English Fictions of Communal Identity, 1485–1603

Joshua Phillips

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754665984
• eBook ISBN: 9781317143109
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Challenging a long-standing trend that sees the Renaissance as the end of communal identity and constitutive group affiliation, author Joshua Phillips explores the perseverance of such affiliation throughout Tudor culture. Focusing on prose fiction from Malory's Morte Darthur through the works of Sir Philip Sidney and Thomas Nashe, this study explores the concept of collective agency and the extensive impact it had on English Renaissance culture. In contrast to studies devoted to the myth of early modern individuation, English Fictions of Communal Identity, 1485-1603 pays special attention to primary communities-monastic orders, printing house concerns, literary circles, and neighborhoods-that continued to generate a collective sense of identity. Ultimately, Phillips offers a new way of theorizing the relation between collaboration and identity. In terms of literary history, this study elucidates a significant aspect of novelistic discourse, even as it accounts for the institutional disregard of often brilliant works of early modern fiction.

PART I
Belonging and Belongings

Chapter 1
The Caxtonian Imaginary:
Knights and the Dreams of the Abbey-Lubbers

Of all types of imaginative literature, romance seems at first glance the least likely to engage with the problems and pleasures of ownership. As a variety of fantasy literature, romance seeks to transcend questions of possession, of material existence itself. So saturated is it with the longing for a communal ethos that writers of satire have merely to introduce the idea of private ownership or money in order to estrange the very genre. We know we have left the world of romance proper, for example, when Don Quijote introduces into his text’s discourse the argument that knights errant have privileges exempting them from “taxes—rent-tax, king’s wedding-tax, land-tax” and ironically inquires, “When did a tailor ever charge for making a knight’s clothes? What warden, giving him lodging in his castle, ever charged a knight for his bed?”¹ In simply uttering words that point to a world of private ownership and a money economy, the knight of La Mancha transgresses the laws of the genre. Indeed, the very idea of knights errant suggests wandering, a dislocation from the kind of placedness that ownership seems to encourage and require.

The romances printed by William Caxton (and his successor Wynkyn de Worde) along with the prologues and glosses appended to those texts, however, do formulate powerful ways of thinking about property and its relation to the real that helped shape early modern English representations of ownership. Between 1485 and 1490, Caxton printed two of the most important works of fiction in the English language: Malory’s Morte Darthur and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Seemingly opposed in nearly every way, these two works broadly define Caxton’s intervention in the literary imagination of Renaissance England, an intervention in which fantasy is inextricably linked to nostalgia and critique. Chaucer’s text, although written earlier, is already a satire of Malory’s representational world and strategies. In Caxton’s hands, however, both of them reveal something important not only about the late Middle Ages, but also about the social fantasies the sixteenth century would take up. Both Chaucer and Malory offer alternatives to what many sixteenth-century and modern critics see as the twin binding forces of early modern society: family structure and private property.² Partaking of a long tradition of social analysis, Sir Thomas Smith (c.1565) called the family “the first and most natural beginning and source of cities, towns, nations, kingdoms, and of all civil society.”³ In contrast, Malory and Chaucer reveal that what the Tudor period would fantasize, even if it didn’t quite organize itself as such, would be not family units, but collective subjectivity. This communal ideal is clearly articulated in Caxton’s edition of Jacob de Cessolis’s The Game of Chess, where we find the following:

by lawe of nature al thyng ought to be comyn to every man and thys lawe was of olde tyme … And also it is to be supposid that suche as have theyr goodes comune and not propré is most acceptable to god. For ellis wold not thyse religyous men as monkes freres chanons observaunters and al other avowe hem and kepe the wylful poverte that they ben professed to. For in trouth I have myself ben conversaunt in a religious hows of whyt freres at gaunt whiche have al thyng in comyn among them and not one richer than another … in whiche hows ben many vertuous and devout freries and yf that lyf were not the best & the most holyest holy chirche wold never suffre hit in religyon.⁴

This passage succinctly emphasizes one of the key elements that would structure a Caxtonian imaginary of collective selfhood: a community of goods, established by natural law and approved of by God and “holy chirche.” Equally, it describes those religious groupings of “monkes, freres, chanons, observaunters” that substitute for familial connections a spiritual fraternalism.

