refers to Hero as Leander’s “Delia” (III, p. 195). Delia is the title of Samuel Daniel’s sonnet sequence which was published in 1592.

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mock sententiae (p. 196, ll. 13–15 and p. 197, l. 35) and etiological fictions (pp. 200–1). Unlike Ralegh, for example, who reads the story of Hero and Leander as a tragedy in “The 21st Booke of the Ocean to Scinthia” (ll. 483– 92), Nashe sees their story as a source of witty creativity, and Marlowe’s fishy story is used to explain why fish goes with mustard, why the ling lives near Iceland and why the herring lives near England. Yet Nashe also makes space for his own voice and, for all its strengths, Hero and Leander is represented by Nashe as an old tale that can only be revived by Nashe temporarily, as he turns it into the source of his own material and poetic nourishment.63 In fact, Hero and Leander is only a shortcut for Nashe, a mere “halfe a penniworth of paper” (p. 195), which he invokes to avoid tedium, and although Marlowe epitomizes the value of metamorphic wit, Nashe outdoes Marlowe’s fashionable poem, turning to a “new lesson” (p. 201), and eventually transforms the red herring into the golden fleece (pp. 220–1). This is certainly outlandish, and Nashe flaunts the fact that his text is an extravagant hoax. His celebration of Hero and Leander is a celebration of the metamorphic power of the imagination. In Lenten Stuff fish are described as “Protaeus heards” (p. 202) and, like Proteus, Nashe derives his power from his ability to take many shapes. Nashe’s praise of Hero and Leander is a localized instance of the paradoxical encomium, where Marlowe and his erotic narrative stand for a particular kind of literariness, one that is skillful, cunning and shameless. At the same time, slimy bawdy puns mean that Lenten Stuff participates in the process of sexualization that is so typical of late Elizabethan culture. In Elizabethan slang, a fish is a prostitute, which turns fishmongers into pimps, while the word “ling” is slang for female genitalia. Lenten Stuff eroticizes literary practice as the defense of the red herring, which is a defense of the author, is also a defense of prostitutes, turning the author who, in a sense, hopes to sell fish, as he hopes people will buy his red herrings, into a pimp. The slipperiness of the paradoxical encomium becomes both a source of revitalizing riches, as well as a potential for chaos. As Nashe breaks down the order of categories through paradox he also effects an alchemical 63

Peter Holbrook discusses the parody of Hero and Leander in Literature and Degree in Renaissance England, pp. 52–6, but I take issue with his conclusions on several counts. Firstly, as the following chapter will argue, I do not believe that Marlowe’s poem aligns itself with an idealizing Sidneian poetic, and to claim this is to misrepresent the function of the epyllion in late Elizabethan culture. I resist the identification of realism with proletarian taste, and mystification with upper-class taste, and Holbrook’s drive to locate Marlowe in a more elevated social milieu than Nashe, who, after all, once lodged with the Archbishop of Canterbury. Holbrook also ignores Nashe’s role in disseminating Sidney’s influence.

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miracle that transforms rubbish into gold, red herrings into the golden fleece, and hopefully text into money, as the panegyric of Yarmouth solicits money from its readers. The miraculous diversion of dross and triviality into beauty and treasure, in Lenten Stuff, is a shameless exercise in authorial selfdefense and self-promotion. In praising the red herring Nashe is playing with straws, but it is by playing with straws that he can talk about his marginal and slightly shameful profession, and his marginal and slightly shameful sense of self. In Lenten Stuff Nashe cites The Schoolemaster and, in particular, Roger Ascham’s criticism of Varro’s eloquence in which Ascham attacks Varro for his lack of depth: “Hee enters not (sayth he [Ascham]) into any great depth of eloque[n]ce, but as one carried in a small low vessell by himselfe very nigh the common shore, not much unlike the fisher men of Rie, or herring men of Yarmouth” (III, p. 181). The defense of herring fishing, and all things to do with Yarmouth, becomes a facsimile for the defense of rhetoric, but a particular kind of rhetoric, one which is skillful, cunning, trivial and superficial, like Varro’s eloquence, and like the shallow techniques of the fishermen of Rye, the herring men of Yarmouth and the emergent professional author. restruct uring reading in the generation of shame Paradoxes are dialectical tools, which demand the collaboration of the reader in uncovering the ways that they pervert meaning, so that the production of meaning is acutely and, from the perspective of the author, anxiously experienced as a collaboration. Nashe’s texts are characterized by a generative open-endedness, and the interrelated activities of reading and writing are recast as an exchange between particular individuals on specific occasions.64 For example, Christs Teares establishes a paradigm of reading which calls on the reader to personalize the meaning of the text, by exhorting him/her to consider whether they are guilty of any of the characteristics of hypocrisy and vainglory: “but let every one that is guiltie in any of them apply them privately to himselfe, least every childe in the streete apply them openly to his reproofe” (II, p. 112). Truth is established by reference 64

Sandra Clark, The Elizabethan Pamphleteers: Popular Moralistic Pamphlets 1580–1640 (London: Athlone Press, 1983), pp. 246–56, discusses Nashe’s “intimate awareness of his reader” (p. 246), which she attributes to the influence of oral literature, and she explores the stylistic devices he uses to render this relationship as direct as possible. Kinney, Humanist Poetics, p. 425, argues that Elizabethan fiction requires a dialectical reading in which the reader tests the text against established models and identifies the points of divergence and convergence between the two. Compare Gary Waller, “Acts of Reading: The Production of Meaning in Astrophil and Stella,” SLI 15 (1982): 23–35, which discusses the “unusually active” (p. 23) reading experience promoted by sonnet sequences.

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to particular, private experience and the efficacy of the text depends on the reader’s willingness to ingest its meaning and turn words into personal matter. As a consequence interpretation is emphasized as a formative experience for text, author and reader. Nashe’s texts participate in that movement into history which is marked by the rejection of allegory and stable transhistorical truth.65 Thus, for example, in the description of the Earl of Surrey’s tournament, in The Unfortunate Traveller (II, pp. 271–8), the ridiculous and elaborate presentation of the contestants’ armor parodies symbolic readings with its own tantalizing suggestions of immanent significance that are never ultimately fulfilled. Similarly, The Terrors of the Night satirizes fixed schemes of interpretation and those who claim to uncover Truth, such as the adherents of “phisiognomie and palmestrie” who claim to be able to read a person’s fate in a face or hand (I, p. 370). Nashe argues it is not adequate to read according to the rules provided by such historical or ideological schemes because such schemes are contingently determined, human constructs. For instance, according to The Terrors of the Night (I, pp. 362–3), the prophecies recorded in ancient chronicles are always correct, but this is because the authors of the chronicles choose to include what suits the particular point they wish to make. These prophecies have less to do with access to supernatural knowledge or Truth, and more to do with suitability to authorial purposes. Nashe asserts individual interpretive agency, albeit in terms that hint at disdain for such individualism: “Everie one shapes hys owne fortune as he lists. More aptly may it be said, Everie one shapes his owne feares and fancies as he list” (I, p. 377). Nevertheless, he conceives of reading and writing as self-expressive activities and makes space for the personality of individual members of the book-buying public, as well as the personality of the professional author.66 Nashe exploits a number of strategies to emphasize the presence of his texts, and to give the illusion of a spontaneous exchange between author and reader. Even The Unfortunate Traveller, which is Nashe’s version of narrative 65

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This has led to charges of nihilism. See, for instance, Richard Lanham, “Tom Nashe and Jack Wilton: Personality as Structure in The Unfortunate Traveller,” Studies in Short Fiction 4 (1967): 201– 16. Nashe’s preoccupation with wandering can be mistaken for aimlessness, and prompted Lanham to complain about the themelessness of almost all of Nashe’s texts. Similarly, G. R. Hibbard, Thomas Nashe: A Critical Introduction (London: Routledge, 1962), pp. 252–3, criticizes Nashe because, he concludes, there is nothing behind the verbal skill and ingenuity. However, Nashe is engaged in a serious reflection on the potential and consequences of wandering and homologous issues, such as redundancy and excess. For another acknowledgement of the active role played by readers in the construction of textual meaning, see Have With You, III, p. 12, where a space is left blank, in the dedication, for the reader to fill in as she/he sees fit.

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chronicle, is cast in the first person and blurs the distinction between the written and spoken word: “Prepare your eares and your teares, for never tyll this thrust I anie tragecall matter upon you” (II, p. 320). Author and text are no longer the transparent media of truth but insist on their presence through the illusion of immediacy. Words become the very stuff of life which, like food and drink, flow in and out of the body: Heigh, drawer, fil us a fresh quart of new found phrases, since Gabriell saies we borrow all our eloquence from Taverns: but let it be of the mighty Burdeaux grape, pure vino de monte, I conjure thee. (Strange News, I, p. 305)

The emphasis on the materiality of words and texts is part of Nashe’s attack on allegorical readings and on mighty abstractions which are detached from contextual realities. A glass of wine is substituted for inspiration, wit literally has its dregs, and Nashe brings the paraphernalia of everyday existence into his writing, exploring the sordid and the urban, and detailing the concrete aspects of existence.67 All experience, even literary experience, has an irreducible physicality that inspires Nashe’s imagination: “I have rid a false gallop these three or four pages: now I care not if I breathe mee, and walke soberly and demurely halfe a dozen turnes, like a grave Citizen going about to take the ayre” (Terrors, I, p. 368). The physical conditions of creation are celebrated and turned into matter of note, so that the text appears to be under construction even as it is read. Nashe’s conception of authorship is based on the idea of “true mixture” (Christs Teares, II, p. 185), and just as good vintners mix the “sweetly sowr and pleasantly sharp” (Christs Teares, II, p. 185), so the best authors mix fact and fiction, abstract and concrete, and a great variety of styles and forms. The more that can be compressed into the space of the text, or even the space of a word, the better: “Come, my maister, inure your mouths to it, and never trust me but when you have tride the commodity of carrying much in 67

Walter R. Davis, Idea and Act in Elizabethan Fiction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), pp. 192–3, argues that in the mid-1590s literature turned to a “realistic” orientation. While I would question the use of the term “realism,” Davis notes that Nashe’s prose promotes the importance of experienced reality (p. 214). Nashe’s passages of realism are often parodies of realistic writing. Michael D. Bristol, Carnival and Theater: Plebeian Culture and the Structure of Authority in Renaissance England (New York: Methuen, 1985), p. 103, claims that Lenten Stuff offers an “alternative economy” which shows how to achieve independence from land as the source of subsistence, and how to break the hegemony of proprietary ownership, both in feudal form, and in capital-accumulating forms. He does not deal with the fact that the basis of this new economic reality is not just a herring but a red herring. Like C. L. Barber, in his study of Summers Last Will and Testament, in Shakespeare’s Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom (1959; Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990), pp. 58–86, he has important points to make about Nashe, but indulges in a nostalgic idealizing of popular forms and does not sufficiently explore Nashe’s complex relationship to competing hierarchies.

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a small roome, you will, like the Apothecaries, use more com-pounds then simples, and graft wordes as men do their trees to make them more fruitfull” (Christs Teares II, 184). Nashe sees combination and variety as more generative than straightforward rationality, so that inconsistency becomes desirable. In this context, Nashe’s authority is guaranteed by rhetorical, rather than by logical or factual proofs. In his quarrel with Harvey, for example, he merges truth and fiction to “prove” his point. The “proof ” is often so unashamedly fantastic that the distinction between factual truth and falsehood becomes unimportant, much as it does in Ralegh’s Discoverie of Guiana.68 Thus, for example, in Have With You to Saffron-Walden, Nashe lists a string of outrageous stories about Harvey, including “how he pist incke as soone as ever hee was borne,” and the story that his mother “had carnall copulation” with an “Incubus, in the likenes of an inke-bottle” (III, p. 62). The irony of his mock rejection of these miracles, lest someone tax him with lying, just as the historian Bodin accused Livy of being a miracle-monger, works in several ways. Through its attack on Livy it undermines the factual claims of the historians, and through Bodin’s earnestness it suggests that anyone who believes this nonsense, and takes the metaphorical to be literal truth, is ridiculously na¨ıve in any case. Nashe is not concerned with logic and will take on whoever will contradict him by spitting “fire for fire” (III, p. 63). In his polemics, Nashe constantly proffers statements as true, and then retracts them, leaving questions of truthfulness fluid. Of course, he also needs to blur the truth because his statements are frequently libelous, but the truth is also as much a matter of the readers’ devising as it is of the author’s intention, whether this is welcome or not: “and yet you maye gather more than I am willing to utter, and what you list not beleeve referre to after Ages, even as Paulus Jovius did in his lying praises of the House of Medices” (III, p. 64). It seems that truth changes with the times. While the personalization of writing and reading is characteristic of the generation of shame, Nashe’s generous acknowledgement of the contribution made by readers to the production of literature also exposes him to the hazards of misreading which threaten authorial identity with alternative versions of its image. The problem is felt particularly acutely by Nashe, whose satire exposes him to the scrutiny of censorship. While the disorientations and novelties of his texts force the readers to work, Nashe does not want them to work too hard, and interpret his texts as political or personal satires which might lead to punishment. As Nashe complains in Lenten Stuff, “Talke I of a beare, O, it is such a man that emblazons him 68

See the discussion of Ralegh’s text in chapter 1 pp. 19–22.

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in his armes, or of a woolfe, a fox, or a camelion, any lording whom they do not affect it is meant by” (III, p. 214). While Nashe challenges forms of belief or knowledge that are divorced from experience, and argues for the importance of context, he must also protect himself from the dangers of literalism. The redefinition of literature requires a change in interpretive activity which no longer reads literature for fact, including moral fact, but must conserve a sense of wonder and irony. For example, Christs Teares argues for the suspension of judgement, and identifies situations in which apparent vices, such as sloth, can turn out to be virtues (II, pp. 155–6). Christ condemns the inhabitants of Jerusalem for what he terms “the maladie of their incredulity” (II, p. 20), and the text argues for the importance of wonder, a hermeneutical and epistemological state in which the mind entertains thresholds of possibility. To protect himself from the dangerous literalizations of the censors, Nashe defends wonder as a necessary response to literature, as he maintains in the preface to Have With You to Saffron-Walden, there is only one caveat readers should bare in mind, “namely, that they bee not nimis credulos aut incredulos, too rash or too slow of beleefe” (III, p. 23). Both fact and fiction are equally profitable as a moral and recreational resource. Nashe constructs his texts out of the paradox of make-believe and historical reference and, in so doing, he carves out a space for literature which is neither a realm of lies, nor a realm of truth, neither a realm completely limited by reason, nor a realm completely liberated by fantasy.69 The business of generating shame is an ostentatious, competitive strategy, but the narcissistic activity of displaying the writer also exposes them to the voyeuristic predatoriness of the reader. In The Unfortunate Traveller, Jack watches Heraclide’s violent rape through a crack in the floor boards and experiences both revulsion and fascination (II, pp. 287–92). Jack’s voyeurism figures Nashe’s uneasiness about breaking the taboos which guard the self and its most intimate and private recesses from alien gaze. Even more disturbingly Jack, who has served the story as narrator, spectator 69

For further discussion of the ways The Unfortunate Traveller explores the differences, and the links, between fiction and history, writing and living, see Robert Weimann, “Fabula and Historia: The Crisis of the ‘Universall Consideration’ in The Unfortunate Traveller,” in Representing the English Renaissance, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 181–96. Weimann notes: “There is in Nashe an historical awareness of the social correlatives and predeterminations of appropriated language which, in the late Elizabethan context, is unrivalled except perhaps by the art of Shakespeare’s dramatic compositions” (p. 188). We agree about Nashe’s interest in the cultural functions of discourse, and that he is critical of the abuse of fiction by writers and readers, rather than of fictionality per se. We disagree over matters of emphasis. I see Nashe as being more skeptical and uncertain about his own authority than Weimann does, and argue that he is much more disturbed by the competing authority represented by his readers than Weimann allows.

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and actor, is himself transformed into the object of voyeurism at the hands of Doctor Zacharie (II, pp. 304–8) when Jack is sold to the doctor as a scientific specimen for his annual anatomy lecture. Jack notes that Dr. Zacharie “caused me to be stript naked, to feele and grope whether each lim wer sound & my skin not infected” (p. 305). Like the page in the hands of the reader, Jack is to be anatomized, examined and dissected, and the threat of his impending public dismemberment tortures him so that, in the circumstances, he “durst not let out a wheale, for feare through it [he] shoulde bleede to death” (p. 305).70 The page is now the object of all-consuming desires, and escapes from Zacharie, only to be worn out by the voracious sexual appetite of Juliana. Nashe draws a parallel between publication, exposure and stripping women’s bodies which figures his anxieties about selling and revealing himself for money. Professional literary practice threatens to unman the author who is figured as a feminized victim. The anxieties of authorship in the 1590s include anxieties about gender identity, but in Nashe, effeminization is threatening, whereas the authors of the epyllion are much more willing to embrace the benefits of hermaphroditism and the hybrid potential of combining sexual identities, as the following chapters will argue. The fears that professionalism is a kind of prostitution, or the expression of some errant form of libido, are again articulated in Have With You to Saffron-Walden, in the discussion over the status of Harvey’s “Gentlewoman” (III, pp. 110–14). One of the interlocutors, the Grand Consiliadore, concludes that, whether the gentlewoman was honest or not, Harvey has dishonoured her “since, as Ovid writes, to a Leno, Vendibilis culpa facta puella sua est, he hath set her commonly to sale in Poules Church-yard” (III, pp. 112–13).71 As Paul’s churchyard was also the focus of the London 70

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Francis Meres compares Nashe with Actaeon in the quotation cited above, on p. 84. Actaeon was turned from the voyeur who intruded on Diana’s bath, albeit by accident, into the victim who was eventually torn apart by his own hounds. On the myth as “the dramatization of reciprocal and dangerous looks” (p. 202) in which the reader becomes the punitive Diana, see Wendy Wall, Imprint of Gender, pp. 198–214 and 225–6. The myth of Diana and Actaeon also figures the threat of censorship. In Strange News, I, pp. 285–6, Ovid is cast as an Actaeon figure who spies on Augustus “in a place where he would not have beene seene,” and is exiled as a punishment. For Nashe, the author is thus both the victim and the perpetrator of voyeurism. The word “prostitute” comes from the Latin, pro stare, to stand in front. All writers who seek exceptional status are, in some way, pro-stitutes with the consequence that individuality, the desire to be different, is eroticized. The analogy between writers and prostitutes survived beyond the late sixteenth century. Compare John Dryden’s prologues to The Wild Gallant (1667) and An Evening’s Love, and William Wycherley’s dedication of The Plain Dealer “To my Lady B –,” the prostitute, known as “Lady Bennett.” See The Prologues and Epilogues of John Dryden: A Critical Edition, ed. William Bradford Gardner (New York: Columbia University Press for the University of Texas, 1951), pp. 13 and 23–4; and The Plays of William Wycherley, ed. Arthur Friedman (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), pp. 365–72.

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book trade, the implication is that the book market has become a flesh market. The Unfortunate Traveller presents the story of a page as a story of increasing victimization.72 Nashe’s anxieties about authorship are expressed in an ambivalent attitude to travel, voiced most clearly by the exiled English Earl whom Jack meets in Italy. The Earl advises Jack to return home. For the anonymous Earl, travel enforces the separation of individuals from their roots and their separation from their true selves. Thus it is the ultimate form of punishment, as the Earl reminds Jack: “God had no greater curse to lay upon the Israelites, than by leading them out of their owne countrey to live as slaves in a strange land” (II, p. 297).73 Since Nashe classifies good authors as “peripaticians” (The Anatomie of Absurditie, I, p. 27), the wanderings of the traveler become a symbol for writing, as the Earl himself points out, the most famous of all travelers was also famed for his eloquence, “Ulysses, the long Traveller, was not amiable, but eloquent” (II, p. 299). Contemporary travel handbooks also made a connection between travel, writing and reading, characterizing all three activities as a search for wisdom. As the author of A Direction for Travailers. Taken out of Justus Lipsius (1592) notes, “Everie one can gaze, can wander, and can wonder, but to few it is given to seek, to search, to learne, and to attaine to true pollicie, and wisedome, (which is traveling indede).”74 Writing is not necessarily an attractive profession, as it condemns the writer to rootlessness and continuous displacements. Nevertheless, for all the coherence of the Earl’s condemnation of travel, the reader is not allowed to settle into an easy acceptance of the exiled Earl’s speech, because Jack ridicules it and cannot wait to escape this tedious encounter. shame and the anx ieties of t he subject In The Unfortunate Traveller (II, pp. 231–2), the French King, like the narrator, bases his authority on extravagant hyperbole. He turns prodigality into military strategy and proves his superiority by piling up heaps of mutilated limbs, in his battle against the Swiss. Nevertheless, as the parallel between authorial and sovereign powers suggests, transgressive forms of 72 73 74

Kinney, Humanist Poetics, p. 354, interprets Jack’s tale as one of mounting hopelessness. Compare Jack’s remarks about “the lotterie of travell,” II, p. 243, for another skeptical voice on travel. A Direction for Travailers. Taken out of Justus Lipsius, and enlarged for the behoofe of the right honorable Lord, the yong Earle of Bedford, being now ready to travell 1592, The English Experience Facsimile 878 (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1977) (A3v). In the dedication to Bedford, the author defines publication as travel for a book, saying that his translation of Lipsius’ Of Constancie “are [sic] comming abroad, beeyng in the presse and more then halfe doone” (A2r–v).

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authorship are not just shameless, they may even be treasonous. In Have With You to Saffron-Walden, Nashe jokingly refers to himself and Harvey as “alchumist[s]” (III, p. 57), but their ability to coin new matter is both a source of pride and wealth, and a threat to authority. In The Unfortunate Traveller, Jack and the Earl of Surrey are wrongly accused of counterfeiting money, and then of attempting to plot against the state (II, pp. 258–64) and they are only saved from execution by the intervention of the famous satirist, Pietro Aretino. The question of authorial credit represents a twofold challenge to authority, because the author not only challenges the state’s power to coin money, as s/he fills up paper which is miraculously turned into financial reward, but s/he also challenges a share in the rhetorical basis of state power. As Jack points out, men become powerful “by the mouth . . . that is, mount or be great by undermining” (II, p. 221), and while this is identified as the basis of political and social power, it is also the strategy Nashe uses to promote his own authorial status, as it is the fundamental process of satire. Moreover, through its association with coining, in texts such as The Unfortunate Traveller, writing comes to be associated with transgressive sexuality. The counterfeit gold that is found to belong to Jack and is the source of his trouble with the authorities, was given to him by the prostitute, Tabitha, who received it from a coiner. In Eric Partridge’s phrase, coiner is Elizabethan slang for a man working “in the mint of sexual intercourse,” in other words, one who imposes his form on the matrix, womb or mould.75 In the sixteenth century, private experience and the kinds of self that it might produce, do not occupy a clearly defined psychological, social or philosophical space. Although writers like Sir Thomas More had already challenged the marginalization of private experience in texts like Utopia, humanism casts the personal as digressive, even transgressive. In addition, the varied strategies of generating shame produce characteristically hybrid texts, which are structured out of discontinuities. As a result, the literary subject is a fragmented subject, and the authorial self so constructed is discontinuous and problematic. The sense of self is associated with a sense of transgression and the inability to stick to the point.76 In Pierce Penilesse, for example, private experience is approached digressively: “But from generall 75 76

Eric Partridge, Shakespeare’s Bawdy (1947; London: Routledge, 1968), p. 81. Shoshana Felman’s description of personal writing is very useful here. She sees a difference between the autobiographical, and the illusion of the personal. Autobiography is a form of self-disclosure that presupposes a coherent or organic self, while in the personal, the self is constructed and decentred, so that discontinuity is acknowledged. What Does a Woman Want: Reading and Sexual Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), p. 155.

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fame, let me digres to my private experience, and with a toong unworthy to name a name of such worthines, affectionatelie emblason to the eies that woonder, the matchlesse image of Honor, and magnificent rewarder of vertue, Joves Eagle-borne Ganimed, thrice noble Amyntas” (I, p. 243).77 In the process, a new value for Nashe’s own personal and marginal experience is discovered. The digression fills up an omission. According to Nashe, Spenser had forgotten to praise Amyntas (alias Lord Stanley) in The Faerie Queene, and Nashe presents his dedication, which is also a digression from the main matter of Pierce, and the conclusion to the text, as supplementary praise which proves Stanley’s worth and gives proper praise to the court. Digressions become spaces of importance, as they do in The Faerie Queene, where the intrusion of pastoral into the epic, in the scene on Mount Acidale in Book VI, canto X, is both a space of generic debasement and of political, personal and cultural resonance and renewal. Given that Spenser had completed Chaucer’s “Squire’s Tale” in the digressions of Book IV, it is appropriate that Nashe’s digressive paean to digression, in Pierce Penilesse, should end as an echo of Spenser: “Beare with me gentle Poet, though I conceive not aright of thy purpose, or be too inquisitive into the intent of thy oblivion: . . . Tantum hoc molior, in this short digression, to acquaint our countreymen that live out of the Eccho of the Court, with a common knowledge of his invaluable vertues, and shew my selfe thankfull (in some part) for benefits received” (I, pp. 244–5).78 The kind of authorial persona and the kind of literary culture defined by the strategies of shame are fragmented. This is partly because the generation of shame focuses renewed interest on the role and the nature of ornament, and on the role and the nature of digression, with the result that the component elements of a text gain prominence, at the expense of the idea of a seamless totality. Moreover, professionalization exacerbates the drive to fragmentation. The professional writer must generate text, and continue to do so. This is one of the sources of desperation for Nashe, because the ambition to be someone who produces matter demands that the writer has something to say. The source of text must never dry up, and improvisation 77 78

C. G. Harlow, “Thomas Nashe, Robert Cotton the Antiquary, and Terrors of the Night,” RES ns 12 (1961): 23, identifies Amyntas as Ferdinando Stanley. Jonathan Goldberg, Spenser’s Endlesse Worke, pp. 31–72, discusses Spenser’s adaptation of Chaucer, concluding that the endless recounting, and deviation from ending, is really a proclamation of literary power, as the endless text represents the fullness of the word and the world. Lars Engle, Shakespearean Pragmatism, p. 132, notes that in the 1590s Chaucer was associated with obscenity. The link between literary excellence and wantonness is, therefore, not only suggested to the 1590s by Ovid, but also by Chaucer. On Chaucer’s attempts to mediate the competing literary-political authorities of Virgil and Ovid, see Heather James, Shakespeare’s Troy, pp. 22–30.

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becomes a necessity. In Nashe, consistency is frequently lost, as the narrator spins out matter from whatever materials are at hand, even allowing words to generate their own associations, so that, as he passes from subject to subject, and style to style, the text fragments.79 In a manner typical of Renaissance writers, Nashe is most personal when he is most conventional and artificial, and most conscious of the restrictions that hedge his articulations. Similarly, one of the ways Spenser draws attention to personal matters in The Faerie Queene is by adopting the highly artificial pastoral disguise of Colin Clout, and when Sidney wishes to draw attention to himself in Astrophil and Stella, he does so through the highly Petrarchan conceit of Astrophil, lover of the star, which invokes the first syllable of his own name, Philip. They develop a self-protective compound of fact and fiction, in which historical and autobiographical truth is inseparable from fiction.80 Nashe establishes himself as one of the most individualistic of Elizabethan authors through an endless game of partial veiling and unveiling, so that Pierce Penilesse and Pierce Respondent, for example, both represent Nashe, and mask him. Nashe’s texts exemplify a characteristically Elizabethan kind of self-consciousness which is dependent on artifice and produced by images that simultaneously hide and indicate a self, which is very different from the full cognizance of self that lies at the heart of Burckhardtian historiography. The authorial self is figured through fiction, ritual and convention but this also raises anxieties about the insubstantiality of identity. These anxieties are most clearly articulated in The Unfortunate Traveller through the pun on Jack Wilton’s occupation as page to the court of Henry VIII. Jack is in fact nothing more than a page, the literal embodiment of the text who is locked in service to his story and his readers. Jack possesses no reality beyond his fictional incarnation, and ending his story would constitute a kind of death. The anxiety of dissolution, the fear that he will somehow use up so many of his personal resources that there will be little or nothing left to sustain him, is the consequence of prodigality. Nashe’s constant fear is that he will become mere style without substance, and it is a fear that is exacerbated 79 80

Satire also exerts its own pressure towards fragmentation. See Fowler, Kinds of Literature, pp. 188–9, where he discusses the derivation of the term “satire” and its association with “casual diversification.” Compare Fumerton’s point, Cultural Aesthetics, p. 103, that Sidney responded to the need to represent subjectivity at the court by “an art of secrecy.” The paradox of truth is preserved in the (false) etymological derivation of the word “sincere” from sine and cera, meaning without wax, as noted in the OED. The mutable substance of wax was used to fill in the gaps during the process of casting metal. A good cast had no holes, or surface imperfections, and therefore no need for wax. So the condition of being sincere, or without wax, originally described the perfect artefact, one that exhibited material integrity. See Anne Ferry, The “Inward” Language: Sonnets of Wyatt, Sidney, Shakespeare, Donne (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983), pp. 247–8.

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by the print system with its promise of monetary reward which induces writers to produce empty froth and mere manner without matter: “& in truth what leasings will not make-shyfts invent for money? What wyl they not faine for gaine?” (Anatomie of Absurditie, I, p. 23). Ironically, although he battles for control of his texts with various patrons, masters, readers, elders and censors, Nashe is not even certain who he is. In the dedication to The Unfortunate Traveller, Nashe uses terms that simultaneously affirm honest self-awareness and a total lack of self-knowledge, “the eye that sees round about it selfe sees not into it selfe” (II, p. 201). Hence it is fitting that Nashe’s most accomplished piece of self-promotion should be the praise of the red herring, because the author is also a productive, but insubstantial, resource which is too slippery to pin down. The integrity of the author is only a provisional achievement that is tied to writing and is always under threat from the exhausting business of creation. Ironically, the more Nashe tries to prove his self-knowledge in self-conscious moments of self-parody and self-revelation, the more skeptical the reader becomes about his protestations of honesty, and the more suspicious she or he becomes about their constant manipulation. Rhetoric is revealed to be self-proliferating, and the author is almost submerged by the sheer volume of words which require self-conscious efforts to bring them to an end. Many of Nashe’s texts can only be brought to a close by abrupt truncation: “Thus I shut up my Treatise abruptly . . .” (Terrors, I, p. 386), “And so I breake off this endlesse argument of speech abruptlie” (Pierce, I, p. 245). This creates the impression that writing is spontaneous, and the frequent allusions to the more perfect and complete texts that he has written, or could write, protect Nashe from the fear that he will expend himself in print. Paradoxically, by acknowledging his present deficiencies, Nashe finds assurance of a fullness to come, as he says at the extravagant close of Lenten Stuff : My conceit is cast into a sweating sickenesse, with ascending these few steps of his renowne [i.e. the red herring’s]; into what a hote broyling saint Laurence fever would it relapse then, should I spend the whole bagge of my winde in climbing up to the lofty mountaine creast of his trophees? (III, p. 226)

Lenten Stuff is therefore cast as a heroic incompletion, an epic undertaking which has not, and cannot, be finished, much like Ralegh’s “Booke of the Ocean to Scinthia” (21st Booke, ll. 89–107). Postmodern theory understands the trifling and the fragmentary as negation, but this is not the case in Nashe where the fragmentary is the appropriate means, the only means, to indicate wholeness. Hutson argues that Nashe does not find a concept of

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the author, or of integrity, with which to replace the past. Thus the author does away with himself in the process of writing.81 However, fragmentariness need not be a threat to the impression of integrity but may well present the very means through which a particular conception of a liminal form of literary identity is given expression. Writing is merely a fragment of what is possible, but such protestations turn fragmentariness and even inadequacy into an advantage, because they not only affirm the richness of Nashe’s subject matter, they also sanction the hyperbole of his style by claiming that it is in fact reticent and decorous. Moreover, the idea that the text is only an insufficient attempt to fulfill the obligations of complete praise or dispraise also proves the infinite creativity of the author’s imagination, as the author says at the end of Have With You to Saffron-Walden, “More battring engins I had in a readines prepared to shake his [Harvey’s] walles, which I keepe back till the next Tearme” (III, p. 139). Of course, it is impossible to decide whether the narrator is being sincere in such passages, but even if they are lying, the artifice guarantees the fiction of their integrity, so that omission and deficiency produce a (paradoxical) claim to sincerity and fullness. conclusion Just as the alchemist transforms hope to gold, so imagination turns the abstract into the concrete, by turning intellectual resources into coins. In the case of Thomas Nashe, through his textual offerings to patrons, which are also commodities put up for sale, Nashe tries to make a space for himself in the late sixteenth-century commonwealth of letters, and that space is self-consciously marginal and playful. Nashe adopts the status of the jester in order to speak seriously by speaking in jest, and his muse is a “holiday Muse” (Strange News, I, p. 259) which derives its authority from the value of pastime.82 The self-trivialization and playfulness of his paradoxical strategies break away from the polarizations of traditional structures of value. Nashe is like the mountebank who gets credit through petty trifles (Terrors, I, pp. 365–6), and The Terrors of the Night is itself an insubstantial trifle, like the dreams it glosses. Both text and dream are the froth of fancy made up from the fragments of the imagination. They are both places 81

82

Hutson, Thomas Nashe in Context, pp. 113–14. Later (p. 143) she argues that variety is a sign of weakness, and that different styles and voices threaten authorial integrity. I argue that variety constructs authorial integrity because self is conceived through, and produced out of, discontinuity and inconsistency in the late Elizabethan period. Compare Heather Dubrow’s suggestive observations on the powerful marginality of Shakespeare’s servants and fools in Captive Victors: Shakespeare’s Narrative Poems and Sonnets (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), p. 263.

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where opposites are confounded and operate on the threshold between waking and sleeping, truth and fiction, the abstract and the material, the fragment and the deferred completion towards which late Elizabethan texts repeatedly gesture: “some longer lyved Tractate I reserve for the full blaze of his vertues, which here onely in the sparkes I decypher” (Terrors, I, p. 375). Yet, in The Terrors, these insubstantialities are worthy of analysis and their tantalizing fragmentariness becomes the incitement or “sparke” to seek for knowledge. As he turns his own guilt to good account and finds value in trivial, wasteful and marginal activities, Nashe invokes Ovid and Aretino as the patrons of prodigality.83 Both writers were associated with guiltiness in the culture of the 1590s mainly because of their eroticism. Thus, for example, in his conventional attack on learning and its slothful predisposition to “newfangled sinnes,” in Summers Last Will and Testament (III, p. 277), Winter unsurprisingly cites Ovid and Aretino as defenders of lechery: Whoredome hath Ovid to uphold her throne; And Aretine of late in Italie, Whose Cortigiana toucheth bawdes their trade. (III, p. 277)

Yet while Ovid and Aretino revel in the luxuriance of their wit and their shameful subjects, they each connect their own writing to other forms of authority. Ovid, the laureate of erotic metamorphoses and the arts of love, was protected by the imperial power of Augustus. Pietro Aretino was renowned as a satirist and was honoured as “Il flagello de principi” (The scourge of princes) (Unfortunate Traveller, II, p. 265).84 He derived his authority from his determination to speak the truth and in this context even the shameless excesses of his style become proof of his honesty and his refusal to compromise with society. Nashe claims a similar frank independence, and in his satire an exuberant, self-consciously prodigal kind of writing no longer stands in simple opposition to authority, as even his excesses guarantee his integrity and his honest independence from convention. For Nashe, Aretino and Ovid are patrons of his attack on the prodigal paradigm and undermine that paradigm’s monopolistic claims on authority. Like Ovid in The Metamorphoses, Nashe is obsessed with seeking permanence for something impermanent. This problem is particularly acute, given the youthful self-confidence of a generation of writers who engage in 83 84

For Nashe and Aretino see Rhodes, Elizabethan Grotesque, pp. 26–36. Thomas Lodge calls Nashe the “true English Aretine” in Wit’s Misery and the World’s Madness (1596), see McKerrow, ed., Works of Thomas Nashe, V, p. 147.

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a series of critiques of received wisdom. When Petrarchanism, romance, sermon and religious complaint are undercut, what forms of authority remain? Nashe addresses this problem by linking his survival with the survival of England. The implications of digression and triviality for Nashe are patriotic, as well as epic and literary. England’s very vulnerability to attack, like the writer’s vulnerability to criticism, becomes the source of its strength: “That State or Kingdome that is in league with all the world, and hath no forraine sword to vexe it, is not halfe so strong or confirmed to endure, as that which lives every houre in feare of in-vasion” (Pierce, I, p. 211).85 In this case Nashe embraces England’s potential weakness as a paradoxical source of strength. As this paragraph of Pierce Penilesse develops, Nashe applies similar arguments to literature, making its toyfulness the basis of its claim to usefulness. Nashe identifies the disease that threatens the late Elizabethan state, as “a certaine waste of the people for whome there is no use, but warre” (I, p. 211). The cure that he suggests for this enforced idleness is founded in the digressive and substitutory nature of literature: “it is very expedient they have some light toyes to busie their heads withall, cast before them as bones to gnaw upon, which may keepe them from having leisure to intermeddle with higher matters” (I, p. 211). The playful, self-subverting and paradoxical role of an epic jester is the most decorous role for the laureate of a vulnerable, trivial nation that needs to turn its own excesses, including its excess population, to good use. Moreover, contention and opposition are as empowering for the nation as they are for the writer, and Nashe embraces opportunities for querulousness with gusto. Satire, which is usually seen as a threat to the state, is redefined as one of the weapons of national regeneration, as the castigatory arm of government, and its excessive violence and license increases its moral and political effectiveness.86 The generation of shame advocates a kind of authorship that is formed from digressions and fragments. Such texts draw attention to their components and uncover the cracks in their structure because it is precisely their fragmentariness that leaves space for the expression of the author’s individual style in the novelties of recombination, thereby articulating the personal substance that gives matter to form. Individuality exists in the 85 86

Compare Pierce, I, pp. 184–5, and Knapp, An Empire Nowhere, p. 5. The trivial red herring is also presented as a particularly English mascot (III, pp. 200 and 226). Nevertheless, in Christs Teares, II, p. 142, England’s predilection for triviality is also a source of worry, while The Unfortunate Traveller concentrates on the horrors rather than the purgative benefits of war. Yet Nashe does argue that contestation is not destructive. As Sr. Marina Gibbons O. P. points out in “Polemic, the Rhetorical Tradition, and The Unfortunate Traveller,” JEGP 63 (1964): 408–21, it has its own rules and conventions.

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way the components are put together and in the gaps between the text and its models. The fragmentariness asserts authorial control and the value of the individual author. As Marx points out in Das Kapital, imperfections present us with an artefact that carries its maker’s mark, rather than with a seamless, anonymous product: It is generally by their imperfections as products that the means of production in any process assert themselves in their character as products. A blunt knife or a weak thread forcibly remind us of Mr. A., the cutler, or Mr. B., the spinner. In the finished product the labour by means of which it has acquired its useful qualities is not palpable, has apparently vanished.87

From one point of view the polysemous and polymorphous narratives of late Elizabethan literature may be imperfect, but ironically these imperfections are also assertions of authorial work and control. In this curious way of promoting the self through deficiency, literary identity comes into being as something discontinuous, fragmented and deformed. For Nashe, fragmentation is a source of power. Christs Teares Over Jerusalem (1593) was a notorious attack on metropolitan immorality which forced Nashe to seek temporary refuge with the Careys on the Isle of Wight, and Nashe constructs his attack on London out of a string of trivia and inconsequential domestic examples which he hopes will convince his reader to listen to the teachings of Christ. The oration includes an attack on sermons which are made out of nothing but scriptural quotations, and hence show no restraint in their use of scripture, piling on effect after effect: “Scripture we hotch-potch together, & doe not place it like Pearle and Gold-lace on a garment, heere & there to adorne, but pile it and dunge it up on heapes, without use or edification” (II, p. 127). In this case, good writing is achieved by the careful placement of quotations “heere & there.” Mixture proves to be more persuasive than the excessive use of one strategy and it is precisely the fragmentary structure of such sermons that makes them more beautiful and more effective. In fact, it would make them more truthful than a text which strives for consistency and completion because, for Nashe, the Anglican apologist, consistency and completion are not things of the self, nor things of this world. Ornamental fragments prove to be more persuasive than the excessive use of one style or source, and texts which wander “heere & there” are both more beautiful and more 87

Cited by Elizabeth Wanning Harries, The Unfinished Manner: Essays on the Fragment in the Later Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1994), p. 7. Harries’ introduction, and her discussion of Petrarch and Rabelais (pp. 12–24), constitute a brilliant contribution to the study of what she terms “deliberate” fragments (p. 2).

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truthful than texts which strive for integrity. In Thomas Nashe in Context, Hutson argues that variety is a sign of weakness, and that different styles and voices threaten authorial integrity.88 Yet a variety of identifiable styles is not only commercially desirable for Nashe as a professional author, variety also constructs an authorial voice, albeit a perverse one, as discontinuity and inconsistency generate the impression of self. Nashe parades his inconsistencies, inadequacies and mistakes to reinforce his authorial image. While each approximate articulation in his texts is wrong, or merely provisional, it is also a step towards getting things right. He does not deal in certainty, but in possibility, as he tries to work out ways of articulating what has not yet been thought out, including the unfamiliar role of professional author. 88

Lorna Hutson, Thomas Nashe in Context, p. 143.

chap t e r 3

Literature as fetish

the epyllion and the eroticiz at ion of eliz abethan literary cult ure One of the embarrassing truths about the literary culture of the 1590s is that it is obsessed with sex. This is not only a matter of explicit content and the liberal use of innuendo: the eroticization of literary culture is also expressed in the way the most fundamental aspects of literary activity are reconceived. For example, as the previous chapter argued, in the account of the rape of Heraclide in The Unfortunate Traveller, reading is represented as voyeuristic sexual aggression, in “The Choice of Valentines,” the pen is elided with the penis, and in Have With You to Saffron Walden, a literary career is both a kind of prostitution and a form of pimping, at least in the case of Gabriel Harvey. The eroticization of literature is widespread and insidious in the 1590s, and its disruptive energy surfaces in texts such as contemporary lampoons of Elizabeth, Donne’s “Elegies” and The Rape of Lucrece, but there is one genre which reached the peak of its popularity in the decade, in which eros is exploited and explored with self-conscious abandon, and that genre is the epyllion. This chapter explores how the pursuit of shame in erotic literature defines a new aesthetic ideology, and how that ideology interacts with understandings of sexuality and gender. The chapter is based on a reading of eleven epyllia, ranging from Scillaes Metamorphosis, published in 1589, to Faunus and Melliflora, published in 1600.1 The epyllion is not only one of the most characteristic forms of the 1590s, its erotic wit reveals the generation of shame at its most brazen and provocative. The word epyllion derives from 1

These eleven poems are: Thomas Lodge, Scillaes Metamorphosis 1589; Christopher Marlowe, Hero and Leander 1598; William Shakespeare, Venus and Adonis 1593; Thomas Heywood, Oenone and Paris 1594; George Chapman, Ovids Banquet of Sence 1595; Michael Drayton, Endimion and Phoebe: Ideas Latmus 1595; Thomas Edwards, Cephalus and Procris 1595; George Chapman, Hero and Leander cont. 1598; Henry Petowe, The Second Part of Hero and Leander Containing Their Further Fortunes 1598; John Marston, The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image 1598; John Weever Faunus and Melliflora 1600.

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the Greek for small epic, and an epyllion is a brief narrative poem about desire. It derives its material from Ovid, usually from the Metamorphoses, but also draws on the Amores, Heroides and Tristia, and it treats its subject matter in a particular way.2 Epyllia are witty, erotic and urbane poems which place great emphasis on style and invention, and constitute virtuoso displays of poetic skill. Moreover, the genre is extremely self-conscious, and the epyllion writers ostentatiously raid each other, copy each other and continue each other’s work, thereby establishing themselves, it will be argued, as poets who are instantly recognizable as members of a literary avant-garde. Like Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the epyllion stands in oblique relationship to epic, and triviality is endemic to the genre, whether it is expressed in the frivolous tone, or in the brevity of the poems. The epyllion is a reduction, truncation and trivialization of epic. At the same time, however, the epyllion exaggerates certain aspects of epic, including its ecphrastic tendencies and potential for digression, as it lets the footnotes and lacunae of contemporary culture run riot. The genre brings to the fore the things that tend to be marginalized by epic including perverse desires, the taste for luxury and, quite simply, the bit players of grander epic narratives. For example, Thomas Heywood’s Oenone and Paris (1594) describes the consequences of the judgement of Paris from an unexpected, domestic and feminine, perspective. The judgement of Paris is the basis of the Iliad, the earliest and most respected of epics for the Elizabethans.3 Oenone and Paris presents itself as an anti-epic and, rather than the great dynastic and political consequences of Paris’ action, it focuses on the personal and domestic effects of his famous judgement.4 The epyllion’s status as a little epic is preserved in the mock-heroic juxtaposition of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis with Homer, in The First Part of the Return from Parnassus. When the braggart, Gullio, decides to woo his mistress, he plans to use “nothinge but pure Shakspeare” (l. 986). In fact, Gullio’s love-talk includes quotations from Venus and Adonis, a text he keeps under his pillow, because he remembers that some ancient king admired Homer to such a great degree that he kept 2

3

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Nigel Alexander, introduction, Elizabethan Narrative Verse, The Stratford-Upon-Avon Library 3, ed. Alexander (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), pp. 3–24, discusses Ovid’s influence on the epyllion. M. L. Stapleton, “Venus as Preaceptor: The Ars Amatoria in Venus and Adonis,” in Venus and Adonis Critical Essays, ed. Philip C. Kolin, (New York: Garland), pp. 309–21, discusses the influence of the Ars on the characterization of Venus as someone who gives bad advice about love. For example, Puttenham calls Homer “the father and Prince of the Poets” in “Of Poets and Poesie,” ch. 8, see The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 16. See also his assessment of The Iliad in “Of Ornament,” ch. 24, p. 289. Compare Petowe’s Hero and Leander, ll. 31–56, which opens with a domestic quarrel between Jove and Juno over the fate of Hero.

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the text with him even while he slept: “let this duncified worlde esteeme of Spe[n]cer and Chaucer, Ile worshipp sweet Mr Shakspeare, and to honoure him will lay his Venus and Adonis under my pillowe, as wee reade of one (I do not well remember his name, but I am sure he was a kinge) slept with Homer under his beds heade” (ll. 1201–5).5 The epyllion developed in answer to the criticisms which had been leveled against poetry in the 1570s and 1580s. These had attacked poetry on two fronts, for its immorality and its poor quality. Thomas Lodge inaugurated the form with the publication of Scillaes Metamorphosis in 1589, but the genre did not become popular until the appearance of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis and Marlowe’s Hero and Leander in 1593.6 These two poems made the epyllion especially fashionable for young writers, partly because of the popularity of Shakespeare’s poem, with his famous description of Venus and Adonis as “the first heire of my invention,” in the dedication to the Earl of Southampton.7 In addition, the sensational circumstances of Marlowe’s premature death, in 1593, fixed him as the perpetual wild young man in the Elizabethan consciousness. The epyllion reached the heights of faddish popularity in the 1590s, waxing and waning with the decade, and by about 1600 it had started to give way to other newly fashionable forms, particularly satire. The genesis of the genre in the pages of debate may help to explain its relatively short lifespan, as the literary agenda changed during the 1590s, partly because of the impact of this kind of erotic writing, and new 5

6

7

Quoted from The First Part of the Return from Parnassus, in The Three Parnassus Plays (1598–1601), ed. J. B. Leishman (London: Ivor Nicholson and Watson, 1949). The king whose name slips Gullio’s mind is Alexander the Great. George Puttenham refers to the story in The Arte of English Poesie, “Of Poets and Poesie,” ch. 8, The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Willcock and Walker, p. 16. The presentation of Gullio and his affected language reflects the process described by John Guillory in Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), pp. 62–3, whereby the literary canon produces an effect of linguistic distinction, of literacy. In the case of the epyllion, canon formation is tied to the emergence of particular kinds of socially marked speech, and of e´litist taste, which it helps define, but the canon is formed outside institutions and schools, through the continued reproduction of these works of art in other literary works, an extra-institutional process of canon formation which Guillory does not describe. Marlowe was killed at Deptford on 30 May 1593. The allusions to Hero and Leander in other epyllia prove that his poem was known before the publication of the earliest extant edition in 1598. For a possible date of composition early in Marlowe’s career, see Stephen Orgel, ed., Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Poems and Translations (1971; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), p. 219. For a contrary argument that dates Hero and Leander to the end of Marlowe’s career, see Patrick Cheney, Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession: Ovid, Spenser, Counter-Nationhood (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), pp. 6–25. The date of composition does not affect my point that Marlowe’s premature death established him (whether justifiably or not – he was 29 when he died) as the embodiment of unrealized, youthful potential. All quotations from Venus and Adonis are from William Shakespeare: The Complete Works, ed. Peter Alexander (1951; London: Collins, 1989).

