Sovereigns and Subjects in Early Modern Neo-Senecan Drama

Republicanism, Stoicism and Authority

Daniel Cadman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9780367880200
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317052111
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Sovereigns and Subjects in Early Modern Neo-Senecan Drama examines the development of neo-Senecan drama, also known as 'closet drama', during the years 1590-1613. It is the first book-length study since 1924 to consider these plays - the dramatic works of Mary Sidney, Samuel Daniel, Samuel Brandon, Fulke Greville, Sir William Alexander, and Elizabeth Cary, along with the Roman tragedies of Ben Jonson and Thomas Kyd - as a coherent group. Daniel Cadman suggests these works interrogate the relations between sovereigns and subjects during the early modern period by engaging with the humanist discourses of republicanism and stoicism. Cadman argues that the texts under study probe various aspects of this dynamic and illuminate the ways in which stoicism and republicanism provide essential frameworks for negotiating this relationship between the marginalized courtier and the absolute sovereign. He demonstrates how aristocrats and courtiers, such as Sidney, Greville, Alexander, and Cary, were able to use the neo-Senecan form to consider aspects of their limited political agency under an absolute monarch, while others, such as Brandon and Daniel, respond to similarly marginalized positions within both political and patronage networks. In analyzing how these plays illuminate various aspects of early modern political culture, this book addresses several gaps in the scholarship of early modern drama and explores new contexts in relation to more familiar writers, as well as extending the critical debate to include hitherto neglected authors.

Chapter 1
‘The hurtful works of pleasure here behold’: Stoicism and Sovereignty in Mary Sidney’s Antonius

The early 1590s were busy years for Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke, at least in terms of her literary career. As Margaret Hannay has shown, Sidney’s literary endeavours included her works as a patron and as an editor and executor of the literary legacy of her late brother, Sir Philip Sidney, as well as working as an author in her own right.¹ His influence upon the literary work of his sister is evident in a number of her translations. As well as completing the translations of the psalms on which they had collaborated, her translation of Petrarch’s Triumph of Death complements Sidney’s appropriations of Petrarch in his Astrophil and Stella sequence and her translation of Philippe du Plessis-Mornay’s Discourse of Life and Death, originally published in the same volume as Antonius, can be viewed alongside Sidney’s English translation of Mornay’s La verité de la religion chrétienne. One of the most notable products from this intense period of activity, however, was her translation of Marc Antoine, a work by the eminent French dramatist Robert Garnier, which was completed in 1590 and first published in 1592 as Antonius. The fact that this text is the first English drama in print to have been written by a woman is not the only way in which it sets an important precedent; it also represents the first attempt to naturalise the Continental form of neo-Senecan drama in English, a move that, as future chapters will show, numerous others aimed to emulate.

Mary Sidney’s choice of dramatic work for translation is significant in that it is part of a sustained interest in contemporary French culture. It is tempting to emphasise the inherent irony of Sidney’s appropriation of the dramatic work of a Catholic writer given the Sidney family’s support for the French Huguenots. However, Garnier’s Roman plays are in fact characterised by calls for moderation, fears of tyranny and civil strife, and a concern for the ordinary people affected by the political manoeuvring of those who hold office. Garnier’s plays do not advance specific partisan interests but are means of responding to the internecine conflicts taking place within his own country, for which the history of ancient Rome, in particular, provided numerous incidents which could serve as fitting analogues. Garnier himself was eager to emphasise this point by describing his tragedy, Cornélie, as a ‘poeme à mon regret trop propre aux malheurs de nostre siècle’,² thereby advancing the events which take place in his text as analogous to those taking place in his own century. He also established his 1568 text, Porcie, in similar terms as the subtitle, ‘tragedie françoise, représentant la cruelle et sanglante saison des guerres civiles de Rome: propre et convenable pour y voir depeincte la calamité de ce temps’,³ suggests. Garnier’s subtitle implies that his representation of the cruel and bloody period of Roman civil wars can be appropriated as an effective commentary upon contemporary affairs in France.⁴ In its interrogation of tyranny and the value and utility of stoicism, Mary Sidney found in Marc Antoine a means of advancing the kind of political and philosophical outlooks to which she and her family were aligned, and responding to issues that were sources of anxiety for her English readers and had considerable bearings upon English foreign policy.⁵

