Bodies and Their Spaces: System, Crisis and Transformation in the Early Modern Theatre (Costerus NS 156)

Bodies and their Spaces System, Crisis and Transformation in Early Modern Theatre COSTERUS NEW SERIES 156 Series Edito...

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Bodies and their Spaces System, Crisis and Transformation in Early Modern Theatre

COSTERUS NEW SERIES 156 Series Editors: C.C. Barfoot, Theo D’haen and Erik Kooper

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Bodies and their Spaces System, Crisis and Transformation in Early Modern Theatre

Amsterdam-New York, NY 2006

Cover design: Aart Jan Bergshoeﬀ The paper on which this book is printed meets the requirements of “ISO 9706:1994, Information and documentation - Paper for documents Requirements for permanence”. ISBN: 90-420-1688-4 ©Editions Rodopi B.V., Amsterdam - New York, NY 2006 Printed in the Netherlands

CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii INTRODUCTION Staging Gendered Space 1 CHAPTER 1 Divide and Rule: The Early Modern Gender System and Private Space 20 CHAPTER 2 The Difference that Makes a Difference: Emergent Gender Systems 52 CHAPTER 3 The Observer Observed: Differentiation and the Theatrical System 69 CHAPTER 4 Posing Manliness: Work and Space as Paradigms of Early Modern Masculinity 84 CHAPTER 5 The Aporias of Masculinity: Systemic Interpenetration and Systemic Instability 96

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CHAPTER 6 Author of Himself: Masculinity, Civility and the Closure of the Body 127 CHAPTER 7 Leaky Vessels: Femininity, the Humoral Economy and Systemic Boundaries 145 CHAPTER 8 Women’s Worlds: Women in the Public Sphere: Space, Community, Language 164 CHAPTER 9 Redrawing the Boundaries: Emergent Gender Spaces on the Stage 188 CONCLUSION The Alteration in Apparel: Cross-Dressing and the Emergent Gender System 207 BIBLIOGRAPHY 227 INDEX 246

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to the Master and Fellows of Trinity College, Cambridge, for enabling me to spend a period during August and September 2002 in Cambridge as a Visiting Scholar. Without the generous grant from the Visiting Scholars Fund, much of the bibliographical work for this study would not have been able to be completed in such favourable circumstances. Adrian Poole was hugely helpful in suggesting the possibility of a stay as a Visiting Scholar and in kindly supporting my application. I am grateful for the truly warm welcome he offered me in Trinity. The staff of the Rare Books Reading Room in the Cambridge University Library, the Pepys Library at Magdalene College, Cambridge, and the Library of St John’s College, Cambridge were unfailingly friendly and helpful. Many thanks to David McKitterick, of the Wren Library at Trinity College, Cambridge, who afforded me a friendly reception. The Curator of Manuscripts at Utrecht University Library, Koert van der Horst, kindly granted permission to reproduce a detail from Johannes de Witt’s drawing of the Swan Theatre (HS 842, f. 132r) as the cover image. Tjane* Hartenstein took on much of the seemingly endless donkeywork of producing the manuscript.

For their loving negotiations of the public and the private with me I owe Tatjana and Joshua more thanks than can ever be put into words. It was Joshua, somnolent on my chest, who was semi-privy to the finishing touches being put to the book before it crossed the threshold to the public domain.

Mais je n’ai jamais ressemblé à cela ! – Comment le savez-vous ? Qu’est-ce que ce « vous » auquel vous ressembleriez ou ne ressembleriez pas ? Où le prendre ? A quel étalon morphologique ou expressif ? Où est votre corps de vérité ? Vous êtes le seul à ne pouvoir jamais vous voir qu’en image, vous ne voyez jamais vos yeux, sinon abêtis par le regard qu’ils posent sur le miroir ou sur l’objectif (il m’intéresserait seulement de voir mes yeux quand ils te regardent) : même et surtout pour votre corps, vous êtes condamné à l’imaginaire. Roland Barthes

INTRODUCTION Staging Gendered Space

It was with an air of surprise that the Chaplain to the Venetian Embassy in 1617, Orazio Busino, noted that the London theatres were “frequented by a number of respectable and handsome ladies, who come freely and seat themselves among the men without the slightest hesitation”. Somewhat taken aback, he reported: “On the evening in question [at the Fortune Theatre] his Excellency and the Secretary were pleased to pay me a trick by placing me amongst a bevy of young women. Scarcely was I seated ere a very elegant young dame, but in a mask, came and placed herself beside me ....”1 Similarly, the traveller Thomas Platter, visiting London at the beginning of the seventeenth century, observed that “without scruple” “men and womenfolk” regularly patronized the public theatres.2 Busino and Platter were among a number of Continental travellers to England during the Elizabethan and Jacobean age who noted with astonishment the unusual degree of freedom enjoyed by English women: Frederick Duke of Württemberg observed in 1602 that English women had “more liberty than perhaps in any other place” and also “kn[ew] well how to make use of it”, and Emanuel van Meteran remarked that they were “not shut up” nor “kept so strictly as they are in Spain or elsewhere”.3 Renaissance playwrights consciously alluded to such notions, knowingly exploiting the fact that their audiences would be to a large extent made up of women. Jonson plays deliberately on these commonplaces. His Volpone muses upon the incomprehensible permissiveness of Sir Politic Wouldbe in the context of a Venetian culture where Corvino keeps his wife under heavy guard: “I wonder at the desperate valour | Of the bold English, that they dare let loose | Their wives to all encounters” (Volpone, 1.5.100-102). Likewise, in 1 2

3

Quoted in Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 231. Thomas Platter, Thomas Platter’s Travels in England 1599, trans. Clare Williams (London: Jonathon Cape, 1937), 170. German original: Thomas Platter d. J., Beschreibung der Reisen durch Frankreich, Spanien, England und die Niederlande 1595-1600, ed. Rut Keiser (Basel and Stuttgart: Schwabe, 1968), II, 794-95. Cited in England as Seen by Foreigners in the Days of Elizabeth and James the First, ed. William Benchley Rye, reprint (New York: Benjamin Blom, 1967), 7, 72.

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BODIES AND THEIR SPACES

Middleton’s A Mad World, My Masters, Harebrain blithely contrasts the ways of various peoples with regard to their wives. Women, he says, are “kept by the Italian under lock and key; we Englishmen are careless creatures” (1.2.20-21). On the other hand, many contemporary English writers displayed a marked will to put restrictions of women’s freedom. One writer claimed that men and women are like to birds ... the Cocke flieth abroad to bring in, the Dam sitteth vpon the nest to keepe all at home. So God hath made the men to trauell abroad, and the woman to keepe home; and so their nature, and their wit, and their strength, are fitted accordingly; for the mans pleasure is most abroad, and the womans within.4

Another didactic author made it an axiom that “our English Hous-wife ... hath her most generall imployments within the house”.5 Yet another contemporary treatise on “The Properties of a Good Wife” intoned that she “hateeth the doore & the windowe ... [and] careth not for feastes & banquets, nor for Dancing”.6 The notorious Swetnam even berated the woman who “although her body be in the house yet her mind is abroad, which redowneth to her shame and to her husbands great hinderance”.7 The spatial restrictions placed upon women, whether real or merely set up as an ideal in the didactic or polemical literature – or, conversely, the relative absence of such constraints – were clearly something immediately visible, and open to debate and commentary by early modern observers.8 How did such debates reflect the changing contours of social and gendered space? In what ways were these polemics symptoms of a gradual but long-term reorganization of the “places” of male and female bodies in society? These questions are the subject of this book. In it, I address the emergence of the distinctively modern demarcation of public and private spaces in the English early modern period. I suggest that this division was an inherently gendered divide, and

4 5 6

7 8

Henry Smith, A Preparative to Mariage, in The Sermons of Mr Henry Smith Gathered into one volume (London, 1631), 27. Gervase Markham, The English House-Wife (London, 1631), 1-2. “The Properties of a Good Wife”, MS Bodleian Library, cited in Margaret J. M. Ezell, The Patriarch’s Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 38. Joseph Swetnam, The Araignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward and Unconstant Women (London, 1615), 56. See Retha Warnicke, “Private and Public: The Boundaries of Women’s Lives in Early Stuart England”, in Privileging Gender in Early Modern England, ed. Jean R. Brink (Ann Arbor: Sixteenth Century Studies, 1993), 123-40.

STAGING GENDERED SPACE

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that it was accompanied by the emergence of biologically based notions of sex and by a novel sense of individual subjectivity. These various changes occurred over roughly the same historical period, and crystallized in the slow transition to a modern gender system which more efficiently enforced the requirements of patriarchy under the evolving economic conditions of merchant capitalism. Together, private domestic space, the private body with its biological sex, and private selfhood, worked in concert to enable an emergent hegemony of soft disciplinary coercion so as to adapt gender relations to the new socioeconomic parameters of emergent capitalism. The privatization of the self, of the body, and of the home were the three discursive and conceptual pillars of the gender systems in transition during the early modern period. Women did not leave the public sphere, nor men the domestic, as the term “separate spheres” tends to suggest. However, in the seventeenth century, the extant conservative imperatives towards women’s sequestration were gradually replaced by an emergent discourse of women’s domesticity, a discursive shift historians such as Robert Shoemaker detect only a century later.9 The discursive marking of women’s domesticity was probably a symptom of two other changes which were also occurring in the seventeenth century. The profile of women’s work was undergoing transformation: women were being excluded from some “public” professions, and other occupations they undertook outside the home were being redefined as “domestic”.10 My use of inverted commas points to the fact that “public” and “private” are not unproblematic descriptive categories, but rather, products of historical contingencies, and thus in need of critical scrutiny. The very constitution of such categories goes hand in hand with changes in the social spaces they ostensibly describe. At the same time, these discursive shifts were probably connected to the increasing privatization of the gendered body, resulting from shifts in anatomical discourse. The new physiological discourses (along with new discourses of sexual activity which privileged penetrative sex and the absence of female desire), stressed gender as a function of the inherent biological characteristics of the body and thus began to foreground the maternal function of the female body.

9 10

Robert B. Shoemaker, Gender in English Society 1650-1850: The Emergence of the Separate Spheres? (London: Longman, 1998), 313. Ibid, 314-15.


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The basic parameters of gendered power relations – inevitably to the advantage of males – remained stable, and distribution of productive roles and their social relations retain hierarchical traits, with changes occurring in conjunction with ongoing social and gender conflicts and a ceaseless transformation of economic structures as early mercantile capitalism evolved stage by stage into industrial capitalism. The turbulent process of evolution towards modern gender configurations in society can be seen to be rehearsed, contested and debated in literary artefacts of the early modern period. I focus on the period before the civil war, thus setting the customary dating for the evolution of the modern public/private divide back by almost a century. Most extant research has focussed upon the eighteenth century as the privileged locus of the public/private divide in its distinctively modern form. Robert Shoemaker argues for a temporal relocation of research in this area, recommending that “Any assessment of the changes in gender roles which took place between preindustrial and industrial England must ... start with the dramatic upheavals of the Interregnum”.11 This book shifts the centre of its examination further still, to the period before the Interregnum, thus arguing implicitly for an even longer process of the evolution of the public/private divide. The book reads these gradual systemic and discursive transformations across a wide range of contemporary texts, but concentrates particularly on a number of early modern dramas which are concerned with questions of gendered power relations and their spaces in early modern society. Early modern drama was itself a cultural mode closely associated with the gender configurations in a state of turbulence in the first half of the seventeenth century. Until the closure of the English theatres in 1642, the drama not only reflected but also exacerbated the unease surrounding gender configurations in transition in early modern society. My choice of the drama as a privileged medium for examining the emergence of the public/private demarcation is based upon the drama’s generic character as an eminently public form of art which could only point to already emergent private spaces as a productive but unsettling aporia in its own system, thereby highlighting the crisis-like sense of change as the transition to new configurations of social space made itself felt.

11

Ibid, 11.


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Theatrical femininities As Busino and Platter suggested, women appear to have been regular playgoers throughout the Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline periods.12 Yet if women were free to visit theatres, their participation in this very visible public space was never truly free of constraint. Their attendance at plays and other such public events did not go uncontested by contemporary moralists such as Anthony Munday, who saw in the theatre a corrupting influence which would draw wives away from their husbands and transform them into common prostitutes.13 Stephen Gosson feared that the theatre would become a threat to women’s reputation, for they which shew themselues openly, desire to bee seene. It is not ... your modestie at home, that couereth your lightnesse, if you present your selues in open Theaters. Thought is free: you can forbidd no man, that vieweth you, to noate you, and that noateth you, to iudge you, for entring to places of suspition.14

In such a manner, women theatregoers might escape from the exclusive control of their husbands, circulating not from lip to lip like Cressida, but from eye to eye, in Jean Howard’s witty gloss.15 John Northbrooke imagined an even more threatening potential outcome of women’s attendance at the theatre: what safegarde of charitie can there be, where the woman is desired with so many eyes, where so many faces look vpon hir, and againe she vppon so manye? She must needes fire some, and hir selfe also fired againe, [an] she be not a stone.16

The writer did not merely fear that the woman would become the prey of any number of men’s roving eyes, but that she herself might take up an assertive visual activity, savouring the prospect of so many male bodies available to scrutiny. In similar vein, Alexander Niccholes

12 13 14 15 16

See Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, 55-63. Cited in E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), IV, 209. Stephen Gosson, The School of Abuse (London, 1579), F2r. Jean E. Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1994), 76-78. John Northbrooke, A Treatise Against Dicing, Dancing, Play and Interludes. With Other Idle Pastimes (1577) (London: Shakespeare Society, 1843), 89.

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anxiously noted that “a rowling eye is not fired, but would fire upon obiects it likes, it lookes for”.17 As Gosson commented: Looking eyes, haue lyking hartes, liking harts may burne in lust ... though you go to theaters to se sport, Cupid may catche you ere you departe .... If you doe but ... ioyne lookes with an amorous Gazer, you haue already made your selues assaultable, & yelded your Cities to be sacked .... If you giue but a glance to your beholders, you haue vayled the bonnet in token of obedience.18

Perhaps this apprehension at women’s potential availability to many masculine eyes, and the converse possibility of women themselves appropriating this public space and with it the predatory male stare, was one of the reasons why women were generally not free to perform on the boards during the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods.19 When Beaumont and Fletcher in The Knight of the Burning Pestle have the citizen’s wife climb up onto the stage, thus effectively joining in the performance, this is to be seen as a serious indecorum.20 The Travels of the Three English Brothers makes much of the Italian theatre’s custom of having women play women’s roles; when the Harlequin’s wife is said to “do tricks in public”, this immediately equates her with a harlot (9.84-85). And one of the misdemeanours set down against Mary Frith, alias Moll Cutpurse, in the court records, was that she sat “upon the stage in the public view of all the people there present in man’s apparel & played upon her lute & sang a song”.21 Generally, as is well known and much commented upon, women’s roles were played by boys. It was only after the closure of the theatres that alternatives begin to emerge. In Lady Jane Cavendish and Lady Elizabeth’s closet drama The Concealed Fancies, probably performed in their private home around 1645, the Prologue commences: “Ladies, I beseech you blush not to see | That I speak a prologue, being a she.” 17 18 19

20

21

Alexander Niccholes, A Discourse of Marriage and Wiving: And of the greatest Mystery therein contained: How to choose a good wife from a bad (London, 1615), 9. Gosson, The School of Abuse, F2r-v. See Michael Shapiro, “The Introduction of Actresses in England: Delay or Defensiveness?”, in Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage, eds Viviana Comensoli and Anne Russell (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 177-200. Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, in The Works of Beaumont and Fletcher, ed. Alexander Dyce (London: Edward Moxon, 1843), II, 133; Elizabethan-Jacobean Drama, ed. G. Blakemore Evans (London: A. and C. Black, 1989), 33. Consistory Court of London, Correction Book, 1612, quoted in Renaissance Drama by Women: Texts and Documents, eds S. P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies (London: Routledge, 1996), 172.


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Nonetheless, a second female Prologue concludes on a more cautious note: “Fearing you’ll censure me now, full of tongue, | It’s not fit that I should speak too long” (1-2, 17-18). Nor did women write for the stage. There are few extant plays written by women in the Renaissance, and virtually no examples for the early modern period of dramas by women dramatists being performed in public. Some plays by women dramatists were performed however as coterie dramas in the closed circle of private homes. Only in 1663 was a play scripted by a woman, Katherine Philips, performed for the first time on a British stage.22 Simon Shepherd notes the frequency of balcony scenes that situate the woman as a distanced spectator upon the making of decisions concerning her own fate. She is crucial to the drama, yet her place seems to be marginal, “just outside the household that controls her and yet above the ground”.23 It would be doubtless fanciful to over labour the parallel between the real status of woman as non-participant spectators in the theatres, and the stage representation of the same ambivalent role. None the less, this potential isomorphism does show up the extent to which the spatial signification produced on the stage concerned the arrangement of gender relationships in early modern society. John Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore provides a striking example of the image of the marginalized woman “above” (sd, 1.2.32). Elsewhere, the play offers an even more striking image of the problematic place of women on the stage. In the midst of the wedding banquet in celebration of Soranzo’s marriage to Annabella, the bridegroom’s ex-mistress Hippolita enters the banquet hall as a masquer, in a standard topos of the play-within-the play as a means of laying bare concealed crimes. She orchestrates this theatrical appearance with the intent of accusing her ex-lover of complicity in the murder of her husband Richardetto. Hippolita’s act of vengeful revelation, intended to culminate in the violent death of Soranzo at the very moment of his union with another women, is abruptly reversed instead into the exmistress’s own death at the hands of Soranzo’s servant Vasques; the 22

23

Katherine Philips’ Pompey: A Tragoedy (in The Collected Works of Katherine Philips, the Matchless Orinda, eds G. Greer and R. Little [Stump Cross, Essex: Stump Cross Books, 1993], III) was performed in 1663 in Dublin. See ORINDA: The Literary Manunscripts of Katherine Philips (1632-16634): A Listing and Guide to the Microfilm Collection, ed. William Piddock (Marlborough: Adam Matthew Publications, 1995), 711. Simon Shepherd, Amazons and Warrior Women: Varieties of Feminism in SeventeenthCentury Drama (Brighton: Harvester, 1981), 55-56.

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jilted woman’s meta-theatrical appearance backfires, resulting in her own elimination on the stage, and marginalization from the dramatic structure of the play (Act 4, Scene 1). This episode epitomizes the fraught position of feminine agency on the stage and its presentation as simultaneously dangerous but marginal to the principal dramatic action. The scene raises a plethora of questions regarding the place of the place of a woman in the dramatic narrative, her capacity to take control of the action, and to actively configure the shape of the theatrical performance according to her own desires and intentions. The portrayal of women in Ford’s drama tends to bear out Hanna Scolnicov’s suggestion that “woman is so closely associated with space that almost any articulation of space on stage or in the plays is directly expressive of her position, her life style, her personality”.24 Following Scolnicov’s claim, this study attempts to explore the ways in which Renaissance drama, from the context of production through to the fabric of the dramatic action and the portrayal of women characters itself, was intimately concerned with the spaces allotted to men and women, and the power relations and interdictions produced by such configurations of space.

The “separate spheres” and gender ideology The sharp dichotomy between women’s prominent visibility as spectators, and their virtually complete invisibility in the productive sphere of the theatre, is one avatar of a fundamental opposition which, though over simplified as a historical explanation, has powerfully shaped our understanding of gender since the beginning of the modern age: that of “the separate spheres”. This opposition has traditionally deemed the domain of public production to be characteristically masculine, and that of the domain of private consumption, of nurture, of the family, inherently feminine. In fact, these domains were always porous and interlinking, despite the ongoing transformations they have undergone over the last four centuries. The apparently stark gendered demarcation of the early modern stage highlights the intersections of gender and space that have become an important aspect of gender research in recent years. Beginning with Kate Millet’s scornful 1970s analysis in Sexual Politics of the woman’s “protected” place of “domestic idyll”, far from the 24

Hanna Scolnicov, Women’s Theatrical Space (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), xiii.


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“open world” of masculine endeavour,25 feminist theorists have given considerable attention to the ways in which the social roles accorded to men and women have been structured by the public/private distinction. Early work in this direction attacked the habitual impulse to identify femininity with the domestic realm of “nature” and masculinity with the public domain of “culture”, seeing an ideological legitimization of an exploitative division of work. Later analyses went a step further, suggesting that this dichotomy itself needed to be cast into question.26 This distinctive thrust of feminist analysis, focused upon the modern private/public distinction, has opened up extensive research on the varying ways in which men and women, as individuals and as groups, define, occupy, contest and remodel space.27 Recent feminist thought has launched a radical critique of the occlusion of space in male social theory, that is, of the elision of the contextual and thus necessarily partial, situated character of perception and enunciation, offering as an alternative, ostensibly feminine spaces such as the “earth”, or the “chora” (a preverbal space of mother-child communication) designed to acknowledge our debts to and pay homage to the spaces which support and nourish social existence.28 Feminism’s 25 26

27

28

Kate Millet, Sexual Politics (1969; London: Virago, 1991), 93-94, 98-108. The Public and the Private, ed. Eva Gamarnikow (London: Heinmann, 1983); Gendered Domains: Rethinking Public and Private in Women’s History, eds Dorothy O. Helly and Susan M. Reverby (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); Feminism, the Public and the Private, ed. Joan B. Landes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998); Gender, Ideology, and Action: Historical Perspectives on Women’s Public Lives, ed. Janet Sharistanian (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986). See for instance Mieke Bal, “Space, Incorporated”, in Signs and Space, Zeichen und Raum: An International Conference on the Semiotics of Space and Culture in Amsterdam, ed. E. Hess-Lüttich (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 1997), 214-15; Mapping Desire: Geographies of Sexualities, eds David Bell and Gill Valentine (London: Routledge, 1995); Liz Bondi and Hazel Christie, “Gender”, in Britain’s Cities, ed. David Pacione, 300-316; Robert W. Connell, Which Way is Up?: Essays on Sex, Class and Culture (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1983); BodySpace: Destabilizing Geographies of Gender and Sexuality, ed. Nancy Duncan (London: Routledge, 1996); Gillian Rose, Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge (Oxford: Polity Press, 1993); Women and Geography Study Group, Feminist Geographies: Explorations in Diversity and Difference (Harlow, Essex: Longman, 1997). Nancy Duncan, “Introduction: (Re)Placings”, in BodySpace: Destabilizing Geographies of Gender and Sexuality, 3-4; Luce Irigaray, Passions élémentaires (Paris: Minuit, 1982); Julia Kristeva, La Révolution du langage poétique: L’avant-garde à la fin du XIXe siècle: Lautréamont et Mallarmé (Paris: Seuil, 1974; English translation: Revolution in Poetic Language, trans. Margaret Waller [New York: Columbia University Press, 1984]), or the succinct comments contained in “The System and the Speaking Subject”, in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 25-33; Rose, Feminism and Geography, 7ff.

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tactical critique of masculinity, claiming that the natural, immutable character of gender characteristics are merely the products of discursive strategies serving the maintenance of oppressive structures inevitably corrodes the contours of the places masculist discourse assigns to the sexes. Paradoxically, this corrosion may in turn undermine the very constitutive binary oppositions employed by emancipatory feminist discourse, thus raising the question of the feasibility of achieving real political change within gender relationships when the constitutive terms of the debate are jettisoned.29 What began as a polemic about the ideological character of the convention that “the woman’s place is in the home”, has developed, three decades later, into a questioning of the very terms we need to use to talk about and intervene in gender issues at all. This vertiginous development demonstrates the profound significance of the debate around the historical constitution and transformation of gendered spaces. It also indicates how far-reaching the eventual consequences of such theorization may be. This study will address the question of the “performance” of the public/private distinction – seen as a mode of social organization along gender lines, but also as constitutive form which has defined for several centuries gender difference as we experience it – at a moment of its turbulent reconfiguration in the wake of the development of early modern protocapitalism. “Performance” is deliberately placed in inverted commas to highlight its double usage in the context of the early modern theatre. Portrayals of residual, hegemonic and emergent gender configurations were enacted on the stage by a group of players. Yet, such enactments were encoded in the same spatial, corporeal, tactile and visual material as the lived experience; to this extent the actors “performed” or carried out what was going on all around the theatre at any given moment. Simply, the social processes the spectators experienced in their everyday lives, were now projected onto the stage as an objective spectacle. The “performance” allowed the everyday playing-out of gender roles to be seen from outside as a play, thereby giving an internally distanced perception of phenomena otherwise perceived in media res. Likewise, the Renaissance theatre may offer us late-moderns a view of the early epochs of our own social world – a view subjective enough to guarantee its experiential authenticity, but objective enough to promise 29

See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990); Annamarie Jagose, Queer Theory: An Introduction (New York: New York University Press, 1996).


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real information value; a view familiar enough to be recognizable, but unfamiliar enough to jolt us into new thought. It is for this reason that it may be worthwhile taking a closer look at the ways the gendered spaces of public and private were articulated on the stage at the moment of their crystallization. Ironically, this very mix of involvement and partial-distantiation hampers our own contemporary perspective upon Renaissance theatre. The exemplary dichotomy dividing the early modern stage between masculine performers and female spectators, which I have taken as indicative of the public/private opposition, may itself be part of the ideology of the separate spheres. Stephen Orgel has demonstrated that there are numerous exceptions to the ostensibly absolute rule of women’s exclusion from the stage. These exceptions, while proving the rule, also show up the ideological assumptions underlying the notion of women’s exclusion from the stage.30 For example, Milton’s Comus (1634) lists “The Lady Alice Edgerton” as having performed the role of The Lady. Thomas Coryate wrote that in Venice he “saw women acte, a thing I neuer saw before, though I haue heard that it hath sometimes been vsed in London”. Dekker’s The Roaring Girl apparently announces in its epilogue Moll Frith’s imminent appearance on stage: The Roaring Girl herself, some days hence, Shall on this stage give larger recompense; Which mirth that you may share in, herself does woo you, And craves this sign: your hands to beckon her to you. (Epilogue, 35-38)

Additionally, there is evidence that women frequently performed in nonprofessional entertainments, pageants or at fairs.31 The court theatre is almost the only context where women’s participation in drama, albeit a drama not truly public, is acknowledged by modern criticism. There, drama was intensively patronized by women, starting with Queen Anne, and women frequently and prominently participated in the performance as masquers, almost fifty women being recorded as taking part in 30 31

Stephen Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 5-9. John Milton, A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634 (Comus), in Milton: Poetical Works, ed. Douglas Bush (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 114; Thomas Coryate, Coryats Crudities (London, 1611), 247 (my emphasis); Thomas Middleton and Thomas Dekker, The Roaring Girl, in Plays on Women, eds Kathleen E. McLuskie and David Bevington (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), Epilogue, 35-38; Ann Thompson, “Women/‘women’ and the stage”, in Women and Literature in Britain 15001700, ed. Helen Wilcox (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 104-105.

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Jonson’s masques alone.32 If women were supposedly less visible as theatrical producers (as authors or actors) than their masculine counterparts, critics such as Natasha Korda provide convincing evidence that they were active participants in the economic networks supporting the stage.33 In other words, the modern critical gaze has to a large extent been blind to women’s involvement in the early modern theatre industry. This implies that even the ways in which we think about early modern theatre would appear to be distorted by the all pervasive concept of gendered public and private spaces. There is all the more reason, then, to pursue the study of the manner in which these emerging spatial configurations were represented within the eminently spatial art-form of the theatre. Hanna Scolnicov claims that the within/without, onstage/offstage structure of the theatre is isomorphic with the private/public, domestic/active, house/world spheres (with the concomitant pairing of feminine body/masculine agency) which have traditionally structured gender relations: Seeing the within and the without in terms of the outdoors and the indoors immediately transforms the theatrical space into a gender-charged environment, naturally fitted for acting out the drama of man and women. The question of theatrical place thus becomes the question of woman.34

Scolnicov’s claims are weighty, for they assign to theatre studies a key role in decoding the cultural representation of gender relations. They enable a partial reply to Sigrid Weigel, who, in another context, has issued a significant challenge to literary gender studies, observing that all research on questions of gender inherently involves questions about the choices of inclusion of material, and thus also of exclusion; the questions “Who speaks?” and “from where do they speak?” – questions of position, place and power – cannot be avoided.35 Thus research on gendered space in the theatre is of relevance because it offers a way of obtaining concrete answers to such questions. In particular, as Lisa Jardine has remarked, “the theatre preserves the textual trace of anxiety or uncertainty about the consequences of gradual shifts in acceptable 32

33 34 35

See Graham Parry, The Golden Age Restor’d: The Culture of the Stuart Court, 1603-42 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1981), Ch. 2; Ben Jonson, eds C. H. Herford, and Percy and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950), X, 44045. Natasha Korda, “Household Property/Stage Property: Henslowe as Pawnbroker”, Theatre Journal, 48 (1996), 185-95. Scolnicov, Women’s Theatrical Space, 6-7. Sigrid Weigel, Topographien der Geschlechter: Kulturgeschichtliche Studien zur Literatur (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1990), 16.


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social practice which are not clearly articulated in other kinds of ‘documentary’ historical evidence”.36 The theatre performed, in a public space, via the medium of a group of “gendered” actors’ bodies (the inverted commas indexing the discursively constructed character of what posed as natural), before an audience, attitudes towards gender and space which would have been immediately recognizable to the spectators, even if it the performance was organized in such a way as to question or infringe those attitudes. The advantage inherent in an analysis of stage representation of gender focusing on the spatial strategies employed in the drama is that the place accorded to women and men is, necessarily, constantly manifest in the very material conditions of performance. In its apparent exclusion of women from the activities of dramatist and actor, the Renaissance theatre would seem to have given impetus to and cemented the public/private distinction gradually evolving into its modern form. Yet by the same token, the recourse to boy actors to play female roles – thereby raising the problems of truth/falsity, reality/appearance, alterity/selfhood in terms of inner/outer oppositions – tended to foreground the fictional character of all roles performed on the stage, including gender roles, both masculine and feminine, so that in the last analysis, the spatial representations of gender power were radically destabilized by the dramatic action. To that extent, the early modern stage offers intriguing comparisons with and contrasts to our own unsettled late-modern epoch – the only standpoint, at the end of the day, from which we can speak.37

The public and the private today In 1967 Michel Foucault suggested that perhaps our life is still dominated by a certain number of oppositions that cannot be tampered with, that institutions and practices have not ventured to change – oppositions we take for granted, for example, between public space and private space, between family space and social space, between cultural space and useful space, between the space of leisure activities and

36

37

Lisa Jardine, “Companionate Marriage versus Male Friendship: Anxiety for the Lineal Family in Jacobean Drama”, in Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England: Essays Presented to David Underdown, eds Susan D. Amussen and Mark A. Kishlansky (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 236. See Hugh Grady, Shakespeare’s Universal Wolf: Studies in Early Modernist Reification (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 9-10, 23, and Terence Hawkes, Shakespeare in the Present (London: Routledge, 2002), 75.

14

BODIES AND THEIR SPACES the space of work. All these are still controlled by an unspoken sacralization.38

To some extent, what Foucault said then, at a moment just preceding the onset of the era of globalization and postmodern culture,39 still holds good. In many respects, however, the three and a half decades which have passed since he uttered these words have witnessed a dramatic erosion of the borders between the hermetically sealed domains he described. Three factors have contributed to a contemporary transformation of the public/private distinction which was developing during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. To begin with, what Beate Rössler calls an “intimization of the public sphere” through the new visibility of formerly private themes, of impulses to individualization and authenticity, began with the invasion of the late-nineteenth-century press into the private lives of prominent persons,40 and reached its apex in scandals such as the Clinton-Lewinsky affair. However, this phenomenon has also has come to characterize the lives of normal citizens in the wake of the tendency towards informality which has marked Western countries since the 1960s. Many discourses which would have been taboo in the 1950s, particularly those of private opinion and sexuality, are now quite harmless in a public context. This “privatization of the public sphere” evinced in an insidious reduction of politics to the private lives of public figures has also been accompanied by a “politicization of private life” (Rössler’s terms) characterized by the alleged inflation of private actions to political dimensions (so that all eroticized interactions, according to one conservative discourse, however 38

39

40

Michel Foucault, “Different Spaces”, trans. Robert Hurley, in Michel Foucault: The Essential Works, II: Aesthetics, ed. James Faubion (London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 1998), 177. Also translated as “Of Other Spaces”, trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics, XVI/1 (Spring 1986), 22-27 (here 23). French original: “Des espaces autres’’, Dits et écrits 1954-1988, eds Daniel Defert and François Ewald (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), IV, 752-62. Georges Benko reflects a general consensus in suggests the 1970s as a benchmark for the truly gathering momentum of globalization as a concerted economic and cultural force (“Introduction”, in Space and Social Theory: Interpreting Modernity and Postmodernity, eds Georges Benko and Ulf Strohmeyer [Oxford: Blackwell, 1997], 7). Jean-François Lyotard’s Postmodern Condition (La Condition postmoderne [Paris: Minuit]), taking stock of a phenomenon already well established, appeared in 1979 (The Postmodern Condition: A Report of Knowledge, trans. Geoff Bennington and Brian Massumi [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984]). Beate Rössler, Der Wert des Privaten (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), 14-15. I follow Rössler’s convenient tripartite classification of the contemporary transformation of the boundaries between the public and private spheres.


15

trivial they may be, fall under the draconian laws of political correctness).41 A second factor, the astonishing development of information technology since the 1950s, has also radically challenged the once impermeable borders between public and private. Television brought the public world visually into the private realm. Public pressure on the American government to withdraw from Vietnam was in large part fuelled by the penetration of televised images of the war into citizens’ living rooms. Fax-machines, PCs, the Internet and e-mail have meant that for many people there is no reason why work should not be carried out from home; thus the boundary between work and domesticity has increasingly been eroded. The prevalence of mobile phones has guaranteed the reverse phenomenon: intimate phone conversations are carried on before audiences of anonymous auditors; the monologues we all carry on inside our heads are apparently engaged in by people strolling on the street.42 A third factor is the most significant in the context of the present study of gender and space. The partial blurring of gender boundaries as a result of the assertive women’s movement active in Western countries since the 1960s has had a major effect on the borders of the public and the private. Since Locke and Mill, the liberal discourse of the private sphere has identified the domestic with the feminine and the public with the masculine. This division reflected clear economic interests: men performed paid work in the public sphere while women carried out “housework”, by definition unpaid, in the domestic space. Thus the domestic reproduction of social relations underpinning the relations of production in the public sphere was secured with minimal financial outlay (essentially board and lodging for the wife) for the wage-earning male sector of the population. But from the 1970s on, the feminist battle-cry, “The personal is the political”, served to underline the economic connection between the two spheres and to demystify the ostensible autonomy of the public and the private. The economic connections between the two spheres, once merely causal, have become personalized in recent years as more and 41 42

See Wolfgang Engler, “Was ist privat, politisch, öffentlich?”, Leviathan: Zeitschrift für Sozialwissenschaft, XXII/4 (1994), 470-97. On the role of mobile phones with regard to the changing shape of social space, see Günter Burkart, “Mobile Kommunikation: Zur Kulturbedeutung des ‘Handy’”, Soziale Welt: Zeitschrift für sozialwissenschaftliche Forschung und Praxis, LI/2 (2000), in particular 215-22. See also Patrice Flichy, Une Histoire de la communication moderne: Espace public et vie privée (Paris: La Découverte, 1991).

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more women have chosen to remain in employment. Few men have dared to make the leap in the opposite direction. Traditionally, white collar men have brought their work home with them (before the age of the laptop it was usually in briefcase format), while the reverse movement remains taboo: the domestic world has no place at work.43 How long this last sector of a long-established social Great Wall will remain intact is difficult to say. Ironically, the modern age, which has increasingly offered women as well as men the fruits of industrial and technological progress – education, health, leisure, and other forms of individual self-fulfilment – provided precisely those solvents which have contributed to the corrosion of its principal socio-spatial features. For the opportunities of self-development offered to women in recent years, opportunities from which men have profited since the dawn of the modern age, have undermined the very basis of modern industrial progress: the nuclear family as the basic unit of production of social relations enabling the material relations of production. In offering women the same autonomy as men, Western industrial prosperity has begun, paradoxically, to eliminate one of the bases upon which it was founded.44 Ours is a time in which the clearly defined gendered spaces whose contours hardened in the early modern period are now crumbling under the pressure of modernism’s own social dynamics. Conservative analysts focus particularly sharply upon the transformation of gendered spaces worked by the shifts of public/private boundaries within the transition from an industrial to an information economy. They identify a disintegration of social cohesion in the loss of kinship and family values, and in the drop in fertility rates.45 A less embattled response is to see the late-modern age in which we live as connected, albeit at a distance, to its early modern avatar. This is why we can learn much in examining the cultural artefacts of the early modern era. The early modern theatre was one of the sites where the moment of coalescence of the private/public boundary was tracked and debated in a form accessible to audiences from a wide variety of social groupings. We can benefit from this heritage by giving it our close attention and attempting to read the 43 44

45

See Doreen Massey, “Masculinity, Dualisms and High Technology”, in BodySpace: Destabilizing Geographies of Gender and Sexuality, 109-26. See Ulrich Beck, Risikogesellschaft: Auf den Weg in eine andere Moderne (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1986), Ch. 4. English translation: Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, trans. Mark Ritter (Thousand Oaks and London: Sage Publications, 1992). Francis Fukuyama, The Great Disruption: Human Nature and the Reconstitution of Social Order (New York: Free Press, 1999), Ch. 2.


17

imbrications of gender and space whose own turbulent transformations are currently sweeping us along with their irresistible momentum. My reading of the connections between space and gender on the early modern stage begins with an attempt to theorize the evolutions of the private/public division against the historical background of an early modern society. It is important to remember that this is society as yet structured in different ways to the ostensible spatial dichotomies – dichtomies whose mobility and porosity is once again becoming patently obvious today. In the Chapter 1 I pay particular attention to changes in the socio-economic status of men and woman as instrumental in the evolution of what we have come to know as the paradigmatic modern gender system discursively marked by the notion of clearly gendered public and private spaces. Upon that basis I then proceed to sketch, in Chapters 2 and 3 respectively, what I call the early modern gender system and the early modern theatre system, in both cases drawing on the theoretical resources of the systems theory elaborated by the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann. I focus in particular on two central concepts with which systems theory operates: first, that of the constitutive division which inaugurates the distinction between system and environment; and second, what systems theory calls “observation” – the process of self-monitoring by which a system maintains itself in an ongoing process of autopoesis. These key concepts are especially apposite for theorizing the aporia of the early modern gender system and resultant development of the modern gender system, and the role played by the theatre system in that long moment of historical transition. In the subsequent chapters I then analyse early modern conceptions of masculinity and femininity respectively in a period of upheaval. I ask which aspects of that gender system, under the pressure of changing socio-economic forces, developed new forms in response to a perceived need for new discourses of legitimization. In the second main part of this study I focus on early modern “manliness”. In Chapters 4 and 5, I suggest that the early modern concept of masculinity construed the male body as a site vulnerability to female power. In response, as I show in Chapter 6, the modern gender system closed the frontiers of the male body, strengthening it against its constitutive but invasive feminine other. In the third part of the study, I suggest the early modern humoral theory which ostensibly proved the inferiority of women and imposed the label of “incontinence”, actually offered a series of metaphors which described the ways women exercise the very social agency the fluidity

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theory ostensibly denied them. Chapter 7 explores metaphors of incontinence, while Chapter 8 asks which real practices may have provoked such misogynist tropes of “leakiness”. Thus, early modern concepts of the feminine body became a site of reversal – a site upon which, as I show in Chapter 9, the emergent modern gender system sought to recuperate and cordon off by reinforcing the notion of the feminine private sphere. In the Conclusion, I briefly examine the way in which one central characteristic of the early modern stage, the custom of having boy actors in drag play the women characters in the dramas, both exemplifies the early modern gender system, and foregrounds the looming instability which the emergence of the modern gender system sought to resolve. Here, I suggest that the stage focalized and thus intensified such moments of contestation in the very notion of gender itself. Crossdressing on the stage and as a plot motif concretely rehearsed upon the stage a feared mode of feminine agency. In contrast, the postRestoration theatre announced the stage performance of conceptions of gender deemed to be dichotomized and thus hierarchized without risk of confusion. The German sociologist and philosopher Habermas, one of the pioneer theorists of the public and private spheres, has responded to the return of confusion by endowing the present age with the unflattering epithet of “the new complexity” or “the new perplexity”.46 Ironically, the clearly demarcated social spaces to which he gave conceptual expression in his classic 1962 work on the public sphere47 to were soon to revert, in ways barely imaginable at the time, to something resembling the more fluid articulation from which they arose. This new complexity, and the perplexity which accompanies it, is the hallmark of our own existence. 46 47

See Jürgen Habermas, Die Neue Unübersichtlichkeit (Kleine Politische Schriften V) (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1996). Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft, new edn (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990). The first edition originally appeared in 1962. English translation: Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Bürger (Cambridge: Polity, 1992).


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One way of dealing with this complexity/perplexity creatively is to use the past, in this case the conditions of possibility of the residual systems whose demise we are still mourning, as a mirror to reflect upon the present.

CHAPTER 1 Divide and Rule: The Early Modern Gender System and Private Space

The moment of transition between the early modern period and what we can identify as the beginning of our own modern epoch in many respects mirrors the contemporary age. Our era too is a transitional period, as the modern shifts into the postmodern or late modern. My concern however is not with labels. Rather, I am interested in social phenomena, and in particular the sense of shifting boundaries of the respective domains of the public and the private. But to what extent can we really use terms such as “public” and “private” to mirror our own experience in that of the past? In a social history of women in England, Anne Laurence has pertinently remarked that notions of public and private do not really fit the organization of the economy and family based on the household. The household economy was part of public life itself .... What was previously considered to be private [before redefinitions of the public/private divide by the women’s movements] has been brought back into the public domain, but how did it become private in the first place?1

Not only “private” but also “public” spaces have always been in a process of “becoming” – thus rendering these terms from the outset much more unstable and fluid than our customary usage of them. But otherwise Laurence’s sense of the otherness of prior configurations of domestic and worldly spaces, and of their distinctiveness and/or overlaps, is appropriate. This chapter aims to map the transformations of the interlinked early modern “public” and “private” domains and their connections with changing modes of organizing gender. The shifts of public/private boundaries will be examined in three principle areas: first, that of gendered social spaces (public and private); secondly, that of individual bodily space; and thirdly, that of the (discursively) differentiated spaces of male and female sex respectively. Subsequent chapters will cover the same ground in a more pronouncedly theoretical manner. In the following two chapters, I explore the notion of an emerging early modern gender system using Luhmann’s sociological 1

Anne Laurence, Women in England 1500-1760: A Social History (London: Phoenix Giant, 1996), 10.

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systems theory and then complement that concept by suggesting that Renaissance theatre constituted an artistic system ideally equipped to articulate the birthing pains of a new gender system in concrete performance terms.

Shifting boundaries between public and private spaces When reading early modern texts one constantly encounters an apparently obsessive accumulation of rather far-fetched comparisons: I cannot liken our affections better than to an Arrowe, which getting lybertie, with winges is carried beyond our reache; kepte in the Quiuer, it is still at Commaundement: Or to a Dogge, let him slippe, he is straight out of sighte, holde him in the Lease, he neuer stirres: Or to a Colte, giue him the bridle, he flinges about; raine him hard, & you may rule him: Or to a Ship, hoyst the sayles it runnes on head; let fall the Ancour, all is well: Or to Pandoraes boxe, lift uppe the lidde, out flyes the Deuill; shut it up fast, it cannot hurt us.2

Francis Meres compiled a massive compendium of thousands of epithets, almost every one structured by a copula of similitude: “As little Bees from euery place bring home that which is profitable: so a student doeth excerpe from euery author that which is for his purpose.”3 This love of simile and comparison was in part a technique designed to cater to the strong visual imaginations of Renaissance readers. But more significantly, it was the immediate expression of a reflexive mode of thought in writers of the era, who saw in every phenomenon hidden connections with other phenomenon. With no exaggeration, one critic speaks of an early modern “rage for analogy”.4 This habit of thinking in analogies, which seems so quaint to today’s reader, was simply an appropriate response to the deeper realities of the universe. The cosmos was made up of concentric spheres which reached from the smallest to the greatest, with entities at one level being matched by their counterparts at another level; the various entities were thought to be linked not just by similarities but also by active forces, whence, for instance, the influence of the heavenly bodies upon the human body. Oswaldus Crollius based his medical lore upon the

2 3 4

Stephen Gosson, The School of Abuse (London, 1579), D2v-D3r. Frances Meres, Palladis Tamia: Wits Treasvry, Being the Second Part of Wits Common-Wealth (London, 1598), 268 (emphasis added). Lena Cowen Orlin, Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), 10.

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BODIES AND THEIR SPACES mutual Analogick Sympathy and harmonious concordance of Plants with the Members of the Human Body .... There is nothing in the World, the Property of which is not found in Man the Microcosme .... We here studying brevity, to the studious in Signatures of hidden things, and to such as labour in searching out like Mysteries latent in the Cells of Nature, commend, and propose these, that from our Example, they may further prove other, and with more happy success and greater contentation, find through the whole Longitude and Latitude of Nature, the admirable content, and harmonious Concordance of all things.5

Renaissance scholars constructed complex typologies of the modes of resemblance of things to one another, including “Amicita, Aequalitas, Communio (contractus, consensus, matrimonium, societas, & similia), Consonantia, Concentus, Continuum, Paritas, Proportio, Similitudo, Coniunction, Copula, Conuenientia”.6 The rhetorical structures of human language were understood less as artifice than as a sort of mimesis. As Henry Peacham wrote in his primer for students of rhetoric, The Garden of Eloquence, “Necessity was cause that Tropes were fyrst invented, for when there wanted words to expresse nature of diverse thinges, wise men remembering that very many things were very like one another, thought it good, to borrow the name of one thing, to expresse another”.7 The practice of working with analogies was a deeply ingrained reflex which followed the universe’s own structure, that of a densely woven network of resemblances, affinities and correspondences.8 The early modern predilection for analogies was particularly evident in concepts of the family, which customarily saw the household as a basic unit of society. This is a notion which has remained part of conservative ideology, but the early modern concept understood the place of the family within a synecdochic relationship quite unfamiliar to us today. 5

6

7 8

Oswaldus Crollius, A Treatise of Oswaldus Crollius of Signatures of Internal Things; or, A True and Lively Anatomy of the Greater and Lesser World (1669), in Bazilica Chymica, & Praxis Chymiatricæ, or Royal and Practical Chymistry in Three Treatises (London, 1670), A2v, 24, 36. Petrus Gregorius, Syntaxeƹn Artis Mirabilis, in Libros XL. Digesturvm (Cologne, 1610), 28. For Renaissance treatments of analogy, see Thomas de Vio, Cardinal Cajetan, The Analogy of Names and The Concept of Being, trans. Edward A. Bushinski and Henry J. Koren (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University, 1959). Henry Peacham, Garden of Eloquence (London, 1577), B1v. The classic references here are Arthur O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain of Being: A Study of the History of an Idea (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1957) and Frances A. Yates, Theatre of the World (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969). The liveliest exposition of the Renaissance mode of thought is the second chapter of Michel Foucault’s Les Mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). English translation: The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1971).