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issues and new problems came to the fore which needed different generic approaches. The epyllion, which was born in and for the Inns of Court, as Lodge produced Scillaes Metamorphosis for the students at Lincoln’s Inn, was replaced by the newer Inns of Court fashion for satire.8 The scurrilous activity generated by the epyllion did not go unnoticed by the authorities. On 1 June 1599, the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London issued an order banning the publication of erotic and satiric texts. They also called in all such texts as were already in circulation so that they could be burned by the hangman.9 As the edict acknowledges, in its coupling of erotic and satiric forms, sex not only offered writers and readers personal gratifications, it also posed a cultural and ideological challenge to the status quo. Most modern critics of the epyllion, however, approach the form as an essay on love. William Keach, for example, maintains that Marlowe’s Hero and Leander is a poem about “the risks, limitations and disappointments of romantic love.”10 Yet those Elizabethans who read 8

9

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On the taste for eroticism as an expression of hostility to the standards of the bourgeoisie, especially at the Inns, see John Carey, “The Ovidian Love Elegy in England,” D.Phil., Oxford University, 1960, pp. 302–16 and 349–77. The political and cultural importance of the Inns of Court is discussed by Philip J. Finkelpearl, John Marston of the Middle Temple: An Elizabethan Dramatist in his Social Setting (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), pp. 3–80; Wilfrid Prest, “Legal Education of the Gentry at the Inns of Court, 1560–1640,” Past & Present, 38 (1967): 20–39; and Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of Aristocracy 1558–1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), pp. 687–92. The Inns performed some of the functions of a club, and provided a gathering place for men about town. They were also closely associated with government, and official committees met in the Inns which, in their turn, provided an unending supply of public servants. On the one hand, they were a place of pastime and reveling, but at the same time they were essential to the perpetuation of good, centralized government. For the banning order, see A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London. 1554–1640 A.D., ed. Edward Arber, 5 vols. (vols. 1–4 London: Privately Printed, 1875–77; vol. 5 Birmingham: Privately Printed, 1894), III pp. 677–8. The order is discussed by Richard A. McCabe, “Elizabethan Satire and the Bishops’ Ban of 1599,” YES 11 (1981): 188–93. However, censorship decisions were always influenced by a combination of forces, as Cyndia Susan Clegg demonstrates in her study, Press Censorship in Elizabethan England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). William Keach, Elizabethan Erotic Narratives (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1977) p. 87. He argues that the epyllion developed in response to the need to find expression for the multiform nature of love, and although this is true, I disagree with the implication that romantic love is the sole focus of the epyllion, and with his moralizing analyses. Keach is part of a venerable tradition that includes Clifford Leech, “Venus and her Nun: Portraits of Women in Love by Shakespeare and Marlowe,” SEL 5 (1965): 247–68, who argues that Venus and Hero are sentimental embodiments of “woman in love” (p. 267); and Nancy Lindheim, “The Shakespearean Venus and Adonis,” Shakespeare Quarterly 37 (1986): 190–203. Most criticism of the erotic narratives has proved resistant to their irony, comedy and their artificiousness. Although Clark Hulse locates the poem in its historical and generic context, he also reads Venus and Adonis as a philosophical poem about love in Metamorphic Verse: The Elizabethan Minor Epic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp. 141–75. He interprets it in the light of the dynamic which he argues characterizes late Elizabethan culture, and opposes the extreme forms of subjectivity developed by genres such as the epyllion, to a skeptical attitude to the subject, articulated by poets like Daniel. While I have greatly benefited from Hulse’s subtle readings,

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these poems as a sentimental education tend to be sent up by contemporaries, as Gullio is in the Parnassus Plays. While Elizabethan writers, like Gabriel Harvey, castigated late sixteenth-century culture for its reliance on the “brothell Muse,” modern criticism has tended to soften and sentimentalize its focus.11 As a result, it has failed to do justice to the most striking aspects of the epyllion, including its tonal ambiguity, wittiness and selfindulgent eroticism. These erotic narratives are only partially about love and the relationship between the sexes, or within the sexes – they are also about poetry, youth and shame. Writers seized on the epyllion in the 1590s because it enabled them to express and develop radically new ideas about the nature and value of poetry. The particular choice of subject matter, the erotic treatment of myth and the unexpected roles ascribed to the sexes were acts of defiant self-assertion given the sort of attack which had been leveled against poetry by moralists such as Stephen Gosson. Through its indulgence in peripheral sexualities and its exploitation of eroticism, the epyllion promotes what is marginal and even what is transgressive. The epyllion writers seize on such subject matter to define their own newness, their own radicalism and their own independence from the literary status quo they inherited. At the same time, the genre provides an experimental intellectual space in which to explore the ways marginality and transgression interact with sexuality and gender, an interaction which produces unpredictable results, as this chapter will argue. No doubt, the epyllion capitalizes on the salacious appeal of its erotic stories but it uses its erotic material in emblematic ways to redefine the role of author and reader, and to explore the nature of literary morality. In the epyllion, the fundamental processes of writing and reading, as well as the structural and stylistic elements that characterize the literary text, are eroticized with the result that the literary text becomes a source of, and a substitute for, sexual gratification. In the particular application of the erotic that is analysed in this chapter, literature becomes a fetish. It is irrationally reverenced, and becomes both a stimulus to sexual desire, and the end of sexual desire. Critics have long noted the association of the epyllion with eros. In an extremely interesting essay on the reception of Venus and Adonis, Katherine

11

we have very different understandings of subjectivity, and my analysis of the epyllion focuses on how the erotic functions to negotiate the configurations of a specifically literary aesthetic in the 1590s. For a generous analysis of the wittiness of Marlowe’s epyllion, see Robert Logan, “Perspective in Marlowe’s Hero and Leander: Engaging our Detachment,” in Kenneth Friedenreich, Roma Gill and Constance Brown Kuriyama, eds., “A poet and a filthy play-maker”: New Essays on Christopher Marlowe (New York: AMS Press, 1988), pp. 279–91. The phrase, “brothell Muse,” is used by Gabriel Harvey in Pierce’s Supererogation. See Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith, 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950), II, p. 259.

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Duncan-Jones concludes that the poem “was susceptible of numberless applications and adaptations, all associated with erotic play and enchantment.”12 However, like the majority of critics, she is ultimately content to explain this association by implying that we are all interested in sex. While this may very well be true, eros takes different forms in different contexts, and means in different ways. This chapter asks what the erotic might mean, and how it might function, in late sixteenth-century culture, and it takes its lead from the pioneering work of Lynn Enterline, Richard Halpern and Leonard Barkan who have begun to analyse the ways the erotic signals an interest in rhetorical and aesthetic theories.13 It begins by analyzing the exploitation of the erotic, in the epyllion, as a social practice, and how it serves to define a particular kind of literary caste associated with youthfulness. The epyllion functions as the opening gesture in a specifically literary career, and implicit in this particular kind of formal introduction are an authorial identity and a professional trajectory which are defined in contradistinction to the heroic model. The epyllion deals in forms as they are subject to change. It preserves the moment when youth assumes a public identity, when one genre is born out of another, when male fuses with female, and when perspectives shift. The products of the 1590s, like the epyllion, are characterized by polymorphism, which suggests the imaginative fecundity of the writer, at the same time as it points to the instability of our mental structures, and acknowledges the passage of history which results in the obsolescence of forms.14 The epyllion is constructed out of etiological myths, including myths about the birth of the poet, myths about the origin of names, and myths about the origins of genres. In Scillaes Metamorphosis (1589), Thomas Lodge records the birth of the epyllion in complaint, and throughout the 1590s the epyllion preserved a close relationship with complaint. This is most clearly illustrated in Heywood’s Oenone and Paris (1594) which gives voice to the complaints of Oenone, the wife abandoned by Paris. The poem is yet another etiological fiction that explains why Mount Ida is barren, but in spite of the many features it shares with other epyllia, Oenone and Paris is different from other epyllia. There is less irony and less exuberance, and Heywood’s interpretation of the genre is more moral and has more 12 13 14

Katherine Duncan-Jones, “‘Much ado with red and white’: The Earliest Readers of Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis (1593),” RES ns 44 (1993): 498. See above, chapter 1, footnote 75. This generic polymorphism is reflected in the structure of individual volumes. The first edition of Cephalus and Procris, for example, appeared with The Complaint of Narcissus. Similarly, sonnet sequences are frequently published with complaints, just as Daniel’s Delia was published with The Complaint of Rosamond in 1592.

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emotional impact, marking a movement towards the complaint. Another aetiological myth concerns the birth of satire in erotic writing. The political is inscribed in the erotic at the moment of its first articulation, at the moment satire is born. The next section of the chapter explores the etiology that links the erotic with political critique, and analyzes how erotic narratives express both political fantasies and political anxieties simultaneously. The chapter then turns to what I see as the major function of the erotic in the culture of the 1590s: its function as a catalyst for the formation of a literary canon and a literary community in late Elizabethan England. The epyllion becomes the vehicle to express and develop radically new ideas about the nature and value of literature and its production, reception and dissemination. As a genre that undertakes self-promotion through self-marginalization, the epyllion reveals unexpected perspectives on the relationship between aesthetics and gender ideology, and this is where I diverge most clearly from the conclusions of Enterline and Halpern, as I will demonstrate later in the chapter. The epyllion pursues feminization by elaborating the female perspective on epic myths, as Heywood does in Oenone and Paris. The genre also acknowledges a fluidity between male and female desires, and between male and female identities, and suggests parallels between the tactics employed by authors of literary texts, and those conventionally ascribed to women in the patriarchal economy. Rather than pursuing masculinity as the basis of their authority, the writers of the epyllion embrace femininity to construct a hermaphroditic model of literary prowess. This process can even be seen at work in Michael Drayton’s Endimion and Phoebe (1595) which most critics read as a conservative, moral work. The poem is certainly interested in cosmography and the nature of planetary influences on human actions, but like other epyllia, it deploys sexuality and gender in highly unexpected, even shocking ways. In the dedicatory sonnet to Lucy, Countess of Bedford, Drayton describes an authorial fantasy of rape by the patron, in which the male author will be raped by his patroness. His hopes that Lucy will show generosity are figured through allusions to the story of Danae who was raped by Zeus in the form of a shower of gold. Drayton assumes the role of Danae and Lucy the role of Zeus: “Unto thy fame my Muse herself shall task, / Which rain’st upon me thy sweet golden showers.”15 The epyllion is one of the quintessential expressions of the culture of the 1590s. It is a 15

All quotations from the prefatory material to Endimion and Phoebe are from The Works of Michael Drayton, ed. J. William Hebel, Kathleen Tillotson and Bernard Newdigate, 5 vols. (1931; Oxford: Shakespeare Head Press, 1961), I, pp. 125–8.

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form which is erotic, fragmentary, digressive and, therefore, highly literary, but its aesthetics are not clearly or predictably patriarchal. The divagations, twists, turns and abrupt foreclosures of the epyllion could be interpreted as mannerist strategies that seek to assert the author as the origin and end of the text. However, to the extent that theories of mannerism, derived from art history, are predicated on an understanding of the subject, as something that is, and then decides to paint, and as something that is fully present to itself, stable and in complete control of its processes, mannerism does not explain the kind of authority pursued in the epyllion. The digressions draw attention to the narrator, as they also draw attention to the reader, and the expectations that govern the reading process, and produce a process of subjectification which is characteristic of the 1590s, but the narrator is defined through self-conscious self-subversion and the embrace of negativity, and represents a very peculiar kind of authority. The cultivation of authority through self-marginalization is fraught with complications, not least because the fluidity of sexual and gender identities in the epyllion, together with the repeated assertions of our inability to control either the erotic potential of language, or our own drives, undermines authorial control. The epyllion is a self-confident, exuberant form, but the authorial self it displays does not resemble any kind of self that is predicted by ordinary assumptions about the subject. It is a self-confidence grounded on fragility, yet, at a specific moment in late sixteenth century-culture the epyllion proves to be a profoundly productive form. The chapter concludes by examining the exploitation of eros as a way of articulating and debating conflicting attitudes towards publication, and it reveals the contradictory perspectives on exposure expressed by that most common activity in the epyllion: blushing. shaping a sense of literary communit y The production of literature, in the epyllion, is presented as a collaborative process which involves the active participation of an e´lite group of readers who share the writer’s motives and aspirations. The epyllion does not just commemorate this literary community, it also creates it, as the proper production and reception of the genre guarantees entry into this e´lite. When the epyllion writers reflect on authorship, they do not present the author as a solitary individual, but as a member of a poetic community. For example, both Drayton in Endimion and Phoebe (ll. 993–1010), and Thomas Edwards in Cephalus and Procris (ll. 679–706), survey contemporary literature and

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commemorate the achievements of the authors with whom they wish to be identified.16 Authorship is a social activity which requires collaboration between writers, and between writers and readers, and when the epyllion addresses literary issues it does so on behalf of a community of interests which it is simultaneously in the process of defining. The themes of poetic community and the defense of literature were popularized by Marlowe’s Hero and Leander in which Marlowe’s interest in the state of poetry receives expression in the digression of Mercury and the country maid.17 Ostensibly, this story explains why the destinies are hostile to love but, at the end of this digression from the narrative of Hero and Leander, Marlowe’s text digresses once again to explain why poets and scholars are poor. The text undertakes a witty defense of authorial status, but does so in a digression from a digression, and by relating that defense to the digressive and dilatory experience of love. Hero and Leander defends “the Muses’ sonnes” (l. 476) from the scorn of society and attacks the evil economy which has perverted the proper relationship between merit and reward. In the corrupt society which provides the context for Hero and Leander, worthless “Midas brood” (l. 475) is honored above poets and scholars, while ignorance and stupidity reap higher rewards than marginalized learning. This confusion of values is caused by the Fates who hate Mercury, the patron of learning, and do everything in their power to upset him: Yet as a punishment they added this, That he and Povertie should alwaies kis. And to this day is everie scholler poore, Grosse gold, from them runs headlong to the boore. Likewise the angry sisters thus deluded, To venge themselves on Hermes, have concluded That Midas brood shall sit in Honors chaire, To which the Muses sonnes are only heire: ll. 469–7618 16

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For Drayton these poets are Spenser, Daniel and Lodge, while Edwards glorifies Spenser. Unless otherwise stated, all quotations from epyllia are from Elizabethan Minor Epics, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (London: Routledge, 1963). Cheney, Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession, is a pioneering and important study of Marlowe’s conception of a literary career. We differ over the role played by Hero and Leander in this career. Cheney sees the poem as a preparation for epic, as part of the Ovidian cursus that moves from amatory poetry, through tragedy, to epic. I see the poem as a parody and criticism of epic and the cultural values it embodies. Hero and Leander, like all epyllia, deviates from epic. For a discussion of the ways Nashe invokes Hero and Leander to define his own modernity through and against Marlowe, see above, chapter 2, pp. 84–6. All quotations from Marlowe are from Hero and Leander By Christopher Marlowe: A Facsimile of the First Edition, London 1598, The Folger Facsimiles, ed. Louis L. Martz (Washington: The Folger

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Hero and Leander speaks on behalf of a literary coterie which it helps define, but it does not present learning as a means to public service, but as an end in itself, an end that confers intellectual and social distinction. The particular application of eros in these poems not only reproduces a poetics of shame, it reproduces the generation of shame, as a self-conscious group of young writers defined by their political and ideological marginalization, and also by their literary activity. The epyllion is a generational marker and these poems are associated with fictions of youth and newness, as well as with social and intellectual e´litism. The density of crossreferences between these poems suggests that Elizabethan writers saw them, and wanted them to be seen, as an identifiable genre. As Rosalie Colie has pointed out, genres offer a code of communication between writers, and between writers and readers.19 A group identity is generated through the bond of reading. One of the most striking features of the epyllion is the cross-weaving of individuals who are associated with the genre. In some cases, these links may be real or they may be coincidental, but in other cases it is possible that writers and Stationers contrived to give the impression of familiarity or friendship, so that the frequent cross-references become signs of familiarity, badges of membership in the fashionable literary group, and jokes to be savored by readers who share in this privileged knowledge. For example, many epyllia rework the central irony of Hero and Leander and rely on the reader’s knowledge of Marlowe’s text for their ironies to come into full effect. In Marlowe’s poem Hero is a nun who has sworn herself to chastity in the service of Venus, the goddess of love. The irony of a mortal vowed to chastity in the service of an unchaste goddess is adapted to fit a variety of situations, from the pastoral na¨ıvety of Endimion, in Endimion and Phoebe (1595), to the perversity of Pigmalion, in John Marston’s Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image (1598).

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Shakespeare Library, 1972). The first edition did not divide the poem into sestiads, nor did it include summaries of the action. These first appeared in the second edition of 1598, which included Chapman’s continuation of the poem, and they serve to fix and limit the meanings of the poem. Rosalie Colie, The Resources of Kind: Genre-Theory in the Renaissance, ed. B. K. Lewalski (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973), p. 8. Walter Allen, “The Non-existent Classical Epyllion,” SP 55 (1958): 515–18, questions whether the epyllion existed as a classical genre. For a contrary view see Paul W. Miller, “The Elizabethan Minor Epic,” SP 55 (1958): 31–8. However, in one sense, I would argue genres never exist: they are not “out there,” but are partly created by the needs of readers. In this way, Allen is unintentionally right to point out that some readers, for whatever reasons, have found it useful to classify texts in particular ways. As Paul de Man notes, in Blindness and Insight. Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), p. 31, “literary form is the result of the dialectic interplay between the prefigurative structure of . . . foreknowledge and the intent at totality of the interpretative process.” Form is always a process on the way to completion, and is constituted in the mind of the interpreter. The dialogue between work and interpreter is endless.

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In Endimion and Phoebe, Endimion vows himself to chastity in the service of Phoebe, the goddess of the moon and an incarnation of Diana, the goddess of chastity. Yet he fails to recognize her when she comes awooing. Drayton’s irony is double-edged. Not only does the lover fail to recognize the woman he loves, but Phoebe is not herself, in the sense that she is no longer the incarnation of pure chastity. Phoebe is more anxious to lose her chastity than Endimion supposes, and she actively pursues him (ll. 153–244), an unexpected turn that resists the legitimizing myth of virginity surrounding Elizabeth I and the sublimated eroticism that fashioned political transactions in her court. In The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image, Pigmalion is initially vowed to chastity, although in this case it is because he is dedicated to art, and “Disdain’d to yeeld servile affection, / Or amorous sute to any woman-kinde” (st. 1). However, he is eventually undermined by the superior power of Love which makes him fall in love with the mere shadow of a real woman: “Yet Love at length forc’d him to know his fate, / And love the shade, whose substance he did hate” (st. 1). Pigmalion’s fate is to fall in love with the statue he has just carved, and live out an ironic riposte to his previous misogyny. Desire proves to be uncontrollable, and Drayton’s and Marston’s reinterpretations of Hero’s fate derive much of their force from the reader’s familiarity with their contemporary sources and their consequent appreciation of the author’s imaginative flexibility. The stories that make up each epyllion are subjected to multiple tellings and retellings, and the self-conscious citations from ancient and modern textual traditions direct attention from the tale to the telling of the tale, from content to form, and raise issues of originality and authority. The epyllion claims that intimacy with literary texts is sufficient basis for a claim to social respectability, but the literary knowledge it parades is not just knowledge of the classics, but knowledge of contemporary English literature as well. There is a sense of profusion in these texts, as they interweave allusions to stories which are not included in their narratives or not included in full. As these poems allude to stuff that has been discarded, they are transformed into repositories of invention, to be plundered by future writers. Each epyllion contains the seeds of other epyllia, either past or future, and through piecing stories together, each epyllion creates the impression of a dense and interactive literary community. For texts that repeatedly assert their author’s originality, these texts are also curiously derivative, and extremely anxious to highlight both their contemporary and classical affiliations. The incestuousness of the epyllion is illustrated by the relationship between Marlowe’s version of the myth of Hero and Leander and

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Chapman’s continuation of the poem.20 Edward Blount published the earliest surviving edition of Marlowe’s Hero and Leander in 1598, together with Blount’s own dedication of the text to Sir Thomas Walsingham.21 In the dedication to Walsingham, Blount presents himself as Marlowe’s friend and he explains that he is obliged to publish the poem in order to be “discharged of the dutie wee owe to our friend, when wee have brought the breathlesse bodie to the earth.” Blount claims to know of Marlowe’s relationship to Walsingham (though this may well have been common knowledge in literary circles) and of the “many kind favors” Walsingham bestowed on the poet, and he explains that he chooses to dedicate the epyllion to Walsingham, because he prefers to keep the transactions of publication within, what could be termed, the family. As Blount explains, Walsingham “would proove more agreeable and thriving to [Marlowe’s] right children, than any other foster countenance whatsoever.” In his dedication, Blount acknowledges the conventions of familiarity which govern the epyllion and its choice of dedicatee. When Chapman’s continuation of this popular epyllion was published later in the same year, he dedicated his work to Lady Walsingham, the wife of Sir Thomas Walsingham. Both Marlowe and Chapman had received support from her husband, and by extending the dedication of Hero and Leander to include Lady Walsingham, Chapman develops the idea of an e´lite “family” of poets and patrons. The epyllion is largely the product of middle-class writers who had social, as well as intellectual, ambitions. The preferred readers of the epyllion are always gentlemen or gentlewomen and the authors of the epyllia found encouragement for their social e´litism in the example of Shakespeare. Both Shakespeare and Marlowe probably wrote their epyllia when the London theaters were closed by plague between June 1592 and June 1594. Compared with the drama, the epyllion offered them a very different mode of address, one which could offer access to exclusive social and intellectual circles.22 From the hostile perspective of the university wits, Shakespeare succeeded in his bid to climb up the social ladder through Venus and Adonis. The First Part of the Return from Parnassus clearly identifies Shakespeare’s epyllion with courting and court culture, through its unfortunate association with the socially ambitious ass, Gullio. The court, it seems, is the proper 20 21 22

The complicated publishing history of Marlowe’s Hero and Leander is discussed by W. W. Greg, “The Copyright of Hero and Leander,” The Library, 4th ser., 24 (1944): 165–74. Walsingham was knighted in 1597. For a sober but still very generative reading of Shakespeare’s poems in the context of his life, see Colin Burrow, “Life and Work in Shakespeare’s Poems,” Proceedings of the British Academy 97 (1998): 15–50. For Burrow, the poems worry about the implications of publication and what can remain private in print.

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place for this silliness, as Gullio exclaims after quoting the opening lines of Venus and Adonis, “O sweet Mr Shakspeare, Ile have his picture in my study at the courte” (ll. 1030–3). Venus and Adonis (1593) was Shakespeare’s first published work and it was dedicated to the Earl of Southampton.23 Southampton was not only an aspiring young member of the court but one who cultivated the image of an aesthete, with strong interests in new artistic trends.24 The artistic prodigality of Shakespeare’s poem and its sophisticated indulgence in the erotic charms of both male and female reflect this image. Southampton’s education, his social position, his ostentatious adherence to fashions and his allegedly fluid erotic tastes made him the perfect patron for the epyllion, as his very image echoed the radicalism of the genre and made its own challenge to the standards and traditions of the status quo. Like other epyllia, Venus and Adonis presents its author as a gentleman who is endowed with the distinguishing social characteristics of sprezzatura and rhetorical ease. It makes poetry out of the gentlemanly preoccupations of hunting and conversation and it exhibits the author’s skill in the art of discourse. But the epyllion not only gives proof of these skills, it also serves to fashion these skills in the youthful poet who is wrought into a mature and sophisticated member of the e´lite by the very process of writing the epyllion.25 In the dedication to the Earl of Southampton, Shakespeare not only describes the poem as his own offspring, but also presents it as a 23

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The details of publication, and those of The Rape of Lucrece, are discussed by Harry Farr, “Notes on Shakespeare’s Printers and Publishers with Special Reference to the Poems and Hamlet,” The Library, 4th ser., 3 (1922–23): 227–50. G. P. V. Akrigg, Shakespeare and the Earl of Southampton (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1968), pp. 176– 88, discusses Southampton’s tastes and the evidence for his homosexuality. Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of Aristocracy, p. 582, includes Southampton among the young aristocrats who were “in open rebellion against the conservative establishment” and found expression for that rebellion in ostentatious expenditure. Southampton was eventually imprisoned for his part in the Essex conspiracy. M. C. Bradbrook, “Beasts and Gods: Greene’s Groats-Worth of Witte and the Social Purpose of Venus and Adonis,” Shakespeare Survey 15 (1962): 62–72, argues that the poem is “a claim to social dignity for its author” (p. 70) which tries to “obliterate” the low-class image Robert Greene had constructed of Shakespeare (p. 68). There are various factions with different ideologies, even within the ranks of the professionals. The authors of the Parnassus Plays define themselves against the court and against the vulgar, and particularly resent the way Shakespeare, a writer without a university education, places himself in the court by writing. By contrast, Marlowe is a writer in their own image – witty, independent and with a university education. Sasha Roberts, Reading Shakespeare’s Poems in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), notes that Venus and Adonis was supposed to be read by eroticized gentlemen readers as a form of light entertainment, but it reached beyond the gentry in the form of printed common-place books, and in these printed versions it was reinterpreted as a source of wisdom and sober aphorisms. See chapter 2, “Light Literature and Gentlemen Readers; Venus and Adonis, Textual Transmission and the Construction of Poetic Meaning,” pp. 62–101. Roberts’ important book was published after I completed the work for this chapter, and I am extremely grateful to her for discussing her theories with me at the conference on Shakespeare’s Narrative Poems, held at the Institute of Advanced Study, London University, 27–29 July, 2000.

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substitute for the body of the poet: “But if the first heire of my invention prove deformed, I shall be sorie it had so noble a god-father: and never after eare so barren a land, for feare it yeeld me still so bad a harvest . . .” The land Shakespeare tills in this metaphor is Southampton’s pocket, and/or the poem itself which might prove an unsuitable gift, and/or the author’s own imagination. The distinction between the text and the author starts to break down and although Shakespeare makes the poem, the poem also makes him, as it presents and embodies him in Southampton’s “Honourable survey.” The “unpolisht lines” of the poem are associated with stylistic deformities, but also with the more personal social inadequacies of the poet. The graceful formality of Shakespeare’s dedication to Southampton is expressive of the desire to enter an e´lite social community as well as an e´lite literary community. The deformed verse is paralleled by the implicit image of the limping poet, with the unseemly body, who can only be made perfect by the Earl’s approval: “I KNOW not how I shall offend in dedicating my unpolisht lines to your Lordship, nor how the worlde will censure mee for choosing so strong a proppe to support so weake a burthen, onelye if your Honour seeme but pleased, I account my selfe highly praised, and vowe to take advantage of all idle houres, till I have honoured you with some graver labour.” Venus and Adonis is not only set up as the opening gesture in a new career, and a new departure for the dramatist, but it also embodies the raw materials from which the poet is fashioned into social and literary respectability. Such dedications are strategies of control and self-defense. They define a coterie audience and the dedicatees are always presented as people who share the author’s tastes and ideas. For example, it is clear from the dedication of Ovids Banquet of Sence that Royden’s intellectual patronage is at least as important to Chapman as material gain, and he exploits Royden’s learned reputation to justify and promote his own theories of creation and reception, so that Royden becomes Chapman’s collaborator in the production of the text. It is Royden’s reception of the text that will attest to Chapman’s intellectual substance: Thus (not affecting glory for mine owne sleight labors, but desirous others should be more worthely glorious, nor professing sacred Poesie in any degree,) I thought good to submit to your apt judgment: acquainted long since with the true habit of Poesie, and now since your labouring wits endevour heaven-high thoughts of Nature, you have actual meanes to sound the philosophical conceits, that my new pen so seriously courteth. (Dedication, ll. 40–7)26 26

The Poems of George Chapman, ed. Phyllis Brooks Bartlett (New York: MLA, 1941). Donno does not reproduce the dedications in her edition.

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Royden’s studies of nature have equipped him with the means to test and prove Chapman’s poetry. The choice of Royden as dedicatee defines the learned images of author and reader that Chapman seeks to present in his earliest published works and, through Royden’s associations, defines a place for Chapman in a particular literary and intellectual community. However, Chapman’s plea for cultural acceptability also involves a plea for social respectability. Ovids Banquet of Sence is an attempt to prove the worth of the poet, and it displays the tendency towards intellectual and social e´litism that characterizes the epyllion. Although Chapman redefines nobility in the course of the poem, by basing it on learning and wit, this contrasts with the high-handed dismissal of what he terms “[t]he prophane multitude,” in the dedication to Royden. Only a small band of e´lite intellects, made up of readers like Royden, will be able to understand Chapman’s poems. This does not mean that the author necessarily wants his poems to be restricted to a small audience, rather such a claim appeals to the cultural and social aspirations of the reading public, warning them that such poems are beyond the common understanding and require careful reading, while at the same time providing them with the means to affirm their own special natures by responding favourably to the poems. Chapman may not give his readers much room for maneuver, but his claims serve the self-interest of both author and reader. Different, even contradictory, modes of valorization are being invoked simultaneously, in the epyllion, and they confer authority on literature, because it is a gentlemanly pursuit, but also because of the wit of its practitioners.

rites of passage The epyllion is in competition with both the literary present and the literary past and sets off one stylistic vision against another to reveal their limitations and the author’s own superior insight. The genre impresses the reader with its “literariness” and the density of its textual contexts. Cephalus and Procris (1595), for example, simultaneously parodies Thomas Heywood’s Oenone and Paris (1594) and Marlowe’s Hero and Leander. Oenone and Paris opens at dawn and ends at nightfall, while Cephalus and Procris opens with a description of Aurora, which outdoes Heywood’s opening, as well as Marlowe’s comparison of Hero to the dawn (Hero and Leander, ll. 801–18), and compounds it with a parody of Marlowe’s description of Hero’s veil (Hero and Leander, ll. 17–20):

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A vale she wore downe trayling to her thighes, The stuffe whereof, I gesse, of such emprize, As Gods themselves are doubtfull of the arte, Seeming as aire with otomie disperst, Her handes, a meny Poets dead and gone, Have heretofore (excelling) wrote upon, It shall suffize Venus doth grace to her, In that she waites before, like to a Starre, Cephalus and Procris, ll. 71–7827

Cephalus and Procris goes on to describe how Aurora passes over the world, but the places she passes are not only geographical locations, they are also loci of myth and allusion, such as the orchard of the Hesperides, Danae’s tower and Mount Ida, topoi which are all inhabited by other writers. Her journey is paralleled by a poetic journey through various styles such as pastoral “Rondelaies of love” (l. 143), revenge melodrama with its passionate invocation of the gods of the underworld (ll. 400–22), complaint (ll. 469– 79), the carpe diem poem (ll. 635–41) and epic (ll. 667–76). Cephalus and Procris keeps on changing styles, and its provisional attitudes leave the way open for other writers and other versions of its own story, and it ends with a challenge to other members of the literary community: And those that take delight in amorous love, Be their Heraclian wits subject to move An other Sunne to grace our Theater, That sadly mournes in blacke, with heavy cheere, ll. 763–6

The transformation of a cultural moment through the passing of time is recorded in Edwards’ parodies of existing styles, as is the impression of creative superiority and the freedom to see through what is already given. Like other epyllia, Cephalus and Procris is obsessed with giving the impression of originality. Even a poem which is a continuation of an earlier epyllion, and is in its very conception belated and dependent, preserves these fictions of originality. Thus, in his conclusion to Hero and Leander (1598), Chapman invokes original fictions to prove the freshness of his subject matter and the originality of his own voice. Through these fictions, Chapman appropriates the mythical powers of the proto-poet Orpheus and incorporates them into his own text, claiming to tell the world’s original 27

Although first published in 1595, Cephalus and Procris was entered in the Stationers’ Register in 1593. I have found no record of Edwards’ birth or education.

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love-story: “And this true honor from their love-deaths sprung, / They were the first that ever Poet sung” (sestiad 6, ll. 292–3). At the same time, however, Chapman’s claim to absolute originality is a claim to marginalization which sets him apart from, and outside, what is common and shared. The epyllion traces a process that associates exile, the condition of being outside society, the condition of rejection and exclusion, with originality. In Faunus and Melliflora, for example, not only does the narrator find himself, with his readers, in a state of cultural isolation where Spenser, and all the revered models, are dead, but he defines his originality on the basis of a story (that Adonis died for love of Melliflora) that is outside the network of shared narratives that defines his culture. The assertion of originality is one of the conventions of this highly derivative genre. Originality is produced from the processes of contextualization, comparison, deviation and marginalization that make the pursuit of originality an unsettling, shameful and even masochistic experience, which deliberately seeks out exclusion and opprobrium. Enterline notes that Renaissance texts register the presence of Ovid in what she terms “the scene of the impossible demand,” in which characters ask for something they will not receive.28 The epyllia are, of course, full of such scenes, from Venus’ doomed approaches to Adonis, to Adonis’ vain requests to be left alone. As she reminds us, Renaissance literary tradition is fascinated with the idea of lost voices, of vain articulations, largely because of the stories Petrarch chose to include in the Canzoniere, a text which is itself predicated on the poet’s impossible demand for Laura. As Enterline points out, in an extremely important argument, this elevates the scene of failure to persuade into a poetic ontology where the beauty of the words, and the condition of exile, are both consequences of the failure of language. The association of rhetorical beauty with exile would also reinforce Ovid’s status as the model of literariness in the Renaissance. His exile to Constanta was one of the key elements in his biography in the Renaissance, and so beauty comes to be associated with exile, not only in Ovid’s texts, but also in his biography. The condition of exile is, as I have argued, the basis of the comparison Meres makes between Nashe and Ovid, in Palladis Tamia.29 The fact that, in Meres’ opinion, Nashe made heavy weather out of his exile in Yarmouth, may indicate Nashe’s realization of quite how appropriate the condition of exile is to the definition of a literary identity, and it may cast a different light on the repeated representations 28 29

Lynn Enterline, The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 14. See chapter 2, pp. 83–4.

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of Nashe as a victim, given that his culture associated literariness with the condition of exile. The epyllion is consistently associated with fictions of newness and youth. As Gabriel Harvey notes in his marginalia, “the wiser sort” of reader preferred Shakespeare’s complaint, The Rape of Lucrece, but “the younger sort” preferred Venus and Adonis.30 When Henry Petowe describes the hostile reaction provoked by the news that he had dared to continue Marlowe’s Hero and Leander, he presents his poem not only as one of his earliest works, if not in fact his earliest work, but also as a proving ground for a new poet: “No sooner had report made known my harmless muse’s first progress, how she intended to make trial of her unfledged plumes, but (myself being present where that babbling dame was prating) I heard injurious Envy reply to this effect . . .” (From the dedication to Sir Henry Guilford).31 Petowe’s dedication, like Shakespeare’s dedication to Venus and Adonis, highlights the association of the epyllion with youth. In fact, the stories of young people falling in love, which so frequently provide the subject matter of the epyllion, record a process of socialization which is echoed in the dedications themselves, where the more private identities of youth are transformed into the more public and urbane networks of adulthood. In fact, as Shakespeare’s first published work, Venus and Adonis heralds the poet’s entry into that most public of worlds – the world of print. The epyllia tend to be dedicated to individuals or groups that have links with the author’s youth. For instance, Lodge, who was a member of Lincoln’s Inn, dedicated Scillaes Metamorphosis (1589), “TO HIS ESPECIALL good friend Master Rafe Crane, and the rest of his most entire well wil lers, the Gentlemen of the Innes of Court and Chauncerie.”32 Chapman dedicated Ovids Banquet of Sence (1595), “TO THE TRVLIE Learned, and my worthy Friende, Ma. Mathew Royden,” who was also the dedicatee of Chapman’s earliest publication, The Shadow of Night (1594), while Weever dedicated Faunus and Melliflora (1600) to Edward Stanley of Winwick, Lancashire, as “some signe of good 30

31 32

The comment is made in Harvey’s marginalia in a folio volume containing Chaucer’s life and works and Lydgate’s Story of Thebes, which Harvey acquired in 1598. Harvey’s appraisals of contemporary writers are on fols. 421v and 422v. The marginalia are quoted by Virginia F. Stern, Gabriel Harvey His Life, Marginalia and Library (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), p. 127. All quotations from Henry Petowe, The Second Part of Hero and Leander, Containing their Further Fortunes, are from Christopher Marlowe: The Complete Poems and Translations, ed. Stephen Orgel. Donno does not reproduce the dedications. They are quoted from: The Complete Works of Thomas Lodge (New York: Russell & Russell, 1963), vol. I; The Poems of George Chapman, ed. Phyllis Brooks Bartlett (New York: MLA, 1941); Faunus and Melliflora, ed. Arnold Davenport (London: Liverpool University Press, 1948).

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will to my countrymen,” in an attempt to exploit the wealthy families who had associations with the area where he was born and raised.33 Marginal forms assume a particular importance in the literary culture of the 1590s. The epyllion is one such marginal form, and it functions as a mediator between youth and age, private and public, shame and shamelessness, and from one genre to another. Its polymorphic nature proves the author’s technical versatility and range, while it also gives expression to the multiform nature of love. In its compendium of contemporary styles the epyllion also contains the means of its own transcendence and renewal in complaint and satire. In particular, the genre is associated with aetiological fictions which not only explain how things got their name, but also how genres came into being. Appropriately enough for the poem that inaugurated the craze for the epyllion in 1589, Scillaes Metamorphosis records the fictional origin of the epyllion in complaint.34 Lodge’s epyllion opens with the complaints of Glaucus and the narrator, and the metamorphic story which constitutes the epyllion proceeds from their laments: Walking alone (all onely full of griefe) Within a thicket nere to Isis floud, Weeping my wants, and wailing scant reliefe, Wringing mine armes (as one with sorrowe wood); The piteous streames relenting at my mone Withdrew their tides, and staid to heare me grone. st. 1

Lodge’s poem is also set during the narrator’s youth, during his time at Oxford University, which is located on the banks of the Isis, the name for the Thames at Oxford. The epyllion genre takes the form of a rite of passage and it is forever being cast off and left on the threshold of other states and other forms. Scillaes Metamorphosis, for example, proclaims its newness and modernity through its fictions of youthfulness, but even as it does so, it shows how its own mode is outgrown and outdated. The poem takes the classical myth of Glaucus and Scilla and transports it to Oxford and the author’s undergraduate days: “Westward I fleeted, and with heedfull 33

34

Weever tried to attach himself to three different circles which were centered on Lancashire, London and Cambridge, where he had been a student at Queens’ College from 1594 to about 1598. Faunus and Melliflora (1600) is an attempt to establish himself within the first of these circles. It was printed by Valentine Simmes, who printed all Weever’s early works. E. A. J. Honigmann, John Weever, The Revels Plays Companion Library (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1987), pp. 4–41, explores Weever’s cultivation of these three circles. His association with Simmes is discussed on pp. 25–6. Hulse, Metamorphic Verse, pp. 16–34, discusses the similarities between complaint and epyllion and concludes that they are “subcategories of a common type” (p. 20) which is the minor epic.

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eie / Beheld the chalkie cliffes that tempt the aire/ Till at the last it was my chance to spie / A pleasant entrance to the flouds repaire” (st. 66).35 The westward movement of culture, whose heroic cursus has been described by David Quint, is no longer heroic: instead, Glaucus flees Greece in a state of frustration, and wanders aimlessly across the face of the world until he finds himself in the cool waters of the Thames.36 England is not the goal of this heroic peripeteia, nor a carefully planned prospect, but a place Glaucus just happens to chance upon. The translation of classical culture is haphazard and potentially reductive. Indeed, the physical space covered by Glaucus and the narrator, in their various journeys in the poem, is reflected rhetorically in the classical topoi out of which the text is woven. The narrator self-consciously covers the proper ground, and runs through the clich´es of classical learning so highly prized by his culture. The classical story of Glaucus and Scilla is framed by another story of unrequited undergraduate love. The poem opens with the narrator, characterized as a hapless youth, “Walking alone (all onely full of griefe) / Within a thicket nere to Isis floud” (st. 1). As he weeps under a weepingwillow tree, the sea-god Glaucus appears from the waters of the Thames, rests his head on the narrator’s “faintfull knee” (st. 3) and dries his cheeks for him. Glaucus then speaks to the narrator and reminds him of the passing of time: With secret eye looke on the earth a while, Regard the changes Nature forceth there; Behold the heavens, whose course all sence beguile; Respect thy selfe, and thou shalt find it cleere, That infantlike thou art become a youth, And youth forespent a wretched age ensu’th. st. 6

The narrator’s youth, the youth which provides the setting for the story of Glaucus and Scilla, is on the point of turning into “wretched age.” At the very moment that Glaucus establishes the narrator’s present youthfulness, he looks both backwards and forwards, as if other states and other times are implicit in the present moment. Lodge’s epyllion re-enacts the moment when youth and youthful poetry are turned into something else and, in the last stanza of the poem, a different sort of poetry is envisaged: 35 36

Lodge had been a student at Oxford, and was admitted to a BA in July 1577, before he was admitted to Lincoln’s Inn in April 1578. See David Quint, Origin and Originality in Renaissance Literature: Versions of the Source (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983).

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Redefining Elizabethan Literature At last he [Glaucus] left me, where at first he found me, Willing me let the world and ladies knowe Of Scillas pride, and then by oath he bound me To write no more, of that whence shame dooth grow: Or tie my pen to Pennie-knaves delight, But live with fame, and so for fame to wright. st. 130

At the moment that he invokes more conventional modes of selfjustification by committing himself to a famous future, the text draws attention to itself as a source of shame, “To write no more, of that whence shame dooth grow.” This shame is not hidden away, but preserved by publication, and re-enacted in each subsequent act of reading. Book XIII of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which contains the story of Glaucus and Scilla, actually starts with the narrative of the fall of Troy. From the tragedy of the Trojan women, Ovid moves into an account of Aeneas’ flight from Troy, and when Aeneas gets to Sicily, Ovid diverts attention from the epic Virgilian narrative into the story of Scilla, complicating matters still further by inserting Galatea’s story into Scilla’s narrative. In Ovid, the story of Glaucus and Scilla is a diversion from epic, and Lodge capitalizes on this unexpected movement by offering the epyllion as an inaugural form which is alternative to pastoral. In the archetypal Virgilian career, the pastoral marks the debut of the epic poet. Just as Virgil opened his career with the Eclogues and moved on to epic in the Aeneid, so Spenser opened his career with pastoral, in The Shepheardes Calendar, and progressed to epic in The Faerie Queene. In “The Epistle to Harvey,” the archaisms and rusticity of The Shepheardes Calendar are justified by reference to this tradition, and the Virgilian progress to heroic poetry is heralded in the “October Eclogue” (esp. ll. 55–84).37 At least, this is the traditional interpretation advanced by “The Epistle to Harvey” and the first stanza of The Faerie Queene. In reality, the pattern of Spenser’s career is much less pure and predictable, and in the middle of his epic, his career diverts into the marginal genres 37

The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William A. Oram et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989). On Spenser’s adaptation of the Virgilian model, see Patrick Cheney, Spenser’s Famous Flight: A Renaissance Idea of a Literary Career; (Toronto: Univerity of Toronto Press, 1993) and Richard Rambuss, Spenser’s Secret Career, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), esp. pp. 62–95. Rambuss points out that Spenser’s social identity was not solely dependent on his laureate persona, as he was also a secretary to Lord Grey and a civil servant. In Rambuss’ words, “Spenser’s vocational aspirations and agendas as a poet are never cordoned off from his professional pursuit as a secretary of office, status, and political influence” (p. 9), and the subject of secrets and secrecy provides one of the principal points of contact between his professional and poetic identities.

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of The Complaints (1591), but the ideal model of the poetic career as the progression from pastoral to epic remains theoretically dominant in the Renaissance. Both the epyllion and the pastoral are inaugural modes, but the epyllion substitutes the Ovidian model for Virgilian gravitas.38 The Virgilian career pattern complements the humanist conception of literature which emphasizes allegory and didacticism and always points to values which are outside the fictional boundaries of the text. The epic with its political, dynastic and moral concerns is the summit of poetic achievement. Even the movement between forms, the movement from pastoral to epic, is moralized and surrounded with gravitas. In opposition to this seriousness, the epyllion writers open their careers with erotic gallimaufries which move between forms for aesthetic reasons, or from a conviction that the text, like all sublunary objects, is prey to change, and they parody the need for consistent morality. Witty, erotic, metamorphic Ovid is set up as a challenge to Virgil. A very different career is being mapped out by the epyllion and it is one whose structure stands in direct opposition to the respected Virgilian archetype. In Faunus and Melliflora, Weever appropriates both the Virgilian and Ovidian inaugural conventions. His poem is an epyllion, but it is prefaced by a dedication in which Weever assumes the pastoral persona. In the dedication, he describes Faunus and Melliflora as “a Shepheards lowly pastorall” but still manages to turn the humble associations into a sophisticated and witty compliment to Edward Stanley: “. . . which considered, I doubt not but your Worship with curtesie, will accept my rusticke incivilitie, and with favourable Patronage, pardon my wood-borne imperfections.”39 Perhaps Stanley’s associations with rural Lancashire made the pastoral persona appropriate, particularly as it emphasizes Weever’s status as a fellow countryman. The young author who is “in the budding of his youthful daies, / Delightsome, pleasant, full of Art, and Wittie” (First commendatory sonnet) writes about love, a subject appropriate to youth, according to Renaissance psycho-physiology, and even manages to find a story which he claims is completely original: 38

39

Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), pp. 50–1, describes the epyllion as part of the Renaissance aspiration towards “a new kind of un-Homeric epic, in which narrative action would be replaced by various forms of poetic digression – a kind subsuming the epyllion, yet not necessarily . . . directly Ovidian in inspiration.” The dedication is quoted from Faunus and Melliflora, ed. Davenport.

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Redefining Elizabethan Literature Sweete Melliflora I can tell ye true, The grasse grew prowd that under her it grew. Faire Melliflora, amorous, and yong, Whose name, nor story, never Poet sung. ll. 129–32

Thus Weever not only emphasizes the modernity of his text, but also exalts what is singular in himself, because no other poet has sung the story of Melliflora. His epyllion is in fact a frivolous rereading of classical and contemporary traditions, which rewrites Ovidian and Shakespearean myth, as in Weever’s new version of the story of Venus and Adonis, Adonis is not killed by a boar, as he is in Ovid and Shakespeare, but by love for Melliflora (ll. 471–80).40 Like the other authors studied in this chapter, Weever is at pains to highlight his novelty and his independence from previous models and sources, but this anti-traditional gesture is coupled with the need to rewrite literary history and set up counter-traditions which can validate and dignify the ideas the epyllion writers hold most dear. Yet the competitiveness of the genre means that positive models like Ovid and Shakespeare are invoked only to be outdone. The tension between dependence and independence which characterizes the epyllion is exemplified in Weever’s attitude towards Spenser. Like all epyllia, Faunus and Melliflora re-enacts the process of casting off the past even if that past is valuable and admired. At the end of his epyllion, Weever expresses his admiration for Spenser, and inserts his story of Faunus and Melliflora into the genealogy of Brutus and Troynovant, which Spenser had commemorated in The Faerie Queene (3.9.38–51): The Faeries ofspring yet a long time went, Among the woods within the wild of Kent, Untill transformed both in shape and essence, By some great power or heavenly influence, The Faeries proved full stout hardy knights, In justs, in tilts, in turnaments, and fights, As Spencer shewes. But Spencer now is gone, You Faery Knights, your greatest losse bemone. ll. 1057–64

In fact, Weever’s story predates Spenser’s in this fictional history, as it tells the story of the “Faeries” before they became “full stout hardy knights” and 40

Compare the conclusion to Hero and Leander (1598), in which Chapman appropriates the mythical powers of the proto-poet, Orpheus, to establish the power and originality of his own voice, by claiming to tell the world’s original love-story: “And this true honor from their love-deaths sprung, / They were the first that ever Poet sung” (sestiad 6, ll. 292–3).

