Literature and the Renaissance Garden from Elizabeth I to Charles II

England’s Paradise

Amy L. Tigner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138257825
• eBook ISBN: 9781317104346
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Spanning the period from Elizabeth I's reign to Charles II's restoration, this study argues the garden is a primary site evincing a progressive narrative of change, a narrative that looks to the Edenic as obtainable ideal in court politics, economic prosperity, and national identity in early modern England. In the first part of the study, Amy L. Tigner traces the conceptual forms that the paradise imaginary takes in works by Gascoigne, Spenser, and Shakespeare, all of whom depict the garden as a space in which to imagine the national body of England and the gendered body of the monarch. In the concluding chapters, she discusses the function of gardens in the literary works by Jonson, an anonymous masque playwright, and Milton, the herbals of John Gerard and John Parkinson, and the tract writing of Ralph Austen, Lawrence Beal, and Walter Blithe. In these texts, the paradise imaginary is less about the body politic of the monarch and more about colonial pursuits and pressing environmental issues. As Tigner identifies, during this period literary representations of gardens become potent discursive models that both inspire constructions of their aesthetic principles and reflect innovations in horticulture and garden technology. Further, the development of the botanical garden ushers in a new world of science and exploration. With the importation of a new world of plants, the garden emerges as a locus of scientific study: hybridization, medical investigation, and the proliferation of new ornamentals and aliments. In this way, the garden functions as a means to understand and possess the rapidly expanding globe.

Chapter 1
The Political Garden: Horticultural Courtship

The trope of the garden is inexorably tied to the paradisiacal, and the paradisiacal, I argue, is the site of political power in early modern England. The garden is a loaded metaphor, of course, summoning nostalgia for the idyllic nature of the classical Golden Age; evoking a desire to return to the perfection and innocence of the Garden of Eden; and expressing a yearning for the sensuous idealization of Solomon’s Song of Songs. The latter represents the female body and the conjugal subject as herself the ideal garden: “A garden enclosed is my sister, my spouse” (4.12). When the landscape of the garden is conflated with a woman’s body in Western culture the woman becomes figured as Eve, Circe, Venus, and/or Mary, seductress and/or mother. In each case, the woman in and of the garden becomes hyper-sexualized: Eve because she led to Adam’s downfall by means of her sexual temptation;1 Circe and Venus because they seduce all men; and Mary because her function of mother calls particular attention to the sexualized female body, even as she is figured as virgin. Moreover, throughout this Western tradition, the physical garden space reads as always already a fecund, fertile locale: essentially teeming with sex.2 The underlying current of paradise in English literature is also sexual: Donne will say of his mistress, “though angel, bring’st with thee/A heaven like Mahomet’s paradise,” and Milton will write that the first couple were “Imparadised in one another’s arms.”3 Sex is similarly the modus operandi of political life in the court of Elizabeth I, where “courtship [is] the discursive site of a conspicuous socio-political controversy,” as Ilona Bell has argued.4 When aristocratic courtship literally takes place in a garden—what I term, “horticultural courtship”—a whole other layer of meaning blankets the political event because the imagery of paradise transforms the particular garden into the universal Garden of Eden. According to the biblical narrative, the Garden of Eden once held all of humankind; and in early modern culture the Garden blurs the cosmological and the political as a synecdoche for the whole world in a perfect state. As any garden can reflect the Garden of Eden, the horticultural space becomes a microcosm for the country and even, I would argue, into the entire world.