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According to this trope of synecdoche (part-whole), the family, with its hierarchies, was a microcosm of the state with its parallel hierarchical structure. Bilson’s assertion that “euery family ... is both a parte, and a paterne of the common-wealth” neatly exemplifies the action of synecdoche.9 The linkage between the “house” and the family, the “tribe” and the “nation” was explicitly described as a synecdochic relationship by Matthew Griffith.10 Another 1608 description of the family temporalized synecdoche, making the family an anticipation upon a later whole. Villages were “the first societies after [the] propagation of families wherein people are united ... in ... the mutual comforts of neighbourhood and intercourse one with another”.11 The relationship between the family and its environment was isomorphic in its structure, and even more so in its functioning. Thus the Anglican homily on order spoke of homologous relationships between the respective levels of “the goodly ordre of God, without the whiche, no house, no citie, no common-wealth, can continue and endure”.12 Gouge, in his Of Domesticall Dvties, could write that the “familie is a little churche, and a little commonwealth”.13 The Earl of Huntingdon claimed in early seventeenth century: “My house doth nearest resemble the government in publicke office which men of my rancke are very often called unto ... if I fail in the lesser ... it followeth of necessitie I shall never be capable of the greater.”14 Dod and Cleaver repeated that “An Household is as it were a little Commonwealth ....”, going on to add that “it is impossible for a man to vnderstand how to gouern the commonwealth, that doth not know to rule his owne house, or order his owne person; so that he that knoweth not to gouerne, deserueth not to reigne”.15 The last example of the family-commonwealth analogy 9 10 11 12

13 14

15

Thomas Bilson, The True Difference Betweene Christian Svbiection and Vnchristian Rebellion (Oxford, 1585), 249. Matthew Griffith, Bethel: or a forme for families (London, 1633), 3 [B2r]. Quoted in Susan Dwyer Amussen, An Ordered Society: Class and Gender in Early Modern England (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 50. CERTAYNE SERMONS OR HOMELIES, Appoynted by the Kynges Majestie, to Be Declared and Redde byAll Persones, Vicars, or Curates, Every Sondaye in Their Churches Where They Have Cure (1547), in Certain Sermons (1547) and A Homily Against Disobedience and Rebellion (1570): A Critical Edition, ed. Ronald B. Bond (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 161. William Gouge, Of Domesticall Dvties: Eight Treatises (London, 1622), 18. The Earl of Huntingdon is cited in Richard Cust, ‘Honour and Politics in Early Stuart England: The Case of Beaumont v. Hastings’, Past and Present CXLIX (1995) 82. John Dod and Robert Cleaver, A Godly Forme of Household Government (London, 1612), A7r, A8v.

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anchors the orderly governance of society not merely in the strict supervision of the family, but in the head of the family’s own mastery of his passions. Thus the link between the macrocosmic state and the microcosmic individual becomes an ongoing, causal, organic connection in which the smallest unit contributes to the stability of the whole. Familial synecdoche is much more than a symbolic relationship, being endowed, here, with genuine agency. In the short play A Yorkshire Tragedy, where a husband ruins his estate by gambling and in despair subsequently kills the members of his family, this point is made forcefully. A fellow gentleman and the master of an Oxbridge college explicitly enumerate the consequences of the protagonist’s actions for the political order to which he belongs (Scenes 2 and 4). The loss of family control, Shakespeare claims, can have radical consequences for the state. In Hamlet, Rosencrantz explains: The single and peculiar life is bound With all the strength and armour of the mind To keep itself from noyance; but much more That spirit upon whose weal depends and rests The lives of many. The cease of majesty Dies not alone, but like a gulf doth draw What’s near with it. It is a massy wheel Fixed on the summit of the highest mount, To whose huge spokes ten thousand lesser things Are mortised and adjoined, which when it falls Each small annexment, petty consequence, Attends the boist’rous ruin. Never alone Did the King sigh, but with a general groan.

(3.2.11-23)

Similarly, in The Winter’s Tale, Antigonus cannot control his sharp, shrewish wife Paulina, who embarks upon a collision course with the monarch Leontes. “What, canst not rule her?” the King asks Antigonus (2.2.46). Yet it is in turn Leontes’ inability to control his own furious (and unfounded) jealousy which endangers the cohesion of his family (with his baby daughter cast out to die, and his son and wife apparently dead by Act 3, Scene 2) – and by extension, that of the state. For an heirless state was a prime candidate for civil strife (5.1.10). In the early modern period, then, the family could not be equated with what we think of as the private sphere in the same way as today. Even when the notion of privacy occurred, it frequently had a different inflection to the one we would give it, as in William Perkins’ Christian Oeconomie, when the author explains that a “Familie, is a naturall and

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simple Society ... vnder the priuate gouernment of one”.16 The notion of the domestic sphere as a private realm is only valid here as a function of the family’s public status within the social fabric. Only within the family/state analogy does the notion of privacy have any meaning, and not in opposition to society and the state. Where the notion of privacy did bear some resemblance to our modern conception, it was in a sense selfcancelling, declaring its own social irrelevance. Thus Holinshed mentions in his Chronicles the 1551 murder of Arden, in Faversham, Kent, adding that “it may seeme to bee but a priuate matter” and thus “impertinent to thys Hystorie”. Arden’s particularly gruesome murder, “the horriblenesse thereof”, and perhaps its political implications, which Holinshead downplayed, conferred upon this crime a social significance which extracted it from the merely private.17 Likewise, Edmund Tilney’s use of privacy is coded in negative terms. He recommended that the husband should “steale awaye” his wife’s “priuate will” in the interests of a functioning family unit as the fundamental building-block of social cohesion; “privacy” was to be eliminated in the interests of social order.18 Early modern dramas confirm this sense of the attenuated availability of privacy. When Shakespeare’s defeated Antony petitions Caesar, via the imperial ambassador, “To let him breathe between the heavens and earth, | A private man in Athens” (Antony and Cleopatra, 3.12.14-15), he is admitting his utter loss of significance within the Roman social order. Here, an assertion of individual identity (as in Antony’s declaration, “I am | Antony yet” – 3.13.92-93) signals that the subject has fallen into a “private” domain beneath the threshold of social visibility, a space marked with the stigma of social “privation”.19 This manner of conceptualizing the putatively private space of the family meant that it

16

17

18 19

William Perkins, Christian Oeconomie, Or, A Short Svrvey of the Right Manner of Erecting and ordering a Family, according to the scriptures, trans. Thomas Pickering, Workes Vol. III (Cambridge, 1618), 669. Raphael Holinshead, Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande (London, 1577), II: 1703; see also Richard Helgerson, Adulterous Alliances: Home, State, and History in Early Modern European Drama and Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 2226. Edmund Tilney, A Briefe and Pleasant Discourse of Duties in Marriage, Called the Flower of Friendshippe (London, 1573), [Bvir]. See Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Methuen, 1985), 35, and Ronald Huebert, “Privacy: The Early Social History of a Word”, The Sewanee Review CV (1997), 29-30, who gives a rich selection of examples of this sense of “privacy”.

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was less an oasis closed off from the world, than a constitutive element of public social life, intimately linked with its environment. This was a notion contemporaries would have had no difficulties accepting. For quite apart from abstruse matters such as analogical thought, family life was carried on very much in the public eye. Thus a further meaning of privacy was connected with information which needed to be concealed from the prying eyes or attentive ears of servants, reserved for a “private whispering room” (Duchess of Malfi, 3.2.257), or which might besmirch the reputation of the family. Alternatively, a further meaning signified the traitorous secrecy characteristic of political sedition.20 Something of this meaning resonates in Jonson’s Alchemist when Dol Common, posing as the Queen of Faery, warns Sir Mammon of the dangers of possessing the fictive Philosopher’s Stone: “Your Prince will soon take notice, and both seize | You and your Stone, it being a wealth unfit | For any private subject” (4.1.148-50). And, if no-one else was there to peep or pry, God would be witness to private (and potentially transgressive) actions: “Be you in your Chambers or priuate Closets”, admonished Richard Braithwait, “be you retired from the eyes of men; think how the eyes of God are on you. Doe not say, the walls encompass mee, the darknesse o’re-shadowes mee, the Curtaine of night secures me ... doe nothing priuately, which you would not do publickly. There is no retire from the eyes of God.”21 The crowded fabric of early modern cities and towns forced people into constant promiscuous contact with each other, so that even within their own home they were not quite out of the public eye – or ear. Gossip travelled fast in densely populated early modern communities: “Rumour with his thousand tongues and then thousand feet was not long in travel before he had delivered this distasted message”,

20

21

See Linda A. Pollock, “Living on the Stage of the World: The Concept of Privacy among the Elite of Early Modern England”, in Rethinking Social History: English Society 1570-1920 and its Interpretation, ed. Adrian Wilson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 78-96; Lisa Jardine, “Companionate Marriage versus Male Friendship: Anxiety for the Lineal Family in Jacobean Drama”, in Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England, 235; Thomas A. King, “Displacing Masculinity: Edward Kynaston and the Politics of Effeminacy”, in Images of Manhood in Early Modern Literature: Viewing the Male, ed. Andrew P. Williams (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999), 120-21. Richard Braithwait, The English Gentlewoman, drawne out to the full Body (London 1631), 49.

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commented the 1605 pamphlet Two Unnatural Murders.22 Neighbours were generally well aware of what was going on even behind closed doors. Walls, proverbially, were well endowed with cracks allowing neighbours to witness scenes of adultery. (Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream even includes a Mechanickal who plays the role of a wall – complete with a hole for illicit communication – 5.1.154-63.) One Yorkshire eye-witness who was living ... next house to the said Ottiwell Babb having only a wall betwixt them have several times seen and observed very uncivil passages betwixt them [the adulterous couple] ... in the said Ottiwell house and especially about the month of May last past this examinate [the witness] looking through a hole in the wall did see the said Mary Babb having her clothes and smock pulled up to the breast none being in the house but the articulate [said] Richard Babb [Mary’s brother-in-law].23

A Coventry and Lichfield defamation court account tells how one witness, Margaret Keeling (the “deponent”) and Joseph Sale her precontest [previous witness in the court case] sitting, one evening after their master and mistress were gone to bed, in their own house and hearing some talk in the said Sophronia’s house suspected she and the maid were talking of the said Mary this deponent’s mistress and so went into the entry, which is betwixt the two dwellings aforesaid, to harken what they said and peeping in at the door into the said Sophronia’s house plain this deponent saw and heard Elizabeth Hulme alias Holmes, the said Sophronia’s maid, say Mary Daintrey (meaning the party in this cause) is a whore and the said Sophronia reply Aye, so she is a whore, and I can prove her one when she has all done; and just after they had so said the said Elizabeth coming to shut the door this deponent and her precontest Joseph Sale went back again into their own house.24

The largely porous boundaries of the family and the home within the village context are attested by Philip Julius, a foreign visitor to England in 1602 who claimed that “in England every citizen is bound by oath to keep a sharp eye at his neighbour’s house, as to whether the married people live in harmony, for though in this realm much liberty is granted 22

23

24

Extracts from Two Unnatural Murders (1605), in Three Elizabethan Domestic Tragedies, ed. Keith Sturgess (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 304. The Induction of Shakespeare’s 2 Henry IV introduces “Rumour” as a dramatic character possessing similar traits. Deposition given by Elizabeth Tullett, of Clipsten Forge, Yorkshire (1666), in Women’s Worlds in Seventeenth-Century England: A Sourcebook, eds Patricia Crawford and Laura Gowing (London: Routledge, 2000), 156. “Mary Daintrey v. Sophronia Daintrey” (1697), cited in Women’s Worlds in SeventeenthCentury England, eds Patricia Crawford and Laura Gowing, 221.

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to women, no licentiousness is allowed them”.25 And Thomas Platter reported, rather comically, that a villager could be publicly punished “for not having come to his neighbour’s assistance when his wife was beating him”.26 Early modern communities were characterized by a high degree of policing and surveillance by neighbours, with some scholars estimating that one in seven people may have been the victim of such denunciation, for instance on the basis of sexual transgression.27 Indices of oppressively close-knit village communities frequently crop up in Renaissance drama: the adulterous Alice Arden worries that “these my prying neighbours blab”, making it difficult to meet her lover for fear of “the biting speech of men” (Arden of Faversham, 1.135-39); a nervous Mr Openwork in Middleton and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl complains that his scolding wife “has a tongue will be heard further on a still morning than St Antholin’s bell” (2.1.278-79). Many families included step-children and half-sisters and -brothers from previous marriages, a phenomenon frequent in times of high mortality, with a third of all marriages being re-marriages. Most households, even those not particularly well off, usually included, alongside the immediate family and lodgers, a number of servants who were customarily regarded as family members. Sometimes apprentices also attained the status of adoptive sons, being mentioned in the master’s will even after the expiry of the indenture.28 Thus William Whately could describe a wife involved in a private domestic dispute as “offend[ing] in publique before the seruants, children, strangers”.29 The family, then, was understood not just as a private domain which existed in opposition to a public sphere, but also as one particular sector of that public sphere. Even the intimate details of a person’s character or their dealings with their immediate family relatives were public property and were negotiated within daily social interaction, sometimes with a vehemence and violence that could bring erstwhile neighbours before the courts. The large numbers of slander cases which were heard before the ecclesiastical courts show to what extent personal identity was made 25

26 27 28 29

Philip Julius, “Diary of the Journey of Philip Julius, Duke of Stettin-Pomerania, Through England in the Year 1602”, ed. Gottfried von Bülow, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, n. s. VI (1892), 65. Thomas Platter, Thomas Platter’s Travels in England 1599, trans. Clare Williams (London: Jonathon Cape, 1937), 182. Derek Hirst, Authority and Conflict (London: Arnold, 1987), 49. See Ralph A. Houlbrooke, The English Family 1450-1700 (London: Longman, 1984), 176. William Whately, Bride-Bush (London, 1617), 26.

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up of public reputation.30 The first, and thus most important criterion, by which Dod and Cleaver recommended young men and women should choose a marriage partner was “the report”, the person’s public reputation, the way in which others spoke of them.31 Alice Thornton spoke of “that most valued jewel ...: my good name”.32 All in all, then, the domestic space was porous, open to its immediate social environment, and in the minds of early modern writers, to the cosmos at large. It is the extensive permeability of private and public which characterizes the early modern domestic social world. Indeed, this permeability was so self-evident that, strictly speaking, it would have disqualified the use of these adjectives as strictly opposed to one another: as indicated above, the private was often understood not so much as one half of a dichotomized configuration of social space, as the point where the eminently visible social fabric began to fade and fray. Whence Marvell’s extreme formulation of this negative sense of privacy in “To His Coy Mistress”: “The Grave’s a fine and private place | But none I think do there embrace.” 33 Public and private, however, were gradually shifting their boundaries. We opened this section with a description of the notion of analogies and correspondences which was felt to underlie the metaphoric workings of language itself. By the early seventeenth century, this sense of cohesion was beginning to fail. Language crosses boundaries now only by a violent process of “inuersion” of meaning: “single words have their sence and vnderstanding altered and figured many wayes, to wit, by transport, abuse, crosse-naming .... There is a kinde of wresting of a single word from his owne right signification, to another not so naturall, but yet of

30

31 32

33

A good deal of research done on slander prosecutions in the early modern ecclesiastical courts has been done since the 1980s. See Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); Ralph Houlbrooke, Church Courts and the People during the English Reformation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979); Martin Ingram, Church Courts, Sex and Marriage in England, 1576-1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); J. A. Sharpe, Defamation and Sexual Slander in Early Modern England: The Church Courts at York (York: University of York, Borthwick Institute of Historical Research, 1980); Richard M. Wunderli, London Church Courts and Society on the Eve of the Reformation (Cambridge, Mass.: Medieval Academy of America, 1981). Dod and Cleaver, A Godly Forme of Household Government, G3r. Alice Thornton, A Book of Remembrances (c. 1668), in Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen, eds Elspeth, Graham, Hilary Hinds, Elaine Hobby and Helen Wilcox (London: Routledge, 1989), 158. Andrew Marvell, “To His Coy Mistress”, The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Hugh Macdonald (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), 22.

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some affinitie or conueniencie with it ....”34 The catachrestic notions of “transport” or “crosse-naming”, both of them inherently spatial, were symptomatic of barriers growing up between domains that were previously felt to be intimately linked by manifold bonds and forces. By the second half of the century, Hobbes could express his unease about “Metaphors, and Tropes of speech”, claiming that they “can never be true grounds of ratiocination”, indicting those who employ words “metaphorically ... that is, in other sense than that they are ordained for ... and thereby deceive others”.35 In the course of the seventeenth century this sense of the gradual polarization of formerly interconnecting domains began to be registered in formal philosophy. Descartes’ 1662 treatise on The World and Man imagined the human body as a machine whose autonomous functioning could be compared to that of a clock; this body still contained humours, but they circulated according to a mechanical model and their influence had little to do with micro-macrocosmic correspondences.36 In 1714 Leibniz proposed a theory of monads (his Monadology) describing indivisible entities hermetically sealed off from their environment: the monads have no windows, nothing enters or leaves them; one monad has no access to and no influence upon another (however, just as God encompasses all these proto-individualist entities, so each monad continues to reflect the universe in itself, a faint remnant of the old order; and bodies apparently remain to some extent porous and open to their environment).37 As early as 1637, Descartes, in the Discours de la méthode, based his methodology for the attainment of reliable knowledge upon the severing of body, understood as a part of the distracting, subjective world of sensation, and the mind. This separation, whose

34 35 36

37

George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (London, 1589), 148-50. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (London: Dent, 1959), 18, 21. René Descartes, Le Monde et le traité de l’homme, in Oeuvres philosophiques, ed. Ferdinand Alquié (Paris: Garnier, 1963), I, 379, 437-40, 479-80. English translation: The World and Other Writings, ed. Stephen Graukoger (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Principes de la Nature et de la Grace fondés en Raison / Monadologie – Vernuftprinzipien der Natur und der Gnade / Monadologie [1714], ed. Herbert Herring, 2nd edn (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1982), 28-29, 48-49, 56-57, 58-59. English translation: G. W. Leibniz’s Monadology: An Edition for Students, trans. Nicholas Rescher (Pittsburg: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1991). For a judicious view of Leibniz’s place in the transition to the modern era see Laurence B. McCullough, Leibniz on Individuals and Individuation: The Persistence of Premodern Ideas in Modern Philosophy (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1996).

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resonances were clearly gendered, thus installed an emergent exterior polarization within the individual itself.38 The public character of the family space was changing in the period from the first half of the sixteenth to the second half of the seventeenth century. The private sphere increasingly gained its own specific contours. Paradoxically, it took on a new visibility in its own right (“the private has gone public”, quips Huebert39) by virtue of becoming hidden from the public eye. In John Ford’s play The Broken Heart, the King dismisses his counsellors by announcing “We would be private” (4.3.5). James Knowles comments that “to be private, to enter into the closet, was a public statement .... Being private is an announced state, an ‘inescapably public’ gesture of withdrawal.”40 By virtue of such ostentatious gestures, a trend towards privacy made itself noticeable. Protestant practices of prayer, meditation, bible-reading or diaristic writing increasingly created private spaces coeval with the reflective, interiorized subjectivities which were formed there.41 When Marlowe’s Edward II refers to “the closet of my heart” (5.3.22), individual interiority becomes isomorphic with a domestic space and its concomitant practices. From being a space which, at least in the rhetoric of family discourses, was not clearly separated from its context, the private realm was understood more and more as a hermetically sealed social unit. The period saw a gradual, symptomatic shift in the design of domestic buildings. The interior organization of early modern houses constituted an aggregate of rooms linked together by multiple interconnecting 38

39 40

41

René Descartes, Discours de la méthode in Oeuvres philosophiques, ed. Ferdinand Alquié (Paris: Garnier, 1963), I, 567-650. English translation: Discourse on Method & Meditations, trans. F. E. Sutcliffe (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968). On this aspect of Descartes’ philosophy see Genevieve Lloyd’s classic account in The Man of Reason: “Male” and “Female” in Western Philosophy, 2nd edn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 39-51, and Susan Bordo, “The Cartesian Masculinization of Thought”, in From Modernism to Postmodernism: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence Cahoone (Oxford: Blackwell, 1996), 638-64. Huebert, “Privacy: The Early Social History of a Word”, 38. James Knowles, “ ‘Infinite Riches in a Little Room’: Marlowe and the Aesthetics of the Closet”, in Renaissance Configurations: Voices/Bodies/Spaces, 1580-1690, ed. Gordon McMullan (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 10. See Roger Chartier, “The Practical Impact of Writing”, in A History of Private Life: Vol. III: Passions of the Renaissance, ed. Roger Chartier, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1989), 111-59; Sasha Roberts, “Shakespeare ‘creepes into the womens closets about bedtime’: women reading in a room of their own”, in Renaissance Configurations: Voices/Bodies/Spaces, 1580-1690, ed. Gordon McMullan (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 30-63; Retha Warnicke, “Private and Public: The Boundaries of Women’s Lives in Early Stuart England”, in Privileging Gender in Early Modern England, ed. Jean R. Brink, 123, 128-29.

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doorways, through which it was necessary to proceed to reach another room, so that all members of the household were constantly circulating through the spaces where the day-to-day business of life was carried on. The metaphors of domestic spaces reveal that they were understood as public spaces: when James I, in his Basilikon Doron, spoke of the monarch’s place within the social order, he referred to “the owne roome”, and Stow’s anatomy of the city of London relegated the humblest inhabitants of the metropolis in “the lowest room” of the social edifice.42 But from the mid-seventeenth century onward, domestic interiors were becoming less and less visible to the outside world. From that date, houses were increasingly structured by organizing individual rooms along the central axis of a long corridor, a design for interior space which allowed the separation of private functions from the main routes of circulation through the house.43 These developments were evinced across a broad spectrum of socio-economic groups.44 The swiftly developing merchant capitalist economy with its rising standard of living and disposable income caused a surge in the production and purchasing of household commodities. The number of goods to be found in household inventories during this period increased at an astonishing rate. Even among social groups with relatively modest incomes the rate of accumulation was surprisingly high, but among those further up the social hierarchy it was positively exponential. The domestic space, filled more and more with private property in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, became a closely guarded domain. The commodities which occupied domestic space increasingly determined it as a realm cordoned off from interlopers.45 Private space itself was becoming a commodified index of privilege by the second half 42 43

44 45

James I, Basilikon Doron (1599) (Facsimile) (Menston: The Scholar Press, 1969), 9; John Stow, A Suruey of London (London, 1603), 559. See Robin Evans, “Figures, Doors and Passages”, Architectural Design, IV (April 1978) 267-78; Alice T. Friedman, House and Household in Elizabethan England: Wollaton Hall and the Willoughby Family (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 8-9, 40-41, 4852, 146-47; Colin Platt, The Great Rebuildings of Tudor and Stuart England: Revolutions in Architectural Taste (London: UCL Press, 1994), Ch. 1. More recent research has partly questioned such readings of early modern architectural developments, as in Linda A. Pollock’s “Living on the Stage of the World: The Concept of Privacy among the Elite of Early Modern England”, in Rethinking Social History: English Society 1570-1920 and its Interpretation, ed. Adrian Wilson (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993), 82-83. See Platt, The Great Rebuildings of Tudor and Stuart England, Ch. 1. Lena Cowen Orlin, Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994). Platt, in The Great Rebuildings of Tudor and Stuart England, Ch. 1, includes numerous examples of household inventories.

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of the seventeenth century.46 In Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness, for instance, the protagonist Frankford’s movements through his house “highlight the semiotic function of private space as an indicator of status and privilege”.47 By extension, the image of domestic space began to assume a new “value” as a refuge from the chaos of public life. Thus the bourgeois, commercial Dutch republic privileged the visual representation of domestic interiors as a synecdoche of middle-class civil peace extracted from the “public” world of political strife or tyranny, as Hegel commented in his Aesthetics.48 For women in particular, the domestic space may have become less open to its environment in the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, without, of course, ever becoming totally closed, just as it had never been totally open. It has been suggested that the new emphasis upon privacy in domestic architecture may have increasingly isolated women from the spaces of public intercourse and business.49 Recent research has questioned such notions, but certainly the writings of some early modern women imply a much stronger sense of constraint within the private sphere than their male counterparts.50 Feminist historians since Alice Clark in 1919 have suggested that the advances of capitalism destroyed the predominantly household-based economies of the late medieval and early Renaissance period, increasingly enforcing a gendered division of work according to which men left the house to engage in wage labour, while the women remained sequestered in the home.51 46 47 48

49 50 51

See Huebert, “Privacy: The Early Social History of a Word”, 30-31. Viviana Comensoli, “Household Business”: Domestic Plays of Early Modern England (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1996), 75. G. W. F. Hegel, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik, in Werke, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Klaus Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), XIII, 221-23 and XIV, 225-59. English translation: Hegel’s Aesthetics, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975). See also Innenleben: Die Kunst des Interieurs: Vermeer bis Kabakov, ed. Sabine Schulze (Ostfildern-Ruit: Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1998); The Public and Private in Dutch Culture of the Golden Age, eds Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr and Adele Seeff (Newark: University of Delaware Press/London: Associated University Press, 2000); Richard Helgerson, “The Folly of Maps and Modernity”, in Literature, Mapping and the Politics of Space in Early Modern Britain, ed. Andrew Gordon and Bernhard Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 241-62, and Adulterous Alliances: Home, State and History in Early Modern European Drama and Painting (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), 79-119. Friedman, House and Household in Elizabethan England, 47-50. See Ronald Huebert, “The Gendering of Privacy”, The Seventeenth Century XVI/1 (Spring 2001), 37-67. Alice Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century, 3rd edn, ed. Amy Louise Erickson (1919; London: Routledge, 1993). Patricia Crawford and Laura Gowring have documented a wide range of women’s occupations between 1610 and 1620 in

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According to this (admittedly contentious) version of the history of women’s work, women found themselves excluded from the public sphere through capitalism’s rationalisation of the processes of production. The atomization of work in the interests of increased efficiency of productive processes, which Marx described for the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, would thus appear to have been accompanied and buttressed by a parallel division of work along gender lines.52 Historians in this feminist tradition have focused upon “a new division between personal and public life [which] made itself felt as the state came to organize Renaissance society” (Kelly), a division which effectively amounted to “a campaign to keep women’s work rooted in the household” (Rappaport) in view of a “streamlining” of the patriarchal family in the interests of increased economic efficiency under emergent capitalism (Davis).53 It is now clear that this narrative of the way in which rapacious capitalism excluded women from public sphere, though immensely appealing in its clarity, entails a substantial degree of oversimplification and distortion of the historical realities. There are significant difficulties in its periodization of the respective stages of the development of

52

53

the domestic sphere (Emma Kene: “She useth to spin, do her household business and to wash and starch sometime at home and sometime abroad if she be hired”), the semi-domestic sphere (Marie Cable: “she keepeth shop for her husband’s trade”) and the public sphere (Ann Brand: “being a butterwoman by profession and tending on the market at Leadenhall”; Ellen Jeffrey: “liveth by keeping of an alehouse or victualling house”) (Women’s Worlds in Seventeenth-Century England: A Sourcebook, eds Patricia Crawford and Laura Gowing [London: Routledge, 2000], 77-80). Karl Marx, Das Kapital (Berlin: Dietz, 1957), Vol. I, Pt. 4, Ch. 12. English translation: Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Vol 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990). See also Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), Pt. 3, Ch. 1 (English translation: Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982), and Rudolf zur Lippe, Naturbeherrschung am Menschen (Frankfurt am Main: Syndikat, 1979), 2 Vols (in particular Vol II: Geometrisierung des Menschen und Repräsentation des Privaten im französischen Absolutismus), which describe analogies between the division of productive processes into their constitutive elements, and other analytical anatomizing tendencies in cultural practices such as military drill or court dance. Zur Lippe specifically addresses this problematic area in Marx’s theory of the division of work: Naturbeherrschung am Menschen, II, 311-23. Joan Kelly, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?”, Women, History and Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 47 (despite the fact that it focuses on Italy, the whole of Kelly’s essay – also to be found in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. Renate Bridenthal and Claudia Koonz [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1977], 139-64 – is well worth reading in this context); Steve Rappaport, Worlds Within Worlds: Structures of Life in Sixteenth-Century London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 39; Natalie Zemon Davis, Society and Culture in Early Modern France: Eight Essays (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1975), 126.

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capitalist economies.54 It would appear that there were gendered divisions of labour, even within the household economies, well before the period at which feminist history has claimed such divisions began to take effect. There is little evidence, for instance, that men’s and women’s agricultural work had ever been interchangeable: in Norfolk in late sixteenth century, men’s and women’s agricultural work was clearly differentiated in terms of status and remuneration. Even production within the family unit was probably always divided along gender lines, and it is likely that the work done by women from home, for instance as spinners or lacemakers in Yorkshire or Devon, was not a complement to the man’s trade, but an entirely separate form of waged employment.55 Revisionist historians have detected less the effective exclusion of women from the public sphere, than uneven and fluctuating relations between women’s domestic and non-domestic labour.56 The most recent research points to a long-term continuity of the public/private distinction. Within the framework of that continuity, gendered spaces and gendered employment evinced constantly fluid and changing configurations, marked by polemics and a frequent sense of crisis, often experienced subjectively and laid down in textual form by contemporaries as cataclysmic rupture of the given order.57 The rapid rise of emergent capitalism drove changes in employment patterns and the gendered ideology of work which privileged domesticity as the place of women and redefined “women’s work”, without ever excluding women totally from the realm of public, non-domestic production. Moreover, even the public/private distinction which is the bone of contention in this historiographical debate, it has been pointed out, is ideologically entangled with the sociological object it is supposed to analyse, and is thus no less part of the emergence of a new gendered structuring of social space than the phenomena it ostensibly describes.58 As Habermas has recently observed, the absence of women was a 54

55

56 57 58

Chris Middleton, “Women’s Labour and the Transition to Pre-industrial Capitalism”, in Women and Work in Pre-Industrial England, eds Lindsey Charles and Lorna Duffin (London: Croom Helm, 1985), 182-85. Amanda Vickery, “Golden Age to Separate Spheres? A Review of the Categories and Chronology of English Women’s History”, The Historical Journal, XXXVI/2 (1993), 402-405. J. M. Bennett, “ ‘History that Stands Still’: Women’s Work in the European Past”, Feminist Studies XIV (Summer 1988), 269-83. See Robert B. Shoemaker, Gender in English Society 1650-1850: The Emergence of the Separate Spheres? (London: Longman, 1998). See Susan M. Reverby and Dorothy O. Helly, “Introduction: Converging on History”, in Gendered Domains: Rethinking Public and Private in Women’s History, 1-14.

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constitutive structural aspect of the formation of the eighteenth-century public sphere – so constitutive and thus so apparently natural that gender questions did not figure at all in his ground-breaking work (as he acknowledged in the 1990 Preface to the new German edition59). The gender-blindness of the notion of “the public sphere” suggests that the term itself is intimately linked to the very historical process which it maps. Yet it is the stubbornly historical character of the private/public distinction in its long-term evolution itself which points to the intense materiality of specific, irregular, localized transformations in the ways the domestic and the public spheres were both linked and separated. There are many well-grounded objections to the thesis of the progressive exclusion of women from the public sphere of employment. None the less, there is striking evidence that some sort of significant shifting and novel delineation of the public-private boundaries was occurring – however non-linear, disunified and regionally specific the phenomenon may have been, and despite the underlying continuity of the contours of patriarchy. These reconfigurations of the gendered boundaries and of the overlaps of public and private spaces were already occurring at pace in the seventeenth century. In many professions in which women were active participants, they fell by the wayside as a result of the increasing rationalization of labour; employment was transferred to hired hands who could concentrate fully on the work, thus becoming more productive; frequently a process of female deskilling occurred as women less often learnt their husband’s trade.60 From the 1550s onwards, records witness to the exclusion of women from the bakers’ and weavers’ guilds, and from the printing and brewing trades in early seventeenth century.61 There was a marked decline in girls’ 59

60 61

Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft, new edn (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990), Preface to the 1990 edition, 18-19. English translation: Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Bürger (Cambridge: Polity, 1992). See however Steve Pincus, “ ‘Coffee Politicians Does Create’: Coffeehouses and Restoration Political Culture”, Journal of Modern History, LXVII/7 (1995), 807-34. Susan Cahn, Industry of Devotion: The Transformation of Women’s Work in England 15001600 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 47. See Anne Laurence, Women in England 1500-1760: A Social History (London: Phoenix Giant, 1996), 126; Alice Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century, 161-67, 221-32: see also Michael Roberts, “Women and Work in Sixteenth-Century English Towns”, in Work in Towns 850-1850, eds P. J. Cornfield and D. Keene (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1990), 88-90.

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apprenticeships in south-east England in trades and agriculture in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries.62 These trends were reinforced by the increasing encroachment of professionalization upon areas of activities formerly occupied by women (such as medicine, midwifery, or brewing63), with a concomitant disqualification and marginalization of women producers in favour of male professionals.64 As the guilds became an acceptable professional avenue for the gentry, the latter tended to displace women members: in the course of the seventeenth century, the percentage of women apprentices in Southampton, for instance, dropped from 48 to 9.65 There were still women surgeons in the late sixteenth century in York and Norwich,66 but again, this was an area of rapidly increasing professionalization. In London, the general structure of the low-qualified employment sectors which remained open to women – domestic service, charring, laundry, nursing, and making and mending of clothes – changed little after 1700. Here, there was no systematic reduction in the range of employments available to women. However, the participation rates had dropped, apparently confirming a trend already in progress a century before.67 Even conservative accounts which dispute the notion of radical changes to the structure of the family in England on the eve of the modern age admit a gradual shift in the spaces available to women.68 Of course, as we stressed earlier, women did remain active in the public realm, in areas of retailing partly derivative from the domestic realm, that is, in the poultry, dairy, fruit and vegetable markets, or 62 63 64

65

66 67 68

Amy Louise Erickson, “Introduction” to Alice Clark, Working Life of Women in the Seventeenth Century, xxvi. See Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500-1800 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995), 232-44. Joan Thirsk, “Foreword”, and Mary Prior, “Women and the Urban Economy: Oxford 1500-1800”, in Women in English Society 1500-1800, ed. Mary Prior (London: Methuen, 1985), 1-21 and 93-117 respectively. Keith D. M. Snell, Annals of the Labouring Poor: Social Change and Agrarian England 16601900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 274. More generally, however, Snell nonetheless notes that the trades did remain open to women into the eighteenth century (though the percentages were low, and sinking), in comparison to a far more radical reduction of female participation in the nineteenth century (30711). Christopher Hill, Intellectual Origins of the English Revolution – Revisited (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 75. Vickery, “Golden Age to Separate Spheres?”, 404-405. See Ralph A. Houlbrooke, The English Family 1450-1700, who vigorously contests narratives of historical rupture such as those of Ariès or Stone (18-38) but notes a “marked restriction of women to their domestic sphere” in the course of the period (107).

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domestic service; one exception to this appears to have been the expanding textile industry from the late seventeenth century onwards.69 In part this was because across Europe spinning represented one of the escape routes from restriction of female access to other forms of work.70 Women’s participation in the public sphere of work was often legitimized by exploiting the very terms of exclusion which relegated femininity to the private realm, as in women’s work as carers in the poorhouses and hospitals, or as public actors driven by pietistic, Christian conscience.71 The major period of female visibility in the public sphere occurred during the civil war, with the weakening of customary modes of social control, women participated fully in the giddying processes of social and political upheaval, figuring as preachers in the radical sects or petitioning parliament and taking part in demonstrations.72 But if, for instance, women were regularly voting in Parliamentary elections from before the civil war through to 1654, by 1690 they were totally excluded from the franchise.73 What may look like a trend to restriction, albeit uneven and gradual, was in fact evidence of a reconfiguration of the gendered topography of work that never created truly “separate spheres” but did ensure the maintenance of patriarchal structures in accordance with the interests of capitalism. Such changes were however buttressed by discourses which increasingly stressed the 69 70 71

72

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Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500-1800, 245-50. Merry E. Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 97-100. Patricia Crawford, “Public Duty, Conscience and Women in Early Modern England”, in Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England: Essays Presented to G. E. Aylmer, eds John Morrill, Paul Slack and Daniel Woolf (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 67-76; Diane Willen, “Women in the Public Sphere in Early Modern England: The Case of the Urban Working Poor”, Sixteenth Century Journal, XIX/4 (1988), 559-75. See Keith Thomas, “Women and the Civil War Sects”, Past and Present, XIII (April 1958), 42-62; E. M. Williams, “Women Preachers in the Civil War”, Journal of Modern History, I/4 (1929), 561-69; Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Ellen McArthur, “Women Petitioners and the Long Parliament”, English Historical Review, XXIV (1909), 698-709; Ralph A. Houlbrooke, “Women’s Social Life and Common Action in England from the Fifteenth Century to the Eve of the Civil War”, Continuity and Change, I/2 (1986), 171-89; and for a selection of women’s petitions, Women’s Worlds in Seventeenth-Century England, eds Patricia Crawford and Laura Gowring, 116-18, 246-64. Patricia Crawford, “Public Duty, Conscience and Women in Early Modern England”, in Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England: Essays Presented to G. E. Aylmer, 65; “ ‘The Poorest She’: Women and Citizenship in Early Modern England”, in The Putney Debates of 1647: The Army, the Levellers and the English State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 204-205.

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virtues of feminine domesticity, and often described women’s public work in those terms. From the Restoration, much of the characteristic early modern discourse circulating around women appears to dry up. The typical early modern misogynist stereotype of the rapacious, lascivious, adulterous or murderous woman is replaced by a discourse of women as innately pure and pious, and a discourse of adulterous or murderous men begins to appear from the second half of the 1600s on. Where the discourse of female adultery does subsist later on in the century, it is focused upon specific problems of royal succession removed from the everyday life of the common people.74 At the same time, this was typical of the shift of emphasis upon women as active, even dangerous sexual agents, to discourses which foregrounded penetrative, vaginal sex, and in consequence evoked a female body which was the site of a benevolent, lust-less, maternalized femininity. A precocious symptom of this increasing defusing of discourses of asexual, unthreatening femininity can be found in John Wing’s declaration of his task in his 1620 tribute to the Honor and Happines of Christian Matrimony: “We will let the wicked Woman passe for the present, seing the words of our Text, treate of no other but of her that is excellent.”75 The emergence of the figure of the sexually voracious (male) libertine after the Restoration is one sign of the transfer of discourses of sexual activity in the public realm from women to men.76 If there had been an “epidemic of scolding” and an upsurge of prosecutions of scolding women and slander cases from the midsixteenth through to the mid-seventeenth century, by the Restoration slander cases had become so rare to be something of a curiosity.77 74

75 76

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Orlin, Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England, 238-39; Joy Wiltenburg, Disorderly Women and Female Power in the Street Literature of Early Modern England and Germany (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1992), 209-38; Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500-1800, 203; Mary Fissell, “Gender and Generation: Representing Reproduction in Early Modern England”, Gender and History, VII/3 (November 1995), 442-43. John Wing, The Crowne Conjugall or the Spouse Royall: A Discovery of the Honor and Happines of Christian Matrimony (London, 1620), 9. See Andrew P. Williams, “Soft Women and Softer Men: The Libertine Maintenance of Masculine Identity”, in Images of Manhood in Early Modern Literature: Viewing the Male, ed. Andrew P. Williams (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999), 95-118. David E. Underdown, “The Taming of the Scold: The Enforcement of Patriarchal Authority in Early Modern England”, in Order and Disorder in Early Modern England, eds Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 119, 121. Even Martin Ingram, who disagrees profoundly with Underdown’s diagnosis of a crisis in gender relations, concurs with this peak and subsequent of scold-prosecution: Martin Ingram, “ ‘Scolding Women Cucked or Washed’: A Crisis

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The imagery of the family as a microcosm of the state disappeared. After 1660, according to Susan Amussen, gender in general became “less tied to other aspects of the social system; the family became less central to political and social order”.78 As the centre of dramatic production shifted in the course of the 1620s to the private theatres, “citizen” drama, though still performed, dwindled in prominence; few new dramas were written which foregrounded the domestic realm or the household. After the reopening of the theatres in the 1660s, the home and domestic “oeconomies” no longer took centre stage in the English dramatic repertoire, having ceased to be a focus for debates nation and governance.79 The family and gender, it would seem, were progressively stripped of their political connotations in the course of the seventeenth century. They appear to have been substantially relocated within the private sphere, and thus isolated from other social discourses. Lockean political theory at the end of the seventeenth century defined the family as private, and as always with theoretical reactions to social realities, followed with some delay a transformation long since achieved.80 The pattern that emerges here is that of spasmodic and differentiated but perceptible shift in the gendered boundaries of the private and public spheres. The progression was not linear; it differs according to region, economic condition, class factors and political climate. By the end of the seventeenth century many previously contested topics of gender unrest had been defused, not because gender power struggles had been settled in favour of dissenting women or men, but because patriarchal structures, in conjunction with capitalism’s need for an environment of civil consent conducive to trade and economic growth, had evolved in new ways which made them less the prominent object of public debate in the previous ways. With the demise of public shaming customs, the shrillest forms of gender disorder seem to have left the public limelight.

78

79 80

in Gender Relations in Early Modern England?”, in Women, Crime and the Courts in Early Modern England, eds Jenny Kermode and Garthine Walker (London: UCL Press, 1994), 56. Amussen, An Ordered Society, 133; see also Amussen, “ ‘The Part of Christian Man’: The Cultural Politics of Manhood in Early Modern England”, in Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England: Essays Presented to David Underdown, eds Susan D. Amussen and Mark A. Kishlansky (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 216. See Wendy Wall, Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 16. Susan D. Amussen, “Gender, the Family and the Social Order, 1560-1725”, in Order and Disorder in Early Modern England, eds Anthony Fletcher and John Stevenson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 196.

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Its mechanisms of control were henceforth situated elsewhere than on the village common or at the cucking pond or before the couple’s front door. The boundaries separating public and private as well as their modes of interconnection had changed enough to have rendered some of the gender discourse of social space irrelevant. However, the transition from one configuration of gender space to another does not ensue without generating tensions and anxieties. The emergence of novel configurations of gendered spaces created turbulences which, as we will see, were registered and articulated in the drama of early modern England.81

Bodily spaces In the course of the seventeenth century, not only the spaces inhabited by early modern bodies, but also the spaces of those bodies, and between male and female bodies, appear to have become more rigidly defined. In a now classic formula the anthropologist Mary Douglas claimed that the body is a model which can stand for any bounded system. Its boundaries can represent any boundaries which are threatened or precarious. The body is a complex system. The functions of its different parts and their relations afford a source of symbols for other complex structures.82

In this section I want to argue that the early modern age presents a special case of the more general principle established by Douglas. Namely, the body became doubly bounded as the early modern period modulated into the modern: not only did it stand as a generalized metaphor for social boundaries as at any given historical moment; far more, its boundaries were reinforced during this period, so that the body itself became inscribed with the shifting parameters of public and private we examined above. I will suggest that the body in general was increasingly enclosed in a private space; it was increasingly divided into a masculine and a feminine body more clearly distinguished from one another. This atomization of the body itself was a concomitant of the atomization of society in general. 81

82

It would appear that a “clearer division of male and female roles” was not restricted to England alone, but was a European phenomenon, though at differing periods, with differing forms of turbulence in the public discursive sphere. See Lyndal Roper, Oedipus and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 1994), 39, 46-52, 107-24. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger (1966; London: Ark/Routledge Kegan Paul, 1985), 115.

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The traditional view of the body which the early modern age inherited from classical and medieval medicine was one in which the body was part of the world, as was evident in the microcosm-macrocosm theories mentioned above. As Michael Schoenfeldt has shown, contemporaries had a clear idea of interior selfhood, but one which was based upon an humoral equilibrium, so that the inner self was never hermetically sealed off from its surroundings.83 The notion of the body as a private entity was foreign to early modern thinkers, as evinced in the way in which a seventeenth-century physician such as Helkiah Crooke, used the terms “publicke” and “priuate” with reference to anatomy: Fernelius in the second Book of his Method, diuideth the body into publicke and priuate Regions: and truly as I think very commodiously, for a practising Physitian or Chirugion. The publick Region is threefold: One, and properly the first, reacheth from the Gullet into the middle part of the Liuer; in which, are the stomacke, and the Meseraicke veynes, the hollow part of the Liuer, the Spleene, and the Pancreas or sweete breade between them. The second runneth from the midst of the Liuer, into the small and hairy veines of the particular partes, comprehending the gibbous or bounding part of the Liuer, all the hollow veine, the great arterie that accompanieth it, and whatsoeuer portion of them is between the armeholes & the Groine. The third Region comprehendeth the Muscles, membranes, Bones, and in a word, all the Moles or mountenances of the body. There are also many priuate regions, which have their proper superfluities, and peculiar passages for their expurgation.84

The interior of the body is to a large extent a “public” space. Almost everything that can be identified in the body is public. The private is only that which is genuinely invisible to the physician’s gaze, and seems to include for instance processes of excretion. Thus the terms “public” and “private” do not indicate exterior and interior, but rather, it would appear, the parts of the body that are known, and those that are unknown. The private appears to fall below the threshold of that which is linguistically articulable, or is so minimal and trivial that it hardly rates a mention. In the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries,

83

84

Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England: Physiology and Inwardness in Spenser, Shakespeare, Herbert and Milton (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). See also Natalie Zemon Davis, “Boundaries and the Sense of Self in Sixteenth-Century France” in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality and the Self in Western Thought, eds Thomas C. Heller, Morton Sosna and David E. Wellerby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 53-63. Helkiah Crooke, MIKPOKO6MO*PA)IA [Microcosmographia]: A Description of the Body of Man. With the Controversies belonging thereto (London, 1615), 35.

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however, this public character of the body was steadily being eroded by significant changes in manners and mores. The cultural historian Norbert Elias has documented the disappearance of the body on the threshold of the modern age. In his monumental Process of Civilization, Elias traced the process whereby bodily functions such as eating, spitting or nose-blowing were increasingly subjected to the rules of etiquette. The points at which the body was open to its environment were regulated more and more strictly by codes which worked to close, not just literally, but also in terms of cultural encoding, the bodily orifices, and restrict the circulation of bodily waste. Thomas Coryate, commenting in 1611 on the novel use of forks at table in Italy, explained that whoever sitting in the company of others at meale, should vnaduisably touch the dish of meate with his fingers from which all at the table doe cut, he will giue occasion of offence vnto the company, as hauing transgressed the lawes of good manners ... the Italian cannot by any meanes indure to haue his dish touched with fingers, seeing all mens fingers are not alike cleane.85

As Lawrence Stone notes, such developments ensured that “there was no longer any chance of a mingling of the salivas of different persons around a dinner-table .... The motive behind all these refinements of manners ... was a desire to separate one’s body and its juices from contact with other people.”86 Other moments of bodily functioning, such as sleep or the visibility of the naked body, were steadily banished to the private space of the bedroom, a place increasingly understood as part of the “intimate sphere”.87 The development of bodily codes of conduct in England is evinced in titles such as Francis Seager’s The Schoole of Vertue (c. 1590), William Finston’s The Schoole of Good Manners (1609) and Richard Weste’s The Book of Demeanor (1619).88 The emergent bourgeois codes of correct individual behaviour described by Elias were buttressed by a rhetoric of visual surveillance of domestic spaces. Social control was banished from the 85 86 87

88

Thomas Coryate, Coryats Crudities (London, 1611), 90-91. Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 171. Norbert Elias, Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation: Soziogenetische und psychogenetische Untersuchungen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998), I, 312-23, 354-5. English translation: The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, trans. Edmund Jephcott, rev. edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). See Anna Bryson, “The Rhetoric of Status: Gesture, Demeanour and the Image of the Gentleman in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England”, in Renaissance Bodies: The Human Figure in English Culture c. 1540-1660, eds Lucy Gwent and Nigel Llewellyn (London: Reaktion Books, 1990), 136-53.