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the subject of The Faerie Queene, and so Weever avoids excessive dependence on his master by casting himself as the origin of Spenser’s tale. Spenser had died in January 1599, but these lines are more than an elegy for a dead master. It is implied that Spenser’s genius is obsolete. His way has run its course: “. . . But Spencer now is gone,” and the implication is that it is time to explore new poetic courses. Thus Faunus and Melliflora presents itself as standing at the threshold of a new personal era and a new literary era. All the authors of the epyllion were in some sense “new” when they used the genre. In some cases, they were young in years, or they were new to the profession of letters, like Weever or Marston.41 In fact, the epyllion proved to be such a useful means of effecting change in the 1590s that it was exploited by writers who were neither new nor particularly young. When Endimion and Phoebe: Ideas Latmus was published in 1595, Drayton was thirty-two years old and had already published a selection of spiritual hymns, entitled The Harmonie of the Church (1593); a collection of nine eclogues, entitled Idea The Shepheards Garland (1593); and the sonnet sequence, Ideas Mirrour (1594). According to the fiction developed in the first commendatory sonnet to Endimion and Phoebe, maturity now requires a different sort of writing and Drayton adopts the epyllion, the genre of transformation, to bring him to this different sort of writing. Endimion and Phoebe enacts a rite of passage for Drayton, and through its composition he takes leave of his poetic youth, and particularly the pastoral and Petrarchan forms which are identified with his early career. In Idea The Shepheards Garland and Ideas Mirrour, Drayton adopted the persona of Rowland the shepherd and this personal tradition is continued in the first commendatory sonnet to Endimion and Phoebe which addresses Drayton as “Rouland.” Drayton’s pastoral, sonnet sequence and epyllion are further related through the invocation of Idea, a symbol of perfection which confounds neoplatonism with the identities of several female addressees. In Endimion and Phoebe, for example, Idea is Anne Goodere, the daughter of Drayton’s patron Sir Henry Goodere, Queen Elizabeth and Phoebe. Through the publication of his epyllion, Drayton reworks his own images and lexicon to create the impression of a coherent personal career. The epyllion gives shape retrospectively to what has come before and brings about the public debut of the poet. As the first 41

Weever was born in 1576 and admitted to Cambridge in April 1594. His first published work was Epigrammes in the Oldest Cut and Newest Fashion (1599). Marston was born in 1575?, and admitted to a BA at Oxford in February 1593–4. The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image, which appeared with Certaine Satyres, is his first published work. Heywood was born in 1575 or possibly earlier. Drayton was born in 1563. Apart from his own acknowledgement that he received his education while serving Sir Henry Goodere as a page, little is known about Drayton’s education.

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commendatory sonnet to Endimion and Phoebe, by E. P., explains, Drayton’s previous texts were private, unpublished verses suitable for a youth, but the epyllion is the means of casting off youthful ways, and of introducing the public poet: ROULAND, when first I red thy stately rymes, In Sheepheards weedes, when yet thou liv’dst unknowne, Not seene in publique in those former tymes, But unto Ankor tund’st thy Pype alone, I then beheld thy chaste Ideas fame, Put on the wings of thine immortall stile, Whose rarest vertues and deserved name, Thy Muse renown’s throughout this glorious Ile,

At the end of Endimion and Phoebe, Drayton publicizes his poetic ancestry and the influences, both literary and non-literary, that have shaped his voice, and he is no longer the distraught Petrarchan lover of his earlier poems, as the epyllion has created a more triumphant and a more flattering version of authorship. It has also claimed to create a more public form of authorship. Phoebe resigns her bow to the “Sweet Nymph of Ankor” (l. 1014), alias Anne Goodere, and therefore merges with Anne, as the object of praise and heroine of the poem: “To whom fayre Phoebe hath her bow resign’d, / Whose excellence doth lyve in thee refin’d, / And that thy praise Time never should impayre, / Hath made my hart thy never moving Spheare” (ll. 1025–8). By implication Drayton, as the lover of Phoebe/Ankor, is now identified with the beautiful Endimion. The frustrations of Petrarchanism are transformed into the multiple satisfactions of the epyllion, and Drayton is eventually transposed into a timeless world of harmony and satisfaction where other “pens” do “yearely sacrifice” to his “Oracle” (ll. 1029–32). Drayton uses the conventional associations of the epyllion with youth and newness to mark a change in his career. Bernard Newdigate suggests that in 1595, the year of Endimion and Phoebe’s publication, Drayton moved to London and tried to establish himself within new literary circles.42 Urbanization requires new modes of identity and new forms of social and discursive authority for Drayton, and he uses the epyllion as a way of transforming pastoralism into the more appropriate forms of witty urbanity and sophistication. Of course, the personal myth 42

Bernard H. Newdigate, Michael Drayton and His Circle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961) pp. 87–101. Drayton’s first patron, Sir Henry Goodere, also died in 1595. Cheney, Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession, pp. 64–5, argues that Drayton follows a Virgilian path in his career, while Daniel follows an Ovidian one. I suggest, however, that the concept of Drayton’s Virgilian career needs to be modified.

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fashioned through the epyllion turns attention away from the contingent and ad hoc processes of writing, and retrospectively imposes a rational structure on the disparate texts that constitute his output, so that authorial activity seems to be planned. Coherence is given to the career and Drayton becomes a particular kind of author, one that is abstracted and distanced from the conditions of writing. The impression of fullness, in other words, the impression that Drayton is a rational subject in total control of his own existence, is the consequence of this fictional narrative.43 The demands of the moment of composition, with its material and practical consequences, are displaced in this schematic autobiography. Drayton’s idealized originary self is the effect of a particular way of restructuring his literary past, through the resources of the erotic narrative, with the result that narrative unity creates the impression of a unified self. The association of the epyllion with youth and newness also draws it into the orbit of the scandalous, by analogy with classical culture and the strategies of the so-called neoteric poets. The epyllion identifies itself with, and is identified with, the more questionable elements of classical culture, and this is also true for those epyllia, like Hero and Leander, which do not draw on Ovid for their primary narrative material. Marlowe’s main source is Musaeus but, as Gordon Braden has pointed out, Musaeus’ version of the myth of Hero and Leander is not wholly respectable. It exploits bathos, digression and a volatile emotional field and, in Braden’s words, it exposes “the meretriciousness of all rhetoric.” As Braden notes, while subsequent reworkings of Musaeus tended to soften its stylistic and narrative “meretriciousness,” Marlowe’s version exaggerates it.44 Indeed contemporary readers noted the association between the epyllion and the disorderly elements of classical culture. In The Pilgrimage to Parnassus (ll. 510–21), Studioso castigates Amoretto’s lewd love poetry, by comparing it to the subtle bawdiness of Catullus, Ovid and “wantome Martiall,” all of whom he dismisses as “entisinge Pandars, subtile baudes.” The comparison with Catullus associates eroticism with rhetorical expertise, and with a Roman 43

44

Some of the ways in which biography has been co-opted by particular ideologies of text and authorship are analyzed in Margreta de Grazia’s important study of the 1790 “Malone edition” of Shakespeare, Shakespeare Verbatim: The Reproduction of Authenticity and the 1790 Apparatus (Oxford: Clarenton Press, 1991). As de Grazia argues, biographical reasoning has been used to construct a particular understanding of the relationship between Shakespeare’s texts and thus to corroborate a particular notion of authorship – a process which, in a rudimentary way, is exploited by Drayton himself. Gordon Braden, The Classics and English Renaissance Poetry: Three Case Studies, Yale Studies in English 187 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978) p. 80. However, the Elizabethans were unaware that Musaeus, the author of Hero and Leander, was a member of the Alexandrian School.

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literary avant-garde that came to be known as the “New Poets.” The phrase “New Poets” was a term of contempt which Cicero applied to a group of poets, which included Calvus, Cinna and Catullus, whose postures he considered to be symptomatic of the moral and cultural degeneration of Rome in the first century bce.45 These “New Poets” appropriated strategies which are similar to those adopted by writers of the epyllion in that they appropriated the decadence and technical flourish of the Alexandrian School to define their difference from the Roman literary status quo, and used low subject matter to undermine the epic model.46 When Richard Carew surveys the English language, in “The Excellency of the English Tongue,” probably written in 1595–6, but first published in 1614, he concludes that it can reproduce the graces and complexity of expression of any other language: “Adde hereunto, that what soever grace any other Languadge carryeth, in Verse or Prose, in Tropes or Metaphors, in Ecchoes or Agnominations, they maye all be lively and exactly represented in ours . . . Will you reade Virgill? take the Earll of Surrey: Catullus? Shakespheare, and Marlowes fragment: Ovid? Daniell: Lucane? Spencer: Martiall? Sir John Davis and others.”47 For Carew, “Shakespeare and Marlowes fragment,” and by this he most probably means Venus and Adonis, The Rape of Lucrece and Marlowe’s truncated rewriting of the myth of Hero and Leander, are all rivals to Catullus, while Daniel rivals Ovid, perhaps because Daniel’s Complaint of Rosamond is modeled on the female complaints of the Heroides. 45

46

47

For the characteristics of the “new poetry” and an analysis of ancient and modern assessments of Catullus, see Kenneth Quinn, The Catullan Revolution (1959; London: W. Heffer & Sons, 1969) pp. 44–69 and 19–26. For Cicero’s insinuations, see The Tusculan Disputations, ed. J. E. King, The Loeb Classical Library (1927; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971) pp. 276–9 (Book III, xix); and Letters to Atticus, 4 vols., ed. D. R. Shackleton Bailey, The Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), II, p. 183 (Letter 125 [VII.2], dated Brundisium, 25 November?, 50 bc). The anacreontic was another form of erotic narrative produced by the Alexandrian school and transmitted to the Renaissance in The Greek Anthology, and its influence can be seen in the aetiological myths embedded in the epyllion, as well as in the anacreontics that allow Spenser to modulate from the Amoretti to the Epithalamium. On the influence of The Greek Anthology on the structure of sonnet sequences, see Carol Thomas Neely, “The Structure of English Renaissance Sonnet Sequences,” ELH 45 (1978): 378–80. However, humanism viewed Greek and Egyptian culture with ambivalence, associating it with the occult, the private and the decadent, in opposition to the public values of Rome: “For many both of the Greeks and of the Egyptians have delighted in contemplation, for they have written much which refers to the knowledge of occult and marvellous things, all of which pertains to the few. But I praise and admire the Romans most of all, who, in writing about laws and morals, consult not private commodity and inward pleasure, but the common utility of men.” Bartommeo Sacchi, also known as Platina, De optimo cive, quoted and translated by Nancy Streuver, The Language of History in the Renaissance: Rhetoric and Historical Consciousness in Florentine Humanism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970) p. 112. Richard Carew, “The Excellency of the English Tongue,” in Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. Smith, II, p. 293.

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In Carew’s opinion, not only is the English language “macheable, if not preferable,” to any other language, English culture is on a par with the highest achievements of classical culture. Classical models, like Catullus and Ovid, encourage the association of eroticism, marginality and transgression with rhetorical skill, and sanction the shameless processes whereby eroticism is elaborated to interrogate the precise nature of literary activity. This particular interface between classical tradition and contemporary poetics is used to challenge contemporary definitions of author, text and canon and to assert the existence and peculiar value of an independent aesthetic space. the politics of the “brothell muse” The epyllion highlights the limitations of contemporary styles in order to free the literary system into new ways of expression, but its polymorphism also has political implications. In Endimion and Phoebe, Phoebe claims that she will make time stand still: “Ile stay the time, it shall not steale away” (l. 267), so that she will make the pleasure she offers Endimion last, but this stasis is reflected in a formal sense as well, as Phoebe reproduces the outworn mode of the pastoral, with its old-fashioned allegories and na¨ıve fictions of pathetic fallacy. However, in this epyllion, even Phoebe’s pastoral discourse is eroticized. Her vision of pastoral simplicity is disingenuous, as her pastoral is revealed to be highly artificial and manipulative, and its aim is to seduce Endimion with fictions of harmony and natural fecundity. She turns the objects of nature, such as resin-producing trees, to her own advantage, inscribing them with meanings that she hopes will lull, or embarrass, Endimion into surrender. Thus, for example, she transforms the resin into tears which, she claims, are shed by the trees out of pity for her, and she hopes their example will teach Endimion to pity her: Behold (fond boy), this Rozen-weeping Pine, This mournfull Larix, dropping Turpentine, This mounting Teda, thus with tempests torne, With incky teares continually to mourne; Looke on this tree, which blubbereth Amber gum, Which seemes to speak to thee, though it be dumb, Which being senceles blocks, as thou do’st see, Weepe at my woes, that thou might’st pitty mee: ll. 269–76

Like other epyllia, Endimion and Phoebe exposes the instability of our perception. Just as Phoebe, who once appeared to be chaste and virtuous, is revealed to be unchaste, so the pastoral, which once appeared to

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be simple, is assigned a place in the poetic repertoire of manipulation and artifice. Phoebe’s perversion of the youthful forms of pastoral reveals the erotic motivation behind her textualizations, because whatever tales she tells, whatever scenes she describes, have one aim: to seduce Endimion. Every use of language in Endimion and Phoebe, from the apparent simplicity of the pastoral voice to the definition of virtue, is conditioned by self-interest and the workings of desire. Not only is the symbolic incarnation of Queen Elizabeth as Diana, or Phoebe, under attack, but so, too, is the whole tradition of pastoral panegyric of the monarch as epitomized by the verses collected in Englands Helicon (1600).48 Drayton’s erotic narrative undermines romantic idealization, but it also undermines the aura generated around the Queen by her symbolic representations. Some critics have described Endimion and Phoebe as Drayton’s attempt to reform the epyllion along moral lines. Unusually for the genre, marriage forms the climax of the poem which ends with an epithalamium celebrating the union of the eponymous hero and heroine.49 Admittedly, Endimion and Phoebe differs from most other epyllia in that it focuses much more extensively on the psychology of its lovers. Endimion is presented as a case study in melancholy (ll. 451–68), and the poem articulates the kinship of the epyllion and the complaint. However, the insecure basis of chastity, and the confusion of guilt and innocence, constancy and inconstancy, in Drayton’s epyllion, caution against ascribing what could be termed conventional morality to this poem. In Phoebe’s eagerness to seduce Endimion, even her virtues are recast as the instruments of seduction, “If not all these, yet let my vertues move thee, / A chaster Nymph Endimion cannot love thee” (ll. 223–4). While the myth of Michael Drayton, in both the sixteenth and twenty-first centuries, presents him as a gentle, serious writer and as a good man who, in the words of The Second Part of the Return from Parnassus, “cannot swagger it well in a Taverne, nor dominere in a hot-house” (ll. 250–1), Drayton’s epyllion is not easily reducible to a single, comforting moral and is marked by traces of the very “hot-house” which he is supposed to have eschewed. Endimion and Phoebe pursues the strategy characteristic of all epyllia as it sexualizes experience, and even eroticizes the motives for chastity. Its attack on stylistic complacency and on the sublimations of 48 49

Englands Helicon was probably edited and planned by Nicholas Ling and John Bodenham. See Englands Helicon, ed. Hugh Macdonald, The Muses’ Library (London: Routledge, 1949). For example, Douglas Bush, Mythology and the Renaissance Tradition in English Poetry (New York: Norton, 1963) pp. 156–66, presents Endimion and Phoebe as a neoplatonic poem; and Hulse, Metamorphic Verse, p. 223, notes that it ends with a vision of harmony based on the numbers 3 and 9. On Ovid as a political model that promotes the interests of the socially mobile and the politically recalcitrant, see Heather James, Shakespeare’s Troy: Drama, politics, and the Translation of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997) pp. 14–28.

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Petrarchan and neoplatonic perspectives, offers a critique of Elizabeth and her modes of representation, which is exacerbated by the consciousness of the passage of history which is articulated by the unstable relations between forms. In 1593, the erstwhile soldier, William Reynolds, wrote a public letter to his fellow Englishmen and the people of London. Reynolds appears to have been unstable, and in this curious and often self-contradictory letter, he melds highly personal passages of self-defense with a record of his own interpretation of Venus and Adonis. In his reading, Shakespeare’s epyllion becomes the vehicle for expressing Reynolds’ erotic fantasies about Queen Elizabeth, while it also articulates his fears about her erotic and maternal powers: Also w[ith]in thees few dayes ther is another boke made of Venus and Adonis wherin the queene represents the person of Venus, w[hich] queene is in great love (forsoth) w[ith] adonis, and greatly desiares to kise him, and she woes him most intierly, teling him allthough she be oulde, yet she is lustie freshe & moyst, full of love & life (I beleve a goodell more then a bushell full) and she can trip it as lightly as a phery nimphe upon the sandes and her foote stepes not seene, and much ado w[ith] redde & whyte, But adonis regardid her not, wherfore she condemnes him for unkindnesse, thoes bookes are mingled with other stufe to daesell the matter.50

This passage is preceded by Reynolds’ bizarre observation that he has surprised his enemies by not making any attempt to woo the Queen. Reynolds, it seems, sees himself as Adonis and the fiction of his total desirability represents a personal fantasy of erotic and social success for Reynolds. At the same time, however, Adonis also figures the unpleasant fate that awaits those who resist Elizabeth’s charms. Reynolds may not have been a typical reader, but for this Elizabethan, at least, the epyllion gave vent to the mingled feelings of erotic desire and revulsion that were stimulated by female authority. The ability to lampoon the Queen’s fading charms, through frankly sexualized female characters, no doubt accounts for the popularity of the epyllion in the 1590s, to a large degree. The eroticization of culture articulated hostility to Elizabeth’s rule and to the symbolic forms of her sovereignty, in texts that repeatedly expose the shameful truth under courtly conventions and puncture the mystifications of Petrarchanism and the Virgin Queen with cynical expos´es of lewd excess.51 50 51

The quotation from Reynolds’ letter is taken from Katherine Duncan-Jones, “‘Much ado with red and white,’” p. 488. She reproduces the letter in full. Peter Erickson, Rewriting Shakespeare, Rewriting Ourselves (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), pp. 31–56, suggests that the repeated references to the colors red and white, in Venus and Adonis, invoke the image of Elizabeth as Venus, and thus sexually manipulative and desirable, and Elizabeth

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In the later 1590s, the relationship between satire and eroticism received explicit articulation through the fiction of satire’s origin in the epyllion.52 John Marston’s epyllion, The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image was originally published with Certaine Satyres in 1598, and the arrangement of the volume reflects the fictional genealogy of the two forms, as Marston’s epyllion opens the volume and is followed by a sequence of satires which develop themes raised in the inaugural poem.53 Satire’s origins are also the subject of John Weever’s epyllion, Faunus and Melliflora or, The Original of our English Satyres (1600). Weever’s account of the birth of satire is based on a skeptical reappraisal of chastity which exposes the monstrous consequences of this so-called virtue. In Weever’s version of the story of Faunus and Melliflora, Diana, the goddess of chastity, is bitterly jealous of love and, out of spite, she turns the offspring of Faunus’ and Melliflora’s happy union into a monster. The poem makes few excuses for Diana’s behavior: “And so (to ease her hate which inly burned) / The faire child to a monster she hath turned” (ll. 1031–2). The poem even goes on to assert, with uncomfortable implications for Queen Elizabeth, that all virgins are monsters: “These virgins then of sound and upright carriage, / Are monsters plaine without the stay of marriage” (ll. 1047–8). The monstrous child of Faunus and Melliflora is none other than satire, and, as soon as it is born, the creature, which is half man and half goat, runs into the woods and “Joyn[s] issue with the Satyres and the Faunes”

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as Diana, and thus chaste and pure, and this paradoxical image resonates with the Tudor myth in which the royal house unites the red and white roses of Lancaster and York. Richard Wilson, “A Bloody Question: The Politics of Venus and Adonis,” Religion and the Arts 5 (2001): 297–316, locates the poem in a Catholic, Shakespearean context, and claims that “at its core, Venus and Adonis is a critique of martyrdom” (p. 301) which debates the issues of loyalty and betrayal raised by the Bloody Question, behind a protective mask of pornography. As Wilson brilliantly makes clear, to the extent that Shakespearean criticism has been involved with British nationalism, it has ignored Southampton’s Catholic sympathies, but he never proves the specific extent of such sympathies, and ultimately over-states his case. Carey, “The Ovidian Love Elegy,” pp. 139–49, argues that “sharpness” (p. 139) is a characteristic of Ovidian erotic themes, and that it is exploited by Marlowe and Weever to “express dissatisfaction” (p. 149) over the poet’s relationship to society. The link between erotic and satiric forms is discussed by Donno, “The Epyllion,” in English Poetry and Prose 1540–1674, ed. Christopher Ricks (London: Sphere Books Ltd., 1970), pp. 94–5; Hulse, Metamorphic Verse, pp. 66–70; and Hallett Smith, Elizabethan Poetry: A Study in Conventions, Meaning, and Expression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), pp. 99–101 and 248–9. Compare the structure of the volume which was banned by the order of June 1599, and includes both Marlowe’s translation of the Amores and Sir John Davies’ satirical Epigrammes. J. M. Nosworthy, RES ns 4 (1953): 260–1, proposes 1595 as the date of publication for this volume. Marlowe’s translation of the Amores is analyzed by Lee T. Pearcy, The Mediated Muse: English Translations of Ovid 1560–1700 (Hamden, CT: Archon-Shoe String Press, 1984), pp. 1–36; Cheney, Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession, pp. 49–67; and M. L. Stapleton, Harmful Eloquence: Ovid’s Amores from Antiquity to Shakespeare (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1996), pp. 133–53.

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(l. 1042). It is suggested that jealousy and frustration are the psychological causes of satire, but they also characterize the psychological state of the goddess of chastity. The relationship between Diana’s bitterness and satire is preserved in Weever’s whimsical etymology of the word satire, which, he claims, is formed from the contraction of the two words “satisfy” and “ire”: This boone Diana then did aske of Jove, (More to be venged on the Queene of Love,) That Faunus late transformed sonnes Satyres, (So cald because they satisfide her ires) Should evermore be utter enemies, To lovers pastimes, sportfull veneries. ll. 1065–70

Countless Elizabethan texts draw parallels between the goddess Diana and Queen Elizabeth, including Ralegh’s lyric, “Praisd be Dianas faire and harmles light.” By turning Diana into its arch-villain, Faunus and Melliflora implies that the (supposed) frustrations of Elizabeth’s single status have contributed to the disintegration of Elizabethan society and have created a climate that is conducive to satire, but hostile to love. However, the nature of any attack on Elizabeth through Diana is complicated by the realization that there are parallels between the narrator’s behavior and that of Diana. Both figures are perpetrators of the voyeuristic gaze, as they survey Faunus and Melliflora, and both figures desire to be the center of attention. Diana’s frustrated desire to be at the center of things issues psychologically in envy. As a pathology of the satirist, Faunus and Melliflora suggests that satire is a product of envy. There is always the danger that voyeurism will actually undo the voyeur and make them dependent on what fascinates them. The Latin word for envy, invidia, has its roots in the verb, videre, meaning to see, and reminds us that envy has it roots in scopophilic fantasies, which carry the danger that the self will be over-powered by the object of the gaze. In Diana’s case, her desire to see and be with Faunus is perverted into the desire to destroy what she wants, but what others possess. Epyllia, such as Venus and Adonis, Endimion and Phoebe and Faunus and Melliflora, are products of the generation of shame not only because of their shameless eroticism, but also because they express frustration with the politico-cultural stasis generated by the old Queen’s prodigious ability to persist. In spite of C. S. Lewis’ claims that golden age writing expresses consensus, and articulates the harmony of values in late Elizabethan culture, this particular form of e´litist writing is not the expression of an organic community, but registers the political and cultural tensions that characterize the

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close of Elizabeth’s reign.54 There are indeed scandalous political implications in burlesquing chastity, and in the comic presentation of predatory women, in the epyllion. At the same time, as the following section of the chapter argues, the shameless exploitation of eros is more than a political threat, as it poses a threat to the very structures of thought and value in late Elizabethan culture. The erotic is not simply an alternative to the values of the status quo. It does more than offer a momentary bout of dirtiness and bad behavior. The erotic content of these texts rewrites hierarchies of value, as it renegotiates the configurations of late Elizabethan culture. The genre’s erotic tricks not only express the political frustrations of a generation shut out of government, they are shamelessly exploited to construct an Elizabethan literary avant-garde and to define a particular kind of literariness. While the epyllion articulates a potential for radical political criticism, it may be as well to remember that the epyllion also subverts any kind of reading that imposes predictability on the text. It is a pure metamorphic form, one whose ideological, structural and stylistic perspectives are governed by change and reflect the unpredictability of existence. As Glaucus warns the narrator, at the start of Scillaes Metamorphosis, one must be prepared for anything because, “Unto the world such is inconstancie, / As sapp to tree, as apple to the eye” (st. 4). sexual transgression and t he mapping of aesthetic space For subsequent generations, Elizabethan literature may well constitute some kind of golden age, but for contemporaries things were rather different. Patriotic treatises, like Richard Carew’s Excellency of the English Tongue, respond to a widespread sense of national inadequacy and the fear that English culture could not match classical or continental achievements, and the epyllion attempts to counter this fear with self-remarking poetic flourish. Epyllia are witty, polished poems which place great emphasis on stylistic accomplishment and invention, and they are characterized by narrative and tonal surprises, digressions and arbitrary endings. Yet, paradoxically, the genre associates authorial self-promotion with marginality, and the kind of authority it generates is not comprehended by any ordinary understanding of authority. Hero and Leander, for example, is typical of the genre in the 54

C. S. Lewis, English Literature in the Sixteenth Century, Excluding Drama (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1954), pp. 322–3. Lewis notes that a golden poet “need neither oppose an existing taste nor create a new one: he has only to satisfy a desire which is already aroused” (p. 323). The fact that Ovid had been exiled by the Emperor Augustus meant that he was also available as a model for political disaffection in the Renaissance. See Andrew Hadfield, Literature, Politics and National Identity Reformation to Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), pp. 176–8.

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ways it capitalizes on its own shortcomings. Ostensibly, it sets out to tell the story of the love affair between Hero and Leander, but it wanders into florid descriptions, extended analogies and narrative digressions, the most famous being the story of Mercury and the country maid, all of which challenge the readers’ narrative expectations. It even ends abruptly with the phrase “Desunt nonnulla” (some things are lacking), although this phrase was almost certainly not Marlowe’s. In interpretations that draw on theories of mannerism, such narrative and tonal surprises are said to assert authorial control over the text, turning Hero and Leander into a confident assertion of the narrator’s virtuoso poetic skills, but mannerism confuses subjectification with control. The digressions provoke a process of subjectification which, while it certainly directs attention to the idiosyncratic author, also directs attention to the processes of reading, with their own assumptions, dissatisfactions and peculiar fulfillments. The interruptions draw attention to the experience of reading, as well as to the experience of writing.55 But, while the epyllion flatters the reader’s and the writer’s sense of amour propre, it marginalizes the reader, just as it marginalizes the writer, by asserting the universal inability to control fate, language or desire. While conventional Elizabethan criticism defined literature as a marginal activity that would eventually be renounced by the prodigal author, the epyllion develops a more positive interpretation of marginality to define a new space for literary activity.56 The epyllia emphasize that they are poems produced at moments of leisure; as Henry Petowe points out in the preface to his continuation of Hero and Leander (1598), his poem is “the first fruits of an unripe wit, done at certain vacant hours.”57 It occupies an empty space, 55

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David Evett, Literature and the Visual Arts in Tudor England (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1990), pp. 125–54 and 242–68, argues that forms, such as the Elizabethan grotesque and mannerism, express the activity of the imagination and emphasize the individual mind as it confronts experience, but his emphasis is fixed on the individual mind of the creator. The epyllion disrupts formal order and the principles of neoclassical beauty, and so gives a sense of the positive, as well as the negative, possibilities of deformation. Clark Hulse, Metamorphic Verse, argues that the epyllion is a form of the minor epic. As a mixed genre, the minor epic is the summation of the Elizabethan literary system for Hulse (pp. 279–83), and it functions as the transitional form by which a minor poet becomes a major poet (pp. 11–12). My understanding of the relation between major and minor in late Elizabethan culture differs from Hulse’s in that I do not see them as clearly opposed polarities, while his brilliant analysis works within given hierarchies of value. The epyllion redefines such hierarchies and is a more disturbing genre than Hulse acknowledges, not least because it deliberately draws attention to its shamelessness and triviality. The phrasing of the preface imitates the dedication of Venus and Adonis and Petowe’s gracefully self-deprecating irony highlights the association of the epyllion with youth and recreation. Like prose romance, the epyllion also defines itself as private recreational material by its association with women readers. As John Lyly famously affirms in the epistle “To the Ladies and Gentlewoemen of England,” prefaced to Euphues and his England (1580): “Euphues had rather lye shut in a Ladyes casket, then open in a Schollers Studie.” The Complete Works of John Lyly, ed. R. Warwick Bond,

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and colonizes its own specific area, the space of “vacant hours.” Similarly, Endimion and Phoebe: Ideas Latmus develops the idea of literary space as something set apart from business, as something separate from the spaces occupied by other concerns. Like other erotic narratives, it defines an area of activity which is beyond the limits and conditions of normal experience and deviates from the expected path. Phoebe’s love for Endimion is itself a digressive activity as it takes place when she slips away from her proper place in the celestial sphere: “Downe slydeth Phoebe from her Christall chayre, / Sdayning to lend her light unto the ayre” (ll. 390–1). In Drayton’s narrative, love and poetry are presented as digressive and dilatory activities that take place when things are out of place, and the poem highlights the relationship between literature and leisure by presenting the text as a locus of private recreative activity for both writer and reader, as well as its protagonists. The whole poem is “Ideas Latmus,” the poem’s alternative title, a place where writer and reader can recreate themselves in the space of pleasure: Phoebe to Latmus thus convayde her swayne, Under a bushie Lawrells pleasing shade, Amongst whose boughs the Birds sweet Musick made, Whose fragrant branch-imbosted Cannapy, Was never pierst with Phoebus burning eye; Yet never could thys Paradise want light, Elumin’d still with Phoebes glorious sight: She layd Endimion on a grassy bed, With sommers Arras ritchly over-spred, Where from her sacred Mantion next above, She might descend and sport her with her love, Which thirty yeeres the Sheepheards safely kept, Who in her bosom soft and soundly slept; Yet as a dreame he thought the tyme not long, Remayning ever beautifull and yong. ll. 975–90

Epyllia are constructed from transgression: transgression in the sense of crossing boundaries, going over, or sliding out of place; transgression 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), II, p. 8. The epyllia are dedicated to women, as is the case with Chapman’s Hero and Leander, and Drayton’s Endimion and Phoebe, or, like “L’Envoy” to Scillaes Metamorphosis, address women readers. However, the private remains a source of disorder in these poems. Reading in enclosed spaces, or in privacy, fragments the interpretive community and is more difficult to control, and the epyllia try to compensate for this by defining a network of readers with a shared aesthetic response.

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in the sense of exceeding or over-going; and transgression in the sense of committing a sin. The epyllion deals in sexual activities which have been forbidden or marginalized, including adultery, autosexual lust and incest. Thomas Heywood’s Oenone and Paris (1594), for example, is based on a story of adultery and betrayal, as Paris abandons Oenone for Helen, who is already married to Menelaus. Marston’s Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image is, among other things, a poem about masturbation, while Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis is about a chance affair in a forest, which breaks taboos about gender, and taboos against intercourse between the generations and within families, through the aggressive and disturbingly maternal figure of Venus in hot pursuit of her lovely young boy.58 Perhaps the most famous erotic fantasy in the genre comes in Marlowe’s version of Hero and Leander, when Leander swims the Hellespont and finds himself increasingly intertwined with Neptune. The relentless rhythm of the lines, with their ceaseless epanalepsis, create an irresistible onward force that envelops Neptune, the narrator and the reader in the same wet dream. Neptune, like the narrator, and the reader, surveys Leander with admiration and the passage has become the locus classicus of early modern homoeroticism: He [Neptune] watcht his armes, and as they opend wide, At every stroke, betwixt them would he slide, And steale a kiss, and then run out and daunce, And as he turnd, cast many a lustfull glaunce, And threw him gawdie toies to please his eie, And dive into the water, and there prie Upon his brest, his thighs, and everie lim, And up againe, and close beside him swim, And talk of love: . . . ll. 667–75

The epyllion puts all forms of desire, including homoeroticism, in a context that is at odds with dominant social and cultural ideologies, largely because desire, in these poems, resists categorization and remains radically polymorphic. While my own analysis of the ways shame interacts with canons of sexuality and gender in the epyllion is indebted to the wealth of recent work on Renaissance homoeroticism, which has brought this kind of desire back into view, I have reservations about an approach that often 58

There is also the potential for bestiality in Venus and Adonis, as Dympna Callaghan argued in an extremely interesting paper, entitled “ (Un)natural Loving: Swine, Pets and Flowers in Venus and Adonis,” delivered at the conference on Shakespeare’s Narrative Poems, Institute of Advanced Study, University of London, 27–29 July 2000.

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tends to silence female erotic desires, just as much as established forms of patriarchy do. The epyllion, at least, seems to acknowledge and give space to a variety of forms of desire, including female sexual desires. The intimacy of the image of Neptune and Leander in a close, watery embrace certainly has homoerotic appeal, but this does not preclude the erotic appeal of Leander’s naked body to hetero/homosexual women, nor, indeed, is the appeal of Hero’s lightly veiled body confined to heterosexual men, in the profoundly unstable libidinal economy constructed by the epyllion.59 Homoeroticism is not necessarily a form of forbidden and marginalized love in the late sixteenth century, but the particular perspective of the epyllion makes all kinds of sexual relationship disorderly, because desire is presented as unpredictable, uncontrollable and excessive. At the same time, I suggest, the genre’s evocation of excessive, fluid desires reinforces its literariness. The association between literary excellence and excessive desire for both female and male objects is established by the myth of Orpheus. Orpheus’ attempt to rescue his wife from the underworld was betrayed by his excessive passion for Eurydice, which caused him to look round when he was leading her out of Hades – the one thing Pluto had forbidden him to do. As a result, Eurydice is removed irrevocably back into Hades. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, after losing his wife for a second and final time, Orpheus shuns the love of womankind, “whether because of his ill success in love, or whether he had given his troth once for all, and turns to the love of young boys.”60 Marlowe’s poem is a celebration of homoeroticism, as well as other forms of desire, but the desirable is still dangerous. As the narrator 59

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Gregory W. Bredbeck, Sodomy and Interpretation: Marlowe to Milton (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), pp. 87–139, argues that Marlowe’s homoeroticism undermines supposedly natural and exclusive heteroerotic desire. While I agree that Hero and Leander is a radical poem, I focus on the way Marlowe uses peripheral sexualities to promote cultural change. Alan Bray, Homosexuality in Renaissance England (n.p.: Gay Men’s Press, 1988), pp. 60–1, cautions against reading texts through a twentiethcentury liberal perspective, as campaigning social statements, and he highlights the classical tradition of urbane homoeroticism. Jonathan Goldberg, Sodometries: Renaissance Texts, Modern Sexualities (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992), focuses on the relationship between homoeroticism and social disorder, and like Bredbeck, his analysis makes vital contributions to our understanding of Renaissance homoeroticism. The problem comes with the way these important studies have been received as if they explained the meaning of homoeroticism in the Renaissance. As Mario DiGangi points out in The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama, Cambridge Studies in Renaissance Literature and Culture 21 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 1–23, homoeroticism in the Renaissance has many meanings. What seems to be at issue is the way homoeroticism is used and presented in a particular text, bearing in mind the specificities and the unfamiliarity of Renaissance understandings of such practices. In relation to the epyllion, homoeroticism is a symptom of indiscriminate desire, and all forms of indiscriminate desire in these poems are associated with excess and shame. Ovid, Metamorphoses, ed. Frank Justus Miller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), X, ll. 78–85.

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of Hero and Leander points out, we are not in control of our own choices: “It lies not in our power to love, or hate, / For will in us is over-rul’d by fate” (ll. 167–8). In fact, desire is so unpredictable that it undermines the notion of the subject as an entity in total control of its own processes, and this flatly contradicts any assertion of conventional authorial mastery. In the epyllion, all forms of desire are threatening, not only because, in the words of Thomas Edwards: “Full oft the like doth hap, / To them that thinke to scape” (Cephalus and Procris, L’Envoy, st. 7), but also because, in the epyllion, desire is almost always extreme in intensity, and extremes of emotion are considered to be dangerous in the sixteenth century. As Sir Thomas Elyot warns his readers, extreme passions are upsetting to body, mind and soul: “For yf they be immoderate, they do not onely annoye the body, & shorten the lyfe, but also they do appaire, and somtyme lose utterly a mans estimation. And that moche more is, they bringe a man from the use of reason, and sometyme in the displeasure of almighty god.”61 The epyllion constitutes a type of writing that stands in opposition to received ideas. It is a transgressive form, one which breaks down the standards of the status quo and this includes the accepted standards of male and female behavior. Indeed, it is the transvestite energy of these poems, and their readiness to present women acting as men, and men acting as women, that is the source of much of their erotic charge. In particular, the epyllion challenges the Petrarchan model of the relationship between the sexes, of the silent, passive female object of desire who is pursued by the dominant male and it does so by acknowledging the erotic equality of the sexes. In Hero and Leander, for example, both Hero and her male lover Leander are unworldly and inexperienced in the ways of love. Moreover, both figures are presented as the objects of erotic desire and descriptions of their beauties often assume an androgynous quality: I could tell ye, How smooth his brest was, & how white his bellie, And whose immortall fingars did imprint, That heavenly path, with many a curious dint, That runs along his backe, but my rude pen, Can hardly blazon foorth the loves of men. Much lesse of powerfull gods . . . ll. 65–71 61

Sir Thomas Elyot, The Castel of Helth Corrected (1541), Bk. III, chapter 11, “Of affectes of the mynde” (R4r–v).

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The thing that is usually blazoned is feminine beauty, and the author goes on to praise Leander’s “orient cheeks and lips,” the features that would be praised in a conventional Petrarchan blazon of the female object.62 In fact, there is nothing innately masculine or feminine about Hero or Leander: they are the products of various discourses of desire, even the same discourses of desire. Both are, for example, constructed through the conventions of Petrarchanism, with the result that, in Leander’s case, “Some swore he was a maid in mans attire, / For in his lookes were all that men desire” (ll. 83–4). Leander’s beauty is established by the blazon and, like Hero, his worth is established by emphasizing his desirability to others. Hero and Leander become the object of other people’s desires, the focus of other people’s stories, and gradually colonize all forms of desire, even incest, so that Cupid imagines Hero is his mother, and nuzzles, panting, into her breast (ll. 39–44). Thus Hero and Leander, in their total desirability, are both the motivation for discourse, the reason for writing and speaking in the poem, and the product of that discourse. They represent the desire aroused by language, and the desired object fashioned by language. As such, they are synecdoches for literature as a whole, for the object fashioned through language, and for the desires that are aroused by that language, desires that are shared by writer and reader. Venus and Adonis establishes another form of gender reversal which is characteristic of the epyllion, by casting Venus as the dominant sexual partner. Adonis is modest, inexperienced and passive, while Venus is articulate and aggressive, and uses arguments that belong to the traditionally male form of carpe diem: “Make use of time, let not advantage slip; / Beauty within itself should not be wasted” (ll. 129–30).63 For Richard Halpern, the misogynistic humor of Venus and Adonis lies in this “grotesque protrayal of female sexual desire.”64 The poem produces frustration in the reader, a process Halpern sees as misogynistic, because the poem allegorizes the plight of the female reader through its portrayal of Venus. Like Venus, the female reader is trapped by desire for Adonis and can do nothing but gaze on him. Unlike many of his predecessors, Halpern took the undoubted popularity of the poem in the Renaissance to be something worthy of serious 62

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For Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), pp. 1–20, male–male love is a way of setting up structures of authority that exclude women. However, in the case of the epyllion, the gender politics are less easy to summarize as women are included in the structures of authority the genre elaborates, either by being dedicatees, or by being identified as part of its e´lite readership. Cephalus and Procris also plays on this joke. The goddess Aurora woos the reluctant Cephalus. First of all, she virtually stifles him in her bosom, then she presses him down, and kisses him and, finally, she produces her trump card, and shows him her bare feet (ll. 203–32). Feet often carry a potent erotic charge in the epyllion. Richard Halpern, “‘Pining their Maws,’” in Venus and Adonis: Critical Essays, ed. Kolin, p. 380.

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consideration, and his analysis of Shakespeare’s epyllion as an “allegory of textual consumption” (p. 383), together with his readiness to address the imbrication of the sexual and the aesthetic in the poem, not only unlocks and revivifies Shakespeare’s text, his argument is an extremely important contribution to the study of the function of eroticism in late sixteenthcentury culture more generally. Nevertheless, I have several reservations about Halpern’s brilliant analysis. My first reservation stems from what I see as the epyllion’s consistent exposure of the fluidity of desire, so that female readers (and male readers) of Venus and Adonis, for example, are set up as forces that desire men, women, themselves, children, their mothers, even animals. In fact, frustration does not necessarily function in a misogynistic way. After all, any male reader who desires the goddess of love is frustrated by the poem, as is any reader who wants straightforward consummation, but more importantly frustration also contributes to the poem’s eroticism. Rather than denying fullfilment, and in a sense negating female sexual fantasies, the process of arousal and denial heightens desire and erotic enjoyment. Lack is not purely negative, but can be generative. Halpern suggests that the problem for Shakespeare is that the artwork lacks a phallus and that the imagination, without physical intervention, lacks the means to satisfy erotic desire. But there are many ways of satisfying desire that do not involve a phallus. In a sense, of course, the satisfaction of desire involves its destruction, and in the paradoxical world of Venus and Adonis, lack is both negative and positive, and possession is both negative and positive. Implicit in Halpern’s interpretation of Shakespeare’s epyllion is a Freudian analysis that conceives of the absence of the phallus as a wholly negative state, and also conceives of female desire as something that only passes from the female to the male, when the poem makes Venus appear desirable to all readers, whatever their age and gender. My second dispute with Halpern concerns his interpretation of the story of the famous competition between the two painters, Zeuxis and Parrhasios, which is recorded by Pliny. This story has become one of the classic instances in the long Western debate over the nature of art, although its conclusions are notoriously unclear. As Pliny notes, when the two painters finally unveil the pictures by which they wish to be judged, Zeuxis shows a painting of grapes which are so lifelike that they actually fool real birds into trying to eat them. However, when Zeuxis goes to Parrhasios’ picture and tries to part the veil in front of the painting, he discovers that what he thought was a real veil is, in fact, a painting, and Zeuxis graciously concedes that Parrhasios is the greater artist. For Halpern this story demonstrates that “the force of art lies not in its capacity to grant some kind of aesthetic satisfaction, but precisely in its capacity to deny satisfaction and thus assert its mastery over

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the viewer” (p. 382). Yet, apart from the fact that Parrhasios wins, partly because he succeeds in fooling a fellow painter, while Zeuxis only fooled animals, Parrhasios’ veil is a mimetic work of art par excellence. It is a perfect representation of a veil and, in this sense, it does grant aesthetic satisfaction. The power of the work of art, in Pliny’s story, does not only come from the capacity to deny satisfaction, but from the dual capacity to grant and deny satisfaction. A veil is an object which hides, but it is also an object through which one can see, and is an object which directs vision. A veil foregrounds the relationship between truth, representation and vision. The choice of a veil as the subject matter for a painting selfconsciously confuses representation and reality, surface and depth, and sets our idealization of straightforward revelation, of transparency, against the possibility that things come into view only when they are hidden. The confusing implications of a veil mean that it is no longer possible to talk of the image’s strict emptiness. It is not clear to me that Parrhasios’ veil reveals a nothingness, it is also possible to argue that it reveals that there is something which is hidden, perhaps eternally hidden, but this is very different from a necessary nothingness. Although Parrhasios’ veil imitates a veil perfectly, Pliny’s story also exposes Zeuxis’ assumptions about art: in particular, his assumption that it is mimetic, by drawing attention to the work as a palpable artefact and by highlighting the difference between the medium of the artefact (its paint and board for example), and the nature of the imitated object (grapes and a veil). Whether we like it or not, as readers we not only share in the desire for Cephalus, Melliflora, Adonis and all the other objects of desire set up by these poems, we are also teased and excited by the narrative. The genre is predicated on the generation and contagion of shame, because it is predicated on the breaking of taboo. These taboos may be broken by falling in love with a nun, or simply by writing or reading, and thus entering into the scandalous matter of indiscriminate desire, and the suppressed intentions which linger behind the most innocent of gestures and language. The aesthetics of imaginative autonomy in these erotic narratives are grounded in a sense of guilt, and the concept of guilt is introduced in the very first line of Marlowe’s Hero and Leander: “In Hellespont guiltie of True-loves blood.” The sense of guiltiness is kept in mind through the allusions to the “guilt starres” (l. 10) on the purple lining of Hero’s garments, the very color of the lining serving as an uncomfortable reminder of defloration. Perhaps predictably, the fear of impropriety is itself aestheticized, transformed into pleasing “guilt starres,” and even ridiculed by the trifling pun on guilt/gilt – a pun that is taken up and made explicit in the self-conscious, highly literary comedy of Chapman’s continuation of Hero and Leander:

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Leander into Hellespontus throwes His Hero-handled bodie, whose delight Made him disdaine each other Epethite. And as amidst the enamourd waves he swims, The God of gold of purpose guilt his lims, That this word guilt, including double sence, The double guilt of his Incontinence, Might be exprest . . . Sestiad 3, ll. 20–765

In her famous essay on “The Pornographic Imagination,” Susan Sontag explores the relationship between the frank treatment of sexual matter and the mentality of avant-garde movements. Such movements, she argues, challenge the normative values of their society by taking up positions on the frontiers of the thinkable, and sexual mores become one of the favored sites of resistance. She studies pornography not as a psychological phenomenon, but as “a modality within the arts,” noting that: “He who transgresses not only breaks a rule. He goes somewhere that the others are not; and he knows something the others don’t know.”66 Like other texts of the 1590s, the epyllion insists on its sexuality and insinuates a connection between the frank treatment of sexual matter and literary innovation. In the preface to his translation of Orlando Furioso (1591), Sir John Harington considers the place of obscenity in contemporary literary culture. At first he seems to take a conservative line on the “plaine scurrilitie” (p. 209) of contemporary pastorals, sonnets and epigrams, although he does acknowledge that even the worst of them may provide some useful knowledge.67 However, like other writers who explore the cultural potential of the erotic, Harington 65 66

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These lines come with the annotation: “He cals Phoebus the God of Gold, since the vertue of his beams creates it.” Susan Sontag, “The Pornographic Imagination,” Styles of Radical Will (1969; London: Vintage, 1994), p. 35 and p. 71. In “Tympan” Derrida is also attracted to the “inexhaustible reserve” (p. 163) of the margin. He describes his project as a search for a margin that philosophy cannot reappropriate or conceive as its own (p. 155). See “Tympan” (1972), A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1991), pp. 148–68. The margin is significant for Derrida because he is searching for a new understanding of difference, partly to accommodate literature which is the other that is condemned and excluded by Platonic philosophy. In “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Derrida notes the god of writing does not have a proper place: “His propriety or property is impropriety or inappropriateness, the floating indetermination that allows for substitution and play.” This constitutes an accurate description of the kind of literature elaborated in the erotic narrative. See “Plato’s Pharmacy,” A Derrida Reader, ed. Kamuf, p. 123. Sir John Harington, preface to Orlando Furioso, quoted from Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. Smith, II, pp. 194–222. Harington quotes (p. 209) from two of Martial’s epigrams: Book IV, no. 9 and Book XI, no. 16. The latter is a warning against hypocrisy: “You also, my girl, will not be dry as you read the naughty jests of my little book.” “Dry” translates the Latin word “uda,” and, in the delicate words of the Loeb footnote: “Uda does not refer to drinking.” See Martial, Epigrams, ed. & trans. D. R. Shackleton Bailey, The Loeb Classical Library, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), III, p. 17 and p. 16.

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goes on to question the possibility of morality, and the nature of the moralists, by drawing parallels between reading, writing and cupidinous desire. As Harington explains in his preface, “self pleasing” (p. 218) motivates both the reader and the writer, whatever claims may be made to the contrary. According to Harington, who bases his argument on Martial, Lucrece and all other chaste matrons blush when they read lascivious material, but only when they know someone is looking at them. Even Lucrece, that paragon of chastity, reads for her own pleasure: “Lucrecia (by which he [Martial] signifies any chast matron) will blush and be ashamed to read a lascivious booke. But how? not except Brutus be by, that is if any grave man should see her read it. But if Brutus turne his backe, she will go to it agayne and read it all.” The erotic investments behind textual transactions are explored by Ovids Banquet of Sence, which has been read as an attempt to reform the sensuality of late Elizabethan culture, as its central motif is based on the neoplatonic theory of the banquet of the senses.68 Chapman’s poem tells the story of Ovid’s love for Corynna, the daughter of the Emperor Augustus, and it is profoundly ambivalent because of the unstable relationship between the narrator and Ovid. While other epyllia are set in a universe governed by chance, Chapman’s allusions to neoplatonic theories of the sublimation of the senses do suggest that there could be a direction and meaning to the processes of love. However, Ovid’s desire for Corynna is not a particularly ennobling emotion. It is largely self-induced and threatens to become a pursuit of an object that has no existence beyond the self-creating fantasies of the poet. Writing is shamelessly exposed as a masturbatory activity, as Ovid’s sexual desire is fed by his poetic rhapsodies, which are stimulated by the sensory banquet.69 Thus Ovid’s penetration of the arbor where Corynna is resting becomes a self-penetrating and self-induced ecstasy: 68

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Phyllis Brooks Bartlett, ed., Poems of George Chapman, p. 5; and Janet Spens, “George Chapman’s Ethical Thought,” E & S 11 (1925): 145–69, argue that Ovids Banquet of Sence aims to reach spiritual ecstasy by means of the senses and is a neoplatonic manifesto. By contrast, Frank Kermode, Shakespeare, Spenser, Donne (London: Routledge, 1971), pp. 100–15; and Raymond Waddington, “Chapman and Persius: The Epigraph to Ovids Banquet of Sence,” RES ns 19 (1968): 158–62, argue that the poem is ironic. However, Waddington later changed his mind. See Waddington, “Visual Rhetoric: Chapman and the Extended Poem,” ELR 13 (1983): 42 where he argues that the poem “should be seen as part of Chapman’s campaign against the currently popular erotic Ovidian narrative poem.” However, elements of counter-genre are characteristic of the epyllion which, like other texts that exploit shame, explores the creative potential of self-subversion. The inclusion of counter-genres is also a way of pre-empting criticism. In a very suggestive essay, “Chapman’s Ovid,” SP 75 (1978): 449, Gerald Snare argues that Ovids Banquet is a meditation on the problems of invention. Although Snare does not think in such broad terms, his essay has very important implications for future studies of Ovid’s function in the Renaissance.