In Le Morte Darthur, as the court breaks into opposed factions, the young knight Gareth forsakes his family (Gawain, Agravain, and Mordred) to join Lancelot’s party. Unknown to Gareth, his brothers, including Gawain, will become the instrument by which Arthurian affiliation meets its demise. Called “the grettest destroyers and murtherers of good knyghtes that ben now in this reame,” these brothers foreground family over other forms of association, undermining the elective nature of the Arthurian ideal community.⁵ It is fitting for the dark ending of this book that kinship ties, and specifically those of brothers, should unravel the social edifice of Camelot. For in much of the literature of the Tudor era, in romance and other fantasies of collectivity, the homosocial bonds of fraternity, of brotherhood (natural or elective), do represent an idealized alternative to the social unit of the household. The Four Sons of Aymon (first published by Caxton in 1489/1490) provides an exemplary model, as do the guilds of Deloney’s Gentle Craft at the far end of the sixteenth century. The mid-fourteenth century Tale of Gamelyn foregrounds the hatred of brother for brother, while its sixteenth-century descendents—Lodge’s Rosalynd and Shakespeare’s As You Like It —balance out the brotherly discord with dreams of fraternal reconciliation. “O my brothers, my co-mates in exile,” Duke Senior calls his male cohorts in the Forest of Arden (2.1.1).

In contrast to the household, which tends to naturalize familial relations, Tudor fictions offer the bonds of brotherhood as elective, rather than merely natural, associations. Presenting fraternity as a matter of choice, the authors of these fictions blur the line between family and friendship. As Ian Ward notes, “so many contemporaries thought the rise of private friendship to be an indirect threat to the role of the family as the central unit of affinity within the community” (“Shakespeare and the Politics of Community,” 6). The important point here is that Caxton’s denaturalization of relation highlights the degree to which all such forms had to be constantly re-imagined into existence. Caxton envisioned for himself a role in the re-imagination, dissemination and reproduction of communal forms. In the epilogue to his influential edition of The Order of Chivalry (1484), Caxton bewailed the current state of English knights, claiming that these days they only “go to the baynes and playe atte dise.” Inadvertently pointing to how actual associational forms can become morally corrosive and how communal recreation can become recreantise, Caxton urges such knights to turn rather to fantasies of communal action as a way of reforming the “brotherhood.” “Leve this,” he exhorts, “leve it and rede the noble volumes of saynt graal of lancelot of galaad of Trystram of perse forest of percyval of gawayn & many mo.”⁶ In providing these tales to the knights and gentleman of the kingdom, Caxton—along with numerous others—is in effect helping to reproduce the very ideology of collective subjectivity that his texts thematize.

Caxton and Fictions of the Monastery

Of course, chivalric groups were not Caxton’s only ideal associational forms. So too were the monasteries, nunneries, and hermitages to which old knights and ladies retired in medieval romance.⁷ I turn now to the monasteries and the romances as sites of cultural contestation that can tell us a great deal about collectivity, fiction, and ownership in the sixteenth century. As we have seen, the works of Caxton and de Worde, especially the romances, tend not to take property as their principal focus.⁸ Rather as part of a general aristocratic ideological fiction, they filter an account of property through their representation of collective fraternities such as that of the Round Table. When that fraternity starts to come undone, the knights return to their own lands, markers of private property. This return to the world of real belongings is the sign of failure under which the Morte Darthur moves toward catastrophe. No longer part of a fellowship in which all the members are “united, heart and soul,” the knights of the Round Table find themselves once again belonging to communities founded on ties of kinship, ethnicity, and property relations. As a response to the disintegration of one form of collectivity, it is illuminating that the knights should find redemption from such a fall by reiterating the elective, masculine, and propertyless community structure that defined Camelot in a spiritualized form: in hermitages and monasteries. Indeed, Caxton’s romances can be said, I think, to take place in landscapes shaped by the monasteries to which their heroes retreat or retire. As such, they stand in productive tension with depictions of monastic dissolution in mid-Tudor history when monasteries operated even more vividly as sites of cultural contestation, figures in a kind of primal scene of the English post-Reformation imagination. A moment of trauma concerning possession of mater ecclesia and of the motherland, the expropriation of monastic lands is, as we shall see, an event that gets re-played over and over again in the dreamlife of Tudor fiction.

