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Power on Display

The Politics of Shakespeare's Genres

Leonard Tennenhouse

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Power on Display

The Politics of Shakespeare's Genres

Leonard Tennenhouse

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First published in 1986. 'Impressively open to the complexity of cultural discourses, to the ways in which one discursive form may function as a screen for another above all to the political entailment of genre.' Stephen Greenblatt. What is the relation between literary and political power? How do the symbolic dimensions of social practice and the social dimensions of artistic practice relate to one another? Power on Display considers Shakespeare's progression from romantic comedies and history plays to tragedy and romance in the light of the general process of cultural change in the period.

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Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2013
ISBN
9781135032692
Edition
1
1
STAGING CARNIVAL
Comedy and the politics of the aristocratic body
Beginning in the 1570s and continuing for almost thirty years, the literate classes in England developed what seems to have been an insatiable appetite for writing concerned with the vicissitudes of erotic desire. There was the Petrarchan poetry for which the epoch is known. Collections of love poems, as well as the sonnet sequences, circulated in manuscript and at times even found their way into print. There were also poetic games played out through conceits of love, answer poems, courtier disquisitions on love, and a wide variety of love poetry and prose translated from classical and continental sources. Narratives of tragic desire appeared in print, as did Ovidian elegies, anacreontics, epyllia, along with the many pastorals devoted to the trials of courtship.1 The drama, too, made love its obsessive concern. Court entertainments ā€” masques and plays ā€” along with comedies and tragedies, staged at the Inns of Court or in the great halls of prominent Elizabethans, seemed bent on figuring out the permissible and forbidden forms of sexual relations. But from a literary historical viewpoint, perhaps the most important manifestation of the new ars erotica, was the rise of a public theater which worked variations within the same problematic of desire. This is all to suggest that England had never before experienced such intense interest in the permutations of love and the pursuit of desire. Although this chapter will attend primarily to Shakespeare's romantic comedies, it is important to remind ourselves at the outset that his comedies appeared in the wake of nearly twenty years of intense literary activity of this kind, much of it produced and consumed by members of the same audience who attended his plays. Available to him was an elaborate language of desire out of which sophisticated comedies could be made and presented to an audience already familiar with these materials.
While Shakespeare was clearly the master at realizing these tropes in dramatic form, it was to Sir Philip Sidney's writing Shakespeare and his contemporaries regularly turned for their model and inspiration. Although not the first work of its kind in England, the Arcadia was one of the most influential, and its appearance in print in the 1590s coincided with the vogue for romantic comedies such as Shakespeare's.2 No single writer was as fully conversant with this language of desire as Sidney, and no writer produced more important literary texts for his generation than Sidney. After his death in 1586, manuscript circulation of his work apparently intensified. Celebrated in handbooks by Fraunce and Put-tenham before it appeared in print, his romance was quickly received as exemplary. Obviously, popular interest in his work was due in part to his claims to high rank and associations with the court. But such fame alone can not explain why Sidney's writing was so closely followed, his figures so widely imitated, his plots so regularly repeated, or his language quoted so frequently. We have to assume the amorous adventures comprising the Arcadian text must have represented sexual relations in a way that was particularly meaningful to Shakespeare's audiences, just as they were particularly useful to young men like Sidney at Elizabeth's court. In this respect, Sidney's Arcadia makes a particularly appropriate background against which to read Shakespeare's romantic comedies.