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This sayde, he [Ovid] charg’d the Arbour with his eye, Which pierst it through, and at her brests reflected, Striking him to the hart with exstasie: st. 49

Literary invention becomes the source of erotic pleasure for the inventor, and Chapman substitutes narcissism and lust for neoplatonic spirituality and self-transcendence. Ovids Banquet of Sence is satirical and non-satirical, indulgent of erotic excess and critical of it. Not only Ovids Banquet of Sence, but the volume in which it appears, develops and enfolds ambiguity and suggests a variety of conflicting, and even incompatible, moral and philosophical interpretations of desire which are never reconciled. Admittedly, Chapman cheats, suggesting richness, while sidestepping the difficulties of structure and control, but the juxtaposition of formal impulses suggests ways in which authors could extend the scope of the epyllion and highlights what were perceived to be the limitations of the genre.70 Chapman’s Ovid is in love with a self-generated image of Corynna. Perhaps all lovers are ultimately enamored of self-generated images, but it is only a step from Ovid to the more disturbing pathology of the myth of Pigmalion who copulates with one of his own statues, after Venus has turned it into flesh for him. John Marston’s poem The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image provides the most striking example of the relationship between reading, writing and cupidinous desire.71 Indeed it is based on a myth that associates desire 70

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Ambiguity of response is stimulated by a reading of the volume as a whole which explores the representation of love in a variety of fashionable forms. Apart from the epyllion, there is the sonnet sequence, A Coronet for his Mistresse Philosophie, in praise of philosophy and the intellect; an extended blazon, entitled The Amorous Zodiack; and a ballad, The Amorous Contention of Phillis and Flora, by Richard Stapleton. See Bartlett, ed., Poems of Chapman, p. 434. Waddington, “Visual Rhetoric,” pp. 41–57, discusses the visual presentation of the volume. Keach, Elizabethan Erotic Narratives, p. 153, presents Marston’s poem as a playfully ironic exposure of erotic idealism. Similarly Philip J. Finkelpearl, John Marston of the Middle Temple, pp. 94– 104, emphasizes the comic aspects of the story. Yet the poem is more disturbing than these critics acknowledge, because it expresses authorial resentment over the collaborative model of reading established by the epyllion. Arnold Davenport in his introduction to The Poems of John Marston, Liverpool English Texts and Studies (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1961) p. 7, classifies the poem as “one of the poorest of Ovidian, mythological, erotic poems,” but the poem is an ostentatiously exaggerated version of the characteristic elements of erotic narrative poetry. Selfparody is one of the characteristic elements of the genre. Pigmalion remained a byway of criticism until Lynn Enterline’s highly productive study of Ovidian rhetoric and the politics of the subject in sixteenth-century England in The Rhetoric of the Body. Her chapter on Marston’s poem, “‘Be not obsceane though wanton’: Marston’s Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image” (pp. 125–51), is a brilliant analysis of the way the poem exploits erotic matter to critique the symbolic and libidinal economy of Petrarchanism. Enterline’s book was published after I had completed my work on Marston, but our points of agreement are striking, and range from a shared interest in the idea of literature as fetish, down to a shared fascination with particular passages in this most characteristic late Elizabethan text. Our divergences will be outlined in the course of the discussion.

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with various kinds of taboo, particularly the incest taboo. The mythological Pigmalion was the grandfather of Myrrha who repeatedly committed incest with her father, Cinyras. The offspring of this horrific liaison is Adonis. In the Metamorphoses, Pigmalion’s story is inset into the narrative of Orpheus and Eurydice. At the very moment that Orpheus ignores Pluto’s injunction, and looks back at Eurydice, the poem diverts into the story of Pigmalion, which is created at the moment when one of the most famous of taboos against looking is broken. The story of the master poet, Orpheus, is diverted into a story of artistic mastery as perversion, in the tale of Pigmalion which figures the dangers inherent in pursuing art as an autotelic activity which occupies its own special, isolated space. The dangers and pleasures of the eye, of illicit looks that lead to illicit sexual activities, provide the matter for The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image. Marston’s poem tells how the sculptor, Pigmalion, falls in love with the statue of a woman which he has made out of “purest Ivorie.” Like Narcissus, he falls in love with an image of his own perfection, which appeals to him because of the excellence of his own artistic skill: Hee was amazed at the wondrous rarenesse Of his owne workmanships perfection. He thought that Nature nere produc’d such fairenes In which all beauties have their mantion. And thus admiring, was enamored On that fayre Image himselfe portraied. st. 372

The poem enacts the association between ecphrasis and sexuality identified by Gordon Braden. Art converts the object into an erotic object which produces the response of wonder, and Pigmalion is “amazed” at the “wondrous” quality of his own artefact.73 The narcissism of Pigmalion’s experience is beautifully captured in the ambiguity of the last line, in the uncertain function of the word “himselfe,” and in the arresting physicality of the preposition “on”: “[he] was enamored / on that fayre Image himselfe portraied.” The subject, Pigmalion, becomes the object of his own desire, but, as the categories of subject and object collapse, the charge of autoeroticism is extended to include the narrator, and this is where I diverge from Enterline’s reading which keeps the identities of narrator and Pigmalion separate. The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image presents a series 72

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For interpretations of the Pigmalion myth in the Ovide moralis´e, which link Pigmalion’s sin with that of Narcissus, see Thomas D. Hill, “Narcissus, Pygmalion, and the Creation of Saturn: Two Mythographical Themes in the Roman de la Rose,” SP 71 (1974): 412–14. Braden, The Classics and English Renaissance Poetry, pp. 137–41.

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of substitutions which include the substitution of Pigmalion, the consummate artist, for the narrator, who aspires to consummate artistry. Just as Pigmalion is figured through his statue, so the narrator figures himself through images, which include Pigmalion, and the poem as a whole. But figuration undermines the distinctions between subject and object, and threatens to unman the narrator, just as it threatens to unman Pigmalion. In stanza 10, for example, Pigmalion’s lust is compared with a woman’s lust, specifically the desires that occupy the minds of hypocritical bourgeois ladies during church services, but the dedication has already established the narrator as lustful. For Enterline, fluidity of gender is only associated with Pigmalion and the image, not with the narrator, but the poem erodes distinctions, including the distinction between the narrator, Pigmalion, and the poem, subject and object, fiction and reality. Paradox, rather than antithesis, seems to govern the narrative, where, as the description of Pigmalion’s invocation to Venus reveals, image and reality, emptiness and fullness, lifelessness and lifelikeness, are confused: Then on his knees he all his sences charmes, To invocate sweet Venus for to raise her [the statue] To wished life, and to infuse some breath, To that which dead, yet gave a life to death. st. 22

Pigmalion confuses art and sex, but so, too, does the narrator, who writes in the hope of achieving consummation. The metamorphic alliance of sexual desire and the artistic imagination is heralded in the dedicatory poem, “To his Mistres” in which the narrator asks his “wanton Muse” to inspire his “dulled ” literary Muse with wit and verbal facility: My wanton Muse lasciviously doth sing Of sportive love, of lovely dallying. O beauteous Angel, dine thou to infuse A sprightly wit, into my dulled Muse. I invocate non other Saint but thee, To grace the first bloomes of my Poesie. Thy favours like Promethean sacred fire, In dead, and dull conceit can life inspire. To his Mistres74

Invention and inspiration are eroticized as the narrator goes on to ask his mistress to show her “mighty power” in him. As she reads, he asks her to “take compassion” and to put him in a position in which he need not envy 74

All quotations from the prefatory material are from Poems of John Marston, ed. Davenport.

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Pigmalion. Reading is transformed into a way of showing sexual favor, and both reading and writing are presented as two sides of a sexual exchange, which is figured by the term “metamorphosis”: “Then when thy kindnes grants me such sweet blisse, / I’le gladly write thy metamorphosis” (To his Mistres).75 When we are told that the “wanton Muse” can also “turne to gold, leaden invention,” sexual fantasy is revealed to possess the same metamorphic power as the literary imagination. Pigmalion’s invocation to Venus echoes terms used by the narrator in his dedication to his mistress. For example, Pigmalion asks Venus “to infuse” (st. 22) breath into the statue, while the narrator asks his “Angell ” “to infuse” his Muse with wit. Pigmalion asks Venus to “take compassion. / Instill into her some celestiall fire, / That she may equalize affection” (st. 24), while the narrator also asks his mistress to “take compassion” and compares her favors to “Promethean sacred fire.” Both Pigmalion and the narrator can bring about the most extraordinary transformations in their double capacity as artist-lovers who aspire to turn the artefact into the vehicle for sexual contact: With that his [Pigmalion’s] nimble limbs doe kisse the sheetes, And now he bowes him for to lay him downe, And now each part, with her faire parts doe meet, Now doth he hope for to enjoy loves crowne: Now doe they dally, kisse, embrace together, Like Leda’s Twins at sight of fairest weather. Yet all’s conceit. But shadow of that blisse Which now my Muse strives sweetly to display In this my wondrous metamorphosis. Daine to beleeve me, now I sadly say: The stonie substance of his Image feature, Was straight transform’d into a living creature. sts. 27–8

The narrator identifies very strongly with Pigmalion, particularly at this climactic moment when the term “metamorphosis” becomes another word that binds Pigmalion and the narrator. “Metamorphosis” (st. 28) refers to the miraculous transformation of statue into woman, which is about to occur, to the masturbatory climax that the narrator (and the reader) are possibly about to experience as they imaginatively participate in Pigmalion’s erotic encounter, but also, given the scenario established by the dedication to the narrator’s mistress, the narrator’s “wondrous metamorphosis” could also 75

Compare “L’Envoy” to Scillaes Metamorphosis which constructs the preceding poem as the means to get the narrator’s mistress to “yeeld.”

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refer to successful heterosexual intercourse between narrator and mistress, achieved by his writing, and her receptive reading, of the poem. Enterline argues that women are cut out of the circuit of the poem, but the narrator’s mistress is addressed by the poem, as well as the young bloods of the Inns of Court, and the master poet, Ovid. Of course, we do not know for certain that the phrase “wondrous metamorphosis” refers to the narrator’s success in bedding his mistress, but, even if we discount the possibility that he gets real sex with a woman, the mistress still retains the power of denial and the poem preserves the narrator’s dependence, on the mistress, a sense of pathetic need for a woman. Even Pigmalion, the famous misogynist, cannot escape women, and it may very well be impossible for all misogynists, including the young bloods of the Inns of Court, to escape women: “And Love at length forc’d him to know his fate, / And love the shade, whose substance he did hate” (st. 1). Pigmalion’s love is also narcissistic. In loving Galatea he loves himself, and so his desire to flee womankind is also the impossible desire to flee himself. It is very difficult to distinguish what is real and what is a conceit in the fictional world of the poem. In any case, conceit is reality in that the poetic conceits are the basis for any masturbatory activity with its messy, practical implications, and there are varied forms of sexual activity all of which are as satisfying to the participants as heterosexual intercourse, while it is also true to say that all forms of love involve an element of fantasy, in which case Pigmalion’s disease is only different in degree, not in kind, only a more exaggerated version of the delusions that infect all lovers. The fetish arouses and satisfies very real desires. The narrator challenges our disbelief, testing the reader’s capacity for imaginative involvement. At the very moment that he admits that everything he has said is pure fiction and only a shadow of reality (“Yet all’s conceit,” st. 28), the narrative takes the most dramatic turn and Pigmalion’s statue turns into a woman. Stanza 28 answers the charge that poets lie in a very unexpected way, by claiming that the more outrageous the story, the more it is to be believed. Paradoxically, the more a poet lies the closer he/she gets to the truth. The reader is not expected to believe the conceits which are “but shadow of that blisse,” but they are expected to believe something which is even more outrageous.76 In any case, conceit may well be reality in this epyllion if the poetic conceits are the basis for the narrator’s masturbatory activity. The text enacts the process of its own fetishization. 76

Many readers, including Davenport, Poems of Marston, p. 11, find Pigmalion pornographic. On Marston’s subversiveness see John Peter, Complaint and Satire in Early English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), pp. 142–52.

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In Pigmalion’s story, art stimulates Pigmalion’s desire. Similarly, the text of Marston’s epyllion stimulates desires that are aroused by linguistic processes that stand in for physical stimuli. Like all epyllia, but only more so, given the nature of the myth Marston chooses to retell, the text acts out its own reduction into a fetishistic substitute. As Enterline notes (p. 148), the “wondrous metamorphosis” refers to the words of the poem and to the narrator’s penis. The bliss is a poetic bliss, and/or the erection achieved by reading the dirty poem. In the light of the dedication to the narrator’s mistress, the possibility also exists that this is an allusion to intercourse between the narrator and his mistress/Muse. For Enterline, the poem is the occasion of a masturbatory verbal fantasy that repeats the excision of what she terms “hated female substance in favour of the image.” The female certainly does exist in the image as all the male readers are brought together in the act of imagining sex, “Let him conceit but what himselfe would doe” (st. 34), but the poem operates by confusing the real and imaginary in ways that undermine the clear confinement of the female to the realm of the imagination, and exposes the erotic imagination as something that has powerful effects on the world and on behavior. The excision of the female is located in a story of frustration and even potential failure for the male narrator. Enterline notes that Pigmalion looks at “love’s pavillion” and blinks and this renders the woman’s wants, in other words, her lack, literal. Writing is not only cast as a heteroerotic fantasy, but also an a homoerotic fantasy as it binds men together in a clique from which the female is excluded. If anything, however, the female substance is desired, not hated, and the substitution of the text for sex is a comic reminder of the narrator’s originary failure, and a satire of homosocial bonding.77 Having led the reader to assume that the relationship between Pigmalion and his statue/woman will culminate in sexual consummation, the narrator coyly demurs and refuses to describe the climactic embrace. The conclusion is left to the imagination of the readers. Thus, if the readers choose to condemn the poem as immoral, then they are condemning something they have themselves supplied. In The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image, morality becomes an unattainable goal as any moral condemnation of the epyllion would in fact be self-condemnation. The irony is that certain things can be thought and even done, but not spoken of: 77

In Arthur Golding’s version of the myth of Diana and Actaeon, Diana’s words to Actaeon as she punishes him turn his punishment into an attack on the politics of homosocial bonding achieved at the expense of the feminine: “Now make thy vaunt among thy Mates, thou sawste Diana bare, / Tell if thou can: I give thee leave: tell hardily: do not spare.” Quoted from Ovid’s Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation, ed. John Frederick Nims (New York: Macmillan, 1965), p. 67. The original is found in Metamorphoses, III, ll. 227–8.

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Who knowes not what ensues? O pardon me Yee gaping eares that swallow up my lines. Expect no more. Peace idle Poesie, Be not obsceane though wanton in thy rimes. And chaster thoughts, pardon if I doe trip, Or if some loose lines from my pen doe slip. st. 38

The shame which is alluded to so frequently in Marston’s epyllion is the reader’s as well as Pigmalion’s and the narrator’s. After all, Pigmalion does no more than the reader imagines, and no more than the reader would do in his place (st. 34). Marston indulges in a kind of autotelic coyness, a coyness aimed at himself, as he exploits the interrelationship between pleasureseeking and self-denying impulses, daring to be provocative only to retreat behind a recuperative gesture. Marston’s relationship with the readers is ambivalent, and the conclusion to The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image both empowers and restricts the reader. Late Elizabethan erotic narratives assign an active and collaborative role to their readers, and the emphasis on the fictional and recreative qualities of the genre enables the reader to reclaim his/her power to generate meaning. However, Marston is more uneasy with the collaborative model of reading than other writers who explore the functions of eros, and the author’s dependence on the reader is masked by presenting the act of creation as a casual act, “Or if some loose lines from my pen doe slip” (st. 38). Marston’s poem frustrates the demands of the reader with aggressive condescension and his disdain for the reader is encapsulated in the satirical dedication “TO THE WORLDS MIGHTIE MONARCH GOOD OPINION,” by W. K., the pseudonymous William Kinsayder, which claims that Good Opinion is the true patron of letters. Opinion’s judgements, and by implication those of the reader, are governed by the principles of self-interest and affection, and W. K. prays that Good Opinion’s special favor will “Vouchsafe to guild my imperfection.” Thus he turns the scandalousness of the epyllion into a compliment to Good Opinion, as he claims that the more imperfect and “blushing” its style, the more Opinion can prove its power to mask imperfections. As Marston explodes the popularity of his own writing, he mocks the perverse logic of the generation of shame with its implicit claim that the more shameful the writing, the more popular it will be. For Enterline, the narrator displaces anxieties about his voice and about women’s wants, in the double sense of their desires and their lack, on to Pigmalion and so the narrator maintains a difference between his full voice and body and the imperfections of Pigmalion and the woman. At the level

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of social and rhetorical transactions, she reads the poem as a masculinist, gynophobic and homosocial performance, but this is to underplay the extent to which all identities in the poem collapse into each other. Enterline sets up a differences between kinds of experience, between the unconscious undercurrent of the poem that challenges masculinist discourses by suggesting that male and female identities are fluid, and the conscious thrust of the poem that celebrates a fantasy of male authorial fulfillment and potency. Yet the division between unconscious and conscious levels in the poem seems to me to be seriously challenged by its confusion of reality and fiction, image and physical experience, which point to a syncretic understanding of language in which words and their libidinal implications cannot be clearly separated. Pigmalions’ status as the vehicle for homosocial bonding is compromised by the hostility of the narrator to the readers, and his sharp observation that they are unable to distinguish the real from the figural. In the end, like much of the work on the queer Renaissance on which she draws, Enterline’s analysis downplays the possibility of female desire, even though women are addressed by the poem: “And therefore Ladies, thinke that they nere love you, / Who do not unto more then kissing move you” (st. 20). These lines start up a dialogue between what women do and do not think, and what men imagine they do and do not want. Indeed there is a pun on the word “nere” in the sense of never, and also in the sense of near, that turns what could be construed as a moment of male high-handedness into a slippery joke that has the potential to undermine the narrator. The lines may mean that a man who only asks for a kiss does not really love a woman, which amounts to a witty justification for asking more from a woman. They may, however, mean that a man near, or dearly, loves a woman if he does not ask for more than a kiss, which would seem to assert the ideal of respect for the mistress. In any case, is it a question of the man or even woman (the gender is not specified) moving the ladies, in which case the ladies are merely something that is acted upon, or is it a question of the ladies themselves being moved, of feeling and sensing that they do not want more than a kiss? The repeated self-subversion is essential to the poem’s construction of a specifically literary kind of authority. I agree that Marston’s epyllion is not as comfortable with the feminization or passivity of authorship as other epyllia are, but neither does its narrator escape criticism. In many ways, The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image is the most characteristic of all epyllia. It identifies the most characteristic conventions of the genre and exaggerates them in order to outdo its predecessors in the form. Far from making it an anti-epyllion, the exaggerated competitiveness of Marston’s epyllion is typical of the genre. Shakespeare’s description of

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Venus could stand as a motto for the genre: “Her best is better’d with a more delight” (l. 78). Marston’s verse outdoes the epyllion at its own game, as it becomes the most compendious of brief, compendious forms, by compressing itself into 200 lines which contain a variety of other forms including blazon, invitation and complaint. Marston’s poem satirizes aspects of the epyllion and indulges them, and is by turns disdainful of the readers and complicitous with them. Moreover, The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image exemplifies the way writers in the generation of shame cultivate an association with activities on the margins of physical, mental or cultural experience. Not only is the poem a disturbing story of lust and obsession, but the narrator is himself unstable and aggressive. Rather than edify his readers, Marston sets out to enthrall and fascinate them with behavior that both attracts and repels them. Marlowe had adopted a similar authorial strategy. Paradoxically, he exploits marginal and transgressive activities to define his authority, and his translation of the pornographic Amores, and his dramatic interest in homoeroticism and black magic all contribute to the image of the artist as the purveyor of spiritual dangers.78 Contemporaries reacted to these radical reinterpretations of authorship by associating Marlowe and Marston with other forms of deviancy, notably “The School of Night.” In The Second Part of the Return from Parnassus, Marlowe is described as a bad man by Judicio: “Pitty it is that wit so ill should dwell, / Wit lent from heaven, but vices sent from hell” (ll. 288–9). The fact that Marston’s supposed membership of “The School of Night” caused (and still causes) less of a sensation than Marlowe’s, has less to do with the relative truth of the accusations, and more to do with the fact that Marston soon adopted a different sort of authorial image in his satires, where he presented himself as a modern Juvenal, and he did not go on to develop the role of author as madman or challenger of taboo.79 For Marlowe, the association with black magic 78

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Jonathan Goldberg, “Sodomy and Society: The Case of Christopher Marlowe,” in Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, ed. David Scott Kastan and Peter Stallybrass (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 75–82, discusses the ways sodomy was embedded in other discourses of subversion. For Goldberg it is the theatrical milieu where the counter-voices of culture are acted out, but my study of the deployment of eros in late Elizabethan culture suggests they are also acted out in lyric. For the final events of Marlowe’s life see also C. F. Tucker Brooke ed., The Works and Life of Christopher Marlowe, 6 vols.: vol. 1, The Life of Marlowe and The Tragedy of Dido Queen of Carthage (London: Methuen, 1930) pp. 50–68 and 98–108. In The Second Part of the Return from Parnassus, Furor Poeticus speaks like Marston and Marlowe in their most bombastic style. See for example ll. 1299–1315. According to Ingenioso, Furor suffers from “a very terrible roaring muse” (l. 1319). For an important study of Marlowe’s atheism that forces us to rethink the questions that we ask of his biography, see David Riggs, “Marlowe’s Quarrel with God,” in Marlowe, History, and Sexuality:

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serves much the same purpose as the invocation of “divine Musaeus” (l. 52) and the mystical powers of this proto-poet, at the start of Hero and Leander. It is a way of glamorizing and dignifying authorship by laying claim to special powers which authorize Marlowe to redefine the status of literature. Similarly, the erotic narratives of the epyllion free literature from didacticism, and turn their triviality and potential for shame into the grounds of their discourse, defining a space for literary activity which is no longer dependent on external values, but works to fulfill its own aesthetic. In its oblique and self-consciously marginal ways, the deployment of eros contributes to the professionalization of letters. eff eminized authorit y Like Venus and Adonis, John Weever’s erotic poem, Faunus and Melliflora (1600), subverts the Petrarchan modes of courtly communication, and the moralists’ emphasis on feminine modesty, by describing ladies who speak, do their own wooing and take the initiative in their relationships with men. Melliflora, for example, speaks for all the nymphs when she asks Faunus to spend the night with them: I would we had such eloquence as might Intreate your Highnesse lodge with us all night, We and our arbour evermore would rest Content, and honourd with so great a ghest: You shall but lie upon a bed of roses, Your sheetes white lillies, pillowes fragrant poses, Your blankets flowerdeluces shall be drawne With prety pinkes, your curtaines leafie lawne, And in my bed, My, unawares out slipt, Her face bewraide how that her tongue had tript, Which Faunus seeing, would have kist her then, To hide those blushes (oh how kind are men!) Fresh she begins, thinking that word to alter, The more she speakes, the more her tongue doth falter, And gainst her will that My she spoke againe, (Love will not let such words be spoke in vaine.) ll. 221–36 New Critical Essays on Christopher Marlowe, ed. Paul Whitfield White (New York: AMS Press, 1998) pp. 15–37. On the so-called “School of Night” whose members (depending on which accounts one reads) also included the Earl of Northumberland, Ralegh, Hariot, Royden and Chapman, see M. C. Bradbrook, The School of Night: A Study in the Literary Relationships of Sir Walter Ralegh (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1936). The exploitation of marginality and an interest in the limits of the thinkable also exposed other writers of the 1590s, including Harington and Nashe, to similar charges.

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However hard Melliflora tries to suppress her sexual motives they still come embarrassingly to the fore, and traditional signs of modesty, such as blushing, are turned into involuntary acknowledgements of her own sexual desire.80 As the presentation of Melliflora makes clear, sexuality is a force which controls the author. The text suggests that lewd behavior is endemic, and so, by implication, the chastity demanded of literature by moralistic interpretations becomes an impossible goal. The narrator’s tone of superiority at Melliflora’s expense should not be ignored, but the epyllion is not a misogynistic genre as some feminist critics have suggested.81 The idealization of female chastity in the Renaissance makes a female character a much more efficient way of questioning the possibility of chastity and, through this, the precise nature and even the possibility of literary morality. Female characters efficiently draw attention to the scandal that literature cannot be chaste. If the genre is misogynistic, it is equally scornful of masculinity. The epyllion’s targets include both male and female fantasies, and the epyllion is much more open to the possibility of slippage between the sexes than a misogynistic perspective would imply. In fact, this type of writing produces both a transvestite form of authorship, and a paradox of gender, which flaunts both masculine and feminine characteristics. In the epyllion, men are like women, and women are like men. While the epyllion may seem to celebrate the masterful authorial viewpoint, this viewpoint is constantly undermined by the ubiquitous workings of desire, which take hold of the subject and force it into involuntary actions. Nor does the reader escape attacks from desire, as these texts set up a parallel between reading, writing and cupidinous desire, so that cultural negotiation becomes simultaneously empowering and disempowering, and cultural agents, whether writers or readers, are both aggressors and victims. Not only does the universality and uncontrollability of sexual desire expose the idealization of chastity as a delusion, the force of desire undoes the identities, including 80

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Paul H. Kocher, Science and Religion in Elizabethan England (New York: Octagon Books, 1969) pp. 284–305, notes that in Elizabethan physiological theory a moral result was seen to spring automatically from a physical condition. A sanguine complexion was a sign of lustfulness. On the potential link between blushing and self-recognition, see Leonard Barkan’s discussion of the Castle of Alma (Faerie Queene II.IX.39) in Nature’s Work of Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1975), p. 172. Philippa Berry, Of Chastity and Power (London: Routledge, 1989), pp. 137–8, argues that the epyllion gives female desire a “viciously satiric treatment” which censures female fantasies of sexual dominance. Berry’s study is important, not least because she was one of the first critics to challenge the consensus that the end of Elizabeth’s reign was a happy era of grateful support for the Queen, but the epyllion also satirizes male desire and its primary target is the hypocrisy of literary morality. See also David L. Miller, “The Death of the Modern: Gender and Desire in Marlowe’s Hero and Leander,” South Atlantic Quarterly, 87/88 (1989): 757–87, which argues that Hero’s voice is suppressed in the poem. I understand misogynism as a force that seeks to maintain clarity of distinction between male and female, and the epyllion operates to undermine all distinctions.

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the sexual, gender and generational identities, that establish the parameters of a sense of self. In the epyllion, authorial mastery, albeit a paradoxical form of mastery, is based on the staging of the author’s lack of control. Authority is located in the ability to be one step ahead of the game, in the ability to accept and acknowledge one’s subordination to the sexual dynamic of language. The erotic equality of the sexes even produces comic confusions in Chapman’s Hero and Leander, in spite of Chapman’s more didactic interests in ceremony, lawful marriage and his indebtedness to Spenser.82 Chapman’s fifth sestiad includes the story of Hymen, who becomes the god of marriage. Hymen is an Athenian youth who is so beautiful that “many thought him of the femall race” (sestiad 5, l. 94). In fact, Hymen is the perfect sex-symbol for the 1590s, a polymorphic love-god, whose loveliness springs from the mixture of elements in his person. Male and female, white and crimson, all come together in “Beauties mixture” (l. 100), and make Hymen an epitome of the beauty of mixed forms, of the attractions of confluence. But the genders become even more confused in Chapman’s story of Hymen, as Hymen disguises himself as a woman to get closer to his beloved Eucharis. Hymen’s story then takes a dramatic turn for the worse. The Athenian maidens, including Hymen, who is now in disguise, are kidnapped and raped by “barbarous Rovers” (l. 168), who apparently do not notice, or perhaps do not mind, that underneath it all Hymen is a man. Hymen’s inset narrative then modulates into an explicit analogy between metamorphosis, homoeroticism and wantonness, through reference to Proteus who has fallen in love with Cupid. Cupid resists the older god’s attentions, so Proteus turns himself into love, so that he can fire Cupid’s dart at Cupid. The strategy succeeds, and Proteus and Cupid, the gods of change and of love, establish a relationship characterized by disorderliness of forms and by excess: 82

For a contrary view, which argues that Chapman corrects Marlowe and resists comedy, see Cheney, Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession, pp. 238–58. While we agree about “Chapman’s pro-Spenser project,” to invoke Cheney’s phrase (p. 258), I find Chapman’s poem to be far more unstable than Cheney’s analysis allows. My argument that Chapman’s continuation frequently becomes a dirty poem is corroborated by Pamela Royston Macfie’s nuanced analyses of the contemporary reception of Marlowe and Ovid in, “‘The Voice from Beyond the Grave’: Absence, Otherness, and Invocation in Chapman’s Hero and Leander,” Renaissance Papers (1993): 41–62; and “Ghostly Metamorphoses: Chapman, Marlowe, and Ovid’s Philomela,” John Donne Journal 18 (1999): 177–93. The kind of desire explored in late Elizabethan erotic narratives is the kind of desire eloquently described by Lacan when he draws a distinction between desire and need in “The Signification of the Phallus”: “The phenomenology that emerges from analytic experience is certainly of a kind to demonstrate in desire the paradoxical, deviant, erratic, eccentric, even scandalous character by which it is distinguished from need.” Ecrits: A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan (1977; London: Tavistock Publications and Routledge, 1995), p. 286.

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And now came Love with Proteus, who had long Inggl’d the little god with prayers and gifts, Ran through all shapes, and varied all his shifts, To win Loves stay with him, and make him love him ll. 206–983

In the epyllion, both the generation of text and the interpretation of text are reformulated as erotic experiences. The aim of telling of tales is the satisfaction of selfish desire, even sexual desire. Aurora’s armory of seduction, in Thomas Edwards’ Cephalus and Procris (1595), includes storytelling, “A thousand prettie tales she tels him too” (l. 225), which she uses in the hope of entangling Cephalus in her web. The construction of narrative, whether by characters or by authors, is figured as a sexual activity. Thomas Heywood, for example, presents the scripting of Oenone and Paris (1594) as equivalent to the loss of his virginity, through the indecent pun on “pen” in the preface to the poem: “Gentlemen: to make a longe Preamble to a short sute were follie, & therfore (in briefe) thus: Heare you have the first fruits of my indevours and the Maiden head of my Pen”.84 Heywood loses his maidenhead by writing the poem. But reading is also presented as seeking its own satisfactions. Before Leander swims the Hellespont, Marlowe compares him to a book that is easy to read: Therefore even as an Index to a booke, So to his mind was yoong Leanders looke. ll. 613–14

The content of this particular book is love and passion. The digressions and the abrupt conclusion to Hero and Leander make the readers self-conscious about their narrative desires, about their desire to know more, but, in Marlowe’s poem, the desire to find out what happens is the desire to find out about the sexual adventures of Hero and Leander, and the knowing characters are those, like Neptune, who are sexually aware. In particular, Marlowe challenges the concept of chaste literature by suggesting parallels between female sexuality and the behavior of male authors. As his epyllion ironizes feminine coyness, it reveals the self-interest 83

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The OED defines an ingle as “a boy-favourite (in a bad sense); a catamite.” This definition may betray more about twentieth-century attitudes towards ingles, than sixteenth-century ones. “To ingle” means to fondle or caress, and so the verb and its derivatives seem to me to be frustratingly fluid terms. To ingle does have homoerotic overtones, but to what degree, and to what effect, and whether the term is positive or negative, seems to depend on context. In this context, however, which is one of the proliferation of forms and extreme inconstancy, the verb has negative associations. All quotations from the preface are from Oenone and Paris by T. H., ed. Joseph Quincy Adams (Washington D.C.: The Folger Shakespeare Library, 1943), p. 3.

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which motivates all action. In fact, the narrator exploits and exposes such coyness in himself, most notably in the digression of Mercury and the country maid, where he attacks the country maid’s coyness: And knowing Hermes courted her, was glad That she such lovelinesse and beautie had As could provoke his liking, yet was mute, And neither would denie, nor graunt his sute. Still vowd he love, she wanting no excuse To feed him with delaies, as women use: Or thirsting after immortalitie, All women are ambitious naturallie, Impos’d upon her lover such a taske, As he ought not performe, nor yet she aske. ll. 421–30

Women, it is claimed, are coy only to encourage, but the country maid is not the only person handing out delays at this point in the narrative, because the narrator is also coy: he is also guilty of delay for similar reasons, as he tries to whet the readers’ appetites by making them wait. His brand of masculine coyness sorts nicely with his own ambitions and his desire to uncover his power to manipulate the audience. Hero never classifies her own reluctance as coyness, the narrator does that for her, and in doing so, opens the possibility of rape, of the denial reconfigured as an affirmative. Coyness has the potential to promote a variety of interests, including the interests of individual women, of aggressive patriarchy, and of narrators, but what is surprising about Marlowe’s narrator is that he identifies himself with women, with Hero, as well as with the misogynistic idea that women say no when they mean yes. Coyness seems to be a component in the oblique, paradoxical and selfmarginalizing strategies employed by the generation of shame. It is a form of assertion through denial, and as such, it is related to the trope of occultatio, a figure by which a summary mention is made of a thing in professing to omit it. Occultatio is related to the figure Puttenham calls “paralepsis, or the passager,” which he describes as “to make wise as if we set but light of the matter, and that therefore we do passe it over slightly when in deede we do then intend most effectually and despightfully if it be invective to remember it: it is also when we will not seeme to know a thing, and yet we know it well inough, and may be likened to the maner of women, who as the com[m]on saying is, will say nay and take it.”85 Occultatio offers an 85

The Arte of English Poesie, “Of Ornament,” ch. 19, ed. Willcock and Walker, p. 232. Richard A. Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms (1968; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991), p. 104,

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oblique, even paradoxical structure, which states the negative in order to invoke an affirmative. It is a curious strategy of authorial self-promotion. The subject is introduced through its own denial, but this, as Quintilian notes in the Institutio Oratoria (IX.2.64), is a form of emphasis: “Emphasis is a Figure too, when a hidden meaning is extracted from a phrase . . . Related to, or identical with, this is a Figure which we use a lot nowadays. For it is time now to come to the very common device, which I am sure the reader is specially waiting for, in which we drop a hint to show that what we want to be understood is not what we are saying – not necessarily the opposite (as in Irony) but something hidden and left to the hearer to discover.”86 Coyness can be seen as the physical, eroticized version of the trope of occultatio, and it characterizes the movement of Chapman’s Hero and Leander. Chapman’s version of the myth declares itself to be more serious, more moral and more respectful of convention, than Marlowe’s original. It offers itself as a celebration of marriage and begins by warning youth to “Shun loves stolne sports” (sestiad 3, l. 16), yet it exploits coyness and the related trope of occultatio. For all its warnings to avoid lust, not only does it offer a highly erotic description of Hymen and Eucharis’ marriage (sestiad 5, ll. 251–60), for example, which is every bit as titillating as any liaison which is described in Marlowe’s poem, but it also presents heterosexual union as something that incorporates a disorderly degree of violence. As the comparison of Hero to Cadiz, and Leander to the Earl of Essex (sestiad 3, ll. 199–226) makes clear, heterosexual love is not comforting, but aggressive and potentially disruptive. Moreover, Chapman’s narrator constantly invokes decorum only to break it. At one point, he frustrates the reader’s desire for an account of Hero because, he explains, she is out of countenance: “To looke on one abasht is impudence” (sestiad 3, l. 173), only to proceed, immediately, to an extensive description of Hero which exposes the mechanisms of his own impudent occultatio. The narrator’s delicacy only serves to highlight the shamelessness of the ensuing description. As Michel Foucault once noted, the invocation of taboo has a tactical role to play in the transformation into discourse.87 Acknowledging the impropriety of what he is doing involves a highly conventional ritual that allows

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defines occultatio as concealment, insinuation and “emphasizing something by pointedly seeming to pass over it.” He notes that occupatio is a synonym but, strictly speaking, should not be used. Quintilian, The Orator’s Education, ed. and trans. Donald A. Russell, 5 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2001), IV, p. 73. However, for Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (Hassocks: Harvester, 1980) pp. 55–62, power operates as a form of control by stimulation, and shamelessness does not function as a challenge to authority.

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Chapman to have his cake and eat it, as he pursues a poetics of assertion through denial. Both Marlowe and Chapman promote themselves by indulging in coy behavior, behavior that is conventionally seen as feminine, as the narrator of Cephalus and Procris notes: “She (as some say, all woemen stricktly do,) / Faintly deni’d what she was willing too” (ll. 435–6). The epyllion is shameless not only because it deals in transgressive subject matter, but also because it effeminizes its author.88 It has already been suggested that the genre deals with feminized subjects, such as love and emotion, that it identifies itself as a form that is marginal to epic, and that men annexe the conventionally feminized strategies of coyness to further their own interests, but male authors are effeminized in other ways as well. The poems are superb examples of what Hulse elegantly terms “metamorphic verse” and metamorphosis is associated with wit in late Elizabethan culture as it figures the transformative powers of the imagination. At the same time, however, as a species of change, metamorphosis is associated with women who are conventionally considered to be more changeable than men.89 Endimion and Phoebe both invokes the convention and undermines it by associating both men and women with changeableness. We are reminded that the moon influences water and so “Of earthly things she hath preheminence” (l. 404). The poem then goes on to point out that the moon has a special influence over women, “That as of Plannets shee most variable, / So of all creatures they most mutable” (ll. 421–2). However, the narrative has already established that man’s estate participates with lunar influences, and will go on to give examples of male “ficklenes and vaine inconstancie” (l. 616). In fact, the changeability of process which is endemic to the epyllion effeminizes author and reader, as our sublunary status not only makes us changeable, it also makes us prey to emotion. Thus, while the authors of the epyllion define new concepts of literary value and exalt the creative personality, the radical kind of authorship so defined is also an effeminate kind of authorship. Authorial self-assertiveness entails a concomitant feminization, a simultaneous assertion and loss of power, although, in the 88

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Shoshana Felman links sexuality and rhetoric in her discussion of transvestism and travesty in Balzac’s “The Girl with the Golden Eyes.” Both transvestism and travesty work through substitutions, and impose an arbitrary sign on to a signified not its own. The sexes can be substituted and there are no literal referential poles, only roles. What Does a Woman Want? Reading and Sexual Difference (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), pp. 50–4. Felman’s analysis of gender offers interesting parallels with the presentation of gender in the epyllion, where sexual and gender identities repeatedly incorporate external elements, shift and change. On the negative association between women, change and the moon, which derives from medieval and Renaissance astrology, see Berry, Of Chastity and Power, pp. 133 and 184.

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freewheeling, comic world of the epyllion, this loss is not condemned and is only the cause of momentary anxieties. In this generic context, the fragmented and shameless forms of late Elizabethan culture define a subject that thrives on crisis, one that embraces loss of power in order to assert an unconventional authority. Of course, the epyllion’s own argument, that desire exerts unpredictable control over individuals, would undermine any claim to conventional authority on the part of the author, but, at the same time, the ubiquity of desire grounds the epyllion’s claim to significance and justifies the dismissal of conventional standards of morality as hopelessly na¨ıve. It is the weakness inscribed in the erotic narrative, the inescapability of desire, that grounds the claim that literature must be judged by other standards, and grounds its claim to be a special kind of discourse which enacts different truths. In the epyllion, the literary subject is generated out of self-subversion, marginalization and disjunction.90 It is neither fully present, nor fully absent, but remains a paradoxical compound that is articulated, even celebrated, through its own subversion. The association of artistry with femininity is suggested by the myth of Arachne, a myth which stands behind Marlowe’s famous description of Hero’s garments and veil. As Leonard Barkan has shown, Arachne functioned as an emblem of artistry in the Metamorphoses and in subsequent Renaissance adaptations of her myth. She fulfills the aesthetic of art as continuous change, an aesthetic that the polymorphic texts of the epyllia, with their insistent ideology of fluid unpredictability, take to an extreme.91 The author as artefact repeatedly doubles, and is doubled by, the woman as artefact in these poems, as each participates in Arachne’s skill. For Henry Petowe, Marlowe is very much echoed in Hero, just as Hero is echoed by Marlowe. Hero and Leander is emblematic of Marlowe’s truncated career as a literary master, and, for Petowe, the completion of Hero and Leander is the process by which a series of analogous incompletions will be made perfect. Not only will the unfinished verses get an ending, but Marlowe’s truncated career will be made whole, and, in Petowe’s dedication, it is even 90

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By contrast, Petrarch’s transmission of Ovidian models produces the subject-in-crisis. See Lynn Enterline, “Embodied Voices: Petrarch Reading (Himself Reading) Ovid,” in Desire in the Renaissance: Psychoanalysis and Literature, ed. Valeria Finucci and Regina Schwartz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994) pp. 120–45. She argues that the language of desire both constitutes and impoverishes the self in Petrarch, and while impoverishment also takes place in the epyllion, through the acknowledgement that its strategies of authorship are feminized, the subject so defined is confident, shameless and avoids the self-frustrating complexities of the Petrarchan subject. The authors of epyllia are less anxious about the status of the subject and the status of language than Petrarch is, which may simply be a way of saying that the epyllion is a comic form. Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), pp. 1–18.

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implied that Marlowe’s body, which was breeched at the moment of his death, will be restored. For Petowe, Hero and Leander, like Marlowe, is a wounded corpus: This history of Hero and Leander, penned by that admired poet Marlowe, but not finished (being prevented by sudden death), and the same (though not abruptly, yet contrary to all men’s expectation) resting like a head separated from the body, with this harsh sentence, Desunt nonnulla; I being enriched by a gentleman, a friend of mine, with the true Italian discourse of those lovers’ further fortunes, have presumed to finish the history, though not so well as divers riper wits doubtless would have done.92

The opening of Petowe’s poem then goes on to confuse Marlowe’s identity still further by setting up a parallel between desire for Hero and desire for Marlowe, which confuses the distinctions between sexual desire and a more abstract, intellectual desire. Petowe’s poem opens with a string of analogies that link three beautiful objects: Marlowe, Marlowe’s verse and Hero: When young Apollo, heaven’s sacred beauty, Gan on his silver harp with reverent duty To blazon forth the fair of Tellus’ wonder, Whose fair all other fairs brought subject under, Heaven gan to frown at earth’s fragility, Made proud with such adored majesty. Hero the fair, so do I name this fair, With whom immortal fairs might not compare, Such was her beauty framed in heaven’s scorn, Her spotless fair caused other fairs to mourn; ll. 1–10

Tellus is an alternative name for the earth, and, as we are later told (ll. 57–8), “young Apollo, heaven’s sacred beauty” (l. 1) is a conceit for Marlowe, who begins the blazon of earth’s beauty. Apollo, Marlowe, Hero and Marlowe’s verse are all united in beauty, and the confusion of identities is emphasized by the ambiguous referent of the word “whose” (l. 4) which could refer to Apollo, Marlowe and/or Hero. The opening of Petowe’s poem develops a mutually constitutive network of fairness, in which the source of the “adored majesty” that ennobles the earth is Apollo, and/or Marlowe, and/or Hero, and/or the verse. Critics have tended to concentrate on early modern authorship as a process of masculinization, but Marlowe had already introduced the possibility of hermaphroditic authorship which Petowe pursues in his homage to Marlowe. When Marlowe praises Hero, in his version 92

In fact, Marlowe was struck through the eye.

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of the myth, he concentrates on her clothes, jewels and ornaments. The description of her veil, for example, is an imaginative tour de force, which offers the poet the chance to prove himself as he proves Hero’s beauty. The process of authorial self-construction and the process of feminine definition are simultaneous. Hero’s carefully wrought appearance provides the occasion for the poet to make their own carefully wrought appearance, and heroine and narrator enjoy a symbiotic relationship in which the celebration of Hero’s artifice is simultaneously also the celebration of the poetic artefact, and of the poet’s imaginative reach: Her vaile was artificiall flowers and leaves, Whose workmanship both man and beast deceaves. Many would praise the sweet smell as she past, When t’was the odour which her breath foorth cast, And there for honie, bees have sought in vaine, And beat from thence, have lighted there againe. ll. 19–24

Hero’s veil is “artificial” in the sense of being well-made. Her appearance is crafted and arranged to show off her beauty, but the description of her appearance is crafted and arranged to show off a homologous poetic beauty. The poet appears through Hero. She is the most desirable of women, and a compound of mother, maid and lover. Her description provokes extreme poeticism from the narrator, which associates literariness with femininity, and then, through the acknowledgement that Hero, and her description, are seductive, associates literariness with wantonness. David Kuchta has demonstrated that, in Renaissance England, effeminacy is linked to an immoderate attention to objects, clothes and ornaments.93 As a result, not only the narrator, but also the reader, of this passage, are effeminized by an obsession with the ornaments that adorn Hero. It is the excess of the description, the exaggerated poeticism, its sheer poetic quality, that defines it as effeminate. There are similar purple passages in other epyllia, where an elaborate description of female attractions also serves to demonstrate the author’s poetic skill: the description of Scilla in Scillaes Metamorphosis (sts. 48–54), for example; or the description of Hero’s religious robes and wonderful scarf, in Chapman’s Hero and Leander (sestiad 4, ll. 13–121). Indeed, like Petowe, Chapman also picks up on the analogies between Hero and the 93

David Kuchta, “The Semiotics of Early Modern Masculinity in Renaissance England,” in Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe, ed. James Grantham Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 239.

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poet in Marlowe’s version, and he fuses male wit, ornamentality and female creativity in the description of the scarf which, while it reveals the riches of the narrator’s imagination, was actually embroidered by Hero. Chapman’s Hero and Leander is the most clearly Arachnean of all epyllia and implicitly reminds us that our word “text” is related to the Latin word textus, the past participle of the verb texere meaning to weave, plait, fabricate: She wrought a Sea in one flame full of ships; But that one ship where all her wealth did passe (Like simple merchants goods) Leander was: For in that Sea she naked figured him; Her diving needle taught him how to swim, And to each thred did such resemblance give, For joy to be so like him, it did live. Sestiad 4, ll. 49–55

A parallel is established between the activity of the needle and the activity of the pen.94 Through her embroidery, Hero tells her own story, and through her story, the narrator defends artistic activity. Immediately after the description of the way Hero embroidered the likeness of Leander on to the scarf, the narrator launches into one of his characteristically grandiose observations: “Things senceles live by art, and rationall die, / By rude contempt of art and industrie” (sestiad 4, ll. 56–7). The fusion of male and female creativity serves as the occasion to defend a particular definition of the aesthetic which once again associates the aesthetic with femininity, and with wantonness. Typically, Hero’s story is erotic – her phallic needle dives into the fabric and teaches Leander to swim – so that several sexual fantasies, involving male and female subjects, and male and female objects, are superimposed on this one image. In Leander, of course, ideal form and nature coalesce. During the sacrificial ritual, Hero closes her eyes and conjures up the image of Leander, but his picture leaves no ill traces in her mind because Leander is the embodiment of perfect beauty and the abstract of perfect number and proportion: Such was his beautie that the force of light, Whose knowledge teacheth wonders infinite, The strength of number and proportion, Nature had plaste in it to make it knowne 94

The parallel between needlework and writing is a long-established convention that derives from the myth of Arachne, and the story of Penelope’s web in The Odyssey, as well as from the derivation of the word “text” from the Latin “textus,” meaning something woven. The association of needlework and poetry is characteristic of Chapman. See Judith Dundas, “‘Arachnaean Eyes.’” A Mythological Emblem in the Poetry of George Chapman,” John Donne Studies 6 (1987): 275–83.