The fact that Mary Sidney translates a text so steeped in French politics 12 years after its original publication in France poses a number of problems for a political reading of the play. Garnier’s own tendency to waver between political positions in different writings, expressing tentative royalism in his dedicatory verses and an anti-tyrannical outlook in his drama, complicates the politics of the work and serves to add ambiguity to any political messages that Sidney may have wished to convey.⁶ Skretkowicz proposes an allegorical reading of the play in which ‘Antony, the kingdom of France, defeated by self-indulgent internal divisions, kills itself, leaving an abandoned Cleopatra, like the desperate French Huguenots, on the brink of annihilation by the new generation of Romans, the Spanish Catholics’.⁷ Whilst this reading shows how the play could be amenable to militant Protestant concerns, it does offer an overly allegorised view of the play’s political engagement. In spite of the fact that Mary Sidney remains faithful to Garnier’s play in her translation, the text still interrogates political issues which were of considerable importance to a contemporary English readership. Paulina Kewes has argued that Mary Sidney’s translation engages with such topical issues as the threat of a Spanish invasion and Elizabeth’s leadership of an increasingly beleaguered nation, resulting in a play that ‘appears to combine a severe indictment of Spanish imperialism with a no less severe indictment of Elizabeth’s failure to combat it’.⁸ The representation of Caesar, ‘a bloodthirsty tyrant exulting in his sole rule over Rome and the world, effectively serves to denounce Philip II’s design for a universal monarchy’, whilst Cleopatra’s political irresponsibility is viewed as a means of engaging with Protestant concerns that, in ‘the event of the queen’s sudden death without a clearly designated Protestant heir, England … would succumb to conquest by Roman Catholic Spain, and, like Egypt, which lost its statehood to Rome after Cleopatra’s death, would degenerate into a mere province of the Iberian empire’.⁹ Sidney’s play, then, is not merely concerned with events in France; it also exhibits a clear awareness that Elizabeth’s England is also a state which is ripe for the kind of devastation which tore apart ancient Egypt and was tearing apart contemporary France. Mary Sidney’s translation establishes a number of the formal and thematic features that would come to characterise the neo-Senecan dramas of the 1590s and early 1600s, particularly through its engagement with stoicism and republicanism. The play’s dramatisation of a constitutional crisis caused, in this case, by the collapse of the second triumvirate and the rise of the power-hungry Octavian, is reflective of the increasingly marginal influence of counsellors at the English court, as well as highlighting anxieties generated by the imperial ambitions of Spain.

Mary Sidney’s interest in French politics is also demonstrated by the fact that the original publication of Antonius is accompanied by her translation of Mornay’s Discourse of Life and Death. Mary Ellen Lamb has argued that these two texts, along with her translation of Petrarch’s Triumph of Death, can all be linked by their engagement in the ars moriendi tradition. Lamb highlights the principal connections between Antonius and the Discourse in terms of the potential application of neo-stoicism. Whereas ‘Mornay’s treatise applied the Stoic ideal primarily to the life course led by men, not by women’, Lamb regards her translation of Garnier, ‘with its heroic portrait of a female protagonist, Cleopatra’, as ‘an attempt to apply Mornay’s philosophy to the situation of Renaissance women’.¹⁰ However, this suggestion is made problematic by the fact that the protagonists go against Mornay’s outlook by committing suicide, making a play dramatising the suicides of the protagonists an odd choice for a companion piece for Mornay’s text. If her intention was to represent the art of dying well, Garnier’s Cornelia, later translated by Kyd, with a stoic heroine who is dissuaded from committing suicide, would seem a more obvious choice.

The essence of Mornay’s argument is that death is not something to be resisted or feared, nor is it something one should seek actively. This is emphasised towards the end of the text:

Wee must seeke to mortifie our flesh in us, and to cast the world out of us: but to cast our selves out of the world is in no sort permitted us. The Christian ought willingly to depart out of life but not cowardly to runne away. The Christian is ordained by God to fight therein: and cannot leave his place without incurring reproch and infamie. But if it please the grand Captaine to recall him, let him take the retrait in good part, and with good will obey it.¹¹

Here, Mornay advances the traditional stoic resignation to fate but hastens to add that this should not be interpreted as an approval of suicide. Mornay also makes use of the recurring medical trope found in various neo-stoic works, including Lipsius’s De Constantia, by arguing that death is like what we would foolishly presume to be an unpleasant remedy for our earthly maladies. By viewing it in the same way as a harsh medicine, we are overlooking its potential to relieve our suffering. The advice against resisting the inevitable onset of death is emphasised by the negative description of life, particularly for a public servant. By having to deal with the sycophancy of subordinates and the whims of a tyrant, the courtier is particularly susceptible to many of the vicissitudes of life. Advancement at court, Mornay argues, depends upon serving the tyrant’s impulses through military service and unjustly slaughtering others, or upon following the courtiers who ‘growe up flattering a Prince, and long submitting their toongs and hands to say and doe without difference whatsoever they will have them’.¹² For Mornay, those who flourish at court must debase themselves to flattery and to the wishes of the sovereign, whatever they may be. By adopting this course of unquestioning acquiescence, the courtier will be unable to achieve the stoic goal of self-sovereignty; they will be forced into situations in which ‘a good minde can never command it selfe’, thereby viewing personal agency as the price for advancement at court.¹³ The themes of political corruption and the emphases upon self-sovereignty, and not just the outlooks towards death, place these two texts in dialogue. The interrogation of these questions is focused upon the representation of the two protagonists, who both fall short of achieving the stoic goal of mastery over one’s self, the consequences of which, and the bearings it has upon questions relating to gender roles, are interrogated throughout the play.

The anxiety surrounding the prospect of losing oneself that is highlighted in the Discourse is one that recurs throughout the play and is addressed by Cleopatra as well as Antonius. Whilst Antonius fears that he has sacrificed...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 ‘The hurtful works of pleasure here behold’: Stoicism and Sovereignty in Mary Sidney’s Antonius
• 2 ‘Plurality of Caesars’: Politics, Stoicism, and Exemplarity in the Roman Plays of Thomas Kyd, Samuel Daniel, and Samuel Brandon
• 3 Giving Tyrants Fame: Fulke Greville’s Mustapha and Alaham
• 4 William Alexander’s Darius and The Alexandræan Tragedy, and Samuel Daniel’s Philotas
• 5 ‘The losse of that which fortune lends’: William Alexander’s Croesus and Julius Caesar
• 6 ‘Insolent fictions of the tragic scene’: Stoicism and Republicanism in Ben Jonson’s Sejanus and Catiline
• 7 ‘The news we heard did tell the tyrant’s end’: Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index