In Le Morte Darthur, Lancelot, who has accidentally killed two of Gawain’s brothers, tries to save the Arthurian fellowship through a ritual act of debasement and a multiplication of non-propertied communities. He promises to Gawain that, in expiation,

I shalle fyrst begynne at Sandwyche, and ther I shall goo in my shert barefoot. And at every ten myles ende I wylle founde and gar make [have made] an hows of relygyon of what ordre that ye wyl assygne me, with an hole covent to synge and rede day and nyghte … And this shal I performe from Sandwyche unto Carleil, and every hows shal have suffycyent lyvelode. (I, 20, 16, 574)

But a world of religious houses, with communicants singing and praying all day, seems to Gawain a cruel imitation of what he can no longer reclaim. “We are past that,” he says. “I will never forgyve my broders dethe” (ibid.). Caught between a spiritualized fraternity and a merely familial brotherhood, Gawain makes the wrong choice. However, as critics have often noted, neither Arthur nor Gawain is the protagonist of Le Morte Darthur: Lancelot is. Unlike the other two, Lancelot stays true to the genre and to the sense of elective associational forms so prized by Caxton. Arriving at a hermitage presided over by the “Bysshop of Caunterburye,” Lancelot “prayed the bysshop to shryve hym and assoyle hym. And than he besought the bysshop that he myght be hys brother” (I, 21, 10, 596). Continually hungering for fellowship, Lancelot ends his days inhabiting a new, if deeply familiar, mode of fraternal belonging. No longer fighting and questing with his fellows, he now prays and sings with them.⁹ So powerful an example of collective thought and action is he that within half a year seven other knights of the Round Table join him, doing “lowly al maner of servyce … for they toke no regarde of no worldly rychesses” (596). Lancelot’s story becomes, in light of his end, an allegory not simply of the movement toward a more fully Christian fellowship, but also of the way that collective subjectivity refuses to be divided out of existence, finding always new forms of expression.

A form of epanorthosis, the monasteries correct one central contradiction of the chivalric life as detailed in these romances. Presented as collective and errant, chivalry rests implicitly on its practitioners being landed. So obvious as to be nearly invisible, this fact unsettles the fantasy of collective subjectivity and communal ownership that the romances are designed to foster. The Knight of the Swan, printed by de Worde in 1512, plays out this contradiction, making much of the importance of inheritance on the one hand, while on the other condemning the practice of marrying specifically for lands and possessions:

the sayd kynge Pyeron hym accorded to take to wyfe the sayd Matabrune for that she had grete possessyon of landes and other infynyte rychesses. Wherby as thystory sayth the maryage was made by coveytyse & not by love whereof many harmes grew.¹⁰

In presenting marriage-for-profit as morally transgressive, the text tacitly asserts that, for the aristocracy, such marriage is non-normative and unrepresentative. This passage should be read as just one example of the ideological work of romance, resolving the contradictions of an aristocratic class in a fantasy of unsought and undesired (albeit wholly merited) privilege. But, in the aftermath of Chaucerian derision and fifteenth-century pietism, these contradictions were not so easily narrated out of existence. A desire for collective subjectivity led readers to question representations of knighthood based on private property and inheritance. Where the system of landed aristocracy ceased to satisfy such a desire, writers and readers often found a resolution in the form of monasteries.

However, just as Caxton’s texts often worried about the decline of knighthood, so too did some of them imagine with horror, however fleetingly, the dissolution of the monasteries. In the version of Charles the Great that Caxton published in 1481, Charles [Charlemagne] ponders an imminent battle between his champion Oliver and the Muslim champion Fierabras: “I swere by the soule of my fader that yf he [Oliver] be now slayn of thys paynym that never in fraunce in ony chirche shal clerke ne preest be reuseted ne enhabyted, but I shal do brenne monasteryes, chyrches, aulters & crucyfyxes.”¹¹ Necessarily, Oliver goes on to vanquish his pagan foe, confirming Charles’ faith and solidifying, for this genre, the importance of the religious houses. By no means an isolated incident, threats to “brenne monasteryes...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Violence of Singularity
• PART I: BELONGING AND BELONGINGS
• PART II: KNOWING TOGETHER, LABORING TOGETHER
• PART III: BROKEN MUSIC: RE-IMAGINING COLLECTIVE SUBJECTIVITY
• Conclusion: A Piece of the Main
• Bibliography
• Index