In his first version of the Arcadia, as in his later obsessive rewriting of that work during the 1580s, Sidney gathered together the elements of earlier romance plots, reordered them, and made them available in such a way that his work anticipated most of the plots that would comprise Elizabethan drama. Sidney's great accomplishment consisted of dismantling plots from Montmeyer, from the Amadis de Gaulle, from the Aethiopian History, from The Morte D'Arthur and various other medieval and classical sources and then reassembling these materials into countless permutations which introduce the language of desire into English romance.3 By so doing, he not only eroticized the form of romance itself but also domesticated it. For the first time in literary history, erotic desire provided the agency of the romance plot. No one before him ā€” neither Sannazaro, nor Boiardo, nor Malory, nor Ariosto ā€” had seen fit to use this language so single-mindedly to produce a series of plots all generated by erotic desire. In this sense, Sidney's romance remains something of a watershed in literary history. I want to stress, however, that the initial writing and the extensive rewriting of the Arcadia was itself more than a matter of producing a collection of tale types or an encyclopedia of narratives on the order of The Arabian Nights, The Decameron, or in Sidney's own day, Painter's Palace of Pleasure or Pettie's Petite Palace of Pettie his Pleasures. Rather I will argue that to write about erotic desire or courtship and marriage in Elizabethan England was to take up a political argument.
Position, place, and power were almost exclusively a matter of kinship and courtship. This fact of Elizabethan culture governs the design of the Arcadia and every narrative of its author's life. To illustrate this point we need only consider the plot which Sidney carries over from the first Arcadia to the later New Arcadia. In both versions the king takes measures to avoid the fate foretold by an oracle:
Thy elder care shall from thy careful face
By princely mean be stolen, and yet not lost.
Thy younger shall with Nature's bliss embrace
An uncouth love, which Nature hateth most.
Both they themselves unto such two shall wed,
Who at thy bier, as at a bar, shall plead
Why thee (a living man) they had made dead.
In thine own seat a foreign state shall sit.
And ere that all these blows thy head do hit,
Thou, with thy wife adultery shall commit.4
By so describing the situation which will generate the narrative of his romance, Sidney has presented us with a political crisis that must be understood and resolved in sexual terms. Faced with the possibility of marriages below rank and the possibility of adultery within the royal household, Basilius abandons the court and renounces the political responsibilities of a monarch. In withdrawing the royal family from the political world, he seeks a resolution to the problem posed by the oracle. Sidney explains Basilius's solution in this way, ā€œThe point of his daughter's marriage, because it threatened his death withal, he determined to prevent with keeping them, while he lived, unmarriedā€ (p. 396). He withdraws from the political world in order to withhold his daughters from the rituals of sexual exchange. But if allowing his daughters to marry will lead to regicide, then it is also true that not allowing his daughters to marry will eventually produce a political crisis of similar proportions. In one way or another, the kingdom will find itself without a monarch.
This problem is a peculiarly English dilemma. That is to say, the fact of the king's having only daughters for heirs represents a clear threat to the continuity of power: the oracle hints at the possibility that one daughter will be stolen and the other will make an unsuitable match. Both these possibilities call the patrilineal distribution of power into question. This suggests that once embodied in the female, power can be transferred to an outsider, a foreign line perhaps, or a family not of aristocratic lineage at all. In a strictly patrilineal system, the marriage of a daughter automatically removes her from the father's family. Should she be the sole heir of her father when she goes to a rival family through marriage, there is the danger that she might take her father's property with her or, barring this, that his property will descend to the next male kin, namely a brother's family or a nephew's. In both cases the father's power passes out of his family. In a purely patrilineal system of inheritance, then, daughters are not allowed to inherit. The English system modified strict patrilineage. Aside from the obvious cases of Mary and Elizabeth, we know of other instances of female inheritance.5 Sir Thomas Smith's remarks about English rules of inheritance allow for this variation on patrilineage: women are not permitted to
medle with matters abroade, nor to beare office in a citie or common wealth ā€¦ except it be in such cases as the authoritie is annexed to the bloud andprogenie, as the crowne, a dutchie, or an erledom for there the bloud is respected, not the age nor the sexe.6 (italics mine)
Any woman who acquired the economic and political prerogatives of a man was overturning the social order of things, according to Smith. But, as Smith makes quite clear, aristocratic blood always authorized the exercise of these powers no matter the sex in which blood might be embodied. We might say, then, that when Sidney opened the possibility of having the power of blood descend through the female, he worked a distinctly English variation on his sources almost all of which prohibit female inheritance. Thus I would like to consider why Sidney should construct a whole narrative problematic around the question of female inheritance and, further, why his work should have been so closely followed for doing so.