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public space of shaming rituals into the private space of the selfmonitored individual body isomorphic with the well-ordered domestic space.89 Thus Braithwait wrote: “Doth disgrace or infamy presse you? You have a Cloud of witnesses within you, that can beare testimony of you, and for you”; “should you, by a due examination of your selues, finde any bosome-sinne secretly lurking, and subtill familiar priuately incroaching, any distempred affection dangerously mutining: Be your own Censors.”90 Thomas Gataker, in his sermon A Wife Indeed injoined: Reade over the Rules that St. Paul and St. Peter prescribe Married women; and examinine thy selfe by them. Reade over the Description that Salomons Mother maketh of a good Wife; and compare thy selfe with it. There is set downe a Paterne and a Precedent for thee. There is a Lookeing-glasse for thee ... to see thy selfe in, and to shew thee what thou art.91

Significantly, the development of flat glass mirrors in Venice in the early sixteenth century (superseding earlier metal mirrors or the convex mirrors of the fifteenth century), and their subsequent export to the rest of Europe, was instrumental in the upsurge of notions of an individual humanist subject in the Renaissance92 – and provided the material support for notions of self-coercing structures of subjectivity. The prying eyes of the close-knit village community were internalized, in this transitional configuration, by the self-scrutinizing subject. The public gaze was directed inward towards a body whose boundaries were a synecdoche of the newly emergent domestic realm. The early modern period’s tendency to associate the humoral notion of the body with shame and embarrassment was instrumental in the implementation of bodily surveillance. Central to the early modern understanding of the body as a “household” or “oeconomie” of turbulent interactions between the four humours and their related 89

90 91 92

See Natasha Korda, “ ‘Judicious Oeillades’: Supervising Marital Property in The Merry Wives of Windsor”, in Marxist Shakespeares, eds Jean E. Howard and Scott Cutler Kershaw (London: Routledge, 2001), 82-103. This rhetoric of surveillance was symptomatic of the accumulation of household goods: “in her priuate family” the wife “is Overseer”, said Richard Braithwait in The English Gentlewoman, drawne out to the full Body (London, 1631), 52. Braithwait, The English Gentlewoman, 199, 205. Thomas Gataker, A Wife Indeed, in Certaine Sermons (London, 1637), 153. See Andrew Belsey and Catherine Belsey, “Icons of Divinity: Portraits of Elizabeth I”, in Renaissance Bodies: The Human Figure in English Culture c. 1540-1660, 31. It is interesting to read this instance of the development of an emergent individual subjectivity in the light of Lacan’s psychogenetic account of incipient individual subjectivity in the child’s encounter with a mirror. See Jacques Lacan, “Le stade du miroir”, in Ecrits (Paris: Gallimard/Points, 1970), I, 95-6. English translation: Ecrits: A Selection, trans, Alan Sheridan (London: Tavistock Publications, 1977), 1-7.

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elements (blood, choler/yellow bile, melancholy/black bile and phlegm, based upon the four elements air, fire, earth and water respectively) and between four qualitative factors (heat and cold, and moistness and dryness), was the imperative to keep an even balance between these warring factions, either by adding something which was missing (with the help of dietary regulation) or by purging something in excess (by means of bleeding, purgation or vomiting). The humoural body was open to its environment. Crooke claimed that “all bodies are Transpirable and Trans-fluxible, that is, so open to the ayre as that it may easily passe and repasse through them”.93 Lemnius concurred with him, stating that the ayre doth sometime slily and closely, sometime manifestly and apparently, enter and breathe into the body, where it either corrupteth or else refresheth the spirits within, sometime with corrupt and stinking favour, and sometime with wholesome and sweet afflation ... the ayre and all things liquid, if they once catch possession in the vitall parts, and enter into the veines, they settle too surely, and take such strong possession, that hardly it is to remedy, and againe thence to dispossesse them.94

Women were understood as being moister, and thus more likely to be eject liquid as part of their humoural functioning. Whence the prominence in women of such bodily functions as menstruation and more frequent urination than their male counterparts. Female bodies, according to critics such as Gail Kern Paster, were thus particularly prone to various forms of excretion, which made them a frequent butt of ridicule in literary texts by men.95 This porosity caused an embarrassment exacerbated by a process of change as bodily experience was increasingly located on the uneasy threshold between a residual public and an emergent private body. Paster is only tangentially interested in embarrassment as a socio-historically anchored phenomenon, remarking merely in passing that female “leakiness” represented a symbolic threat for the new acquisitiveness of the patriarchal family.96 Here I wish to restore an emphasis upon the historical dimension central to Elias’ work. Equally important in this context is the historical narrative of the closure of body proposed by the Russian critic Mikhail Bakhtin. In his reading of Rabelais, he set up a decorous “classical” body (“classical” in the sense 93 94 95 96

Crooke, Microcosmographia, 175. Levinius Lemnius, The Touchstone of Complexions: Expedient and profitable for all such as bee desirous and carefull of their bodily health, trans. T.[homas] N.[ewton] (London, 1633), 74. See Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993). Paster, The Body Embarrassed, 25.

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of seventeenth-century French classicism), one somewhat akin to Elias’ discrete modern bodies, against an earlier archaic “grotesque” body which farted and pissed and vomited.97 In contradiction to Paster, who situates Bakhtin’s and Elias’s work within her account of the humoural epoch, I would argue that the increasing isolation and control of the body and its functions signals the progressive demise of the humoral epoch. In other words, the threshold of shame is not merely situated within the humoural system, but also marks its historical limits. Shame inflects the transitional moment where the humoural system shades into an as yet emergent configuration, one which eventually will supplant it. Paster’s interest in the gendering of bodily wastes and their ejection remains thoroughly relevant within this historicized framework, because the process of transitional closure, and the turbulence surrounding that process, as I shall argue in Chapter 3, is focused explicitly upon the female body. By the end of the seventeenth century, Harvey’s discovery of the circulation of the blood, and advances in anatomy had effectively banished the Galenic humoural body from scientific discourse (though many aspects of humoural theory remained prominent in popular language and everyday medical practice: classical medicine would continue to serve polemical purposes well into the nineteenth century, for instance in the discourse of public hygiene;98 and the terminology of the temperaments survives in our own descriptions of personality traits). The notion of the heart as a pump also contributed to the paradigm shift in which the body came to be seen as a machine, deprived of much of its symbolic potential. It is significant that the dedication of Harvey’s 1628 De Motu Cordis in Latin, addressed to Charles I, explicitly alluded to the relevance of medical science to the body politic; when the text was translated in 1653, the “exemplary” character of the body was downgraded to a mere “resemblance” clearly relegated to the past.99 The body, as a machine, was less unequivocally an organic part of its environment, connected to the world around it by causal relations of structural affinity. This new body was an isolated mechanism with rigidly defined contours.

97 98 99

Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World, trans. Helen Iswolsky (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1968). See Philipp Sarasin, Reizbare Maschinen: Eine Geschichte des Körpers 1765-1914 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), 33-51, 173-89. See Jonathon Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995), 29-30.

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Similarly, by the end of our period, as we noticed earlier, the female body in particular had ceased to be described in popular discourse as a dangerously lascivious and mobile body – one that transgressed the boundaries of the permissible and the forbidden – and had become one characterized by innate natural purity (neither contaminated, nor contaminating, that is, closed off from its environment). This attribution of purity to the feminine body was also the result of a clearer sense of a division between male and female. The Galenic model of the body inherited by early modern medical theorists posited a “single-sex” body, as in Christopher Newstead’s claim that woman differed from man “onely in a materiall designation, having one and the same specificall essence”.100 This theory assumed that male and female bodies were essentially the same, and were merely differentiated by variances in temperature which caused the male sexual organs to be extruded, so that where the woman possessed a womb, the man had a penis. These notions have been most thoroughly explored by Thomas Laqueur.101 The theory he describes can be easily identified in treatises such as Crooke’s Microcosmographia: The Testicles in men are larger and of a hotter nature then in women; not so much by reason of their scituation, as because of the temperament of the whole body, which in women is colder, in men hotter. Wherefore heat abounding in men thrusts them foorth of the body, whereas in women they remain within, because their dull and sluggish heate is not sufficient to thrust them out. The trueth of this appeareth by manifold stories of such women, whose more actiue and operatiue heate hath thrust out their Testicles, and of women made them men.102

The connection of the two sexes according to this model is merely another instance of analogical thinking, for, as Crooke pointed out in the opening pages of his treatise, man “is in power (in a manner) All things ... Analogically by participation or reception of the seuerall species or kinds of things”.103 Alongside the objection that Laqueur’s own concentration upon the genital organs merely reproduces the bias of modern gender theory, other valid critiques of Laqueur’s exposition of the single-sex model have pointed out the very partial hegemony of Galenic theory’s isomorphic construction of male and female genitals. Galenic medicine was in itself a 100 101 102 103

Christopher Newstead, An Apologie for Women: Or, Womens Defence (London, 1620), 2. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990). Crooke, Microcosmographia, 201 Ibid, 3.

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field of discursive conflict, it competed with the common people’s own lay understanding of their bodies, and its predominance fluctuated according to region and period.104 More significantly, advancing anatomical knowledge was increasingly leading to scepticism regarding the accuracy of genital homology. By the end of the 1500s, most medical textbooks had rejected the Galenic theory of the parallelism of male and female genitals. Thus genital differentiation was already emerging by degrees as a scientifically legitimate concept in the late 1500s and early 1600s, in contrast to Laqueur’s claims for the eighteenth century.105 Such scepticism regarding Galen is already latently evident in Crooke’s own writing. The citing of Galen as an authority takes on a light tone of irony at one point: It was the opinion of Galen in his 14. Booke de vsu partium, and the 11. Chapter, that women had all those parts belonging to generation which men haue .... This wombe is likened by Galen in his 4. Booke de vsu partium, and the sixt chapter, to the scrotum or cod of a man [Tab. II, fig. I] as if the cod were but a womb turned the inside outward, and hanging forth from the Share-bone; and Archangelus maketh no other difference between them than of scite and insertion .... Againe, the necke of the wombe (saith he) is the stead of the yard, for they are both of a length, and by friction and restriction the seede is called out of the like parts, into the same passage, onely they differ in scituation which is outward in men, inward in women.106

Galen is still being enlisted as an authority, but the very fact of citing in this manner implies an increasingly differentiated stance with regard to the traditional canon of medical knowledge. The discourse wavers between an implicit attribution of fact, buttressed by the name of Galen, to the mere citing of an opinion, which the name serves to differentiate; here the parenthetical “saith he” hesitates between a reverent nod in the 104

105

106

See Janet Adelman, “Making Defect Perfection: Shakespeare and the One-Sex Model”, in Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage, eds Viviana Comensoli and Anne Russell, 23-52; Elizabeth A. Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England (London: Longman, 1999), 11-12; Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 6-7; Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, “Fetishizing Gender: Constructing the Hermaphrodite in Renaissance Europe”, in Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, eds Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (New York: Routledge, 1991), 88; Patricia Parker, “Gender Ideology, Gender Change: The Case of Marie Germain”, Critical Inquiry, XIX (Winter 1993), 337-64; Gail Kern Paster, “The Unbearable Coldness of Female Beings: Women’s Imperfection and the Humoral Economy”, English Literary Renaissance, XXVIII (December 1998), 416-40. Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 33. Crooke, Microcosmographia, 216.

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direction of the ancient authority and a sceptical framing of that figure. Later on, Crooke’s scepticism about the one-sex model is expressed more directly: we haue shewed how little likenesse there is betwixt the necke of the wombe and the yarde, the bottom of it and the cod. Neither is the structure, figure, or magnitude of the [male and female] testicles one and the same .... Neither yet must we think that the Sexes do differ in essentiall forme and perfection, but in the structure and temperament of the parts of Generation.107

Here the author is equivocating. The empirical evidence increasingly contradicts received authority, but at the same time, there is an attempt to accommodate empirical knowledge of sexual difference to the larger framework of ancient and medieval medical lore. Whence Crooke’s cautious retreat to an “essential”, metaphysical level of likeness so as to save the theory in the fact of empirical contradiction. The oscillation between belief and scepticism, between the authority of tradition and the authority of experience, between the identity of the sexes and the difference of the sexes, are all symptomatic of a transitional period. By the end of the century, the differences between male and female had crystallized fully. Thomas Bartholin’s Antatomy, in the translation of Nicolas Culpepper and Abadiah Cole, published in England in 1663, clearly differentiated the male and female organs, illustrating them not as inverted versions of each other but as visually quite distinct.108 “Howbeit”, said Bartholin, “the generative Parts in Women differ from those in Men, not only in Situation, but in their universal Fabrick, in respect of Number, Surface, Magnitude, Cavity, Figure, Office, and Use; as is sufficiently manifest to a skilful Anatomist”. His marginal note is succinct and scathing: “The similitude of the Yard and the Womb, ridiculous.”109 Thomas Gibson, in his Anatomy of Humane Bodies Epitomized (1682), explicitly rejected theories which regarded male and female “seed” as analogies of one another, and introduced the ovum.110 In the visual configuration of anatomical findings, entire bodies situated in a classical landscape are increasingly rare, being replaced by diagrams of isolated organs drawn in great detail. This clearer anatomical status was mirrored in a concomitant fixation in the cultural domain, as in the 107 108

109 110

Ibid, 271. See Thomas Bartholin, Batholinus Anatomy, trans. Nicholas Culpepper and Abadiah Cole (London, 1663), 60 (“All the parts of the yard”), 76 (“the sheath of the womb, the Body of the clitoris, and the external Female Privity”). Ibid, 62. Thomas Gibson, The Anatomy of Humane Bodies Epitomized (London, 1682), 163-64.

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“nauseaous” mid-1660s poetry of a George Etheredge, which singlemindedly focused upon “The powerful cunt!”, “cunt and prick, the cunt’s delight”, with repetitive, almost incantatory obsession. The poet’s reifying gaze “show[ed] Love’s chiefest magic lies | In women’s cunts, not in their eyes”.111 Bodies, in these texts, have faded into the background so as to privilege the absolute differentiation of polarized genital equipment. The genitals are increasingly configured now as “private parts” sharply defined in their isolation from each other and their social context, just as the private domains to which they belonged were constituted by the severing of erstwhile correspondences and analogies. By the time of William Cowper’s large-format The Anatomy of Humane Bodies (1697), the “neck of the womb” has become the “vagina”. Cowper’s monumental tome, whose pages measure a metre in length and a half-metre in width, presents the penis and the vagina respectively in 2:1 dimensions and in almost photographic realism, thereby consecrating genital difference by presenting it as “the real”.112 The human figure as “subject” as a dichotomized, biologically-determined gender-identity emerges progressively as the “object” of its scientific gaze grows in graphic detail and density. This modern body is the “site of an empiricaltranscendental doubling”, a “strange figure, the content of whose empirical knowledge, under its own power, deliver the conditions which made those contents possible”, to borrow Foucault’s formulation. The modern subject, dissected and bisected (in gender terms), was the subject and the object of its own irresistibly self-confirming knowledge.113 That ineluctable self-evidence possesses such force that it is only at the cost of considerable effort that it is possible “to denaturalize the sexual body by historicizing it, by illuminating its multiple historical determinations”.114 111

112 113

114

George Etherege, “Mr Ethereges’s Answer” (lines 2, 9-16), The Poems of Sir George Etherege, ed. James Thorpe (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963), 43. The critical epithet is that of John Oldham (109). William Cowper, The Anatomy of Humane Bodies (London, 1698), tables 44-51. See Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses, 329; Naissance de la clinique (Paris: PUF/Quadrige, 1988), x. English translation: The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, trans. A. M. Sheridan (London: Tavistock, 1973). Martina Mittag, in Gendered Spaces: Wandel des ‘Weiblichen’ im englischen Diskurs der Frühen Neuzeit (Tübingen: Gunter Narr, 2002), claims that anatomy was the reigning rhetorical trope for the period, but unfortunately provides few examples to substantiate this claim. See however Devon L. Hodges, Renaissance Fictions of Anatomy (Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press, 1985) and Jonathon Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995). David M. Halperin, “Historicizing the Sexual Body: Sexual Preferences and Erotic Identities in the Pseudo-Lucianic Erôtes”, in Discourses of Sexuality: From Aristotle to

DIVIDE AND RULE

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Advances of anatomy thus consecrated the differences of the sexes, thereby allowing the emergence of a socially hegemonic discourse of the natural difference of women from men. Anthony Fletcher detects a sense of settledness in gender roles around 1800 – a phenomenon for which portents can already be detected at the end of the seventeenth century, when the biological, somatic basis for gender roles, previously sanctioned principally by biblical authority and the superior force of men, were established discursively.115 Lest the reader ask where the connection to early modern drama is to be found in all this, it is worth pointing to the surprising transition from the all-male theatre of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, to the Restoration theatre where women acted on the stage. The theatre until 1642 worked with boy actors playing the women characters, sometimes with rather baroque effects, as when a boy actor acted a girl crossdressing as a boy, who then took off his/her boy’s clothes to reveal her femininity. After the Restoration, this tangling of stage-gender was increasingly dissolved by recourse to naturally embodied sexual difference – a difference itself crystallized and then ratified by changing medical discourses. At the same time, it would seem that the taboo on women actors, doubtless connected with the early modern period’s fears of unruly women in the public world, had been to some extent, if not completely, laid to rest. At the level of gendered discourse at least, women had been relegated to a private sphere, so that their bodily presence on the stage, it would seem, now constituted less of an incitement or performance of hegemonic masculinities’ deepest fears. The question of cross-dressing and its demise is one to which we will return at the end of this book.

115

AIDS, ed. Domna C. Stanton (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1992), 241. Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500-1800, 407.

CHAPTER 2 The Difference that Makes a Difference: Emergent Gender Systems In George Wilkins’s play of 1607, The Miseries of Enforced Marriage, the young suitor Scarborrow is somewhat perplexed by the odd behaviour of the woman he is courting. Meeting Clare for the first time, he expects her to embody the chattering femininity of contemporary stereotypes, and is perturbed by her un-feminine silence: Scarborrow: Prethee tell me: Are you not a Woman? Clare: I know not that neither, til I am better acquainted with a man. Scarborrow: And how would you be acquainted with a man? Clare: To distinguish betwixt himselfe and my selfe. Scarborrow: Why, I am a Man. Clare: Thats more then I know Sir. Scarborrow: To approue I am no lesse: thus I kisse thee. Clare: And by that proofe I am a man too, for I haue kist you. [A4v]

This short exchange lays bare the aporia of definitions of gender that are not autonomous and self-reliant, but dependent upon their constitutive other. When one other-defined gender identity meets in its counterpart an equally other-defined identity, there ensues a dizzying exchange of mutual mirroring which deprives the partners of any stable base for defining themselves. In this example, the young suitor attempts to escape from this dilemma by asserting what he takes to be a clearly defining masculine characteristic: active initiative of a sexual contact, in the form of kissing. This assertion of inherent masculine identity is in turn, however, no less dependent than any other characteristic upon its other, here feminine passivity. Clare only has to construe her kiss as equally active (not unlike Cressida who asks Menelaus, “In kissing do you render or receive?” – Troilus and Cressida, 4.6.37) for femininity to be read as activity, and thus as masculinity. Once again, masculinity is deprived of the mirror in which it sees itself in a narcissistic reflection. The episode demonstrates the dependence of the two genders upon each other for their mutual self-constitution. There is nothing natural or biologicallyfixed about masculinity and femininity here. Gender identities are comically shown in this exchange to be fluid, blurred and interlocking.

THE DIFFERENCE THAT MAKES A DIFFERENCE

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Other-defined constructions of gender continue to function to this very day. However, the decisive change is that after the early modern era, the entanglements of opposites would be more carefully masked; it would take a Nietzsche, at the end of the nineteenth century, to proclaim the factitious character of binary oppositions, thus ushering in the first precocious symptoms of the postmodern frame of mind. The early modern epoch operated with a notion of the continuity of the genders, derived from Galenic medicine, and simultaneously, a notion of contrasts, based on rigid, god-ordained hierarchies of social difference. These apparently contradictory notions of gender continuity and difference would be superseded by a notion of absolute dichotomies anchored in inherent, natural and biological oppositions, and less and less in social hierarchy or rank. A predominantly vertical mode of gender differentiation, with a porous horizontal axis of basic similarity was superseded by an increasingly horizontal type of differentiation, as vertical hierarchies shifted their forms. In Joseph Swetnam’s Araignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward and Unconstant Women, the woman-hater proclaimed that women are “nothing else but a contrary vnto man”.1 In this gnomic statement Swetnam can be said to anticipate upon the shifting markings of the difference between men and women that would come about in the course of the century. Paradoxically, his formulation also withdraws the very substance of the natural identities which was apparently so firmly established in the period following the Restoration. Swetnam’s statement highlights the significance of differential oppositions for a collective gendered identity – and conversely, by the addition of the “nothing else but”, points out how fragile that identity really is. For Swetnam’s formulation encapsulates the constitutive oscillation in all binary gender identity between dependence upon the opposed other for the grant of identity, and at the same time, opposition to that other. This opposition must be understood not as a state, but far more as a process, an ongoing assertion which is never without an element of aggression because in it the self’s own existence is at stake. Swetnam’s “contrary” points up the persistent drawing of a boundary, the recurrent setting of a fundamental binary opposition, which according to the German sociologist Niklas Luhmann, is the founding gesture by which any social system comes into being.

1

Joseph Swetnam, The Araignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward and Unconstant Women, 33.

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Luhmann’s innovative systems theory has been enormously influential across disciplinary boundaries in German-speaking social sciences and literary studies. However, although a substantial selection from his massive production has been translated in English,2 his work has yet to make an impact upon the English-speaking academy. For this reason, it will be necessary in what follows to progressively sketch out some of the basic concepts of systems theory as I appropriate them for a reading of the early modern transformation of the spaces of gender and their stage representation. Social systems as Luhmann conceives them consist of ongoing, highly-organized configurations of communicational events which pattern information about the world in such as way as to ensure the coherence of social processes. Their contours are formed by an inaugural binary distinction between system and non-system or what Luhmann terms “environment”. “In there beginning”, claims Luhmann in his synthesizing work Social Systems, “there was not identity, but rather, difference – the difference that makes a difference”. Once this constitutive, founding difference is taken up by the system itself in a “self-observing” gesture of recursive self-reflexivity, the system can begin to elaborate itself on the basis of its own boundary, developing its own internal coherence and structures:3 We can conceive of system differentiation as a replication, within a system, of the difference between a system and its environment. Differentiation is thus understood as a reflexive and recursive form of system building.4

Systems theory posits the setting-up of a boundary which establishes an inner and an outer domain, system and environment respectively. The same binary logic is then taken up within the respective code pertaining to the respective systems of economics, politics, love, science, and so on. 2

3

4

For those of Niklas Luhmann’s works in English that I refer to, see in particular The Differentiation of Society, trans. Stephen Holmes and Charles Larmore (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982); Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986). Accessible introductions in English to Luhmann’s notoriously difficult work which I use are Observing Complexity: Systems Theory and Postmodernity, eds William Rasch and Cary Wolfe (Mineapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), and William Rasch, Niklas Luhmann’s Modernity: The Paradoxes of Differentiation (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000). Niklas Luhmann, Soziale Systeme: Grundriß einer allgemeinen Theorie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984), 112. English translation: Social Systems, trans. John Bednarz, Jr., with Dirk Baecker (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). Niklas Luhmann, “The Differentiation of Society”, in The Differentiation of Society, 23031.


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The code constituting a given social system affords the key to the communicational medium based on appropriate binary oppositions – wealth or non-wealth, in the case of the economic system, truth and falsity in the case of the system of science, and so on – which allow distinctions to be made, and in turn lay the foundations for decisionmaking and action. The code replicates the process of selection inaugurated in the initial system/environment distinction, and provides a highly developed and generalized language (in the broadest sense) with the help of which social life can be structured and directed in a constant binary-based process of judgement, selection and exclusion.5 The code filters environmental information so as to process only that data which is conducive to systemic self-perpetuation. Science, for instance, filters out information which does not admit of categorization within the code of truth or falsifiability, as Foucault has suggested.6 Thus social systems emerge out of a pre-existing but undifferentiated social field via a process of differentiation in communicative patterns, to the point where they attain fully fledged autonomy within the given society. Such systems are “autopoetic”, in Luhmann’s term, in the sense that they only exist by continually maintaining their hard-earned autonomy in an ongoing series of self-replicating communicational acts. And they are “self-reflexive” in so far as it their foundational signifying operations are not, in the first instance, based upon reference towards the outside world (“Fremdreferenz”), but upon their own (essentially random) gesture of laying down a border and then elaborating that border in a series of complex operations so as to create an internal structure. The non-system is not an objective given, it is merely what is deemed to be outside by the marking of a border. But this border, once posited, suffices to begin operating, and furnishes the foundation upon which operations can continue. The male-female dichotomy cannot fail to stand out as one of the most important divisions, perhaps as the fundamental division, which structures the conceptualization and organization of social life. It can be aptly described as a “super difference” which is “irreplaceable at the current time” and “generates self-confirming results at the very instant of

5 6

For a clear sketch of Luhmann’s conception of the functioning of codes within social systems, see Luhmann, “The Political Code”, in The Differentiation of Society, 166-73. See Michel Foucault, L’Ordre du discours: Leçon au Collège de France prononcée le 2 décembre 1970 (Paris: Gallimard, 1971), 37. English translation: “The Discourse on Language”, appendix to US edition of The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Pantheon, 1972), 215-37.

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its application”.7 The social systems we normally take for granted are the favourite target of Luhmann’s analyses. He suggests that what appears to be most self-evident is in fact most highly “improbable”, contingent and engineered.8 For this reason, the apparently absolutely natural character of the binary gender distinction warrants careful examination. The historical conditions of possibility of this emerging gender dichotomization can be tracked. Foucault comments, for instance, on the manner in which, from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries onwards, medical discourse increasingly attempted to assign a “true sex” and disentangle hermaphrodite bodies.9 Luhmann’s notion of social systems as self-constitutive on the basis of an inaugural, reflected differentiation aptly describes the working of what we can plausibly designate as the evolving early modern gender system. Such a system would be made up of myriad communicational events which organized communication according to the dichotomizing code of gender, with a view to facilitating the imposition of masculine power upon women and children. One very prominent instance of the early modern gender system’s coding was drawn from the first book of the Bible, Genesis. The archetypal narrative of Eve’s creation from Adam’s rib, and the resultant splitting of humanity into men and women, was a constantly reiterated self-reflexive gesture of internal structuration of the gender system. Systems theory mobilizes a spatial rhetorics – at times quite explicitly10 – to describe the functioning of society, and is thus well equipped to throw light on the spatial characteristics of the creation narrative, which cast Eve as a “derivative” of originary masculinity, taken from the “crooked” left rib.11 In the creation narrative, the division of 7

8 9

10

11

Peter Fuchs, Westöstlicher Divan: Zweischneidige Beobachtungen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995), 11. The “super difference” Fuchs refers to is actually that of the East/West distinction in post-reunification Germany. His application of Luhmann’s systems theory to this central social distinction is analogous to my own use of Luhmann’s principles to gender as a social system. Luhmann, “Zu einer Theorie sozialer Systeme”, in Luhmann, Aufsätze und Reden, ed. Oliver Jahraus (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2001), 8-9. Michel Foucault, “Le vrai sexe”, Dits et écrits 1954-1988, eds Daniel Defert and François Ewald (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), IV, 116; see also Herculine Barbine dite Alexina B., ed. Foucault (Paris: Gallimard/Folio, 1993). See Rasch, Niklas Luhmann’s Modernity, 104; Peter Fuchs, Die Welt, die Kunst und Soziale Systeme: Die Kulturtheorie von Niklas Luhmann (Hagen and Cologne: FernUniversität Hagen/Polyphonia Tongesellschaft, 1990), 35-36. Thomas Heywood claimed that “all male children are conceived in the right side, and females in the left: and as the left side is the weakest, so the woman made from thence, is the weaker vessel” (A Curtaine Lecture [London, 1637], 170-71) and Webster had the Cardinal in The Duchess of Malfi berating “Unequal nature, to place women’s hearts | So far upon the left side” (2.5.32-33). Swetnam said that women “were made


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the social world into two sexes, with its tangible, bodily self-evident character, was reasserted time and time again within Christian belief and quotidian religious practice. This inaugural biblical narrative, particularly in visual as well as textual form, constituted an ongoing reinforcement of the defining existence of a gender system.12 The second narrative from which the early modern gender system drew its legitimacy, that of the Fall, turned around Eve’s responsibility for the expulsion from Eden. Eve was the maleficent agent of a negative inaugural division structuring the religious system. To that extent, all women, as Eve’s successors, were the ever-present bearers of the gender system’s “other”, its environment, cast in quite concrete terms of originary body and its female derivative, of paradise and exile. The early modern gender system drew in large part upon theological paradigms of gender difference, and thus depended upon a code of authority (obedience/disobedience) which demonized women but also endowed them with a disturbing power. What is of interest in the context of the present study is the increasingly differentiated paradigm which appears to have developed within the early modern gender system, working to dispel some of the ambivalences which trammelled it. This evolving paradigm consisted of changing horizons of selection which made novel criteria – notably those of newly visible sexual difference – relevant for the assertion of systemic boundaries. In other words, the codes regulating the selection criteria, constituted earlier by humoral distinctions such as “hot”/“cold”, “dry”/“moist”, “extruded”/ “interior” underwent significant changes. The shift in the nature of distinctions between man and women produced an intensification of the inaugural gender dichotomization, borne out by the genital distinctions “penis”/“vagina”, “semen”/“ovum”. Other criteria also worked to reinforce the processes of gender differentiation. The dominance of the rhetorical principle of “copia”, which accumulated examples to create a multidirectional textual web of

12

of the ribbe of a man, and that their froward nature sheweth; for a ribbe is a crooked thing good for nothing else, and women are crooked by nature” (The Araignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward and Unconstant Women, 1) and Richard Braithwait, alias “Philogenes Panadonius”, pontificated that “the Matter shee was made of, fore-told what shee would bee. Shee was made of a crookt Subject, a Rib: and out of her crooked disposition ... shee will not sticke to tyrannize over a sheepish husband, and give him rib-roast” (Art Asleep Husband?: A Boulster Lecture [London, 1640], 3-4). See Margaret R. Somerville, Sex and Subjection: Attitudes to Women in Early Modern Society (London: Arnold, 1995); Catherine Belsey, Shakespeare and the Loss of Eden: The Construction of Family Values in Early Modern Culture (Basingstoke and London: Palgrave, 1999).

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allusions, gave way towards the end of the sixteenth century to “Method”, derived from the thought of Ramus, which organized formal writing around binary oppositions. A subject of discussion was divided into two polarized parts, themselves split into subordinate polarized subjects, and so on, until one arrived at “indivisibles” or “essentials”. “Method” as a technique of written analysis had striking results when used to discuss sexual or marital relations. Thus Gouge describing the duties of the marriage partners in this manner, explaining that “because contraries laid together doe much set forth each other in their lively colours, I have to every duty annexed the contrary faults, and aberrations from it”.13 In a two-page table following the epistle, Gouge sets out, in four columns, each including twelve items, the “Particular duties of Wives”, the “Particular duties of husbands”, the “Aberrations of Wives from their particular duties”, and “Aberrations of Husbands from their particular duties.” Such a mode of writing about gender relations, with its primary “husband/wife” division, and secondary division into “duties/ aberrations”, was obviously a powerful producer of a binary gender “reality” – the inverted commas marking the illusory character of this reality. This discursive configuration worked to naturalize the very gender system it helped to create. The binary structure of the heavily moralizing secondary dichotomy (“duties/aberrations”) possesses a normative force which retroactively reinforces the invisible coercion of the first dichotomy.14 Indicative of the central paradigmatic role of this male/female binary opposition is that although the duties of husbands and wives are only two of a total of six “treatises” Gouge’s devotes to “duties” (the others concern the duties of children, parents, servants and masters), alone husbands and wives are schematized in such a tabular binary format. In this way the rigorously dichtomizing emergent gender system became self-replicating, raising its inaugural division to the status of self-evident “reality”. Gouge goes to some length to dispel his parishioners’ “misunderstandings” of his intentions, incorporating the two-level table to avoid having his women listeners take offence at what they understood as misogynist tirades. Rather, “Let every one, as their conscience (an impartiall Iudge) shall beare witnesse, make a right application of every thing to themselves. Thus shall we Ministers be

13 14

William Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties (London, 1634), *3r and pages following *5r. See Karen Newman, Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 20-25.


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freed from many evill surmises.”15 Apart from absolving the speaker from the charge of misogynist bias (and thus endowing him and his discourse with an aura of objectivity) this strategy asks the reader to insert her- or himself within the rigidly dichotomized categories proposed. The epistle exemplifies the manner in which a social systems filter information from the environment so as to reinforce the constitutive paradigms of their prior structure. Gouge’s recording of his parishioners’ reactions to his sermons and his incorporation of those reactions, together with his modification of his own text, in the printed version of the work, exemplifies Luhmann’s notion of observation (in the sense of self-monitoring) as a meta-communicational event. Observation launches the next phase of communicational acts, determining the subsequent round of information output, and following that, new input. Gouge’s epistle affords a remarkable glimpse of the dynamic negative-feedback loop functioning of an emergent social system in the process of acquiring systemic stability.16 His text helps to explain how, at an early moment of its coalescence, our present gender order acquired the remarkable degree of stability which has characterized it over its four-century history. Luhmann gave little attention to the early modern era, and even less to gender, but two of his historical studies in a neighbouring period and on related themes are helpful for an analysis of transformations in the early modern gender system. Luhmann’s history of the system of romantic love since its genesis around 1600, Love as Passion, provides a useful analogy for early modern transformations of the private and public spheres. The seventeenth century saw the gradual differentiation of personal and non-personal relationships, and the concomitant crystallization of a specialized language which contributed to the elaboration of an autonomous system of intimate love relationships. The intimacy-passion system developed on the basis of extant discourses of courtly love and an already clearly developed notion of individualized personal identity.17 Luhmann’s study of the increasingly autonomous 15 16

17

Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties, *3r-v. Examples of such negative feedback loops and the role of “observation” are given by Edgar Morin, La méthode: 1. La Nature de la Nature (Paris: Seuil/Points, 1981), Ch. 2, and Steve Joshua Heims, Constructing a Social Science for Postwar America: The Cybernetics Group 1946-1953 (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 15-16. Niklas Luhmann, Liebe als Passion: Zur Codierung von Intimität (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982). English translation: Love as Passion: The Codification of Intimacy, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris L. Jones (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1986). Interesting complements to Luhmann’s study can be found in Julia Kristeva Histoires d’amour (Paris: Denoël, 1983), English translation: Tales of Love, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New

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system of intimate relationships provides a fruitful parallel to seventeenth-century shifts in the gendered division of the public and private spheres. But because Love as Passion emphasizes the paradoxes which both complicate and drive the communicative system of intimacy without analysing these constitutive dilemmas in terms of power relationships, it turns the notion of system-stability into a form of power neutrality – indeed power blindness – which proves highly problematic for gender studies. The goal of a system, according to Luhmann, is nothing else but its own maintenance. To claim that changes in the boundary-marking of gender in the early modern age reinforced the functioning of extant gender systems, in the interests of economic complexification and the maintenance of male power is to suggest a change in the tenor of systems theory hitherto. For there is little place for the dynamics of power relationships in its conceptualization of social systems. Several theorists have pointed out that this has been one of the principal shortcomings of systems theory.18 This theory assumes that the primordial drawing of a boundary is contingent and disinterested. The drawing of a gender boundary may well be contingent, based as it is upon random bodily markers (the reproductive organs) which only gain significance within the discourse of sex.19 But it is certainly not disinterested, for it serves the attainment of power by one half of humanity at the cost of the other half. As William Rasch notes in relation to the processes of “selection” and “exclusion” which Luhmann treats as value free acts necessary to the construction of social reality: Such a depiction of logical inescapability [the obligation to select some aspects of the environment and exclude others in order to make sense of

18

19

York: Columbia University Press, 1987), and Catherine Belsey, Desire: Love Stories in Western Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994). See William Rasch’s and Cary Wolfe’s critique: “Luhmann’s account reproduces all the problems of a liberal technocratic functionalism that has no way to address the sharp symmetries of power in the social field, asymmetries that make the autopoeisis of social systems work better for some than for others” (“Introduction: Systems Theory and the Politics of Postmodernity”, in Observing Complexity: Systems Theory and Postmodernity, eds William Rasch and Cary Wolfe [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000], 25). See also Frank Lay, Die Macht der Systeme und die Funktionen der Literatur: Untersuchungen zur theoretischen Fundierung eines Modells der systemtheoretischen Funktionsanalyse am Beispiel der englischen Literatur des 18. Jahrhunderts (Trier: WVT, 2003); Rasch, Niklas Luhmann’s Modernity, 106-107; Cary Wolfe, “In Search of Posthumanist Theory: The Second-Order Cybernetics of Maturana and Varela”, in Observing Complexity, eds William Rasch and Cary Wolfe, 185-92. See Judith Butler, Gender Trouble.


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the world], however, raises more than a few hackles and takes on a different shading when a moral or political discourse is substituted for, or superimposed upon, the logical one. From a political perspective, the excluded becomes the other (of the system, of the dominant discourse, etc.). If we stick to the example used above [that of two doors, presumably in the entrance hall of a public toilet, labelled “male” and “female” respectively, between which the subject is obliged to choose], we can see that in a patriarchal society, the male ‘self’ awards himself the attributes of an assumed universality (i.e. desired traits such as strength, rationality, educability, seriousness), while the female “other” becomes the source of unwanted (or, more rarely, idealized) deviance (with traits such as weakness, irrationality, “natural” immutability, frivolousness). More than a logical necessity, exclusion is thus read as a series of existential consequences of ideological choice. From such a political perspective, to maintain a logical or scientific (wissenschaftlich) observation of the logical necessity of exclusion is deemed an evasion or denial of the victimized other, if not, in fact, a further masculist strategy of domination. Indeed, according to this view, logic itself, by hiding (excluding) the political analysis, becomes ideological. If a whole culture, in the name of humanism, is walked through the door called “Man”, and if “Man”’, not so coincidentally, bears a striking resemblance to “man”, then the logical exclusion is no longer the way things are but rather the way things have deliberately been made to be and, therefore, the way things ought not to be. Thus, to remain “neutral” about the excluded other is tantamount to a moral affirmation of what is included, the privileged self; and this affirmation, it is felt, must be met with critique in the name of the excluded. 20

Rasch’s use of the conditional is a symptom of his concern to engage with Luhmann’s theory and concede the aporia generated by such critiques of systems theory: trying to speak or act in the name of the “excluded other” inevitably collides with the epistemological necessity of exclusion.21 Though fascinating, and of crucial importance for postmodern political activism, such engagements go beyond the immediate concerns of the present study. It is for this reasons that most social systems claim that the primary oppositions upon which they are based are god-given and natural, erasing their own constitutive contingence: witness the function of both these discursive claims in early modern gender discourse. More useful in this respect is Luhmann’s analysis of the concept of “interaction” among the French aristocracy of the seventeenth and

20 21

Rasch, Niklas Luhmann’s Modernity, 115. Ibid, 116-19.

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eighteenth centuries.22 As in the course of the seventeenth century the aristocracy in France saw its putatively natural legitimacy, based on religious and political doctrine, being increasingly cast into question, new notions of difference emerged which allowed class stratification to be defended, preserved and reinforced. In the transition to the eighteenth century, “interactional” criteria such as “refinement” and “gentility” or “commerce” (meant as a social rather than an economic quality) crystallized. These new criteria of selection allowed a more successful differentiation of the aristocracy from other social classes, which were themselves defined (negatively) by that act of differentiation. In this way the social system of aristocracy maintained its existence, and, of course, reinforced its social prestige and power. This analysis cannot be directly transferred to the English seventeenth century (as Luhmann himself notes23), for there, the class system underwent decisive transformations under the pressure of the emerging capitalist economy which preceded by more than a century those that were to come on the Continent. Out of the English civil war, the commercial middle classes emerged as the political victors, while the aristocracy retained a largely symbolic prestige. The gender differentiation which crystallized in the course of the seventeenth century was, of course, part and parcel of this political and economic transformation. Nonetheless, Luhmann’s description of the development away from a theological basis for social privilege, as a result of its increasingly manifest inadequacy in the course of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, to a more clearly differentiated distinction between the classes, does lend itself to transposition to the gender context. One further analogy between the French context analysed by Luhmann and the English context at the same period can be suggested. Luhmann identifies in the emergence of “interactional” criteria a form of evolution which he defines as “involution”, suggesting the infinite refinement of qualities to the point of their psychologization.24 His term also suggests, however, the increasing privatization of the site of differentiation, its insertion in a private sphere whose development is 22

23 24

Niklas Luhmann, “Interaktion in Oberschichten: Zur Transformation ihrer Semantik im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert”, in Gesellschaftsstruktur und Semantik: Studien zur Wissenssoziologie der modernen Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1993), I, 72161. I am grateful to my colleague Frank Lay for drawing my attention to this reference. Ibid, 81-82. Ibid, 87.


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driven by the impulse to “involution” and which is anchored in a concomitant sense of individual subjectivity. The subjective internalization of sentiments goes hand in hand with the private space available for their indulgence. This study is particularly relevant because it admits the dimension of social power and the defence of privilege to the conceptual apparatus of systems theory. Furthermore, it permits the articulation of social systems as power structures upon the shifting contours of social spaces, in this case that of individual and collective spaces of class consciousness. In analogy with systems-theory research on the same period, it could thus be plausibly suggested that a new gender-system was emerging in England in a process of increasingly marked differentiation during the late sixteenth century and the early to mid-seventeenth century. The principal characteristics of the emergent gender system would include the elements we have already discussed. Firstly, the emergent modern gender system was marked by the development of discourses of the domestic space as a private space, which though they did not translated any hermetic demarcation of putative “separate spheres”, did build upon material changes in the design of domestic spaces. Secondly, the emergent system evinced a reconfiguration of men’s and women’s participation in public political and economic life with a marked trend towards the description of women’s public work in domestic terms. Thirdly, the emergent gender system increasingly relied upon the internalization of structures of surveillance rather than public rituals of shaming. Finally, the developing modern gender system integrated the increased dichotomization of a putatively natural biological gender as the material base of systemic coherence. The goal of this emergent system was the maintenance of the patriarchal system and its more efficient coordination with emergent capitalist economic systems. This is approximately the conclusion reached by Anthony Fletcher, whose investigation of gender in England between 1500 and 1800 “reveals the fluidity of a patriarchal system which was under pressure. The issue facing men seems to have been: could they secure patriarchy more surely by drawing sharper lines between the sexes?”25 Traditional (often theological) theories of the superiority of the male increasingly found their legitimacy being eroded. Such theories had defined the male as “a person, in whom resteth the priuate and proper gouernement of the whole household ... by the 25

Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500-1800, xix.

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ordinance of God, settled euen in the order of nature”; the household was an entity “Which to maintain for his part, God hath given to the man greater wit, bigger strength, and more courage to compell the woman to obey by reason, or force”.26 Physical force and control of family material assets were also increasingly discredited as instruments ensuring the maintenance of male hegemony in the family. At the same time, there was pressure upon men to demonstrate forms of public masculinity which were often difficult to achieve and to retain. Fletcher comments: It was not so much that men abandoned the trust that they had long put upon God’s word in scripture or on the tradition which condoned male power and the use of force but that they sought a framework for gender which rested upon something more permanent and more secure than either of these things. The central intention was the proper internalisation of gender values. If they could teach both boys and girls, men thought, to see sexual difference as fundamental and intractable, sustaining their superiority and women’s subordination would become easier.27

Similarly, Thomas Laqueur writes, “When, for many reasons, a preexisting transcendental order or time-immemorial custom became a less and less plausible justification for social relations, the battleground of gender shifted to nature, to biological sex.”28 In other words, patriarchy was evolving in ways that would make the exercise of gendered power more efficient and less costly, just as the later disciplinary regimes Foucault identified from the eighteenth century onwards sought to obtain and hold power more economically.29 In the realm of gender strategies in Britain, where political absolutism was abolished long before its European counterparts, indices of a striving to achieve more efficient forms of gender hegemony can already be found 26 27 28 29

Perkins, Christian Oeconomie, 698; Sir Thomas Smith, The Commonwealth of England: And the Manner and Government thereof (London, 1640), 24-25. Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500-1800, 401-31, 407. Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, 152. Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975), 220. English translation: Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982). Paradoxically, though Foucault analyses the historical development of productive regimes of punishment and sexuality (in the first volume of the History of Sexuality), he appears to be blind, in part at least, to the historical character of binary sex. See E. L. McCallum, “Technologies of Truth and the Function of Gender in Foucault”, in Feminist Interpretations of Michel Foucault, ed. Susan J. Hekman (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1996), 77-97; Susan Bordo, “Feminism, Foucault and the Politics of the Body”, in Up Against Foucault: Explorations of Some Tensions Between Foucault and Feminism, ed. Caroline Ramazanoglu (London: Routledge, 1993), 179-202.


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in the early seventeenth century. In the pragmatic words of William Whately, patriarchy sought ways “to prevaile with the least burden to the inferiour, & toyle to the superiour”,30 the two aspects being of course intimately linked: masculine tyranny generated feminine resistance, which in turn necessitated a costly expenditure of force. A later edition of Whately’s book explained that Much reproouing will make a reproofe of no force, much more will much commanding [sic] make commandements weake and feeble, and of no efficacie. And thus haue you the rules of wisdome, which must keepe authority (as it were) vpon the wheeles thereof, that it may goe forward cheerfully, both for the husbands and the wiues comfort.31

This rationalization of disciplinary processes could best be achieved by assigning the work of gender control to gendered subjects themselves. The Gramscian notion of hegemony aptly describes this willing acceptance of their subjection on the part of the subjects of governance. Whence Whately’s notion that “her-selfe shalle bee Judge against herselfe, if shee giue not what shee lookes to receiue”.32 This entailed subjects keeping to the places – in particular the bodily places – which were appropriate to the sexual identities they learnt to recognize as inherently their own. The increasingly clear differentiation of the genders was underwritten by the changing discursive demarcations of the places and spaces assigned to men and women respectively. In the course of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, there occurred significant reconfigurations of the boundaries of gendered spaces – collective, domestic and bodily – necessitated by the rationalization of masculine economic and political power. To this extent, one can only speak of a “sex/gender system” in the early modern period, as some literary or cultural critics have done, with careful qualification – because the gender system constructed upon a clear binary notion of biological sexes, with all its ramifications for the spaces of bodily and social existence, was still in a process of emergence.33 The notion of a “sex/gender’ system assumes “a set of arrangements by which a society transforms biological sexuality”, “the biological raw material of human sex and procreation”, “into products of human 30 31 32 33

William Whately, A Bride-Bush, or A Wedding Sermon (London, 1617), 29. William Whately, A Bride-Bush, or a Direction for Married Persons (London, 1632), 155. Whately, A Bride-Bush, or, A Wedding Sermon, 42. See for instance Louis Adrian Montrose, “ ‘Shaping Fantasies’: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture”, in Shakespeare and Gender, eds Stephen Orgel and Sean Keilen (New York: Garland, 1999), 20.