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Art was her daughter, and what humane wits For studie lost, intombd in drossy spirits Sestiad 4, ll. 140–5

Leander is the ideal artefact, and these lines confuse the beauty of his image as it appears in Hero’s imagination, with the beauty of his image as it appears through the narrator’s imagination. The poet’s flight of neoplatonic fancy is also a shameless masterpiece of a peculiar form of self-promotion that trivializes and effeminizes itself, because the blueprint for art and beauty that is Leander, is, in the terms of the fiction, both the work of the coy narrator and the product of Hero’s imagination. From one perspective, aestheticization is the disease that plagues the epyllion. The artificiality of the verse is frequently exaggerated in these poems, even to the point of preciousness, and the contrivance which is fundamental to all literature becomes even more contrived and self-conscious. These poems are hyperliterary. Not only are they repositories of myth and poetic conventions, their poeticism is taken to the point where good writing and bad writing collapse into each other. Each epyllion is an anthology of forms and poetic felicities, a seed-plot for new writers. At times, the poems exhibit a strong tendency to go one better, to add excess to plenty. Venus and Adonis is typical of the epyllion in its bid to outdo the clich´es from which it is constructed, including the clich´es of Petrarchanism: Thrice fairer than myself, thus she [Venus] began, The field’s chief flower, sweet above compare, Stain to all nymphs, more lovely than a man, More white and red than doves or roses are, ll. 7–10

This litany of praise is both a dismissal of Petrarchan similes and an intensification of Petrarchanism, as Adonis is “More white and red than doves or roses are.” In these lines that parade their redundancy, and their inability to describe Adonis properly, imagination seems to have run out, and rather than figure a new simile, Venus is content to exaggerate the old ones. Adonis is “sweet above compare,” and so is inaccessible to comparison, at the same time as being the ultimate term of comparison, the man who is “more lovely than a man, / More white and red than doves or roses are.” The texts of the epyllion anthologize themselves, breaking up into poetic gems, ready to be picked and retransmitted. They treat the process of aestheticization with comic, even clumsy, abandon. Rhetorical energy usually turns objects into tropes, but in the epyllion imaginative energy is allowed to run into extreme forms, where, paradoxically, it produces literalization,

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as tropes are turned back into objects. Venus and Adonis plays with the literal translation of the word “anthology,” which is derived from the Greek anthos, meaning flower, and refers to a collection of flowers. Adonis is literally, in the terms of the fiction, turned into a flower, and Venus wishes that “her cheeks were gardens full of flowers” (l. 65).95 Both hero and heroine are self-consciously anthologized in a text that is not only an anthology, but an exploration of anthologizing, and the relationships between fragments and literariness, triviality and aesthetic sensibility. In fact, I would go so far as to suggest that the comic, even trivializing touch of the epyllion is already, in some sense, inscribed in its interest in ancient myths, classical culture and polymorphism. In the sixteenth century, antic was also written as antique, and the two terms were visually and aurally interchangeable. Consequently, through the physical nature of words, those things that belonged to former times, and those things that were relics of ancient art, came to be associated with the incongruous, bizarre and fantastic. Antic was originally applied to the fantastic representations of animals, humans and floral forms running into one another that were found in the Baths of Titus at Rome. The metamorphic narratives of the epyllion, where stone becomes flesh, where the sea is anthropomorphized into Neptune, where forms do indeed run into one another, are antic in all senses of the term. blushing and the defense of publication The blushing that is such a frequent activity in the epyllion points to a natural relationship between eros and youth. In sixteenth-century physiology, the blood is supposed to be more active in young people. For example, in his psycho-physiological treatise entitled The Touchstone of Complexions (1581), Levinus Lemnius argues that “Bloud and vital Spyrite are in their chiefest Pryme and most abound in lusty and flourishing yeares” (M2v). Moreover 95

DiGangi, The Homoerotics of Early Modern Drama, p. 33, points out that Fancy is associated with women’s wit in The Faerie Queene. See, for example, II.IX.50 and III.XII.26. Although attitudes towards ornament change between the Renaissance and the nineteenth century, Naomi Schor’s study of nineteenth-century French fiction, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York and London: Methuen, 1987) alerts us to the fact that aesthetics are never sexually neutral. Her subtle analysis notes an association between details, femininity and decadence (p. 22), which is already established in the criticism of Cicero and Quintilian, and her conclusions about detail and ornament have fruitful implications for an analysis of the operation of shame in such highly ornamental sixteenth-century genres as the epyllion: “the concomitant affinity of details for the effete and effeminate ornamental style point[s] to what is perhaps most threatening about the detail: its tendency to subvert an internal hierarchic ordering of the work of art which clearly subordinates the periphery to the centre, the accessory to the principal, the foreground to the background” (p. 20). As Schor points out, the censure of the particular has been one of the enabling gestures of neoclassicism, with its rejection of the overloaded image.

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blood makes people “pursue the inticementes of all sensual lustes and unbrydled affection” (N5v), so that they lead what Lemnius calls “a Minstrelles life” (N5v) and “wholy addicte themselves to inglorious excesse, unseasonable watching, and immoderat lust of carnal venerie” (N5v).96 Blushing is a consequence of the rush of blood to the face, so it has an affinity with youth, the period in which blood is most active. The affinity between shame and youth is exploited in the erotic narratives of the epyllion, the genre in which the members of the generation of shame often choose to open their careers, but Renaissance psycho-physiology also argues that, like blood and passion, the imagination is also more lively in youth. As Francis Bacon notes, in his essay “Of Youth and Age”: “the Invention of Young Men, is more lively, then that of Old: And Imaginations streame into their Mindes better, and, as it were, more Divinely. Natures that have much Heat, and great and violent desires and Perturbations, are not ripe for Action, till they have passed the Meridian of their yeares.”97 The redness of blushing implies that the head is hot, and suggests a potential association between shame and creativity, given that mental activity is supposed to produce heat in sixteenth-century physiology. The richly allusive somatic language of blushing also points to sexual transgression, not only because sexual misdemeanors provoke blushes, but more specifically because a cuckold’s horns were also supposed to produce a burning sensation in the head, and burning produces redness. Furthermore, the blush’s instability as a sign is exacerbated by the fact that excessive activity of the blood was thought to stimulate passion, so redness becomes both the sign, and in a sense the cause, of sexual arousal. Consequently, not only is the blush, as a sign of modesty, easily confused with the flush, as a sign of activated sexuality, but modesty itself, the propensity to blush, may actually cause lechery, as it activates the blood which arouses passions. The discomfiting similarity between opposing states which is suggested by the blush is brought out in Shakespeare’s Venus and Adonis, where red-hot Venus, and shamefast Adonis share the same ruddy complexion: “She red and hot as coals of glowing fire, / He red for shame, but frosty in desire” (ll. 35–6).98 Adonis’ shame is erotic, and while he may wish to prevent union, his reluctance produces the same effects as coyness and inflames Venus’ desire. Blushing 96 97

98

Levinus Lemnius, The Touchstone of Complexions, trans. Thomas Newton (London: Thomas Marsh, 1581). Sir Francis Bacon The Essayes or Counsels, Civill and Morall, ed. Michael Kiernan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), p. 130. “Of Youth and Age” was first published in 1612, but Kiernan bases his text on the 1625 edition. There is also a pun on red/read. Venus and Adonis is read for shame, as shame spreads like contagion between writer, text and reader.

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reflects the ambivalence and unpredictability which are the governing principles of the epyllion. As Drayton explains in Endimion and Phoebe (ll. 547– 54), the ebb and flow of the blood produce both ruddiness and paleness, and it is particularly ironic that two such contrary effects should be part of the same process. Erotic narratives are full of incidents of exposure, of embarrassment and blushing. In his famous comparison of Hero’s blush to daybreak, at the end of Hero and Leander, Marlowe literally turns shame into poetry: Thus neere the bed she blushing stood upright, And from her countenance behold ye might, A kind of twilight breake, which through the heare, As from an orient cloud, glympse here and there. And round about the chamber this false morne, Brought foorth the day before the day was borne. ll. 801–6

From Clore’s “envious blushes” in Scillaes Metamorphosis (st. 15), to W. K.’s “blushing stile” in The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image (Dedication to Good Opinion), blushing is an integral part of the action of these poems. Although blushing is often interpreted as a sign of modesty, in the epyllion it is a sign of foreknowledge, even in the most na¨ıve of characters, and it is associated with sin and shame, but also with the anxieties of exposure. The stories of shameful sexuality, which disturbed the censors in the late 1590s, are exploited not just for their intrinsic attractions, but also because they emblematize the shame of going public. The elementary situation of shame is nakedness. The source of shame lies not only in the fact that it is shameful to talk publicly about sex, or about women, but also in the fact that it is considered to be shameful to expose oneself to public gaze in print.99 By exploring the anxieties associated with publication and exposure, the epyllion familiarizes writers and readers with the effects of publication. In particular, the epyllion writers focus on women as an efficient way of figuring their own anxieties about exposure. For a woman, private decency is connected with her body and with her speech. If she is loose verbally, then she is, by implication, loose sexually and morally. The private–public dichotomy is emphasized in traditional Elizabethan thinking about gender 99

Tina Krontiris, “Breaking Barriers of Genre and Gender: Margaret Tyler’s Translation of The Mirrour of Knighthood,” ELR 18 (1988): 21–2, discusses the prejudices against publication for women and the dangers of self-display. As Chapman points out, in Hero and Leander (sestiad 3, ll. 41–50), there is a very fine line between fame and infamy.

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and also, as Wendy Wall has so brilliantly demonstrated, in thinking about publication.100 One of the effects Thomas Newton identifies as the consequence of a superfluity of blood, in his translation of Lemnius, is “unseasonable watching,” and “unseasonable watching” is an important element in the epyllion. The epyllia rework the myth of Diana and Actaeon and are full of scenes of illicit viewing, of spying and of secret visual pleasures. Indeed, as Venus points out in Venus and Adonis, sight is the principal avenue of lust: Who sees his true-love in her naked bed, Teaching the sheets a whiter hue than white, But, when his glutton eye so full hath fed, His other agents aim at like delight? Who is so faint that dares not be so bold To touch the fire, the weather being cold? ll. 397–402

It is the sense which stimulates all other senses to desire and it is the most greedy and predatory of the senses for, as Spenser demonstrates in his characterization of Acrasia, cupidinous desire finds expression through voyeurism.101 Optical activity and its implications lie at the heart of the epyllion. Not only are visual descriptions and voyeuristic indulgences part of the action of the epyllia, but the matrix of exposure and cupidinous desire characterizes the production of the text, as the reader voluntarily or involuntarily participates in the role of voyeur. The voyeur represents a similar sort of threat to his/her Diana as the public does to the author of a printed text, as both threaten the autonomy of the subject with passive objectification.102 100

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The interrelationships between authorship, publication and gender have been studied in brilliant detail by Wendy Wall, The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). She analyzes the processes by which the domain of writing became gendered as male in Renaissance England, but my specific focus on the epyllion suggests that, in this particular instance, the domain of writing is scandalously gendered as both male and female. Chapter 3, “Prefatorial Enclosures,” includes a provocative analysis of Lodge’s preface to Scillaes Metamorphosis (pp. 185–6). See The Faerie Queene II.XII.73. Andrew Fichter, Poets Historical: Dynastic Epic in the Renaissance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), pp. 162–4, defines voyeurism as “the tragic disequilibrium of subject and object” (p. 162). In a classic discussion of Cellini’s relief, “The Nymph of Fontainebleau,” in her essay, “The Mistress in the Masterpiece,” in The Poetics of Gender, ed. Nancy K. Miller (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), pp. 36–7, Nancy Vickers argues that the voyeuristic display of the female body is used to articulate the mastery of male artist and male patron. In the epyllion, this process is rendered problematical by male and female inability to control desire so that, in sexual terms, they are often slaves, as well as masters/mistresses, and the object, as well as the perpetrator, of the gaze. Optical activity is another way in which authorship is rewritten as transvestism in the erotic narrative. In Freud’s model, “Instincts and their Vicissitudes,” The Standard Edition of the Complete

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Images of greedy foes and gluttonous eyes devouring a passive and helpless victim are often used in erotic narratives to characterize the reading public. In the preface to Oenone and Paris, for example, T. H. hopes to escape “the captious tongues and lavish tearmes of the detracting vulgar.” He compares them to “the Caterpillers that, neastled in a tree, feed on everie leafe til al be wythered and defaced,” using the image of uncontrollable consumption to characterize the relationship of the vulgar readers to his text. Endimion and Phoebe uses similar imagery to express fears about the reception of the text in a public sphere. The poem traces the passage from a private to a public poet, but this passage into the public world is marked by tentativeness and hesitancy. Drayton’s epyllion expresses both regret for the lost purity of the private, youthful world, which is represented by Endimion’s confinement among the ageless pleasures of Latmus, where he “Remayn[s] ever beautifull and yong” (l. 990), and fear of exposure to the “spitefull Envy” (l. 1008) of the public realm: And you the heyres of ever-living fame, The worthy titles of a Poets name, Whose skill and rarest excellence is such, As spitefull Envy never yet durst tuch, To your protection I this Poem send, Which from proud Momus may my lines defend. ll. 1005–10

The thematic association of the epyllion and publication receives its clearest expression in Ovids Banquet of Sence, at the moment when Ovid spies on the naked body of Corynna, while she is bathing in a spring. The poem describes how Ovid satisfies each of his senses on Corynna. First Psychological Works, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press & The Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1953–74), XIV, pp. 109–40, voyeurism is a one-way transaction from powerful male voyeur to passive female object. In the erotic narratives, the author desires to look, and to be seen, and occupies both the powerful subject position and the feminized object position, with the result that the categories of subject and object, male and female, are elided through visual transactions that transfer pleasure, shame and power. For a very suggestive reinterpretation of the politics of voyeurism which also takes issue with Freud, see Regina M. Schwartz, “Through the Optic Glass: Voyeurism and Paradise Lost,” in Desire in the Renaissance: Psychoanalysis and Literature, ed. Vateria Finucci and Regina M. Schwartz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 146–66. A letter from Gilbert Talbot to his father, dated 3 May 1578, reveals the dangers inherent in spying on Elizabeth, however inadvertently, in terms that recall the fact that Actaeon bore his punishment on his forehead. Young Talbot tells how he crossed the tilt-yard and happened to see the Queen looking out of a window, “my eye was full towards her, and she shewed to be greatly ashamed thereof for that she was unreddy, and in her nyght-stuffe.” Elizabeth saw the hapless Talbot at dinner that evening, and gave him “a great phyllyp on the forehead” as she walked by. Quoted from The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, ed. John Nichols, 3 vols. (1823; New York: Kraus Reprint Corporation and AMS Press, 1977), II, p. 93.

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his hearing is entranced by her singing, as she accompanies herself on the lute. Then his sense of smell is delighted by the sweet perfumes which rise from her bath. Next he ventures to spy on her nakedness in order to satisfy his sense of sight. Until this point, Corynna has been unaware of Ovid’s presence in her father’s garden, but as he creeps closer to look at her body, she catches sight of him in her mirror. At first, Corynna is deeply offended by his presumption, but in the exchange which follows Ovid not only manages to convince her that what he did was acceptable, he also convinces her to agree to a kiss, which pleases his sense of taste. Finally, he convinces her to satisfy his sense of touch, whereupon he puts his hand on her breast and, in the arbitrary manner typical of the epyllion, the narrative comes to an abrupt close: “Ovid well knew there was much more intended, / With whose omition none must be offended” (st. 117). The tantalizing pleasures of voyeurism, as what should be kept secret is exposed to view, are given liberal treatment in Chapman’s epyllion and are presented in the familiar terms of greed and gluttony: Now as shee lay, attirde in nakednes, His eye did carve him on that feast of feasts: Sweet fields of life which Deaths foote dare not presse, Flowred with th’unbroken waves of my Loves brests, Unbroke by depth of those her beauties floods: st. 58

Corynna’s anger is exacerbated by exposure to her social inferior. She rebukes Ovid and tells him that he has pre-empted a pleasure which should properly be reserved for the nuptial hour. In other words, he has pre-empted a pleasure which should be reserved for private consumption. As she tells Ovid: This Glosse is common, as thy rudenes strange Not to forbeare these private times, (quoth she) Whose fixed Rites, none shoulde presume to change Not where there is adjudg’d inchastitie; Our nakednes should be as much conceald As our accomplishments desire the eye: It is a secrete not to be revealde, But as Virginitie, and Nuptialls clothed, And to our honour all to be betrothed. st. 77

Risk of exposure to one’s social inferiors was one of the arguments used against publication, and Corynna argues for the exposure of her body to

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be restricted to a private sphere. Using arguments similar to those used to defend manuscript circulation, she claims that the communication of what could be called her corporeal text must be protected by the formal rules which regulate behavior among social equals. Ovid replies with the theory that excellence must be submitted to public scrutiny to maintain its value and honor: “All excellence of shape is made for sight, / Else, to be like a Beast were no defame; / Hid Beauties lose theyr ends, and wrong theyr right” (st. 80). In addition, Ovid’s replies locate true worth in spiritual and poetic gifts. He redefines the social hierarchy, by arguing for a concept of nobility that is based on merit, not on lineage: “Virtue makes honor, as the soule doth sence, / And merit farre exceedes inheritance” (st. 91). As the narrator points out, “All wealth and wisdome rests in true Content” (st. 53). True happiness, true virtue and true writing are all comprehended in the phrase “true Content,” with its pun on contentment and literary contents, so that virtue becomes its own reward, as true contents inevitably bring true contentment.103 Ovid’s intrusion on Corynna is a parody of Actaeon’s intrusion on Diana in The Metamorphoses, Book III.104 In his version of the myth of Diana and Actaeon, Ovid intensifies the motifs of mortal isolation and divine willfulness. One day Actaeon is hunting deer and he follows his quarry to Gargaphia, a spring which is particularly sacred to Diana, the goddess of chastity. By accident, he stumbles across the goddess while she is bathing and sees her naked body, which was forbidden to mortal sight. Diana punishes Actaeon’s presumption by turning him into a deer which is pursued and devoured by his own hounds. A deer can only sigh and bray, and so Actaeon cannot call off his own dogs and perishes. For Ovid the deer becomes an 103

104

In st. 115, Ovid addresses Corynna as “deere Soveraigne.” She is Ovid’s sovereign both figuratively and literally, as she is the Emperor’s daughter, but in addressing a “deere Soveraigne” the poem may also be turning to other dames and another sovereign lady, Queen Elizabeth, whom the poem wishes to engage in the cycle of reciprocal honor and reward. This sovereign lady lies at the heart of the discourse. She is the hidden and unspeakable center of power who can only be addressed indirectly, and as soon as the poem addresses her it is cut off (st. 116). Lacan, who seems to share many of the concerns of the epyllion, uses the image of Actaeon to represent what happens to those who pursue truth. See Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, Lacan: The Absolute Master, trans. Douglas Brick (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1991), p. 199. For Lacan, the scopic fantasy is the fantasy par excellence, because it gives the illusion of unity to the subject, and the relationship between subjectivity and vision is preserved in the eye/I pun. However, in the epyllion, the illusion of unity is profoundly challenged by the interactions between subject and object, and the confusions between subject and object. For a discussion of Petrarch’s use of the myth of Diana and Actaeon that focuses on the themes of seeing and bodily disintegration, see Nancy J. Vickers, “Diana Described: Scattered Woman and Scattered Rhyme,” Critical Inquiry 8 (1981): 265–79.

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emblem for the failure of human language, as Golding points out in his translation of the story: He could none other do But sigh, and in the shape of Hart with voyce as Hartes are woont, (For voyce of man was none now left to helpe him at the brunt) By braying shew his secret grief among the Mountaynes hie III, ll. 285–8105

Actaeon is punished because he is sinful and, in the “Epistle to the Earl of Leicester” (ll. 97–102, Nims, p. 408), Golding interprets the myth as a warning against excessive indulgence in frivolous pursuits, such as gambling, hunting, gluttony, “freaks” (which Nims glosses as capers or vagaries) and “foule excesse of chamberworke,” many of the pursuits, in fact, out of which the epyllion is constructed. By contrast, Chapman presents the reader with a comic parody of Actaeon’s story and the tragic death of the hart becomes the source of erotic witticisms where Ovid/Actaeon’s “hart” is struck by the beams reflected from Corynna’s breasts (st. 49). Both Chapman’s and Ovid’s versions of the myth of Diana and Actaeon share the motif of pure springs violated, an emblem for the loss of female chastity, and both raise the problems of personal purity, violation and pollution, the very problems that are raised by publication. Yet, while Ovid turns Actaeon into an emblem of the failure of human language, Chapman’s Ovid suffers no punishment for a very similar crime. On the contrary, although exposure initially shames Corynna: “Shame from a Bowre of Roses did unshrowde / And spread her crimson wings upon her face” (st. 75), she eventually countenances Ovid’s intrusion and encourages him to indulge his senses of taste and touch. In Chapman’s version of the myth, intrusion and exposure go unpunished, and the threat they pose is diminished, in a story that can be interpreted as an encouragement to the writers and readers of published texts, and to anyone who dares expose what should be kept from view.106 105 106

Ovid’s Metamorphoses: The Arthur Golding Translation 1567, ed. Nims, p. 69. I suggest that by comparison with other genres, such as the sonnet sequence, the epyllion is a printed genre, and it does not figure heavily in early modern manuscript culture. Peter Beal, ed., Index of English Literary Manuscripts Volume I. 1450–1625, 2 parts (London: Mansell, 1980) reveals a paucity of references to epyllia in contemporary manuscripts. My suggestion, however, remains conjectural. On the ways print encourages the institutionalization of literature, see Arthur Marotti, “Shakespeare’s Sonnets as Literary Property,” in Soliciting Interpretation: Literary Theory and Seventeenth-Century English Poetry, ed. E. D. Harvey and K. E. Maus (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), pp. 161–3, and John Donne, Coterie Poet (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986), pp. 7–13. Marotti’s brilliant analysis does not, however, preclude the possibility that manuscript can promote the institutionalization of literature.

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In his commendatory sonnet prefaced to Ovids Banquet of Sence, Richard Stapleton praises Chapman’s verse for its luxuriousness, its ampleness and leisureliness, defining it as a space in which the Muse takes time to amuse and sustain herself: The other [the Muse] decks her with her golden wings Spred beyond measure, in thy ample verse, Where she (as her bowrs of Lawrell) sings Sweet philosophick strains that Feends might pierse, The soule of brightnes in thy darknes shines Most new, and deare: unstainde with forraine graces

Both Stapleton and the author of the second commendatory sonnet, Thomas Williams, emphasize the stylistic qualities of the poem, presenting Ovids Banquet of Sence as a poem to be savored for its artistic excellence. Thus the commendatory poems set Chapman’s epyllion in a competitive context, advising lesser wits to learn from Chapman’s achievement so “that dearely taught thereby / Your onely soules fit objects may aspire” (sonnet by Thomas Williams). The authors of the commendatory sonnets read Ovids Banquet of Sence in the conventional context of the erotic narrative. They identify and discuss the very themes that were the central concerns of the epyllion movement: stylistic excellence, the value of recreative poetry, the need to raise poetic standards, the aesthetics of reception, and the catalytic role of Ovid in Renaissance culture. As the final, anonymous commendatory sonnet explains to Chapman: “Shee [Venus] makes (in thee) the spirit of Ovid move, / And calles thee second Maister of her love.”107 The epyllion is a self-consciously modern genre that enables writers to subvert traditional concepts of value and proportion by magnifying and promoting what are usually considered to be marginal structural and thematic elements. It is concerned to prove the value and dignity of poetry, and to reform the practice and reception of literature, not in the terms laid down by orthodox humanist morality, but in the terms of the developing aesthetic and literary morality of the 1590s. This morality finds value in the trivial and marginal and makes its apparent weaknesses the basis of its claim to importance. The epyllion is an agent for change, a way of taking up positions on the frontiers of the thinkable. Its ironies remain perplexing and complicating forces and it remains for the reader to acknowledge the variety of potential meanings. While the literary comes to be identified with 107

These dedications are reproduced in The Poems of George Chapman, ed. Bartlett.

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guiltiness and with peripherality in the epyllion, eros becomes the catalyst for ideological change. This particular use of shame argues for a new kind of literary community, one in which the exchange of intellectual wares will confer status and financial rewards on writers. It argues for the socialization of literature and highlights the benefits of a proper community of exchange, but in order to achieve this community, the epyllion must also develop its own justifications for publication and exposure. This is achieved by extending the arguments against chastity into the debate about publication. Marlowe had introduced the theme through Leander’s argument that, “One is no number, mayds are nothing then, / Without the sweet societie of men” (ll. 255–6). Hero and Leander goes on to develop the theory that objects only acquire value when they enter the marketplace “Base boullion for the stampes sake we allow, / Even so for mens impression do we you” (ll. 265–6). Honor and value are not intrinsic attributes in this epyllion, but are conferred on individuals by society. Thus chastity, and other forms of retirement, preclude honor and fame, and may even corrupt society as they do in Faunus and Melliflora, where chastity creates satire. In the textual community defined by the epyllion, everyone is on display. Paradoxically, the concerns of late Elizabethan erotic narratives are acutely social. While these texts attempt to assert the subjective authority of author and reader, they also extoll the virtues of a community defined by the quality of its emotional and aesthetic responses. A passionate response is praiseworthy, as is the ability to respond fully to the sufferings of the protagonists, as Marlowe’s narrator reminds us, “And who have hard hearts, and obdurat minds, / But vicious, harebraind, and illit’rat hinds?” (Hero and Leander, ll. 701–2). Any reader who wishes to show that they are not “vicious, harebraind, and illit’rat” must show softness of heart, and the opposite of obduracy, something that comes close to changeableness or emotional pliancy. Nevertheless, as we might expect in the epyllion, the experience and the articulation of this emotion have become literary and the emotion has been aestheticized. In Scillaes Metamorphosis, it is not only a question of the proper reader having the correct emotional literacy, she/he must have cultivated that emotion by reading. As Glaucus cries out in the pain of unrequited love for Scilla: He that hath knowne the passionate mishappes That nere Olimpus faire Lucina felt When as her Latium love her fancie trappes, How with suspect her inward soule dooth melt: Or markt the Morne her Cephalus complaining,

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Glaucus continues his complaint, and his list of figures who will educe the proper response in his audience includes Adonis wounded by the boar, Venus mourning over his death and Angelica’s lament for Roland and the faithless Medor, from Orlando Furioso, so that only the reader schooled in classical myths and contemporary European romances can respond properly to the griefs of Glaucus and the lovelorn narrator. Such responses indicate one’s level of cultivation. By assembling their cultivated readers through Scillaes Metamorphosis and Hero and Leander, Lodge and Marlowe pursue the cultivation of English letters, constructing a literary community which is defined in relationship to their poems, and specifically by the quality of their response to their words.108 This sense of community is constructed in a sexual context. The act of commemoration undertaken by Edward Blount, Chapman, Petowe and others, in the publication of Hero and Leander and its various continuations, also flaunts the association between memory, rhetoric and sex as ways of overcoming loss. This association is preserved in the Renaissance definition of elegy, which is both a poem of commemoration, and an erotic lyric in the tradition of Ovid’s Elegies, which is the title given to Marlowe’s translation of the Amores.109 Henry Petowe’s continuation of Hero and Leander, for example, is an act of memory, that acknowledges the gap left by Marlowe: “What mortall soule with Marlo might contend, / That could gainst reason force him stoope or bend? / Whose silver charming toung, mov’d such delight, / That men would shun their sleepe in still darke night” (ll. 77–80). Marlowe is so closely bound to Hero, for Petowe, that his death has impaired her beauty, and Hero and Marlowe are cast as objects of desire whose loss or impairment can only be recuperated by writing which will satisfy the “Desire that longs to view a blessed end” (l. 475). Not only is Petowe’s epyllion an act of commemoration and a continuation of the Marlovian tradition, it is a call to other writers to fill the gap left by their master, but this call is made in an erotic poem which confuses the nature of the writer’s 108

109

The association between the epyllion and e´litism is established by Shakespeare. Compared to the mixed audiences of the plays, Venus and Adonis offered a very different mode of address, one which could access exclusive social and intellectual circles. The poem was also, of course, dedicated to an earl. According to the university wits, in The First Part of the Return from Parnassus, ed. Leishman, ll. 1030–3, Shakespeare succeeded in climbing the social ladder through Venus and Adonis, a text which the wits consistently identify with the court. George Puttenham defines the elegy as a love poem, in “Of poets and poesie,” ch. 11, and also as the proper term for a long epitaph, in “Of poets and poesie,” ch. 28. See The Arte of English Poesie, ed. Willcock and Walker, p. 25 and pp. 56–7.

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desire for Marlowe.110 Similarly, in his dedication of Hero and Leander to Sir Thomas Walsingham, Edward Blount presents the publication of the epyllion as a memorial to Marlowe, as an elegiac gesture which will gather his friends in shared activities of commemoration and celebration. The publication of Hero and Leander both constructs and reflects a literary community, establishing its identity and its goals in relation to Marlowe’s epyllion, but in a context that is eroticized. The literary community is drawn together through the elegy, through a form that sexualizes the processes of commemoration and production. Reading, as well as writing, is constructed as the self-conscious projection of fantasies, whether these are fantasies of social success, of personal sophistication, of youthfulness or of sexual fulfillment. The text is a relay point, linking together networks of looks and networks of readers, but these networks are e´litist, as writers and readers look into the text of the epyllion to see other like-minded readers and to separate themselves from the vulgar, so that production and interpretation become ways of affirming one’s taste and a new kind of social standing that is not solely dependent on birth or money.111 The fictional and recreative status of the epyllion enables writers to think the unthinkable, to challenge sexual, gender and aesthetic conventions, by exploiting its license, so that the mechanisms for cultural change are precisely those elements of late Elizabethan culture that modern criticism has dismissed and overlooked. It remains for other kinds of writing, which were equally popular in the 1590s, such as the fictional verse epistle, to register the full extent of the ontological and rhetorical problems raised by the pursuit of shame. 110 111

See above, pp. 161–2. This is where I diverge from the conclusions of Claude Summers’ important essay in Constructing Christopher Marlowe, ed. J. A. Downie and J. T. Parnell (Cambridge: Cambridge University, Press, 2000), pp. 133–47. Although we both see the erotic narrative as an encounter with difference, he sees this process as affirming a more inclusive point of view. This is true, given the particular perspective on gender politics with which Summers approaches the poem, but I read the erotic narrative as more e´litist and less inclusive, as it establishes hierarchies between those readers who know and share the joke, and those who do not understand, or are shocked by, the joke. The erotic narrative establishes a sense of difference from the many for its readers.

chap t e r 4

Shame and the subject of history

recovering the particul arit ies of engl and Every redefinition of literature, and every intervention in the aesthetic system, is necessarily an intervention in other contexts and systems of value. In the case of the epyllion, the redefinition of literature, through the strategies of shame, presupposes a particular understanding of gender as fluid, even hermaphroditic. In The Unfortunate Traveller, Nashe acknowledges that the pursuit of the poetics of displacement, in this history of the reign of Henry VIII, not only undermines teleological structures, it also constitutes a highly unconventional kind of national chronicle: “All the conclusive epilogue I wil make is this; that if herein I have pleased anie, it shall animat mee to more paines in this kind. Otherwise I will sweare upon an English Chronicle never to bee out-landish Chronicler more while I live.”1 For Nashe, the redefinition of literature through displacement and marginality has ramifications for his understanding of history, especially its relationship to the reader and the ways its ideological goals are reflected in its formal conclusions. A particular understanding of the nature of the literary not only presupposes a particular definition of gender, it also presupposes a particular definition of selfhood. As the late sixteenth-century debate over the nature of literature engages with the relationship between private and public experience, it inevitably raises questions about the role of the individual in the nation. The literary debate is, inescapably, a political, ontological and gender debate. By the last decade of Elizabeth’s reign, England’s expansionist enterprise had established bridgeheads in America and had provoked serious resistance in Ireland. National ambition made an untidy package with governmental caution and a persistent sense of national inferiority. At the same time, the need to reassess England’s role in the context of the shifting global order, 1

The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow, 5 vols. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1966), II, p. 328.

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and also in the context of shifting domestic orders, provoked an obsessive interest in history. The Tudor dynasty needed to unite its heterogeneous subjects under the myth of a single, historical nation, while apologists for the Anglican settlement discovered its roots in the holy purity of the early British Church. All of these activities required a careful sifting of the records. Elizabethan debates about the nature of England obviously raised racial, political, linguistic and religious issues, but they also raised literary issues, because each vision of England required the proper laureate, the proper style and the proper form for its articulation. This chapter explores how the new habits of invention that characterize late sixteenth-century culture interact with contemporary understandings of national identity. A new kind of history becomes popular in the late sixteenth century, one that combines lyric with historical narrative, and uses the shameful potential of lyric to challenge contemporary conceptions of nation, history and gender. Historical complaints, such as Daniel’s Complaint of Rosamond (1592), Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece (1594), Drayton’s Peirs Gaveston (1594?) and Matilda (1594), as well as plays such as Marlowe’s Edward II, articulate the private perspective on famous historical events, through their particular combination of lyric with narrative history. Drayton seems to have found the historical complaint particularly productive, and he experimented with lyric as a form of continuous narrative, by producing a chronological sequence of complaints in Englands Heroicall Epistles (1597). Englands Heroicall Epistles was Drayton’s most popular work: there were five editions before 1603 – in 1597, 1598, 1599, 1600 and 1602 – and earned Drayton the title of “our English Ovid.”2 The first edition consists of nine pairs of complaints, in the form of letters, exchanged between famous historical lovers at dramatic moments in their relationship. These exchanges also mark dramatic historical developments, and the volume is arranged chronologically, starting with epistles exchanged between Henry II and his mistress, Rosamond de Clifford, and ending in the Tudor period with the epistles of Lady Jane Gray and Lord Gilford Dudley, which prophesy the coming of Queen Elizabeth and the establishment of peace and stability after the extensive period of instability recorded in the volume.3 2

3

The phrase was first used by Joshua Sylvester. See The Works of Michael Drayton, ed. J. William Hebel et al., 5 vols. (1931–41; Oxford: Published for the Shakespeare Head Press by Basil Blackwell, 1961), V, p. 97, for contemporary reactions to Englands Heroicall Epistles. The Heroicall Epistles also provided popular material for miscellanies and are quoted 67 times in Englands Parnassus (1600) and 88 times in Belvedere (1600). See Works of Michael Drayton, V, p. 97. The edition of 1598 included five new epistles: those between Edward the Black Prince and Alice, Countess of Shrewsbury; those between Elinor Cobham and Duke Humphrey; and an epistle by

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This new form of history explores passion and emotion, and opens both lyric and narrative forms to new subjects and themes. It redefines the nature of authorship and the proper sphere of literary activity, by challenging the self-assertive masculinity of epic historical narratives through its exploration of the personal and political consequences of desire. However, lyric is inescapably associated with the marginal experiences of privacy, and the potentially shameful and distracting realms of emotionalism and desire, and this new kind of history also acknowledges that it is a source of shame. In Englands Heroicall Epistles, for example, the most popular collection of this kind of history, Michael Drayton notes that the emphasis on self and love makes this kind of historical text shameful. As the character of Elinor Cobham reminds her reader, in reading her words, “All thou canst reade, is but to reade my shame.”4 Complaint was, of course, a long-established genre, but what is new about the historical complaints of the 1590s is that they combine native traditions of complaint with Ovid’s Heroides, and offer late sixteenthcentury culture another way of anglicizing Ovid. Interest in the Heroides grew towards the end of the sixteenth century through translations such as Heywood’s version of Heroides 16 and 17, and George Turbervile’s translation of the Epistulae Heroidum (1567), which included translations of three of the replies to Ovid’s epistles written by Ovid’s contemporary Aulus Sabinus. Ovid’s series of epistles are addressed by legendary heroines to their lovers and have obvious links with the counter-history of the generation of shame, not least because both the Heroides and the historical complaints record the female perspective on epic events.5 Although Turbervile notes that Ovid’s text was valued “no lesse for diversity of dishes,

4

5

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. The edition of 1599 added Lady Geraldine’s reply to the Earl of Surrey and printed the sonnet sequence, Idea, after the Heroicall Epistles, tracing a modulation from public to private worlds. The Epistles were revised less drastically than Drayton’s other works. See Works of Michael Drayton, ed. John William Hebel et al., V, pp. 100–1. The Works of Michael Drayton, ed. Hebel et al., II, p. 215, l. 14. All subsequent quotations from Michael Drayton’s texts are from this edition, but are checked against the originals, as Hebel et al. base their edition on the 1619 Works. My study of lyrical history complements Elizabeth D. Harvey’s major study of Renaissance appropriations of The Heroides, in Ventriloquized Voices; Feminist Theory and English Renaissance Texts (London: Routledge, 1992). Her highly productive reading of intertextuality in the context of gender theory focuses on the process of ventriloquism, when a (male) author assumes another (female) identity. She concludes: “In these cases, not only are authorial and textual autonomies transgressed by subtexts, but the stability of gender itself is revealed to be what Judith Butler has recently termed a structure of impersonation” (p. 10). In Englands Heroicall Epistles, Michael Drayton draws parallels between the situations of his famous historical lovers and the legendary situations of The Heroides. For example, Mary, the French Queen, and Charles Brandon are compared to Hero and Leander; Edward IV and Jane Shore are compared to Paris and Helen; and the Earl of Surrey and Lady Geraldine to Ulysses and Penelope.

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then copie of confictes,” his version is characterized by sententiousness and homely wisdom.6 Just as medieval commentators had used the Heroides to promote chaste love, Turbervile’s interpretation of the text highlights its didactic message and pays only secondary attention to its technique.7 However, his presentation of the epistles of Helen, Hero and Cydippe with their replies from Paris, Leander and Acontius, focuses on the transfer of meaning between sender and receiver, and multiplies perspectives on single stories or events. The counter-history of the 1590s develops this polyfocal tendency by, for example, taking the form of letters exchanged by different historical figures, or by casting history as the words of a ghost who briefly escapes from the past to transmit its competing version of events through a poet-secretary. While the tragic complaints are heavily indebted to the Heroides, they are in fact more diverse than Ovid’s Heroides, and explore various forms of love, not just the states of unrequited love and desertion which occupy the discourses of Ovid’s heroines.8 This discourse of lyrical history explores how the private assumes public shape and form, but also how public themes are internalized and made private, and its formal interest in psychology is rooted in the complaint form.9 There are many competing kinds of history in late Elizabethan culture, including the prose narratives of the chronicle tradition, and other forms of history which are influenced by Tacitus, as well as the forms influenced by Ovid. While none of the narrative chronicles represents the official version of the past in the late sixteenth century, collectively they came to define what D. R.Woolf has called “a zone of correct opinion about the past.”10 6 7 8

9

10

The Heroycall Epistles. Translated into English Verse by George Turberville, ed. Frederick Boas (London: Cresset Press, 1928), p. ix. Lee T. Pearcy, The Mediated Muse: English Translations of Ovid 1560–1700 (Hamden, CT: Archon-Shoe String Press, 1984), pp. 11–13, discusses Turbervile’s moralizing interpretation of the poem. Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women had already adapted Ovid’s Heroides to a debate about the nature of women and of love. Chaucer’s narrator uses praise of faithful women to promote himself, and the increasingly subjective nature of his narrative eventually undermines his claims to give women a fair hearing. See “The Legend of Phyllis,” ll. 2454–8 and 2559–61, in The Complete Works of Geoffrey Chaucer, ed. F. N. Robinson (1933; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). The letter emphasizes subjectivity by invoking the deictics “I” and “you” which reinforce the sense of a personal locality. The role of language in designating the “I” is discussed by Emile Benveniste, “Subjectivity in Language,” in Problems in General Linguistics, trans. Mary E. Meek, Miami Linguistics Series 8 (Coral Gables: University of Miami Press, 1971), pp. 223–30. Compare Lacan who, as Madan Sarup argues in An Introductory Guide to Post-Structuralism and Post-Modernism (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1988), p. 29, sees subjectivity, not as an essence, but as a set of relationships which come into play by the oppositions of the “other” to the “I”. D. R.Woolf, The Idea of History in Early Stuart England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1990), p. 32. Tudor historiography is also surveyed by F. J. Levy, Tudor Historical Thought (San Marino: CA: Huntington Library, 1967) who is particularly interesting on the popularization of history and the way chronicles by Stow and Grafton found their way into cheaper pocket versions (pp. 204–33). Arthur

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Furthermore, the importance of texts such as Holinshed’s Chronicles as a literary source ensured that their opinions were disseminated even more widely. The generation of shame adapts complaint to resist this “zone of correct opinion.” It uses lyric to conjure up passion and emotion and to articulate the feminine and feminized voices that resist the processes of a peculiar form of naturalization whereby national identity is engulfed by a particular form of stoic, masculine identity.11 The historical complaints not only contribute to Renaissance debates about the nature of history and the nature of Englishness, but also contribute to the reordering of literature in the late sixteenth century whereby new conceptions of literary function are developed, and private recreative experience becomes a legitimate focus for literature. The debate over forms of history and forms of nationhood is also a literary debate which encompasses the role of the writer in the new nation. The kind of authorial persona defined by lyric, with its indulgence in personal emotions and desires, is the kind of persona that the narrative chronicles exclude from their definition of Englishness. The lyric exposes what such conceptions of national identity exclude, and they exclude the prodigal, errant and self-consciously trivial forms of authorship being defined, manipulated and tested by authors such as Marlowe, Nashe, Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson and Donne, among others. At the same time, history, and the epistolary form exploited by Drayton, question lyric assumptions. Texts like Englands Heroicall Epistles are uncertain about the more extreme strategies of the generation of shame and probe the problems of constructing a person out of a text, and the unstable boundaries between animate and inanimate objects, selves and pages.

11

B. Ferguson, Clio Unbound: Perception of the Social and Cultural Past in England, Duke Monographs in Medieval and Renaissance Studies 2 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1979), focuses on the development of social and cultural history; and F. Smith Fussner, The Historical Revolution: English Historical Writing and Thought 1580–1640 (London: Routledge, 1962), is particularly interesting on the interactions between law and history. For the influence of Tacitus on Renaissance historical thought and politics, see J. H. M. Salmon, “Seneca and Tacitus in Jacobean England,” in The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, ed. Linda Levy Peck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 169–88; and F. J. Levy, “Hayward, Daniel, and the Beginnings of Politic History in England,” HLQ 50 (1987): 1–34. Any study of issues raised by “the Elizabethan writing of England” is indebted to the seminal work of Richard Helgerson in Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). He explores how discourses of nationhood engaged with issues of monarchical power and class, and notes that there were many ways of writing the nation that subverted the absolute claims of the crown (p. 10). Helgerson’s study revivifies a variety of fundamental Renaissance texts which had grown dull and distant due to a lack of critical imagination. For Helgerson, chronicle history is “the Ur-genre of national self-representation” (p. 11). He is less interested in the complaint, in the interactions between lyric and history, and in their impact on issues of gender and writing.

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In recent criticism, lyric has frequently been the object of political distaste. For Mikhail Bakhtin, the lyric is monologic and politically na¨ıve, while the novel is polyphonic and politically complex – the product, by implication, of cultures that are more democratic than those that are characterized by the production of lyric. To make matters worse, C. S. Lewis’ celebration of lyric as the supreme expression of courtliness in “The Golden Age,” and his equation of the court with a conservative ideal of England, apparently corroborates Bakhtin’s assessment that lyric is distastefully conservative.12 Nevertheless, the lyrics produced by the generation of shame are frequently self-contradictory and polyvocal. Moreover, the understanding of what it is to be English is subjected to intense scrutiny in the 1590s, and this political and cultural interrogation is effected by and through lyric. Like Richard Halpern, I argue that lyric is, in fact, open to political readings, although in a more direct way than he suggests. In “The Lyric in the Field of Information: Autopoiesis and History in Donne’s Songs and Sonnets,” Halpern takes the formal closure of lyric as the starting point for an analysis of the ways Donne’s poems declare the birth of a literary space which is distinct from other social spaces. Love provides a utopian realm of mutuality which is bound up with Donne’s aesthetic spaces, the famous “pretty rooms” of “The Canonization”: “In the discourse of passion, lovers are no longer defined by their places in the social order, they are in effect rebaptised as lovers and enclosed in a quasi-religious state of seclusion from the secular world.”13 Halpern reads the lyric vision of the Songs and Sonnets as a response to the “dizzying multiplication of worlds” (p. 109), the specialization and fragmentation of knowledge, which is the consequence of the modernizing process, and which the lyric answers with its vision of a single unifying world, the world of love. Halpern’s analysis of the emergence of “autopoietic or self-referring” (p. 114) sexuality in Donne’s lyrics is a quite brilliant corrective to Foucault’s account of the ways sexuality gains it own history, and clearly enriches my account of the ways writers in the 1590s tried to map out an aesthetic space. His reading, however, seems to be very specific to Donne, and to a 12

13

In “Lyric and Modernity,” Paul de Man points out that lyric is often seen as an early and spontaneous form of language, in contrast to the more reflective and evolved forms of literary discourse found in prose. In the eighteenth-century aesthetics of Vico, Rousseau and Herder, poetry is presented as archaic, and prose is presented as modern and rational. See Blindness and Insight: Essays in the Rhetoric of Contemporary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), pp. 166–86. Richard Halpern, “The Lyric in the Field of Information: Autopoiesis and History in Donne’s Songs and Sonnets” (1993), in John Donne, New Casebooks, ed. Andrew Mousley (Basingstoke: Macmillan Press, 1999), p. 108. The quotation from “The Canonization” (l. 32) is from John Donne The Complete English Poems, ed. A. J. Smith, Penguin English Poets (1971; Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976).

