The Art of Picturing in Early Modern English Literature

Camilla Caporicci, Armelle Sabatier, Camilla Caporicci, Armelle Sabatier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9780367425197
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000734836
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Written by an international group of highly regarded scholars and rooted in the field of intermedial approaches to literary studies, this volume explores the complex aesthetic process of "picturing" in early modern English literature. The essays in this volume offer a comprehensive and varied picture of the relationship between visual and verbal in the early modern period, while also contributing to the understanding of the literary context in which Shakespeare wrote. Using different methodological approaches and taking into account a great variety of texts, including Elizabethan sonnet sequences, metaphysical poetry, famous as well as anonymous plays, and court masques, the book opens new perspectives on the literary modes of "picturing" and on the relationship between this creative act and the tense artistic, religious and political background of early modern Europe. The first section explores different modes of looking at works of art and their relation with technological innovations and religious controversies, while the chapters in the second part highlight the multifaceted connections between European visual arts and English literary production. The third section explores the functions performed by portraits on the page and the stage, delving into the complex question of the relationship between visual and verbal representation. Finally, the chapters in the fourth section re-appraise early modern reflections on the relationship between word and image and on their respective power in light of early-seventeenth-century visual culture, with particular reference to the masque genre.

Part I

To Look or Not to Look at Pictures?

1 An Edifying Pictura Loquens

Alberico Gentili’s Commentatio and His Defense of Drama in Elizabethan Oxford

Cristiano Ragni

In early modern England, when playgoing became more and more part of the daily life, a heated controversy over the morality of drama broke out. This was mainly fueled by Calvinist extremists, the Puritans, who condemned plays for their supposed “empiety” and “evil.” Resulting from the fierce iconoclasm of the radical exponents of the Reformed Church, these attacks ended up condemning drama especially because it brought to life dynamized verbal pictures, whose powerful impact on the audience the most alert among them did not fail to acknowledge and denounce (O’Connell 2000). The aim of this chapter is to investigate the theoretical framework of the controversy over drama, by showing how Puritan criticism specifically condemned the dangers implicit in the latter’s visual nature. Particularly, the focus will be on the controversy that took place at Oxford University at the beginning of the 1590s. This involved well-known personalities of the cultural world of the time, namely, John Rainolds, professor of Greek at Corpus Christi College and one of the most eminent theologians of his time; William Gager, the most famous academic playwright, and Alberico Gentili, regius professor of civil law and who is today considered one of the fathers of modern international law.

As is known, the Puritan faction had been raging against the increasingly successful London playhouses since the 1560s.¹ Between the 1580s and 1590s, in particular, personalities such as Stephen Gosson or Philip Stubbes – just to name the most famous couple – engaged in relentlessly repeated attacks, which pointed out how all plays were “sucked out of the Devills teates, to nourish us in ydolatry heathenrie and sinne” (Stubbes 1585, Lv). While the denigrating campaign against public theaters has always been on the spotlight, the heated controversy over the legitimacy of academic drama taking place at the same time within the walls of Oxford or Cambridge has caught much less attention.² A thorough analysis of the Oxford controversy, however, is crucial to understand not only the importance of both public and academic drama as privileged means of communication of the Elizabethan age but also the political interests lying behind such apparently literary querelles (Camerlingo 2016, 123–38; Ragni 2018, 159–75).

As the Puritan faction took more and more control of Oxford University over the years, John Rainolds, professor and theologian, never missed a chance to give vent to his particularly strict views on drama. Despite working mainly on theological issues, playgoing seems to have been one of his favorite targets, as he invariably called it into question while drawing derogative parallels with other more honest habits. In his De Romanae Ecclesiae Idolatria (1596), just to name one of his most famous treatises, he thundered against both playgoing and drama vehemently (Binns 1990, 328–31; Feingold 2012; Blank 2017, 513–47). Within this extremely knowledgeable dissertation on idolatry and the distinction between the concepts of imago and simulacrum – the former being the representation of something existing in nature and the latter the representation of something inexistent – Rainolds argued that all Papists were idolatrous, because of their cults of the saints and the Eucharist. While questioning the value of these representations and the implicit danger of confusing them with reality, he claimed that the Catholic tradition of painting angels was no less idolatrous than the Egyptian fashion of picturing their gods with animal heads. These considerations gave Rainolds the opportunity to delve even deeper in his critical reading of the value of mimesis itself and inevitably to deal with the most famous mimetic art of his time: drama. By focusing on the specific case of the representation of God in religious plays, the theologian strongly advocated how this was a proof of the dangerous spreading of idolatry even among Protestants. According to him, not only did the actors playing God end up being identified with the Lord himself in a blasphemous way, but the Scriptures too were often transformed into immorally humorous stories on the stage: “Isn’t it true that who played God was called God? Also, God was allowed to enter neither the theatre, nor the temple (as a matter of fact, they turn their temples in theatres and God’s sacred Word in funny stories”) (Rainolds 1596, CC3r).³ In this regard, Marguerite Tassi (2005, 24) wrote,