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activity”.34 But the early modern context shows that the very notion of biological sex as it is used here is not a pre- or extra-cultural raw material, but is always already a discursive, and thus historically specific product: “Gender ought not to be conceived merely as the cultural inscription of meaning on a pregiven sex”, writes Judith Butler, “... gender must also designate the very apparatus of production whereby the sexes themselves are established”.35 Gender systems always work with some binary notion of gender, but the cultural structuring and everyday location of binary oppositions is historically specific and subject to change. Therefore while Ludovicus Mercatus claimed in a text anthologized in 1597 that “in all things, and especially in animals and with even stronger cause in humans, it was necessary to have distinction of sex” in order to achieve procreation, this distinction was understood within an analogical and humoral frame of reference, in which “the female sex stands side-by-side with men in association”, as an entity closely connected to its counterpart by relations of homologous correspondence.36 It would seem that it became increasingly necessary in the English early modern context to reinforce and redefine this binary opposition by an intensification of the differentiating process, so as to strengthen the contours and the internal identities of patriarchal masculinity and its subordinate other within a rapidly evolving economic situation. Let us focus briefly on one specific symptom of this transformation of the early modern gender system on the stage. In the wake of the Reformation, many signs of the sacred were banished from the visibility of public spaces. The major Corpus Christi play cycles were largely suppressed between 1560 and 1580. The Diocesan Court of High Commission in York prohibited in 1576 any performance in which “the Majesty of God the Father, God the Son, or God the Holy Ghost ... be counterfeited or represented”; Parliament passed a law forbidding God’s name to be uttered on stage in 1606.37 One of the very last Corpus 34

35 36

37

Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex”, in Towards an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayna R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 159, 166. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble, 7. Ludovicus Mercatus, On the Common Conditions of Women, included in Johann Spacius’ Gynacea (1597), cited in Renaissance Woman: A Sourcebook: Constructions of Femininity in England, ed. Kate Aughterson (London: Routledge, 1995), 53, 52. John R. Elliot, Playing God: Medieval Mysteries on the Modern Stage (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1989), 6; Celia R. Daileader, Eroticism on the Renaissance Stage: Transcendence, Desire, and the Limits of the Visible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 4.


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Christi performances took place in Chester in 1609, with the actor playing God being obliged to speak his lines from offstage. The bans explained the changes: “all those persones yt as God doe play | ... wth voice & not be seene | for no man can pportion Godhead I saye.” The invisibility of God was novel enough to need reiteration: “A Clowdy Cooueringe of ye man a voice only to heare | And not God in shape or person to appeare.”38 The absence of the sacred as a representable, embodied dimension in public performance coincided, in the half-century of so until the closure of the theatres, with the absence of portrayals of sex, a pragmatic result of the absence of female bodies on the English stage.39 The incestuous union between Giovanni and his sister Annabella in Ford’s ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, for instance, occurs offstage. Giovanni closes Act 1, Scene 2 with the words, “Come then; | After so many tears as we have wept, | Let’s learn to court in smiles, to kiss and sleep” (1.2.279); the opening stage direction of Act 2 inform us, “Enter Giovanni and Annabella, as from their chamber” (2.1.1., sd). There is thus an unstable transitional period in which both the sacred body and the female body are absent from the stage: a turbulent moment of intersecting absences in which secularization has pushed one form of cultural power off the stage, and another emergent form of cultural authority, the body as the material anchor for clearly delineated sexual identity, is still lurking in the wings, awaiting its entrance with the Restoration. The early modern stage thus itself performs the transition between the gradual demise of biblical authority as the ground for patriarchal power, and the slow emergence of clearly delineated binary gender-spaces visible upon on the boards. This uncertain moment between the retreat of a gender system which exerted coarse forms of power over gendered spaces, and the fully developed 38

39

W. W. Greg, The Trial & Flagellation with other Studies in the Chester Cycle (Oxford: Malone Society Sudies, 1935), 159; see also V. A. Kolve, The Play Called Corpus Christi (London: Edward Arnold, 1966). See Daileader, Eroticism on the Renaissance Stage, whose thesis I adapt here.

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emergence of one which organized them with a finer grid of surveillance, assigning subjects to more carefully differentiated spaces with which they themselves would identify, possessed its own unique theatre system, to which we now turn in the following chapter.

CHAPTER 3 The Observer Observed: Differentiation and the Theatrical System There exists a famous photograph of Jackson Pollock at work in his New York studio on one of his drip paintings. It is taken from above, with the artist, his pots of paint, and the floorboards of the studio visible in the top half of the frame. In the lower half of the frame is the canvas bespattered with the maverick trails of paint. The seam along which the canvas and the floorboards meet is perfectly horizontal, dividing the photograph exactly in two. The photograph itself thus incorporates within its own boundaries the relationship any viewer who approaches it necessarily constructs with the work facing her or him. The photograph delineates the very division, projected onto a perpendicular plane, which defines itself as art in relationship to the audience. The Pollock photograph provides a neat visual parable of the manner in which, according to systems theory, the self-elaboration of autopoesis. Autopoesis occurs in two stages which can be seen at work in the moment of viewing that photograph. First, a division is drawn, creating a form of basal “sense” in a hitherto undifferentiated mass of social phenomena. Secondly, that act of division must be observed or monitored and taken up in a reflexive act of self-scrutiny by which the system inaugurates an endless chain of internal feedback loops that make up its ceaseless self-organizing activity. In the act of viewing the Pollock photograph, the next loop of division/observation has already been inaugurated. My verbal account of that process perpetuates that process with another subsequent loop … and so on and so forth. Given the importance of division and observation, art would appear to epitomize social systems as they are described in Luhmann’s work.1 For art is only art by virtue of not belonging to everyday life: a fictional story is literary precisely because it is fictional rather than true. And art can only be activated by an act of observation. A recipient enters into engagement with the work of art, whether by reading a novel, looking at a painting, or listening to a symphony. Generally, the observer is 1

See Peter Fuchs, Die Welt, die Kunst und Soziale Systeme: Die Kulturtheorie von Niklas Luhmann, 15-16.

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implicitly shadowed within the work of art itself, offering possible modes of interpretation that the observer may or may not want to take up.2 Luhmann stresses that the act of observation is not necessarily dependent upon a human subject – a refrigerator, for instance, “observes” differences of systemic and environmental temperature and incorporates them into its functioning.3 Theatre, however, ostentatiously embodies the act of observation in a group of human participants. Crucial to their role is the marking of the constitutive boundaries of theatre itself, the inaugural division upon which it depends. Theatre occurs in a real space and a real time, yet the theatrical experience is defined by a set of more or less tangible boundaries which declare its difference from that real world in which it is situated and that real time in which it progresses. This division must be activated by a group of spectators and taken up in an ongoing audience-actor feedback loop. The play-script (what Elam calls the “dramatic text”) remains a purely virtual potential until it is performed (Elam calls this “theatre”), and that performance assumes a spectator, in however minimal form she or he may take.4 Luhmann situates persons not within social systems, but within the environment of those systems. For the role of systems is to reduce the complexity of the world. In contrast, human beings inevitably remain far more complex than any system. Luhmann’s theory thus accords a particular privilege to the human subject. But in another sense, systems theory is radically anti-humanist in the autonomy it accords to the system over and beyond the subject. A social system, he claims, consists of communicational events, not of people. At the same time, however, social systems would not exist without social actors, whose action is guided and given meaning by the categories produced within social systems.5 This would appear to be particularly true in the context of theatre. Spectators in the theatre system are the human guarantors of its functioning: not only in their pragmatic role as spectators, but in that they carry the structural function of observation within the theatre 2

3 4 5

The classic work on this subject is Wolfgang Iser, Der implizite Leser: Kommunikationsformen des Romans von Bunyan bis Beckett, 3rd edn (Munich: Fink/UTB, 1994). English translation: The Implied Reader: Patterns of Communication in Prose Fiction from Bunyan to Beckett (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990). Peter Fuchs, Niklas Luhmann – beobachtet: Eine Einführung in die Systemtheorie, 2nd edn (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1993), 30. Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London: Methuen, 1980), 2, 95-97. Niklas Luhmann, Soziale Systeme: Grundriß einer allgemeinen Theorie, 288-89, 193. English translation: Social Systems, trans. John Bednarz, Jr., with Dirk Baecker (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).

THE OBSERVER OBSERVED

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system, from the moment they enter its orbit. They are the condition of possibility of its communication. Whence the disarray of the Renaissance players in Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, for instance, upon being deserted in the midst of a performance by their audience of the two eponymous courtiers: You left us ... the humiliation of it – to be tricked out of the single assumption that makes our existence viable – that somebody is watching .... The plot was two corpses gone before we caught sight of ourselves, stripped naked in the middle of nowhere and pouring ourselves down a bottomless well ... every gesture, every prose vanishing into the thin unpopulated air .... We pledged our identities, secure in the conventions of our trade; that someone would be watching. And then, gradually, no on was. We were caught high and dry.6

Here, the absence of the spectator does not merely render theatre pointless. More radically, it effectively erases the constitutive boundary that makes theatre theatre. Observation, the act of taking up an operative division as the basis for further structuring operations, has been lost. What saves the actors, however, is their figuring themselves, retrospectively through the act of narration, as their own spectators in a narrated dramatic episode: “we caught sight of ourselves”. And thus the play goes on, against all odds, after all. Theatre, one could say then, is the social system par excellence, a complex series of communicational acts, in the several senses of the word. It is a communicational event founded upon an inaugural difference which marks it out from its environment, and which is perpetuated in its self-organizing existence by the presence of spectators. In the early modern open-stage theatres in Southwark such as the Globe, the Swan or the Hope, this auto-reflexive process of observation took on a particularly concrete sense, in that the spectators in the wrap-around galleries were able to watch their co-spectators watching the performance and other spectators.7 Here observation is subject to observation, second-order systemic elaboration already being taken up in a subsequent self-referential loop. Such autopoetic elaboration is a fine exemplification of systems theory’s definition of self-observation as

6 7

Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (London: Faber, 1968), 46-47. This opens up interesting avenues of exploration as suggested by Christian Metz’s parallels between dreams and the psychic mechanisms of self-observation, selfcensorship and ego-vigilance, and the spectator in the cinema: “Le film de fiction et son spectateur (étude métapsychologique)”, Communications, XXIII (1975), 108-35.

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“communication that treats itself as action”.8 However, Luhmann’s replicative second-order semiotic activity of observation happens within the system, and not outside it. Whence the question: are the spectators part of the theatre system or not? Certainly they do not participate in the theatre system in the same way as the actors, for the stage limits implicitly marks out who is in the play and who is not. At the same time, however, it could be claimed that spectators enter the theatre system every time they go to the theatre – paying to cross a threshold marked by an exchange of money and a change in semiotic orders of referentiality. And the raucous participation of Renaissance playgoers, to the point of storming the stage to take part in fictional fisticuffs, or as the “stagegallants” who sat preening themselves on stools on the stage, meant that some spectators could on occasions become part of the spectacle. Edmund Gayton wittily remarked at the end of the seventeenth century that “it is good policy to amaze those violent spirits with some tearing tragedy full of fights and skirmishes ... which commonly ends in six acts, the spectators mounting the stage and making a more bloody Catastrophe among themselves than the players did.”9 And Stephen Gosson accused his readers, “the Gentlewomen Citizens of London”, of going to the theatre to be seen by others: “I have seene many of you whiche were wont to sporte your selues at Theaters.”10 The question of the location of theatre spectators – whether they are internal or external to the theatre system – is important because it focuses the crucial issue of the ways social systems intersect, interact or interfere with each other. The ambiguous position of the spectator is a symptom of the turbulence that results at the places where systems overlap. In the early modern context of the London theatres, this ambiguity and the resulting turbulence were quite tangible. The so-called public theatres were located on the outskirts of London, whether in the north (the Red Bull, the Fortune, the Theatre, the Curtain) or on the south bank of the Thames (the Swan, the Hope, the Rose, the Globe). 8 9

10

Schwanitz, “Systems Theory and the Environment of Theory”, in The Current in Criticism, eds Clayton Kolb and Virgil Lokke, 281. Edmund Gayton, Pleasant Notes upon Don Duixot [1654] quoted in Elizabethan-Jacobean Drama, ed. G. Blakemore Evans [London: A. and C. Black, 1989], 34). On the stagegallants, see E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, II, 536-7. Thomas Dekker advised his gallants to calculate the advantages of paying extra for a place on the stage: “cast vp a reckoning, what large cummings-in are pursd vp by sitting on the Stage. First a conspicuous Eminince is gotten; ... the Stage, like time, will bring you to most perfect light ...” (Dekker, The Guls Horn-Booke [1609], The Non-Dramatic Works of Thomas Dekker, ed. Alexander D. Grosart [New York: Russell and Russell, 1963], II, 248-50). Stephen Gosson, The School of Abuse (London, 1579), F2r.


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By banishing the theatres to the outlying Liberties the civic authorities hoped to eradicate the threat to city law and order posed by this new form of entertainment with its attendant rowdy crowds.11 The location of the majority of the theatres outside the city precincts was a clear spatial index of their rejection by the representatives of traditional civic virtue and received community values: As free-standing and distinctive structures, they were quite obvious urban elements, as may be readily seen in the various Renaissance engraved “views” of the city; yet despite this distinctiveness they were not really landmarks in Kenneth Lynch’s sense of the term since they were not, properly speaking, a part of the urban configuration.12

But as off-shoots of a new culture of consumption arising out of London’s increasing wealth and expanding population, they were an integral part of the booming economic system of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England.13 The public theatres were both inside and outside of London’s social fabric, “heterotopias”, to take a term coined by Foucault: “actual places that are designed into the very institution of society ... in which ... all the other real emplacements that can be found within the culture are ... represented, contested, and reversed”. Heterotopias are “places that are outside all places, although they are actually localizable” and are “utterly different from all the emplacements they reflect or refer to”.14 11 12 13

14

See Leeds Barroll, Politics, Plague and Shakespeare’s Theater: The Stuart Years (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991). Marvin Carlson, Places of Performance: The Semiotics of Theatre Architecture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989), 70. See Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986); F. J. Fisher, “The development of London as a centre of conspicuous consumption in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries”, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 4th series, XXX (1948), 37-50. See also The Theatrical City: Culture, Theatre and Politics in London, 1576-1649, eds David L. Smith, Richard Strier and David Bevington (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Michel Foucault, “Different spaces”, trans. Robert Hurley, in Michel Foucault: The Essential Works, 2: Aesthetics, ed. James Faubion (London: Allen Lane/Penguin, 1998), 178. The original French text of “Des espaces autres” (a lecture delivered in 1967 but not published until 1984) can be found in Dits et écrits 1954-1988, eds Daniel Defert and François Ewald (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), IV, 752-62. An additional English translation appeared under the title “Of Other Spaces”, trans. Jay Miskowiec, Diacritics, XVI/1 (Spring 1986), 22-27. The notion of the “heterotopia” is already to be found in the opening pages of Les Mots et les choses: Une archéologie des sciences humaines (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). English translation: The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences, trans. Alan Sheridan-Smith (New York: Pantheon, 1971).

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In systemic terms, the theatres were situated at the border between the civic system and its environment. This border itself was highly unstable (witness the commercial power of the Liberties) in a period in which the economic system was attaining new levels of autonomy and creating turbulences in other neighbouring social systems. The theatres, closely related to the economic system, and situated at the fault line where the civic system struggled to maintain its autopoesis, could not but function as a sort of seismograph in the crisis-ridden early modern systemic landscape. Indeed, dramatic discourse on occasions highlighted its own critical hybrid situation and integrated it to the dramatic action. Middleton and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl provides a useful example. In one of the opening scenes Sir Alexander Wengrave shows a group of guests around his house. His descriptions of the generously decorated rooms, as so often in Renaissance drama, are grounded in the physical contours of the theatre itself: Th’inner room was too close; how do you like This parlour, gentlemen? ... when you look into my galleries— How bravely they are trimmed up— you all shall swear You’re highly pleased to see what’s set down there.

(1.2.6-16).

“Verbal scenery” was made concrete by attaching it to the tangible, physical form of the Fortune theatre where the play was performed. The double referents of Sir Alexander’s domestic guided tour performs a semiotic operation crucial to theatre: deixis. Deixis denotes the action of anchoring discourse in a concrete here and now. In everyday speech this is evinced in pronouns which anchor utterances in a speaking subject (“I”, “we”) and in the context of their address (“you”); in the time and place of enunciation (“here”, “there”, “now”, “Monday”, “afterwards”); and in a milieu populated by physical objects (“this chair”, “that car”) – without which, the discourse would remain purely abstract and without effect in a world of human actions and interactions.15 Dramatic discourse, likewise, must be anchored in a concrete context, that of the stage: “Th’inner room” (the tiring house), “This parlour” (the open stage), “my galleries” (where the audience sat).16

15 16

See Emile Benveniste, “L’appareil formel de l’énonciation”, Problèmes de linguistique générale (Paris: Gallimard/Tel, 1980), II, 77-88. See Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, 18-19, 72-73.


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Middleton and Dekker have the eponymous heroine Moll perform this function most ostentatiously when she comments on a nearby group of pickpockets to her stage-companions: “One of them is a nip [cutpurse]; I took him once i’ the twopenny gallery at the Fortune” (5.1.264-66). Her dramatic discourse, though coyly pretending otherwise (the Fortune as “elsewhere”), is thus embedded in the very place of its performance – in a gesture all the more impudent for the fact that pickpockets may have been at work among the spectators at that very moment. By this means, the theatre itself provides the raw spatial material to be transformed by verbal alchemy, thereby anchoring the fiction in a real context; by the same token, the real is reworked by virtue of its assimilation to the dramatic fabric. Therefore Sir Alexander’s guided tour simultaneously evokes a fictional place and fixes it in a real geography, that of the Fortune theatre. Not only the physical context of the performance, but also the spectators themselves, are gathered up into this theatrical transmutation of the real. The pictures to be found in Sir Alexander’s galleries tell stories of human existences which are equated with the human lives gathered in the real galleries of the theatre: Stories of men and women, mixed together, Fair ones with foul, like sunshine in wet weather. Within one square a thousand heads are laid So close that all of heads the room seems made; As many faces there, filled with blithe looks, Show like the promising titles of new books Writ merrily, the readers being their own eyes, Which seem to move and give plaudities ....

(1.2. 17-24)

The square frame of the Fortune theatre (“Within one square”) is the real counterpart of the imagined picture frames hanging in Sir Alexander’s rooms. The galleries of the theatre, in turn, provide the real counterpart for Sir Alexander’s galleries. In this way, the entire theatre space is integrated into the narrative process. The visitors to Sir Alexander’s domestic rooms are spectators whose admiration and receptive curiosity figures that of the spectators in the larger theatre. However, the guests are not merely spectators, they are primarily part of the dramatic action. When Sir Alexander detects in his pictures the stuff of potential narratives, by extension, he implies that the spectators in the theatre itself are to be understood as so many actors in innumerable real-life dramas beyond the walls of the theatre. The relations between spectator and spectacle are overlaid and complicated,

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so that it becomes impossible to clearly distinguish participants in and observers of the various dramas. In a deft shift of metaphor, the spectators are also the readers of narratives of their own destines – in part because the spectators at an early modern daylight performance were not plunged into darkness, and thus were able to see other members of the audience in galleries above the stage and on the other side of the theatre; in part because the theatre implicitly claims to be telling stories which are drawn from their own social world, and with which spectator identification is possible and intended. Sir Alexander’s double deixis anchors the fictional drama in the context of the theatre; but more radically, it also suggests that the drama is from the outset anchored in a larger context, that of the Lebenswelt of the spectators themselves. The walls of the theatre, as we have suggested, cordon off the fictional world of the play from the real world outside. But paradoxically, the very functioning of the theatrical performance tends, at the same time, to dissolve the boundaries of the theatre and draw the real into the range of reference of the drama. In the very functioning of the theatre, intensified by an extraordinary degree of self-reflexive observation, the early modern theatre system constituted its own boundaries and playfully had them oscillate. The theatre marked a line between theatrical fiction and environmental reality, but in the act of autopoetically reasserting that border, never ceased to ingest its own environment, producing out of that digestive process, theatre. Here the process-character of systemic autopoesis did not conceal itself, as would be more markedly the case in post-Restoration theatre, but, by laying bare the fraught character of systemic division, embodied and provoked the crisis of socio-spatial systems which is the subject of this book. The omnivorous extension of the dramatic fiction has significant implications for the representation of shifting public/private boundaries in the seventeenth century. Sir Alexander’s picture galleries are a halfway point between public and private spaces. They are more accessible than the “inner room” the guests have just left, and are plainly made for visitors, designed to be put on show. To this extent, they resemble the theatre, and it is of course this similarity which allows the rather farfetched picture-gallery/theatre-gallery analogy to function at all. Moreover, the theatre is also a threshold space, a public space in which private dramas are performed. Recent theatre research suggests that this hybrid position has more than a merely metaphorical value. Careful examination of the Diary or daily account-book kept by the theatre entrepreneur Philip Henslowe


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between 1592 and 1604 has revealed the extent to which the business of pawnbroking that furnished a good part of Henslowe’s income blurs the boundaries between private and public economies. It has been suggested that “pawnbroking functioned as a supplement to both household and playhouse economies during the period. These economies were not closed or restricted, but rather open and permeable, each at once supplying and feeding off the other. Goods circulated between them in manifold and complex ways”.17 At this period, the “public” economy of the commercial theatre was obviously coupled to the “private” economy of the family and the household via the hybrid business of pawnbroking. Costumes, in particular, migrated from private owners in financial difficulties through the pawnbroking undertaking to the actors’ companies and the players on the stage; several members of Henslowe’s family appear to have been involved in the various financial activities which connected private house and public playhouse. No less significantly, the theatres themselves seem to have been caught up in the increasing privatization of experience we noted earlier. In the course of the 1620s and 1630s the private theatres in the centre of London (Blackfriars and Whitefriars) increasingly supplanted the earlier prominence of the public theatres. “Private” and “public” are misleading terms here, referring simply to audience size, price and auditorium configuration; the private theatres catered to a smaller audience paying more to sit indoors rather than an open theatre building. However, the rise of the private theatres was in one sense indeed part of a trend towards privatization. Whereas the spectators in the public theatres were often an unruly crowd, in the private theatres they made up a smaller, more compact audience. Evening performances and diminished lighting may have reduced the audience’s own sense of itself as a collective entity, with spectators participating in the theatrical experience principally as individuals increasingly occupying a “sociofugal” rather than a “sociopetal” space: “The result is to emphasise personal rather than social perception and response, to introduce a form of ‘privacy’ within an experience which is collective in origin.”18 The early modern theatre was itself implicated in the establishment of new systemic boundaries out

17 18

Natasha Korda, “Household Property/Stage Property: Henslowe as Pawnbroker”, Theatre Journal, XXXVIII (1996), 195. See Keith Sturgess, Jacobean Private Theatre (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1987), 52, 48; Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama, 64-65; Erika Fischer-Lichte, “Spatial Signs”, The Semiotics of Theater, trans. Jeremy Gaines and Doris. L. Jones (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 100.

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of which a novel private space would increasingly coalesce as a felt experience. The transitional character of the early modern theatre, both in synchronic and diachronic terms, straddling public and private, was manifestly the result of its historical situation at a moment of systemic shift. The public theatre, with its collective, mass audience, belonged to a residual form of art in which the consumer was not yet isolated from coconsumers and producers alike (in contrast to the emergent situation of the reading public from the end of the seventeenth century on). On the other hand, many of its plots participated in nascent, barely emergent mode of artistic interpellation of the individual. Individual rebels such as Romeo and Juliet may be condemned to failure, but their revolt sketches out new possibilities of identification still on the horizons of cultural agency. Such nascent modes of addressivity would later be intensified in literary forms such as the epistolary novel – forms that would increasingly seduce the reader with a privileged gaze into the intimate life of the characters.19 Thus the theatre offered mass entertainment (Sir Alexander counts “a thousand heads”) whose contents foreshadowed the individualizing appeal of stories about private existences. As the epistle to “the Comic Play-Readers” said, the printed version of The Roaring Girl “may be allowed [sic] both gallery-room at the playhouse and chamber-room at your lodgings” (Epistle, 17-18), thus carrying in itself traces of the transfer from public to private entertainment. To this extent, the early modern theatre itself evinced a historically transitional status, lodged between changing configurations of public and private spaces. In both diachronic and the synchronic terms, the systemic boundaries of the London public theatres displayed a high degree of ambiguity and instability. First, systems display features of continuity and of discontinuity in their historical development: a system needs a prior environment against which it gradually distinguishes and differentiates itself (as do the codes which structure them20); despite this dependency, systems rapidly erase their emergence from the context with which they were once one. The English Renaissance theatre did indeed emerge by a powerful process of differentiation: in spatial terms, from street theatre, which lacked the boundaries necessary to make all its customers pay; in 19

20

See my article “To the Unknown Reader: Constructing Absent Readership in the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Fielding, Sterne and Richardson”, Arbeiten aus Anglistik und Amerikanistik, XXVI/2 (Autumn 2001), 105-23. See Niklas Luhmann, “The Political Code”, in The Differentiation of Society, 170.


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economic terms, from the patronage which had previously enabled but also constrained artistic production; and politically, from the civic processions and ritual pageants which were the monopoly of the City of London. None of these phenomena of caesura, however, were ever complete: the theatres remained mobile, frequently shifting beyond the bounds of the newly built playhouses, to court, to private houses around the country; various aristocrats, and after James’ accession, the Monarch himself, remained nominal patrons of the players’ companies; and dramatists who wrote for the public theatres, such as Middleton, continued to create pageants for the city fathers. Secondly, on the synchronic plane, the ambiguous position of the theatres can be described with the help of the systemic notion of interpenetration. It is quite possible for various social systems to overlap, so that one system constitutes the other’s outside or environment, and vice versa.21 In the case of the system of civic authority, as noted above, the theatres’ Liberties site clearly constituted the geographical and also moral exterior or environment. From the point of view of the theatre system, the pragmatic world of civic order constituted the real which it took as its raw material and reworked as fiction – indeed dematerialized – in the creation of dramas: the word always foregrounds the fragility of the thing, points to its absence, for if things were truly present and available, we would have no need of words to describe them; non-verbal forms of art have the same corrosive effect. Indeed, this was the aspect of the stage that most concerned early modern critics: they feared that the fictions acted on the stage would exert more persuasive force upon playgoers than the realities of traditional social hierarchies and customs. The incantatory power of the theatre was what the polemical critic John Rainoldes believed to be most dangerous, singling out the women’s garb worn by boy actors: “the apparell of wemen ... is a great provocation of men to lust and leacherie: because a womans garment beeing put on a man doeth vehemently touch and moue him with the remembrance & imagination of a woman; and the imagination of a thing desirable doth stirr vp the desire.”22 The theatre system, with its internal coherence and its capacity to incorporate the spectators within the logic of the fictional world, creates new and dangerous realities within its charmed circle. Conversely, from the point of view of the system of social authority articulated in Rainoldes’ text, the stage represented the other, the dangerous domain of moral looseness and depravity outside the 21 22

Luhmann, Soziale Systeme, 290. John Rainoldes, Th’Overthrow of Stage-Playes (London, 1599), 97.

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borders of civility. The interpenetration described by Luhmann thus becomes the site of an antagonistic confrontation between opposed social systems. The ambiguous position of the spectator, her- or himself both observer and observed, and indeed, observer of others’ observation of her or him, embodies this confrontation. It is difficult to know where the systemic boundaries are to be located in the early modern theatre. Did they follow the line of the stage, so that the fiction took place on the boards, and was watched by the spectators from the yard or the galleries, at a safe distance? Everything we know about the Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre suggests that there was very little actor-audience distance, and thereby little separation between the fictional world of the stage, and the real world of the audience. The wide thrust stage which effectively brought the actors out into the midst of the audience, the wrap-around audience configuration which precluded a distanced “picture-frame” effect and obliged the actors to address spectators, the daylight performances which allowed spectators to see their fellows on the other side of the stage – all these factors would have militated against a strong boundary between theatrical system and environment being constructed around the limits of the stage.23 Was the systemic boundary, alternatively, identical with the visually very prominent contours of the early modern theatre buildings – an architectonic outline with which the construction of the New Globe Theatre on the London Bankside has once again made us familiar? This would have meant that the spectators became infused with the spirit of the fictional world to the point of forgetting the outside world altogether. The prominence of political theatre in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries suggests that this was in no way the case. Both the authorities and playwrights were intensely aware that audiences brought their everyday preoccupations, often of an explosively political nature, with them into the playhouse. During the political crisis of 1623-24, Middleton’s play A Game at Chess directly addressed contemporary events, portraying easily identifiable personalities from the court of James I (the actors, or so they claimed, had even managed to obtain a suit worn by the hated Spanish ambassador Gondomar, which allowed his stage counterpart to be instantly recognized).24 A Game at Chess played to packed houses (three thousand was the smallest audience) for

23 24

See my Spatial Representations and the Jacobean Stage: From Shakespeare to Webster (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 33-58. See Andrew Gurr, Playgoing in Shakespeare’s London, 235.


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nine days before it was closed by the authorities.25 It is difficult, then, to locate the precise boundary between the conflicting social systems at work in the early modern theatre. This difficulty is indicative of the seismograph role of the early modern theatres referred to earlier. In the conceptual terms of systems theory, the theatre can be said to have been a place where “contradiction” (another Luhmannian term with a different meaning to the customary one) occurred. For Luhmann, contradiction is what keeps systems alive. Incoming information which cannot readily be assimilated by the system destroys, for an instant, its illusion of always being able to manage the world’s complexity through reduction. Contradiction can cause a salutary shock that provokes a reorganization of the system’s internal coherence. Such shocks, and the resulting reorganization, make up the information events that prevent a system from falling into rigidity and sclerosis. In this way, foreign information input, rather than being regarded as a threat to be eliminated, guarantees the continuing autopoesis which characterizes social systems.26 It is worth asking whether this version of contradiction is not overly idealistic. If the gender system we have described is not simply a way of making sense of the world by organizing it according to the basic of all binary categories, but rather, a hierarchical schema which legitimizes a world-wide exploitation of one half of humanity by the other, then Luhmann’s version of contradiction as the basis of autopoesis may need some revision. The process he describes resembles what leftist political theory in the 1980s called “recuperation”, the benign tolerance exercised by liberal Western democracies in response to many forms of radical politics. The early modern gender system evolved by strengthening its constitutive boundaries, and by importing this reinforcement reflexively into the system itself. Gender was progressively privatized so as to be less a social role than a putative innate, natural difference. Just how durable this modification has been is shown by the fact that the ostensible naturalness of sex has hardly been questioned until the mid- to late twentieth century. Out of the contradiction which we will detect on the early modern public stage, it would appear that the gender system survived in the manner described by Luhmann: by importing hostile impulses into the system and responding creatively to them in such a way 25

26

J. W. Harper, “Introduction” to Thomas Middleton, A Game at Chess (London: Thomas Benn, 1966), xii. See also Jerzy Limon, Dangerous Matter: English Drama and Politics in 1623/24 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Luhmann, Soziale Systeme, 506-507.

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as to assimilate and thus neutralize their disruptive force. Contradiction in this context implies an extremely efficient and virtually invisible form of hegemony. In contrast, the closure of the theatres in 1642 may be an index of that some social systems only tolerate a certain degree of contradiction before eliminating the system with which they interpenetrate. The theatres’ threat to many aspects of social stability (their interrogation of political authority, the crowds that gathered their, their disruption of regulated labour, their putative erosion of moral values) were factors which provoked their systemic eradication. In the following chapters, I will suggest that the reason for this was their all too ostentatious performance of the tensions and contradictions generated by systemic transition in its manifest forms – one of which was the reconfiguration of gender relationships. Their form of contradiction, in Luhmann’s sense, was excessively turbulent. With their constant self-reflexivity, the theatres made their engagement with incoming information the very subject of their dramas. To that extent they laid bare their selfobservation in ways which made their systemic instability, the ever present flip side of systemic self-maintenance, all too obvious – and that of the other systems with which they came into contact, equally so. In particular the aporias of the early modern gender system in a state of transformation became uncomfortably evident once transported onto the stage. Too much contradiction, too little resolution: this was not a promising formula in an age with a deep respect for hierarchy and a deep fear of disorder. The Interregnum cemented these anxieties and was succeeded by a cultural moment prone to foreground patterns of consensus. The Restoration theatre did not pose a contradiction in the same way as its pre-civil war counterpart. Rather, it offered a more carefully framed dramatic illusion, one that faithfully mirrored, among other aspects of social order, an ostensibly better-organized gender reality. Symptomatic of that putative reality was the presence of women on stage. This presence of corporeal femininity signalled the demise of some dramatic devices which too obviously drew attention to the factitiousness of gendering. Such a theatre less ostentatiously focussed, at least at the level of metatheatrical convention, on the deep contradictions in the gender settlement. When Sebastian Frank visited villages around Ulm and Augsburg in the sixteenth century, he was confronted with disturbing contradictions: “Not only women and maids, but also men and boys, spin; one sees


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contradictions: they work and gossip like women, yet are still vigorous and quarrelsome people, the kind any country would want to have.”27 (Similarly, in his Catechism of 1564 Thomas Becon included spinning, carding and weaving among the exemplary “kinde of laburs ... that become maides”. The misogynist Swetnam railed against men performing “worke which belongeth not to the man”. And various forms of shaming rituals in early modern England such as the skimmington attempted to restore the loss of gender hierarchies by parodically miming the “disorder” being punished; the tools of female work, a distaff or a skimming ladle, were used to beat the husband or his effigy.28) Such contradictions would never disappear, of course. But discourse on gender would articulate, with increasing vehemence in the course of the next two centuries, a sense of order, however spurious it might have been, to be established in the places and concomitant activities assigned to the genders. In the short term context in Britain, gender confusion and its destabilizing representation would eradicated from the English public stage – partly, if not only, under the pressure of its own complex engagements with the phenomenon of gendered spaces.

27

28

Gustav Schmoller, Die Strassburger Tucher und Weberzünft: Urkunden und Darstellung nebst Regesten und Glossar: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der deutschen Weberei und des deutschen Geweberechts vom 13.-17. Jahrhundert (Strassburg: Karl J. Trübner, 1879), 519 (my translation). Thomas Becon, Worckes (London, 1564), ccccc.xxxiv; Swetnam, The Araignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward and Unconstant Women, 56; Jean E. Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England, 103.

CHAPTER 4 Posing Manliness: Work and Space as Paradigms of Early Modern Masculinity

In a dramatic characterization of the early modern German burgher, the male has been described as “a creature who is always breaking through the boundaries of his own body, to the point that he threatens social order. He is a volcano of fluids and drives which constantly threaten to erupt, spilling outwards to dirty his environment through ejaculation, bloodshed, vomiting, defecation.”1 Paradoxically, this undisciplined, chaotic, dangerous body was one of the driving forces within the disciplinary patriarchal guild society which structured the civic fabric of bourgeois German towns. Values such as courage and violence were vital for civic defence in times of war, but also posed a constant danger to communal life in times of peace. The historical development of the restrained, civilized male body (“civilized” in Elias’ sense of the word) was a heavily conflicted process propelled by pressures from without, but also, more importantly, by tensions within – tensions often experienced as real physical forces pulling the male in several contradictory directions, tearing the body apart. The transition from the early modern masculine body to what begins to emerge as a recognizably modern male body at the beginning of the eighteenth century is the result of an attempt to resolve tensions within the body which had become intolerable and, in socio-economic terms, untenable. In this chapter I trace the historical transformation of representations of the masculine body during the early modern period. In particular I focus upon the spatial contours of that body and the manner in which those contours gradually hardened as the result of socio-economic pressures to make the functioning of patriarchy more efficient. I posit that the early modern open stage, which foregrounded the dynamic patterns formed by groups of actors onstage, and the manner in which bodies interact with each other and their surrounding space, was a particularly appropriate forum to expose to view the turbulent 1

Lyndal Roper, Oedipius and the Devil: Witchcraft, Sexuality and Religion in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 1994), 112.

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transformational processes of presentation and representation of the male body. If I begin my analysis of the public and private gender, as evinced in the dramas, with masculinity, it is not because I concur with the historical privilege of the male half of the population. Rather, it is because the early modern gender system was normatively masculine. Femininity constituted the system’s environment (in distinction to women themselves, who were included within it). Only within the bounds of normative discourse of masculinity, as I shall show in subsequent chapters, were alternatives imaginable. Resistant counterdiscourses of femininity, then, were produced within the dominant discourse. Potential for subversion emerged not beyond but inside the dominant discourse as seismic eruptions in the Kristevan sense. Indeed, the contradictions and tensions within early modern discourses of masculinity itself offered ample potential for other discourses to exploit the lacunae and aporia of masculinity for critical purposes. None the less, masculinity determined the broader contours of the system, and its selfinduced contradictions furnished the grounds for its adaptation under new economic conditions.

Sexual work In the early modern period, the aggressive metaphorics of masculine sexuality included an enormous range of immensely colourful expressions which broadly connoted male work upon passive feminine material. In Shakespeare the male member itself is often described as an implement of warfare (lance, pike, pistol, poll-axe, standard, sword, weapon), of gardening (stake, prick), or of various crafts or professions (distaff [a cleft stick upon which wool was wound for spinning], instrument, needle, organ, pen, pin, pipe, stump, tool, yard, hook). The catalogue of workaday slang for sexual activity was compendious. Male sexual activity was described, among a wide range of similes, as action, works, angling, fishing, hooking, business, custom, horsemanship, management (of a horse), husbandry, occupation, rents, revenues, service and services, stair-work, trunk-work, tillage, tilth (cultivation), ploughing, trading, traffic, usury, assay, coining and counterfeiting, conquest, besieging, ransacking, blowing-up. It is interesting to note that female sexual activity generally appears to register in Shakespeare in passive terms such as giving or yielding; where it does become active, it poses a

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threat to masculinity.2 Shakespeare reflects everyday usage in which copulation and conception were described in the language of arable land cultivation: “The Yard [penis] is as it were the Plow wherewith the ground is tilled, and made fit for production.”3 The language of orchardry was another source of reproductive metaphors: “the Fruit of her WOMB; especially in the First Months, ... may be justly be compar’d to the tender BLOSSOMS of Trees, which are easily blasted, or shaken-off.”4 Crafts provided another semantic field, with the womb being compared to the caster’s or the glass-blower’s mould or “matrix”.5 The dramas were full of such industrious expressions. Arden of Faversham has Alice Arden says of her usurped husband and his lost sexual prerogative, “Why should he thrust his sickle in our corn?” (10.88). In Measure for Measure, Claudio is to be punished for “Groping for trouts in a peculiar river”.6 Elsewhere in the same play, Lucio says of Juliet, “her plenteous womb | Expresseth his full tilth and husbandry” (1.4.42-43).7 Of Antony and Cleopatra we are told, “He ploughed her, and she cropped” (Antony and Cleopatra, 2.2.235). Likewise, in Pericles, Boult says of Marina, “An if she were a thornier piece of ground than she is, she shall be ploughed” (19.169-70).8 Act 3, Scene 7 of Henry V has a whole passage in which Orleans, the Dauphin and the Constable discuss sex in terms of “horsemanship”, “riding”, “bridling” and “mounting” (47-67). In Pericles, Bawd says to Lysimachus, regarding Marina, “My lord, she’s not paced yet. You must take some pains to work her to your manège” (18.67-68). The Clown in All’s Well that Ends Well says, “I would cozen the man of his wife and do his service” (4.5.27-28). Pompey the pimp says in Measure for Measure, “ ’Twas never 2

3

4 5 6 7

8

Eric Partridge, Shakespeare’s Bawdy, 3rd edn (London: Routledge, 1994), 25-38. Thus when Iago accuses Emilia, “You rise to play and go to bed to work” (Othello 2.1.118), we know what sort of trade he is speaking of. Jane Sharp, The Midwives Book (London, 1671), quoted in Mary Fissell, “Gender and Generation: Representing Reproduction in Early Modern England”, Gender and History, VII/3 (November 1995), 435. John Maubray, The Female Physician (London, 1730), 74. See Fissell, “Gender and Generation”, 435-39. Measure for Measure, 1.2., additional passages in Wells and Taylor Oxford edition, line 6. Compare Shakespeare’s Sonnet 2: “For where is she so fair whose unear’d [i.e. unplanted, unfertilized by male seed] womb | Disdains the tillage of thy husbandry” (lines 5-6). Sonnet 142 includes a curious complex of metaphors based on the semantic field of landed wealth, with “rents” being the male ejaculatory “spending” which legitimizes his possession of the woman: “Those lips of thine | That have profaned their scarlet ornaments | And seal’d false bonds of love as oft as mine, | Robb’d others’ beds revenues of their rent” (lines 5-8).

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merry world since, of two usuries, the merriest was put down” (3.1.27576). When Melatius suspects his sister of relapsing into an illicit relationship with the King in The Maid’s Tragedy he thunders, “Evadne, thou wilt to thy trade again” (4.1.133). Pandarus, in the Quarto and Folio final passage of Troilus and Cressida, proclaims “O traitors and bawds, how earnestly are you set a work, and how ill requited”, with earlier editors reading “traders” in the place of “traitors”.9 Thus the drama documented the ubiquitous early modern notion of sexuality as work, even if the notion of “work” is at times inflected by the social status (aristocratic in many cases) of the speaker. Towards the end of the seventeenth century, however, there emerged a new imagery in which the female body dwindled from a recognizable social space of reproductive work stressing masculine agency, to a mere receptacle for the penis and the male orgasm. The use of metaphor to describe reproductive processes was also increasingly criticized in medical literature, thus taking bodily processes out of a rich variety of semantic fields drawn from everyday life and resituating them in the abstract realm of an increasingly autonomous and self-referential scientific system.10 Its visual icons, as mentioned above in chapter 1, referred less and less to the worldliness of bodies, taking on, rather, reified forms which no lay person would have recognized (how many of us know what our own innards look like?). These objects, whether visual or discursive, were the products of medical discourse, and their strange unworldliness worked to confirm its impartiality, objectivity – in other words, its systemic closure and stability. There was none the less a certain continuity in the brutal vector of action evinced in much of the language of masculine bawdy. The new reification worked by a process of selection, focussing narrowly upon the semantic field which emphasized the penis as a violently penetrative instrument: lance, pike, sword, thistle, stake, thorn, needle, pin, horn, pistol.11 The new prominence of penetration rather than work in the imagery of masculine sexuality gave rise to expressions such as “to be in a man’s/woman’s beef”, meaning both to stab a man or penetrate a woman. The durability of topoi describing the penetrative thrust of phallic sexuality provides the common discursive backdrop against which the paradigm shift in notions of masculinity could occur. What fell out of 9 10 11

Troilus and Cressida, additional passages in Wells and Taylor Oxford edition. See Fissell, “Gender and Generation: Representing Reproduction in Early Modern England”, 440-441. Partridge, Shakespeare’s Bawdy, 23.

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sight little by little with the transformation of the female body, from passive ancillary of male reproduction to a site for masculine pleasure, was the intensely social, earthy sense of male sexuality as work. The end of the seventeenth century marks a point at which “manhood” was gradually understood less and less as an ongoing worldly activity, and was increasingly being localized in the bounded body itself, mirrored in a correspondingly reified feminine anatomy. The early modern stage up until the closure of the theatres in 1642, with its playacting of masculine roles, and even more so of female roles, highlighted the performative character of gendered behaviour. Significantly, “perform”, with its theatrical resonances, was a slang expression for sexual activity.12 Poins in 2 Henry IV ruminates, “Is it not strange that desire should so many years outlive performance?” (2.4.262-63). “They say, all lovers swear more performance than they are able, and yet reserve an ability that they never perform” accuses Cressida (Troilus and Cressida, 2.3.30). The theatre thus pointed out the performative nature of masculinity: the fact that it was not a given, but had to be achieved and maintained by carrying out particular actions or by rehearsing them in verbal bravado. Both the necessity to “play | The man I am” (in Coriolanus’ words – Coriolanus, 3.2.13-19) and the suspicion that this was in itself an admission of inadequacy led to a fundamental anxiety: “how do you know when someone is acting like a man or only acting like a man?”13 Bravado always betrays its underlying insecurity. In Arden of Faversham, Greene cuts short Black Will and Shakebag’s squabble about their respective achievements in theft, war or earnings, with the rebuke, “So while you stand striving on these terms of manhood, | Arden escapes and deceives us all” (9.33-34). The two villains’ laborious bragging exemplifies the maxim pithily formulated by Angela Carter, “To be a man is not a given condition but a continuous effort.”14 Similarly, Laura Levine suggests that “men are only men in the performance of their masculinity (or, put more frighteningly, they are not men except in the performance, the constant re-enactment of their masculinity)”.15 Acting can cease at any moment, thus signalling the loss of the identity being 12 13 14 15

“Play” had similar connotations of sexual activity: Iago sarcastically accuses women of being “Players in your housewifery, and hussies in your beds” (Othello, 2.1.115). Gary Spear, “Shakespeare’s ‘Manly’ Parts: Masculinity and Effeminacy in Troilus and Cressida”, Shakespeare Quarterly, XXXXIV/4 (1993), 415. Angela Carter, The Passion of New Eve (London: Virago, 1982), 63. Laura Levine, Men in Women’s Clothing: Anti-theatricality and Effeminization 1579-1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 7.

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acted, indeed, the potency (“activity”) at the heart of manliness itself, as Pandarus warns Troilus with regard to Cressida: “she’ll bereave you o’ th’ deeds too, if she call your activity into question” (Troilus and Cressida, 3.2.54-56). Such notions of gender as performativity, which owe much to the frequently quoted work of Judith Butler, are only radically unsettling for us because they reintroduce into our conceptual universe an idea we have largely repressed for three hundred years: namely, the sense that our gender is generated by our “habitus”, a complex web of everyday bodily and discursive practices, rather than something which is anchored in our anatomy. Such notions disturb a comfortable illusion of an ahistorical maleness enshrined in the body itself. Renaissance drama staged, literally, a once-acute sense of the process-based ephemerality of maleness, and thus helped to exacerbate tensions which in turn propelled the formation of a more secure cultural and epochal sense of masculinity. Manliness in the Renaissance had always been defined by a structural tension. Manliness could imply the outward reflection of an inner essence, one not determined by a biological sex, but for instance, by degree.16 This essential aristocratic manliness was not a biological given, but one conferred by birth into a social class, an inherent quality that anyone of good upbringing could detect. Manliness as rank informs the Jew of Malta’s equivocation upon the ambivalences contained in the homonym “man” as master (and concomitant mastery), and “man” as servant, a masculinity subordinated and thereby emasculated (4.4.15). But conversely, manliness could also mean the actions which were expected of a man. Marlowe’s Tamburlaine, for instance, appears to embody the conventions of nobility-communicated-by-appearance in ascertaining, “Noble and mild this Persian seems to be, | If outward habit judge the inward man”. Yet the “if” is symptomatic of a paradigm shift from essence to usurping performance. He himself evinces the victory of “performance” over “essence” when he half-boastingly, halfashamedly states, “I am a lord, for so my deeds shall prove, | And yet a shepherd by parentage” (1 Tamburlaine, 1.2.163-4; 34-35). Tamburlaine’s capacity to assume a social status to which he does not inherently belong 16

See David Kuchta, “The Semiotics of Masculinity in Renaissance England”, in Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images, ed. James Grantham Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 233-46; Anna Bryson, “The Rhetoric of Status: Gesture, Demeanour and the Image of the Gentleman in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century England”, in Renaissance Bodies: The Human Figure in English Culture c. 1540-1660, eds Lucy Gwent and Nigel Llewellyn (London: Reaktion Books, 1990), 136-53.

