Performing Masculinity in English University Drama, 1598-1636

Christopher Marlow

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409410195
• eBook ISBN: 9781317082385
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Referencing early modern English play texts alongside contemporary records, accounts and statutes, this study offers an overdue assessment of the relationship between the dramatic efforts of the universities and early modern male identity. Taking into account the near single-sex constitution of early modern universities, the book argues that performances of university plays, and student responses to them, were key ways of exploring and shaping early modern masculinity. Christopher Marlow shows how the plays dealt with their academic and social contexts, and analyses their responses to competing versions of masculinity. He also considers the implications of university authority and royal patronage for scholarly performances of masculinity; the effect of the literary traditions of classical friendship and platonic love on academic representations of male behaviour; and the relationship between university drama and masculine initiation rituals. Including discussion of the Parnassus trilogy, Club Law and works by Thomas Randolph, William Cartwright, John Milton and others, this study shines new light on long neglected aspects of the golden age of English drama.

Chapter 1
The Contexts of Early Modern University Drama

Despite the enduring cultural significance of the early modern stage, the world of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century university drama remains for the most part an unfamiliar one. College life at Oxford and Cambridge was, by its very nature, secluded, and as a result the theatrical, cultural, and social circumstances of that life are much less well known than, for example, those that accompanied contemporaneous performances on London stages such as the Swan, the Globe and Blackfriars. If the plays produced by the Oxbridge colleges of the early modern period are to be understood at this historical and cultural distance, it is important to locate them within the contexts that enabled them to persist and, for a time, flourish. So while in the Introduction I set out the essential ‘facts’ of university drama, here I will investigate more fully the intellectual and social cultures within which that drama was written and performed. What I want to convey above all else in this first chapter is the specificity of that environment. I am particularly interested in addressing unfamiliar elements distinct to the experience of the early modern scholar, including the traditions, rules and habits that formed part of that scholar’s cultural and educational experience. The type of higher education available to students in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was, not surprisingly, rather different from that on offer in the twentieth and twenty-first, and I begin this chapter by spending some time setting out exactly what those differences were. I pay particular attention to the cultural and social meanings attached to early modern learning and those involved in it; to the traditions and conventions that impinged upon Oxbridge students; to relationships between students, and between students and townsfolk; and to the important role that drama played in Oxbridge life. Ultimately, of course, there is much in the plays that will remain opaque. But although we will never be able to recover the meaning of every in-joke, private allusion or piece of stage business, without some attempt to reconstruct the experience of student life and college performance in early modern Oxford and Cambridge the plays will remain hopelessly untranslatable.

Moreover, the representations of masculinity that appear in these plays would lose much of their pertinence – and indeed impertinence – if we failed to recognize that on their own they tell only a part of the story of what it was like to be a man studying at an Oxford or Cambridge college during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Of course, young male students were not insulated from their culture’s understanding of what it meant to be ‘manly’, and would have felt social and institutional pressure to behave in certain ways. Qualities such as self-control, moderation, rationality, honourableness, and physical and moral strength were commonly attributed to the ideal version of manliness described in conduct books of the era. In the words of Elizabeth A. Foyster, ‘manhood in the early modern period was a status to be acquired and then asserted to others. It was concerned with a rejection of “feminine” qualities through a display of “masculine” qualities of reason and strength’.¹ She goes on: ‘learning to exercise self-control was vital to the acquisition of honourable manhood’,² and these sentiments are echoed by Michael Mangan, who notes ‘the masculine messages of the Tudor and early Stuart periods are encoded in hundreds of sermons, homilies, character-books, essays, letters and conduct-books, and … they share a common theme: that masculinity lies in governance’.³ But while the broad category of early modern manhood provides a useful starting point for thinking about male behaviour at the universities, it will tell us little about scholarly masculinity – which encompasses a range of versions of maleness performed by university students – unless it is refined further to take into account questions of age, college affiliation, membership of social networks, involvement in performance and, in particular, anxieties about the status of learning. My aim is to arrive, by the end of this chapter, at a point from which a close analysis of university plays through the lens of gender can usefully begin.

To introduce this world I want to turn first of all to Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay, an Oxford-set play of the late 1580s or early 1590s, in which the more colourful side of university life is foregrounded. While not a university play itself, and despite a title that reminds us of the fundamental connection between religion and learning in this period, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay nevertheless counteracts any lingering notions of the early modern university as bastion of clerkly rectitude, and contains a number of episodes that establish ideas that will be important throughout this book.⁴ In the second section of this chapter I use contemporary evidence such as diary entries, letters and extracts from play texts to examine more closely the early modern student experience and its bearing upon drama. In the final section, I turn my attention to performance itself, and show how deeply drama permeated the cultural life of the early modern universities.

Friar Bacon and the Scholarly World

There are many important differences between the early modern universities and the higher education institutions of today; however, some things never change. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Oxbridge records give evidence of familiar stories of alcohol-fuelled revelry and violence amongst the students; of conscientious scholars being kept awake at night by the loud music of their neighbours; of staff lamenting the ease with which their charges could be distracted from their books; of sexual impropriety within both the staff and student body; of clashes between town and gown; of retention crises, student debts and academic rivalry. No single professional play illustrates the differences and similarities of the early modern scholarly world better than Robert Greene’s Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay. The play recounts and embellishes the life of the historical Oxonian Roger Bacon, a natural philosopher and Franciscan friar who published early works on mathematics, optics and astrology amongst other subjects. In the sixteenth century he also gained a reputation as a magician, and Greene achieves great dramatic impact by juxtaposing Bacon’s power over superhuman forces with the all too human failings encountered at Oxford.⁵ Because it was written for the public stage, Friar Bacon and Friar Bungay is unencumbered by the eccentricities of many college plays, and thus offers an ideal way to enter the curious realm of the early modern university.

