The Expense of Spirit

Love and Sexuality in English Renaissance Drama

Mary Beth Rose

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9780801421891
• eBook ISBN:
  9781501723254
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A public and highly popular literary form, English Renaissance drama affords a uniquely valuable index of the process of cultural transformation. The Expense of Spirit integrates feminist and historicist critical approaches to explore the dynamics of cultural conflict and change during a crucial period in the formation of modern sexual values. Comparing Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatic representations of love and sexuality with those in contemporary moral tracts and religious writings on women, love, and marriage, Mary Beth Rose argues that such literature not only interpreted sexual sensibilities but also contributed to creating and transforming them.

1

Moral Conceptions of Sexual Love in Elizabethan Comedy

i

Elizabethan romantic comedy is traditionally regarded as a dramatic form that can be distinguished as a generic celebration of marriage. Contrasting the erotic teleology of romantic comedy (which she calls “pure comedy”) with the moral corrective of satire and the tragicomic emphasis on plot, Helen Gardner has written that “the great symbol of pure comedy is marriage, by which the world is renewed, and its endings are always instinct with a sense of fresh beginnings. Its rhythm is the rhythm of the life of mankind, which goes on and renews itself as the life of nature does. … The young wed, so that they may become in turn the older generation, whose children will wed, and so on, as long as the world lasts. … The end of comedy declares that life goes on.”¹

In romantic comedy, then, the sexual love that leads to marriage symbolizes the ongoing life of society, which in Elizabethan terms suggests a spiritually integrated cosmos. Although recent scholarship has been carefully dissecting the ideological program that sustains this comic syndrome, pointing to the devious subversions of its unity and the complex qualifications of its ideals, no analysis has disputed that the multileveled idealization of marriage is a powerful informing presence in Elizabethan comedy.² Yet this celebratory sexual and social configuration, which Shakespeare discerned and exploited until it had been thoroughly imagined and expressed, was by no means always developed or even implicit in earlier Elizabethan comedies. John Lyly was the first Elizabethan playwright to clarify the aesthetic realization that the theme of erotic love could be used to organize the disparate materials of early romantic comedy into a coherent design; but unlike the comedies of Shakespeare, Lyly’s plays never acclaim sexual love and rarely end in a festive celebration of marriage. This chapter seeks to trace the ways in which Elizabethan comic form developed in plays by Lyly, Robert Greene, and Shakespeare in accordance with the precise erotic teleology Gardner describes by relating changes in the dramatic representation of love and marriage to similar patterns of change in conceptualizations of love and marriage in the nondramatic literature, particularly in Elizabethan moral and religious writing, including sermons and courtesy and conduct books.

Two salient modes of conceptualizing eros and marriage emerge from the complex controversy over changing sexual values articulated in Elizabethan conduct literature: a dualistic sensibility, in which sexual love is idealized beyond physical existence on the one hand or derided as lust on the other, and which views marriage as a necessary evil; and a more realistic, multifaceted sensibility, which, while retaining much of the skepticism about erotic love contained in the first view, nevertheless begins to conceive of affectionate marriage with great respect as the basis of an ordered society. Taking into account the inevitable overlapping and intermingling of shifting values and attitudes, historians have shown that in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century England, the second sensibility was gaining ground over the first.³ What I suggest is a parallel development between this shift in mentalité and the changing representations of sexual love and marriage that characterize the growth of Elizabethan comedy: Lyly, whose comic structures embody the dualistic sensibility, was unable to develop romantic comedy beyond a certain point; Greene developed the form to a limited extent; and Shakespeare brought it to fruition with As You Like It and Twelfth Night, dramatizing more complex representations, in which sexual love and marriage have acquired greater centrality and prestige.

My purpose in comparing the changing attitudes articulated in Renaissance sexual discourse to the altering dramatic representations of sexual love is not, therefore, to demonstrate causal connections between them, but to show that the concepts and values that inform the one can be seen as informing the other, and that the shifts discernible in one form are similarly discernible in the other. As a result my method involves suggesting reciprocal influences among kinds of evidence often thought to have a different value: the imagination of the individual artist, the aesthetic requirements of the comic form, and contemporary moral and religious writings about love and marriage. What emerges is a picture of alterations in the sexual conditions of possibility in the English Renaissance that suggests a new perspective on the cultural context and development of Elizabethan comedy.

ii

Lawrence Stone and other historians of the relations between the sexes have demonstrated convincingly that the institution of marriage enjoyed a considerable rise in prestige in post-Reformation England.⁴ The precise origins and chronology of this change in sensibility are as difficult to determine as is the actual sexual conduct of medieval and Renaissance men and women. In terms not of actual behavior, but of the moral prestige granted to heterosexual love and marriage, however, it is clear that those medieval conceptualizations of heterosexual relations which were officially articulated by homilists, theologians, and poets often stressed and valorized asceticism.

Once made, such a generalization about centuries of thought, feeling, and representation must of course be qualified. Caroline Walker Bynum has definitively demonstrated that the modern scholarly emphasis on medieval asceticism is based on a radical privileging of genital sexuality and an accompanying disregard of the wide range and detailed exploration of erotic feeling and representation that characterize medieval spirituality. It is also true that a commonsensical, concrete counterideal of married love existed among ordinary people throughout the Middle Ages.⁵ Yet for purposes of this discussion, which centers on the rising prestige of the secular institution of marriage in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, it remains appropriate to stress the striking contrast with the late medieval idealization of celibacy. Sexual love was considered out of the question as a basis for marriage, which the upper classes regarded as an alliance for the enhancement of family property and as an outlet for the avoidance of fornication. It is true that Saint Jerome, who felt that love between men and women was at best “to be endured, not enjoyed,” and preferably “to be avoided if at all possible, ” represents the extreme of medieval opinion; nevertheless, carnal love, even for purposes of procreation, was usually conceptualized as tainted with some odor of sin and was at best regarded as morally neutral. Celibacy was upheld as the ideal behavior to be emulated, not only by priests and nuns, but by the whole community.⁶ Even Saint Paul, cited so often by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Protestant preachers as the main scriptural authority in their vehement defenses of marriage, could be seen to consider marriage as merely a necessary evil: “For I would that all men were even as I myself am … [i.e., celibate],” he writes in 1 Corinthians. “It is good for them if they abide even as I doe. But if they cannot absteine, let them marrie: for it is better to marrie then to burne” (7.7–9).