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is constantly contested by other characters in the play, who label him a “thief”, “vagabond” and “usurper” – this is his real identity (1 Tamburlaine, 2.4.40; 4.1.6; 2 Tamburlaine, 3.1.15-16, 74; 3.5.77). Yet at the same time, his bodily existence as a stage character, his capacity for example to don aristocratic scarlet (1 Tamburlaine, 4.4.1 sd), eerily confirm the susceptibility of social status – and thus, in this context, gender – to performance and masquerade. Status and gender were thus clearly attributes quite independent of any essential qualities. The seventeenth century witnessed a mounting awareness of the duplicity of social action, fuelled on the one hand by the vulgarization of Machiavellian thought and popular conceptions of amoral courtier pragmatism, and on the other, of notions of commercial deviousness under the increasingly competitive conditions of developing merchant capitalism.17 This sense of the falsity of people’s behaviour was focused upon the stage and upon the player in particular. The fact that the poet John Hall could claim that the “Man in business is but a Theatricall person, and in a manner but personates himself”,18 is dependent upon the equally prevalent notion that the theatrical person, the player, was involved in a pursuit of profit no less deceitful. This generalized equation of deceit, performance and action can be seen to drive a desire to anchor identity, and gender identity in particular, in a more secure site than that of practices offering no permanent guarantee of completion or closure. The dramas make ample use of these tropes of action and duplicity, freely exploiting the connections to be made between play-acting and duplicity in other forms of social interaction. Viola, alias Cesario, speaking a travestied male voice in Twelfth Night, declares: “We men may say more, swear more, but indeed | Our shows are more than will; for still we prove | Much in our vows, but little in our love” (2.4.116-18). And when Troilus reserves the right to love Cressida with a love which may be less than perfect with the excuse, “This is the monstruosity in love, lady – that the will is infinite and the execution confined; that the desire is boundless and the act a slave to limit”, Cressida replies swiftly. Her acid rejoinder, which we quoted above, echoes Cesario/Viola’s: “They say all lovers swear more performance than they are able ....” (Troilus and Cressida, 3.2.77-82). At this epoch co-hegemonic notions of gender as performance jostling with degree-based notions of manliness (both soon to become 17 18

See Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). Cited in Agnew, Worlds Apart, 97.

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residual in their turn) collided with an only just emergent sense of biological sex as the truth of a person’s identity – what has been called the “phallocization” of masculinity.19 The stage perversely exacerbated this tension by grounding these conflicts in its own performance practices. Thus Moll in The Roaring Girl probes her serving man Trapdoor: “Faith, he seems | A man without; I’ll try what he is within” (3.1.146-47) The irony of this quip is of course that inner/outer distinction Moll applies to Trapdoor relies for its implementation upon the same inner/outer duplicity in Moll herself; for Trapdoor does not realize that the aggressive gallant seeking his services is the cross-dressed Moll Cutpurse; at the same time, however, the audience knows that Moll’s interior body-beneath-the-costume is no more feminine than Trapdoor’s facade of bravado is manly. Here gender as performance, in its literal stage sense, and gender as anatomy, also in its literal stage presence as the actor’s body, simultaneously drive the episode’s action and provide its comic appeal.

Masculinity and social space Early modern manhood, as we have observed above, was an attribute not inherently immanent in the body, defined by the presence of male genitalia. Rather, manhood was a quality to be learned and acquired at the cost of much effort, largely focused upon the expulsion of unmanly attributes, as contemporary writers stressed. Golding, in the preface to his 1567 translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, explicitly made a connection between the absence of manly activity and effeminacy, saying that “idleness | Is cheefest nurce and cherisher of all voluptuousnesse | And that voluptuous lyfe breedes sin: which linking all toogither | Make men to bee effeminate, unweeldy, weeke and lither”.20 Thomas Gainsford dictated that effeminacy “hateth exercise, is an enemy both to strength and wit, when labour perfecteth the vnderstanding and raiseth manhood to a full height”.21 Nicholas Breton claimed that

19

20 21

Thomas A. King, “Displacing Masculinity: Edward Kynaston and the Politics of Effeminacy”, in Images of Manhood in Early Modern Literature: Viewing the Male, ed. Andrew P. Williams (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1999), 123. More generally, see Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité, 1: La Volonté du savoir (Paris: Gallimard, 1976). English translation: The History of Sexuality, Vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981). Arthur Golding, Epistle to his 1567 translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, The. Xv. Bookes of P. Ouidius Naso, entitled Metammorphosis (London, 1567), a.iii. Thomas Gainsford, The Rich Cabinet (London, 1616), 38.

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BODIES AND THEIR SPACES An Effeminate Foole ... loues ... to be daunced in Laps, to be imbraced in Armes, and to be kissed on the Cheeke: To talke Idley, to looke demurely, to goe Nicely, and to Laugh continually: ... To ride in a Coach, and gallop a Hackney, to watch all Night, and sleepe out the Morning: to lie on a bed, and take Tobacco, and to send his Page of an idle message to his Mistresse.22

Christopher Newstead regretted that “each man with Teresias, is metamorphosed into a woman: pleasures and delights, are the ingendring Serpents, that haue womanized their affections”.23 Significantly, “effeminate” could be a verb as well as an adjective, meaning to weaken or corrupt masculinity and its social institutions.24 Manliness was a characteristic which could only be maintained by constant vigilance. Margaret Cavendish recorded that her brothers rejected dancing and music as pastimes “too effeminate for masculine sprits”. Lord Thoresby could not “endure the effeminacy” of coach travel. A writer of 1633 said that “we thought it a kind of solecism, and to savour of effeminacy, for a young gentleman in the flourishing time of his age to creep into a coach and shroud himself there from wind and weather”.25 An early modern male was never secure in the knowledge of his maleness, but was obliged to defend it at every turn. This work was often spatial work. The imagery of work and space is particularly forceful in Shakespeare’s Cymbeline. Cloten, in his conviction of having usurped Posthumus as Innogen’s lover, combines the tropes of spatial conquest and manly work, when having captured his rival’s suit, assumes he has attained the latter’s place in Innogen’s heart: “How fit his garments serve me. Why should his mistress ... not be fit too? – the rather – saving reverence of the word – for ’tis said a woman’s fitness comes by fits. Therein I must play the workman” (4.1.2-6). The curious (but not uncommon26) topos of sexual union as sartorial fitting is supplemented by a metaphorics of work. This perfect fit delineates the contours of Cloten’s occupation of a receptive feminine space which, he 22 23 24 25

26

Nicholas Breton, The Good and the Badde, or Descriptions of the Worthies, and Vnworthies of this Age (London, 1616), 30-31. Christopher Newstead, An Apologie for Women: Or, Womens Defence (London, 1620), 3. See Gary Spear, “Shakespeare’s ‘Manly’ Parts: Masculinity and Effeminacy in Troilus and Cressida”, 411-12. All cited in Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500-1800, 87. In his pamphlet The World Runnes on Wheeles (London, 1635), John Taylor enumerated the moral dangers of coach travel. The imagery of sexual union as sartorial fitting can be found in other dramas, as in Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness, where Sir Charles congratulates Frankford upon his choice of wife: “She doth become you like a well-made suit | In which the tailor hath used all his art” (1.1.59-60).

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imagines, will be confirmed by Innogen’s “fit”, her affirmative orgasm when he possesses her. Early modern reproductive theory claimed that only with the woman’s orgasm did “concoction” begin, allowing the male and female seed to become productive. Thus the man’s potency to bring the woman to climax was the guarantee of the extension of his lineage. Cloten’s performance as a workman, wielding his potent tool, stakes out his ownership of a dynastic and national space. Cloten’s proleptic anticipation of penetration of Innogen foresees his legitimization as heir to the throne, and thus possessor not only of the space of the woman’s body, but of the realm itself. Work, here, was an ongoing process which claimed and defended a territory, and to that extent only, sealed the manhood of the masculine actor. That the play endorses neither Cloten’s rights to Innogen’s body nor to the realm, and makes him an object of ridicule, merely underlines how fraught “workmanship” was as an undertaking. Robert Connell remarks that “to be an adult male is distinctly to occupy space”.27 Masculinity, today as in the early modern period, is predicated upon the capacity to enter and occupy space and fix its boundaries through subjugating power. Masculinity defines itself by acts of spatial power, and thus the imagery of masculine work points towards a larger context of gendered geography and politicized topography. Just as early modern discourses of male sexual prowess were structured according to work and activity, rather than an inherent essence anchored in the body as a given organic entity, so masculine activity, understood as the mastery of space, was by definition a practice of public spaces – not because men had no private lives or did not retire to private spaces to pursue their sexual pleasure, but for the simple reason that the putatively private realm of sexuality was always already is assimilated to the world of work ... or, as we shall see in due course, of war. If masculinity is predicated upon the control of space, then the stage, as an artistic operation which sections off a segment of social space so as to make it a model for the larger environment,28 can be said to ostend, to make visible in focused performance, such gendered practices. Ramsay Burt, speaking of dance as a performance art, has examined the ways in which particular dance techniques display masculinity as the bodily control of space: in particular springing, jumping or lifting motifs (the last often taking a female dancer as the passive object of their display of 27 28

Robert W. Connell, Which Way Is Up?: Essays on Sex, Class and Culture (Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 1983), 19. See Keir Elam, The Semiotics of Theatre and Drama (London: Methuen, 1980), 8-11.

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strength).29 Displays of spatial control were also performed, in concrete ostensive form, on the early modern stage. The spatial mastery of the male warrior was acted out before the audience’s eyes when Tamburlaine had himself drawn across the stage in his chariot, with the enslaved kings of Trebizon and Soria in the harnesses, champing impotently at the bit (2 Tamburlaine, 4.3). Spatial struggle was likewise enacted when, to the sound of “alarms”, Tamburlaine’s soldiers “scale the walls” of Babylon, climbing up the inner masonry of the Theatre playhouse (or the other London playhouses which hosted the performance30) to the “above” where the governor of the city and terrified citizens have appeared just minutes before (5.1.62 sd; 1, 37 sd). (The theatres made frequent use of the interior of the theatre buildings as a concrete icon of city walls, with 1 Henry VI as an extreme example, making constant reference to the walls of Orleans, Rouen, Bordeaux and Angers.31) In this way the play makes concrete its central thematic preoccupation: the conquest of place. The place names with which Tamburlaine is filled are indices of the geography of masculine power, of military conquest, of what Spengler rather appropriately called “Faustian space”.32 Tamburlaine’s aspirations are absolute. His desire is to “write myself great Lord of Africa. | So from the East unto the furthest West | Shall Tamburlaine extend his puissant arm .... | And by this means I’ll win the world at last.” At the end of his career he is “emperor” and “arch-monarch of the world” (1 Tamburlaine, 3.3.244-60; 2 Tamburlaine, 3.5.22; 4.1.152). Tamburlaine explicitly rejects “those blind geographers | That make a triple region in the world, | Excluding regions which I mean to trace” (1 Tamburlaine, 4.4.81-83). Rather than the traditional schemes of the world divided into the three continents of Asia, Europe and Africa, according to classical wisdom,33 Tamburlaine promotes a pragmatic new conception of geography based upon his own voraciously desiring gaze, 29 30

31 32

33

Ramsay Burt, The Male Dancer: Bodies, Spectacle, Sexualities (London: Routledge, 1995), 82. The Admiral’s Men shared the Theatre playhouse in Shoreditch with Burbage between November 1590 and May 1591; the 1590 edition of Tamburlaine the Great recorded that the play had been “sundre times shewed vpon Stages of the Citie of London” (Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, II, 136 and III, 421). Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage, III, 54-55. Oswald Spengler, Der Untergang des Abendlandes: Umrisse einer Morphologie der Weltgeschichte (Munich: dtv, 1997), 234. English translation: The Decline of the West, trans. Charles Francis Atkinson (New York: Knopf, 1986). Marlowe’s Faustus, like Tamburlaine, says, “I’ll be great emperor of the world, | And make a bridge through the air | To pass the ocean” (Doctor Faustus, 1.3.104-106) See Bernhard Klein, Maps and the Writing of Space in Early Modern England and Ireland (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2000), 17-18.

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“the frowning looks of fiery Tamburlaine” (1 Tamburlaine, 4.1.13). In accord with the conqueror’s “piercing instruments of sight” which are cognate with the martial weapons of conquest (1 Tamburlaine, 2.2.14), this new belligerent geography inscribes the world along lines determined by usurping individual power and imperial ambition: I will ... with this pen reduce them to a map, Calling the provinces, cities and towns, After my name and thine, Zenocrate. Here at Damascus I will make the point That shall begin the perpendicular .... (1 Tamburlaine, 4.4.79-89)

Tamburlaine proposes the re-writing maps through a process of “reduction”. The map is presented here in negative terms, as a pared down version of reality. The action of the phallic pen-sword enables the re-writing of the physical world through a process of destruction, conquest and re-organization based upon the warrior’s own supreme will backed by brute military force. Ironically, at the end of the Tamburlaine cycle, a map serves to exemplify Tamburlaine’s conquests, now on the verge of being lost as his powers wane – and all that he will now never conquer (2 Tamburlaine, 5.3.124-59.) Tamburlaine’s “pen” contains an allusion here to the dramatist’s “pen” (2 Tamburlaine, Prologue, 3). Marlowe, with his hyperbolic inflation of place names, and his fascination with their power to evoke symbolic spaces when uttered upon the space of the stage, indulges in an activity no less imperial, but in the last analysis, no less illusory, than the hubristic stage Tamburlaine played by Edward Alleyn, who “Himself in presence shall unfold [the dramatic narrative of conquest] at large” (2 Tamburlaine, Prologue, 9). Thus it is on the stage, in that last analysis, that Marlowe has masculine spatial ambition, given verbal form in the first instance, translated into dynamic performance. In this way, Tamburlaine becomes the hyperbolic exemplar of the principle of masculine mastery of space – and of its vulnerable and ephemeral nature. He stands for all the more quotidian practices of spatial control performed by male actors on the stage, but also for the constantly present possibility of their demise.

CHAPTER 5 The Aporias of Masculinity: Systemic Interpenetration and Systemic Instability In Durham in 1631 a certain John Sheffield taunted William Bell with being “so awebound to his wife that he durst not drink a cup of ale with a friend”.1 How could such an apparently anodyne comment provoke a brawl or a court case? What was so fragile about early modern manliness that a slur on a man’s freedom to go out, or on his ability to drink “a cup of ale” must be defended with fists or fought out before a judge? Clearly the needling “awebound”, with its spatial-hierarchical resonances, touched a sore spot. This brief vignette may well be symptomatic of larger sense of instability that appears to have dogged the constitution of manhood in the early modern period. In this chapter I turn to related dramatizations of problematic masculinity, ones played out on the stage. Several Renaissance plays, notably the anonymous Arden of Faversham and Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside exemplify the fraught nature of masculine gender as an ongoing, conflicted process of spatial struggle within the public realm. The narrative of the murder of a local gentleman landowner in Faversham, Kent, by his wife and her lover in 1551 became famous in the sixteenth century because it focused popular anxieties about women’s power to usurp masculine authority. But it also crystallized fears about the spatial gender configurations in a time of rapid change. It may seem that the two plots of Arden of Faversham – Arden’s unpopularity in the local community because of disrespect of traditional rights of common-land usage and the story of his wife’s infidelity and subsequent murder of her husband – are largely unconnected to one another. In fact, however, both narratives strands focus upon the occupation of space. In both narratives, traditional spaces are violated. Arden is granted the substantial lands of the Abbey of Faversham (1.1-7) and then displays his contempt for the time-honoured rights of common usage of the lands. He sweeps aside privileges previously granted to the smallholder Greene

1

Cited in Elizabeth A. Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England (London: Longman, 1999), 40.

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or to the poor sailor who can only maintain his family with the supplementary resource of a small parcel of land (1.470-75, 13.11-18). In the domestic sphere, a further disturbance of traditional space drives the play’s action. Arden leaves his house open to invasion by the adulterous Mosby, thus deserving, according to early modern logic, to be cuckolded. At the latest by Scene 4, Arden has also understood his mistake: “My house is irksome, there I cannot rest .... Then that base Mosby doth usurp my room | And makes his triumph of my being thence” (4.27-30). Room has in this passage the double sense of a the bedchamber, but also of the appropriate space with the social order and hierarchy: in his Basilikon Doron, James I dealt with the role of the king within the state in a part of the text referred to as “the owne roome”, and when he feared the influence of sedition from the continent, he imagined his subjects attempting to “place another in my room”; Stow’s anatomy of London referred to the humblest inhabitants of the city as occupying “the lowest room’ in the social edifice”.2 While the play condemns Alice for her adultery, it also demonstrates that by “making room” for his usurper, Arden is instrumental in his own displacement as family head. The intimate linkage of these two spatial paradigms is demonstrated in the usage, very early on, of legal notions of ownership applied both to the acquisition and ownership of land and the relational prerogative. Both usages of ownership are placed in the context of the disruption of traditional relationships. In the opening lines of the play, Arden is presented with “letters patent from his majesty” and “deeds sealed and subscribed | With [the Lord Duke of Somerset’s] name and the king’s” ceding the abbey lands to him (1.4-7). These deeds of ownership change the relations between landowner and land users, leading to the destruction of the fabric of the local community. Employing the same notion, Alice Arden says that her husband hath nought but this, That I am tied to him by marriage. Love is a god, and marriage is but words, And therefore Mosby’s title is the best.

2

(1.99-102; my emphasis)

James I, Basilikon Doron (1599; Menston: The Scholar Press, 1969), 9; James I quoted in Margot Heinemann, Puritanism and Theatre: Thomas Middleton and Opposition Drama under the Early Stuarts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 153; John Stow, A Suruey of London (London, 1603), 559.

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Given the early modern predilection for analogies, it is plausible that these two narrative strands, both emphasizing rightful ownership and its perversion by male mismanagement, are to be understood as isomorphic with one another. The larger social disturbance of land relations needs to be mapped onto the disturbance of the traditional marriage relationship. Indeed, this mapping operation is implicit in Alice Arden’s attempt to exploit Arden’s social unpopularity in bribing the recently dispossessed Greene to do away with her husband: “When he is dead you shall have twenty [pounds] more, | And the lands whereof my husband is possess’d | Shall be intitled as they were before” (1.523-25). With the definitive eradication of Arden’s domestic and conjugal “title” by death, his own abuses of traditional common-law land titles will be rectified, implies Alice. This rectification of the abuse of dual spatial entitlements is anticipated in the very place where Arden is laid out immediately after his murder: the counting-house (14.254). This was the room where deeds and titles and account books were customarily stored. It represented the intersection of domestic space (indeed, it focused the new closure and privacy of the home within the shifting boundaries of private and public3) and the outer world of property and finance.4 A further index of the analogy between the two levels of spatial disturbance is to be found in the imagery surrounding the family domicile. Alice’s use of the notion of house is particularly significant in this respect. She threatens Adam Fowle, “were they house of force, | 3

4

See Orlin, Private Matters and Public Culture in Post-Reformation England, 183-89; Alan Stewart, “The Early Modern Closet Discovered”, Representations, L (1995), 76-100; James Knowles, “ ‘Infinite Riches in a Little Room’: Marlowe and the Aesthetics of the Closet”, in Renaissance Configurations: Voices/Bodies/Spaces, 1580-1690, ed. Gordon McMullan (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 3-29. The same linking of domestic and public is evinced in the curse uttered upon Arden by an impoverished sailor tenant. His plea for fair treatment regarding a plot of land now in Arden’s possession falls of deaf ears: That plot of ground, which thou detainst from me, I speak it in an agony of spirit, Be ruinous and fatal to thee. Either there be bucher’d by thy dearest friends, Or else be brought for men to wonder at, Or thou or thine miscarry in that place, Or there run mad and end thy cursed days. (13.32-38; my emphasis) Arden will indeed be murdered, for “domestic” reasons, but his death nonetheless is a form of retribution for his unprincipled administration of public spaces. This is confirmed by the final lines of the play: “Arden lay murder’d in that plot of ground | Which he by force and violence held from Reede” (Epilogue, 10-11).


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These hands of mine should raze it to the ground, | Unless that thou wouldst bring me to my love” (1.117-19). The house as the metonymy of the smallest unit of social cohesion (“a naturall and simple Society of certain persons, hauing mutuall relation one to another, vnder the priuate gouernment of one”, the husband5) is cast into question by Alice’s usurpation of traditional domestic relations and by Arden’s condonement of that usurpation. Above all Alice Arden’s insubordination (“What hath he [Arden, her husband] to ... govern me that am to rule myself” – 10.89-90) runs counter to early modern notions of the wife’s place in the household hierarchy. Moreover, the house is bound up in Arden’s self-destructive actions. When his friend Franklin instructs the adulterer Mosby to stay away from Arden’s house, the latter contradicts him: Nay, rather frequent it more; The world shall see that I distrust her not. To warn him on the sudden from my house Were to confirm the rumour that is grown .... And I will lie at London all this term To let them see how light I weigh their words.

(1.349-52)

The house is usurped, with the willing acquiescence of its owner and master, who abandons his own territory to his competitor. When Arden’s manservant Michael plans to leave the doors of Arden’s London residence unlocked at night so as to facilitate the entrance of the hired murderers Black Will and Shakesbag (3.180-85), the servant is only continuing a course of action initiated by the master. This logic is completed when the two thugs, in the final attempt of Arden’s life, hide in his counting house (Scene 14). On several occasions an alternative explanation for Arden’s downfall is proposed. At the very beginning of the play, Arden’s friend Franklin suggests that infidelity among women is “natural”, and thus nothing to be too greatly worried about (1.20-21). Here, Franklin was merely repeating a commonplace about women’s ostensible inability, as weaker creatures not endowed with strength of reason and will power, to control their voracious sexual appetites. Christopher Newstead went as far as to make of this ostensible weakness a mitigating circumstance in cases of 5

William Perkins, Christian Oeconomie, Or, A Short Svrvey of the Right Manner of Erecting and ordering a Family, according to the scriptures, trans. Thomas Pickering, Workes (Cambridge, 1618), III, 669. Perkins observes that “The husband indeede naturally beares rule ouer the wife ...” (III, 698).

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female adultery, claiming that “If women bee vnchaste, they are but incontinent, and therefore but semi-malae, but half euill”.6 None the less, the play insists that this ostensibly natural disposition of women is aided and abetted by Arden’s own negligence of his spatial responsibilities, both macrocosmic in the local community, and microcosmic in the home. Manhood is predicated upon spatial vigilance, and the slackening of that vigilance can lead to the failure of manhood. A second example, Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, bears out the unstable character of public manhood. Aristocratic manhood carried the responsibility of guaranteeing the maintenance of family territory, and the failure of sexual activity could entail the loss of dynastic space. Lady Kix berates her husband Sir Oliver for his infertility, assuring him that the necessary pre-conditions on her part (penetrability – and generously so) are present: “Can any woman have a greater cut?”; to which Sir Oliver replies: “I know ’tis great, but what of that wife? | I cannot do withal” (2.1.138-40). The fault, it seems, is Sir Oliver’s, unable as he is to perform according to the topography of passive feminine receptivity and masculine cultivation (the penis as a plough tilling the female ground and planting seed, gestation as fruiting7) which structured so much of the imagery of early modern reproductive discourse (and continued a tradition of classical philosophy, according to which space is always feminine, constituting the passive object of masculine activity across time8). The fertile ground has already been “cut” and awaits insemination but the male instrument remains flaccid. This failure of male potency constitutes a threat to property, for if the couple have no children, their estate will pass into the hands of their kinsman Sir Walter Whorehound: ’Tis our dry barrenness puffs up Sir Walter – None gets by your not-getting, but that knight; He’s made by th’means, and fats his fortune shortly In a great dowry with a goldsmith’s daughter.

(2.1.159-62)

Thus the topography of sexual interaction is intimately connected with the topography of family structures, and thereby with the topography of landed estates. To penetrate and fertilize feminine space is to fix it, to 6 7 8

Christopher Newstead, An Apologie for Women: Or, Womens Defence (London, 1620), 16. Mary Fissell, “Gender and Generation: Representing Reproduction in Early Modern England”, Gender and History, VII/3 (November 1995), 435-40. See Alice A. Jardine, Gynesis: Configurations of Women and Modernity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985), 24-25.


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secure its boundaries, and thereby guarantee the continuity of patriarchal dynasties across history. This principle can function equally at a national scale, as in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. When Leontes becomes convinced of his wife’s infidelity, Polixenes tellingly remarks that “The King hath on him such a countenance | As he had lost some province, and a region | Loved as he loves himself” (1.2.369-71). The stock household-state analogy permitted the application of the same notion along a sliding scale of magnitude from the humblest family to the state itself. But it also laid a heavy responsibility upon male shoulders – that of “being bound to trayne up their families” just as princes, “the publicke fathers of their countries” are “in conscience charged ... to frame their subiectes to the true seruice of God”, of being “a bishop in his owne house”9 – with all the concomitant risks of failure. To this extent, the early modern gender system, while investing males with great powers, overstretched their resources in a way that was becoming increasingly manifest in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Both Arden of Faversham and A Chaste Maid in Cheapside exemplify the erosion of the family and dynastic domains, the breakdown of systemic coherence on a microcosmic scale, as a result of the failure of “manhood”.

War and homosociality A salient character of gendered public spaces, whether domestic, dynastic or national, within the early modern gender system, was their instability. Such spaces had constantly to be defended against invasion. We are informed from the outset in Troilus and Cressida that the Greek heroes’ vow is made To ransack Troy, within whose strong immures The ravished Helen, Menelaus’ queen, With wanton Paris sleeps – and that’s the quarrel.

(Prologue, 7-10)

The fact that the sack of Troy imitates and follows the kidnapping Helen alerts us to the instability of gendered national domains. The violation of a space of masculine possession incorporated in a double movement of transgression (in its early modern sense, ravishment could mean both rape, illegitimate penetration, and abduction, illegitimate removal) is simply inverted into the reverse movement, the expedition and 9

Thomas Bilson, The True Difference Betweene Christian Svbiection and Vnchristian Rebellion (Oxford, 1585), 249; Becon, The Catechisme, in Worckes, I, cccccxir-v.

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subsequent invasion of the city of Troy, in turn feminized by the synecdochic presence of Helen within its walls. Defining national selfhood, however, is costly: maintaining the prize of that sortie onto foreign (Greek) territory continues to render the invaded Trojan collectivity, its body politic, vulnerable: “I would not wish a drop of Trojan blood | Spent more in her defence”, criticizes Troilus (2.2.19697). The sortie beyond the national boundaries has placed Troy in a defensive position, so that the outward-bound mission has become a vulnerability in the inner domain of the nation; the reciprocated invasion by the foreign power has created a leak in the resources of the body politic which cannot be stemmed. Nonetheless, claims Paris, the original sortie is justified, and recouped, by spatial knowledge: “Well may we fight for her whom we know well | The world’s largest spaces cannot parallel” (2.2.160-61). At this moment, the absolutist claims of masculine occupation of space are reasserted, and the dangers of instability in inner/outer oppositions and invasive vectors are safely banished. Paradoxically, war, despite its constantly shifting fronts, posed least threat to the performance of masculinity. Indeed, war was paradigmatic, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth century, in constructing manliness. Military manuals often defined military masculinity as the ideal form of manhood.10 One typical manual of 1627 included a frontispiece portraying the idealized soldier-scholar, simultaneously erudite and tough, bestriding a cross-topped globe, flanked by book and helmet, compass and drum, and underwritten by the motto “Marti Mvsisqve”, a combination is no way experienced as an oxymoron.11 Such masculinity, however, necessitated constant vigilance and “training”.12 Tamburlaine enumerates for his sons the basic elements of a training programme in the rudiments of war. I’ll have you learn to sleep upon the ground, March in your armour through watery fens, Sustain the scorching heat and freezing cold, Hunger and thirst, right adjuncts of the war .... When this is done, then ye are soldiers 10 11

12

(2 Tamburlaine, 3.2.54-48)

James A. Freeman, Milton and the Martial Muse: Paradise Lost and the European Traditions of War (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980), Ch. 1. Sir Thomas Kellie, Pallas Armata, Or, Militarie Instructions for the Learned: And All Generous Spirits, who Affect the Profession of Arms. The First Part (Edinburgh, 1627), frontispiece. See Edward Davies, Military Directions, or the Art of Trayning (London, 1618); The Art of War and Englands Traynings (London, 1619).


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John Fletcher defined the British general Caratach, one of the protagonists of his Roman play Bonduca, in terms which were typical for early modern notions of the formation of masculinity:13 he’s a Souldier So forg’d out, and so temper’d for great fortunes, So much man thrust into him, so old in dangers, So fortunate in all attempts, that his mere name Fights in a thousand men, himself in millions, To make him Roman.14

Prince Hal is described by his father in similar terms: “He hath a tear for pity, and a hand | Open as day for melting charity. | Yet notwithstanding, being incensed, he is flint” (2 Henry IV, 4.3.31-33). This warrior body needed to be trained – “forg’d” and “temper’d” in Fletcher’s words – to make it hard and manly. Thus Marlowe’s shepherd warrior Tamburlaine, whose “manly” physique makes of him the perfect warrior gentleman (1 Tamburlaine, 2.1.11, 7-30) constantly stresses the “deeds” which will establish his virile “nobility” (1.2.34-35, 203-209). Yet even Tamburlaine’s physique contains an “unmanly” element, the “long and snowy fingers” which modern textual editors have persistently altered to “long and sinewy” (2.1.27).15 The hardness of the warrior body was never permanent, as evinced in The Maid’s Tragedy, when Amintor, deserted by his spirit of revenge, laments “O, my soft temper” (3.2.237), or in the pamphlet Haec-Vir, where the “Womanish-Man”, “a most tender piece of Masculine”, a “tender piece of mans flesh”, who “languish[es] in this weake entertained sinne of womanish softnesse” and must be cajoled into “put[ting] on [his] owne amours”.16 Significantly, the body characteristic of maternally-dominated childhood and femininity was soft and watery. Lemnius said women were “tender, 13

14

15

16

See Goran Stanivukovic, “ ‘The Blushing Shame of Souldiers’: The Eroticism of Heroic Masculinity in John Fletcher’s Bonduca”, in Images of Manhood in Early Modern Literature: Viewing the Male, 41-54. Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, Bonduca, in The Works of Beaumont and Fletcher, ed. Alexander Dyce (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1970), V, 24 (1.2; no line numbers in this edition). See the editor’s note in Marlowe, The Complete Plays, ed. J.B. Steane (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 588 n2; Doris Feldmann, “Literaturwissenschaft, New Men’s Studies und das Drama der englischen Renaissance”, in Wann ist der Mann ein Mann?: Zur Geschichte der Männlichkeit, eds Walter Erhardt and Britta Herrmann (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1997), 145. Haec-Vir, or The Womanish-Man: Being an Answere to a late Booke intituled Hic-Mulier (London, 1620), A3v, A4r, C2r, C3v.

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smooth ... soft skinned creatures ... a womans flesh is loose, soft and tender”.17 Shakespeare had the Duke of York in 3 Henry VI say “Women are soft, mild, pitiful...” (1.4.142). Kate in The Taming of the Shrew ruminates, “Why are our bodies soft, and weak, and smooth, | ... But that our soft conditions and our hearts | Should well agree with our external parts?” (5.2.170-73). Spenser, in his View of the State of Ireland dramatizes just such a fantasized process of softening: when Cyrus had overcome the Lydians that were a warlike nation, and devised to bring them to a more peaceable life, hee changed their apparell and musick, and, in stead of their short warlike coat, cloathed them in long garments like women, and, in stead of their warlike musick, appointed to them certaine lascivious layes and loose jiggs, by which in short space their mindes were so mollified and abated that they forgot their former fiercenesse and became most tender and effeminate.18

This was not mere literary convention. In the 1630s, Robert Ward complained that “our people are so metamorphiz’d from that true worth which in former ages was inherent to the English, but now so effeminiz’d by their voluptuous living, that they are not fit to undertake the paines and care of a Souldier”.19 And Gainsford complained that “Effeminatenesse is lamentable in a souldier, when hee must needs haue a downe-bed to lie vpon, a warme ouercoat, an oiled gauntlet, a sweet shirt, a perfumed armor”.20 Often, military success and the attainment of true manhood through sexual consumation appear to be coeval. Deflowering a virgin, according to one contemporary pamphlet, invested the deflowerer with typically military virtues, making him “a man of courage, full of metall and very active”.21 Tamburlaine refuses to marry his concubine Zenocrate until he has achieved, through military conquest, a degree of honour he believes worthy of her beauty (4.4.148-49; 5.2.427-73). The attainment of adequate warlike prowess entails, for instance, the destruction of 17 18 19

20 21

Levinus Lemnius, The Secret Miracles of Nature (London, 1658), 273-74. Edmund Spenser, A View of the State of Ireland: From the first printed edition (1633), eds Andrew Hadfield and Willy Maley (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 72-73; emphasis added. Robert Ward, Anima’dversions of vvarre; or A militarie magazine of the Truest Rules, and Ablest Instructions, for the Managing of Warre .... Composed, of the most refined discipline ... that these late Netherlandich and Swedisch warres here produced (London, 1639), 167. For equivalent early modern European examples, see Alison McNeil Kettering, “Gerard ter Bosch’s Military Men: Masculinity Transformed”, in The Public and Private in Dutch Culture of the Golden Age, eds Arthur K. Wheelock, Jr. and Adele Seeff (Newark: University of Delaware Press/London: Associated University Press, 2000), 100-19. Thomas Gainsford, The Rich Cabinet (London, 1616), 39. “Joannes Baptista Guardano Lodovico punto”, The Skilfull Mountebanke; Or, Come, and i’le cure you (London, 1638), A4v.


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Damascus, Zenocrate’s home town – beginning, significantly, with the massacre of supplicant virgins who are slain and displayed on the city walls; and culminating, equally significantly, with the defeat and capture of Zenocrate’s father Soldan. Marlowe underlines in an unsubtle manner the conjunction of sexual and warrior bragging, with an example of verbally and visually ostended phallic symbolism addressed not only to the doomed virgins, but also to the audience: “Behold my sword; what see you at the point?” (5.2.45). Early modern dramas defined the spaces of war not just as the site of armed conflict, but more strikingly, as a space of essential consensus between men on the nature of their gendered identity. The space of military conflict, concretized in Troilus and Cressida in the open ground outside the walls of Troy where the combatants meet to do battle, is a space which belongs to men alone, except for the exchange of a woman (Cressida), and is therefore marked by a sense of gender harmony often expressed in euphoric terms. What Paris refers to in oxymoronic terms as “the noblest hateful love” between the Greeks and Trojans (4.1.34), is even more graphically described by Aeneas: “By Venus’ hand I swear | No man alive can love in such a sort | The thing he means to kill more excellently” (4.1.23-25). These paradoxical descriptions can be understood in part as indices of the schizoid relationship to the enemy warriors, who are perceived as respected equals off the battlefield precisely by virtue of their status as mortal enemies on the field. It may well be that here the different sites of masculinity determine a diametrically opposed mode of relationship, which only a powerful mechanism of dissociation can maintain. More plausibly, however, it would seem that there is a continuity in the modes of relationship: men do battle with men who are loved precisely because battle allows a radical affirmation of the hardened masculine exterior, enhanced as it is by armour and the other accoutrements of warfare. The battlefield is a site of remarkably strong systemic differentiation. In contrast to the inaugural distinction upon which the early modern gender system is based (masculine/feminine), this bellicose dichotomization, which at the same time is powerfully marked as the same, is situated within the system itself, and appears to contribute to the stability of the masculine pole of the system. That such a dichotomization is accompanied by the ever-present risk of death does not appear to threaten the system. The systemic reinforcement which takes place in battle generates an erotic charge in connection with an intense mutual narcissism. Certainly

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Diomedes’ greeting to his respected enemies – “The one and the other Diomed embraces” – and Aeneas’ oath, “By Venus’ hand I swear” would appear to confirm the erotic nature of the love/hate relationship with a lover/enemy (4.1.14, 23). These are not isolated examples. In Fletcher’s Bonduca, Caratach’s own description of himself confirms this sense of erotic self-affirmation through extreme encounter in battle: I love an enemy; I was born a soldier; And he that in the head on’s troop defies me, Bending my manly body with his sword, I make a mistress. Yellow-tressèd Hymen Ne’er tied a longing virgin with more joy, Then I am married to that man that wounds me: Are not all these Roman?22

Similar sentiments are to be found in the warm welcome Tullius’ gives to his inveterate enemy Coriolanus, his declaration of love and passionate description of his oneiric struggles with the guest (4.5.114-27). The homoerotic elements of these discourses do not substantially work to effeminize the warring partners and erode their hardened masculinity. Rather, the warlike context defuses the potentially threatening nature of such discourse. These homoerotic elements function then to mark a space which is gendered as absolutely and exclusively masculine. In images of war, the public world of masculinity as presented on the Renaissance stage was homogenized as a masculine sphere of action. War was the paradigmatic form of masculine gender practices because, through the very extremity of the forms of interaction it implied, provided the starkest affirmation of masculine mastery of space and the clearest definition of the hardened boundaries of the borders of the male body by virtue of martial conflict with other men. Several brief anecdotes from the Renaissance demonstrate how the bellicose homosociality based on violence which was performed on the stage mirrored quotidian gender practices. One story from 1637 tells about two friends named Thomas Pouncey and Richard Paty drinking together in a Dorchester alehouse. They quarrelled over some matter, whereupon they went outside and fought it out with their fists. “All bloody with fighting”, they then went back inside and resumed their companionable drink. Further up the social scale, the nineteen-year-old Earl of Essex picked a quarrel with Sir Charles Blount (later Lord Mountjoy) and was reprimanded by 22

Beaumont and Fletcher, Bonduca, in The Works of Beaumont and Fletcher, V, 9 (1.1; no line numbers in this edition).


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Queen Elizabeth; the two men later became good friends.23 Needless to say, the inherent systemic friction generated by such an ethos of conflict and its potential costs for the body politic as a whole, were not negligible.

Love as a threat The apparently schizoid structure of respect for those one tries to kill reveals a deeper ambivalence at the heart of love. These combative relationships point, chiastically, towards a figure which suggests that heterosexual love is constructed upon a substrate of war.24 Here the system-founding inaugural division appears to subsist only with a high degree of potential entropy. The threat of entropy generates powerful aggression towards the “environment” (or “other”) produced by and necessary to systemic self-definition. An ambivalent relationship of just this sort is detected by Paris when he summarises Diomedes’ attitude towards Helen as that of “Disprais[ing] the thing that you desire to buy” [4.1.78]). The structure of this ambivalent homoerotic relationship of warfare is clearly at work – in inverted form – in heterosexual relationships. For many of the male characters in the drama of the early modern era, love appears to be a risky undertaking. Love carries with it the threat of becoming dangerously like the object of one’s love: Sidney in his Arcadia declared that the “effeminate love of a woman doth so womanize a man that, if he yield to it, it will not only make him an Amazon, but a launder, a distaff-spinner ...”.25 In his Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton claimed that love is “full of fear, anxiety, doubt, care, peevishness,

23

24

25

David Underdown, Fire From Heaven: Life in an English Town in the Seventeenth Century (London: Fontana/HarperCollins, 1993), 164; Victor G. Kiernan, The Duel in European History: Honour and the Reign of Aristocracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 80. Hélène Cixous notes the agonistic structure underlying the masculine-feminine binary terms which structure Western culture and deems that one term must always annihilate the other (“Sorties”, in Cathérine Clément and Hélène Cixous, La Jeune née [Paris: UGE 10/18, 1975], 115-16; English translation: ‘Sorties’, The Newly Born Woman, trans. Betsy Wing [Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986], 86). Sir Philip Sidney, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, ed. Maurice Evans (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977), 134. Mary Sidney’s The Tragedy of Antonie similarly imagined a king effeminized by love, “Spinning at distaff, and with a sinewy hand | Winding on spindles thread, in maid’s attire” (3.359-60).

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suspicion, it turns a man into a woman”.26 The effeminacy imposed by love takes effect in the very fabric of Swetnam’s discourse: women haue deuices & inuentions to allure men into their loue, and if thou suffer thy selfe once to be lead into fooles paradice, (that is to say) the bed or closet wherein a woman is, (then I say) thou art like a bird snared in a lime-bush, which the more she striueth the faster she is.27

Here the love-rapt male is abruptly transformed into a feminized captive (the male is characterized, significantly, as a female bird: “she”). He is drawn perilously close to the object of his desires. In the drama, love constantly threatens to undermine the hardened boundaries of the male self, wounding manhood in its very mode of constitution. The phallic warrior prowess evinced by Marlowe’s conquering shepherd Tamburlaine must be constantly defended against the threat of effeminacy originating out of the loved women it strives to be worthy of, Zenocrate. Thus Tamburlaine ruminates, But how unseemly it is for my sex, My discipline of arms and chivalry, My nature, and the terror of my name, To harbour thoughts effeminate and faint! Save only that in beauty’s just applause, With whose instinct the soul of man is touched, And every warrior that is rapt with love Of fame, of valour, of victory, Must needs have beauty beat on his conceits. (1 Tamburlaine, 5.2.111-19).

However, Tamburlaine successfully “subdues” the “effeminate thoughts” and “conceits”, evoked by the person of his mistress Zenocrate, which both drive and threaten warlike brutality, and goes on to further bloody exploits (5.2.120). Often the phallic quality of metaphorical swordsmanship emblematic of masculine sexuality (of which Tamburlaine is a prime exemplar with his quip to the virgin supplicants of Damascus: “Behold my sword; what see you at the point?” – 5.2.45) is cast into question by love. Romeo famously cries, “O sweet Juliet, | Thy beauty hath made me effeminate, | And in my temper softened valour’s steel!” (3.1.113-15). The loss of male power incurred by the abrupt explosion of emotional dependence upon an other person is both articulated in the mythology of Cupid with 26 27

Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy [posthumous edition of 1651], eds. Floyd Dell and Paul Jordan-Smith (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1927), 728. Joseph Swetnam, The Araignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward and Unconstant Women (London, 1615), 35.


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his barbed attack upon the integrity of the self, and simultaneously displaced from the women to a mythological figure. Love represents a loss of masculine control, with Philisses in Mary Wroth’s not insignificantly entitled play Love’s Victory exclaiming: “And thou, all conquering Love, | Which show’st thy power still on hapless me” (3.2.12).

The irruption of the humours – and the maternal influence The experience of love is figured as a perforation of the hard masculine carapace. Love for Troilus is an “open ulcer” in his heart, a “gash”, which makes him unmanly (1.1.53, 62). The hardness of bodily boundaries as a criteria of masculinity, alluded to here in physiological terms, translated into everyday tests of bodily self-control such as drinking, where the ability to hold one’s liquor evinced the non-porosity of corporeal limits. Pissing or vomiting were signs of inadequate manhood, as evinced in Fortune Matthew’s insulting John Patteson in 1607 as a “foresworn drunken fellow” and a “spewbleck”.28 This interest in bodily liquids in their various forms – which early modern people would have understood as mutually exchangeable, mutually translatable or “fungible” – points to another resonance of Romeo’s reference to “my temper”, and an equally significant source for the metaphorics of unmanning at work in descriptions of love. The humoral economy underlay gender identity, and it provided the conceptual underpinning for the masculine insecurity evinced in experiences of love. The trademark of aristocratic masculinity was the acquired ability to keep the humoral household rigorously under control.29 Significantly, moisture was the humour typical of women’s temperament, and an excess of moisture rendered men effeminate. Such excess is evinced in extreme form in Shakespeare’s Falstaff, “this unwholesome humidity, this great watery pumpkin” (The Merry Wives of Windsor 3.3.37-38). Commenting upon men of an overly moist “complexion” or humoral disposition, Lemnius wrote, their wit neither sharpe nor fine, their courage base and nothing haulty, nor attempting any high enterprises, nor caring for any glorious and difficult 28 29

Elizabeth A. Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England (London: Longman, 1999), 4041. Darryll Grantley, “ ‘A bodie of presence’: Early Modern Education and the Elite Body in the Writings of Richard Mulcaster”, in The Body in Late Medieval and Early Modern Culture, eds Darryll Grantley and Nina Taunton (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 111.

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BODIES AND THEIR SPACES adventures: and the cause is, for that heat which pricketh forward and emboldeneth to take in hand worthy attempts, is in them very weake and small: for this cause, are men quicker witted, deeper searcher out of matters, and more diligent and ripe of judgement then women: for a woman compasseth and doth all things after a worse sort, and in going about affaires and making bargaines, hath not the like dexterity and seemlinesse that a man hath .... Which is by reason and effect of heat, which whosoever lacketh, or else have feeble and faint, are for the most part persons effeminate, tender, without courage and spirit, sleepy, slothful, weaklings, meycockes .... 30

The demise of Shakespeare’s Antony under the influence of the Cleopatra, whom he calls “my serpent of old Nile” (Antony and Cleopatra 1.5.25), is defined from the very outset by her proximity to water. This is so from Antony’s first meeting with Cleopatra on her barge (2.2.198224). As Antony falls under her spell, he is increasingly drawn into her watery domain. His retreat in a naval battle in imitation of her unmanly flight (“Egypt, thou knew’st too well | My heart was to thy rudder tied by th’ strings, | And thou shouldst tow me after” – 3.11.56-58) reveals his own loss of manliness. “I never saw an action of such shame. | Experience, manhood, honour, n’er before | Did violate so itself” says one observer (3.10.21-23). Antony’s movement is “feminine” because it is subsumed to the influence of feminizing elements and humoral influences of femininity. His later decision to wage battle against Caesar at Pharsalia reveals his continuing subordination to the feminine element: O noble Emperor, do not fight by sea. Trust not to rotten planks .... Let th’Egyptians And the Phoenicians go a-ducking; we Have used to conquer standing on the earth, And fighting foot to foot.

(3.7.61-66)

Antony’s final defeat is indicative of his utter suffusion in a humoral environment which unmans him, as he candidly admits: “Authority melts from me of late” (3.13.90). In the act of taking off his armour in the final scenes of the play, Antony symbolically puts off the hard contours of the warrior and statesman, taking on the porous bodily boundaries thought to be typical of moist femininity. 30

Levinius Lemnius, The Touchstone of Complexions: Expedient and profitable for all such as bee desirous and carefull of their bodily health, trans. T.[homas] N.[ewton] (London, 1633), 129-30.


