Redefining Elizabethan Literature

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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 8RU, 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 ISBN-10

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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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Redefining Elizabethan Literature

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 the function of prod igalit y in cultural 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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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

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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 formal interests 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.

Introduction

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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

73

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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. rereading 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. red ef ining wast e 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.

Thomas Nashe and the production of authorship

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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