The player’s most dangerous quality for the Protestant iconoclasts lay in this shadowy business of imitation, or the act of impersonation. This act of identity transformation was regarded as nothing short of a scandal, a religious sacrilege, since the impersonator engaged in an act of falsehood that denies his God-given identity and drew spectators into admiring a falsehood. At the same time, the actor was a carnal personhood, which could be so compelling spectators were led to attribute the shadow with a life of its own or, in the iconoclasts’ term, to treat the representation as an idol.

Unsurprisingly, this accusation against the value of theatrical mimesis would be one of Rainolds’s standpoints when he started to oppose first Gager and later Gentili over the legitimacy of academic drama. In the following pages, it will be shown how it did not take him long to move from the condemnation of specific religious plays to that of academic ones, and eventually to an attack on drama as a whole.

Despite Rainolds’s frequent raging against plays and playgoing, between the 1580s and the 1590s one of the finest examples of lively academic drama flourished in his own university. If public drama could thrive in London because of the protection of Queen Elizabeth I and the aristocracy, how was it possible for the academic one to do so in the smaller ambience of the university, where Puritanism had been acquiring more and more power? The answer lies in the fact that academic stage plays respected most of the restrictions that even strict Puritans such as Rainolds could not help granting. First, these plays were mainly staged for free in front of a selected audience of students and faculty. Second, they were mostly written and acted out in Latin, with a patent educational aim, namely, to improve students’ appreciation of Plautus and Seneca, as well as their memory and writing style. As William Gager – the leading academic playwright of the time – put it (as quoted in Young 1916, 614),

We . . . doe it to recreate owre selves, owre House, and the better parte of the Vniversytye, with some learned Poeme or other; to practise owre own style eyther in prose or verse; to be well acquaynted with Seneca or Plautus; honestly to embowlden our yuthe; to trye their voyces, and confirme their memoryes; to frame their speech; to conforme them to convenient action, to trye what mettel is in every one, and of what disposition thay are of; wherby never any one amongst us, that I knowe, was made the worse, many have bynmuche the better . . .

The educational value was, indeed, the reason why the university board used to allow such plays to be staged regularly. “The surviving documents,” Blank (2017, 519) argues, “indicate that the official university position was clear: despite considerable discussion and debate over drama, academic drama’s educational value made it a clearly permissible activity.” This said, then, why did what can be defined as an “open war” over drama break out in Elizabethan Oxford? Because John Rainolds, influential as he was, felt insulted – probably not without reason – by the abovementioned Gager.

On the occasion of the Polish Palatine Count Jan Lanski’s 1592 visit to Oxford, Gager was appointed to take care of the stage performances. A few days before this visit, Rainolds expressed his firm disapproval of the arranged theatrical productions in a letter to Oxford Vice-Chancellor Thomas Thornton, and his absence during the celebrations was a visible reminder of his displeasure to the whole audience. On February 6, Gager’s adaptation of Seneca’s Hyppolitus was staged. The playwright, however, had added a few scenes in his own hand and introduced the character of the theater critic Momus, who defended the legitimacy of stage plays by highlighting their educational purpose. As Momus’s defense ironically touched on the same arguments that Rainolds had recently discussed in his letter to Thornton, it was inevitable for the theologian to feel outraged (Tucker Brooke 1951, 401–31; Panizza 1981, 57–61). Despite Gager’s letter of apology – now gone missing, where he must have denied the association between Momus and the theologian – Rainolds angrily replied with a long letter in which he brushed away all the playwright’s arguments in defense of the goodness of academic drama. He rejected, for instance, the cases found in Roman law and presumably quoted by Gager to demonstrate the century-old legitimacy of free theatrical staging. On the contrary, Rainolds (1599, 4) firmly argued that, whether on payment or not, acting had always been a shameful occupation:

To the first reason then . . . that Stage-players are infamous all by the civill law, you answere that they are not all, but onely such as play for gaine sake . . . By which kinde of reasoning one might conclude likewise that sith by the scripture a woman taking mony for prostituting her body to men is infamous: therefore she is not so, who doth it freely, much lesse, who give the mony to haue her louers companie; whom yet the Scriptures counteth most infamous of all.