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Tears in particular were a threat to masculinity – not because crying as such was identified as a feminine variety of behaviour, but because it was a symptom of a humoral function central to the feminine constitution. Lemnius’ connection between an excess of moisture and the inability to beget children (“whosoever lacketh [heat], ... are for the most part persons effeminate, tender ... and not apt nor able to beget any children, because their Sperme is too thin and moyst”31) would have made Sir Oliver Kix’s propensity toward tears a clear symptom of the same humoral imbalance that vitiates his potency: “Talk not on’t pray thee”, he begs his accusing wife, “Thou’lt make me play the woman and weep too” (A Chaste Maid in Cheapside, 2.1.157-58). Crying was an index of “tender” contours and thus of a putatively feminine constitution. Ever since Antiquity, self-control in love had been a hall-mark of masculinity; the loss of self-control was equated with effeminacy, because it denoted a dangerous resemblance to the feminine other – with a femininity whose humoral economy was characterized by the absence of control, retention, restraint.32 Lancelot in The Merchant of Venice displays irritation at the “foolish drops” which “do something drown my manly spirit” (2.3.13-14). Posthumus fears the solvent effect of emotion: “O lady, weep no more, lest I give cause | To be suspected of more tenderness | Than doth become a man” (Cymbeline, 1.1.93-95). In particular tears signal the irruption of direct maternal influence upon the male. Effeminacy, as defined by early modern writers, was a spatial affair, a matter of frequentation, as well as of behaviour. Sir Thomas Wright warned against the dangers issuing from the feminizing space of the home: “a valiant Captaine in the field, for most part is infected with an effeminate affection at home”.33 Women in general were a maleficent influence in this respect. Gainsford claimed that “Effeminateness is a fault of all mothers; when their children may not ... stirre out of dores, till their girdle by aired by the fire.”34 Richard Braithwait alluded to “effeminate Youths, whose womanish disposition

31 32

33 34

Lemnius, The Touchstone of Complexions, 129-30. See Michel Foucault, Histoire de la sexualité, II: L’usage des plaisirs (Paris: Gallimard/Tel, 1997), 112-16. English translation: The History of Sexuality, Vol. 2: The Use of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999). Sir Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Mind (London, 1604), 207. Gainsford, The Rich Cabinet, 39.

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hath begot in them a love to this hatefull profession [prostitutes]”.35 Nicholas Breton claimed that “An Effeminate Foole ... loues nothing but ... to keepe among Wenches ... to feed on sweet meates, and to be daunced in Laps, to be imbraced in Armes, and to be kissed on the Cheeke .... To sigh for Loue, and weepe for kindnesse, and mourne for company, and be sicke for fashion .... In summe ... he is a ... Womansman.”36

Most early modern medical texts stressed that the human body was porous, allowing the humoral household to be affected by its environs (with some wonderful apocryphal tales of the impressionability of the humoral body). Tears can therefore be understood as a fateful sign of a threatening proximity to womankind which infiltrates manhood and erodes its contours. Thus Exeter in Henry V, having witnessed York’s emotional mourning for the dead Suffolk, laments, The pretty and sweet manner of it forced Those waters from me which I would have stopped. But I had not so much of man in me, And all my mother came into my eyes And gave me up to tears’

(4.6.30-32).

Likewise, Cassius imprecates But woe the while! Our fathers’ minds are dead, And we are governed with our mothers’ spirits. Our yoke and sufferance show us womanish. (Julius Caesar 1.3.81-83)

In similar vein, Coriolanus, at the end of the play which bears his name, laments the loss of his masculine resolve under the pressure of persuasive maternal influence: O mother, mother! What have you done? Behold, the heavens do ope, The gods look down, and this unnatural scene They laugh at. (Coriolanus 5.3.183-86)

35

36

Richard Braithwait, The English Gentleman, containing Sundry excellent Rules or exquisite Observations, tending to Direction of every Gentleman, of selecter rank and Qualitie (London, 1630), 25. Nicholas Breton, The Good and the Badde, or Descriptions of the Worthies, and Vnworthies of this Age (London, 1616), 30-31.


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When one of Tamburlaine’s son’s dares to deviate from the warlike careers the shepherd-emperor imposes upon his scions (“But while my brothers follow arms, my lord, | let me accompany my gracious mother”), the father accuses him of being a “Bastardly boy, sprung from some coward’s loins, | And not the issue of great Tamburlaine!” (2 Tamburlaine, 1.4.65-70). Significantly, it is this son, Calyphas, who repeatedly proves his unmanliness (3.2.93-94, 130; 4.1.15-71), and who says upon his mother’s death, “If I had wept a sea of tears for her, | It would not ease the sorrows I sustain” (3.2.47-48). Here the dramas point to a central trauma of early modern masculinity, that of a chronology of primordial proximity and difficult separation from women which rendered men’s sense of masculinity permanently precarious. In early modern culture, the attainment of aristocratic masculinity was based upon a temporal and spatial ritual of separation from femininity, the custom of breeching. Thus the synchronic difference from femininity which underpinned the early modern gender system, and which represented one of its central sites of contradiction, was mirrored in a diachronic moment of separation which was no less problematic. Sometime between the ages of five and ten, the little boy was taken from the nurses who had formerly cared for him and confided to tutors and male attendants. Edward VI, in his own third-person account, was brought up, ’til he came to six yeres old, amoung the wemen. At the sixt yere of his age, he was brought up in learning by Mr. Doctour Cox, who was after his maner, and Jhon Chiekes, Mr of Art, tow lernid men, who sought to bring him up in learning of tongues, of the scriptures, of philosophie, and of all learned sciences.37

Often (but not always) coinciding with this momentous event was the boy’s progression from “coats”, or young children’s skirts, to male attire. The event was important enough to become the frequent object of diary entries. Sir Henry Slingsby wrote in 1641, I sent from London against Easter a suit of clothes for my son Thomas, being the first breeches and doublet that he ever had, and made by my tailor Mr Miller; it was too soon for him to wear them, being but five years old, but that his mother had a desire to see him in them, how proper a man he would be. 38

37

38

Edward VI, Literary Remains of Edward the Sixth (1857), cited in Susan Snyder, “Mamillius and Gender Polarization in The Winter’s Tale”, Shakespeare Quarterly, L/1 (Spring 1998), 2. Cited in English Family Life, 1576-1716: An Anthology from Diaries, ed. Ralph A. Houlbrooke (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988), 147.

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John Greene said of is eldest son in 1649, “This Christmas day my boy John in breeches, being almost six years old”. The fourteen-year-old Thomas Isham noted in 1671, “Katherine went to Northampton and bought cloth for brother Ferdinando’s first breeches”.39 The breeching ceremony often included the gift of a sword, signifying the accession to aggressive aristocratic masculinity. Young Francis North, upon receiving his first breeches in 1679, strutted about in his new attire and sword, rejoicing “to throw off the coats and write man”.40 The acquisition of manhood, clearly associated with the acquisition of social power symbolized in the boy’s sword, is constantly stressed in contemporary accounts. Thus the passage from childhood to incipient manhood involved a change of social space, from the care of women to the care of men, and a change of the sartorial marking of the body’s place in social space. The transition was achieved with varying degrees of abruptness – the acquisition of breeches was a punctual event, whilst the removal to the world of males may have been more gradual – but it was in both cases spatially marked. Masculinity in its early modern configuration was thus not a given. Rather, it was an inherently secondary and artificial state, achieved by extraction from a prior domain in which male children were spatially and integrated in a feminine world, and the clear sartorial positioning within a new gender status. Logically, therefore, masculinity was constantly threatened with a fall back into an originary situation of ubiquitous femininity, a notion which coincided with early modern theories of sexual identity based upon Galenic medicine.41 Tears, for instance, to return to our example above, were a humoral reminder of the “changeable alteration, this conversion, mutability, inconstancy, and inclination of things from one to another, in the whole course of nature” (in the words of Lemnius42) – an “inclination” which meant that the differentiation upon which masculinity was predicated could never be 39 40 41

42

Cited in English Family Life, 1576-1716, ed. Ralph Houlbrooke, 150, 164. Cited in Susan Snyder, “Mamillius and Gender Polarization in The Winter’s Tale”, 3. Scholars have debated whether early modern medicine believed that men could be transformed into women, or merely “effeminized” (that women could be transformed into men was an acknowledged fact within Renaissance medical theory). For differing points of view, see Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, “Fetishizing Gender: Constructing the Hermaphrodite in Renaissance Europe”, in Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, eds Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub (New York: Routledge, 1991), 84-87; Patricia Parker, “Gender Ideology, Gender Change: The Case of Marie Germain”, Critical Inquiry, XIX (Winter 1993), 337-64. Lemnius, The Touchstone of Complexions, 48-49.


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anything more than a temporary respite. Narratives of the transformation of male bodies into female were the more extreme manifestation of such conceptions. Occupied with black meditations about his wife’s imputed infidelity, and caught with a scowl on his face, Leontes in The Winter’s Tale hastily invents a pretext: Looking on the lines Of my boy’s face, methoughts I did recoil Twenty-three years, and saw myself unbreeched, In my green velvet coat; my dagger muzzled, Lest its should bite its master, and so prove, As ornament oft does, too dangerous.

(1.2.155-60)

Leontes looks across the gap of the years and sees himself – and not just an earlier version of himself, but also, though he denies the similarity, a terrifyingly contemporary version of his own imagined plight, in the situation of his son. Leontes’ paranoid state of mind triangulates between his own childhood before entry into a society influenced by male tutors and the friendship of other boys, his son’s proximity to women, and his own current obsession with what he perceives as the maleficent influence of an ostensibly unruly wife. A renewed separation from femininity proposes itself as the only possible solution – for his son, and for himself. The moment of spatial separation was not understood as a moment of trauma, as in contemporary theories which project an originary trust into the moment of birth, although an excessively precocious separation was thought to be dangerous for the child. On the contrary, the moment of separation was crucial in the passage from childhood into early masculine boyhood. Tragically, however, the happy space of boyhood as masculine coexistence must also, at some point, be left behind in order to attain the next stage of manhood, that of marriage. Here, as Polixenes explains to Hermione, the re-intervention of woman spoils a hitherto undisturbed homosocial community. Temptations have since then been born to’s; for In those unfledged days my wife was a girl. Your precious self had then not crossed the eyes Of my young playfellow.

(1.2.78-82)

Thus masculinity is produced by its extrication from the space of womankind, and yet, upon accession to adulthood, finds itself once again

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entangled with women. The moment of breeching delineated a masculine space, even as that space was defined by its outside, its excluded other. The reintroduction of the feminine to the space of masculinity blurs the boundaries upon which manhood was predicated. This blurring is projected into the masculine obsession with women’s ostensible boundary-breaking as devouring, desiring, chattering, pissing, menstruating creatures. Thus the irruption of women back into the homosocial world of men, an irruption necessary to full manhood, imperils a space of masculinity which is, inevitably, always only secondary. Against all claims to be normative, masculinity defines itself only by separation from a primordial space of femininity. In this configuration, masculinity did not precede femininity, as in the narrative of Eve’s creation from Adam’s rib, but was itself derived from femininity. Within the early modern aristocratic life-narrative, masculinity was literally the environment (in the parlance of systems theory) constituted by the caesura of breeching, the imposition of a boundary delimiting an originary nurturing feminine system. In this context, the inaugural moment of systemic division can be seen as a mystificatory masculist attempt to recast itself as the normative system, and its own maternal origins as the peripheral environment. Thus when Leontes peremptorily orders his son Mamillius to be taken away from his mother and her female attendants (“Bear the boy hence. He shall not come about her” – 2.1.61), thereby inaugurating the moment of breeching, his action is purely reactive. Not just because this separation appears as a puerile form of vengeance upon the wife he regards as adulterous, but because the logic of identity-as-separation meant that a boy’s identity was formed, primarily, by the influence of the mother: “Though he does bear some signs of me, yet you | Have too much blood in him” says Leontes. This influence is construed by Leontes as a form of corruption, and Hermione feels herself to be separated from her son “like one infectious” (2.1.59-60; 3.2.97). Separation from the mother was, in a sense, always already too late. Masculinity could only ever be temporarily rescued from a femininity which never ceased to threaten because it was irrevocably and inevitably prior to manly education. Effeminacy lowered at every turn. Twelfth Night explores from beginning to end the chronological aporia which undermined the early modern gender system as a synchronic structure. In one of the opening scenes, Viola decides to disguise herself as a page and present herself to Olivia. The space she takes up, the long hiatus between boyhood and full adulthood which was coeval with


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apprenticeship or service, represents a deferral of clear chronological gender identity. The crucial word “estate” is placed in a state of suspension: “O that I served that lady, | And might not be delivered to the world | Till I had made mine own occasion mellow, | What my estate is” (1.2.36-40). The suspension of gendered “estate” characterizes the play’s approach to Viola’s gender right through to the final scene. Significantly, this opening instance of the word “estate” is echoed by Feste’s use of the term at in play’s closing song. By virtue of these inaugural and concluding allusions to the canonical ages of man, Shakespeare’s drama evinces an understanding of masculinity as a developmental process. This was a standard trope of early modern medicine science. Lemnius, for example, analysed the six ages of man as diachronic gradations in the quantities of natural heat inhabiting the body, intersected by a synchronic balance of the humours which also determined an individual’s degree of manliness at any one time.43 This developmental model, however, offered closure only at one single stage, that of death, and thus reinforced a sense of manhood as an ephemeral phenomenon. Feste’s song takes up the topoi of the ages of man, demonstrating the fragility of a masculinity based upon a fluid temporal process. His song traces the ages of man, confronting them at each turn with a liquid element (“With a hey, ho, the wind and the rain .... For the rain it raineth every day”) which early moderns would have instinctively categorized as feminine. Feste’s song progresses through three stages. It begins with the “foolish thing” of boyhood, the yard, as yet “vnprofitable for that imploiment for which God and Nature hath ordained it”, namely manly potency.44 Next the song mentions the “closure” of manhood, based upon property and being (the double sense of estate), defined in a gesture of exclusion (“ ’Gainst knaves and thieves men shut their gate”). Finally, Feste arrives at fully-fledged manhood signified by the status of head of the family. Here, however, the fugitive plenitude of masculinity 43 44

Lemnius, The Touchstone of Complexions, 46-47. Helkiah Crooke, MIKPOKO6MO*PA)IA [Microcosmographia]: A Description of the Body of Man. With the Controversies belonging thereto (London, 1615), 212. Here I disagree fundamentally with Susan Dwyer Amussen’s “ ‘The Part of Christian Man’: The Cultural Politics of Manhood in Early Modern England”, in Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England: Essays Presented to David Underdown, eds Susan D. Amussen and Mark A. Kishlansky (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), who claims that sexual prowess played a minimal role in the definition of manhood (214, 218-19, 227). In contrast, Elizabeth Foyster, in Manhood in Early Modern England (London: Longman, 1999) provides considerable evidence for the importance of sexual bragging in the assertion of an adequate masculinity (42-45).

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is once again deferred, reduced to derivative “posturing” by a corrosive liquaeous other: “But when alas I came to wive, | With a hey, ho, the wind and the rain, | By swaggering could I never thrive, | For the rain it raineth every day” (5.1.385-92). What has been acquired upon accession to man’s estate can always be lost again, thus making manhood a permanent state of vulnerability. Masculinity appeared again and again in early modern dramas as temporally and spatially contingent. Its stability was permanently deferred by a primordial maternal threat which meant that manliness, precisely because acquired, could always be lost again. The very fact that the early modern gender system was based upon a process of differentiation vitiated its stability, and appears to have been a driving factor behind the gradual emergence, towards the end of the seventeenth of a novel configuration in which masculinity was understood as a fact of difference.

Productive paranoia Up until now the early modern gender system has been described as being only partially separated from, and thus overtly dependent upon the other produced by its own inaugural division. This residual connection resisted the inaugural difference and thus resulted in an eternal deferral of the system’s stability. This apparently permanent deferral of systemic closure seems to have engendered the sort of crisis evinced in Posthumus’ imprecations following his discovery of Innogen’s ostensible infidelity: “Could I find out | The woman’s part in me – for there’s no motion | That tends to vice in man but I affirm | It is the woman’s part” (Cymbeline 2.5.19-22). The conditional tense which tentatively lays bare the wounding link to the loved other, the unfinished sentence, the enraged attempt to expel all trace of the other from the self – all these discursive strategies are symptoms of an acute systemic instability and a porosity in the systemic boundaries which borders on collapse. Why, then, did the early modern gender system survive for so long and prove so resilient? Cuckoldry, as Posthumus’ rantings might suggest, is an apposite domain in which to search for an answer to this question. In Leontes’ vision of himself before the accession to the world of masculinity, he describes the boy’s dagger, “muzzled, | Lest its should bite its master, and so prove, | As ornament oft does, too dangerous” (The Winter’s Tale, 1.2.158-60). The ability to use the sword is an index of masculinity, and that ability is yet to be acquired. The sword – and the codpiece – are supplements (“ornaments”) designed to draw attention to


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the thing itself, the phallus, the ultimate signifier of masculinity. But the necessity of such supplements suggests that the thing itself is perhaps inadequate. Thus the supplements are not merely indices of the phallus, but more disturbingly, indices of its powerlessness to guarantee masculine power. It is for this reason that Moll Cutpurse’s duel with the gallant Laxton, in Middleton’s and Dekker’s play The Roaring Girl, is so significant. For by maintaining the upper hand thanks to her skilled swordsmanship, Moll proves her possession, symbolically, of the phallus, while her opponent, the appropriately named Laxton (“lacks stones”, that is, testicles) is clearly emasculated: “Call you this a lecherous voyage?” laments the erstwhile seducer (3.1.125). Similarly, if the young boy that Leontes sees in his pretexted ruminations was not able to wield his sword properly, his own phallic sword, it would seem, is none too active. Indeed, where he once had only one muzzled sword, he now has two protuberances of a more humiliating variety, the cuckold’s horns: “Thou want’st a rough pash and the shots that I have”, he muses to his son (1.2.130). The supplement is reversed here into a derisive signifier of ridicule. Worse still, this sword, this supplement, and its variations, may actually damage masculinity rather than buttress it. Bruce Smith wittily observes that in the portrait of Sir Martin Frobisher in the Bodleian Library, the gallant gentleman blithely brandishes a pistol in alarming proximity to his penis.45 In not dissimilar manner, little Leontes’s dagger may also “prove, | As ornament oft does, too dangerous”. Might the obsessive emphasis upon the masculine weapon, and the anxiety, whether real or imagined, about its potential impotence, not possibly have constituted more of an impediment to masculinity than a guarantee of its power? Mark Breitenberg has suggested that the ubiquitous threat of feminine infidelity rendered early modern masculinity doubly dependent upon femininity in that the loss of feminine honour through adultery signified the loss of masculine honour through being cuckolded.46 It is plausible to suggest that this instability constituted, in the last instance, a crippling, self-vitiating underside to masculinity – “so that”, in Constantia Munda’s picturesque image, “thou carriest in thy selfe a walking Newgate vp & downe with thee, thy owne perplexed suspicions like Prometheus vulture is 45 46

Bruce R. Smith, Shakespeare and Masculinity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 31-32. Mark Breitenberg, Anxious Masculinity in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

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alwaies gnawing on thy liuer”.47 The worried reproach of Leontes’ manservant Camillo contextualizes this malignant suspicion of women’s potential infidelity: “Good my lord, be cured | Of this diseased opinion, and betimes, | For ’tis most dangerous” (1.2.298-300) – the question is, for whom? As Leontes has his wife led away to prison, one of the Lords at the court, Antigonus, is more specific: “Be certain what you do, sir, lest your justice | Prove violence, in which the three great ones suffer – | Yourself, your queen, your son” (2.1.129-31). The fear of female infidelity rested upon the debilitating conviction of the impossibility of preventing its occurrence: “for trust me, no wisdome, no craft, no science, no strength, no subtilitie, yea, no pacience sufficeth to enforce a woman, to be true to hir husbande, if she otherwise determine.”48 Male convictions of women’s propensity towards adultery thus possessed the character of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Typically, Master Ford’s understated caution is marked by this proleptic mistrust: “I do not misdoubt my wife, but .... A man may be too confident”; a little later, the proleptic suspicion receives the confirmation it seeks: “God be praised for my jealousy” (The Merry Wives of Windsor, 2.1.175-77; 2.2.297-98). Renaissance dramas are replete with “testing” episodes where female chastity, placed under suspicion by jealous husbands or lovers, is subject to an examination which inevitably finds what it has attributed to “wanton wenches”. Mosby, towards the beginning of Arden of Faversham, virtually confesses the folly of the expectation of feminine infidelity and the way in which it brings about that which it most dreads: now I see That which I ever fear’d and find too true: A woman’s love is as the lightning flame, Which ever in bursting forth consumes itself. To try thy constancy I have been strange. Would I had never tried but lived in hope.

(1.205-10)

Mosby regrets the strategy of testing, aware that it has created the very phenomenon it was designed to forestall; yet in the same breath, he reiterates and so perpetuates the stereotype of female inconstancy whose fallacious character so apparently recognizes. 47 48

Constantia Munda, The Worming of a Mad Dogge: Or, A Soppe for Cerbervs the Iaylor of Hell (London, 1617), 19. Edmund Tilney, A Briefe and Pleasant Discourse of Duties in Marriage, Called the Flower of Friendshippe (London, 1573), [Cviiv].


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In his debate with Camillo over the truth of male suspicion, Leontes claims that no man would provoke such a situation of his own free will: “Dost thou think I am so muddy, so unsettled, | To appoint myself in this vexation? .... Could I do this? | Could man so blench [that is, swerve from the path of right conduct]?” (The Winter’s Tale, 1.2.326-35). It is worth taking his claim, though patently and paranoidly tautological, seriously. In what ways may the self-undermining of masculine power have been entangled with its simultaneous exercise of hegemony? It is possible that “the forgeries of jealousy”, to take Titania’s expression in A Midsummer Night’s Dream (2.1.81) were not merely factitious and fictitious aberrations, but a place in which specific effects were engendered to coherent ends. I suggest that the positive, productive role of this structural paranoia was to defend the boundaries of masculinity and to perpetuate a watchfulness crucial to the survival of the system of early modern manhood. Renaissance drama does appear, on rare occasions, to acknowledge the interdependent character of male subjectivity and its imbrication with femininity – but almost without exception with the exclusive aim of exploiting that dependency at the heart of masculinity. In this context, manhood’s inherent fragility is the motor for its constant regeneration. In Troilus and Cressida, Aeneas comes to the Greeks as an envoy of Hector, to challenge them to a competition with Hector. Hector’s challenge is issued to all the Greeks who have a mistress for whom they are prepared to declare their love not just in the privacy of the bedroom (“That loves his mistress more than in confession | Than truant vows to her own lips he loves, | And dare avow her beauty and her worth | In other arms than hers” – 1.3.266-69) but in the masculine publicity of clashes of (military) arms. Women are thus made a spur to public prowess in battle, by being made the vehicle of a challenge issued by other men. Any man who does not take up the challenge will implicitly incriminate himself by not daring to leave the domain of the woman’s embrace, thereby also running the risk of incurring his own mistress’s contempt for not proving his valour to her. This danger is confronted explicitly in Henry V: “Our madams mock at us, and plainly say | Our mettle is bred out” report the French (3.5.28-29). Even more, however, women become the object of comparison and public competition. Hector declares that “he hath a lady fairer, wiser, truer, | Then ever a Greek did compass in his arms”. This implicit slur upon Grecian women works “to rouse a Grecian that is true in love”, a form of arousal which

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appears to be based as much upon desire for the other man’s woman as upon the debasement of one’s own mistress (1.3.272-76). The intersection of intimate sexual prowess and (aristocratic) public valour, which means that a man’s gaze upon his mistress passes in turn via his opponent’s gaze upon his own mistress, results in the Trojan warrior’s threat of his public word of disparagement. Were the challenge not to be taken up by a worthy opponent, such slander would deem both Greek men and women sexually inadequate: “he’ll say in Troy when he retires | The Grecian dames are sunburnt and not worth | The splinter of a lance” (1.3.279-80). Implicit in the Greeks’ imagined failure to meet in combat with the challenger is not only the inadequacy of their military weapons, but the low prestige of Greek women which is insufficient to stiffen the Greek soldiers’ other penetrative weapon. Both the (passive) sexual attractiveness of the Greek women, and the (active) sexual potency of the Greek men is ridiculed in advance. The domains of sexuality and war are clearly porous, so that masculine performance in one domain is gauged by equivalent performance in the other. Manliness is a coercive structure: “No space is left for a kind of manhood that would not be fighting.”49 Furthermore, the feminine objects which furnish the inner domain of sexuality are paraded in the public domain as reflectors of their owners’ prestige, or devalued as a derisive thrust their owner’s cowardice – or, alternatively, displayed as a goad to excite the opponent to exposure on the battlefield. It is significant that the Trojan Hector uses both his own mistress and his opponents’ respective mistresses as weapons against the Greeks’ honour as lovers and warriors, so that women are not only employed outside of their customary inner domain as a lever to spur on masculine bravery, but women both inside and outside the walls of Troy are deployed against the hapless Greeks. The imagery of trumpet calls and malevolent gossip (1.3.274, 278), two forms of transmission of information over long distances, show to what extent the barriers of domesticity/battlefield and Greek/Trojan are porous, so that the male actor is never safe from the contemptuous gaze of both men and women from both sides of the city walls. Laura Levine has detected a correlative of this pressure to perform (both sexually and theatrically) in many polemical texts dealing with effeminization in the theatre, which spurs men on to demonstrate the reality of their masculinity, by mobilizing “a kind of a priori sense of 49

Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 131, 134.


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powerlessness that springs precisely from the fear that there is no real masculinity, no masculine self”.50 The core of masculine identity appears to be constantly in danger of dissolving if not re-activated or re-enacted in the public sphere or on the stage of the world. Agamemnon confirms this state affairs in accepting the Trojans’ message with the response: “This shall be told our lovers, Lord Aeneas” (1.3.281). Similarly, Ulysses states that man Cannot make a boast to that which he hath, Nor feels what he owes, but by reflection – As when his virtues, shining upon others, Heat them, and they retort that heat again To the first givers.

Achilles concurs that speculation turns not to itself Till it hath travelled and is mirrored there Where it may see itself.

(3.3.93-106)

Ulysses’ discourse on mirroring initially appears to be a critique of masculine narcissism: no man is the lord of anything, Though in him and of him there be much consisting, Till he communicate his parts to others. Not doth he of himself know them for aught Till he behold them formèd in th’applause Where they’re extended – who, like an arch, reverb’rate The voice again; or, like a gate of steel Fronting the sun, receives and renders back His figure and his heat.

(3.3.109-18)

However, Ulysses’ usage of mirroring technology demonstrates how precarious and fleeting masculine prowess can become. His discourse shifts from mirroring images to “mastery”, “applause” or “figure and heat”. The interdependent character of self-reflection is used against Achilles as a cautionary measure. Ulysses intends to persuade him that his fame is diminishing, thereby quelling his mutinous spirit, and by the same token, channelling his unruliness into regained prowess.

50

Laura Levine, Men in Women’s Clothing: Anti-theatricality and Effeminization 1579-1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 8.

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The space of intersubjectivity is thus acknowledged as crucial for the constitution of subjectivity. This intersubjective realm, however, is constructed as a space to be reappropriated constantly so that co-opted others will continue to gratify the ego’s need for confirmation. Masculine prowess must constantly reassert itself by repeated conquest of space, as Ulysses warns: if you give way, Or hedge aside from the direct forthright, Like to an entered tide they all rush by And leave you hindmost; Or like a gallant horse fall’n in the first rank, Lie there for pavement to the abject rear, O’errun and trampled on.

(3.3.151-57)

Ulysses’ imagery is that of a man constantly in danger of being overrun. Time and speed are co-opted in favour of constant expansion. Here the image of the battle determines from the very outset the agonistic character of contact with the desired other, with those who determine the subject’s identity, and, indeed, with oneself. The imagery of the Trojan war pervades all aspects of sexual and amorous relationships, such that interaction with another human being is consistently conceived of in terms of resistance and capitulation, whence Troilus’ question to Cressida, once she confesses her long-enduring love, “Why was my Cressida then so hard to win?” (3.2.113). There may be a further reason, however, for the all-pervasive character of such metaphors of war in love. The state of war typified the ongoing crisis characteristic of early modern masculinity. War provided one of the paradigmatic metaphors for a self-generating masculinity perpetuated by its own suspicion of crumbling boundaries – in the guise of constantly policing the expected transgressions of women, and ongoing competition with other men. By constantly monitoring its own frontiers, early modern masculinity re-enacted the moment of division upon which the gender system was founded. The tragic instability arising out of early modern masculinity’s dependence upon female power can be seen as debilitating, but also, in a paradoxical manner, as productive. Masculinity constantly generated the spectre of its own enemy in a phenomenon reminiscent of Freud’s notion of a repetition compulsion which anxiously goes back to that which it most fears. Paradoxically, that which constantly threatened masculinity with disintegration – the re-entry of womankind into the domain of masculinity constructed by extraction from womankind – became its very principle of self-perpetuation.


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Thus, when Camillo suggests that Leontes is merely imagining or hallucinating Hermione’s infidelity, he ripostes with a massive claim: if her infidelity as he perceives it does not exist, then nothing exists; her infidelity is as obvious as the existence of the earth: Is whispering nothing? Is leaning cheek to cheek? Is meeting noes? Kissing with inside lip? Stopping the career Of laughter with a sigh? .... Is this nothing? Why then the world and all that’s in’t is nothing, The covering sky is nothing, Bohemia nothing, My wife is nothing, nor nothing have these nothings If this be nothing.

(1.2.286-98)

Clearly, Hermione’s infidelity is a matter of existential importance: her imputed actions threaten Leontes in the core of his masculinity, but at the same time, they are the guarantee of that masculinity. He cannot bear the thought that perhaps she is not unfaithful. For were that the case, early modern masculinity would be deprived of its central, if hallucinatory, self-generating mechanism. Early modern masculinity was engendered by a productive dilemma, one in which a paranoid manhood was produced in the very moment of being undermined. Needless to say, this was an uneconomical mode of systemic self-maintenance, wasting energy which could be better spent securing other forms of power. It was certainly one unsuited to a capitalist mode of production concerned to minimize friction in the important domestic sphere of re-production of social relations. This is what Shakespeare’s play, though participating to a great extent in the very structure it probes and interrogates, is beginning to show: that the attempt to preserve the integrity of masculine space by force, is doomed to fail. Conflicting expectations of manhood based upon the mutually contradictory spatial operations of separation and fusion (breeching as the inauguration of adult masculinity and marriage as its fulfilment), and self-fulfilling paranoid prophesies regarding the inherently transgressive character of femininity doubly undermined the very modes of masculinity they brought forth. In the long run, such unwieldy and contradiction-laden structures were an inefficient form of gender production. Rather than forcing apart two genders which social conventions necessarily brought together, and projecting/anticipating the transgression of discrete spaces so as to police a porous border between those genders, inherently polarized gender domains would

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furnish a more tenable illusion of systemic dichotomy and thereby stability. As we shall see, it would become more efficient to create a discursively produced sense of two essentialized blocks, with boundaries perceived as secure, ostensibly producing themselves from within rather than from without. In the final three chapters of this book, I will examine the implications of this notion for femininity. Before moving on to early modern discourses of femininity and its systemic functioning, however, in the next chapter I will read Shakespeare’s Coriolanus as symptomatic of the uneven and contradictory emergence of a discrete male body as the basis for masculine gender. With that body, one of the constitutive elements of the emergent modern gender system will begin to become visible.

CHAPTER 6 Author of Himself: Masculinity, Civility and the Closure of the Body In one of the gruesome plates from Valverde’s Historia del composicion del cuerpo humano of 1556, a flayed figure stands with a bared sword in one hand and its own skin hanging from the other.1 This warrior shows forth his own mutilated body with a theatrical gesture, wielding the weapon of his own self-inflicted agony. His gaze is focused upon the ragged skin he holds out for our inspection; the imprint of his face is still discernible upon that skin, constituting a second gaze which peers eerily beyond the frame of the illustration, not, however, meeting our own. In this obscene play of gazes upon the wounded body, we have a visual vignette which prefigures the gazes cast upon the male body in the early modern theatre. One such play of gazes is dramatized and reflected – literally and conceptually – in Shakespeare’s Coriolanus. Upon returning to Rome after his victory over the city of Corioles, Martius (later to be baptized Coriolanus in commemoration of his conquest) stands for election as one of the Roman consuls. Tradition demands that he present himself to the people, and in order to obtain their votes, that he display his wounds as the visible evidence of his heroism. The language in which this custom is explained is striking. One of the populace explains, “For if he show us his wounds and tell us his deeds, we are to put our tongues into those wounds and speak for them” (Coriolanus, 2.3.5-7). Coriolanus opposes this wish, and in his individual stance against enshrined tradition, creates a forerunner of the individual masculine body as a central element of the modern gender system. In this chapter I will argue that the transformations of the early modern gender system imposed new forms of order upon the masculine body so as to harmonize it with the increasingly efficient workings of the capitalist economy and the public sphere in which the male body was supposed to belong. The emergent gender system evolved to eradicate potential contradictions between the economic system and the male body, achieving this standardization to a large extent, though never 1

The plate from Valverde’s Historia del compsicion del cuerpo humano is reproduced in Jonathon Sawday, The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture (London: Routledge, 1995), fig. 24, between pages 84-85.

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totally, by the beginning of the eighteenth century. The stage registered these new pressures upon the male body, but as an art form indebted to older forms of pageantry and spectacle in which an ostentatious male body was put on display, it could not fail to foreground the interferences and tensions between residual and emergent configurations of what it understood as “manliness”.

Bodily shows, spectacles of possession The election of the consul involves a well-known ritual in which each side plays its part. Underlying that ritual is a curious strand of metaphors which emphasize the bodily connectedness of consul and people. In return for the spectacle of the warrior’s body, the people offer him their tongues, a synecdoche of their voices, in a dramatic figure of corporeal connection. The people’s words in support of the consul are translated here into a direct oral participation in his public corporeal identity. A public man is a public man because, via a gruesome sort of fellatio in his warrior orifices, he voluntarily opens up a collective space shared with those he governs. The warrior’s living body is imagined as public space of collective memory, as in Menenius’s simile of “the wounds his body bears, which show | Like graves i’th’ holy churchyard” (3.3.50-52). Political office is coeval with the body politic, with the body of the public figure being located in a continuum in which distinctions between public and private are irrelevant. In Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great Part 2, we find a dramatic precedent for this ritual. Tamburlaine is attempting to inculcate military masculinity into his sons: View me, thy father, that has conquer’d kings .... And see him lance his flesh to teach you all. He cuts his arm. A wound is nothing, be it ne’er so deep; Blood is the god of war’s rich livery. Now look I like a soldier, and this wound As great a grace and majesty to me .... Come, boys, and with your fingers search my wound, And in my blood wash all your hands at once, While I sit smiling to behold the sight.

(3.2.110-28)

As in Coriolanus, the emphasis is upon the wound as spectacle (“View me”) and as a site of communal corporeal bonding through a literal intermingling of bodies (“with your fingers search my wound”). Both the spectacle and the bodily experience inaugurate the perpetuation of a

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military dynasty (“rich livery”), a version of family not as bounded domestic unit but as the core of a structure of imperial might. Here blood signifies not merely a shared public space (a space all the more public for being acted out upon the stage), but the temporal maintenance of that space, handed down from one generation to another. Celebinus requests, “Give me a wound, father”, and his brother Amyras reiterates, “And me another, my lord ... cut [my arm] bravely, as you did your own” (3.2.131-34). This gory performance of imperial clan power remains valid even when the play goes on to record the collapse of Tamburlaine’s empire. Coriolanus, in contrast to his Scythian predecessor, is surprisingly sensitive about showing his wounds. In this way, Shakespeare’s reluctant hero embodies a precocious attempt to close the body off from its social environment. This attempt is couched in physiological terms, in keeping with the language and content of the ritual, but it has implications for the changing configurations of corporeality in early modern social space. Here we have a body which is, for the first time, no longer accessible to the public eye. This moment heralds the beginnings of the disappearance of the masculine body from public space. Responding to the pressure to conform to the tradition, Coriolanus tries to find a compromise somewhere between spectacular bodily visibility and the incipient retreat of the body of which he is a symptom: “I have wounds to show you which shall be yours in private” (2.3.75-76). With “showing” and “private”, Coriolanus attempt to straddle a division becoming visible in a new way, thus embodying on the early modern stage a paradigm change in modes of bodily experience. It is curious that Coriolanus concedes access to his body in terms of possession (“which shall be yours”), without entirely releasing his body into the public domain (“in private”).2 This odd use of proprietary language indicates that the body itself is in the process of becoming assimilated to the semantic field emerging around the notion of private property, consumer objects which increasingly filled the domestic interiors of early modern England. Coriolanus is incensed at the idea of showing his wounds in return for the people’s votes, “As if I had received them for the hire | Of their breath only!” (2.2.150-51). His 2

My reading of Coriolanus here is indebted to a thought-provoking article by Cynthia Marshall, “Wound-Man: Coriolanus, Gender, and the Theatrical Construction of Interiority”, in Feminist Readings of Early Modern Culture: Emerging Subjects, eds Valerie Traub, M. Lindsay Kaplan and Dympna Callaghan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 93-118.

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definitive refusal to display his wounds represents a retreat from a commerce of bodies in which political favours are procured – significantly, the people await their scarred hero and future consul “on th’ market-place” (2.2.160). Paradoxically, by extracting the body from the realm of common commerce, and placing it in a private space out of reach of interest and monetary processes, the play’s novel insistence upon privacy asserts that the body is now understood as private property, as belonging (with all the attendant ambiguities of that verb) to the private realm and not to the public. Coriolanus is struggling against a paradigm which, in the world presented in the play itself, is still hegemonic, but in the broader context of the theatre, was in the throes of becoming a residual cultural phenomenon. Thus Lartius announces that Rome must know The value of her own. ’Twere a concealment Worse than theft, no less than a traducement, To hide your doings and to silence that Which, to the spire and top of praises vouched, Would seem but modest. (1.10.20-25; my emphasis)

Here the body is clearly understood as public property, part of a spectacular economy in which valour and value are intimately linked. It is this attempt to stake a public claim on the (individual’s) body which Coriolanus resists so vociferously. When Lartius learns that Coriolanus’ wounds may well not be aired before the people, he threatens: “Should they not, | Well might they fester ’gainst ingratitude, | And tent themselves with death” (1.1.0.29-31). “Ingratitude” signifies a selfish withdrawal from an economy which benefits all members of the body politic. Privacy (“tent themselves”) is understood as a retreat from healthful circuits of public circulation which make the recluse a threat to the public welfare. (Later on, Coriolanus’ enemies will describe him as “a disease that must be cut away”, as “gangrened”, and as an “infection, being of catching nature” [3.1.296, 308, 311]). By concealing his wounds, Coriolanus offends against the common weal and the commonwealth, these being understood as the one and the same within the networks of humoural correspondences which link individuals, the polis and the cosmos. This refusal of the economics of the collective body – which goes hand in hand with a proto-capitalist commercialization of all domains of

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social life, including the private3 – is announced in the very event which destines Coriolanus, or Martius, as he is called before his return to Rome, for senatorship. At Corioles the warrior Martius storms in through the city gates – on the stage, presumably the stage doors or the discovery space – leaving his soldiers behind him, and completes his martial task alone and out of sight of the public. To have one’s wounds put upon public display and have one’s actions praised is to become part of a specular regime of a masculinity dependent upon an audience.4 In contrast, Coriolanus’ disappearance is a real disappearance before the eyes of the theatre-going London public. Hidden within the city, Martius concretely figures a roving, individualist masculinity constructed not within the “general economy” of potlatch, spectacle and the gift, but within a “restricted economy” of efficient management of bodily resources.5

Proxemic signs and invisibility The male body itself is a spatial sign on the stage, a representative of the class of bodies of which it a member, a synecdoche for masculine bodies in general. In a play about the public character of political office bearers, the stage itself functioned as a global concrete metaphor for public visibility. There was a long tradition which compared royalty to actors on the stage: “We princes”, Elizabeth had told Parliament in 1586, “are set upon stages in sight and view of all the world”; James repeated that “a King is as one set on a skaffold [later editions of Basilikon Doron replaced scaffold by stages] in whoese smallest actions & gestures al the people gazingly do behold”; Heywood completed the loop in claiming that “we [actors] are men that stand in the broad eye of the world”.6 In the context of Coriolanus’ struggles with the visibility that is expected of him, the public visibility of the actor playing his role itself becomes semanticized as a signifier of central importance. How he appears on the stage thus becomes one of the principal theatrical signs of the play. In 3 4 5 6

See Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). See Jonathon Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 302-303. See, for instance, Georges Bataille, L’Erotisme (Paris: Minuit, 1957). English translation: Eroticism, trans. Mary Dalwood (London: Boyars, 1987). Christopher Hill, A Nation of Change and Novelty: Radical Politics, Religion and Literature in Seventeenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 1990), 106; James I, Basilikon Doron (Edinburgh: Robert Waldegrave, 1599) (Facsimile) (Menston: The Scholar Press, 1969), 121; Thomas Heywood, An Apology for Actors (London, 1612), E3r.

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the wound-display scenes, the senators and tribunes vainly try to reassure a nervous and jumpy Coriolanus that public praise of his scars is a perfectly normal procedure for a hero of his status: First Senator: Sit, Coriolanus. Never shame to hear What you have so nobly done .... Brutus: Sir, I hope My words disbenched you not? Coriolanus: No sir, yet oft When blows have made me stay I fled from words .... Menenius: Pray now, sit down. Coriolanus: I had rather have one scratch my head i’th’ sun When the alarums were struck than idly sit To hear my nothings monstered. Exit (2.2.67-77; my emphasis)

Coriolanus’ exit is an exit from the public space of the theatre. This withdrawal of the body from public scrutiny, a mode of claiming ownership of one’s own body, is expressed in the concrete proxemic language of the stage. The Roman populace from which Coriolanus so brusquely withdraws is also the London audience. The spatial language of retreat is evinced clearly at the end of Act 3, Scene 3 in Coriolanus’ contemptuous words to the masses: “Despising | For you the city, thus I turn my back” .... Exeunt Coriolanus, Comenius and Menenius, with the rest of the Patricians (3.3.137-38). Likewise, almost at the end of the play, when Coriolanus has turned against Rome and is preparing its destruction, he is petitioned by his mother, wife and son. Finding himself weakening before their pathetic requests for mercy, “He rises and turns away”, in the editor’s interpolated stage direction. “Nay, go not from us thus”, pleads his mother, in an example of diegetic redundancy which underlines the importance of the proxemic information conveyed to the audience. Forty lines later, her distraught “—He turns away” repeats this strategy (5.3.132, 169). Coriolanus’ repeated attempts to abscond are not merely exemplifications of a recurring topos of masculine irresponsibility throughout history,7 but far more visual theatrical signifiers of a new mode of bodily experience. With the help of these theatrical signs, the issue of the public as against

7

See Carl Pietzcker, “The Motif of the Man Who, Although He Loves, Goes to War: On the History of Construction of Masculinity in the European Tradition”, in Conceptions of Postwar German Masculinity, ed. Roy Jerome (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 133-70.

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the private character of the body is placed in the here-and-now of the early seventeenth-century theatre.

The rise of civility The spatial codes of onstage presence and offstage absence, one of the fundamental binary oppositions structuring the visual language of the theatre,8 is particularly pregnant with meaning in an era when the rules of etiquette were undergoing radical changes in Europe, and when much of bodily experience was being banished to the realm of the invisible. In an effort to control the civil unrest arising out of an aristocratic ethos of honour centred upon warrior violence, early modern states fostered novel codes of civility which emphasized bodily refinement and gentility as signs of distinction rather than the spectacular confrontations of clan competition. Hand in hand with these new codes of gentility went their coercive counterpart, a novel sense of shame about bodily habitus which contradicted the new ethos. Thus nakedness and the bodily functions increasingly disappeared from public view, thereby creating, by the very act of their relocation, a private realm hitherto unknown. The campaign against violent public masculinity would continue on into the eighteenth century, with the culture of private sensibility explicitly combating libertine or rake discourses and their concomitant public disorder.9 Symptoms of this paradigm shift can be detected in Romeo and Juliet, where the Prince symbolizes the state’s condemnation of destructive internecine conflict between aristocratic clans. The Prince’s rhetoric still evinces an notion of collective organic identity (“My blood for your rude brawls doth lie a-bleeding” – 3.1.188) yet it is precisely this replacement of the clan-clan axis of conflict with that of the clan-state axis which breaks up the solidity of group identity, thus re-orienting 8 9

See Michael Issacharoff, “Space and Reference in Drama”, Poetics Today, II/3 (Spring 1981), 211-24. See Roger Chartier, “Figures of modernity: Introduction” in Passions of the Renaissance, ed. Roger Chartier, trans. Arthur Goldhammer [Vol. III of A History of Private Life, eds Philippe Ariès and Georges Duby] (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1989), 16; Norbert Elias, Über den Prozeß der Zivilisation: Soziogenetische und psychogenetische Untersuchungen (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998), I, 312-23, 354-55. English translation: The Civilizing Process: Sociogenetic and Psychogenetic Investigations, trans. Edmund Jephcott, rev. edn (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000). See also Michael Sonntag, “Das Verborgene des Herzens”: Zur Geschichte der Individualität (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1999). For the post-Restoration context of the taming of disorderly “libertine” behaviour in public, see Graham John Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), in particular Ch. 2: “The Reformation of Male Manners”.

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ethical responsibility along new lines facilitating the emergence of an individualizing ethos of civility. Symptoms of this changing attitude to the body are evinced in the sense of shame which the otherwise not oversensitive Coriolanus displays at the thought of showing his wounds: “I cannot | Put on the gown, stand naked, and entreat [the people] | For my wounds’ sake to give their suffrage.” Likewise, once he has ceded, he grumpily complains: “It is a part | That I shall blush in acting .... To brag unto them ‘Thus I did, and thus’, | Show them th’unaching scars, which I should hide” (2.2.13749).10 Coriolanus is one of the plays exemplifying what Robin Headlam Wells has identified as Shakespeare’s sustained critique of the militant masculinity embodied by the Earl of Essex or Prince Henry, with its generally damaging results for the community as a whole.11 Coriolanus’ warrior pride leads to his own death at the hands of Tullius, and in the last analysis, to Rome’s defeat and occupation by the Volscians. Martius’ pride is seen among his patrician colleagues as a threat to social order (1.2.252ff), with Brutus grumbling, “The present wars devour him! He is grown | Too proud to be so valiant” (1.2.258-59). During the early part of the seventeenth century, concepts of honour among the gentry were shifting. The age saw a gradual transfer of emphasis from dynastic notions of lineage, towards individual notions of civic service, with the relative importance of virtue over lineage expressed with increasing clarity as the seventeenth century took it course. In the words of The Maid’s Tragedy, “virtue shall inherit, and not blood” (2.1.224). Thus Richard Braithwait, in his English Gentleman, exemplified emergent notions of civic virtue in arguing that personal valour is only justified if serves the noble’s country. He criticizes Razis’ self-sacrifice quoted in the Book of Macabees as “an act that tasted more of stoutnesse than of goodnesse. For what could that act of his benefit his Countrey.” In contrast, when a Bohemian soldier at the siege of Belgrade, grappling with a Turkish attacker on the walls, threw himself to his death together with the assailant, “and so (by his owne death onely), 10

11

If Coriolanus’ shame constitutes one index of a private domain in formation, Coppélia Kahn’s assumption of an already extant public/private binarism equivalent to that of our own period, opposing motherhood to war, would appear to be anachronistic – or in the process of being dissolved before it had been formed (“Mother of Battles: Columnia and her Son in Coriolanus”, in Roman Shakespeare: Wounds, Warriors and Women [London: Routledge, 1997], 144-48). Robin Headlam Wells, Shakespeare on Masculinity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

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saved the life of all the City”, he first asked whether such an act of selfsacrifice would entail “any danger damnation to his soule”.12 Here, the self is engaged in an act of public utility, in which the inner virtue of the individual is at stake rather than its public status. This shift was also reflected in the gentry’s waning interest in gaining formal recognition of their status by heralds’ visitations after 1660, and the shift in memorial architecture, as busts with individual figures became a more familiar sight than family tombs with the effigies representing lineage. Thus the idea of honour as one of the defining characteristics of masculinity shifted from the public sphere into the individual sphere, in part under the influence of Puritan moral thought.13 Yet if Coriolanus epitomizes the dangers of aristocratic factions committed to war, he can also be identified, through his rejection of spectacle, with a new civic virtue. In contrast to the polis’ “acclamations hyperbolical” (1.10.50), Coriolanus embodies a new form of political culture, sober and modest, rooted not in the culture of the court, but in a notion of private citizen duty: “I had rather be their servant in my way | Than sway with them in theirs” (2.1.199-200). In this context, it is significant that the conquest of Corioles (Act 1, Scene 5) is achieved alone. The element of individual identity, translated into the protagonist’s spatial enclosure and separation from his fellow troops (“He is himself alone | To answer all the city” – 1.5.22-23), sketches the emergence of a proto-modern monadic identity at the heart of the residual feudal-militaristic configuration. The dramatist is particularly resourceful in his exploitation of the stage space, with the stage doors furnishing the gates of the city of Corioles (“The gates close, and Martius is shut in” – sd, 5.1.17). Simultaneously, however, by virtue of their material character within the architectonic fabric of the London theatre, the stage doors/city gates symbolize the boundaries of a domestic space defining the private citizen identity. Martius emerges a short while later covered in blood but having won “his” battle. This new masculine body is active in the public space, but, paradoxically, no longer constituted through a set of public relationships. It is a private body, nourished in an intimate space, closed to the public eye, which moves out into the public space to operate as a discrete 12

13

Richard Braithwait, The English Gentleman, containing Sundry excellent Rules or exquisite Observations, tending to Direction of every Gentleman, of selecter rank and Qualitie (London, 1630), 143, 144. See Mervyn James, Society, Politics and Culture: Studies in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 308-309, 375-79.