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degree, although he acknowledges that the impenetrability and opacity of the lyric world actually reproduce the social differentiation it is meant to escape, he underplays the extent to which Donne’s male speaker, with his insistent desire for autopoietic utopia, is ironized by the poems, and their interactions with other texts in the collection and beyond it. The processes of sequestration articulated by sixteenth-century lyrics are varied but still contentious, and Halpern’s analysis gives the impression that epistemic fragmentation is an overwhelming, ineluctable force and that lyric is a byproduct of historical forces rather than a vehicle for active engagement with, even resistance to, these forces. History is clearly invoked by the complaints studied in this chapter, and these are lyrics which are directly concerned with worlds beyond love and poetry, and the ways history does and does not fit into the lyric vision. The complaints are also acutely aware of the ways gender affects retreat, of the uses of the autopoietic fantasy in masculine discourse in, for example, Henry II’s discourse in Daniel’s Complaint of Rosamond, and Drayton’s Heroicall Epistles. They are acutely aware of the ways female voices read privacy differently and find that their sequestration is read differently by others. They are both attracted to retreat, and skeptical about its consequences, not only because of the influence of contemporary debates about England’s role and the nature of the true Englishman, but also, as Halpern notes, because of developments in other cultural fields, especially the emerging discipline of history. If history represents the world of public affairs, in the complaints, lyric becomes the arena in which the claims that literature can offer a complementary truth to history, even a superior truth, are debated, and where the claim that the private and the erotic can stand apart from history is probed. the problem of proper english st yle The Tudor obsession with history is a response to Tudor nationalism. Not only do narratives such as Holinshed’s Chronicles glorify English history, they also define a quintessential “Englishness” which is based on the values proper to the public realm and the assertion of sober masculinity, at the expense of personal emotions and desires. Holinshed’s Chronicles exploit the resources of epic, and through their extravagant celebration of the Tudor myth that culminates in the messianic vision of a dynasty sent to deliver the nation from civil war, the contributors to the second edition of the Chronicles (1587) lay claim to laureateship. In the conclusion to the reign of Queen Elizabeth, Abraham Fleming casts himself as a heroic figure who has

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finally tamed the unruly matter of history and completed “a long labour, of great care and expense: howbeit at length conquered and overcome.”14 Like epic, this type of history is full and copious and establishes shared intellectual apparatus and shared patterns of behavior. Prose narratives, such as Holinshed’s Chronicles, both construct and reflect the communal memory, constructing a public sphere which is ruled by the conventions of political life, thereby defining the proper style of the English nation, of the English subject and of late Elizabethan English culture.15 In the late sixteenth century, such providential narratives are challenged by a different kind of history which combines lyric and narrative elements. This form of history extends and questions the public perspectives of narrative history, while the dialectic of genre and counter-genre, of narrative and lyric, challenges the claims of either form to a monopoly on truth. Formal mixture becomes a way of insinuating change and of resisting the limits of an integrated world, of resisting the processes of normalization. Specifically, by combining lyric, particularly Ovidian lyric, with historical narrative, these poems challenge the version of English identity which is based on the assertion of masculine values that trivialize privacy, emotion and the feminized voice, and a particular kind of lyric utterance becomes the site of political, literary and gender resistance to the values of the narrative chronicles.16 These complaints question the very notion of an “Englishness” established on the suppression of the private and emotional spheres, 14 15

16

Holinshed’s Chronicles of England, Scotland and Ireland, 6 vols. (London: J. Johnson, 1807–8), IV, p. 951. All further quotations are from this edition and references will be given in the text. Although any discussion of the public sphere is indebted to J¨urgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (1962; Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), his conclusions cannot be applied directly to a Renaissance context. Habermas traces the transformation of the public sphere from the eighteenth century to the late twentieth century. In the eighteenth century, the public sphere was the site for the critical discussion of state policy by informed outsiders, but in its modern form it is the debased object of media manipulation. The crucial difference between the bourgeois public sphere, as defined by Habermas, and what might be termed the Renaissance public sphere, is that the eighteenth-century public sphere presupposes the strict separation of the public from the private realm (Habermas, pp. 175–6). It is my argument that the public realm cannot be strictly separated from the private realm in Renaissance understandings of history, or Renaissance understandings of self, although some kinds of Renaissance history are concerned with trying to contain and distinguish these realms. Habermas’ theories are analyzed and developed in Habermas and the Public Sphere, ed. Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992). In its affinity with the present, as opposed to history’s affinity with the past, lyric also points to the problems of integrating past and present. On the tensions between Stoic and Christian thought, see William J. Bouwsma, “The Two Faces of Humanism: Stoicism and Augustinianism in Renaissance Thought,” in A Usable Past: Essays in European Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), pp. 19–73; and Richard Strier, Resistant Structures: Particularity, Radicalism, and Renaissance Texts (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

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and this new form of lyrical narrative gives voice to women and passionate men, to the marginal elements that had been suppressed in texts such as Holinshed. Humanist morality privileges the public realm, opposing what is active, public and useful, to the private and contemplative, so the promotion of personal histories in these complaints is the promotion of matter that is trivial, errant and even deviant, because to promote the interests of the individual is to deviate from the common good. As Daniel notes in the preface to Certaine Small Workes (1607), error is the mark of individuality: “I know no work from man yet ever came / But had his marke, and by some error shewd / That it was his . . .” (my emphasis).17 Individuality is conceived through the expression of guilt. While these lyrics question the more radical assumptions of the 1590s, particularly the promotion of authorial individuality as the sole basis of literary authority, they also promote a different sort of reading that rests in the text and gives priority to its textual attributes and its self-reflexive tendencies. Language is now presented as an opaque medium with its own intractable dynamic, which gets in the way of individual as well as communal meanings. In oblique and selfconsciously marginal ways these texts contribute to the professionalization of late Elizabethan literature. The voluminous, multipurpose, collection of fact and opinion known as Holinshed’s Chronicles is in fact a collaborative creation. What was to become Holinshed’s Chronicles was first conceived by the Queen’s printer Reginald Wolfe as a universal history and cosmography for which he procured the services of Raphael Holinshed, among others. After Wolfe’s death, in 1573, the project was supported by a syndicate of publishers who insisted that the focus be narrowed to British history, as the project had become too expensive. The first edition appeared in 1577 and consisted of histories of England and Scotland by Holinshed, descriptions of England and Scotland by William Harrison, and a history and description of Ireland by Richard Stanyhurst. Holinshed died in 1580 and the second edition of 1587 was produced under the editorial supervision of Abraham Fleming.18 17

18

The Complete Works in Verse and Prose of Samuel Daniel, ed. Rev. Alexander B. Grosart, 5 vols. (Printed for private circulation, 1885–96) I, p. 13, ll.43–45. This is the only edition of the collected works of Daniel that is available, but it needs to be approached with caution. Fleming contributed the dedication and postscript that frame the additions to the second edition, and I follow Annabel Patterson, Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), p. 9, and Elizabeth Story Donno, “Some Aspects of Shakespeare’s Holinshed,” HLQ 50 (1987): 231, in ascribing the editorship to Fleming. However, Levy, Tudor Historical Thought, p. 182, suggests that the editor was John Hooker.

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This mongrel history was the product of compromise between the economic, political and intellectual priorities of a group of Stationers and historians and it is therefore multivocal and sometimes even inconsistent. Moreover, its inconsistencies are reinforced by the aim of the chronicle which, as Holinshed explains in his dedication to Sir William Cecil, was written according to principles of comprehensiveness, rather than order, and it respects the voices of earlier historians by carefully recording their conflicting opinions. Yet, in spite of its multiplicities, the history and description of England promote a national identity based on the values associated with the public realm of masculine action and subordinate private interests, private emotions and desires as effeminizing threats to the commonwealth. This reading runs counter to the most recent work on Holinshed: Annabel Patterson’s book Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles, which argues that the Chronicles are committed to “the underprivileged, the demotic and the untitled,” and that the Chronicles interrogate the invisibility of women.19 However, Holinshed’s Chronicles is in the res gesta tradition which defines history as the record of the deeds of great men and focuses on wars and political intrigue. For example, in the preface to his continuation of the history of Scotland, Francis Thin gives some examples of the kind of event he covers in this part of Holinshed’s Chonicles: “the actions of mortall creatures, as battels, mutations of kingdoms, death of princes, and such other earthlie accidents” (V, p. 657), and he sums up his prefatory meditation on historiographical principles with an argument based, as he notes, on Socrates: “Thus having laid before thee, that he writeth best that trulie writeth publike affaires” (V, p. 659). As Thomas Blundeville explains in a contemporary treatise on historiography, The True Order and Methode of Wryting and Reading Hystories (1574): “hystories bee made of deedes done by a publique weale, or agaynst a publique weale, and such deedes, be eyther deedes of warre, of peace, or else of sedition and conspiracie.”20 In addition, contemporary historians argued that the proper organization of this material is essential for good history. According to William Camden, in The History of the Most Renowned and Victorious Princess Elizabeth (1615): “‘Take away from History Why, How, and To what end, things have been done, and Whether the thing 19

20

The quotation is from Patterson, Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles, p. xv. The thesis that Holinshed is a liberal text is set out in the Preface, pp. vii–xv. The role of the lower orders in the narrative is discussed in ch. 9, pp. 187–214, while the role of women is discussed in ch. 10, pp. 215–33. Stoic values had also been transmitted to the Renaissance through Cicero, in De officiis and De amicitia, and through Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy. Thomas Blundeville, The True Order of Wryting and Reading Hystories. London 1574, The English Experience 908 (Amsterdam: Theatrum Orbis Terrarum, 1979), A4v.

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done hath succeeded according to Reason; and all that remains will rather be an idle Sport and Foolery, than a profitable Instruction.’” Good history, according to Camden, proceeds according to reason and it is interested in establishing relations of cause and effect. His preference for a history of reason is echoed by Blundeville, who values histories “speciallye if they be written withal that order, diligence, and judgement, that they ought to be.”21 As history involves the processes of organization, the implication of contemporary historiographical opinion is that good historiography is masculine. In Holinshed’s Chronicles, John Hooker’s dedication of the history of Ireland to Sir Walter Ralegh invokes the Ciceronian commonplace that history is “the mistresse of life” (VI, p. 101), that “she” has to be mated with masculine reason to produce wisdom. Drawing on a tradition that extends back to the ancient Greeks, early modern culture tends to gender reason as masculine, and so historiography, as the ordering and rationalization of the welter of events, is itself associated with masculinity. Early modern definitions of gender were influenced by Aristotle’s theory of conception, as outlined in The Generation of Animals, in which the father contributed form and soul, and the mother physical matter. In the various prefaces and dedications scattered throughout Holinshed’s Chronicles, the historians who contributed to the volume repeatedly express their anxieties that they have not ordered their material well enough, as Holinshed himself notes in the dedication of the history of England to Camden: “it may be, that having had more regard to the matter than the apt penning, I have not so orderlie disposed them, as otherwise I ought” (II, p. 1). In order to make the matter of England civil, masculine reason must be applied to the unruly body of fact, and although Holinshed’s Chronicles are less ordered and coherent than Camden’s history of Elizabeth’s reign, they are still interested in questions of how and why, and provide the feminine matter that is tamed by the heroic virtus of the historian. In Abraham Fleming’s 21

The quotation from Camden is from The History of the Most Renowned and Victorious Princess Elizabeth Late Queen of England. Selected Chapters, ed. Wallace T. MacCaffrey, Classics of British Historical Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), p. 6. In the quotation, Camden is quoting Polybius approvingly. Camden’s History of Princess Elizabeth had masculine associations in another way in that it was written in Latin. MacCaffrey uses the anonymous translation which first appeared in 1675. The History of Princess Elizabeth has a complicated publishing history. The first part of the work was published (in Latin) in 1615 and ran up to 1588. The rest of the History was first published in Leyden in 1625. The first English translation of the first part came out in 1625, and of the second part in 1629. The quotation from Blundeville is from The True Order of Wryting and Reading Hystories (D4r). Ferguson, Clio Unbound, pp. 24–7 and 34–5, points out that Blundeville’s treatise adapts Italian humanist treatises by Francesco Patrizi (1560) and Giacomo Acontius (1564) which present history as the narrative of the public realm. Blundeville was a member of the Earl of Leicester’s circle and The True Order is dedicated to the Earl.

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terms, the Chronicles are something to be “conquered and overcome” by the historian.22 Holinshed’s Chronicles associate private experience such as love, desire and emotion, and even certain kinds of intellectual activity, especially wit, with the female and the foreign, constructing them as threats to English integrity. In the “Description of Britain” that begins Holinshed’s Chronicles, William Harrison defines the quintessential English subject: “Such as are bred in this Iland are men for the most part of a good complexion, tall of stature, strong in bodie, white of colour, and thereto of great boldnesse and courage in the warres” (I, p. 192). Harrison admits that other races exceed the Britons in “pregnancie of wit, nimblenesse of limmes, and politike inventions” (I, p. 193), all because the sun does not warm English wits as much as it warms the wits of those closer to the equator.23 Englishmen, it seems, are brave blockheads, but there is no need to despair because Harrison contrives to turn English disadvantage into an advantage, and the foreigners’ ostensible advantage into a disadvantage. While women such as Jane Shore and Margaret of Anjou are indeed acknowledged to be witty in the Chronicles, wit is presented as an ambivalent attribute, one which, in Harrison’s eyes, is frequently the attribute of the crafty foreigner.24 In fact, English slow-wittedness is a virtue because it grounds that cornerstone 22

23 24

See above, p. 185. Aristotle, Generation of Animals, trans. A. L. Peck, Loeb Classical Library (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1943), p. 101 and esp. pp. 111–21. The classical and medieval roots of the system of interlocking contraries that sets masculinity and reason against femininity and irrationality are discussed by Patricia Parker, Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property (London: Methuen, 1987), pp. 181–5. Although Holinshed’s Chronicles were dedicated to William Cecil, they do not constitute official Elizabethan history and even fell prey to the censors. See Donno, “Some Aspects of Shakespeare’s Holinshed.” However, this does not undermine my argument that Holinshed celebrates a national identity based on the values associated with the public realm of masculine action. A long historiographical tradition represented the matter of history (the raw events that constitute both lived experience and the subject of history) as feminine. In his discussion of Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, as a great synthesis of languages and traditions, J. G. A. Pocock notes that the struggle between heroic fortitude and fortune is often expressed in terms of a sexual relationship – of “a masculine active intelligence [which] was seeking to dominate a feminine passive unpredictability which would submissively reward him for his strength or vindictively betray him for his weakness.” Virtus therefore carries connotations of virility. See J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), p. 37. The tradition continues through Machiavelli where the fickleness of women figures the fickleness of fortune, often in the crudest, misogynistic manner. For a quite exceptional analysis of the representation of fortune as a woman, in one of Machiavelli’s letters, see Juliana Schiesari, “Libidinal Economies: Machiavelli and Fortune’s Rape,” in Desire in the Renaissance: Psychoanalysis and Literature, ed. Valeria Finucci and Regina M. Schwartz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), pp. 169–83. This theory also ultimately derives from Aristotle. See Z. S. Fink, “Milton and the Theory of Climatic Influence,” MLQ 2 (1941): 67–80. For the argument that Jane Shore’s wit is emphasized in Holinshed, in a kind of profeminist polemic, see Patterson, Reading Holinshed’s Chronicles, pp. 217–20.

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of English identity, the sense of fair play: “For if it be a vertue to deale uprightlie with singlenesse of mind, sincerelie and plainlie, without anie such suspicious fetches in all our dealings, as they commonlie practise in their affaires, then are our countrimen to be accompted wise and vertuous” (I, p. 193). The English may be slow, but this means that they are open, fair, straightforward and dependable. Harrison’s description acquires moral status and is no longer merely descriptive but prescriptive. His ideal is moderation – the moderation “used at the tables of the honorable and wiser sort” – who strive to keep themselves “from the note of surfetting and dronkennesse” (I, p. 282). Lack of moderation is demonstrated in the English obsession with fashion that undermines the integrity of the sober English subject, contaminates the country with foreign trends, and upsets its economic integrity by encouraging the importation of foreign textiles and trinkets: “And as these fashions are diverse, so likewise it is a world to see the costlinesse and the curiositie: the excesse and the vanitie: the pompe and the braverie: the change and the varietie: and finallie the ficklenesse and the follie that is in all degrees: in somuch that nothing is more constant in England than inconstancie of attire” (I, p. 289). Fickleness and mutability threaten English identity and they are associated with women and foreigners. Harrison acknowledges the positive virtues of the foreigners, but not only do foreign virtues have the potential to degenerate into “instabilitie,” it seems to be a particular characteristic of foreign virtues that they should degenerate in this way: “Howbeit, as those which are bred in sundrie places of the maine, doo come behind us in constitution of bodie, so I grant, that in pregnancie of wit, nimblenesse of limmes, and politike inventions, they generallie exceed us: notwithstanding that otherwise these gifts of theirs doo often degenerate into meere subtiltie, instabilitie, unfaithfulnesse, & crueltie” (I, p. 193). At the same time, when the peace and unity of the English nation are disturbed it is often the result of female mutability and slavery to the passions, as it is in the reign of Edward II and in the period following the death of Henry V. The Chronicles promote stoic ideals of constancy, self-control and selfsufficiency. Open and fair in all dealings, the ideal Englishman lives publicly and is loyal to the public good. Inconstancy, lack of self-control and loyalty to one’s private ends are traits that are threats to English integrity, and they are associated with the foreign and the womanish. Female willfulness is one of Holinshed’s themes in his account of medieval history. For example, Queen Isabel rebels against her husband Edward II, for “ (alas) what will not a woman be drawne and allured unto, if by evill counsell she be once assaulted” (II, p. 578). In the reign of Henry V,

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Queen Isabel of France rebels against her son, the Dauphin, because he seizes her treasure to finance the war against the English: “The queene forgetting the great perill that the realme then stood in, remembring onelie the displeasure to hir by this act doone, upon a womanish malice, set hir husband John of Burgognie in the highest authoritie about the king . . .” (III, p. 92). Women are associated with willfulness, with passionate obstinacy, and blind devotion to private goals. Even good Queen Katherine, widow of Henry V, falls from grace in marrying Owen Tudor by behaving in a typically womanish way: “following more hir owne wanton appetite than freendlie counsell, and regarding more private affection than princelike honour, tooke to husband privilie a galant gentleman” (III, p. 190). “Privilie” has connotations of secrecy and underhandedness, which are contrary to the honesty and straightforwardness of the true Englishman. In fact, Holinshed’s Chronicles are a warning against factionalism and the pursuit of private goals that lead to internal division, and expose the country to the threat of invasion. It attacks the tendency to place private desire above the common good. The moral that concludes the reign of King John serves as an example: “Here therefore we see the issue of domesticall or homebred broiles, the fruits of variance, the gaine that riseth of dissention, whereas no greater nor safer fortification can betide a land, than when the inhabitants are all alike minded” (II, p. 337). In spite of Annabel Patterson’s claims, there does not seem to be much room for difference here, the inhabitants ideally being “all alike minded,” and the right to speak is limited by reasons of state. Holinshed’s Chronicles advocates a form of consensual history. The role played by the dispossessed and by women in political affairs is certainly noted, but only to prove the inclusiveness of the English ideal, and to promote the myth of a united commonwealth. They remain functions of someone else’s story, and are models of loyalty and conformity.25 Meanwhile 25

My conclusions are corroborated by Dr. Tom Betteridge in his forthcoming study of the Tudor chronicles. Betteridge treats the idea of a liberal Holinshed with skepticism. As he points out, there is one chronicle that takes the democratic stand Patterson attributes to Holinshed, and that chronicle is Robert Crowley’s “Continuation” (London: T. Marsh, 1559) to An Epitome of Cronicles by Thomas Lanquet and Thomas Cooper, which was first published without the “Continuation” in 1549. The “Continuation” subverts the usual strategies of the Tudor chronicles. For example, in his account of the Marian persecutions, Crowley includes accounts of the ordinary people who suffered, and gives specificity to the anonymous mass of common people. By contrast, Tudor chronicles usually only give detail to the careers of gentlefolk. In Crowley, each martyr, of whatever rank, has an individual entry. Betteridge’s book is an important and detailed study of the chronicles, which takes their historiographical ideas seriously, and will redefine the way we read the Tudor chronicles. I am very grateful to him for allowing me to read the introduction to his book, “Tudor Histories of the English Reformations, 1530–1583,” in draft form.

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the Chronicles advocate conversation, counsel and the exchange of language as the way of achieving the desired consensus, just as the readers of its historical narrative are defined as civil English subjects by the process of reading the Chronicles. Thus Holinshed’s Chronicles promote what was to become a cornerstone of English self-representation – the sense of fair play – but they also promote another cornerstone of English self-representation: an early modern version of the stiff upper lip. The English subject who is good and true will suppress emotion and passion. As always, King John serves as an admonitory example. He dies from an ague brought on by excessive emotion on losing the treasure he stole from the Church: “he tooke such greefe for the losse susteined in this passage, that immediatlie thereupon he fell into an ague, the force and heat whereof, togither with his immoderate feeding on rawe peaches, and drinking of new sider, so increased his sicknesse, that he was not able to ride” (II, p. 335). By contrast, Henry V, the epitome of Englishness, the paragon of public manners, is a model of selfabnegation, “So staied of mind and countenance beside, that [he was] never jolie or triumphant for victorie, nor sad or damped for losse or misfortune” (III, p. 133). Henry treats victory and defeat as things indifferent and, as such, he is always the same (to adapt Elizabeth’s motto, semper eadem); he is the self-determining, integrated subject which is none other than the proper Englishman. Of course this poses problems for the authors of the 1590s who were exploring precisely the kinds of experience belittled in Holinshed’s Chronicles.26 The tragic complaints to which I will now turn are not simply poems about the risks and limitations of romantic love, they are also poems about the nature and value of authorship. pl aining, counter-history and aesthetics Writers in the generation of shame exist in complicated relationship with the issues of nationalism and gender. They use lyric to reincorporate the marginal within the ideal of England and, therefore, they lay claim to a form of laureateship that is based on marginality. These writers argue for a more inclusive ideal of Englishness, but only to the extent that they themselves are to be included in this revised version of nationhood. These 26

In the dedication of the history of Ireland to Ralegh, John Hooker cites Cato to define the ideal member of the commonwealth in traditionally humanist terms: “Idlenesse therefore the mother of all wickednesse, and idlers the sonnes of so bad a mother, are utterlie to be exiled and expelled out of all well governed commonweales; and they onelie to be fostered, nourished and cherished, who as they are borne to the countrie, so if they doo good and be beneficiall to the same” (VI, p. 1106).

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are not democratic or populist texts, but argue for the incorporation and valorization of those participants in the nation’s culture who share their own views. Any skepticism over the type of authority defined by various ways of exploiting shame is exacerbated by respect for history. For example, Michael Drayton’s collection of complaints, Englands Heroicall Epistles (1597), is a mixture of love-story and chronicle material through which Drayton develops his own interpretation of authorial function. He casts the author as a poet-historian whose duty it is to preserve the facts of British history for the inspiration and edification of a British audience. The text confronts the fictionalized and very personal perceptions of love, expressed in the actual letters, with political and historical interpretations of the relationships, which are recorded in appended notes, which are largely derived from chronicle histories. The prevailing interpretation of history, which is politically determined, is not only contrasted with the body of inherited textual interpretation, but also with conflicting individual perspectives on the same events, which are presented through the paired lovers and their epistles. The generation of multiple perspectives does not empty history of meaning, but suggests that facts are always adapted to the contingencies of rhetorical situations. The realization that all versions of the same event are somehow skewed, in Englands Herociall Epistles, alters the reader’s perception of the relationship between reality and fiction. It suggests that reality can only be understood by being recreated through images, and that fiction and reality are linked rather than opposed. The process of privileging the serious modes of factual discourse, at the expense of the modes of literary fiction, needs to be revised. To a large extent, Drayton derives his authority from the reverence he feels for the past and from the importance accorded to matters of national interest. Yet Englands Heroicall Epistles shows the problems posed for the laureate by the developments of the 1590s. The historical complaints produced by the generation of shame record and promote English history, the genealogy of its rulers and its places, and the deeds of its famous children and, in many respects, they justify claims to Tudor laureateship through their extravagant celebration of the Tudor myth that culminates in a messianic vision of Queen Elizabeth. However, these writers are also skeptical about the status and permanence of history, and explore the possibility that it is nothing more than a highly personal and unstable interpretation of events, which can never be fully known, because of the distortions and limitations of textual communication. The text is not a transparent medium which reveals unchanging truth, hence the possibility is raised that any

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celebration of the Tudors is nothing more substantial than authorial opinion. The problem for the laureate is that literature is no longer conceived to be independent of time or change, and this exposes the laureate’s claims to commemorate deeds for posterity as empty rhetoric.27 On the one hand, the authors of historical complaints correct the individualistic presumptions of the generation of shame by grounding authority on public interest. On the other hand, they value the ideas expressed in the modes of shame and this undermines any faith in laureate authority. Until the publication of Daniel’s Complaint of Rosamond in 1592, and Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece in 1594, the most influential body of complaint literature in the second half of the sixteenth century was The Mirror for Magistrates, edited by William Baldwin, first published in 1559, and reprinted in 1563, 1571, 1574, 1575, 1578 and 1587. The 1559 edition of The Mirror is a collection of tragic complaints by a variety of authors, which mixes patriotism with political teaching. As its title suggests, The Mirror is a warning for those in authority. It cautions them against pride, the abuse of power and the misguided sense of self-sufficiency by highlighting the inescapability of punishment and the inevitable revolution of Fortune’s wheel, as a procession of ghostly speakers give an account of their earthly careers.28 The theme of love is introduced to The Mirror by Thomas Churchyard, in “The Tragedy of Shore’s Wife,” which was originally published in the edition of 1563. Although Churchyard continues to emphasize the turn of Fortune’s wheel in Jane Shore’s collapse from riches to destitution, he opens the way for a gradual extension of the tragic complaint into new thematic and stylistic areas by John Higgins and Thomas Blenerhasset. Higgins’ complaint of “Elstride,” first published in the 1574 edition of The Mirror, again deals with the theme of illicit love, while Blenerhasset’s “Tragedy of Lady Ebbe,” first published in the edition of 1578, emphasizes moral as opposed to purely political themes. Thus, through successive editions, The Mirror for Magistrates was slowly redefining its form, but with the 27

28

Nancy S. Streuver, The Language of History in the Renaissance: Rhetoric and Historical Consciousness in Florentine Humanism (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1970), p. 37, argues that rhetorical concepts of discourse are essential to a commitment to historicism. According to Streuver, rhetoric “emphasize[s] change, not permanence, the many, not the one, the particular, not the universal.” This understanding of rhetoric goes back to Socrates who distrusted the rhetoricians because they privileged intermediate and relative ends, whereas the philosophers dealt in final and absolute ends. As Streuver notes, the structure of language determines the structure of knowledge, and so it also determines our definition of historical reality. See, for example, “The Tragedy of Thomas Duke of Gloucester” (1559) which concludes with the warning, “Take heed ye princes by examples past, / Blood wyll have blood, eyther, fyrst or last” (ll. 202–3). The Mirror for Magistrates, ed. Lily B. Campbell, Huntington Library Publications, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1938 and 1946), I, p. 99.

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publication of The Complaint of Rosamond (1592) the complaint underwent radical change.29 Daniel’s most important innovation was the introduction of Ovid to the traditional tragic complaint.30 Drawing on the rhetorical and imagistic resources of the Heroides and the Metamorphoses, Daniel turned the impassive generalizations of much Mirror writing into a dramatic verse form which focuses on the apprehensions and reactions of the individual. In The Mirror for Magistrates, private actions are explained by the operation of Fortune, and the pattern of Providence gives universal meaning to particular events. As The Complaint of Rosamond focuses on the exploration of individuality and its relation to meaning, the complaint is recast as one of the forms for talking about the incipient and not quite respectable subject of the self.31 Daniel’s extremely influential poem became the vehicle for the production and valorization of feeling in late sixteenth-century culture, as Francis Meres explains in Palladis Tamia (1598): “As every one mourneth when hee heareth of the lamentable plangors of Thracian Orpheus for his dearest Euridice: so every one passionateth when he readeth the afflicted 29

30

31

The Complaint of Rosamond inspired a host of imitations including: Anthony Chute, Beawtie Dishonoured Written Under the Title of Shores Wife (1593); Thomas Churchyard, Churchyards Challenge (1593), which included a revised version of “Shore’s Wife,” which takes account of the new taste for personalized suffering and increased pathos in the complaint; Drayton, Peirs Gaveston (1594?) and Matilda (1594); Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucrece (1594); Henry Willoby?, Willobie his Avisa (1594), which celebrates an English counterpart to Lucrece; Peter Colse, Penelope’s Complaint (1596), which attacks the author of Avisa for defending mean women when classical heroines are far superior as exemplars of virtue; and Thomas Middleton, The Ghost of Lucrece (1600). For a discussion of literary treatments of Shore’s story see D. F. Rowan, “Shore’s Wife,” SEL 6 (1966): 447–64, and for treatments of Rosamond’s story, and its association with the story of Shore, see Virgil Heltzel, Fair Rosamond: A Study of the Development of a Literary Theme, Northwestern University Studies in the Humanities 16 (Evanston: Northwestern University Studies, 1947), p. 19. Chute’s Beawtie Dishonoured is grouped with Thomas Edward’s epyllion, Cephalus and Procris, by Nashe in Have With You to Saffron-Walden, Works, ed. McKerrow, III, p. 90. Clark Hulse, Metamorphic Verse: The Elizabethan Minor Epic (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), analyzes how Daniel uses the Complaint of Rosamond to explore the ambivalences of Petrarchanism (pp. 59–65), and its relationship to history (pp. 205–10). Hallett Smith, Elizabethan Poetry: A Study in Conventions, Meaning, and Expression (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), pp. 102–30, traces the revival of complaint at the end of the sixteenth century. On Daniel as a historian, see also, May McKisack, “Samuel Daniel as Historian,” RES 23 (1947): 226–43; and Clark Hulse, “Samuel Daniel: The Poet as Literary Historian,” SEL 19 (1979): 55–69. John Kerrigan, Motives of Woe: Shakespeare and the Female Complaint (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991) is a sophisticated history of the complaint and the multiple components that constitute the complaint tradition. He provocatively suggests that in pre-Reformation texts, plaining precipitates the subject, while in post-Reformation texts, the speaker’s relationship to language is primarily at issue (p. 26). Kerrigan explores the interrelationship between forms of devotion and the complaint, and goes on to note that post-Reformation complaints describe an individualized life “from within” (p. 27), linking this kind of complaint to the soliloquy. For Kerrigan the complaint intersects with history because the post-Reformation form abandons an interest in unlucky fate, to examine the effect of being subject to causes, a condition of passivity that is exemplified by female experience.

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death of Daniel’s distressed Rosamond.”32 In other words, the poem facilitates the aestheticization and sentimentalization of culture, a process Meres conceives as a process of civilized acculturation. The Complaint of Rosamond turns the reading public into Orpheuses, no less, and gives proof that English culture is comparable, indeed superior, to continental culture, which is one of the aims of Palladis Tamia. However, the indulgence in emotion that is precipitated by Rosamond’s tale produces its own tensions, not only for contemporary definitions of Englishness, but also for contemporary definitions of masculinity, where emotion and aesthetic sensitivity occupy an equivocal place. Marlowe’s hero, Tamburlaine, highlights the problem when he catches himself moved to pity by Zenocrate’s beauty. Her face is the place “Where Beauty, mother to the Muses, sits / And comments volumes with her ivory pen” (V.i.144–5), but such heady poeticism is soon cut short: But how unseemly is it for my sex, My discipline of arms and chivalry, My nature, and the terror of my name, To harbour thoughts effeminate and faint!33 V.i.174–7

For Tamburlaine, the processes of aestheticization, in the twin sense of a developing artistic responsiveness, and of a developing affective responsiveness, undermines his heroic integrity, as he becomes both more sensible to feeling and more sensible to beauty. The link between aestheticization and loss of manhood is also made by Mortimer Junior in Marlowe’s Edward II. According to Mortimer, Edward’s relationship with Gaveston has weakened the king, and he characterizes the relationship in terms that indicate an association between prodigality, artistic activity (in the triumphs, masques and shows), eroticism and metamorphosis: The idle triumphs, masques, lascivious shows, And prodigal gifts bestowed on Gaveston Have drawn thy treasure dry and made thee weak; The murmuring commons overstretched hath. II.ii.156–934 32 33

34

Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1950) II, p. 316. Christopher Marlowe, Tamburlaine the Great, Part I, ed. J. S. Cunningham, The Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981). Tamburlaine identifies beauty, love and lyricism as effeminate, although the play also points out the limitations of this attitude. The idea that love and women are inimical to epic is also explored in Marlowe’s tragedy, Dido, Queen of Carthage. Christopher Marlowe, Edward the Second, ed. Charles R. Forker, The Revels Plays (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994). I discuss Edward II and the nature of history, in more detail, in

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The Complaint of Rosamond presents itself as a source of shame and this poses problems for contemporary definitions of history, nation and authorship, and this is not only because the poem focuses on the female point of view in contrast to the majority of poems in The Mirror.35 Just as the epyllion eroticized the relationship between the past and the present, by representing the classical past as the object of cupidinous desire through its association with metamorphic myths of lust and the stylistic accomplishment of neoteric erotic poetry, so Daniel’s complaint represents the English past as the object of infinite desire, through its reincarnation as the irresistibly beautiful Rosamond. The Complaint of Rosamond deals in shameful matter, bringing out details of Henry II’s adulterous affair with Rosamond de Clifford which he tried to hide from Queen Eleanor, his wife. It also describes how the Queen succeeded in murdering her rival. Indeed, Rosamond’s very name is inscribed with shame. It is the name of the rose of the world whose “blasing . . . blush” (l. 118) amazes all onlookers with its beauty, but Rosamond is also a name that recalls the redness of the face of shame, and reminds the readers that Rosamond is “The Minotaure of shame kept for disgrace” (l. 478).36 Through the ambiguous phenomenon of blushing, shame raises questions about cause and effect, the interpretation of experience, motivation and public opinion, which also lie at the heart of historiographical debate. Daniel’s poem is a ghost narrative, and as Rosamond’s ghost returns from its other world, it becomes a particularly efficient means of focusing attention on the nature of Providence, and the shape of human experience. In The Mirror for Magistrates, private actions are explained by the operation of Fortune, and the pattern of Providence gives universal meaning to particular events. In the tragic complaints, like The Complaint of Rosamond, Providence still has a role to play in human history, but so too have chance and human will, so that it becomes much more difficult for the poet to see a unifying pattern in events, and the interpretation of action becomes problematic.37

35

36 37

“Tampering with the Records: Engendering the Political Community and Marlowe’s Appropriation of the Past,” in Marlowe’s Empery: Expanding his Critical Contexts, ed. Sara Munson Deats and Robert A. Logan (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2002), pp. 164–87. For John Peter, Complaint and Satire in Early English Literature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), pp. 114–16, the rise of the female subject in the late sixteenth century broke down the commonplaces on which medieval complaint depended and contributed to its demise. All quotations from The Complaint of Rosamund are from Poems and A Defence of Ryme, ed. Arthur Colby Sprague (1930; Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972). Similar issues are raised by the competing ways of reading Ovid, that are current in the sixteenth century, some of which do not read universal meanings in the text, but historically specific ones. See the discussion in chapter 1, pp. 42–5.

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The Complaint of Rosamond was published with Daniel’s sonnet sequence Delia, and the sonnet sequence is a form of extended male complaint, with its own cupidinous excesses, as the poet-lover attempts to woo his own mistress. Rosamond’s story begins with an account of her safe and happy childhood in the country and she dates the beginning of her fall to her removal from the country to the court: Happie liv’d I whilst Parents eye did guide, The indiscretion of my feeble wayes, And Country home kept me from being eyde, Where best unknowne I spent my sweetest dayes; Till that my frindes [sic] mine honour sought to rayse, To higher place, which greater credite yeeldes, Deeming such beauty was unfit for feeldes. ll. 85–91

In this nostalgic recollection of Rosamond’s humble origins, Daniel’s complaint reveals its close affinity with the pastoral, particularly as it is the specific delights of the court – fame, adoration and riches – which tempt and eventually corrupt Rosamond.38 Rosamond’s ghost then goes on to recall how her beauty made the king fall in love with her, and how she rejected his advances, in a scenario that parodies the basic Petrarchan situation of an abject lover and a remote mistress. Eventually, however, an old woman, who is described by Rosamond’s ghost as, “A seeming Matrone, yet a sinfull monster” (l. 216), finally convinces her to yield to Henry.39 The complaint shows how Rosamond gradually becomes accustomed to sin, and how 38

39

In the 1590s, Daniel had contacts with sympathizers of the Earl of Essex. See David Norbrook, “The Panegyric of the Monarch and its Social Context under Elizabeth I and James I,” D. Phil., Oxford University, 1978, p. 165. Daniel’s intellectual flirtation with Seneca and Tacitus could easily acquire political connotations. The presentation of the court as the focus of lascivious impulses has obvious affinities with satire. Compare Thomas Middleton’s complaint, The Ghost of Lucrece (1600), which also satirizes Petrarchanism. Middleton recasts courtly behavior as the source of shame, by linking the redness of blushing with Petrarchanism’s particular mixture of red and white, and the sorry confusion of the different natures of Venus and Diana in the court. See The Ghost of Lucrece by Thomas Middleton, ed. Joseph Quincy Adams (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1937), ll. 302–22. In Chaste Thinking: The Rape of Lucretia and the Birth of Humanism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989) p. 7, Stephanie Jed notes that Lucrece’s chastity seems to encourage lust. The matron uses similar arguments in her corruption of Rosamond, when she claims that the fame of Rosamond’s chastity has actually contaminated her, at least socially, through the “Breath of the vulgar” (l. 270). Unless a woman is completely cut off from society, her reputation will always be in danger, even from the fame of her chastity. The matron’s arguments seriously undermine the assertions of those Petrarchan poets who claim to commemorate their lady’s virtues in their poetry because fame and chastity are revealed to be inimical and, even when the poet has renounced physical advances, his verse is still a way of violating his mistress’ integrity. Jed argues that the rape of Lucretia is the founding myth of Florentine humanism, and, furthermore, that the philological project of Florentine humanism is presented through metaphors that draw analogies between corrupt texts, that need castigating to render them pure and chaste, and the female body. Jed notes that the word castigare,

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Henry’s enjoyment of Rosamond makes him ever more possessive until he decides to imprison her in a tower at Woodstock, which he has surrounded by a maze. However, Henry’s jealous wife succeeds in locating Rosamond and breaches all the barriers that are set up for her protection, and she forces Rosamond to take a deadly poison. At first, the news of Rosamond’s death provokes Henry to acknowledge that he has abused his power, but then Henry’s lament modulates into a blazon of Rosamond’s beauty which reasserts his love for her, and seems to undermine his previous acknowledgement of his own sinfulness and guilt. In Daniel’s poem, the presentation of the overpowering desire of the Petrarchan lover to possess his mistress slips easily into a critique of the political drive to possess, invade and occupy. Rosamond’s story is framed by the addresses of her ghost to the poet. In the opening lines of the complaint, the ghost appeals to the poet to restore Rosamond to memory. The ghost recognizes the importance of finding a good secretary and observes that Shore’s wife has been pitied because of a “well-told tale” (l. 27). Rosamond will appear to be as good, or as bad, as her poem, and so she must choose her poet carefully. Her ghost cannot find rest until it is delivered by the sighs of living lovers (ll. 13–14), and so Rosamond appeals to the poet for pity. In fact, her complaint effects an exchange of pity through a series of substitutions. As her ghost explains, if the poet pities Rosamond’s case (l. 42) and writes her story, then Delia may be moved to pity his case, through pity for Rosamond: Delia may happe to deygne to reade our story, And offer up her sigh among the rest, Whose merit would suffice for both our glorie, Whereby thou might’st be grac’d, and I be blest, That indulgence would profit me the best; Such powre she hath by whom thy youth is lead, To joy the living and to blesse the dead. ll. 43–9

Like the erotic narratives explored in the previous chapter, these lines question the nature and even the possibility of literary morality by drawing the word used to describe the process of correction, and the word castus, meaning chaste, are linked, but her own philology is attacked by Debora Shuger, “Castigating Livy: The Rape of Lucretia and The Old Arcadia,” RQ 51 (1998): 526–48. Shuger reverses Jed’s gender politics and notes that castus is used by ancient writers to refer to male purity or male impotence. Moreover, the Renaissance talks of editing texts in terms of castration, and is acutely concerned with patrolling male bodies. Shuger concludes that, unlike Livy, who equates monarchy with lust, Sidney’s rereading of the rape of Lucretia defends aristocratic privilege. Like Livy, Daniel’s ghostly complaint equates monarchy with lust, but it is also sensitive to the play of chance and the force of passion that generate events.

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parallels between reading, writing and cupidinous desire. While the complaint explores the externalization of Rosamond’s passion, it also expresses the externalization of the poet’s passion, by recording his reaction to Rosamond’s story, and by presenting itself as a kind of letter which conveys the author’s amorous ambitions to his own mistress. Ostensibly, The Complaint of Rosamond rewrites and moralizes Petrarchanism. Rosamond’s story is, after all, the story of a Petrarchan lady who eventually succumbs to her lover’s pleas, and her unhappy fate is presented as a warning against lust, as well as a reflection on the uses and abuses of male power:40 Tell Delia now her sigh may doe me good, And will her note the frailtie of our blood. And if I passe unto those happy banks, Then she must have her praise, thy pen her thanks. ll. 732–5

But rather than defining chastity and its opposite, the poem actually confuses the two, because, if Rosamond and the poet succeed in writing a moving poem, then Delia will learn to pity the poet and consummate their relationship. In Rosamond’s words, on reading the complaint, Delia will be moved “To joy the living” (l. 49). As a consequence, Daniel’s complaint undermines stable definitions of internal and external, subject and object, as Rosamond, Delia and the poet see themselves reflected in each other, so that the poem becomes a channel for the movement of praise and thanks between the unstable categories of subject and object. The poem deals in the exposure of scandal and, once again, the generation of shame recasts reading and writing as sexually motivated activities. Invention becomes a source of erotic satisfaction, and tales of narcissism and lust are substituted for morality. The imperative to write comes to be associated with guiltiness and even with wantonness, as the poet uses the historical complaint to seduce his mistress, having already failed to do so, as Rosamond’s ghost 40

Englands Heroicall Epistles is also a text about the use and abuse of power. The epistles can be divided into three groups: the first describes attempted seductions by royal figures (Henry II, King John, Edward the Black Prince, Edward IV), the second describes liaisons between a queen and a nobleman (Isabel and Mortimer, Katherine and Owen Tudor, Margaret and William de-la-Poole, Mary and Charles Brandon), and the third describes the relationship between faithful lovers of royal or noble rank (Richard II and Isabel, Elinor and Duke Humphrey, Henry Howard and Geraldine, Lady Jane Gray and Lord Gilford Dudley). The political theme runs through all these epistles. King John’s treatment of Matilda, for example, is a symptom of his tyranny and Matilda attacks his abuse of personal and political relationships (ll. 117–20). Richard Hardin, Michael Drayton and the Passing of Elizabethan England (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 1973), pp. 46–8, emphasizes the political purpose of the Heroicall Epistles.

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reminds him: “Although I knowe thy just lamenting Muse, / Toylde in th’affliction of thine owne distresse / . . . / Yet as thy hopes attend happie redresse, / Thy joyes depending on a womans grace, / So move thy minde a wofull womans case” (ll. 36–7, 40–2). Given Henry II’s assertion that he will preserve Rosamond’s memory after her death (ll. 687–93), The Complaint of Rosamond is surprisingly pessimistic about poetry’s ability to overcome time.41 Just as the poem claims that the passing of time has revealed Roman Catholic pieties to be follies (ll. 701– 14), so time, it is claimed, may defeat poetry’s claims to embody any form of truth or permanence. In these poems, lyric is subject to time and to the fluctuations of taste. Set in the context of the destructive force of time, descriptions of the present and prophecies of the future acquire an elegiac tone, as if present and future are already defeated by the passing of time even as they find expression: And were it not thy favourable lynes Reedified the wracke of my decayes: And that thy accents willingly assignes, Some farther date, and give me longer daies, Fewe in this age had knowne my beauties praise. But thus renewd, my fame redeemes some time, Till other ages shall neglect thy rime. ll. 715–21

Even as Rosamond asserts the poem’s ability to overcome time, she acknowledges that time will eventually defeat poetry, and will consign the creations of her poet-secretary to oblivion.42 The Complaint of Rosamond raises questions that are central to the complaint, questions that touch on the relationship of the individual to 41

42

Richard McCoy, The Rites of Knighthood: The Literature and Politics of Elizabethan Chivalry (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 106–13 and 124–6, discusses Daniel’s fatalism and his theory that time defeats poetry. McCoy concentrates on The Civil Wars (1595; complete text first published in 1609), and concludes that Daniel’s history reveals a bifurcated mind that is drawn to both order and honour, to peace and to the noble rebel. Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990) argues that the secretary embodies the ideals of a rhetorical culture. He claims that the word “secretary” is derived from the word “secret” (p. 266), and the secretary is the keeper of secrets which are committed to him by his master. Thus the secretary is structured by, and as, a replacement for his lord. The secretary is the space of the lord’s secret where interiority and exteriority are intertwined. As a result he must relinquish the individualizing marks in his own writing. A self is forged in the secret sharing of lord and secretary, and individuality is constituted and produced in the secretary’s letters (p. 272). Individuality is produced in the secretarial activity of the historical complaints, such as The Complaint of Rosamond and Englands Heroicall Epistles, but, unlike Goldberg’s secretary, the poet-secretary does not become invisible.

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time, the relationship of individual experience to history, and the question of how to articulate internal experience, and it does so in a selfmarginalizing text that ends in unexpected self-dismissal. After the poet has heard Rosamond’s tale of grief, he is reluctant to continue in the manner of Delia and talk about his grief in the same way. Instead, he rejects the errors of the sonnet cycle with its self-indulgent monotony and insistent Petrarchanism: But (ah) the worlde hath heard too much of those, My youth such errors must no more disclose. Ile hide the rest, and greeve for what hath beene, Who made me knowne, must make me live unseene. ll. 739–42

Daniel’s complaint is yet another example of the liminal forms that are so characteristic of late sixteenth-century literary culture, as it inscribes a process of self-rejection without any clear conception of exactly what might take its place. The poet’s sympathy for Rosamond’s story has exposed the solipsism of his Petrarchan poetics, and the expression of internal feelings has been brought to a point where a different form of articulation is necessary.43 Self-consciousness is the product of stylistic consciousness. The authorial subjectivity Daniel defines through Rosamond is not an integrated subjectivity, but one that is indicated through the endless equivocations between undesirable forms of articulation. Like the complaint in which it finds expression, it is self-subverting and marginal. Oblique constructions are the most appropriate way to articulate a selfhood which does not occupy a clearly defined psychological, social or philosophical space in the late sixteenth century. The poet-secretary’s diversions and self-displacements are not opposed to subjectivity, they are the very medium through which the subject is articulated. In this new kind of lyric history, subjectivity comes into being through paradox, by pointing to the ways in which it is 43

Heather Dubrow, “A Mirror for Complaints: Shakespeare’s Lucrece and the Generic Tradition,” in Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation, ed. B. K. Lewalski, Harvard English Studies (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), pp. 399–417, identifies a sub-genre of complaints, including The Complaint of Rosamond, Churchyard’s Tragedy of Shore’s Wife, Chute’s Beawtie Dishonoured, Lodge’s Complaint of Elstred, Drayton’s Matilda and Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece, which are concerned with the political implications of “private pleasure” (Rape of Lucrece, l. 1478). In Captive Victors: Shakespeare’s Narrative Poems and Sonnets (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1987), pp. 80–168, Dubrow analyzes how The Rape of Lucrece uses the conventions of genre to express Lucrece’s individuality, noting that Lucrece’s predilection for sententiae and antitheses reveals a character that clings to the simplifications of absolute truths.

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undone.44 This kind of self is also the thing that is left behind, or left out, by the experimental articulations of the poem, the thing that fails to fit. The historical laments set out to renovate history and supply what has been overlooked or marginalized. As Drayton explains in the dedication of Peirs Gaveston to Master Henry Cavendish, he intends to supplement history in this poem, but at the same time he suggests a parallel between this marginalized historical matter and poetry: I present to your judiciall view, the tragicall discourse, of the life, death, and fortune of PEIRS GAVESTON, whose name hath been obscured so many yeeres, and over-past by the Tragaedians of these latter times: assuring myselfe your honourable patronage shall protect him, against the Art-hating humorists of this malicious time, whose envious thoughts (like Quailes) feed only on poyson, snarling (like doggs) at every thing which never so little disagreeth from their owne Stoicall dispositions.45

By defining a space for erotic desire and private experience, Drayton is simultaneously defining a space for a new kind of poetry and he draws a connection between the defense of his scandalous, degenerate subject Peirs, lover of Edward II, and the defense of poetry. Both need defense from the sober self-control of the stoic temperament.46 However, Peirs is not overlooked in Holinshed – he is a major player in the reign of Edward II – but he remains a function of Edward’s story. By contrast, Drayton’s complaint presents events from Peirs’ perspective and takes a much more sympathetic attitude towards his wantonness. In so far as the ghost gives voice to excessive passion and privileges private desire, even cupidinous desire, over public duty, it is morally transgressive. Moreover, the dubious ontological status of the ghost, and the association of ghostly phenomena with irrationality, are not only challenges to the rational self-abnegation on 44

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In “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Derrida notes that the term “pharmakon,” which Plato uses to condemn writing in the Phaedrus, means both poison and medicine. This pun threatens the philosophical process from within, because it is a permanently ambiguous term and is too untidy for dialectic reasoning. In “The Double Session,” Derrida goes on to classify puns such as “pharmakon” as “points of indefinite pivoting,” a process that marks spots that can never be mastered or dialecticized. I would argue that the paradox is another site of “indefinite pivoting.” See A Derrida Reader: Between the Blinds, ed. Peggy Kamuf (New York: Harvester-Wheatsheaf, 1991), pp. 124–37 and 190. All quotations from Peirs Gaveston are from The Works of Michael Drayton, ed. Hebel et al., vol. I. In Marlowe’s Edward II (I.i.6–9), Gaveston compares himself to Leander, a figure whose marginal glamor impressed itself on late Renaissance culture through Marlowe’s, Chapman’s and Petowe’s shameful reworkings of the myth of Hero and Leander. In her notes to the poem, The Complete Works of Michael Drayton, V, p. 25, Kathleen Tillotson suggests that “Stoicall” is a misprint for satirical, on the grounds that the phrase, “Stoicall dispositions,” does not make sense. This chapter argues for ways in which the phrase, “Stoicall dispositions,” might well have made sense in a late Elizabethan context because the historical complaints challenge the ideal of stoic Englishness.