II

Late in 1578, Queen Elizabeth opened discussions of a possible match with the Duke of Anjou. Unlike earlier marriage negotiations, this one was initiated by the queen herself. Through marriage she hoped to create a more secure alliance with France. The exchange, Wallace T. MacCaffrey suggests, was to protect French Protestants while guaranteeing their loyalty to Henri III, as well as to end French Catholic interference in England and Scotland.7 In addition, such an alliance between England and France would force Philip of Spain to moderate his harsh treatment of the Dutch. For my purposes, however, it is important to note the argument voiced by those of Elizabeth's subjects who were opposed to her proposed match. It was assumed by many including the queen herself, that the popular opposition to her plans for marriage to the Catholic Anjou was based on religious grounds. To quell this opposition, Elizabeth stepped up the persecution of Catholic dissidents at home. Camden, for instance, tells us that when the Duke of Anjou came to England, Elizabeth ā€œpermitted Edmund Campian ā€¦ Ralph Sherwin, Luke Kirby and Alexander Briant, Priests, shoud be arraignedā€ indicted, condemned to die and executed. She did this, in Camden's account, because it would ā€œtake away the Fear which had possessed many mens minds, that Religion would be altered, and Popery toleratedā€¦ .ā€8 But the voices rising in opposition to her marriage seem to have objected to the duke on other than simply religious grounds. A greater fear had to do with the integrity of the English nation, as if the very concept of nationality were jeopardized by the marriage of an English queen to a member of the French royal family.
Of those who opposed her policy, one of the most famous was John Stubbs. Although Camden and subsequent historians treat his as the argument of a Puritan zealot, Stubbs is a closely reasoned case against the marriage from the position of a nationalist for whom England and its Reformation were inextricably bound. The title of his pamphlet ā€” The discovery of a gaping Gulf wherein England is to be swallowed by another french marriage ā€¦ ā€” announces this nationalist theme. The great danger, he says, is that having rescued England from the threat of a Spanish ruler, Elizabeth will now subject her people to another foreign ruler: ā€œIt is natural to all men to abhor foreign rule as a burden of Egypt.ā€9 Elizabeth punished Stubbs for this political pamphlet by having his right hand cut off. On the scaffold he is reported to have received his punishment with a patriotic testimony that his fate would not undermine his loyalty to the queen:
I praie you all to praie with me, that God will strengthen me to endure and abide the paine that I ame to suffre, and graunt me this grace, that the losse of my haunde do not withdrawe any part of my dewtie and affection toward her Maiestieā€¦. Praye for me, nowe my calamity is at hande.10
To question the queen on the matter of her marriage was obviously regarded as a challenge to her authority. We may believe that Stubbs's patriotism made it perfectly consistent for him to oppose Elizabeth's marriage and to accept the punishment which was his due for challenging the policy of an English monarch. Stubbs was not alone in acting as if the definition of English nationalism was at stake in the enactment of such a policy which questioned the symbolic bond between the land and the blood.
Another famous statement opposing the marriage was Sidney's letter detailing objections to the Anjou match. Possibly put up to this by his uncle the Earl of Leicester, if not simply acting out of the presumption for which he was notorious, Sidney was quite aware of what had happened to Stubbs. Unlike Stubbs's pamphlet, Sidney's letter was intended to be received as a private correspondence. But Sidney was not an advisor to the queen, nor had she asked his opinion. As a result, or so the story goes, Elizabeth so strongly resented Sidney's letter that he was forced to absent himself from court and retire to his sister's estate where he drafted the first version of the Arcadia11 We should note how closely Sidney's letter follows the argument of Stubbs's pamphlet. He, too, advises against the match for fear it will allow England to be ruled by this foreigner. Echoing Stubbs, Sidney warns Elizabeth that these consequences will follow from her marriage to Anjou:
ā€¦ if he come hither, he must live here in far meaner reputation than his will well brook, having no other royalty to countenance himself with; or else you must deliver him the keys of your kingdom and live at his discretionā€¦.12
He predicts that, like her sister, Elizabeth will find it necessary to turn over ā€œthe keys of your kingdomā€ to the foreign prince. He assumes, in other words, that the patriarchal principle will subordinate England's power embodied in a female to the male heir of the French line should they marry, and English power thus would lose its sovereignty as such.
Sidney and Stubbs were not the only two to express anxiety lest marriage would obscure the line between English power and that of another kingdom. Camden summarizes the dilemma about the queen's deliberations concerning her prospective marriage. ā€œSome were of the opinion,ā€ he says,
that she was fully resolved in her Mind, that she might better provide both for the Commonwealth and her own Glory by an Unmarried life than by Marriage; as foreseeing that if she married a Subject, she should disparage herself by the Inequality of the Match, and give occasion to domestical Heart-burnings, private Grudges and Commotions; if a Stranger, she then should subject both herself and her People to a foreign Yoke, and endanger Religion: Having not forgotten how unhappy the Marriage of her Sister Queen Mary with King Philip a Foreigner had beenā€¦. Her Glory also, which whilst she continued unmarried she retained intire to herself and uneclipsed, she feared would by Marriage be transferred to her Husband.13
The same fear that marriage to a female monarch would provide access to the power inhering in the Tudor blood prompted others during Mary's reign to join in the Wyatt rebellion upon the announcement she intended to marry Philip of Spain. But since the rule of England did not in fact pass into foreign hands with Mary's marriage to Philip, the question remains as to why there should be such fear at the prospect of Elizabeth's marriage to Anjou? Nor can the anxiety inspired by her marriage be explained away simply as a frenzied outburst of anti-Catholic sentiment.
I would like to suggest an alternative explanation: that with the accession of Mary a significant gap developed between the distribution of power according to law and the way people imagined that power to have been distributed. Within the population's memory, there had been no cause to see power in other than strictly patrilineal terms until the last year of Edward's reign. According to the English version of patrilineage as it was then understood, political power passed from first son to first son or to the nearest male equivalent. When a daughter married, then, it was as if she and any propert...

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