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individual identity. At the same time, however, it is significant that the stage can only represent this new, individualist form of public service by having it take place off-stage: it remains, under the present regime of representation, invisible, unrepresentable, except as a marked absence. In general, the play’s manner of dealing with these paradigm shifts is deeply contradictory. Paradoxically, while Coriolanus embodies the dangers of militant masculinity for the collectivity, he is also the bearer of a new code of gentility and bodily discretion which emerged in opposition to that warlike mentality. If the play mobilizes the humoral model for its critique of militaristic masculinity (as in the elaborate parables of Act 1, Scene one, in which the plebs are the “mutinous members” which rebel against the well-fed patrician “stomach” [1.1.14647]), then Coriolanus represents a disequilibrium in the humoral economy of the whole state: “Being once chafed, he cannot | Be reined again to temperance” (3.3.27-28). Coriolanus is the choleric excess which will be purged in the course of the play’s tragic progress, but only at great cost to the body politic. Yet by the same token, Coriolanus, as the embodiment of individual bodily existence, by definition casts into question the humoral model. The wounds Coriolanus refuses to show exemplify the body as a humoural economy. The imbrication of the humoral system in the topoi of the wounded body is evinced in Marlowe’s Tamburlaine Part 1. Processes of humoral fungibility are exemplified when the dying Persian monarch Cosroe groans, “My bloodless body waxeth chill and cold, | And with my blood my life slides through my wound; ... | The heat and moisture, which did feed each other, | For want of nourishment to feed them both, | Is dry and cold” (2.7.42-43, 46-47). The soldier’s wounds point not to the “impregnability of the male body”, as Coppélia Kahn claims,14 but to the threatening generalized porosity of bodily boundaries (“with my blood my life slides through my wound”). This bodily porosity inevitably tends to insert bodies within a social and cosmic continuum.15 In contrast, at the moment when Coriolanus is expected to participate in the bodily continuum of the polis by displaying his wounds, he retreats into an invisible space guaranteeing the “discretion” of discrete corporeal boundaries. 14 15

Coppélia Kahn, Roman Shakespeare: Wounds, Warriors and Women (London: Routledge, 1997), 153. The physicians’ diagnoses of Tamburlaine’s illness in 2 Tamburlaine 5.3.82-99 confirm that the play is solidly anchored in the Galenic conception of the body and its environs.

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Likewise, the principal language the play uses to represent this public space of communal bodily existence is that of theatrical spectacle. In the spectacle, the body enters the public domain as a visible entity. The refusal of bodily spectacle at the heart of the dramatic undertaking is thus deeply contradictory. For while the drama rejects militarism as a broader phenomenon, its stage equivalent must be maintained as it is indispensable for the theatrical performance itself. In this way the drama foregrounds in the very fabric of its own representational means, acute tensions within the early modern gender system.

Blood as a spatial sign Yet there is another aspect of Coriolanus’ striving to maintain bodily discretion which is coeval with his distaste for vulgar display of his wounds: namely, his attempts to distance himself from features of femininity with which, in the last analysis, he is inextricably tangled. The spatial sign of the actor’s bodily presence on stage or absence offstage concretizes the sealing-up of the masculine body. Similarly, one other prominent theatrical sign signals the impossibility of disentangling masculinity from its constitutive opposite. That sign is blood, along with skulls and other similarly gruesome props one of the favourite stage effects used on the early modern stage. The effectiveness of blood lies in its iconic value (pig’s blood, the usual variety used for stage bloodbaths in the early modern theatre, was, of course, blood), in its metaphorical capacity to replace a death which cannot be shown on stage, but also in its non-mimetic semiotic functioning. As an index, blood is a pointer (its power to capture the horrified fascination of spectators is unparalleled), a sign of causality both deductive (the trace of a wound, of death) and temporal (the lingering traces of a life no longer lived, of a body no longer seen). As metonymy, it signifies the relations between inner and outer (the transgressive sign of the body’s inner workings), as a synecdoche, of part to whole (as a signifier of a battle whose entire dimensions would exceed the stage’s representational capacities). Blood as a spatial signifier thus possesses a multiplicity of spatial modes of functioning. Icons and metaphors cover, and, paradoxically, therefore displace or repress their referents; metonymy and indexes are linked to their referent by contiguity; synecdoche is contained by or contains its referent. Blood therefore signifies various spatial relationships between the body and itself or other bodies in its environment. It is this multiplicity of spatial

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signifying functions on the stage that can go to explain the deeply ambivalent value of blood in Coriolanus. Constant diegetic (or verbal) overlaying of the visual signifiers help the audience decode the various meanings of the “mute” blood which is repeatedly emphasized by the stage directions: “Enter Martius, bleeding, assaulted by the enemy”, “Enter Martius, bloody” (1.5.32; 1.6.3; 1.7.21). Blood functions as a spectacle of masculinity, as Volumnia, Coriolanus’ mother, enthuses: “It more becomes a man | Than gilt his trophy” (1.3.41-42). The spectacular element should alert us to the humoral dimension blood, to which even Martius subscribes. When his comrade Lartius urges him to withdraw from the battle (“Worthy sir, thou bleed’st”) Martius brushes him off with a brusque reply: “My work hath not yet warmed me .... | The blood I drop is rather physical | Than dangerous to me” (1.6.14-19). Here war figures as a purge for the body, restoring the balance of the humours through “physic”, and placing combat back in the Galenic realm of porous corporeality intimately connected to environs. More significantly, blood signals the warrior’s submission to maternal influence. When Martius returns to Rome to be confronted with the praise of the people and their expectant gaze, his mother is part of this vocal-occular threat to his bodily integrity: “My mother, | Who has a charter to extol her blood, | When she does praise me grieves me” (1.10.13-15). The mother, like the populace, claims ownership to this extension of her body, this offspring of her blood. The play presents people and mother as parallel agents of a bodily continuum Coriolanus wants to avoid at all costs. In the second half of the action, Volumnia snaps at her son, “Do as thou list. | Thou valiantness was mine, thou sucked’st from me, | But owe thy pride thyself” (3.2.128-30). Thus blood, in keeping with Galenic medicine, is a signifier related to the mother’s milk: “milk useth to be made exactly from bloud”; “blood is sweet, and in a manner of the relish and taste of milk, because it is much like and of kin unto it.”16 Volumnia imposes a clear line of matrilinear productivity, in which masculine valour is owed to the maternal side of parenthood. Clearly, despite all his efforts to the contrary, Coriolanus is still enclosed within the world of humoral identity as evinced in his command to himself, “Away my disposition” (3.2.111). Inherently part of this humoral conception of selfhood is the “influence” of feminine

16

Levinus Lemnius, The Secret Miracles of Nature (London, 1658), 310; The Touchstone of Complexions, 140.

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dispositions both within and outside the self, an influence which is being disputed by an emergent form of bodily autonomy in this play. The maternal figure is identified here as the proximate aspect of a humoral collective body. Here we observe the proto-modern emergence of a later discourse of the “suffocating mother” – a discourse, I would argue, which it is anachronistic to discover in the early modern context,17 except in a very shadowy prototypical form. It is only with the full development of discourses of bodily autonomy evidently still in their infancy at this stage, that the discursive framework necessary to and underlying notions of “maternal suffocation” will be fully formed. Rather, this aversion to fusion with the mother is more clearly related to the extant discourse of separation in the custom of breeching, which then can be seen to gradually coalesce into a later discourse of maternal domination. Here, however, the maternal presence is still read as an adjunct of the collective body, and this, primarily, is what Coriolanus rejects – whence, for instance, the refusal of the “womanish toge” (2.3.115), perhaps reminiscent of the childhood “coats” which boys gave up when they left the maternal world for the world of tutors and apprentice swordsmanship. It is not by chance, then, that Coriolanus, through the agency of the public discourse which he so dreads, and which obliges him “To hear my nothings monstered” (2.2.77), finds himself strangely feminized: others’ discourse causes him give birth to monsters where his wounds were once mere “nothings”, that is, of no account, but at the same time, by their “nothingness”, dangerously close to the “lack” of the feminine genitalia 17

See, for instance, Janet Adelman, Suffocating Mothers: Fantasies of Maternal Origin in Shakespeare’s Plays (London: Routledge, 1992). Similar risks involved in the utilization of object-relations theoretical approaches such as the pioneering work of Nancy Chodorow in The Reproduction of Mothering: Psychoanalysis and the Sociology of Gender (London: University of California Press, 1978). The use of such approaches entails an anachronistic “ethnocentrism” regarding our own past. Hans Bosse’s ethnological study of adolescent separation from feminine figures among the contemporary Sepik-River people in Papua New Guinea (which also includes a consideration of the ways the erosion of traditional social structures also aggravate these separation processes) offers an interesting parallel to the “historical ethnology” of European society’s own changing patterns of gender separation crystallizing in emerging differentiation of the genders. See “Die Trennung vom Weiblichen: Rituelle und moderne Formen der Vermännlichung bei Adoleszenten”, in Männlichkeitsentwürfe: Wandlungen und Widerstände im Geschlechterverhältnis, eds Hans Bosse and Vera King (Frankfurt am Main: Campus, 2000), 51-70. A cogent polemic against the imposition of modern gender patterns upon early modern cultural artefacts can be found in Phyllis Rackin, “Historical Difference/Sexual Difference”, in Privileging Gender in Early Modern England, ed. Jean R. Brink (Ann Arbor: Sixteenth Century Studies, 1993), 3763.

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(as in the title of Much Ado About Nothing, which refers to Hero’s ostensibly sullied “nothing”, the central bone of contention in the play about lost virginity; or in Shakespeare’s homoerotic Sonnet 20, which rejects women as “to my purpose nothing”). This strain of feminine metaphorics emerges again when Volumnia, counselling her petulant son to speak soothing words to the hated but mutinous plebeians, recommends her son adopt the required tone as a “bastard” discourse, not true, but none the less “born” of the speaker: “such words | That are but roted in your tongue, though but | Bastards and syllables of no allowance | To your bosom’s truth” (3.2.55-58). Shortly after, having been persuaded by his mother, Coriolanus sulkily agrees to return to the people to repair the damage done to his consulship by his prior refusal to show his wounds. Expressing his sense of alienation from the role he is expected to play, he associates himself becoming a common actor (a recurring topos in the play, in 3.2.105, 109-10, and later at 5.3.40-42) with prostitution: “Away my disposition; and possess me | Some harlot’s spirit” (3.2.111-12). The turning-away remarked upon above has a parallel in Coriolanus’ rejection of the links of blood. These two forms of rejection come together when Coriolanus swears, “My birthplace hate I, and my love’s upon | This enemy town” (4.4.23-24). The mother-body and the collective space of the polis are condensed, in an attempted escape from the masculine body as a mere synecdoche of a restraining matrix (personal and social). Coriolanus’ desire to “stand | As if a man were author of himself | And knew no other kin” (5.3.34-37) is tantamount to a denial of the origins, maternal and social, which have brought him into the world and which the humoral worldview insists upon perpetuating. He inherits Marlowe’s “I disdain to have any parents” (Doctor Faustus, 2.1.116). “Necessity”, Corolanus boldly claims, “Commands me name myself” (4.5.57-58), thus constituting the individual body as its own origin, diachronically, and thus as self-generating and in consequence synchronically independent. As a self-referential being, he is paradigmatic of the emergent individual as a newly differentiated organic-psychic system. Interestingly in this context, Niklas Luhmann writes: By Descartes’s time, medieval scholastic debate had settled one thing about the individuality of the individual: individuality cannot be defined by pointing to some special quality of the individual in counterdistinction to other qualities; it is not something given to the individual from the outside.

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An individual itself is the source of its own individuality; the concept of individuality therefore has to be defined by self-reference.18

In the end, however, Coriolanus cannot deny the organic, bodily link to the mother, whom he describes as “the honoured mould | Wherein this trunk was framed” (5.3.22-23). He thus admits his place within a somatic continuum, just as he admits his place within an elemental continuum: “I melt, and am not | Of stronger earth than others” (5.3.28-29). The play insists, through to the closing imagery it uses to describe its unfortunate protagonist, on squeezing him back into the metaphorical frameworks of collective corporeality from which he has struggled to escape. It is as if Shakespeare creates a character who sketches out, in terms as yet imprecise, an individual body to come, while relentlessly figuring his identity in the language of the dominant humoral paradigm. It is equally paradoxical that the new ethics of shame is figured through an arrogant aristocratic warrior masculinity, when in actual fact this was precisely the form of belligerent social conflict which the new codes of gentility set out to combat, thus forcing manifold aspects of bodily existence back into a private domain constituted by the selfsame impulse of shame. Doubtless, however, the new mode of pacific gentility was not yet culturally powerful enough to bear the dramatic weight of a role which it was only just beginning to assume: certainly public opinion was not entirely in favour of the new docility, as John Chamberlain’s caustic comments on attempts to control the most prominent form of unsanctioned aristocratic violence in Jacobean England, duelling, indicated. On 17 February 1614 Chamberlain wrote: “This week here came forth a long proclamation with a book annexed of reasonable bulk, against challenges and duels, which seems a curious piece of work, and though at first it was commonly attributed to Sir Frau. Bacon, yet by that little I have read of both, I did quickly acquit him, and did easily discern that it came from some higher hand.”19

18

19

Niklas Luhmann, “The Individuality of the Individual: Historical Meanings and Contemporary Problems”, in Reconstructing Individualism: Autonomy, Individuality and the Self in Western Thought, eds Thomas C. Heller, Morton Sosna and David E. Wellerby (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 314. The Chamberlain Letters: A Selection of the Letters of John Chamberlain Concerning Life in England from 1597 to 1626, ed. Elizabeth McClure Thomson [(ondon: John Murray, 1966), 130. The higher hand referred to was James, who issued proclamations against duelling and led a campaign to divert gentry disputes into the courts; but in 1615, the Star Chamber, under Bacon’s guidance, did unanimously issue a condemnation of duelling. See Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558-1641 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 242-50; Kiernan, The Duel in European History, 78-88.

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This uneasy situation on the turbulent fault line between hegemonic and emergent gender systems is evinced not only in the play’s use of humoral concepts or its mobilization of notions of femininity. More radically, its own status as theatre is foregrounded as the site of irresolvable tensions. Coriolanus associates repentance before the populace (with its implied concomitant of showing his wounds to a spectator-people – 3.2.105, 109-10) and subsequently the admission of ill-concealed feelings of family kinship (with the associated notion of somatic, organic connection – 5.3.40-42) with the profession of the common actor. In this way, the play gestures towards its own situation within a tradition of public spectacle designed to take effect upon the body politic. At the same time, the drama is groping towards the articulation of a somatic-discursive paradigm shift whose full expression is precluded by its own artistic structure. The theatre itself condemns to invisibility the emergent private identity it portrays, and, in the character of Coriolanus, condemns it to inevitable tragic failure. For although the actor is a private man, of course, somewhere else, by definition he cannot perform that private role in public (for then he would no longer an actor, but simply himself). The very medium of its portrayal means that the private masculine body will, at this stage of its dramatic representation, remain an emergent entity. In a significant episode towards the end of the play, Coriolanus reproaches his mother: “Why did you wish me milder? Would you have me | False to my nature?” His accusation exemplifies the stereotypical Renaissance trope according to which women’s influence womanizes men and alienates their manliness. Then he concludes: “Rather say I play | The man I am.” But Coriolanus’ reference to masculinity as acting opens a breach for Volumnia’s subsequent taunt, which singles out masculinity as a form of performance: “You might have been enough the man you are | With striving less to be so” (3.2.13-19). This short exchange condenses many of the concerns touched upon in this chapter. In the early modern gender system, masculinity was inextricably linked to its constitutive other, thus delivering it up to permanent instability. This in turn condemned men to a permanent striving to attain an impossible ideal of manhood – and opened them up the charge of merely performing manliness. What is the solution to this dilemma? The answer is very simple: Stop acting. This demand, curiously, was met by the closure of the theatres in 1642. When they re-opened, at the Restoration, men and women performed on the stage what they biologically were: men and women.

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Only decades before, when George Sandys visited theatres in Sicily, “where the parts of women are acted by women”, such a spectacle could be qualified as “too naturally passionated”.20 Coriolanus’ quip, “I play | The man I am”, likewise anticipates on this “natural” dramaturgy of the Restoration. At the same era, male fashion would increasingly move towards the discrete, modest three-piece suit, which announced the modern effacement of the masculine body.21 The natural body, the unspectacular body, is at the same time a body which is no longer acting – a body which simply is, intrinsically and undeniably, masculine. The body being left behind is exemplified in Holbein’s 1536-37 portrait of Henry VIII. Royal manliness is connoted by the enormous shoulders, the hands defiantly at the sword-belt, the legs akimbo, and the prominently displayed codpiece.22 The protruding codpiece, significantly, is not Henry’s penis, and does not, perhaps, even allude to it directly. Rather it is a more distant metonymy of the monarch’s political power and virility. With the disappearance of the codpiece, the metonymy of masculine habitus cedes to the invisible, but natural sexual organ itself, endowed with a new and absolute ontological status. Exemplary of this phenomenon, and in marked contrast to its predecessor, would be Charles II’s penis, praised by the Earl of Rochester as “the sauciest prick that e’er did swive”.23 Because the male sexual organ is itself and nothing else, it can function as guarantor of masculine gender without need for ostentatious display.24 Analogous to the transformation of bodily masculinity as described here, Thomas King traces a chiasmic development of forms of masculinity from the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries. What was understood as effeminacy in the seventeenth century – an excessive proximity to women, a contemptible love of home comforts – was recoded as the privacy of the private man of the age of sensibility. Conversely, the spectacular public body of aristocratic masculinity understood as being normative in the 20 21 22 23 24

George Sandys, Relation of a Journey begun Anno Dom. 1610 (London, 1615), 245-46 (my emphasis). See David Kuchta, “The Semiotics of Masculinity in Renaissance England”, in Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images, 244-45. See Andrew Belsey and Catherine Belsey, “Icons of Divinity: Portraits of Elizabeth I”, in Renaissance Bodies: The Human Figure in English Culture c. 1540-1660, 12-13. “A Satyr on Charles II”, The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, ed. David Veith (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1968), 61. In an immensely entertaining chapter entitled “In Hiding and On Display”, Susan Bordo describes the contemporary demise, beginning in the 1990s, of three centuries of elision of the penis (The Male Body: A New Look at Men in Public and Private [New York: Frarrar, Straus and Giroux, 1999], 15-35).

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seventeenth century became the effeminate ostentatious body of the fop or the molly in the eighteenth century. This chiasmic reversal of the masculine value of public and private is symptomatic of manner in which the collective category of “public men”, as it emerged in the eighteenth century, marked a historical discontinuity from the “public representativeness” of particular men (aristocrats) in an earlier, traditional society. The public legitimacy of men qua men in the eighteenth century was represented as founded on their “privacy” ... originating in the intimate sphere of the conjugal family.25

The privacy of the family as the ground for modern public man and his inward subjectivity were isomorphic with the privacy of the male sexual organs (his private parts) as the essence of the inherent masculinity of men. This new body (in contrast to the public man it bears) was withdrawn from the public eye, extracted from interactions which constituted it but also rendered it dependent upon its Others, thus allowing its emergence as “author of itself”, as an essence whose origin was its own inalienable identity, a “necessity | [which] Commands me name myself” (Coriolanus, 4.5.57-58). At the historical moment of its more effective differentiation from its environment, to return to systems theory, the masculine body initiated the process of its own autopoesis – a process astonishingly stable, for it marks the gender system still largely hegemonic today. This, then, is the impossible, as yet inarticulate project embarked upon by Coriolanus. The play therefore announces, but cannot yet genuinely attain, the differentiation of a masculine body whose more sharply defined contours would better equip it to resist the ostensible onslaughts of female power, the subject of the following chapter.

25

Thomas A. King, “Displacing Masculinity: Edward Kynaston and the Politics of Effeminacy”, in Images of Manhood in Early Modern Literature: Viewing the Male, 120-21.

CHAPTER 7 Leaky Vessels: Femininity, the Humoral Economy and Systemic Boundaries

Early modern social theory insisted upon the weakness of women. The temperamental body, whether male or female, was a turbulent entity communicating with the world around it and therefore prone to unpredictable fluctuations in its own humoral economy. Human subjects could, to some extent at least, exercise a degree of influence upon that economy if they possessed the necessary self-knowledge and the requisite strength of will.1 However, some human subjects, women in the main, were endowed with cold and moist temperaments, and were characterized by softer flesh, less will-power, and mental lability (mollities). To women were attributed changeable traits such as deceit, inconstancy, lack of stamina and self-control, or infidelity. Moreover, the uterus was also thought to have a detrimental effect on women’s rationality, making them more prone to passion and violence.2 Helkiah Crooke, in his extremely popular Microcosmographia, stressed that “from the impotencie and weaknes of their mind, ... [women] are not able to lay a law vpon themselues .... the imaginations of lustfull women are like the imaginations of bruite beastes which haue no repugnancie or contradiction of reason to restrain them”.3 Likewise, Lemnius rehearsed self-evident notions in claiming that daily examples testify that women are subject to all passions and perturbations ... [women’s rage] proceeds from weaknesse of mind, and lack of judgement in women, whence it happens that a woman enraged, is besides her selfe, and hath not power over her selfe, so that she cannot rule her passions, or bridle her disturbed affections, or stand against them with force of reason and judgement.4

Sir Thomas Wright made connections between women’s “temperament” or humoral temperature, and their flaws of character: “Neyther are they 1 2

3 4

See Michael C. Schoenfeldt, Bodies and Selves in Early Modern England. See Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 42. Helkiah Crooke, MIKPOKO6MO*PA)IA, 276. Levinus Lemnius, The Secret Miracles of Nature (London, 1658), 273-74.

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so prone to incontinency as men, for lacke of heate ... yet foure passions greatly possesse them; pride, ... Envie ... detraction. The fourth most protrite and manifest unto the worlde, is thei Inconstancie.”5 Martin Day claimed that the “woman hath euer beene more inclining to the Libertine, then the man, ... euen to that height of freedomee, that in many causes they are reputed lawlesse”.6 These examples could be extended ad infinitum. Such commonplaces were so frequent that they had the status of self-evidence among early modern people. The discourse of the weakness of women served to buttress and legitimize discrimination against them. Women’s ostensible subjection to passion was the ground for barring them from education, from leadership, whether in the family or in the state, and from social and political self-determination. Yet notions of women’s uncontrollable passions posed and equal and opposite problem for the male beneficiaries of the power monopoly. For if masculinity and femininity were heavily implicated in one another within the early modern gender system, if “The honour of the husband dependeth on the wife”, in the succinct formulation of Dod and Cleaver,7 meaning that male prestige depended upon female chastity and submission, then women’s lack of reason posed a permanent threat to men. The characteristics early modern patriarchy deemed to be typically feminine inevitably rebounded upon patriarchy itself. This chapter traces the transformation of the spatial paradigms that underlay notions of femininity in the early modern period. I begin with a consideration of the ways in which Renaissance conceptions of women’s bodies logically implied a porosity of boundaries dangerous for male dominance.8 I go on to suggest that in so far as the theatre was structured by common notions of feminine nature, it could not but dramatize the aporia of such notions for the generalized masculine will to power.

5 6 7 8

Sir Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Mind (London, 1604), 40-41. Martin Day, A Mirror of Modesty (1621) in A Monument of Mortality (London 1630), 8 [A5v]. John Dod and Robert Cleaver, A Godly Forme of Household Government (London, 1612), L4r. Modern avatars of this doubled-edged notion can be found today. See, for instance, Margrit Shildrick, Leaky Bodies and Boundaries: Feminism, Postmodernism and (Bio)Ethics (London: Routledge, 1997).

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Fantasies of incontinence The early modern gender system used a systemic code which governed the range of selections available for information input: “hot/cold”, “dry/moist”, “retention/incontinence”. However, because they were drawn from the micro-macrocosmic worldview and its humoral physiological conceptions, which were fundamentally inimical to a compartmentalized universe, this code was not conducive to the clear definition of systemic boundaries. This type of horizon of selection was thus inadequate to guarantee the system’s autopoesis. The other discursive and non-discursive strategies which buttressed the early modern gender system (religious authority and brute force) experienced dwindling legitimation. Faced with an in increasingly evident set of aporia generated by its own dysfunctional systemic self-perpetuation, the early modern gender system would be obliged, in the long run, to adapt its horizon of selection in order to eradicate its own chronic, selfinduced instability. Under changing socio-economic conditions, those of developing capitalism, new configurations of systemic coherence made themselves manifest. In early modern thought, feminine honour was predicated upon spatial notions of closure. The ideal of feminine chastity was that of a hermetically sealed space reserved for a single man, the husband. Braithwait described the chaste woman as “an excellent impregnable fortresse”.9 Henry V imagines “cities turned into a maid – for they are all girdled with maiden walls that war hath never entered” (5.2.318-19). Cymbeline refers to the “firm | ... walls of [Innogen’s] dear honour” (2.1.61-62). In the words of Braithwait, “chastity is an inclosed Garden; and by no licentious foote to be entred”.10 Such hortus conclusus tropes gained hegemonic cultural status by their prominence in the famous Ditchley portrait of the Virgin Queen Elizabeth.11 Here the world of feminine honour, secured by the impermeability of physical boundaries, remains intact, and with it, the integrity of the kingdom. Such images of the body politic merely mark one end of a macro-microcosmic continuum whose other pole was the family. Yet the very formulation of such boundary tropes assumed and feared transgression. Such limits were predicated upon the threat posed by the predatory man, but far more by the lascivious woman themselves, “that 9 10 11

Richard Braithwait, The English Gentlewoman (London, 1631), 43. Ibid, **2v. See Roy Strong, Portraits of Queen Elizabeth I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1963), 15.

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imperfect piece of Nature | ... woman, unsatiate Woman”.12 On the one hand, as we saw earlier, this attitude was related to generalized structures of masculine paranoia which saw feminine infidelity everywhere. The plots of Much Ado About Nothing, The Winter’s Tale and Othello are all constructed upon the capacity of jealous men to conjure up groundless scenarios of wifely adultery. On the other hand, paradoxically, the sentiments expressed by jealous men are structural to the artistic context in which they are embedded. The drama, while ostensibly condoning rigid boundaries, never fails to exploit the dramatic value of transgressed limits – and the deep apprehensions associated with such transgression. Drama depends, like all narrative texts, as Lotman has suggested, upon the transgression of extant epistemological topographies in order to make a story in which something happens – a story worth telling.13 Early modern drama oscillated between arousing and stilling the fears and the fantasies of both men and women: masculine fear of and feminine fantasies of women’s autonomy and mobility, masculine desire for and feminine utopian denial of the male control over wives’ and daughters’ daily existences. Itself a rapidly developing social system with its own self-perpetuation constantly in mind, the theatre was not above presenting narratives which ran counter to those favoured by the early modern gender system. The topos of bodily incontinence was widespread in the early modern era. The female body was imagined (primarily by men) as defined by its absence of effective boundaries, its tendency to evade the limits set by masculine control. Medical theories of the Galenic school did not necessarily have much support among the general population, or in all parts of Europe,14 but this appears to be a trope which was common to academic medical theory and popular notions of physiology. One early modern book of medicinal recipes spoke of menstruation as “the

12

13

14

Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, The Woman-Hater, in The Works of Beaumont and Fletcher, ed. Alexander Dyce (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1970), I, 40 (3.1; no line numbers in this edition). Jurij Lotman, The Structure of the Artistic Text, trans. Gail Lenhoff and Ronald Vroon (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan/Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, 1977), 305ff. See Janet Adelman, “Making Defect Perfection: Shakespeare and the One-Sex Model”, in Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage, eds Viviana Comensoli and Anne Russell (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 26-39; Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, “Fetishizing Gender: Constructing the Hermaphrodite in Renaissance Europe”, in Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, eds Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub, 88.

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flooding of the courses”.15 When Helkiah Crooke reported extreme cases of such “flooding”, such as “a dropsie Woman, whose Nauell in a tempestuous night, when she thought little of it, opened, whereout flowed a great streame of water [whose] spirits [were] almost spent by reason of the sudden and immoderate euacuation”,16 his description only served to reinforce notions of the female body as inherently saturated and porous. The topos of incontinence has been investigated in detail by Gail Kern Paster in The Body Embarrassed, so there is little need to go over the same ground at great length. None the less I begin with this topos because it provides the master metaphor for two other topoi of feminine “incontinence” in the early modern period which had real socio-political consequence: talkativeness and infidelity. Such images of incontinence frequently occur in the dramas. On occasions they are contained in mere passing quips, as in Gonzalo’s description of the ship as being “as leaky as an unstanched wench” (The Tempest, 1.1.46). Elsewhere these concepts structure entire scenes, as in Mistress Allwit’s lying-in chamber in Middleton’s A Chaste Maid in Cheapside: 3 Gossip: See gossip and she lies not in like a countess; Would I had such a husband for my daughter. 4 Gossip: Is she not toward marriage? 3 Gossip: O no sweet gossip. 4 Gossip: Why, she’s nineteen? 3 Gossip: Ay that she was last Lammas, But she has a fault gossip, a secret fault. 4 Gossip: A fault, what is’t? 3 Gossip: I’ll tell you when I have drunk. 4 Gossip: Wine can do that, I see, that friendship cannot. 3 Gossip: And now I’ll tell you gossip – she’s too free. 4 Gossip: Too free? 3 Gossip: O ay, she cannot lie dry in her bed. 4 Gossip: What, and nineteen? 3 Gossip: ’Tis as I tell you gossip. (2.3.101-15)

After the gossips have gone, Allwit says “Hyda, a looking glass [chamber pot]; they have drunk so hard in plate, | That some of them had need of other vessels” (3.2.201-202). The scene continues: 15

16

The recipe book of Anne Glyd (1656), cited in Women’s Worlds in Seventeenth-Century England: A Sourcebook, eds Patricia Crawford and Laura Gowing (London: Routledge, 2000), 31. Crooke, MIKPOKO6MO*PA)IA, 92.

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BODIES AND THEIR SPACES Allwit: What’s here under the stools? Davy: Nothing but wet sir, some wine split here belike. Allwit: Is’t no worse thinkst thou?

(3.2.220-22)

The daughter’s “fault”, which is revealed as being generic to the gossips, inverts the sadistic thrill of the erotically desired “cut” thematized earlier in the play by Lady Kix (2.1.138), making it a flaw, a dysfunction of the body. This representation of an aspect of the female body perceived as repellent instead of erotic is reinforced in the following scene, when Maudlin Yellowhammer’s son Tim arrives from Cambridge with his tutor, and is enthusiastically welcomed by the neighbourhood gossips gathered around the christening bed. Tim receives a kiss from lady Kix, and revolted, he cries, “O this is horrible, she wets as she kisses; | Your handkercher sweet tutor, to wipe them off, as fast as they come on .... This is intolerable!” (3.2.184-89). This body is, by definition, uncontrollable. Such topoi of incontinence remain within the logic of feminine weakness. Yet Middleton is very aware that stereotypes of feminine incontinence contained the potential for reversal – or indeed, were perhaps so prevalent in order to combat a perceived potential for eluding masculine control. The topoi of leakiness erase conscious feminine agency, but cannot quite elide other forms of agency of a more disturbing nature. In A Chaste Maid, the gathering of women celebrates the arrival of a new child; it is a gathering at which Allwit and Sir Walter Whorehound, the husband and father respectively, are only marginally present, making their exits with comparative haste. The proximity of birth, the volume of female communication, the anxiety about spilt wine or urine or menstrual secretions, are all stereotypes indicative of masculine anxiety about a loss of patriarchal control. Typical masculine sanctions such as cloistering femininity or degrading it to the level of contemptible common property (as with ostensibly insatiable female desire, labelled as whoredom) are impotent here. The priority of fluidity in this scene means that the feminine community cannot be divided against itself, or individuals punished. The negative topoi of incontinence are evaluated positively: the daughter’s incontinence forms the basis for communication and seals the bonds of community; the act of drinking furnishes a concrete symbol of the flow of feminine communication; and the mode of communication is foregrounded through the persistent phatic reiteration of the form of address “gossip”. It is precisely the allusions to the common experience of child-birth or menstruation,

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reflected in the collective activities of drinking and gossiping, which create a cohesive identity from which males are excluded. Here then was a feminine community which appeared quite self-sufficient and impervious to men, constituting a domestic space not under masculine control.17 That the notion of incontinence readily contained the potential for its own sabotage is indicated by masculine narratives which, in a further turn of the screw, re-appropriate feminine incontinence in the interests of male power. Heywood tells a story of a farmer gaining revenge on a Friar who seduced his wife by inviting the priest to dinner and serving him a bowl of wine, which, it transpires, is his wife’s urine; so female bodily fluids are manipulated by the farmer so as to reassert male conjugal mastery and possession.18 In this way, the unsettling perspective of female mobility beyond the powers of masculine control, focused upon and simultaneously defused by the topoi of incontinence, are recuperated at a second level for a masculine narrative of male regulation of female sexuality. The danger for patriarchal power here, however, was purely at a symbolic level. It was none the less a field of discursive contestation because the topos of incontinence provided the metaphorical underpinning for two other domains of concrete gender struggle, both of which are alluded to in the gossips episode in A Chaste Maid.

“A flood of words” The first of these domains of gender politics was that of the stereotype of talkativeness. Heywood wondered “Why women were more apt to talk, and for the most part, make a greater & lowder noise than men?”.19 In Jonson’s Epicoene, an astounded Truewit says, “How these swabbers talk!”; “Ay”, explains Clerimont, “Otter’s wine has swelled their humours above the spring-tide” (4.4.141-43). Clerimont’s quip points to the causal connection, within the humoral context, between women’s loquacity and their liquescent disposition. The two paradigms of porose orifices – verbal and urinary – were frequently collapsed, as in Jonson’s Volpone. “Another flood of words! a very torrent!” exclaims the protagonist, horrified at the thought of being cooped up with the talkative Lady Would-be (Volpone, 3.4.64). Jonson’s characters exaggerate their dismay 17 18 19

Gail Kern Paster, The Body Embarrassed: Drama and the Disciplines of Shame in Early Modern England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993), 47. Thomas Heywood, A Curtaine Lecture (London, 1637), 173-80. Ibid, 172.

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to comic ends, but they evince the masculist humoral conception of women translated into discursive terms. Early modern thought saw a direct link between women’s inability to contain humoral secretions and their inability to keep a secret. Thomas Wright attributed to England’s cold, moist climate a tendency on the part of its inhabitants to “reveal and disclose themselves very familiarly and easily”; by analogy, women’s “lack of heat” and the “tenderness of their complexion” meant that their “passions may easily be discovered ... [women] by their grave and chaste looks may soon be discerned”.20 Swetnam warned that “he that will disclose his secrets to a woman is worthy to haue his haire cut with Samson, for if thou vnfoldest any thing of secret to a woman the more thou chargest her to keepe it close the more she will seeme as it were to be with childe till she haue reuealed it amongst her gossips”.21 It was as voluble creatures, renowned for chatter and gossip, that women could be branded as leaking information beyond the bounds of privacy (read: secrecy, in early modern thought, as discussed in Chapter 1) into the public realm – and thus being unfaithful to their husbands. Cressida wonders, “Who shall be true to us, | When we are so unsecret to ourselves?”, having confessed her passion to Troilus’ (Troilus and Cressida, 3.2.121-22). Images of linguistic incontinence allowed women to be presented as a genuine threat, a betrayal of male interests – the moral and the political often being conflated. Information was power, as so many examples of servants testifying against their masters in court showed. To limit women’s access to information was a primary means of limiting their social power. The pretext of women’s talkativeness legitimized such strategies of control. The power to manipulate and intervene in discursive flows was similarly withheld by barring women from education, and in the great mass of the population, from literacy.

Leaky conduits The second concrete domain of gender politics was one that loomed much larger in the patriarchal imagination. In Epicoene, when Truewit’s pragmatically suggests that Morose’s unbearably talkative wife should simply “hold her peace”, the desperate husband begs, “O no. Labour not to stop her. She is like a conduit pipe that will gush out with more force when she opens again” (4.4.67-70). With his choice of simile, Morose 20 21

Thomas Wright, The Passions of the Mind (1604), ed. William Webster Newbold (New York: Garland, 1986), 84, 119, 110. Swetnam, The Araignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward and Unconstant Women, 41.

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unwittingly identifies Epicoene’s real function in this family intrigue. It is she who will prove instrumental in unblocking the rightful flow of Truewit’s inheritance. Here we come to the second aspect of women’s bodies in which the topoi of the uncontrollable feminine humoral economy revealed itself as deeply problematic for masculine ideology: namely, the notion of women as a conduit. Lady Anne Fanshawe wrote in her diary, “My dear husband had six sons and eight daughters borne and christned, and I miscarryed of 8 more”.22 The children successfully reared and socialized within the family passed into the patrilinearpatronymic domain of the dynastic family, making the woman a mere conduit for the transmission of patriarchal values (both in the conceptual and material sense). As Rubin has wriiten on “the traffic in women”, “If it is women who are being transacted, then it is the men who give and take them who are linked, the women being a conduit of a relationship rather than a partner to it.”23 Only when Anne Fanshawe’s children are stillborn, never traversing the threshold of dynastic belonging, do they remain identified, in her statement, with the mother. The feminine status as conduit, however, produced a widespread anxiety about “female influence over inheritance, legitimacy and the state”.24 Calvin anxiously demanded: “What else will remain safe in human society if license be given to bring in by stealth the offspring of a stranger? to steal a name which may be given to spurious offspring? and to transfer to them property taken away from lawful heirs?”25 The conduit function was vulnerable to alienation, once again within the topoi of incontinence. Webster’s Ferdinand, after his sister the Duchess of Malfi has married independently of the family’s wishes, curses “that body of hers, | [which] While that my blood ran pure in’t, was more worth | Than ... a soul” (The Duchess of Malfi, 4.1.119-20; my emphasis). Because the family blood ran in an alienable conduit potentially exposed to 22

23

24 25

Cited in Helen Wilcox, “Private Writing and Public Function: Autobiographical Texts by Renaissance Englishwomen”, in Gloriana’s Face: Women, Public and Private, in the English Renaissance, eds S. P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992), 58. Gayle Rubin, “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex”, in Towards an Anthropology of Women, ed. Rayner R. Reiter (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975), 174. Alan Sinfield, Faultlines: Cultural Materialism and the Politics of Dissident Reading (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 129. John Calvin, A Commentary on Genesis, cited in Keith Thomas, “The Puritans and Adultery: The Act of 1650 Reconsidered”, in Puritans and Revolutionaries: Essays in Seventeenth-Century History Presented to Christopher Hill, eds Donald Pennington and Keith Thomas (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), 262.

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contamination and corruption, dynastic values, projected upon the bodyconduit itself, were immensely vulnerable. The same language of fluidity operates in Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Woman-Hater. Gondarino advises Valore regarding his ostensibly lascivious daughter, “Call back the blood that made your stream in nearness, | And turn the current to a better use: | ’Tis too much muddied.”26 In Henry V, male honour is passed down from father to son in an unbroken patrilinear continuity: On, on, you noblest English, Whose blood is fet from fathers of war-proof, Fathers that like so many Alexanders Have in these parts from morn to even fought, And sheathed their swords for lack of argument. Dishonour not your mothers; now attest That those whom you called fathers did beget you.

(3.1.17-23)

Any failure to conform to the paternal tradition of military valour is an adverse reflection upon the female conduit through which masculine inheritance flows. Inadequate manliness inherently implies that women have “stepped out of line”, that patrilinearity has been disrupted by the infidelity of women to their husbands. The alienation of the conduit-status formed the stock matter of dramatic plots. Typically, the servant Vasques says to his master Soranzo, after the newly-wed husband has discovered his wife’s pregnancy: “Alas, to marry a great woman, being made great in the stock to your hand, is a usual sport in these days; but to know what ferret it was that haunted your cony-berry, there’s the cunning” (’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, 4.3.154-58). Vasques plays on the idea of possession of a woman’s dowry upon marriage which elevates a husband in social prestige, with the implicit meaning of attendant property, and thus spatial power (“being made great”); there is also a secondary meaning of erection and penetration. This multi-layered image of masculine spatial conquest through territorial occupation (to “occupy” a woman was the most common early modern term for sexual intercourse27) is then deflated by the imagery describing what is subsequently discovered to have preceded the courtship: the 26

27

Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, The Woman-Hater, in The Works of Beaumont and Fletcher, ed. Alexander Dyce (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1970), I, 84 (5.2; no line numbers in this edition). See Laura Gowing, Domestic Dangers: Women, Words and Sex in Early Modern London (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), 271. Gowing cites, for instance, Agnes Seare of Whitechapel, who berated her husband thus in 1579: “Thow hast occupied her [his mistress] ... rownd about the house: And thow hast occupied her as often as thow hast occupied me” (93).

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woman is a cony-berry, a rabbit warren, already penetrated by a ferret, her former lover(s). The image is crude and demeaning, and not without a taint of leering voyeurism in its multiplication of warren-like orifices, effectively spatializing the ostensibly insatiable sexual desire of the fantasized woman. The “great cut” which Lady Kix so ineffectually makes available to Sir Oliver in A Chaste Maid turns against the husband’s exclusive occupation of his wife’s body; no man, it appears, can adequately impose sexual rule upon this sensual territory with its gaping openings. The space of masculine transmission, presented here in the concrete simile of architectural routes of access, with an additional obscene meaning of anatomical “passages”, presents itself as irremediably public. When the Cardinal in Webster’s Duchess of Malfi contemptuously snaps We had need go borrow that fantastic glass Invented by Galileo the Florentine, To view another spacious world i’th’ moon, And look to find a constant woman there

(2.4.16-19)

we are not confronted, as Daileader claims, with an oxymoronic collision of optical and exploratory topoi of the macrocosm and the microcosm of hidden feminine desire.28 Rather, a litotic expression of feminine desire (the absence of chaste women) attains macrocosmic proportions. Likewise, in Othello, Desdemona’s father Brabanzio warns Othello: “Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see. | She has deceived her father, and may thee” (1.3.292-93). Once a woman has displayed independence from the father in marrying for love (here construed as lust), Brabanzio implies, there is no guarantee that her desires will not divert her from her husband as well, and from any other men to whom she may subsequently offer herself. The woman’s desire appears as a centrifugal force which no patriarchal authority can control. De Flores, in The Changeling, says: if a woman Fly from one point, from him she makes a husband, She spreads and mounts then like arithmetic, One ten, a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand, Proves in time sutler to an army royal.

28

(2.2.61-65)

Celia R. Daileader, Eroticism on the Renaissance Stage: Transcendence, Desire, and the Limits of the Visible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 8.

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In these misogynist stereotypes, women’s permeable boundaries, the necessary condition of her conduit function within the patriarchal family, generate their own transgression, thus eluding conjugal control. Renaissance dramas paid careful attention to the topography of infidelity. Thus Jonson’s Celia showing herself at the window is ample proof, for her husband Corvino, of her lascivious nature. In an expression which repeats de Flores’ lewd mathematical punning, Corvino sneers: “I think you’d rather mount? would you not mount?” (Volpone, 2.5.18). The window represents an opening in the closed space of exclusive masculine mastery, a metonymy of the orifices of the female body which invite penetration by a whole crowd of men below, the “hot spectators” (2.5.9). Similarly, Basanes in Ford’s The Broken Heart rages: I’ll have that window next the street damm’d up; It gives too full a prospect to temptation, And court’s a gazer’s glances. There’s a lust Committed by the eye that sweats and travails, Plots, wakes, contrives, till the deformed bear-whelp, Adultery, be lick’d into the act, The very act. That light shall be damm’d up, D’ee hear, sir?

(2.1.1-8)

A contemporary treatise on “The Properties of a Good Wife” emphasized that she “hateeth the doore & the windowe”.29 Braithwait intoned, “What an excellent impregnable fortresse were Woman, did not her Windowes betray her to her enemy?”30 If the woman was a conduit for the transmission of masculine values, above all the family name and family property, the alienation of the female body within the broader public space beyond the family was a perturbation of the masculist paradigm – but one, significantly, which that logic itself produced. It is for this reason that the notion of the permeable woman as a public space, a thoroughfare for strangers, functions even when the woman does not cede to the advances of other men. For the same reason, even revenge appears to pass via women as conduits, often at their cost. In plays such as The Maid’s Tragedy, Melatius discovers that his sister Evadne is the king’s mistress: a “whore” in his terms. He does not 29

30

“The Properties of a Good Wife”, MS Bodleian Library, cited in Margaret J. M. Ezell, The Patriarch’s Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), 38. Braithwait, The English Gentlewoman, 43. On this topic see Hanna Scolnicov, Women’s Theatrical Space (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 54.

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confront the king directly in order to revenge his sullied honour and that of his friend Amintor, Evadne’s husband. Rather, he threatens her at sword-point until she agrees to kill the king herself (Act 1, Scene 4). Evadne must implement his revenge, it would appear, because she is the channel for the slight upon his honour: But since his hot pride drew him to disgrace me, And brand my noble actions with his lust (That never-cured dishonour of my sister, Base stain of whore, and, which is worse, The joy to make it still so) ....