Yet, because any horticultural space—especially an Edenic one—cannot be divorced from its association with the sexualized female body, the image of England as a garden serves above all as the perfect site for courtiers to situate the queen’s body, an avatar for the political body of the country.5 Over the course of Elizabeth I’s 45-year reign, the queen required her court to go “on progress” through the English countryside during the spring and summer months. On these royal journeys, the queen and her entourage would visit towns and aristocratic houses. Mary Hill Cole notes, “These trips provided the only direct contact most people had with a monarch who made popularity a cornerstone of her reign. Public appearances gave the queen a stage on which to interact with her subjects in a calculated effort to keep their support.”6 As much as the progresses offered Elizabeth an opportunity to be a visible power in the eyes of her people, the journeys also enabled her noblemen to negotiate their own authority as they entertained and courted the queen within their own domain. The outdoor entertainments at Kenilworth in 1575 by the Earl of Leicester, Robert Dudley, and those in 1591 at Elvetham by the Earl of Hertford, Edward Seymour, were the most extensive and elaborate spectacles presented to Queen Elizabeth while she traveled on progress. Of particular importance to these tours, the Earls Leicester and Hertford drew upon the French and Italian practice of employing garden performances as a means of political persuasion and as an exhibition of wealth and power. In these entertainments, literary, mythological, and allegorical characters, played by hired actors, interacted directly with royal or aristocratic persons. The effect is that the real persons would be drawn into fictive narratives, making them almost appear as characters themselves within the drama. Yet almost always the narratives were not mere fancies but had ideological and political arguments undergirding them. As such, the sponsor of the entertainments could make aesthetic and indirect requests or suggestions to the key spectator/participant or they could, as was most often the case on the continent, glorify those in power. However, the interactions between the scripted characters played by actors and real people participating in the narrative, who are not scripted, are unstable precisely because the participant, i.e., Elizabeth, did not always agree with the argument of the skit. In France, the crown primarily produced garden magnificences for the glory of the crown; however, in England, analogous garden spectacles performed for Queen Elizabeth were never sponsored by her. Instead aristocrats produced these garden entertainments as horticultural courtship, a mode of personal and political maneuvering that employed the paradisiacal space and all its powerful associations to court the queen’s favor.

Throughout the queen’s long reign, England as a geographic land and political territory represented Elizabeth’s power and authority, and the land came to symbolize her very body, as Roy Strong and Louis Montrose have argued.7 The most stunning example of the correlation between the queen and the English geographic imaginary is the “Ditchley” portrait that depicts Elizabeth standing on the map of England. The island appears as an extension of the queen in her voluptuous skirts. As Roy Strong observes, “[I]n the ‘Ditchley’ portrait Queen, crown and island become one. Elizabeth is England, woman and kingdom are interchangeable.”8 Considering the Edenic associations with ideological understanding of the island and the queen, I see Leicester and Hertford as endeavoring to effectuate their own ideas of governing and to further their own desires concerning royal ascendancy and succession. Creating garden extravaganzas modeled after continental examples, these English aristocrats made a bid for monarchal power by constructing their own iconographic representation of the national landscape and, by extension, the queen’s body and realm.

Within this complex context of courtly gardens, aristocratic politics, and the female/matriarchal body, Edmund Spenser wrote the first edition of The Faerie Queene (1590) while exiled from both homeland and queen. The gardens in the poem, particularly the Bower of Bliss at the end of Book II and the Garden of Adonis in the middle of Book III, with their highly charged sexuality and representation as a female body intentionally reflect the spectacle at Kenilworth and all its associations with the paradisiacal. England and therefore Spenser’s Faerie Lond at some level represent the queen’s body politic, and the Spenserian gardens correlate with the sex of her body natural. The Earl of Leicester created an emblematic landscape in which he devised a drama that aspired to manipulate the queen’s movements and roles; so too, Spenser constructed his symbolic gardens as places that narrate the queen’s private body natural. Within his literary gardens, Spenser re-created the roles that Elizabeth played at Kenilworth. In place of an actual garden performance, the gardens in The Faerie Queene become an elaborate literary imagining of the horticultural courtship that occurred at the aristocratic estates. At Elvetham, the Earl of Hertford was highly influenced by both Leicester and Spenser in their courtship with the queen. Hertford’s garden-spectacle narrative mirrored Spenser’s imaginary gardens and their symbolic connection to Elizabeth; most revealing is the appearance of the “Fairy Quene” at Elvetham. Though their tactics varied, the two garden entertainments given at Kenilworth and at Elvetham and the literary gardens in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene all attempted to construct the body of the English queen in the English landscape. This chapter argues not only that such practices and performances in the aristocratic garden directly impact the literary world of Spenser and early modern England, both its production and its reception, but also, and crucially, that the abstract literary imagination of the garden shapes the physical horticultural landscape in England. Illustrating this cultural phenomenon in early modern England, Leicester’s garden at Kenilworth (itself a recreation of the paradisiacal) finds reflection in Spenser’s literary gardens; and Spenser’s epic poem in turn influences Hertford’s garden and garden entertainments at Elvetham. This tripartite reiteration of paradise in English letters and horticulture situates England as Edenic, the fundamental position from which England could envision itself as morally and politically hegemonic.