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which the English ideal is founded, but also challenge the very processes of ratiocination. The liminal and extraordinary figure of the ghost arouses feelings of wonder, awe and shock. Wonder seizes on those details that from a rational point of view seem trivial or perverse. The presence of the ghost offers knowledge and forms of experience that are inaccessible to other kinds of writing, thereby corroborating the claims that literary forms of history may offer necessary, but unexpected, forms of knowledge. Thus Peirs and Edward are not only to be anatomized and criticized, they are also to be wondered at. Peirs’ ghost describes itself as: A verie meteor in the eies of men, Wherein the world a wonder-world may see Of heaven-bred joye and hell-nurst miserie. (ll.34–6)

It demands a response that is specifically literary, one which draws on wonder, pity and emotion, rather than reason. Yet it is the unreasonableness of the ghost that makes it such an attractive figure to the authors of the tragic complaint because it is through this shameless unreasonableness that they challenge the political, cultural and gender definitions promulgated by the status quo.47 In Holinshed’s Chronicles the obsessive love between Edward II and his paramour Peirs Gaveston is simply a disease and a sin, and Peirs’ fall is an example of divine punishment. By contrast, in his complaint of Peirs, Drayton dissipates this master narrative among conflicting opinions. At one point, for example, the text forgets its hostility to Peirs, and the ghost suggests that Peirs was overthrown, not because he was immoral, but because of the ambitions of other courtiers “whose eyes to death envide my glorie, / Whose saftie still upon my down-fall stood” (ll. 355–6).48 47

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Lynn Enterline, The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 12, makes the important observation that the Ovidian myths of Philomela, Orpheus, Actaeon and Echo become commonplaces in the vocabulary of Renaissance self-representation. In these stories, she argues, subjectivity, authorship and language are undermined from within the voice itself. The ghostly speakers of the historical complaints are another expression of this Renaissance fascination with lost voices, an extreme reworking of the relationship between representation, materiality and action, which puts intense pressure on empiricist conceptions of the voice. Rosamond’s ghost, for example, materializes as a consequence of an over-powering desire to speak. The rhetorical impulse precipitates form, it calls the individual into being, as far as a ghost has being, and not the other way round. Late sixteenth-century culture is also divided over which part of the past it should research and which sources it should use. A note signed by M.D., and appended to the first edition of Peirs Gaveston, argues that the poem offers an alternative to “the writers of these latter times” because it goes back to medieval sources which are closer to the events and will therefore contribute to the stated aim of embodying the past “without maime or deformitie.” For an analysis of one form of the

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Unlike Holinshed, Drayton’s response to Peirs is ambivalent. Peirs is a threat to England, a figure of excess and superfluity, who spends and cannot be controlled and is therefore quintessentially un-English. In fact, Peirs wears over-exotic foreign clothes (l. 1078), and is a double outsider: a page who has been elevated to equality with King Edward, and a Frenchman exiled from France. Peirs threatens the patrimony of the nation and it is even rumored that he has committed the ultimate sacrilege, for the English, by conveying no less than King Arthur’s relics out of the country (ll. 1261–6). Peirs represents undifferentiated sexual appetite, the confusion of lasciviousness and lavishness, who speaks excess, and possesses both Edward and his own wife with the same relish, with the same strained imagery of the sun and Titan. Yet for all his acknowledged monstrosity, Peirs is also an object of sympathy for Drayton, a champion of love and private experience, who personalizes English history, fleshes out its details and makes interpretation problematic. His love for Edward is sometimes presented as an example of perfect harmony between souls: O heavenly concord, musicke of the minde, Touching the heart-strings with such harmonie, The ground of nature, and the law of kinde, Which in conjunction doe so well agree, Whose revolution by effect doth prove, That mortall men are made divine by love. ll. 169–74

The complaint is ambivalent in its attitude towards Peirs partly because it questions the values of the public realm, and recognizes hypocrisy in the world and its standards. The individual subject is now threatened by the public gaze, as Peirs is victimized and loses control of his reputation: “My youth embowel’d by their curious eyes, / Whose true reportes my life anatomis’d” (ll. 373–4). Edward’s rejection of worldly values is no longer simply condemned, it is also understandable: “O damned world, I scorne thee and thy worth, / The very source of all iniquitie” (ll. 487–8).49

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dialectic between antiquity and the Middle Ages in the writing of England, see Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood, pp. 21–62. Recreative activity, idleness, sensuality and sensuous indulgence are all associated with emasculation in Daniel’s dialogue, “Ulisses and the Syren.” The Syren invites Ulisses to come to her, “And joy the day in mirth the while” (l. 7). Ulisses rejects her offer and explains: “Delicious Nimph, suppose there were / Nor honour, nor report, / Yet manlines would scorne to weare / The time in idle sport” (ll. 25–8). Quoted from Samuel Daniel, Poems and A Defence of Ryme, ed. Arthur Colby Sprague (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1972). However, a contrast is also established in the poem between Edward I’s meritocratic court and that of Edward II. Drayton claims that Elizabeth’s court, like the court of Edward I, nourishes virtue, learning, arts and military glory. Drayton treats Peirs and Edward sympathetically, but the court of Edward II is not constructed as an ideal.

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Peirs is undone partly by hostile reception, by gossip and misinterpretation. The need to protect integrity, which is expressed in the complaint, necessitates a renegotiation of the relationship between public and private spheres. In Drayton’s complaint of Matilda (1594), as well as Daniel’s Complaint of Rosamond, the value of the private sphere is associated with the female speaker’s need for self-protection. The frankness of the English ideal, the desirability of a life lived openly and publicly, the very idea that subjectivity can only be fully expressed in the public realm, is challenged by the female subject’s need to preserve its secrets and its integrity. Gossip, which Matilda defines as “Foule Blabbing tel-tale, secrets soone bewrayer” (l. 148), has already effected a kind of rape against Matilda, long before King John tries to seduce her, because it is loose talk that originally arouses his interest in her.50 Complaint renegotiates the humanist hierarchy of public over private spheres. In fact, retreat becomes a form of resistance for Matilda, as she seeks greater freedom in the country, away from the dangers and pressures of the public realm, but even in this secret place, the eyes of the court spy on her and pry into her privacy: “My steppes are told, my pathes by spyes are noted” (l. 659). Lust turns King John into a tyrant, a modern Nero, and Matilda attacks not only the perversion of power through eros, but the “wanton and adulterate conceits” of John’s Ovidian style which creates its own perverse reality. Her chastity is reflected in Elizabeth’s chastity, and Matilda prophesies a golden age of peace, when poets will sing, and monarchs will protect the public interest, not their own private interests. These lyrics are an attack on courtly values and courtly culture, and also on humanist values, as they valorize the private realm and question the desirability of an existence lived publicly. The historical subject is secure if it remains sequestered from the court, and if it remains silent, as language remains a way of violating integrity. The publication of one’s story is a form of whoredom. In these complaints both Drayton and Daniel promote what has been overlooked: Matilda is not even mentioned in Holinshed, and nor is John’s sexual appetite. Rosamond is only mentioned at the very end of the history of Henry II’s reign, and the account of their relationship is brief and marginal to the main history of his reign. She has no voice and is referred to as a symptom of Henry’s lust. By defining a space for erotic desire and private experience, within the fiction of England, the generation of shame simultaneously defines a space for a different and more inclusive kind of subjectivity. 50

All quotations from Matilda are from The Works of Michael Drayton, ed. Hebel et al., vol. I.

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l aureates of shame: defining public and privat e space The narratives on which these complaints draw function as an anti-genre to lyric, highlighting the dangers of solipsism, and questioning the author’s claim to be the origin and end of the text. In turn, lyric functions as an anti-genre to narrative, and highlights the possibility that history is nothing more than a highly personal interpretation of events which can never be fully known because of the distortions and limitations of language. Discourse is no longer conceived to be independent of time or change, and the complaint exposes the laureate’s claims to commemorate the deeds of the nation for posterity. Moreover, truth is rendered problematical, not only because it is divided between competing versions of the same event, but also because its relation to objective reality, to any understanding of objective historical fact, is undermined by the text’s awareness of the ways individuals construct their own truth. History, as Paul Ricoeur argues in The Reality of the Historical Past, is more a matter of representation than documentation.51 The generation of shame uses lyric to unsettle contemporary definitions of history, to give voice to women and to passionate men, but these writers are also acutely aware of the problems posed by lyric. These complaints shamelessly expose the shameful, but they are also reflections on the limits and problems of exploiting shame, and on the consequences of such strategies for the subject, for history and for the text. The exploration of the relationship between shame and the ideals of Englishness is developed in Englands Heroicall Epistles where the relationship between the letters, and between the letters, the chronicle annotations and public events, is characterized by parody.52 The epistles serve to clarify Drayton’s developing self-consciousness as a national poet whose duty it is to commemorate 51

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Paul Ricoeur, The Reality of the Historical Past (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1984), p. 2. Ricoeur conceives of his project as undermining the problematic of subject and object established by Kant. Ricoeur challenges the division between history and fiction by challenging the division between objectivity and subjective projection. Compare Hans-Georg Gadamer’s warning, in Truth and Method (1965), translation ed. Garrett Barden and John Cumming (London: Sheed & Ward, 1975), p. 289: “application is neither a subsequent nor a merely occasional part of the phenomenon of understanding, but codetermines it as a whole from the beginning.” In this case, application is “not the relating of some pre-given universal to the particular situation,” but a question of the interpreter relating the text to their own particular hermeneutical situation (p. 289). Hulse, Metamorphic Verse, pp. 220–41, explores the interaction between historiography and the minor epic through a discussion of Drayton’s legends of Peirs (1594), Matilda (1594) and Robert Duke of Normandy (1596). He takes a very pessimistic view of Drayton’s experiments in historical poetry, concluding that history and the marvelous deconstruct each other “to reveal a blank space beyond” (p. 241). Richard Hardin, “Convention and Design in Drayton’s Heroicall Epistles,” PMLA 83 (1968): 35–41, presents the collection as an exploration of God’s providential plan for England. Neither critic acknowledges that this kind of history engages with problems of literary self-definition.

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and record both the past and the present stories of Britain, a role that Drayton had already started to explore in his complaints of Peirs and Matilda. Englands Heroicall Epistles is certainly a patriotic text and the chronological arrangement of the epistles unfolds the providential plan that will lead England to greatness, and yet there is a tension between the historical and heroic material, and the shamefully amorous lyric material.53 For example, the cluster of epistles from the reigns of Henry V and Richard II explores the compatibility of private desire and public duty, of lyric and heroic form. In “The Epistle of Queene Katherine to Owen Tudor,” Katherine, the widow of Henry V, affirms her love for Owen Tudor, an accomplished courtier, but her social inferior. She expresses her craving for “Those secret Joyes, that other Women have” (l. 144), and sets private desire over public virtue: So I (a Queene) be soveraigne in my choyse, Let others fawne upon the publique voyce; ll. 145–654

In contrast, Owen Tudor’s reply to her letter affirms his determination to work with Providence, and brings about a temporary reconciliation between private desire and public duty. This reconciliation is achieved in Merlin’s prophecy that kings and queens will follow from Tudor’s line. Just as, in The Faerie Queene (III.III.21–50), Merlin prophesies that Britomart’s body natural will be reconciled to her body politic through her love for Artegall, which will produce a line of glorious sovereigns, so Owen Tudor prophesies with Merlin that his fruitful union with Katherine will unite private desire and patriotic duty in the establishment of the Tudor line. This happy 53

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Tzetvan Todorov uses the categories of ´emetteur (sender) and r´ecepteur (receiver) in his analysis of the construction of meaning in Litt´erature et signification (Paris: Larousse, 1967). His argument that language depends on the response of the reader for signification can usefully be applied to the pairs of epistles that make up Drayton’s text. Each letter depends on a response for completion and the pairs of epistles figure the problems of constructing meaning and the conflicting claims of author and reader on the text. Compare Bakhtin’s call in “Discourse Typology in Prose,” first published in 1929, and reprinted in Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, ed. Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska, Michigan Slavic Contributions 8 (Ann Arbor: Michigan Slavic Publications, 1978), pp. 176–96, for a new approach to the analysis of discourse which does not confine words within the bounds of a single monologic context. In Englands Heroicall Epistles, the pairs of epistles deal with the process of shifting words from one utterance to another, and in such cases, Bakhtin identifies “an inner dialogic relation between the word in one context and the word in the context of another speech act” (p. 193). Bakhtin’s theory emphasizes “the sociology of language usage” (p. 195). It presents dialogue as an arena of events within itself, one in which the very topic of discourse is seen in a new light which discloses new facets of meaning which are inaccessible to monologic discourse. All quotations from Englands Heroicall Epistles are from Works, ed. Hebel et al., vol. II. Line numbers will be given in the text.

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union of private and public is also expressed through the metamorphosis of Petrarchan imagery in Owen Tudor’s epistle. The roses and lilies which are invoked by countless Petrarchan poets to praise their mistress’ complexion, and are conventionally used to exalt the primacy of personal beauty and personal desire, are transmuted by Owen Tudor into the emblems of royalty. The French lily and the English rose are reconciled in the redemptive myth of Tudor propaganda.55 But Owen Tudor’s vision is only a temporary reconciliation of private desire and public duty, and it is undermined by the pair of epistles which immediately follow it, between William de-la-Poole and Queen Margaret, in the 1597 edition, and between Elinor Cobham and Duke Humphrey, from the 1598 edition onwards. Both pairs of epistles reveal the disintegrating force of private desire, and its dangerous effects on the state, through the events which surrounded the deposition of Richard II.56 The single idealized version of the past, which is represented in Owen Tudor’s articulation of God’s universal plan for England, is undermined by the variety of personal interpretations of the events that make up English history. In this tension between erotic and heroic values, between introspection and high matter, Englands Heroicall Epistles addresses issues raised by other forms popular in the 1590s, such as the sonnet sequence and the epyllion, from a different perspective. In the Heroicall Epistles, the tension is focused on the combination of lyric and narrative as a means of exploring the divisions between private and public meaning. This leads to tensions in Drayton’s role as, on the one hand, he presents himself as what Richard Hardin, borrowing from Nietzsche, calls a “monumental historian,” whose patriotism finds expression in epideictic rhetoric and, on the other hand, he presents himself as a secretary, as a channel for the private emotions of others, and his sense of value and patriotic duty is complicated by his awareness of the way individuals construct their own truth.57 55

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See especially ll. 33–46. Katherine Carter, “Drayton’s Craftsmanship: The Encomium and the Blazon in Englands Heroicall Epistles,” HLQ 38 (1975): 297–314, examines how the Epistles use epideictic strategies to relate history. The love affair between William de-la-Poole and Queen Margaret did not in fact occur. Late sixteenthcentury culture prompts us to reconsider the bases of the opposition between fact and fiction, an opposition which is constitutive of our understanding of literature and its relationship to other disciplines. William Nelson, Fact or Fiction: The Dilemma of the Renaissance Storyteller (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1973), pp. 11–55, explores the redefinition of the category of fiction and its gradual separation from the category of history. Richard Hardin, Michael Drayton, p. 36. Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation: The Conditions of Writing and Reading in Early Modern England (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), p. 95, argues that the tension between private and public meaning is exacerbated by the nature of the letter, which focuses on confidentiality, secretiveness and privacy, and their entry into the public domain.

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The heroic status of Englands Heroicall Epistles was nevertheless important to Drayton. In his epistle “To the Reader,” Drayton justifies his use of the term “heroicall” in his title by arguing that his collection of epistles is heroic in spirit, if not in form. It may not observe epic conventions of plot structure or style, but it does present the deeds of people of extraordinary greatness of spirit, and so it offers a personalization of epic criteria, and a more modern form of the gesta anglorum which, as might be expected, invokes Ovid as its model: And though (Heroicall) be properly understood of Demi-gods, as of HERCULES and AENEAS, whose Parents were said to be, the one, Coelestiall, the other, Mortall; yet is it also transferred to them, who for the greatnesse of Mind come neere to Gods. For to be borne of a coelestiall Incubus, is nothing else, but to have a great and mightie Spirit, farre above the Earthly weakenesse of Men; in which sense OVID (whose Imitator I partly professe to be) doth also use Heroicall. (“To the Reader”)58

As Drayton’s confidence in his poetic role increases, his definition of the heroic is extended to include the poet. The 1598 edition of Englands Heroicall Epistles includes the epistle from Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, to the Lady Geraldine, and presents the poet as hero through the figure of Howard. Parallels are drawn between the situation of Henry Howard, the poet of Tottel’s Miscellany who finds himself wandering the seas far from home, and Ulysses, the hero of Homer’s Odyssey (ll. 15–46). The parallel is reinforced by the inclusion in 1599 of Geraldine’s reply in which she casts herself as “ULYSSES Wife” (l. 181), and imitates the actions of patient Penelope by spinning and waiting (ll. 163–82).59 “The Annotations of the Chronicle Historie” reinforce the image of Surrey’s heroism and martial prowess, and point out that he defended England’s territory against the Scots and “punished ” “the wilfull Perjurie of James the fifth,” the Scottish king, at the Battle of Flodden. Surrey’s success as a castigator in the political sphere is paralleled by his success as a castigator in the linguistic sphere, as he not only keeps England chaste by defending her territorial integrity against the Scottish enemy, but he also defends linguistic integrity by punishing the abuse of language and the lack of integrity in the perjury of James V. Surrey’s linguistic project extends to 58 59

Drayton developed the doctrine of the “clear spirit” as a way of linking poets and heroes. See Joan Grundy, “Brave Translunary Things,” MLR 59 (1964): 502–3. Geraldine’s invocation of Penelope contributes to the feminization of epic criteria. Compare Peter Colse’s poem, Penelope’s Complaint (1596), which casts Penelope as its heroic protagonist. Hallett Smith, Elizabethan Poetry, p. 120, notes that chastity is a heroic subject in Orlando Furioso. For the confused etymologies of the words: heroine, eros, herus (a lord, or knight) and heros (a man of courage), in the Renaissance, see John Kerrigan, Motives of Woe, p. 5.

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his writings. The glorification of England and the English language through Surrey’s epistle, and through his poetry, extends the definition of Surrey as England’s champion to include Surrey the poet: Yet let not Tuscan thinke I doe it wrong, That I from thence write in my Native Tongue, That in these harsh-tun’d Cadences I sing, Sitting so neere the Muses Sacred Spring; But rather thinke it selfe adorn’d thereby, That England reades the prayse of Italy. ll. 5–10

The poet defines, glorifies and protects English identity as well as the soldier. The Earl of Surrey is an important expression of Drayton’s patriotism, of his sense of England’s glorious destiny, but Surrey’s epistle is also the most powerful vehicle in the collection for the expression of Drayton’s ideas about poetry. The world of history in Englands Heroicall Epistles is also the world of eros, and Drayton sees himself as a love poet, as well as a poet-historian, as the author of the sonnet sequence, Idea, first published in 1592, and simultaneously as the author of the Heroicall Epistles.60 Through Surrey as poet-lover and poet-hero, Drayton explores his own poetic ambitions, and the historical poem moves into the realm of contemporary poetics. Drayton’s identification of the roles of love poet and historical poet is based on the view that memory plays a central role in all poetic activity. Englands Heroicall Epistles is an exploration of the role of memory in constructing national and personal identities, of its potential both to create and to destroy. For Drayton the powers of commemoration and creation are interdependent, and this explains his veneration for the bardic tradition which combines lyricism and historical narrative.61 The bards not only sing to their harps, like the old lyric poets, they also record the past and preserve the records of families and nations like historical poets: 60 61

The sonnet sequence, Idea, in which the poet speaks in the first person of his love for Idea, followed Englands Heroicall Epistles in the 1599, 1600 and 1602 editions. Maureen Quilligan, Milton’s Spenser: The Politics of Reading (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), pp. 120–8, discusses the importance of memory in the heroic poetry of Spenser and Milton, noting that it is the consciousness of the past that ensures the possibility of reformation (p. 124). Drayton’s invocation of the bardic model of authorship is discussed by Geoffrey Hiller, “‘Sacred Bards’ and ‘wise Druides’: Drayton and his Archetype of the Poet,” ELH 51 (1984): 1–15; and by John E. Curran Jr., “The History Never Written: Bards, Druids, and the Problem of Antiquarianism in Poly Olbion,” RQ 51 (1998): 498–525. Curran argues that the bards are Drayton’s way of combating the antiquarian argument that our knowledge of the past, prior to the start of the records, is limited. He claims that Drayton is insistent about the need to battle loss and time, and he takes issue with Claire McEachern’s point, in The Poetics of English Nationhood 1590–1612 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 138–91, that Poly Olbion is “an aggressively local poem” (p. 139) that privileges the forces of temporal and geographical loss and disintegration.

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This Berdh, as they call it in the British Tongue, or as we more properly say, Bard, or Bardus, be their Poets, which keepe the Records of Pedigrees and Descents, and sung in Odes and Measures to their Harpes, after the old manner of the Lyricke Poets. (“Owen Tudor to Queene Katherine.” “Annotations of the Chronicle Historie.”)

In Queen Katherine’s version of the myth of Hippocrene, the fountain of the Muses is also the fountain of memory, and literature is defined as commemoration and history, with poets and chroniclers functioning as a form of corporate memory. It is their ability to remember which produces fame. In practice, the Elizabethans linked elegy with acts of commemoration, and with epistolary poems of love or complaint. Indeed, some of the elegies published with sonnet cycles in the 1590s are very similar to love letters.62 For example, elegies 4 and 5, in Barnabe Barnes’ sequence Parthenophil and Parthenophe (1593), reproduce an epistolary exchange between Parthenophil and his mistress. Barnes’ elegies are usually mournful or plaintive, although they are sometimes satirical (elegy 4), or erotic (elegies 9 and 21), and it is emphasized that they are the product of private space. They also link commemoration with the erotic, by virtue of their location in a Petrarchan narrative. In addition, like the epistles of Englands Heroicall Epistles, these elegies are not only forms of commemoration, they are also forms of selfdramatization which draw parallels between the content of the poem and the content, or personality, of their author. In the 1599, 1600 and 1602 editions of Englands Heroicall Epistles the final epistle from Lord Gilford Dudley to Lady Jane Gray is followed by a sonnet which catalogues the lovers of Englands Heroicall Epistles and introduces the sonnet sequence Idea. In this sonnet the poet tries to demonstrate that he has discharged his duty and implies that he has grown tired of the burden he assumed in writing Englands Heroicall Epistles: Their sev’rall Loves since I before have showne, Now give me leave, at last, to sing mine owne.

He asks for permission to find the recreation he craves in the sonnet sequence Idea. The catalogue sonnet is the place where the more impersonal modes of Englands Heroicall Epistles modulate into the personal, where the past turns into the present, and where Englands Heroicall Epistles becomes Idea. Rather than casting Petrarchanism as a preliminary to heroic poetry, the catalogue sonnet presents the Petrarchan experience as complementary 62

See F. Weitzmann, “Notes on the Elizabethan Elegie,” PMLA 50 (1935): 436; A. L. Bennett, “The Principal Rhetorical Conventions in the Renaissance Personal Elegy,” SP 51 (1954): 107; and Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982), pp. 206–12.

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to the Heroicall Epistles. Even though Englands Heroicall Epistles is critical of Petrarchanism, it concludes by making the recreative freedom of the lyric mode the basis for its rehabilitation. At least in the context of Drayton’s fictionalized autobiography, which presents Idea as posterior to Englands Heroicall Epistles, Drayton manages to suggest that narrative and lyric modes are interdependent versions of reality, and that heroic narrative has its necessary complement in the marginal affairs of lyric. epistol ary form and the interrogation of the poetics of shame Nevertheless, in Englands Heroicall Epistles, the assertion of a distinctly literary form of authority by the generation of shame is undermined by unease over language and its relation to truth, and the expression of this unease is focused through the letter. The letter is a form of self-creation and it defines a specific image of the self by selecting and interpreting details from the flux of events. In this sense, the letter is a metaphor for history, which is similarly selective in its choice of details. The letter focuses on the imaginative processes by which experience is transformed into language, but the processes of imagination, of selection and interpretation, are the universal conditions of discourse, whether apparently objective and historical, or avowedly personal and literary. Since Petrarch’s rediscovery of Cicero’s Epistulae ad familiares, published in Rome in 1467, the Renaissance had been keenly aware of the potential and techniques of letter-writing. Late sixteenth-century writers increasingly exploit the literary potential of the letter, often combining it with complaint, as demonstrated in Daniel’s Letter from Octavia to Marcus Antonius (1599), and the epistles Charles Brandon added to his play, The Tragicomoedi of the Vertuous Octavia (1598).63 Handbooks such as Angel Day’s English Secretorie (1586), John Hoskins’ Directions for Speech and Style (1599) and, to a lesser extent, Nicholas Breton’s Poste with a Packet of Madde Letters (1602), which was more entertaining than instructive, promulgated the techniques of letter-writing and codified its sub-genres and conventions. Although letter-writing was considered to be 63

Claudio Guill´en, “Notes Towards the Study of the Renaissance Letter,” in Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History and Interpretation (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986), ed. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski, pp. 70–101, explores “the Renaissance awareness of the letter” (p. 73). Letterwriting manuals, which became extremely popular in the Renaissance, are discussed by L. B.Wright, Middle-Class Culture in Elizabethan England (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1935), pp. 139–46; and Jean Robertson, The Art of Letter Writing: An Essay on the Handbooks Published in England During the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (London: University of Liverpool Press, 1942), pp. 9–24.

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one of the attributes of gentility, the epistle was a flexible form, ranging from the commercial letters analyzed in The Marchants Avizo (1591), to the dedicatory epistles which mediated the relationship between authors and patrons.64 Although epistolary handbooks established models and rules, decorum demands that the letter be appropriate to the nature of its author, to the nature of its recipient, and to its occasion, thereby sanctioning a fluidity that challenges strict generic and stylistic divisions. In Drayton’s hands, the epistle becomes the means to question the more radical assumptions of the 1590s, particularly the promotion of authorial individuality as the basis of literary authority. By focusing on the individual perspective on events, on the power of the mind to shape experience, the letter questions the notion of history as a force external to the individual and whether the notion of truth exists outside its articulation in language. Admittedly, history as external force exists in Englands Heroicall Epistles, in the guise of Providence, and characters can choose to act with it, like Owen Tudor, or against it, like Elinor Cobham, but the focus of the epistle is always the problematical relationship of the individual to the public world. The truth of the chronicle annotations often collides with the personal projections, emotions and thoughts of the epistle writer, and the dual nature of Englands Heroicall Epistles, as both narrative and lyric, makes any simple divisions between objectivity and subjectivity, fact and interpretation, problematical. As the apparent certainties of fact dissolve under the pressure of conflicting interpretations, the mind is revealed as a source of meaning, and the letter becomes a form of lyric. Thus the Heroicall Epistles function as a synecdoche for literature through their exploration of the ways in which language affects experience, and of the way style defines, and does not merely reflect, the self. The letters manipulate conventional styles and explore a variety of ways in which the self manifests itself through language, most notably in the Petrarchan style of Henry II and Edward II, and the Ovidian style of Edward the Black Prince and King John. Henry uses language to recreate Rosamond as a goddess whose perfections will make him immortal (ll. 75– 106), and he reinterprets the signs of her guilt as emblems of her virtue. For example, Rosamond’s name, which Rosamond herself reads as a source of shame (ll. 129–30), is reinterpreted by Henry as a sign of all that is sweet and excellent (ll. 153–64), because Henry’s assumed role as lover demands 64

John Hoskins, Directions for Speech and Style, ed. Hoyt H. Hudson (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1935), makes the connection between letter-writing and courtliness by using material from Sidney’s Arcadia to illustrate correct writing style (pp. 4–8).

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her deification to justify his passion.65 Similarly, Edward the Black Prince uses the sensual Ovidian style to convert everything to instruments of love. Ovidian rhetoric, with its mythical and rhetorical transformations, is used to construct a world which is congenial to Edward (ll. 153–74), only to see it undercut by Alice’s reply which places matter above style. In this way, Englands Heroicall Epistles explores how the rhetorical conventions of these personal styles serve to structure the perception of history and the definition of self for both author and reader.66 Drayton’s text foregrounds the processes of letter-writing by commenting on the tools of ink and paper, the physical appearance of the letter, the activity of the hand in writing the letter and the activities of other hands as they receive, open and touch the same letter. For example, in her letter to King John, Matilda describes the process of sitting down to write and the difficulty she has in articulating feelings which are beyond her control: I set me downe, at large to write my mind, But now nor Pen, nor Paper can I find; For still my passion is so powerfull o’r me, That I discerne not things that stand before me: ll. 27–30

Eventually she manages to put pen to paper, but the frequent underlinings, ink blots and corrections which appear on the page, “I enterline, I blot, correct, I note” (l. 36), are visual projections of the combination of fear and outrage which is precipitated by the reception of John’s letter. Matilda’s letter gives physical shape to her inner thoughts and, in these lines, meaning and its expression exist in an uncomplicated relationship where external matter gives direct expression to internal thought. Matilda’s letter emphasizes the process of letter-writing and letter-receiving. It presents the moment when individual interiority finds a form, which makes it external and subject to view, and figures the problems of reception through the imagined reactions of King John. The epistles overcome absence in two 65

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Joan Grundy, The Spenserian Poets (London: Edward Arnold, 1969), pp. 119–20, relates the theme of shame in the Epistles to the exposure of private matters in the complaint, as well as to sexual passion. For a more up-to-date discussion of the construction of a public sphere by the Spenserian poets in Jacobean England, see Michelle O’Callaghan, The “shepheard’s nation”: Jacobean Spenserians and Early Stuart Political Culture, 1612–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000). The epistles of Henry, Edward, the Black Prince and John reveal how individuality is constructed by conventional means. As Natalie Zemon Davis argues in “Boundaries of the Sense of Self in SixteenthCentury France,” in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality and the Self in Western Thought, ed. Thomas C. Heller et al. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), p. 63, common experience may feed the sense of one’s distinctive history, and cultural categories and images can be turned to individual advantage.

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ways. Firstly, they act as substitutes for their absent authors. For example, Charles Brandon presents his letter to Mary the French queen as a stop-gap measure, as a way of overcoming spatial and temporal distance until the time when they will be reunited: “With patience then let us our Hopes attend, / And till I come, receive these Lines I send” (ll. 183–4). Secondly, a letter, like Matilda’s, gives a material existence, or presence, to abstract thoughts by giving them shape and making them, quite literally, tangible. As John explains in his letter to Matilda, the function of the letter is “By signes in presence to expresse the Mind” (l. 10). The historical complaint explores the conditions of its own production and the claims made by script and print on the authorial subject. They comprehend different kinds of writing and different kinds of source. Oral accounts are set up against written accounts, and different perspectives on textuality are explored. The frequent references to the writer’s hand and to the writer’s handwriting serve to personalize the text, to highlight the link between text and body and the dependence of words on matter, but the body leaves other traces on the text in addition to these manual imprints. Lady Jane Gray’s tears, for example, stain her page and dilute the ink, so that the letters seem to weep in sympathy with her. The page becomes an exact representation of its author’s physical and mental state, as the paleness of the page parallels the paleness of her complexion and the smudged letters on the white page “weepe with [her] dim Eye” (l. 29). On the one hand, these imprints of corporeality on the text answer the problem of how to represent feeling in language. They posit a direct link between internal and external, between feeling and its articulation, and an untroubled relationship between thought and the semiotic system that gives it perfect expression. In Gray’s letter, her feelings are literally put on paper, as her tears fall onto the page and stain it with a bodily language in which feeling and expression are one, as she writes about weeping in inky tears. However, this is only one answer to the problem of relating feeling which is raised by the epistles’ particular form of lyric expression and, as I will argue later, Englands Heroicall Epistles also explore the potential of language to betray and distort.67 The analogies between self and artefact, and between body and artefact, are an attempt to find some grounding for the text, in the face of the disintegration of authorities which once controlled language. The situation is one 67

Gray’s letter confuses the distinctions between subject and object, body and rhetoric. Enterline, Rhetoric of the Body, p. 6, notes that the understanding of the body as “both a bearer of meaning as well as a linguistic agent, a place where representation, materiality, and action collide” is central to Ovid and to his Renaissance heirs.

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of spiralling anxiety for the generation of shame because the destabilization of authority, which results from the focus on the personal perspective, forces the author to locate authority in the only apparent certainty – the private self – which in turn provokes yet more anxiety. For example, Rosamond’s inscription of feeling in her letter is, in some ways, a repetition of her original sin because, in her desire to set down her private thoughts, she is repeating that confusion of private and public behavior which led to her loss of chastity in the first place. Her linguistic incontinence perpetuates this confusion and Rosamond’s letter draws attention to this by indicating that it talks of secret things. On one level, publication enables Rosamond’s ghost to set the record straight, to define and defend herself in the face of what she sees as historical misconstructions, but on another level, the process of exteriorization through language produces a series of painful disclosures which force Rosamond to acknowledge her responsibility for her sin. Her imprisonment within the tower, within the maze, is a parody of the state of separateness and solitude she should have sought in order to preserve her chastity, and her ghost both promulgates her guilt, and defends her innocence, by projecting her private thoughts and feelings in the form of a letter into the public world, outside the isolation of the labyrinth and the tower. However, in Englands Heroicall Epistles, the confidence in the power of language to express feeling and thought is juxtaposed with the realization that language can betray and distort feeling as well. On the one hand, these poems develop a corporeal language in which there is a simple correspondence between self and expression, interiority and expression, in, for example, Rosamond’s ink-stained page which perfectly epitomizes her sullied purity (ll. 11–14), but the epistles do not always express their writer’s ideas as perfectly as does Rosamond’s corporeal language because they have a life of their own and are open to reinterpretation and misinterpretation by their readers. The epistle writer may try to control the reception of their letter, by projecting positive and negative scenes of reading, which delimit the reader’s interpretive freedom and the semantic potential of the text. For example, Rosamond’s reaction to the fountain of Diana (ll. 140–52), and to the pictures on the casket which Henry sent her “the Night before [she] Honour lost” (l. 154), offers a paradigm for the reception of her own epistle. The fountain reminds Rosamond of the story of Diana and Actaeon, and she sees a parallel between Actaeon’s act of defilement, through his intrusion on Diana’s private bath, and her own act of self-defilement through her liaison with Henry. As the narrative momentarily deteriorates into madness,

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she imagines that she is being pursued by her own thoughts, just as Actaeon was pursued and eventually dismembered by his own hounds: This sacred Image I no sooner view’d, But as that metamorphos’d Man, pursu’d By his owne Hounds; so, by my Thoughts am I, Which chase me still, which way soe’r I flye. ll. 144–7

Another interpretation of the fountain of Diana is possible, one which draws a parallel between Henry’s defilement of Rosamond and Actaeon’s defilement of Diana, but this interpretation is not available to Rosamond who reads every text as an indictment of her own behavior. The pictures of Jove’s amorous liaisons and erotic metamorphoses, which decorate the casket, clearly lend themselves to ambivalent interpretations. Rosamond reads the pictures of Amimone and Io on the casket as warnings against the consequences of lust, and uses this interpretation of the visual text to excuse Henry’s behavior: This was not an intrapping Bait from thee, But by thy Virtue gently warning mee, And to declare for what intent it came, Lest I therein should ever keepe my shame. ll. 159–62

Yet the casket can also be read as an incitement to lust, which is how Rosamond first interpreted it. In this case, it becomes an indictment of Henry’s manipulative strategies and of his deceptive rhetoric which insinuate that adulterous lust is inescapable, and even natural, when what he asks is, in the terms of the epistle, unnatural. Rosamond now reads every text as an admonition, and her insistence on reading within the parameters of guilt and innocence, shame and excuse, argues that subsequent rereadings of her epistle should be firmly contextualized within this moral framework. However, the ambivalent potential of the casket also undermines such moralized interpretations, as it suggests that Rosamond’s morality is nothing more than the expression of obsessive self-abasement.68 68

Barbara Ewell argues that in the terms of Drayton’s career, Englands Heroicall Epistles represents a shift away from the neoplatonism of his early works, with their invocation of inherited ideals, to a more personalized poetics which focuses on selfhood as a principle of order. See “Unity and the Transformation of Drayton’s Poetics in Englands Heroicall Epistles: From Mirrored Ideals to ‘The Chaos in the Mind,’” MLQ 44 (1983): 231; and “From Idea to Act: The New Aesthetic of Drayton’s Englands Heroicall Epistles,” JEGP 82 (1983): 515–25. Although I agree that the Epistles objectify their own methods and the shaping processes of the creative mind, Ewell emphasizes the personal perspective in Englands Heroicall Epistles at the expense of its nationalistic and communal

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The varied strategies that exploit shame are not without their own problems and contradictions, particularly in the ways they promote the subjective. In Englands Heroicall Epistles, these problems are acknowledged through the female writers who express the most serious reservations about the nature of language and the value of writing. Through its juxtaposition of male and female texts, male and female authors, the collection raises questions about the relationship of text, writer and reader through scenes of gendered reading and writing.69 The women are frequently much more hesitant in their application of words to thought than the male writers. Matilda, Alice, Rosamond and Elinor all describe the difficulty of getting started and of finding a form proper to their matter. For Alice, the problem of how to write and how one’s words will be received is highlighted through her awareness that her words will be read by a man. Plain words can always be misconstrued, as Matilda also acknowledges, but Alice construes the problem as one that is exacerbated if the text is female and the reader male. AS ONE that fayne would graunt, yet fayne deny, ’Twixt Hope and Feare I doubtfully reply, A Womans Weakenesse, lest I should discover, Answering a Prince, and writing to a Lover: And some say, Love with Reason doth dispence, And wrests our plaine words to another sense. Thinke you not then, poore Women had not need Be well advis’d, to write what Men should read; When being silent, but to move awry, Doth often bring us into obloquie? ll. 1–10

The problem of self-expression is exacerbated by the fact that if women give expression to their female thoughts then slander is let loose. By virtue of the restrictions on their own positions, and by virtue of their inability

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perspectives, and though Drayton may be witness to the disintegration of the medieval world, the Heroicall Epistles still affirm the permanence and value of nation and Protestantism. Lady Jane Gray is the incarnation of patriotic, Protestant values, and the harbinger of Elizabeth’s glorious reign. Her sense that providential forces control individual existence, and her realization that permanence can only be achieved after death, are privileged by virtue of their position at the end of Englands Heroicall Epistles. Enterline’s extensive and extremely productive analysis, in Rhetoric of the Body, of the ways Ovidian narratives “bring to light the often occluded relationships between sexuality, language, and violence” (p. 2), is an important context for my reading of Englands Heroicall Epistles. The female epistle writers are not only profoundly interested in the relationship between idealized literary forms, such as Petrarchanism and Ovidianism and sexual violence, they are also sensitive to the potential threat to the subject posed by any entry into language, even the plainest and simplest language.

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to turn stated aims into action, because of the limits imposed on female activity by society, women in Englands Heroicall Epistles are much more skeptical about the power of language to control and structure reality. Drayton’s view of gender figures his anxieties about authorship, both his fear of exposure to the hostile eyes of unknown readers and possible misinterpretation, and his fears about the immorality of the emotional indulgence he promulgates. The poet is in some sense a whore, as Daniel acknowledges at the very end of The Complaint of Rosamond, “Who made me knowne, must make me live unseene.” Self-promotion and self-articulation are sources of shame. Moreover, by virtue of their dependence on men, women are much more dubious about the power of language to express the self and to avoid misconstruction. Even Matilda’s recourse to the plain style as a way of preserving her integrity is ironic. Matilda attempts to uphold the identity of word and thing by simple diction, the eschewal of ornament and the rejection of any elaborate comparison which might open the way to ambiguity, but as she tests the notion of self-definition through language, even though the main focus of her attack is the specious rhetoric and distortion of John’s letter, she becomes aware of her inability to control language, of the impossibility of controlling its semantic potential, even through simplicity: My faint Hand writing, when my full Eye reads, From ev’ry word strange Passion still proceeds. ll. 41–2

Women are even denied the recourse to silence because, as Matilda points out, “some will say, that Silence doth consent” (l. 24). Different rules apply to female and male behavior, and to female and male uses of rhetoric. Men can tempt women in language because society actually transfers hermeneutical responsibility from men to women. Thus, as Alice points out in her allusions to the previous epistles of Rosamond and Matilda, women always get the blame for sexual misdemeanors and her attack on society’s double standard is expressed through an attack on the double standard of Petrarchan sexual politics. For Alice, as for Matilda, all language slips, whether its user is male or female. Alice argues from a position of inequality, and attempts to construct a position of equality for herself by manipulating the conventions of exchange and reciprocity which govern the exchange of letters. The conventions of giving and receiving letters are used to establish a new hermeneutical system in which author and reader exist in harmony. She challenges Edward to be honorable, and only then will she agree to

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grant his suit. She is careful to economize on her linguistic constructions and only sends him what she receives in a system of reciprocal exchange (ll. 59–60, 155–62): But if that love, Prince Edward doth require, Equall his Vertues, and my chaste desire; If it be such as we may justly vaunt, A Prince may sue for and a Lady graunt; If it be such as may suppresse my Wrong, That from your vaine unbridled Youth hath sprong. That Faith I send, which I from you receive: The rest unto your princely thoughts I leave.

She invokes a parallel between the exchange of words and the exchange of the body. The act of giving away more than one has received in the exchange of meaning is perceived as a kind of whoredom, or at least imprudence. In contrast, men can indulge in linguistic prodigality without the risk of shame. Alice’s epistle is an attempt to recuperate language through moderation. She is as aware as Matilda of its potential to destroy and distort, but she is also aware of its power to satisfy and entertain. As she acknowledges, words satisfy her desire indirectly with veiled enticements. Indeed, she was attracted to Edward when she heard her husband’s accounts of his attractions: Oft he would say, How sweet a Prince is hee! When I have prays’d him but for praysing thee; And to proceed, I would intreat and woo, And yet to ease him, helpe to prayse thee too. ll. 103–6

Alice’s discussion of the economics of exchange, and her exposure of the unequal status of men and women in a system which allows men alone to indulge in linguistic prodigality, introduces a theme which is also explored in “The Epistle of Duke Humphrey to Elinor Cobham.” The Duke’s epistle is structured by scenes of exchange, most notably the exchange of joy and woe re-enacted through his reply to his wife (ll. 145–8, 161–4). The epistle explores the obligations which structure the rituals of giving and receiving and exposes the states of gratitude and ingratitude. Duke Humphrey accuses England of ingratitude and contrasts this with positive images of his own prodigality. Even though he owed England nothing, he poured gifts into the nation’s lap out of pure magnanimity. In his reckoning of gifts given and gifts received, the Duke locates his claim to honor and glory in his

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prodigality, in the fact that he has given more than he received, and there is a very different attitude to male and female prodigality: England to me can challenge nothing lent, Let her cast up what is receiv’d, what spent; If I her owne, can she from blame be free, If she but prove a step-mother to mee? ll. 59–62

conclusion The complaints that have formed the focus of this chapter are fragmentary texts that dissipate the assessment of history among a number of conflicting perspectives. Their combination of fact and fiction raises questions about the nature of truth, while their exploration of the function of writing, in affirming authorial identity, raises questions about the nature of authorial integrity. Paradoxically, the perverse narratives of poetry seem to be closer to the truth of the past than the public narratives of the chronicles. In fact, poetry becomes the memory of the nation, a fuller and more effective means of recording the truth of events than history. Poetry and history complement each other, but poetry’s claim to attention comes from its very partiality, from the distortions that record the perspective of the individuals who fashion history. Like other forms popular in the 1590s, the complaint challenges accepted norms, whether social, generic or moral, and it reveals the corruption of chastity, and the weaknesses of the social and gender hierarchies, as it exposes the ideology of the emergent nation state and the exclusivity of the so-called commonweal. By setting narrative chronicles in dialogue with complaint, the generation of shame re-examines the nature of the Tudor subject. The texts produced by the combination of narrative history and the shameful resources of lyric contest late Elizabethan interpretations of the nature of Englishness, and question what D. R.Woolf terms “the zone of correct opinion about the past,” opinion which was, to a large extent, determined in the late sixteenth century by Holinshed’s Chronicles. While the Tudor chronicles extoll an Early Modern version of the stiff upper lip, the historical complaints adapt the chronicle material to form a shameful counter-history which redefines the nature of Englishness and resists the values promoted by the chronicles. They resist the interdependent political, cultural and gender hierarchies, and an attack on one aspect of this system necessitates a reorganization of other elements in the system. The proper Tudor nation requires a proper Tudor laureate to celebrate and articulate its identity. The debate over the

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nature of Englishness is also a debate over the nature of the canon, and the attempt to redefine the Tudor subject in these complaints is also an attempt to extend the boundaries of Tudor culture and to find a space for a new kind of Tudor writer, an effeminized Tudor writer, although not a female writer. It is the mixture of gendered elements, or, to put it in different terms, the paradox of gender, that writers in the generation of shame find so productive.

Epilogue

form s of the lit tle and l ate eliz abet han culture Late Elizabethan literary culture is un-whole-some. It exacerbates and parades its potential for shame, but it is also un-whole-some in a very literal sense, as well, in that its structures are disjunctive. The generation of shame is preoccupied with the fragmentable nature of culture. After the iconoclasm of the dissolution of the monasteries, not only the classical past, but also the more recent medieval past, came down to the English Renaissance as fragments. Late Elizabethan culture is constituted from fragments, from the remains of other cultures which Spenser, for example, commemorates in The Ruines of Rome (1591). In the Renaissance, knowledge was disseminated and preserved through anthologies, manuscript miscellanies and common-place books which assembled the monuments and structures of knowledge from aphorisms, quotations, facts and diverse parts of varied texts. These could then be worked into any text or situation. Paradoxically, these fragments, or commonplaces, assert the continuity of a community of knowledge. The processes of revisiting, recording, resynthesizing and remembering are central to late sixteenth-century culture. Of course, humanism itself requires the precise attention to textual detail that can produce a disintegrative reading. While the generation of shame defined itself in opposition to certain aspects of humanist ideology, these writers were themselves the products of humanist hermeneutical reforms that were propagated by sixteenth-century schools and universities. In this intellectual environment, even science was conceived as the assembly of facts from reliable sources in a new order, and not, primarily, as the discovery of new facts.1 Scientific knowledge, like other forms of knowledge, was a rearrangement of the past, a form of bricolage, and scientists were trained as commentators, and undertook the discussion of canonical texts, line by 1

See Ann Blair, “Humanist Methods in Natural Philosophy: the Commonplace Book,” JHI 53 (1992): 541–60; and Anthony Grafton, “Kepler as a Reader,” JHI 53 (1992): 561–72.

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line, as a process integral to the best scientific practice.2 Nevertheless, reading in detail, with an awareness of scribal and readerly errors, makes texts problematic, and makes both the text and the author the subject, and also the object, of knowledge and of history. Of course, fragments of knowledge were not gathered in chaos, and there were conventions that governed their reassembly. As Thomas Wilson notes, in The Arte of Rhetorique (1560), “al things stande by order,” and dispositio, or the arrangement of parts in discourse, is symbolic of social, political, natural and military order.3 Common-place books gather disparate pieces of information under headings and order facts within networks of association, but overall order and structure do not mask the fact that culture was the product of the recombination of parts.4 Indeed, classical texts and myths were often transmitted in the form of excerpted tales, arranged in different orders, in competing versions, and gathered as dictionaries.5 Thus from one point of view, the anthology becomes the basic form of all writing in the late sixteenth century, as texts are conceived as polyvocal, heterogeneous structures, which are composed from fragments drawn from other times, other situations and other texts. This may suggest another reason why forms, such as the sonnet sequence, come to occupy a central place in late Elizabethan literary culture. The sonnet sequence outdoes the anthologizing tendency that is characteristic of late sixteenth-century literary activity, by anthologizing itself. Each new sonnet attempts to reach a conclusion by repeating and recontextualizing what has been said before, so that the sequence weaves rhetorical garlands out of the citation and recitation of its own components, and constitutes its own edited highlights. Moreover, sonnet sequences are miscellaneous structures that mix a 2

3 4

5

Twentieth-century cultural theory made the term “bricolage” fashionable, but there is a related term, “bricole”, in sixteenth-century usage. Together, bricolage and bricole suggest the fragmentariness and the strategies of obliqueness that are, I claim, characteristic of the culture of the generation of shame. In tennis, a bricole is, according to the OED, “the rebound of a ball from the wall of a tennis court, a side-stroke against the wall.” It is also used figuratively to indicate “an indirect unexpected stroke or action.” Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique 1560, ed. G. H. Mair, Tudor and Stuart Library (n.p.: 1909), pp. 156–7. The conventions of gathering commonplaces and excerpting proverbs are discussed by Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993). As Lynn Enterline points out, in The Rhetoric of the Body from Ovid to Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University, Press, 2000), p. 1, even Ovid’s Metamorphoses came down to the Renaissance in fragments, which was, in a way, highly appropriate as “dismemberment informs Ovid’s reflections not only on corporeal form, but linguistic and poetic as well.” See also, De Witt T. Starnes and Ernest William Talbert, Classical Myth and Legend in Renaissance Dictionaries: A Study of Renaissance Dictionaries in Their Relation to the Classical Learning of Contemporary English Writers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955).