During the English Renaissance, conjugal loyalty and affection replaced celibacy as the officially idealized pattern of heterosexual conduct.⁷ Like other forms of medieval thought, however, much of the consciousness of love, marriage, and sexuality persisted into the Renaissance.⁸ Stone reports that “marriage among the property-owning classes in sixteenth-century England was … a collective decision of family and kin, not an individual one. … Property and power were the predominant issues which governed negotiations for marriage.”⁹ Individual, rather than parental choice of a spouse, let alone prior affection between potential mates, seemed foolish, undesirable. The eminent sixteenth-century humanist Vives, whose works were accessible in English, observes, for example, that “they that mary for loue shall leade theyr lyfe in so-rowe.”¹⁰ Montaigne, whose translated essays were also available after 1603, is less hostile to erotic love than Vives; nevertheless, he affirms what he construes to be the essential incompatibility of erotic love and marriage:

Loue disdaineth a man should holde of other then himselfe, and dealeth but faintly with acquaintances begun and entertained under another title; as marriage is. Alliances, respects and meanes, by all reason, waighe as much or more, as the graces and beawtie. A man doth not marrie for himselfe, whatsoever he alledgeth; but as much or more for his posteritie and familie. The use and interest of mariage concerneth our off-spring, a great way beyond us. Therefore doth this fashion please me, to guide it rather by a third hand, and by anothers sence, then our owne: All which, how much doth it dissent from amorous conventions? … I see no mariages faile sooner, or more troubled, then such as are concluded for beauties sake, and hudled up for amorous desires. There are required more solide foundations, and more constant grounds … this earnest youthly heate serveth to no purpose.¹¹

Furthermore, while celibacy no longer flourished as an idealized mode of behavior after the Reformation, the distrust of sexual desire and the ideals of maidenly virtue—virginity—and wifely chastity continued to preoccupy the Renaissance imagination of the moral and spiritual life well into the seventeenth century.

It is worth dwelling briefly on the tremendous spiritual weight put on sexuality in the Renaissance. A good example is the emphasis placed on premarital female virginity. Many have argued that the perceived necessity for premarital female chastity, as well as the double standard of sexual morality, arose originally from the economic need to legitimize property for the purposes of inheritance;¹² however this may be, the ideal of virginity accrued moral and theological overtones and became for poets a useful means of dramatizing female social and spiritual life. One need only think of Britomart, Spenser’s embattled knight of chastity, dueling her way through a world full of erotic peril. In the courtesy book Instruction of a christen woman (1529), dedicated to Catherine of Aragon, Vives elaborates powerfully the consequences that loss of virginity entails for a young woman:

Turn hir whiche way she will, she shall fynde all thynges sorow-full and heauy, walyng and mourning, and angry and displeaser-full. What sorowe will hir kynneffolkes make, when euery one shall thynke them selfe dysshonested by one shame of that maide? What mourninge, what teares, what wepyng of the father and mother and bryngers up? Doest thou quiete theim with this pleasure for soo muche care and labour? Is this the rewarde of the bringyng up? What cursyng will there bee of hir acquaintance? … What mockinge and bablynge of those maides, that enuied hir before? What a loathynge and abhorrynge of those that loued hir. What flyinge of hir company … when euery mother wyll keepe not onely their daughters but also their sonnes from the infection of such an unthryftie mayde. And wooars also, if she had any, all flee away from hir. … I reherce the hate and angre of folkes for I knowe that many fathers have cut the throtes of their daughters, bretherne of their sisters, and kinnesmen of their kynneswomen.¹³

Could any young woman possibly have endured such an onslaught of threatened damnation, social ostracism, personal guilt and despair, open ridicule, and family catastrophe? In a chapter discussing when a maid should leave the house (to which his answer is never, unless absolutely necessary, and in that case certainly never alone), Vives evokes a world of sexual desire that, like the world of Spenser’s Britomart, is fraught with spiritual dangers. “Howe so euer she turneth hirselfe from god unto men, whether shee like them or be liked of them, shee forsaketh Christe, and of Christes spouse sodeynly becometh an adulterer.”¹⁴ This statement, striking in its lucidity, starkly conveys the perils of sexuality, the evils of it, and the human responsibility for it; Vives has here clarified the association of sexuality with sin. Female entrance into the sexual world, whether through body or mind, by choice or unwittingly, whether by reciprocating male affections or merely remaining the passive object of them, is equivalent to sin, is sin. Even when sexual love is viewed with a less foreboding gloom, it is often regarded as bitterly degrading, bestial, and absurd. Once again we can turn to Montaigne for the liveliest and most direct articulation...

Table of contents

• Preface
• Introduction
• 1 Moral Conceptions of Sexual Love in Elizabethan Comedy
• 2 Sexual Disguise and Social Mobility in Jacobean City Comedy
• 3 A Waste of Shame: The Heroics of Marriage in English Renaissance Tragedy
• 4 Transforming Sexuality: Jacobean Tragicomedy and the Reconfiguration of Private Life
• Index