Unsurprisingly, Rainolds grounded his claim on the Scriptures, by quoting the well-known passage from Deuteronomy on the promiscuous use of clothes to prove the immorality of all plays: “A woman shall not wear man’s clothing, nor shall a man put on a woman’s clothing; for whoever does these things is an abomination to the Lord your God” (Deuteronomy 22:5). Just like other theater enemies, Rainolds vehemently condemned the widespread practice of theatrical cross-dressing. Excluding that it could ever be legitimate for a man to wear women’s clothes and vice versa, he merely saw in it a likely source of sin and incitement toward unnatural and sodomitical acts, especially in the case of boy-actors “feigning love” onstage (Rainolds 1599, 10–18).⁴

What the real focus of Rainolds’s tirade was, however, emerged right after this passage. His aim was, indeed, to attack the mimesis and the persuasive power of words – the two elements representing the essence itself of drama. Harking back on and expanding what he had already hinted at in his De Romanae Ecclesiae Idolatria, Rainolds underlined the dangers implicit in playing morally dubious parts. Imitation – he claimed – could lead both actors and audience to identify with the fictitious characters so much to make them acquire those wrong behaviors:

Now, within the compasse hereof doth the playing of sundry parts in Comedies fall, as of cozening varlets, base parasites, and the rest . . . of sundry parts in tragedies, as of ambitious, cruell, blasphemous, godless caitiffs . . . in a word, of all such parts . . . The foole doth commit wickednesse in pastime; and the scriptures teacheth they are no better than madde men . . . For the care of making a shew to doe such feastes, and to doe them as liuely as the beasts themselues in whom the vices raigne, worketh in the actors a marueilous imperfection of being like the persons whose qualities they expresse and imitate: chiefly when earnest and much meditation of sundry daies and weeks . . . shall . . . engraue the things in their minde with a penne of iron, or with the point of a diamond.

(Rainolds 1599, 19–20)

In so doing, however, Rainolds also implicitly acknowledged that the great power of drama consisted precisely in bringing what were already alluring verbal pictures to life, thus intensifying their grip on the audience through the acting skills of the actors. The resulting visual effect of this powerful mixture of words and action could prove so persuasive, that even an irreproachable Puritan like himself could not be able to resist. As Michael O’Connell (2000, 35) put it, “Seeing the ‘lively action and representation’ that the players create and hearing speech directly, carrying the very emphasis and emotive expressiveness that they have in life – these are what so potently affect the emotions, whether the spectator wills it or not.” The exchange of letters between Rainolds and Gager continued for a long time, and the former’s tone became angrier and angrier. Possibly, this was also due to the fact that Queen Elizabeth herself, visiting Oxford later that year and informed of the ongoing controversy, reproached the theologian for his “obstinate preciseness” (Plummer 1887, xxvii). In the likely attempt to support a by-then disheartened and surrendered Gager, in July 1593 Regius Professor Alberico Gentili intervened in the controversy.

Why would a Professor of Civil Law step out against the influent theologian John Rainolds on such an extravagant topic as drama? The answer is simple. Apart from his friendship with Gager, earlier in 1593 Gentili had published an interesting and today quite a neglected work, Commentatio ad Legem III Codicis de professoribus et medicis. Here, while commenting on a section of the Roman Code of Justinian which dealt with the commodities offered to teachers and doctors, but not to poets and actors, he had articulated an overall defense of poetry – a concept which was synonymous at the time of today’s “literature” – and made specific reference to drama and the profession of actors.⁵ This, along wi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Editors and Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I To Look or Not to Look at Pictures?
• Part II Confluences: English Texts and European Paintings
• Part III Portraits on the Page and the Stage
• Part IV The Power of the Visual and the Verbal
• Index