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variety of genres with the sonnet. For example, Barnabe Barnes’ sequence, Parthenophil and Parthenophe comprises one hundred and five sonnets, twenty-six madrigals, five sestine, twenty-one elegies, three canzoni, a translation of The First Eidillion of Moschus and twenty odes.6 Sequences are often complemented by complaints. The trend was established by the publication of Daniel’s Delia with The Complaint of Rosamond (1592), and was echoed in the publication of Thomas Lodge’s Phillis with The Complaint of Elstred (1593), and of Shakespeare’s Sonnets with A Lover’s Complaint (1609). The sonnet sequences refine the cultural identity of the individual author, and of the English nation, simultaneously, and images of discovery and fantastic treasure frequently figure the poet’s internal resources as well as the resources of England. The poet is full of poetic riches, just as England is self-sufficient and full of riches. In the sequence, Emaricdulfe (1595), for example, the poet-lover is compared to the merchant adventurer: What meane our Merchants so with eger minds To plough the seas to finde rich juels forth? Sith in Emaricdulf a thousand kinds Are heap’d, exceeding wealthie Indias worth Sonnet 157

Two senses of invention, invention as finding external matter and invention as finding internal matter, are confused in the image of the poet-adventurer whose imagination produces “a thousand kinds” out of his mistress, so that generic variety turns Emaricdulfe, itself, into a copious resource of personal and national significance. The length of the sequence displays the rhetorical qualities of copia and variatio, while the compact formality of individual sonnets calls on, and refines, the author’s technical abilities. The cultural transfer effected by the sonnet sequence, from Italian to English, from foreign to native soil, from one sequence to another, from classical to modern, not only refines the image of the poet, but also refines English culture and contributes to the idea of England as a nation which encompasses plenitude in little. Out of the fragmentariness and brevity of its component elements, which it gathers into significant wholes, the sonnet sequence turns itself into a repository of cultural knowledge which will prove England’s civilized status. The poet-lover’s literary ambitions are tied up with national ambitions, and both are based on self-conscious triviality. The sonnet sequence 6

7

In the only extant early copy of the sequence (British Library C.132.i.50), the different components are emphasized typographically: the sonnets, sestine, elegies, canzoni and eidillion are in italics; the madrigals and odes are in roman. The quotation is from Emaricdulfe. Sonnets written by E. C. Esquier (London: Printed for Matthew Law, 1595).

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is, after all, a recreative genre which explores that most trivial of subjects: love, but the authors of the sonnet sequence could still claim to be serving the commonwealth and could derive their authority from a new kind of laureateship that paradoxically extols the trivial. The fragments, digressions and ornaments contribute to the cultural increase which is one of the obsessions of a culture that associates literariness with fragmentariness. In seemingly trivial texts, which transmit an awareness of the disparateness, particularity and partiality of their component elements, the generation of shame not only redefines literary practice, it prompts a reconsideration of the nature of the ideal, of whether, in fact, the ideal need necessarily be conceived as a seamless integral whole, without cracks and discontinuities, or whether it is a conglomeration of parts, in which the parts retain something of their distinctive nature. The fragment can be read in many ways, but we have tended to see it as negative, as an emptying out, or loss. Fragmentation is undoubtedly associated with dismemberment and rape in Renaissance readings of Ovid, as Enterline has so brilliantly demonstrated, but, in sixteenth-century culture, fragmentation can also be something constructive. Thomas Nashe’s understanding of the fragmentary nature of experience and the elusive quality of truth does not make him nihilistic. In Christs Teares Over Jerusalem, Nashe locates truth and wholeness in the body of Christ, and, although his texts never achieve perfection, they do claim to impart truth.8 Nashe stresses the value of corporation and sets about gathering the parts into adumbrations of completeness, a completeness that can only be seen, that only has existence through the parts.9 Christ’s oration in Christs Teares plays extensively on the verb “to gather” and its derivatives (II, pp. 26–36). Christ “came into the World to no other ende but to gather together the lost sheepe of Israell” (p. 27), and he “practisd a thousand waies, to gather you [the people of Israel] to repentance and amendment of lyfe” (p. 27). By recording Christ’s complaint, Nashe also becomes one of the “Labourers and Gatherers,” with Christ, who strive “to reape and gather in his Harvest” (p. 27). Christ’s speech is a variation on the 8

9

Compare Spenser’s sonnet sequence, The Amoretti, which were published with the Epithalamion in 1595. While The Amoretti record his courtship of Elizabeth Boyle and look forward to their union, the final sonnet is about absence, not union, and the sequence is cast as a dilatory text which alternatively fixes and postpones the marriage day. Even the Epithalamion, which, generically, is a celebration of married union, is presented as a deferral, as a “Song made in lieu of many ornaments” (l. 427), which takes the place of what is to be and forestalls time with promises of reality. Like the epyllion, the sonnet sequence finds conclusion difficult, but, like Christs Teares, it turns the unstable, radically metamorphic nature of experience into a metaphysical, as well as an aesthetic, issue. Text quoted from The Yale Edition of the Shorter Poems of Edmund Spenser, ed. William Oram et al. (New Haven: Yale University, Press, 1989), p. 679. The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. R. B. McKerrow (Oxford: Blackwell, 1966), II, p. 32.

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theme of gathering. He gathers great crowds to hear him preach and feeds them with five loaves and two fishes, miraculously turning deficiency into sufficiency. To be charitable is translated as to “gather for the poore” (p. 28), and disciplined Christians are those who are “content to be so tamed or gathered ” (p. 31). In their obsessive efforts to gather together earthly fragments, Christ, and his agents, fulfill the injunction recorded in St. John’s Gospel (6:12), “Colligite fragmenta quae supersunt ne pereant” (Collect the fragments which remain lest they perish).10 But Christ’s injunction has cultural implications as well. His list of good things which are the sum total of gathered fragments includes bread, which is made from gathered grains of corn, and the monuments and structures of civilization, including buildings made from gathered stone, and society itself which is made “of a number of men gathered together” (p. 28). The process of gathering, the process of self-constitution out of diverse smaller elements, becomes the defining process of civilization. Nashe’s own contributions to the civilizing process are texts which speak on behalf of the collective literary community to a crowd gathered together by print. Authorship is formed from digressions and fragments, and not only is there no need to be consistent, but texts must draw attention to their components and uncover their cracks, because it is only in the coming together of fragments that wholeness can be glimpsed. Like Christ, who tried to gather his flock by the power of words, “Ah, woe is mee, that ever I opened my mouth to call thee, or gather thee” (p. 29), Nashe proves himself, in Christs Teares, by gathering together a string of trivia and inconsequential domestic examples which he hopes will convince his readers to listen to Christ. In the late sixteenth century, fragmentariness determines authorial selfconstruction, and the production of an acutely aesthetic, self-consciously literary kind of self. This is partly because ornamentality is itself fragmentary. An ornamental style is made up of smaller forms, such as metaphors and similes, embedded within larger structures, which may well disrupt narrative continuity and are disintegrative on some level. The self-conscious literariness of the generation of shame, the brazen ornamentality and triviality of its literary processes, inevitably generates a fragmentary textual structure and a fragmentary authorial self-construction. For Angus Fletcher, ornamentation involves the adjustment of an object to the prevailing norm, a process that is exemplified in conduct literature which aims to transmit 10

Petrarch may also have had this quotation in mind when he chose the Latin title for his sonnet sequence: Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (Fragments of vernacular poetry). See Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976) p. 26.

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the flourishes and rituals of hierarchical society to its lower levels.11 Nevertheless, the self-conscious ornamentality of those late Elizabethan texts that exploit shame both resists and constructs hierarchy. On the one hand, it defines a literary e´lite, that includes both writers and readers, while on the other hand, ornament is represented as prodigal, redundant and transgressive, and it dismantles and reformulates the system of value. In the generation of shame, ornament is certainly used to generate a sense of authorial proprietorship, but not necessarily a sense of propriety. Out of fragmentariness and the brevity of its component elements, the texts studied in this book turn themselves into a repository of cultural knowledge which will provide matter for other writers and prove England’s civilized status. At the same time, they anticipate their own classification as trivia. The experimental space of these texts is both a source of freedom and copious wit, and the place of transgression. By exploiting shame, the culture of the 1590s invents a different subjectivity and the claims to newness and ingenuity are coupled with a sense of guilt. The invention of a new subject takes place in a form that acknowledges its own transgressive and errant nature. The experience of those writers who constitute the younger generation of the 1590s is one of difference, and therefore of error. Literature is a place of testing which is both negative and positive, both disabling and enabling. The generation of shame challenges our conception of the relative importance of the periphery and the center in late Elizabethan culture, because it foregrounds its own peripheral nature and turns that peripherality into the source of its invention. The texts produced by the generation of shame are extravagant texts, they are both flashy, and vagrant, as they stuff their bodies with digressions, periphrases, anecdotes and ornaments that disrupt our narrative expectations, just as their abrupt endings do. The digressiveness that results is a process of subjectification where attention is directed to the idiosyncratic author as the origin of the text, and to the process of reading. From one point of view, fragmentation and hybridity are forms of ellipsis. While they encompass a variety of elements, they also truncate those elements and leave things out, and ellipsis invites readers to make up the gap, and even, as Angus Fletcher has suggested, to adopt an analytic frame of mind.12 The fragment has affinities with riddling, and even with fictionality, itself, as fragments, riddles and fiction are forms which communicate knowledge by 11 12

Angus Fletcher, Allegory: The Theory of a Symbolic Mode (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1964), p. 128. Ibid., p. 107.

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games of veiling and unveiling, by indirections, suggestions and displacements. Fragmentariness is certainly associated with a taste for enigmas and word games in forms such as acrostics, anaphora and epanalepsis, which rely for their effect on breaking words into their component letters and then recombining those letters into new patterns. In echo poems, such as sonnet 89 of Parthenophil and Parthenophe, and sonnets 22 and 48 of Chloris, fragments of utterance, which at first appear obscure, become invested with meaning, and sonnet sequences certainly play with the separation and repetition of letters and syllables, a process which is parodied in sonnet 51 of Parthenophil and Parthenophe.13 Such word games are linked to riddling and riddling is, of course, a conventional component of the sonnet sequence, whose enigmatic qualities are thematized in Astrophil and Stella, when Astrophil articulates his own opacity: BECAUSE I oft in darke abstracted guise, Seeme most alone in greatest companie, With dearth of words, or answers quite awrie, To them that would make speech of speech arise Sonnet 2714

In the sonnet sequence, poet-lovers frequently indicate an object by withholding its full disclosure, and then remarking on that withholding. As the poet-lover in Drayton’s Ideas Mirrour (1594) explains, “What most I seeme, that surest I am not” (sonnet 50). At the same time, this kind of oblique articulation poses its own challenge to ideologies of representation based on verisimilitude and the ideal of seamless, transparent description because it is acutely aware of the difficulties that subtend the passage into language. The description hides the poet-lover, but also contributes to a clearer conception of what he is through the rejection of misdescription. Drayton’s poet-lover is pieced together from fragments of knowledge and negative knowledge, and the poet-lover is precipitated by seeming. His sense of being is the consequence of representation: “What most I seeme, that surest I am not.” The stuttering movement of the fiction, as he tries to put 13

14

The Ovidian myth of Echo and its association with literary history and the construction of authorial subjectivity are the focus of Joseph Loewenstein’s study, Responsive Readings: Versions of Echo in Pastoral, Epic and the Jonsonian Masque, Yale Studies in English 192 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984). Quoted from The Poems of Sir Philip Sidney, ed. William A. Ringler, Jr. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), which is based on the 1598 edition. For the text of Barnes’ sequence, see Parthenophil and Parthenophe, ed. Victor A. Doyno (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1971); and for the text of Chloris, see William Smith, Chloris, or the Complaint of the Passionate Despised Shepheard (London: E. Bollifant, 1596). All the sonnet sequences mentioned in my text are also reprinted in An English Garner. Elizabethan Sonnets, ed. Sir Sidney Lee, 2 vols. (London: Constable, 1904).

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things into words, drops that particular inadequate approximation, and starts again, captures an image and still imparts knowledge that cannot otherwise be seen. Such texts draw attention to their components and uncover their cracks because it is precisely their fragmentariness that leaves space for the expression of individual style which exists in the way the components are put together and in the gaps between the text and its models. The very imperfections become the basis of a peculiar kind of truth, and a peculiar kind of authority, that is predicated on deformation. The myth of Orpheus links this fractured authorial subjectivity to the fragmentary nature of poetic discourse by suggesting that there is a link between fragments and poetry. In classical myth, Orpheus was recognized as the greatest of all poets because his verse tamed nature, transformed barbarity into civilization, and even moved the powers of the Underworld (Metamorphoses, Book X and Book XI, ll. 1–84). The invocation of Orpheus asserts the value of literary authorship, as it simultaneously threatens loss, disintegration and diminishment. In Ovid’s version of the myth, Orpheus is killed by the Maenads, followers of Bacchus, who tore him limb from limb in a fit of Bacchanalian frenzy.15 The figure of Orpheus suggests that literary subjectivity, like the texts through which it is produced and the culture to which it contributes, is necessarily fragmentary, unstable and liminal. The author gains articulation at the expense of integrity and yet these authors highlight their fragmentariness because this is the way in which the corpus, both the authorial self and a specifically literary corpus, finds expression and comes into being. The myth of Orpheus also associates sexual ambiguity, eroticism and artistic excellence because, according to Ovid, once deprived of sexual fulfillment with Euridyce, Orpheus turned to young boys. The ruins and fragments of the classical past became erotic paradigms, as Leonard Barkan has argued, but paradigms that were associated with ambiguous erotic play.16 In his analysis of the material revival of antiquity and the ways Renaissance viewers responded to the classical statues that filled Italy and were being dug out of its soil, Barkan notes that the ruins of the past were enfolded in all kinds of ambiguity. For example, the identity, function and original location of a statue were difficult to establish, and it was (and still is) unclear whether some of these statues 15

16

Some Renaissance authors interpret Orpheus’ death as a punishment for the poet’s misogyny. Others, like Nashe in Christs Teares Over Jerusalem, argue that Orpheus is punished for emasculating men: “They must have Orpheus melodie, who[m] the Ciconian weomen tore in peeces, because with his musique hee corrupted and effeminated theyr men.” See Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. McKerrow, II, p. 156. Leonard Barkan, Unearthing the Past: Archaeology and Aesthetics in the Making of Renaissance Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999) p. 152.

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represent men or women. As a consequence, the ruins and fragments of the past stood alone, free from sociological function, denotation and even a generic context. In Barkan’s words, “The discovery of the great fragment of ancient art puts Renaissance artists in mind of art” (p. xxxii). Ambiguity raised fundamental questions about verisimilitude, representation and the play of sameness and difference, and ambiguous representations gradually emerged as the supreme instance of artistic skill. This curious way of promoting the self through deficiency is, of course, central to the paradoxical encomium, a form which often assumes the defence of small things – flies, nuts and gnats, to cite some classical examples. The texts produced by the generation of shame are defenses of the indefensible, which assert the authority of an unconventional and even scandalous kind of authorship. They draw attention to their guilty, errant and marginal status, and to their wantonness, and base their defense on precisely these things, because in doing so they find a way to speak in specifically literary terms. The interest in trivia is related to late Elizabethan culture’s predilection for small forms, both as subjects and as formal structures. Miniaturization defines a particular aesthetic ideology, partly because the miniature was seen as one of the ultimate tests of skill and wit, an association which is exploited by Shakespeare who makes a defense of the imagination through the diminished fairy forms of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As Francis Bacon reminds his readers in The Advancement of Learning (1605): “So it commeth often to passe, that meane and small things discover great, better then great can discover the small: and therefore Aristotle noteth well, ‘that the nature of every thing is best seene in his smallest portions,’” in other words, creation is very often most to be admired in the smallest details, and these details reveal a more perfect and complete form of knowledge than the study of larger structures.17 The minute description of a piece of clothing, a shield, a veil, or of the locus amoenus, became both a test of the writer’s verbal power, and an instance of abundance, of plenitude in little. Indeed smallness was so admired, by late sixteenth century-culture, that it 17

Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, ed. Michael Kiernan. The Oxford Francis Bacon 4 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), Book II, “Historia mechanica,” p. 64. The quotation is taken from Aristotle’s Politics, Bk. I, iii. John Coolidge, “Great Things and Small: The Virgilian Progression,” Comparative Literature, 17 (1965): 1–23, stresses the importance of comparing great things with small as a theme in Virgil’s texts and notes that the comparison also structured Virgil’s career. The classical commonplace “to compare great things with small” figures the relationship between pastoral and epic, retrospection and prophecy, memory and desire in Virgil. However, Coolidge argues that small things contain the promise of maturity (p. 10). While this is true of Virgil, maturity implies superiority, and I am arguing for a different philosophy of the small in the sixteenth century, in which the small is not something to be left behind, nor something that can only be understood as imperfect, but something that is constitutive of and central to thinking.

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conferred its own form of validation on discourse, where the terseness and brevity of the epigram guarantees the truthfulness of its own words. Ornament may be characteristic of a self-consciously literary style, but it is also fragmentary and shameful. It is something that goes beyond common speech, in George Puttenham’s words: “As figures be the instruments of ornament in every language, so be they also in a sorte abuses or rather trespasses in speach, because they passe the ordinary limits of common utterance, and be occupied of purpose to deceive the eare and also the minde . . .”18 Shame is a fundamental component of ornament, but Puttenham’s definition not only constructs ornament as transgressive, it also relates ornament to the paradox, a figure that also passes the limits, or goes beyond (para), the common. Both ornament and paradox are a kind of perversion, and the generation of shame maps out an alternative space for literature by maximizing the perverse. Through their shameless reinterpretations of value, these texts make their independence from inherited values the basis of their authority and turn originality into a central rather than a peripheral concern. The redefinition of agreed values in the culture of late Elizabethan England inevitably challenges our own structures of thought and the preconceptions we bring to late Elizabethan literature. In particular, our own definitions of center and margin, major and minor, canonical and non-canonical, are challenged by fragmentary and self-consciously trivial forms whose importance to the culture of the 1590s lies in their very marginality. 18

Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie by George Puttenham, “Of Ornament,” ch. 7, ed. Gladys Doidge Willcock and Alice Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 154.

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Index

Adamson, Joseph, 13 Adorno, Theodor, 50 aesthetic value, 18–19, 41–2, 51–2, 73, 78, 110–11, 141, 142–3, 162, 175–6, 182–4, 203–4, 227, 228–9 and loss of manhood, 108, 166, 189–90, 195–6, 205 Agnew, Jean-Christophe, 33 allegory, 33–4, 42–3, 44–5, 46, 87 anacreontics, 128 anagnorisis, 18, 19 anthologization, 32–3, 81, 128, 145, 165–6, 224, 225–7 antic, 166 Arachne, 161, 164, 165 Aretino, Pietro, 58–9, 75–6, 93, 98 Ariosto, 26, 43–4 Aristotle, 10, 50, 180–1 Ascham, Roger, 86 attacks on literature, 5, 6, 38, 40, 104 authorship amateur and professional models, 53–6, 59–65, 75–81, 83 and authorial name, 45 and effeminization, 90–1, 92, 150, 154–65, 169–70, 189–90, 218, 222–3 and idolatry, 45, 80 and labor, 45, 77–9 and retrospective fictions, 120–7 anxieties of articulation, 134–5, 142–3, 193–4 as purveying spiritual danger, 153–4, 157 avant-garde, 41–2, 48, 75–81, 103–4, 109–16, 134, 143–4, 175–6 Axton, Marie, 64–5 Bacon, Sir Francis, 167, 232–3 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 14–15, 50, 183, 208 Barber, C. L., 88 Barkan, Leonard, 8, 36, 107, 155, 161, 231–2 Barnes, Barnabe, 61

254

Parthenophil and Parthenophe, 211–12, 225–6, 229–31 Bate, Jonathan, 36, 37 Bedford, Lucy Countess of, 108 Berger, Harry, 30–1, 34 Berry, Philippa, 155 bestiality, 137 Betteridge, Tom, 191 Bishops’ Ban, 1 June 1599, 63, 75, 105 Black, L. G., 61 Blenerhasset, Thomas, 194 Blount, Edward, 112, 177 Blundeville, Thomas, 187, 188 blush, 13, 143–4, 155, 166–8, 197 and publication, 167, 168–73 Bodenham, John, 56–7 Bourdieu, Pierre, 64 Braden, Gordon, 127–8, 146 Brandon, Charles, 213 Bray, Alan, 138 Bredbeck, Gregory, 138 Brennan, Michael, 63 Breton, Nicholas, 3, 213–14 bricole, 224–5 Bristol, Michael, 64–5, 88 Burrow, Colin, 113 Cairns, Douglas, 16 Callaghan, Dympna, 137 Camden, William, 187–8 canon formation, 9, 56, 71, 73, 104, 108, 222–3 Carew, Richard, 128–9 Carey, Sir George and Lady Elizabeth, 59–60, 61–2 Carter, Katherine, 209 Cave, Terence, 18, 66 Chapman, George, 153–4, 156 Hero and Leander, 112, 117–18, 124, 142–3, 156–7, 159–60, 163, 168 Ovids Banquet of Sence, 115, 119, 144, 145, 170, 172, 174

Index Chaucer, Geoffrey, 93–4, 103, 119, 181 Cheney, Patrick, 11, 36, 37, 83, 104, 110, 126, 132, 156 Chettle, Henry, 62, 64 Churchyard, Thomas, 4, 194, 195, 202 Chute, Anthony, 61, 195, 202 Cintio, Giraldi, 43–4 Clark, Sandra, 86 classicism, 36–45, 48–9 see also epyllion and Musaeus; Homer; neoteric poets; Ovid; Virgil Cohen, Walter, 31 Coleman, D. C., 54 Colie, Rosalie, 28, 111–13 Colse, Peter, 195, 210 commonplaces, 30–1, 45–6, 120–1, 165–6, 197, 202, 215, 224, 225 complaint, 4, 107–8, 120–3, 130, 178–82, 192–5, 215, 223 and Chaucer, 181 and gender, 180–1, 185–6, 194, 195–6, 197, 210 and Ovid, 180–1 as political critique, 193–4, 198–9, 200, 202 Coolidge, John, 232 coyness, 12–13, 151, 157–60 credit, 3, 71, 89, 93 Crewe, Jonathan, 56, 64, 70, 80 Crowley, Robert, 191 Culler, Jonathan, 36 Curran, John E., 211 Curran, Leo, 36 Daniel, Samuel, 126, 128, 195, 198 A Letter from Octavia to Marcus Antonius, 213 Certaine Small Workes, 186 Delia, 84, 107, 197–8, 199–203, 225–6 The Civil Wars, 201 The Complaint of Rosamond, 179, 184, 194, 195, 198–9, 201, 203, 220 Ulisses and the Syren, 205 Danter, John, 61 Davis, Natalie Zemon, 215 Davis, Walter R., 88 Day, Angel, 213–14 dedications, 53–5, 61–2, 63–4, 69, 74–5, 87, 112, 113–15, 119–20, 213–14 women dedicatees, 62, 108, 112, 135–6 defenses of literature, 6, 36–8, 41–2, 45, 78, 104, 203–5, 227, 228–9, 232–3 Dekker, Thomas, 59 Derrida, Jacques, 31, 143, 203 Diana and Actaeon, 83–6, 91, 150, 169, 170, 172, 173, 217–18 DiGangi, Mario, 138, 166

255

digression, 33, 40–1, 82, 93–4, 109, 110–11, 123, 134–5, 157–60, 226–7 see also error; marginality Donne, John, 74, 182 “Elegies,” 2, 102 Paradoxes, 28 Songs and Sonnets, 182–4 Donno, Elizabeth Story, 38, 132, 186, 189 Drayton, Michael, 125, 127, 130, 210, 211 and Ovid, 126, 179, 180, 210 Endimion and Phoebe, 108–10, 111–12, 129–31, 136, 160, 168, 170 Englands Heroicall Epistles, 179, 181–2, 184, 193–4, 200, 201, 207–8, 209, 215, 218–19, 222 Idea (1599), 25–6, 180, 211, 212–13 Ideas Mirror (1594), 229–31 Matilda, 179, 195, 202, 205–6 Peirs Gaveston, 179, 195, 203–5 Dubrow, Heather, 97, 202 Dundas, Judith, 164 Echo, 230 ecphrasis, 141, 146, 162, 232–3 Edwards, Thomas Cephalus and Procris, 107, 109–10, 116–17, 139, 140, 157, 160, 195 elegy, 74, 132, 176, 177, 211–12 Elias, Norbert, 13–14 ellipsis, 70, 93–7, 100–1, 229–31 Elyot, Sir Thomas, 139 Emaricdulfe, 226–7 Englands Helicon, 130 Engle, Lars, 3, 94 Enterline, Lynn, 29, 36, 37–8, 44–5, 107, 145–53, 161, 219, 225, 227, 228–9 body and language, 12, 37–8, 216 lost voices, 118, 204 epic, 36, 40–2, 50, 81–6, 103–4, 108–9, 122–5, 135, 232 and history, 184–5, 209–11 epyllion, 48–9, 102–77 and complaint, 107–8, 120–3, 130 and elegy, 132, 176–7 and gender, 49, 108, 135–6, 137–8, 139–40, 141, 145–53, 154–5, 160, 166, 177 and generation of a literary community, 103–4, 109–16, 143–4, 152–3, 161–2 and literariness, 104, 108, 116–17, 165–6, 175–6 and mannerism, 123, 134–5, 165–6 and Musaeus, 127–8 and neoteric model, 127–8, 129 and Ovidian model, 103–4, 118 and politics, 107–8, 111–12, 129–32, 134, 155, 172 and recreative pleasures, 135–6, 174

256

Index

epyllion (cont.) and self-construction, 134–5, 160, 161, 166, 172 and sex, 114, 134–7, 139, 142–4, 145–53, 154–66 and Spenser, 118, 122–3, 124–5, 127–9, 169 and urbanity, 109–16, 126, 143–4 and youth, 104–5, 111, 116–20, 125–7, 166–8 as etiological fiction, 4, 83–5, 107–8, 119, 120–7, 132–3 definition of, 102–6 relation to epic, 103–4, 122–3, 125, 135 relation to print, 119, 168–73, 175 relation to satire, 104–5, 107–8, 131–2, 134 Erasmus The Praise of Folly, 28, 83 Erickson, Peter, 131–2 eroticism, 39–40, 48–9, 73, 75, 85–6, 93, 102–40, 177, 215 and canon formation, 37, 134, 231–2 and processes of memory, 161–2, 176–7, 179–80, 207–9 eroticization of wit, 1–2, 38–40, 41–2, 94, 134–54, 231 explicitness and fame, 40 links to satire, 129–32, 134 see also Ovid; reading; satire; sexual taboo; transgression; writing error and difference, 227, 228–31 and marvellous, 22–6, 173 and relation to history, 186, 218 and relation to lunacy, 25, 26 and wandering, 20–2, 26, 28, 173 see also transgression; wandering; wonder Esler, Anthony, 3 Essex, Earl of, 198 Evett, David, 135 Ewell, Barbara, 218–19 excess, 20–2, 25–6, 30–1, 45–6, 60–5, 66, 73, 92, 96–7, 139, 173, 204–5 and panegyric, 27–8, 65–6, 67, 96–7, 165–6 and paradox, 27–8, 65–6 1590s, 27, 47 and literary history, 5, 50–2, 133–4, 135 conceptual change, 4–45 expansion of literary activity, 3–4 fin-de-si`ecle anxiety, 5 tensions in, 1–2, 3, 50, 98, 129–34, 155 fact and fiction, 20–2, 75, 88, 89, 90, 95–6, 193–4, 207, 209 Father Hubburd’s Tales, 76–7 feet, 140 Felman, Shoshana, 93, 160 Ferguson, Arthur B., 181–2 fetish, 106, 140, 149–50

Fichter, Andrew, 169 fictional verse epistle, 4, 49–50, 178–223 Fineman, Joel, 27, 67 Fleming, Abraham, 184–5, 186 Fleming, Juliet, 39 Fletcher, Angus, 33–4, 69, 228–9 Foucault, Michel, 5, 159 The Archaeology of Knowledge, 31 Fowler, Alastair, 29, 95, 123 Fox, Alistair, 63 fragmentariness, 32, 95, 224–33 and anthologies, 32–3, 225–7 and self-definition, 33, 93, 97 fragmentation in Ovid, 29 reading as process of fragmentation, 224–5 see also small forms Fraser, Russell, 5 Freccero, John, 22 Freud, Sigmund, 6, 13, 15, 169–70 Fumerton, Patricia, 35–6 Fussner, F. Smith, 182 Gadamer, Hans-Georg, 207 Gascoigne, George, 23, 73–4 gender and authorship, 24, 49–50, 106, 108, 137–9, 154–66, 169, 231 and history, 178–84, 189, 205–6, 222–3 and reason, 188, 189 and relation to language, 184, 205–6, 218, 219 feminization, 49–50, 85–6, 90–1, 92, 108–9, 135–6, 139–41, 145–53, 154–66, 169–70, 178–96, 205, 210, 222–3, 231 homoeroticism, 137–8, 139, 140, 150, 156–7, 177, 231 misogyny, 140, 142, 145–53, 154–5, 165, 231 generic mixture, 28–9, 32, 41–2, 43–4, 67–8, 80, 88–9, 100–1, 107–8, 135, 145, 185–6, 207, 225–6, 227, 229–31 see also polymorphism genre, 29, 48, 111, 113 georgic, 82–3 Geraldine, Sister M., 28 ghost narratives, 197, 198, 199–201, 203–4 Goffman, Erving, 12 Goldberg, Jonathan, 94, 138, 153, 201 Golding, Arthur, 39, 103, 150, 172 Gosson, Stephen, 38–40 gratuitousness, 22, 66 Grazia, Margreta de, 5, 39, 127 Greene, Robert, 23, 53, 56–7, 66 Pandosto, 18 Greene, Roland, 19 Greene, Thomas, 30 Grundy, Joan, 210

Index Guill´en, Claudio, 29, 213 Guillory, John, 71, 104 guilt, 15–16, 45–6, 98, 142–3, 199–201, 217–18 and Ovid, 39–40, 98 Guy, John, 50 Habermas, J¨urgen, 185 Hadfield, Andrew, 134 Halasz, Alexandra, 3, 55–6 Hall, Joseph, 54, 73, 75 Halpern, Richard, 36, 37, 44–5, 107, 140–2 and lyric, 182–4 hands, 215–17 Hardin, Richard, 200, 207 Harington, Sir John, 153–4 The Metamorphosis of Ajax, 28, 39–40, 54 Orlando Furioso, 143, 144 Harvey, Elizabeth, 180 Harvey, Gabriel, 61, 76, 78 Foure Letters, 53, 78 marginalia, 77, 116–19 Pierce’s Supererogation, 1–2, 32, 58, 106 quarrel with Nashe, 75, 76, 81, 89 Heidegger, Martin, 19 Helgerson, Richard Elizabethan Prodigals, 23, 72 Forms of Nationhood, 182, 204–5 Self-Crowned Laureates, 47, 55–6, 83 Heller, Agnes, 17 Heywood, Thomas, 59, 125 Oenone and Paris, 103, 116, 137–9, 157, 170–3 translation of Heroides 16 and 17, 180–1 Higgins, John, 194 history, 44–6, 87–8, 89, 178–82, 194, 223 and epic, 184–5, 209, 210 and fiction, 88, 90, 193–4, 207, 209 and gender, 49–50, 185–9, 192, 198–9, 203–6 and lyric, 185, 186, 193–4, 203–6, 207, 214–15 and narrative, 178, 197, 207–9, 214–15 and shame, 178–82, 195–203, 207–9 historian as hero, 184–5, 209–10, 211 historical process and questions of style, 29–30, 32, 67–8, 98, 116–17, 201–3 historiography, 181–2, 187–9, 191, 197, 207 consensual history, 191–2 past as object of desire, 197 problems of documentation, 204–5, 207, 211 Holbrook, Peter, 55–6, 85 Holinsheds Chronicles, 181–2, 184–5, 186–9, 191, 192, 203 and masculine bias, 186–9, 192 authorship of, 186 Homer, 83, 84, 103, 123

257

homoeroticism, 42, 137–8, 139, 153–4, 157, 177, 179, 203–5 see also gender Hoskins, John, 213–14 Howell, Thomas, 43, 44 Hulse, Clark, 27, 41, 105–6, 135, 160, 195, 207 Hutson, Lorna, 47, 55–6, 63, 65, 101 on patronage, 59–60, 63 implausibility, 18, 90, 203–4 incest, 137, 140, 145–6 ingle, 157 Inns of Court, 104–5, 119, 149 invention, 26, 36, 45–6, 144, 166, 189–90, 199–201 see also originality James, Heather, 36, 37, 94, 130 Jameson, Fredric, 5–32, 33 Javitch, Daniel, 30 Jed, Stephanie, 198–9 Johnson, W. R., 36 Jones, Ann, 59–60 and Peter Stallybrass, 69–70 Jones, Emrys, 5 Jones, Katherine Duncan, 106–7 Jonson, Ben, 45, 66, 182 Kaiser, Wolfgang, 28 Kant, Immanuel, 17 Keach, William, 105–6 Kerrigan, John, 195, 210 Kinney, Arthur, 23, 64, 86 Kintgen, Eugene, 19 Klibansky, Raymond, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl, 26 Knapp, Jeffrey, 22, 50 Krell, David Farrell, 19 Krier, Theresa, 8 Kuchta, David, 35 Lacan, Jacques, 11, 156, 172, 181 Langer, Ullrich language, 44, 88, 95–7, 186, 193–4, 195, 204, 207, 210–11, 213–16, 219, 222 Lanham, Richard, 27, 35 laureateship, 178–82, 193–4, 201, 207–11, 226–7 leisure, 97–9, 135–6, 205 see also recreation Lemnius, Levinus, 166–7, 169 letters, 208, 209, 213, 214, 222 and question of individuality, 181, 214–17 relation between letters and history, 207–9 Levy, F. J., 181 Lewis, C. S., 50, 51, 56, 133–4, 183

258

Index

liminality, 4–5, 33, 55–6 see also marginality Lipsius, Justus, 92 literariness, 4–19, 37, 45, 51–2, 56, 108, 118, 138, 166, 175–6, 203–4, 224–7, 233 and fetishization, 106, 134, 140, 162 literary space, 48–9, 75–81, 109–11, 116, 127–9, 145–6, 182–4, 203–5 paradoxical encomium as paradigmatic literary genre, 81–6 Lodge, Thomas, 23, 98, 121 A Reply to Stephen Gosson’s Schoole of Abuse, 38–42 Phillis, 225–6 Scillaes Metamorphosis, 104, 119, 120–3, 134, 148, 163, 168, 169, 175–6 The Complaint of Elstred, 202, 225–6 Logan, Robert, 105–6 London, 4, 56–7, 61, 63, 100–1, 120, 126 see also urbanity Lyly, John, 23, 66, 135–6 lyric, 19, 30, 50–1, 207 and de Man, 183 and gender, 134–66, 180–1, 185–6, 195–6, 205–6 and privacy, 179–80, 182–4, 205–6, 212–13 as form of historical narrative, 49–50, 178–82, 185, 186, 203–5, 207–9 as paradigm for cultural resistance, 31, 50, 153, 182–4, 198, 199, 202, 205–6 Macfie, Pamela Royston, 156 Malloch, A. E., 28 Man, Paul de, 111, 183 Manly, Lawrence, 24, 44, 56–7 Marchants Avizo, 213–14 marginality, 31, 33–4, 56, 65, 68–71, 73, 82–3, 93–4, 95, 134–5, 179–80, 185–6, 193–4, 203–5 Michel Foucault, 5, 31 Fredric Jameson, 5–34 liminality, 4–5, 55–6, 201–4 Marcel Mauss, 4, 35 moral marginality, 51–2, 71, 73–5, 153–4 relation to cultural change, 4–6, 31–2, 51–2, 106, 143 Marlowe, Christopher, 32, 36–7, 56–7, 104, 105, 128, 153–4, 182 Dido, 196 Dr. Faustus, 81, 84 Edward II, 179, 195–6, 203 Hero and Leander, 84–5, 104, 110–11, 112, 116, 127, 130, 134–5, 137–41, 142–3, 157–8, 162–3, 168, 175–7 Ovid’s Elegies, 74, 176–7 Tamburlaine, 195–6

Marotti, Arthur, 56, 173 Marston, John, 125 The Metamorphosis of Pigmalions Image, 112, 131–4, 137, 145–53, 168 Martin Marprelate controversy, 56, 76 Marx, Karl, 99–100 masturbation, 137, 144–5, 149–50 Mauss, Marcel, 4, 35 McCoy, Richard, 201 McEachern, Claire, 211 memory, 211 and complaint, 179–80, 181–2, 201, 203–6, 207–9, 211–12 memorialization, 176–7 Meres, Francis Palladis Tamia, 5, 66, 83–4, 91, 118, 195–6 metamorphosis, 39–40, 147–9, 160 Middleton, Thomas The Ghost of Lucrece, 195, 198 Miller, David Lee, 31, 155 Mirror for Magistrates, The, 194–5, 197 Moore, Katherine, 55 More, Sir Thomas, 93 Mullaney, Stephen, 31 Murrin, Michael, 43 Musaeus, 127–8 Narcissus, 40–1, 43 Nashe, Thomas, 23, 32, 102, 153–4, 182, 231 and addictive behaviour, 66–7 and Aretino, 58–9, 75–6, 93, 98 and civilization as the gathering of fragments, 227–8 and history, 87–8, 89 and idiosyncracies of style, 66–8, 80 and laureateship, 61–2, 78, 80, 81–6 and nationalism, 71, 79, 80, 98, 99 and Ovid, 73–5, 83–5, 91, 98, 118 and marginality, 56, 68–71, 73, 82–3, 93–7 and Marlowe, 74, 84–5 and paradox, 61–2, 65–6, 70, 81–6 and parody, 65–6, 67–8, 79–80 and patronage, 46–7, 59–61, 65 and print, 46–7, 59, 61 and problems of self-articulation, 93–7 and prodigality, 65, 66, 70–1, 72, 88–9 and radicalism, 56, 64, 70, 76 and satire, 23, 58–9, 73–6, 93 and sense of literary community, 15, 46–7, 58–9, 75–81, 227–8 and Shakespeare, 58 and shame, 46–7, 55–6, 90–2 and Sidney, 57–8, 62, 78, 79 and Spenser, 61–2, 83, 93–4

Index as iconic professional author, 56–7, 58 as literary critic, 57–8, 73–5, 195 as victim, 59, 83–4, 92 quarrel with Harvey, 75, 81, 89 The Anatomie of Absurditie, 65, 78, 95–6 Christs Teares Over Jerusalem, 61–2, 67–8, 70, 82, 86–7, 88–9, 90, 99, 100–1, 227–8, 231 Have With You to Saffron-Walden, 77, 78, 79, 87, 90, 93, 95–6, 97 Lenten Stuff, 65–6, 77, 81–2, 89–90 Pierce Penilesse, 70–1, 73, 78, 80, 81–2, 93–4, 99 Summers Last Will and Testament, 64–5, 98 Strange News, 61, 71, 78–9, 80, 88, 91, 97–9 “The Choice of Valentines,” 73, 74, 75 The Isle of Dogs, 83–4 The Terrors of the Night, 62, 79, 82, 87, 88, 97–8 The Unfortunate Traveller, 53–5, 58–9, 68–70, 87–8, 90, 92, 93, 95–6, 98, 178 Preface to Menaphon, 73, 75 national identity, 71, 80, 128–9, 182, 186–90, 192, 204–5, 210–11 and shame, 49–50, 178–80, 182 and small forms, 22, 50, 226–7 feminization as a threat to, 189–90, 192 lyric as supplement to, 49–50, 179–80, 185–6, 205–6, 212–13, 222–3 neoteric poets (new poets), 127–8, 129 Newton, Thomas, see Levinus Lemnius Norbrook, David, 67, 76 originality, 26, 36, 66–7, 80, 117–18, 124, 125, 227–8 and error, 25–6, 186 and guilt, 25–6, 73–5 see also invention ornamentality, 32–5, 36, 60–5, 68–9, 127–9, 142–3, 227, 228–9, 233 and gender, 32, 35, 36, 162, 166 Orpheus, 124, 138, 145–6, 195–6, 231 Ovid, 35, 36–9, 43, 45, 130, 225, 227, 228–9 Amores, 40, 103–4, 132, 153, 176–7 and Drayton, 179, 210 and eroticization of literary transactions, 144–5 and gender, 12, 42, 180–1, 219 and Nashe, 73–5, 83–5, 91, 98 and wit, 38–40 Ars amatoria, 39, 40, 103 as counter-Virgilian model, 36, 37, 41–2, 103–4, 110, 122–5 Heroides, 49, 103–4, 180, 181, 195

259

his exile, 118, 134 Metamorphoses, 26, 36–44, 98, 103–4, 145–6, 195 provokes feelings of shame and guilt, 26, 36–7 Ovide moralis´e, 43, 44, 146 panegyric, 27–8, 65–6, 67, 209 paper, 54 paradox, 26–7, 28, 41–2, 65–6, 70, 81, 95, 203, 222–3 as accessing new forms of knowledge, 28, 201–3 as perversion, 27–8, 203, 233 definition of, 27, 28 paradoxical encomium, 28, 65–6, 232–3 paradoxical encomium as paradigmatic literary genre, 81–6 Parker, Patricia, 21–2, 26, 189 Parnassus Plays, 58, 73, 103, 113–14, 127, 130, 153, 176 parody, 29–32, 65–6, 67–8, 79–80 and relationship between letters and historical narrative, 207–9 Paster, Gail Kern, 14 Patterson, Annabel, 19, 187, 191–2, 209 Pearcy, Lee T., 43, 132 Peele, George, 56–7 Peter, John, 197 Peterson, Douglas, 30 Petowe, Henry Hero and Leander, 103, 119, 135–6, 161–2, 176–7 Petrarch, 213, 228 Petrarchanism, 29–30, 38, 118, 129–31, 139–41, 155, 161, 165–6, 172, 195, 198–9, 219, 220–2 Pliny, 141 Pocock, J. G. A., 189 polymorphism, 28–32, 67–8, 107, 116–17, 120–3, 134, 137–9, 156–7, 225–7 see also generic mixture print, 53–5, 56, 61, 76, 77, 78, 79, 113, 119, 168–73, 175, 215–17 private and public modes of being, 15–16, 113, 119, 125–7, 128, 170, 171–2, 179–80, 185, 191, 202, 204–6, 207–9, 215–17 prodigality, 22–4, 25, 65 and gender, 220–2 and narrative form, 71–3 didactic and romantic models, 22, 72 see also excess; error professionalization, 46–7, 53–6, 77–9, 85–6, 101, 114, 153–4, 175, 186 and waste, 53–4, 55, 82 promptness, 38–9

260

Index

propriety and proprietorship, 66–7, 80, 85–6, 143, 228–9 publication, 24, 60–5, 168, 169, 173 and whoredom, 85–6, 90–1, 92, 220 public sphere, 184–5, 205–6, 215 Puttenham, George The Arte of English Poesie, 26, 32–3, 43, 71, 103, 158, 176, 233 Quilligan, Maureen, 211 Quint, David, 44, 120–1 Quintilian, 34, 70, 159 Ralegh, Sir Walter, 153–4 “Praisd be Dianas faire and harmles light”, 133 “The Booke of the Ocean to Scinthia”, 26, 29–30, 51–2, 85–6 The Discoverie of Guiana, 20–2, 89 strategies of shame, 8, 21–2 wonder, shame and subjectification, 20–2 Rambuss, Richard, 122 Rawls, John, 16 reading, 8, 19, 42–3, 46, 81, 86–7, 92, 135–6, 167, 175–6, 208, 217–18 as sexual activity, 114, 143–4, 145–53, 157–8, 168–73, 199–201 recreation, 97–9, 135–6, 182, 212–3, 226–7 see also leisure redundancy, 22, 30–1, 45–6, 60–5, 82 Reynolds, William, 131 Ricks, Christopher, 14–15 Ricoeur, Paul, 207 Roberts, Sasha, 114 Royden, Matthew, 115, 119, 153–4 satire, 76, 93, 95, 98, 104–5 and eroticism, 73–5, 105, 107–8, 131–2, 133, 134, 198 see also epyllion and politics; Martin Marprelate controversy; Nashe Schiesari, Juliana, 189 Schoenfeldt, Michael, 11–12 Schor, Naomi, 35, 166 Schwartz, Regina M., 169–70 secretarial activity, 199–201, 203 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 140, 150 sentiment, 135–6, 175–6, 195–6 sexual taboo, 73, 74, 75, 85–6, 90–2, 106, 137, 138, 139, 142–4, 168, 170 see also eroticism; transgression Shakespeare, William, 113, 128, 182 A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 2, 49–50, 232–3 Love’s Labour’s Lost, 27, 58 Othello, 73

Sonnets and A Lover’s Complaint, 27, 225–6 The Comedy of Errors, 18 The Rape of Lucrece, 11, 102, 116–19, 194, 195, 202 Troilus and Cressida, 39 Venus and Adonis, 103, 104, 113–14, 115, 116–19, 124, 131–2, 135–6, 137, 140–2, 152–3, 165–6, 167, 169, 176 shame and civility, 13–15 and competitiveness, 17–18 and creativity, 14–15, 36–7, 38–40, 134–54 and democratic values, 17 and Englishness, 178–223 and feminization, 15, 24, 49, 154–66 and history, 49–50, 178–223 and psychology of affect, 10–11, 13 and publication, 24, 166–73 and self-definition, 17, 51–2, 92–7 as mediating relationship between public and private, 15–16, 166–73, 178–223 characteristics of as a literary device, 2–3, 6 definitions of, 6–18 generation of, 3 role of in professionalization, 38–42, 53–101 shame and guilt, 15–16 shame cultures and guilt cultures, 16 shamelessness, 2–3, 12, 102–77 Shuger, Debora, 198–9 Sidney, Sir Philip, 3, 23, 62, 78, 79 Arcadia, 3, 13, 18, 39, 40, 198–9, 214 Astrophel and Stella, 57–8 Astrophil and Stella, 95, 229–31 Defence of Poetry, 78 small forms, 22, 75, 81, 128, 153, 224–32, 233 see also fragmentariness Smith, Hallett, 195, 210 Smith, William Chloris, 229–31 Snare, Gerald, 39, 144 social e´litism, 34–5, 73, 109–14, 116, 176, 177, 191 sonnet sequence, 4, 25, 26, 28–9, 30, 45–6, 50, 81, 84, 95–6, 128, 173, 197–8, 225–7, 229–31 Sontag, Susan, 143–4 Southampton, Earl of, 54, 69, 104–5, 113–14, 115 Spenser, Edmund, 83, 94, 103, 122, 123, 128, 182 Amoretti and Epithalamion, 128, 227 and epyllion, 118, 122–3, 124–5 and Nashe, 61–2, 83 Complaints, 122–3 Muiopotmos, 62 prodigality, 94 The Faerie Queene, 2, 6–10, 23, 34, 45, 67, 93–4, 95, 169, 208 The Ruines of Rome, 224

Index Stapleton, M. L., 40, 103, 132 Stapleton, Richard, 174 stoicism, 185, 187, 190, 192, 203 Streuver, Nancy, 128, 194 subjectification and supplement, 68–9, 93–4, 201–3, 205–6 process of in reading and writing, 19, 43, 44–5, 46, 86–92, 134–5, 210, 218–19, 229–31 skepticism about processes of, 181–2, 186, 204 self-articulation, 20–2, 33, 51–2, 66–7, 92–7, 195, 214–15, 217 Summers, Claude, 177 Surrey, Earl of, 57, 68–9, 128, 210–11 Taciteanism, 181–2, 198 Talbot, Gilbert, 170 Tillotson, Kathleen, 203 Todorov, Tzetvan, 208 Tomkins, Silvan, 11, 13 transgression, 4–13, 25–6, 39–40, 45, 46, 71, 73, 75, 80, 85–6, 91, 93–4, 106, 127–9, 134–45, 154, 169, 215 and coining, 92–3 and newness, 73–5, 227, 228–9 Traub, Valerie, 31 travel, 72, 92 see also wandering triviality, 1–2, 31–2, 34–5, 68–9, 75, 103–4, 166, 227, 228–9 and national identity, 22, 50, 99, 181–2, 226–7 see also small forms Turbervile, George, 180–1 unwholesomeness, 224–8, 233 urbanity, 4, 82–3, 103–4, 126

Virgil, 36–7, 43–4, 83, 122–5, 232 voyeurism, 8, 83–4, 90–1, 92, 167, 168, 169–70, 172, 173, 204–5 Waddington, Raymond, 144 Wall, Wendy, 24, 91, 169 Waller, Gary, 86 Walsingham, Sir Thomas and Lady, 112 wandering, 18–22, 25–6, 65, 71–3, 82–3, 92, 120–1 and paradox, 65–6 see also wonder Weever, John, 125 Faunus and Melliflora, 118, 119–20, 123–5, 132–3, 155 Weimann, Robert, 90 westward movement of culture, 116–17, 120–1 Whitgift, George, 59–60, 64 Williams, Bernard, 16 Williams, Thomas, 174 Willoby?, Henry Willobie his Avisa, 195 Wilson, Richard, 132 Wilson, Thomas, 225 wit, 36–7, 38–40, 166, 177, 189–90 Wither, George, 3 Wolfe, John, 61, 76, 77, 78–9 wonder, 19, 43–4, 73, 89, 90, 203–4, 207 and wandering, 18–22, 26, 28, 173, 229–31 see also ghost narratives Woolf, D. R., 181–2 writing, 215–17 and relation to gender, 217–18 as a sexual activity, 24, 41–2, 85–6, 144–8, 153, 157–8, 160, 168–73, 199–201 Wurmser, Leon, 13 Zeuxis and Parrhasios, 141

Varro, 86 Vickers, Nancy, 169, 172

261