Ostensibly set in the thirteenth century but reflecting a university life that would have been recognizable to many in the late sixteenth, Friar Bacon decisively undermines any naive notions a modern audience might have about sixteenth-century Oxford in its very first university-set episode. The scene begins unremarkably, as Bacon and a poor scholar whom he employs as a manservant meet with three eminent Oxford doctors to discuss Bacon’s research. Were the research in question not concerned with the magical arts of pyromancy, hydromancy and aeromancy, the language of the scene would be as mundane as is its setting in Bacon’s rooms at Brasenose College. But once the spectre of professional jealousy manifests itself in the character of Dr Burden, a faculty member who questions the efficacy of Bacon’s research, the groundwork is laid for an exposure of the sensual appetites at work in the rarefied atmosphere of this supposedly austere seat of learning. Using his magic, Bacon reveals that Burden’s frequent visits to a nearby town are not, as he claims, to take the air, but ‘to spend the night in alchemy’ – a metaphor for illicit sexual congress – with the hostess of the Bell Inn at Henley-on-Thames.⁶ The spectacular nature of the play is affirmed by the sudden and inexplicable entrance of the hostess, who has been magically transported from Henley along with a shoulder of mutton and a minor devil.⁷

While Burden certainly displays fleshly appetites (perhaps doubly so if we take both the literal and figurative meanings of mutton into account) the exposure of his dalliance is represented here as a triumph for Bacon’s learning. An audience might therefore be forgiven for assuming that the play sets learning in opposition to living, and that the former is preferable to the latter. If Bacon’s art can defeat lechery, perhaps the lesson of the play is that education elevates the community as a whole, irrespective of whether the whole of the community is educated. However, a later scene – and, I would hazard, the experience of early modern Oxford and Cambridge townsfolk – would suggest that this is not in fact the case. When, towards the end of the play, two scholars visit Bacon in order to borrow a ‘glass prospective’ that will allow them to watch their neighbouring fathers in far off Suffolk, Bacon fears that some misfortune is about to occur. His fears are proven correct when the scholars, who describe themselves as ‘college mates, sworn brothers’,⁸ see their fathers kill each other in a duel. In what must be two of the swiftest acts of revenge ever seen on the stage, the young men immediately follow the example set by their fathers, and stab one another to death.

Here, Bacon’s learning is straightforwardly positioned as the cause of strife between the young men, and neither their identity as scholars nor as sworn brothers can prevent them from coming to blows. While the emotional impact of these deaths is mitigated by the characters’ modest roles in the play (they appear only in this scene and are dead within 60 lines of their entrance) the episode is nevertheless a successful piece of dramatic shorthand designed to illustrate the failings of university men. While the situation the scholars find themselves in, even setting aside the prospective glass, is an extreme one, an important point is being made: university students are possessed of no more self-control than townsfolk or courtiers, and their absence from the family home may give them licence and opportunity for misconduct; therefore, learning is not necessarily a guarantee of well-governed, manly behaviour. But of course this would not have been news to an early modern audience. Indeed, the religious temper of the times meant that Bacon’s learning could not be simply understood as a mark of progress, as it might more easily be in a post-Enlightenment age. Like Doctor Faustus, which it may or may not have inspired, Friar Bacon suggests that the ultimate end of the quest for knowledge is untimely death.⁹ But Bacon does not share Faustus’s dire fate; instead, Greene allows him, Prospero-like, to experience a revelatory moment of self-disgust, and he exclaims:

Bacon, thy magic doth effect this massacre.
This glass prospective worketh many woes;
And therefore, seeing these brave lusty brutes,
These friendly youths, did perish by thine art,
End all thy magic and thine art at once.¹⁰

The play concludes with Bacon, having contritely smashed his glass and rejected his magical books, resolving to dedicate the rest of his life to humble Christian prayer.

In its own small way, Friar Bacon shares with Doctor Faustus a central tension that has made the latter play a fixture of the modern stage. In both works, the taboo placed upon the recovery of arcane knowledge is counterpointed by the energy of a humanism that sought to harness and reproduce the achievements of the ancient world, and there was no better place for such energy to manifest itself than at the two universities. By the late 1580s, the earliest date at which Greene could have been writing Friar Bacon, humanism was well established at Oxford and Cambridge.¹¹ Mark H. Curtis emphasizes how, from the early sixteenth century onwards, English monarchs encouraged curricular reform because they understood that it was designed to harness the vigour of humanism for the good of the commonwealth:

Humanism had heightened the appreciation of knowledge and good letters and humanists found in the virtue and wisdom which these were purported to instil the secret means to social and political order. To the Tudors and Stuarts and their servants, therefore, the encouragement of learning promised practical as well as intangible returns. Inspired also by pride in their own intellectual attainments, these monarchs assiduously strove to advance the cause of good learning and letters, even as they anxiously strained for religious uniformity.¹²

The question of the role of drama in the social and political function of the universities is one to which I shall return, but it is important to note, as Curtis does, the dual impulse of the Tudor and Stuart monarchs’ involvement with Oxford and Cambridge: their interest was in a learning that promoted and maintained religious uniformity. While the spiritual conformity of the universities was haunted by the threat of a devilish pope rather than Bacon’s devilish servants, the line between innovation and ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 The Contexts of Early Modern University Drama
• 2 Town and Country
• 3 Drama, Authority and Misrule
• 4 Friendly Rivals
• 5 Manhood and the Learning World
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index