The Magnificence at Kenilworth

Part I. The Garden

During the Renaissance, garden owners specifically sought to recreate the paradisiacal in the terrestrial. In 1615, the traveler Fynes Moryson will say of the Cardinal Ippolito d’Este’s garden at Tivoli, near Rome, “[I]t resembles a terrestriall paradise by reason of the fountaines, statuaes, caues, groues, fishponds, cages of birds, Nightingales flying loose in the groues, and the most pleasant prospect.”9 Later Moryson will compare the gardens in Naples with the gardens of the Hesperides and comment that they each “seem like an earthly Paradise.”10 Though Moryson is describing gardens he encountered in Italy in the early seventeenth century, aristocrats in England had by the last quarter of the sixteenth century already begun laying out gardens in this paradisiacal continental style. As Roy Strong has discussed, we know from the depiction in a letter by Robert Laneham that the Earl of Leicester was one of the first in England to create a garden styled after the French and Italian designs.11 When Laneham described the layout of the garden, he exclaimed that it was “worthy to be called a paradys.”12 As with the continental aristocrats and monarchs who amused important guests with entertainments in their paradisiacal gardens, Leicester saw the paradisiacal space as an ideal location to host Elizabeth I. At Kenilworth in 1575, Elizabeth was treated to 18 days of outdoor spectacles, the extravagance of which had never before been seen or experienced in England. A year after the event, the entertainment script was published as The Princely Pleasures at the Courte at Kenelwoorth (1576) and was attributed to George Gascoigne with the addition of verses by other court poets.13 Other recorded sources of the entertainments include “A Letter: Whearin, part of the Entertainment, untoo the Queenz Maiesty, at Killingworth Castl” known as Laneham’s Letter, published almost immediately after Elizabeth’s visit, and the Spanish ambassador Antonio de Guaras’s 1578 letter, a source brought to light by Susan Frye.14 Gascoigne’s, Laneham’s, and de Guaras’s accounts differ as to what entertainments they recorded, and Laneham and de Guaras give us varied, and at times competing, perspectives on the events that Gascoigne’s more official record (the one that Leicester commissioned) omits. In Gascoigne’s account, one drama was completely removed from the list of entertainments and another was significantly truncated and changed: a masque in which Diana and Juno argue over the nymph, Eliza, which was a not so veiled argument for the queen to marry Leicester, was never performed; and a jousting match between Sir Bruse sans Pitie (who was threatening to rape the Lady of the Lake) and a captain (probably meant to be enacted by Leicester himself) was supposed to take place. In Gascoigne’s account, the captain was to have won the match and then freed the Lady of the Lake. Yet in Laneham’s account, the queen changed the narrative so that she herself replaced Leicester as the Lady of the Lake’s savior.

Recent scholars have found the entertainments at Kenilworth, more than any other garden spectacle of the period, to be of particular interest because of its length and lavish display. To date, the most comprehensive and illuminating study is Susan Frye’s Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation, which has laid the groundwork for our understanding of Leicester’s spectacles at Kenilworth and how these entertainments became the site of the infamous political wrangling between the earl and the queen. Frye has read the entertainments as Leicester’s political manipulation of, and contest with, Elizabeth about the representation of throne and queen, as he makes his bid for her hand in this elaborate courtly display that projects his authority and power. Frye’s scholarship also demonstrates a clear connection between Kenilworth and Spenser’s Faerie Queene; in particular she is concerned with how Spenser’s definition of chastity, especially in the character of Britomart, is colore...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The Political Garden: Horticultural Courtship
• 2 The Untended Garden: Shakespeare and the Anti-Paradise
• 3 The Corporeal Garden: Masquerading in Paradise
• 4 The Colonial Garden: Collecting Paradise
• 5 The Revolutionary Garden: Milton and Early Modern Environmental Thinking
• Bibliography
• Index