(5.2.44-48)

The sequence in which Melatius mentions the respective instances of dishonour – first his own sullied reputation, then that of his sister – is deeply significant. In Cymbeline, the devious Giacomo claims that Innogen’s honour is not proof against his advances; he sets a bet of ten thousand ducats upon his capacity to “enjoy” Innogen’s “dearest bodily part”. Posthumus is confident enough in Innogen’s fidelity to wager the diamond ring given him by Innogen, thus handing over to Giacomo a symbol of her penetrability by a male member (Act 1, Scene 4). The logic of Posthumus’ participation in this wager consigns Innogen from the very beginning, like Cressida, to the public space of whoredom. If she yields her virginity to the Italian, then her reputation was not worth fighting for, and the male bond of a commonly enjoyed woman – a whore – will take precedence over the other bond possible within this configuration. The latter is a (negative) bond of disparaged (masculine) honour created should Innogen indeed resist. The two forms of male bonding are intimately linked to each other: if you make your voyage upon her and give me directly to understand you have prevailed, I am no further your enemy; she is not worth our debate. If she remain unseduced, you not making it appear otherwise, for your ill opinion and th’assault you have made to her chastity you shall answer me with your sword. (1.4.154-60)

If Innogen lets herself be penetrated by Giacomo, she absorbs his phallic assault, and loses her existence as a discrete feminine space – discrete in the several meanings of the word. Then she has become common masculine space, is no longer owned by any one man, and not worth the owning. If she repels this assault, retaining the integrity of her interior space, a domain of intimacy which links her and Posthumus, then Giacomo’s penetrative blow is, as it were, deflected towards Posthumus,

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who will “reply” (“answer me”) with a counter-attack. In both cases, Innogen functions as a public space: either that of the whore, in which case she becomes valueless, or as a sort of conductor, through which other men’s desires are transmitted towards Posthumus as aggression. The degree of aggression is directly proportionate to the value of the conductor. In Much Ado About Nothing, Hero, yet another innocent victim of accusations of adultery, functions similarly as a transmitter of insults passed between men. In casting aspersions on Hero’s honour, Claudio has insulted her family, or so says Antonio, who places himself together with Leonatus to form a clan block. The situation almost escalates to a “fray”, that is, to a duel as trigger of an aristocratic feud (5.114-15). Hero dies in the process. She is, in terms of the dramatic structure, dispensable, a conducting element to be eliminated in the process of transmission. The fact that she is resurrected in the concluding scene of the play does not change the basic structure at work here. The topos of the woman as the transmitter of masculine codes of honour was a means of dealing with a fundamental aporia in the status of women as conduits for patrilinear transmission, namely the risk of the displacement of familial embedding of this feminine function. The fact that whether chaste or unchaste, the woman exists only as the common space of masculine sexual prowess shows that whether she is situated inside or outside the family is fundamentally indifferent. In other words, the woman’s status within the patriarchal family is always already dangerously public. This in turn means that the notion of the female body as a site for the perpetuation of patriarchal power is inherently unstable. The permanent slide of the feminine body from the status of male possession to an agent of male dispossession was endemic to the entire early modern paradigm within which all bodies were situated. All bodies were imagined as fluid and situated within a play of cosmic forces which eluded containment within imposed boundaries. Thus the humoral body, the loquatious body and the transmitting body were all isomorphic with one another in their common recalcitrance to recuperation by patriarchal ideology. Whence the coupling of such topoi as in Swetnam’s misogynistic maxim: “There are three waies to know a whore: by her wanton lookes, by her speach, and by her gate.”31 Paradoxically, that very recalcitrance was a spin-off of the fundamental assumptions of the ideology itself. 31

Swetnam, The Araignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward and Unconstant Women, 18.

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Unsurprisingly, fluidity, liquidity, flooding, the guiding metaphors of notions of incontinence, could never offer a stable terrain upon which to ground patriarchal authority and its legitimization. Equally unsurprisingly, topoi of liquidity leaked back into discourses of masculinity itself in a manner deeply subversive for conceptions such as aristocratic manliness which were predicated upon the rigorous control of one’s humours.32 William Vaughan warned men to look after their “Sperme or seede of generation ... which wilfully shed at least, harmeth a man more, then if he should bleed forty times as much.”33 One thinks also of Antony’s sense that “Authority melts from me of late” (Antony and Cleopatra, 3.13.90), or the contemptuous riposte of his former companions: “Sir, thou art so leaky | That we must leave thee to thy sinking” (3.13.63-65). In the 1630s, Robert Ward scoffed at paltry modern soldiers’ “hearts melting like butter, upon the supposition of meeting death in the face”.34 Barry Taylor suggests that The leaking of armoured masculinity [of which Antony is a prime exemplar] towards its fluid, abjected exterior, a leaking which reveals the “prior” interiority of what is excluded, sets up an oscillation which overflows the rigid demarcation of inside/outside. Masculinity, then, would be this wave-like oscillation between an imaginary integrity and its selferoding leakiness.35

Such oscillation, itself an avatar of feminine fluidity, and endemic to the early modern gender system because that system was incapable of eliding its necessary inaugural debt to its constitutive other, rendered early modern patriarchy acutely unstable. Such structural flaws at the heart of early modern patriarchal ideology would drive the reconfiguration of the discursive paradigms underlying gender power on the eve of the modern era. When, in Congreve’s The Way of the World of 1700, Witwoud explains of Millamant, “she’s a

32

33 34

35

See Darryll Grantley, “ ‘A bodie of presence’: Early Modern Education and the Elite Body in the Writings of Richard Mulcaster”, in The Body in Late Medieval and Early Modern Culture, eds Darryll Grantley and Nina Taunton (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 110. William Vaughan, Approved Directions for Health, both Naturall and Artificiall (London, 1612), 70. Robert Ward, Anima’dversions of vvarre; or A militarie magazine of the Truest Rules, and Ablest Instructions, for the Managing of Warre .... Composed, of the most refined discipline ... that these late Netherlandich and Swedisch warres here produced (London, 1639), 167. Barry Taylor, “Armour, Flows and Bliss: Liquefactions of Gender in The Faerie Queene Book II”, in The Body in Late Medieval and Early Modern Culture, eds Darryll Grantley and Nina Taunton, 46.

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woman and a kind of homourist”,36 meaning capricious and flighty, his “and” functions as a caesura. Womanliness and humours could be associated but were no longer intimately connected. The humoral economy had been superseded, thus stemming the fluidity at the core of feminine corporeality and banishing the danger of contamination. Redefining the spatial coordinates of the female body was one of the fundamental tasks of the reorganization which resulted in the emergent modern gender system.

Stage critiques of humoral fantasies In a quixotic movement of inversion, early modern concepts of incontinence, which ostensibly proved the inferiority of women, actually offered them a platform on which to express the very agency incontinence was supposed to deny them. The topoi of fluidity became a counter-discourse, a site of feminine re-appropriation of public space. This re-appropriation of public space could be detected in fictional form on the public stage. The fact that early modern dramas were quite capable of articulating masculist fantasies of female bodies and at the same time of dramatizing the aporia of those fantasies, indeed, in some cases of making those aporia the very mainspring of the dramatic plot, shows that the stage was never merely a univocal organ of patriarchal ideology. The early modern drama frequently articulated a critique of the masculist notions of the feminine which supplemented the internal structural flaws of patriarchal ideology itself. The tendency to present such metaphors of feminine fluidity and incontinence in negative terms does not go uncontested by the women characters of the plays. Not surprisingly, it is in the comedies and romances, where the general spatial parameters of the drama are more flexible, that topoi of liquidity can be presented in more positive terms. Thus when Orsino in Twelfth Night mobilizes typical topoi of porosity to claim that There is no woman’s sides Can bide the beating of so strong a passion As love doth give my heart; no woman’s heart So big, to hold so much. They lack retention. Alas, their love may be called appetite, No motion of the liver, but the palate, 36

William Congreve, The Way of the World, ed. Kathleen M. Lynch (London: Arnold, 1965), 30.

LEAKY VESSELS That suffer surfeit, cloyment, and revolt. But mine is all as hungry as the sea, And can digest as much

161

(2.4.92-100)

he provokes the vigorous resistance of Viola/Cesario. Orsino’s imagery is entirely within the Galenic discourse of incontinence: women “lack retention”. In his topography, women are the weaker vessel whereas masculinity displays a limitless capacity to contain a fluid surging of emotion within. It appears that fluidity, so long as it can be retained, and its tendency towards “revolt” suppressed, does not un-man the male. In the first instance, Viola/Cesario questions the content of the impermeable container of which Orsino is so proud. Speaking as a false man, she declares: “We men may say more, swear more, but indeed | Our shows are more than will; for still we prove | Much in our vows, but little in our love” (2.4.116-18). Here Viola/Cesario plays upon the frequent topos of true interior versus false appearance which structured much Renaissance thinking about identity.37 This trope is overlaid, moreover, with that of speech as an often factitious sign of the thing itself. At the same time, however, this double topos is further complicated by that of cross-dressing, so that “femininity” constitutes the true interior, and “masculinity” the specious facade. Viola/Cesario’s rhetorical exercise is both highly self-reflexive and self-undermining at once, because she claims to speak from the space of a communal “we” which she both infiltrates by the assumption of a boy’s costume and dissolves by the maintenance of an other identity. She claims the “real” character of masculine performance at the very moment of carrying through that “performance” as a mere fiction. Viola/Cesario’s actions and her words put paid to the notion of masculine bodily space as a tangible topology with clear borders, rendering it a fluid medium to be entered and quit at will. Emblematic of this erasure of the boundary typifying masculinity is Viola’s assumption, under the name of Cesario, of the role of a eunuch – itself a fluid gender identity, a spatial equivalent of her assumption of the status of page, a temporal suspension of status between childhood and adulthood. Viola’s strategy of disguise refuses clear distinctions, opting instead for the freedom of a fluid, flexible copula or liquid transitions between structuring terms. As Linda Bamber notes, 37

See Katharine Eisaman Maus, Inwardness and Theatre in the English Renaissance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995); Jean-Christophe Agnew, Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theater in Anglo-American Thought, 1550-1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 58-60.

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BODIES AND THEIR SPACES In Shakespearean comedy the successful avoidance of choice is a feminine prerogative, and the men are burdened with a graceless tendency to choose .... The feminine Other is confident that she may enjoy relationships that may be mutually exclusive for the male Self.38

Interestingly, such notions were presented by the writer of The Woorth of Women, translated from French and published in England in 1599, who suggested that “All the great Monarchies were instituted by the Councell of women”, for the simple reason that their dominant humour was “more moyst” than that of men, which made them less liable to “frenzies and furiousness”; the female “vertue” “consisteth much more of debating cases, and the facultie imaginative”, facilitating their mastery of diplomacy and negotiation.39 Such strategies of negotiation of apparently opposed positions, exemplified in the path of action followed by Viola, can productively be theorized within the framework of analyses of nondisjunctive oppositions or notions of the mediating role of mucous membranes in communication between separate entities.40 Whereas Cressida’s attempts to occupy several apparently contradictory positions, remaining faithful to Troilus while making overtures to her Greek captors, is impossible in the rigid and deathoriented space of tragedy, in the space of romance this feminine flexibility is salutary. Once again, Bamber’s commentary is apposite: “The avoidance of choice is at the heart of Shakespearean comedy; the very genre can be defined in these terms.”41 Orsino, consumed with love for Olivia, complains: “That instant, I was turned into a hart, | And my desires, like fell and cruel hounds, | E’er since pursue me” (1.1.20-22). The self is split and rendered mobile by impulses out of its own control. Whence Viola’s pertinent question, upon arriving in Illyria, “Who governs here?” – in other words, an enquiry about the space of rule in which she has arrived (1.2.22). In stark contrast to this disarray at mobility and multiplicity within the self is the attitude displayed by Viola, thrown up on the beach subsequent to the shipwreck, and asking, “What country, friends, is this?” (1.2.1) – an estrangement which allows her to assume a new identity in the new situation, thus carrying two apparently 38 39 40

41

Linda Bamber, Comic Women, Tragic Men: A Study of Gender and Genre in Shakespeare (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982), 118, 120. Cited in Shepherd, Amazons and Warrior Women, 35. See Julia Kristeva, 6KPLHLZWLNK: Recherches pour une sémanalyse (Paris: Seuil, 1969), Chs 3 and 7; Luce Irigaray, Ethique de la différence sexuelle (Paris: Minuit, 1984). English translation: An Ethics of Sexual Difference, trans. Carolyn Burke (London: Athlone, 1992). Bamber, Comic Women, Tragic Men, 121.

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incompatible identities in herself, as she takes on the disguise of a young man, becoming not only an androgynous actor figure, but an embodied contradiction: “I am not what I am” (3.1.139). Her mobility and estrangement is seen in “friendly” terms, whereas Orsino experiences his self-estrangement in terms of mortal conflict and dismemberment of selfhood. A similar rejoinder is delivered to the testy Malvolio by Olivia: “To be generous, guiltless and of free disposition is to take those things for birdbolts that you take for cannon bullets”, says Olivia (1.5.87-89). A “birdbolt” was a derivation of burbot, a form of flat-headed eel-like freshwater fish (OED). In place of Malvolio’s thin-skinned masculine vulnerability, she recommends a more fluid sense of selfhood, in which assaults upon the self can be accepted as sinuous dynamism in a fluid medium. Such images of fluidity and liquidity structure narratives of female agency early modern drama. These narratives point towards what will transpire to be the genuinely transgressive, border-crossing, character of feminine agency within the social fabric beyond the walls of the theatre. The humoral-derived narratives of feminine action sketched above had, after all, a material referent. The mode of reference appropriate to these material concomitants of dramatic narratives, I will suggest, was not a mimetic or referential one, but one which was aligned with the phatic function of theatrical semiosis, that is, was oriented towards the addressee of the theatrical messages. Fictions of feminine agency as fluidly crossing borders referred to female spectators’ own experiences and everyday practices. It is these concrete practices within the public sphere and their articulation within the dramas which will now be addressed in the following chapter.

CHAPTER 8 Women’s Worlds: Women in the Public Sphere: Space, Community, Language “We’re all male to th’middle”, puns the ever-inventive Follywit in Middleton’s A Mad World My Masters (3.3.103). His good-humoured comment is symptomatic of the excessive porosity of the early modern gender system, a porosity which came about when its horizon of selection retained information ill-fitted to drive its own autopoesis. Follywit’s comment blurs the boundaries between men and women; a similar overflow of systemic boundaries was epitomized in the systemcorroding discourses of feminine incontinence. This systemic porosity had a concrete concomitant in the domain of socio-economic practice: namely, the marked tendency on the part of women as space-users to cross and thus blur the boundaries between distinct social spaces. It is to these feminine trajectories that we now turn. Up until now I have concentrated upon masculist views of women and the self-vitiating aporia of such conceptions of femininity. What is neglected in such a presentation, however, is the specificity of feminine everyday practice which is elided by male points of view. In other words, a revisionist account of early modern gendered social space must pay attention to “the disparities between the orthodox use of space ... and the actual use made by women of their actual worlds”.1 In this chapter I examine textual evidence of the genuinely “crossborder” activities of women in daily life. Here again, the dramas can be seen to pay tribute to the spatial parameters of its female spectators – often to the dismay of their male counterparts, if their characters’ reactions are in any way indicative of audience attitudes. In what follows, we will frequently find evidence for feminine agency across various domains of the public sphere in the structures. In the following, glimpses of feminine agency in a positive form which exceeds the mere fissures of masculist ideology, will be offered – glimpses, admittedly, frequently

1

Sasha Roberts, “Shakespeare ‘Creepes into the Womens Closets About Bedtime’: Women Reading in a Room of Their Own”, in Renaissance Configurations: Voices/Bodies/Spaces, 1580-1690, ed. Gordon McMullan (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1998), 47.

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mediated by male writers, but in a form more substantial than in the inverted images of self-contradicting masculist ideology. The mobile activity of women was a social fact which, once encoded as a communicational event so as to be absorbed as environmental information, created additional turbulences and friction. Yet again, the early modern gender system found itself obliged to digest information which could not but weaken its own systemic boundaries. Such input did nothing to enhance the stability of a system already under considerable pressure. It is for this reason that male writers with a jaundiced view of women painted extreme pictures of their agency within the business of everyday existence. Tilney laid down that “the office of the husbande is, to prouide money: of the wife, not wastfully to spende it”.2 The awkwardly negative formulation reveals his reluctance to concede a positive evaluation of women’s “oeconomic” agency. Tilney is warding off a perceived slackening of oppositional tension between his two conceptual elements, expressive of a loss of systemic differentiation. But to do this he must implement the notion of feminine “waste” and then negate it, which places his syntax under some strain. In a series of diatribes also heavily depending upon notions of incontinence, Swetnam sarcastically described woman as “helper vnto man, and so they are indeede, for she helpeth to spend & consume that which man painefully getteth”.3 It is worth beginning with these commonplaces of misogyny, because they concern the central core of feminine agency in the early modern period – namely, that of economic production. Swetnam’s opponent Ester Sowernam replied specifically to the notion of women spending and consuming. First she derides this as the “a ridiculous ieast [jest]” (2), seeming initially to ignore Swetnam’s glossing of “helping” as “consuming and spending” and its constitutive ironic (biblical) intertextuality: woman as “helpmate” (Genesis 1). She then goes on to state that in Swetnam’s his subsequent claim (to the effect that women “degenerate from the vse they were framed vnto” – 3), he contradicts himself. The woman-hater’s heavy irony is taken at face value: “Was the end of Gods creation in Woman to spend and consume? Is Helper to be taken in that sense, to helpe to spend? &c. Is spending and consuming, helping?” (3) At the same time, however, Sowernam’s rather clumsy riposte can be understood as an implicit rejoinder to the intertext upon which Swetnam’s irony reposes. Paradoxically, Sowernam’s 2 3

Edmund Tilney, A Briefe and Pleasant Discourse of Duties in Marriage, Called the Flower of Friendshippe (London, 1573), [Cvv]. Swetnam, The Araignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward and Unconstant Women, 1.

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deafness to Swetnam’s rhetoric – perhaps better understood as a strategic misunderstanding implemented by several female ripostes to Swetnam4 – enables her to engage, in all seriousness, with the notion that women’s economic function is secondary, derivative and merely domestic.5 Sowernam’s rhetoric implicitly poses the question of women’s actively productive function within society, in contrast to the denigrating notion that they are merely consumers. What forms, then, did women’s socio-economic agency take in early modern society? One of the most striking features of early modern writing on feminine conduct is the prevalence of texts prescribing spatial restriction. One conduct-book author claimed that men and women are like to birds ... the Cocke flieth abroad to bring in, the Dam sitteth vpon the nest to keepe all at home. So God hath made the men to trauell abroad, and the woman to keepe home; and so their nature, and their wit, and their strength, are fitted accordingly; for the mans pleasure is most abroad, and the womans within.6

Another didacticist made it an axiom that “our English Hous-wife ... hath her most generall imployments within the house”.7 Yet another writer, Juan Luis Vives, restricted women’s radius of action while, paradoxically, sketching out possible fields of action: For it neyther becometh a woman to rule a schole, nor to lyve amonge men, or speke abrode, and shake of her demurenes and honesty, eyther all together, or els a great parte: which if she be good it were better to be at whome [sic] within and unknowne to other folks.8

The excess of these last prescriptions must make one ask about the real character of female agency in early modern life and the spaces it traversed. Keith Thomas has suggested that women’s “actual independence ... was always greater than theory allowed; and part of the evidence lies in the very frequency with which that independence was

4

5

6 7 8

See Ann Rosalind Jones, “Counterattacks on ‘the Bayter of Women’: Three Pamphleteers of the Early Seventeenth Century”, in The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon, ed. Anne M. Haselkorn and Betty S. Travitsky (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), 46. Ester Sowernam, Ester hath hang’d Haman: Or An Answer to a lewd Pamphlet .... (London, 1617) [Facsimile included in Female Replies to Swetnam the Woman-Hater, ed. Charles Butler], 2-3. Henry Smith, A Preparative to Mariage, in The Sermons of Mr Henry Smith Gathered into one volume (London, 1631), 27. Gervase Markham, The English House-Wife (London, 1631), 1-2. Juan Luis Vives, The Instrvction of a Christen Woman, trans. Richard Hyrde (London, 1541), 9r.

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denounced”.9 It is thus ironically appropriate that Vives, for instance, rehearsed arguments against such restrictions on behalf of the women concerned: “Why than say some, shulde we neuer walke out of our own dores: Shulde we euer lye at home? that were as though we shulde lye in pryson.”10 Unintentionally – for Vives was embarked here upon a crusade against “proud soles ... that desire to se and to be sene” – he thus provided a voice for women as mobile agents within the public world. For there were a large number of areas in seventeenth-century society in which women did indeed act as mobile social actors, crossing the boundaries between diverse social contexts. Within the immediate locality, as mentioned above, women were active as neighbours, creating community relationships. The gossips in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside are identified as “neighbours” (3.2.79), and thus as members of a network of mutual assistance in the early modern period. Arthur Dent specifically praised “neighbours meet[ing] now and then ... at the alehouse ... meaning no hurt: I take it to be good fellowship, and a good means to increase a love among neighbours”.11 Drinking is the positive antonym of the incontinence topos, a mode of social fluidity which bonds the members of a local community. Male commentators often denigrated such local social cohesion, as in Samuel Rowlands’ satirical ballad The Bride: Nor intermeddling as a number will Of foolish gossips such as doe neglect The things which doe concerne them, and too ill, Presume in matters vnto no effect: Beyond their element, when they should looke, To what is done in Kitchin by the Cooke.12

What Rowlands pejoratively called “intermeddling” can be recast, literally, as the positive work of meddling in the interstices of social networks, a vital function of social coherence at the local level. The mobility of such gossips, the border-crossing activity which welded disparate household units to another in a tissue of community, was similarly denigrated by Rowlands:

9 10 11 12

Keith Thomas, “The Changing Family”, Times Literary Supplement, 21 October 1977, 1226. Vives, The Instrvction of a Christen Woman, 38v. See Keith Wrightson, English Society 1580-1680 (London: Routledge, 1993), 43-54, 169-70. Samuel Rowlands, The Bride (London, 1617), D4v.

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BODIES AND THEIR SPACES Fourth dutie is, to loue her own house best, And be no gadding gossipppe vp and downe, To heare and carry tales amongst the rest, That are the newes reporters of the towne: A modest woman’s home is her delight, Of businesse there, to haue the ouersight.13

The agency of gossips appears to have implied a genuine threat to male control of social space, given the amount of rhetoric expended in demonizing it. Male writers constantly focused upon the spatial mobility of the gossip. Feminine creation of social bonds within a specific locality was interpreted negatively as the idle, leisurely neglect of duties at home. Typical in this respect is Dod and Cleaver’s irritated attempt to fight gossip on several fronts at once: She that much frequenteth meetings of gossips, seldome cometh better home. Some count it a disgrace, to come much abroad, least they should be counted gossips, which name is become odious: but they must have tatlers come home to them, to bring them newes, and to hold them in a tale, lest they should be thought to be idle without cause.14

In a reflex that will be seen to occur again and again in early modern male writers, the label of “whoredom” was a weapon turned against women whenever they were perceived as asserting social agency. Thus the mobility of women could only be constituted as prostitution. To be “gadding” about in public could not but connote ephemeral relationships of a lewd nature. Barnabe Rich explained that the pathes of a harlot ... are mooueable, for now shee is in the house, now in the streetes, now shee lieth in waite in euery corner, shee is still gadding about from place to place, from person to person, from companie to company: from custome to custome, she is euermore wandring: her feet are wandring, her eies are wandring, her wits are wandring.15

What is branded as “harlotry”, however, carries all the hallmarks of the local mobility of women in the service of everyday work or neighbourliness. To registered women’s community-building agency in negative terms, as the transgression of boundaries rather than the linking of heterogeneous domains of the social fabric, receives a further absurd turn of the screw in the tirades of Joseph Swetnam. He discovered “wandering” harlotry in incipient form even in the ideal sedentary 13 14 15

Rowlands, The Bride, E1r. John Dod and Robert Cleaver, A Godly Forme of Household Government (London, 1612), F7r. Barnabe Rich, My Ladies Looking Glasse (London, 1616), 43.

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housewife who “although her body be in the house yet her mind is abroad, which redowneth to her shame and to her husbands great hinderance”.16 Predictably, male discourse discovered a structural link between the gossip’s mobility and the mobility of her tongue. Her activity created connections and formed alliances within the spaces of social existence. Conservative critics, at the very moment of condemnation, willy-nilly identified such activity as a powerful communicative force. Women’s discursive power could often however only be acknowledged in negative form. Thus anxious males described the female tongue as a force destructive of social cohesion, an inverted tribute to talk as a form of work in the world, albeit masculine and violent. In early modern usage, the (female) tongue was described as a murderer that “ ‘cuts like a rasor’, an arrow, a hammer, a sword, a traitor, a ‘common pickpurse’, and a ‘notorious robber’ ”.17 Of Beatrice, Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing says, “She speaks poniards, and every word stabs” (2.1.231-32). Richard Braithwait’s spatial metaphors reveal his grasp of the function of feminine speech in welding together disparate sites of social action: in no particular detract [women] more from their honour than by giuing too free scope to that glibbery member .... What restraint is required in respect of the tongue, may appeare by that iuory guard or garrison with which it is impaled. See, how it is double warded, that it may with more reseruancy and better security be restrained!18

What such discourses did reluctantly acknowledge was the power of women’s verbal skills as a weapon of defence – often the only one they possessed. In the words of Thomas Becon, who accurately vetriloquized women’s defence of their loquacity: “And when they are reproued for their misdemeanor towards their husbands: they shame not to answer: A woman hath none other weapon but her tonge, which she must nedes put in practice. They haue been made dolts and foles long inough.”19 Karen Newman convincingly demonstrates that the key to Petruchio’s power over Kate in The Taming of the Shrew is his capacity to manipulate language and thus twist her statements, recuperating her communication in his own 16 17

18 19

Swetnam, The Araignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward and Unconstant Women, 56. Robert St George, “ ‘Heated’ Speech and Literacy in Seventeenth-Century New England”, in Seventeenth-Century New England: A Conference held by the Colonial Society of Massachusetts June 18 and 19, 1982, eds David D. Hall and David Grayson Allen (Boston: Colonial Society of Massachusetts/University Press of Virginia, 1984), 280, 283. Braithwait, The English Gentlewoman, 88. Thomas Becon, Catechisme, in Worckes, I: cccccxvir.

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interest, and seizing the only form of social agency which she possesses.20 Whence her passionate plea for her own freedom of speech: Why, sir, I trust I may have leave to speak, And speak I will. I am no child, no babe. Your betters have endured me say my mind, And if you cannot best stop your ears. My tongue will tell the anger of my heart, Or else my heart concealing it will break, And rather than it shall I will be free Even to the uttermost as I please in words.

(4.3.73-80)

Spatial mobility, the creation of communal cohesion, and verbal agency were the three principal parameters of feminine agency in the public world, and can be seen to define the activity of women in a wide range of modes of participation in early modern society. Class factors of course differentiated the forms of participation and the pressure which women may have encountered. The picture I paint here covers different sectors of early modern society, adding up to variegated composite of communicational events at odds with the reigning gender system.

Feminine spheres of action The early modern gender system was porous not merely in its ideological discursive structure, but also struggled to integrate the communicational events of women’s vital economic activity, as agents of social exchange who traversed diverse social spaces. In the early modern period, many women were highly mobile workers shifting constantly between domestic and marketplace economies. Cahn suggests that women moved frequently in public, selling or bartering on the streets or markets the wares they had produced within the household unit, moving across the permeable boundaries between the two areas.21 On the market, spatial mobility and verbal power converged in women’s work. The participation of women vendors in the public sphere, expressed linguistically through their skill in crying their wares and haggling with customers, and their reputation for being articulate and assertive, voluble, sharp-tongued and unruly, could be turned against them as “public” women or whores, that is, themselves subject to disapproving

20 21

Karen Newman, Fashioning Femininity in English Renaissance Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 39-45. Cahn, Industry of Devotion: The Transformation of Women’s Work in England 1500-1600, 39.

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gossip.22 Thus Richard Braithwait’s description of “a shrew” in Essays upon the five senses (1620) detailed the genealogy of verbally powerful women in connection with the market place: her father was a common barreter [fraudster], and her mother’s sole note (being the voice of her vocation) echoed, new wainfleet oysters! .... Her progenies are but small, yet all hopeful to be interested in some clamorous offices: for her eldest itcheth after Bellmann, her next after Cryer ....23

The economic energy of women vendors was discredited by being associated with that of a prostitute. Both walked the streets, and by walking the streets, the woman herself became the ware she was selling. Vives recommended: In goyng, let the woman neyther walke ouer fast, nor ouer slowly .... Let her nat suffre to be plucked at, or to be touched wantonly: let her chaunge her place, or go away and nede be; let her gyve nothing to no man, nor take ought of any man. The wyse man sayth: he that taketh a benefite, selleth his liberty. And there is in Fraunce and Spayne a good sayeng: A woman that gyveth a gyft, gyveth her selfe: a woman that taketh a gyft, selleth her selfe. Therefore an honeste woman shall nother gyve, nor take.24

Thomas Becon reduced the activity of the typified honest wife to a minimum in connection with commerce, enjoining her not idely & wantonly to gad abrode, seeking new customers ... [but] continually to remain at home ... except urgent, weighty and necessary causes compel her to go forth, as to ... go to the market to bie things necessary for her household.25

The same discursive strategies were employed against “citizen” wives who worked in shops. The architectural overlap between the merchant household and shop allowed a fluidity in roles which contemporary commentators found disturbing – a fluidity which they dealt with wielding the label of whore. The female shopkeeper, like the woman at the window, often sat at the door in pauses between activity, thus placing herself on display like a prostitute. Such self-display turned her shopcum-home into a form of brothel where the safe distinction between the 22

23

24 25

Michael Roberts, “ ‘Words they are Women, and Deeds they are Men’: Images of Work and Gender in Early Modern England”, in Women and Work in Pre-Industrial England, eds Lindsey Charles and Lorna Duffin (London: Croom Helm, 1985), 15254. Richard Braithwait, Essays upon the Five Senses (London, 1620), cited in Renaissance Woman: A Sourcebook: Constructions of Femininity in England, ed. Kate Aughterson (London: Routledge, 1995), 244-45. Vives, The Instrvction of a Christen Woman, 40r, 40v-41r. Becon, The Catechisme, in Worckes, I, cccccxvr.

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commercial world and domestic space could not longer be clearly asserted. The female shopkeeper on the threshold attracted commerce but also threatened to become one of the commodities: “In troth, a finefaced wife in a wainscot carved seat is a worthy ornament to a tradesman’s shop, and an attractive, I warrant; her husband shall find it in the custom of his ware, I’ll assure him”, says Mistress Mulligrub in Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan (3.3.13-17).26 Paradoxically, the very act of branding women involved in everyday commerce as harlots was to concede their social power. Women who were agents of commercial exchange attained a degree of mastery over legitimate processes of exchange which otherwise often relegated women to the passive role of objects in paternal marriage negotiations. The label “whore”, usually the most damaging epithet that could be used against women, and one which could have devastating financial and existential consequences for the woman who suffered its application, also had subterranean connotations of enviable financial independence. John Taylor wrote satirically: “Her shop, her ware, her fame, her shame, her game, | ’Tis all her owne, which none from her can claime.”27 Such epithets were a vain attempt to impose order upon the complexities of social space, because women were constantly crossing the borders between closely monitored domestic spaces and “going abroad” into the world outside.28 A further area where woman were active in the public world, bridging separate domains of action, was as carers translating the charitable policies of parish administrations into almsgiving and hospice work. Similarly, urban women were often active in public as the distributors of poor relief.29 In both instances they were vital mediators between the populace and the civic authorities. Women were also visible as agitators

26

27 28

29

See Linda Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540-1620 (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1984), 174-75; Garrett A. Sullivan, “ ‘All Things Come Into Commerce’: Women, Household Labor and the Spaces of Marston’s The Dutch Courtesan”, Renaissance Drama, ns, XXVII (1998), 19-21. John Taylor, “A Whore”, All the Workes of John Taylor the Water Poet (London 1630), 107. See also Gowing, Domestic Dangers, 90-92. Patricia Crawford, “Public Duty, Conscience and Women in Early Modern England”, in Public Duty and Private Conscience in Seventeenth-Century England: Essays Presented to G. E. Aylmer, eds John Morrill, Paul Slack and Daniel Woolf (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 57-76. Diane Willen, “Women in the Public Sphere in Early Modern England: The Case of the Urban Working Poor”, Sixteenth Century Journal, XIX/4 (1988), 559-75; Wilcox, “Private Writing and Public Function: Autobiographical Texts by Renaissance Englishwomen”, 52-53.

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in countless public actions: grain riots, protests against miscarriages of justice, demonstrations against perceived political abuse.30 Women’s intercessory role, spanning various instances of social space, most prominently came to the fore during the civil war, when upper class women acted as petitioners on the part of imprisoned husbands and their sequestered property. Thus one petition explicitly opened with the words: “those petitions which have been exhibited unto you in behalf of ... the liberty of our husbands’ persons and estates ....”31 Similarly, Anne Fanshawe set off from France in 1649, “sent into England” by her exiled husband “to try what sums I could raise for his subsistence abroad and mine at home”. During her fund-raising journey on behalf of her husband she successfully raised “near 4000 lb which at that time I thought a vast sum”.32 When, in 1651, her husband was incarcerated as a prisoner of war, I failed not constantly to goe when the clock struck 4 in the morning, with a dark lanterne in my hand, all alone and on foot ... I would goe under his window and softly call him. He, that after the first time expected me, never failed to put out his head at first call. Thus we talked together, and sometimes I was so wet with rane that it went in at my neck and out at my heels. He directed how I should make my adresses, which I did ever to their general Cromwell, who had a great respect for your father and would have bought him off to his servise upon any termes. 33

Anne Fanshawe’s petitions to Cromwell and the Council of State were eventually rewarded with success. Once again, the distinctions between public and private are blurred by the activity on behalf of a close family member. Such actions could take on considerable proportions, mobilizing large sectors of the population, as when over seven-thousand Quaker women signed a petition against tithes submitted to Parliament in 1659.34 Here the class differences which variegated the forms of women’s public agency become quite evident.

30

31 32 33 34

Ralph A. Houlbrooke, “Women’s Social Life and Common Action in England from the Fifteenth Century to the Eve of the Civil War”, Continuity and Change, I/2 (1986), 171-89. A true copy of the petition of the gentlewomen and tradesmen’s wives (1st edition, 1641), cited in Renaissance Woman: A Sourcebook, ed. Aughterson, 159. Wilcox, “Private Writing and Public Function: Autobiographical Texts by Renaissance Englishwomen”, 53-54. Ibid, 54-55. Elspeth Graham, Hilary Hinds, Elaine Hobby and Helen Wilcox, “Introduction” to Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen, eds Elspeth Graham, Hilary Hinds, Elane Hobby and Helen Wilcox, 15.

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In the early seventeenth century, women participated in the emergent public discursive space which predated by a century the public sphere identified in Habermas’ influential work. Women’s seventeenth-century participation in the realm of public discourse forms the repressed genealogy of the homosocial eighteenth-century domain of the coffee houses, in which the absence of women (an absence reflected in Habermas’ own account) was a constitutive structural element.35 Women’s discursive activity was evident across a range of areas. During the civil war period in particular, women gained an astonishing visibility as writers and public speakers. In a social context in which one commentator observed that “Women have no voyce in Parliament, They make no Lawes, they consent to none, they abrogate none”,36 the sudden explosion of female discursive activity in the public world was remarkable. The upsurge of women’s political writings in the English civil war was unprecedented and without parallel in Europe. The number of political texts by women rose from six in the period 1600-1640, to seventy-seven in the decade 1641-50 alone.37 Probably the proportion of women’s texts in relationship to men’s did not substantially change.38 None the less, the visibility of women as discursive agents increased dramatically. A published prophet and preacher such as Anna Trapnel with the support of prominent political figures posed a genuine threat to conservative forces. From the early on in the seventeenth century, women had begun to gain prominence as preachers. In 1609, William Heale complained: “I could neuer approue those too holy women-gospellers, who weare their testament at their apron-strings, and wil weekely catechize their husbands, citing places, clearing difficulties, & preaching holy sermons too, if the spirit of their devotion moue them.”39 As preachers, and thus as go-betweens mediating the word and the will of God for the faithful, 35

36 37 38

39

Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit: Untersuchungen zu einer Kategorie der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft, new edn (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1990), Preface to the 1990 edition, 18-19. English translation: Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Bürger (Cambridge: Polity, 1992). T. E., The Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights: or, The Lawes Provision for Woemen (London, 1632), 6. Merry E. Wiesner, Women and Gender in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 167. See Hilary Hinds, “ ‘Who May Binde Where God Hath Loosed?’: Responses to Sectarian Women’s Writing in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century”, in Gloriana’s Face: Women, Public and Private, in the English Renaissance, eds S. P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies, 205-207. William Heale, An Apologie for Women (Oxford, 1609), 35-36.

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women gained a new social prominence.40 Thomas Edwards’ Gangraena of 1646 set about discrediting women preachers in the radical sects, but his account nonetheless registers the activity of women as public mediators and interpreters of religious doctrine: this Lace-woman turned her selfe to the company and spake to some of them to exercise, excusing her selfe that she was somewhat indisposed in body, and unfit for this worke, and said if any one there had a word of exhortation let them speake; but all the company keeping silent, none speaking: Then the Lace-woman began with making a speech .... When she had read the text she laboured to analyse the chapter as well she could .... Then the Gentlewoman that sat at the side of the Table, began to speake, making some Apologie that she was not so fit at this time in regard of some bodily indispositions ... and as she was preaching, one in the company cryed, Speake out, whereupon she lifted up her voice; but some spake the second time, Speake out, so that upon this the Gentlewoman was disturbed and confounded in her discourse, and went off from that of love to speak of I Iohn 4. of trying the spirits, but shee could make nothing of it, speaking non-sense all along.41

Clearly, the quality of women’s public speech is a pretext for a counterattack against the very fact of women taking up a public discursive role. For conservative male contemporaries, this could not but be interpreted as a symptom of social chaos, as in Jonson’s clear disdain at a group of voluble women who “cry down or up what they like or dislike in a brain or a fashion with most masculine, or rather, hermaphroditical authority” (Epicoene, 1.1.67-69). The very fact of usurping masculine authority by assuming the right to speak in public was an index of crumbling gender hierarchies. And once again, images of verbal energy and spatial mobility (“cry down or up”) inevitably lead to brandmarking women as harlots. This was the implicit charge against which Anna Trapnel defended herself during the court hearing after her arrest for preaching in Cornwall in 1654: Lobb [the judge]. ‘But why did you come into this country? A. T. ‘Why might I not come here, as well as into another country? Lobb. ‘But you have no lands, nor livings, nor acquaintance to come into this country.’ 40

41

See Phyllis Mack, Visionary Women: Ecstatic Prophecy in Seventeenth-Century England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Ellen McArthur, “Women Petitioners and the Long Parliament”, English Historical Review XXIV (1909), 698-709; Keith V. Thomas, “Women and the Civil War Sects”, Past and Present XIII (1958), 4262; E. M. Williams, “Women Preachers in the Civil War”, Journal of Modern History, I/4 (1929), 561-69. Thomas Edwards, Gangraena (London, 1646), 85-86.

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BODIES AND THEIR SPACES A. T. ‘What though I had not? I am a single person, and why may I not be with my friends anywhere?’ Lobb. ‘I understand you are not married.’ A. T. ‘Then having no hindrance, why may not I go where I please, if the Lord so will?’42

In this brief exchange, Trapnel furnishes a synecdoche of the larger struggle going on between women’s participation in the discursive public sphere and their threatening capacity to cross borders – here literally, thus provoking elements of an authoritarian “masterless men” discourse – and to mobilize public opinion to such an extent as to unleash forces of juridical repression. Of particular interest within the context of drama as a mediator of women’s changing place within the public world is the role of women as the managers of theatres. Women have largely been erased from this aspect of early modern stage history. However, Henslowe’s “diary” or book of daily business transactions contains evidence which suggests that women played an important role in the networks supporting the stage. In Natasha Korda’s account, “the Diary itself fails to distinguish ... those accounts concerning Henslowe’s ‘private’ household from those concerning his ‘public’ playhouses .... Within the diary ... entries documenting what Henslowe ‘layd owt abowt [his] playhowsse’ commingle with memoranda of household affairs and expenditures.” Women have customarily been cast as consumers in stage history, and not as producers. In stark contrast, women can be seen in Henslowe’s diary regularly participating in his business ventures, theatrical and otherwise.43 Women’s active participation in dealing in the buying and selling of clothes, that is, in the circulation of a sartorial form of wealth as portable property that moved across the imaginary boundaries separating public/private space, was of particular relevance to early modern theatres, which often overlapped with flourishing pawn businesses.44 An even more striking instance of female involvement in the public sphere through theatre management was Queen Anne’s instigation, 42

43 44

Anna Trapnel, “Anna Trapnel’s Report and Plea”, in Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen, eds Elspeth Graham, Hilary Hinds, Elaine Hobby and Helen Wilcox, 81. Natasha Korda, “Household Property/Stage Property: Henslowe as Pawnbroker”, Theatre Journal XXXVIII (1996), 185, 187-88. See Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 31-32, 181-85. Jones and Stallybrass observe that “the commercial theater was crucially shaped by the market in clothes. Or, to put it another way, the theater was a new and spectacular development of the clothing trade” (176).

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production and performance in court masques. More radically, The Masque of Queens was characterized by Queen Anne’s deployment of the masque within the intricacies of overseas diplomacy, partly in contradiction to the wishes of King James. James and Anne negotiated not only with the Spanish, French and Venetian ambassadors regarding invitations to the masque or the withdrawal of invitations, but also with each other, for their respective political alliances did not always coincide. Thus the masque itself was a site of political friction between James and Anne.45 However, Sophie Tomlinson suggests that the Jacobean masque, with its “silent and emblematic participation of women” was far outstripped by Henrietta Maria’s theatrical diversions and their “far more dynamic potential for projecting female personality by the declamation, action, singing and dancing”. These events, which aroused considerable controversy, notably provoking William Prynne’s attack on “Womenactors, notorious whores”,46 owed part of their potential for incensing contemporary commentators to the manner in which the female usurpation of male visibility and male attire resonated with Henrietta Maria’s own political activity. These factors combined to create a potent image of feminine appropriation of the male royal prerogative. In this context the overlapping early modern etymology of the term “actress” (as a woman wielding entire social and cultural agency, and as a female player in the theatre) gains its full import. Henrietta Maria’s theatrical practice perhaps paved the way for the acceptance of women actresses after the Restoration, taking the transgressive edge off the public appearance of the woman on stage. More speculatively, it is possible that this feminized “performative culture” at the court, sharpened by Henrietta Maria’s political engagement, contributed to the spate of cultural social and political activity of women during the civil war period.47

45

46 47

Marion Wynne-Davies, “The Queen’s Masque: Renaissance Women and the Seventeenth-Century Masque”, in Gloriana’s Face: Women, Public and Private, in the English Renaissance, eds S. P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies, 86. William Prynne, Histrio-Mastix (London, 1633), Rrrrrr4r. See Sophie Tomlinson, “She that Plays the King: Henrietta Maria and the Threat of the Actress in Caroline Culture”, in The Politics of Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and After, ed. Gordon Macmullan (London: Routledge, 1991) 189-207.

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The early modern theatre and the discourses of femininity It has been suggested that the early modern period was characterized by a widespread male anxiety about female agency, an anxiety which made itself manifest in stereotypes of female volubility and female mobility. It is significant that discursive factors were privileged to describe the porosity of the early modern gender system, for systemic coherence stands or falls on communicational events and their capacity for selfreinforcing reiteration. Contemporary epithets suggests a sense of discursive heterogeneity propelling systemic reconfiguration. Luhmann’s somewhat bland notion of contradiction acquires a literal resonance in this context: female contra-diction was vociferous and posed a genuine threat. Speech, a weapon which women wielded with great aplomb, was thought to be “harder to be tamed ... than a strong city is to be conquered”. Shrews spoke “as if their throats were Hell itself”.48 The often vitriolic gossip literature suggests a sense of male defensiveness about women banding together to act in concert, buttressed by the paranoid suspicion that such common undertakings could only target male interests.49 Even clearer was apprehension at the prospect of women usurping masculine authority through the exercise of political discourse. Such fears resulted in attempts to prevent women voting or demonstrating or petitioning.50 A petition submitted to Parliament in 1649 by Elizabeth Lilburne and other women demanded “a proportionable share in the freedoms of this commonwealth” and “an equal interest with the men of this nation in those liberties and securities contained in the Petition of Right, and other good laws of the land”. Parliament replied “that the matter they petitioned was of a higher concernment than they understood, that the House gave an answer to their husbands, and therefore desired them to go home, and look after their own business, and meddle with their huswifery”.51 The attempt to restore, by the force of a performative utterance, the constitutive spatial division at the base of the early modern gender system, is patent. Despite such exercises in intimidation, there were documented instances of public pressure being exerted by women with evident 48 49 50

51

St George, “ ‘Heated’ Speech”, 280, 283. Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance, 236. Patricia Crawford, “ ‘The Poorest She’: Women and Citizenship in Early Modern England”, in The Putney Debates of 1647: The Army, the Levellers and the English State (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 197-218 Catherine Belsey, The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama (London: Methuen, 1985), 181.

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success. The Protestant divine William Gouge confessed to being forced to adjust the tone of his chauvinist rhetoric: I remember that when these Domesticall Duties were first uttred out of the pulpit, much exception was taken against the application of a wifes subjection to the restraining her from the disposing the common goods of the family without, or against, her husbands consent. .... Other exceptions were made against some other particular duties of wives .... This just Apology I have beene forced to make, that I might not ever be judged (as some have censured me) an hater of women.52

Here was a clear instance of redoubtably focused contra-diction provoking systemic reorganization. For our purposes it is particularly interesting that it was as a preacher in the pulpit that Gouge came under fire from his female parishioners. Evidently the female members of the parish community wielded considerable collective power to make themselves heard and inflect masculine discourse about their concerns. It is likely that dramatists may have been sensitive to similar pressure in the early seventeenth century from the numerous female members of theatre audiences. Woodbridge has traced the demise of cuckolding dramas on the 1620s stage, and the prevalence of prologues and epilogues which evinced apprehension about audience disapproval – in particular disapprobation on the part of women theatregoers. The epilogue of the mildly chauvinistic A Woman is a Weathercock (1609-10) pleaded, “Women forgiue me”. It is pertinent in this regard that dramatists were faced with a not insignificant female sector of theatre consumers whose economic power was sufficient to influence the products put on the market.53 Jonson, in Epicoene, referred sarcastically to the attraction the stage had for female theatregoers: “Alas, sir, do you ever think to find a chaste wife in these times? Now? When there are so many masques, plays, puritan preachings, mad folks, and other strange sights to see, private and public?” (2.2.29-32). His satire, as ever, was probably an accurate indicator of social trends. Theatregoers consumed the stage product because it offered them images of their own existence in ways which addressed contemporary concerns or offered wish-fulfilment at moments of social aporia. Stephen Orgel cogently suggests that Renaissance theatre offered “powerful fantasies of freedom in a patriarchal society, for women even more than for men”, and plots of sexual intrigue which implied that women’s “sexuality is powerful and attractive, threatening to husbands, 52 53

William Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties (London, 1634) *3v-*4. Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance, 250-52.

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and under her own control”.54 This thesis needs to be stated in a stronger form, however. Plays which offered scenarios of women’s selfassertion and resourcefulness were popular not merely because they provided fantasies of otherwise unobtainable autonomy, but rather because they suggested dramatic models for audiences who were already genuinely active bearers of feminine agency in the public sphere. A play which very deliberately placed these factors in the foreground of its action was the anonymous Swetnan the Woman hater Arraigned by Women. The play centres on an illegitimate union between Leonida, the princess of Sicily, and her lover Lisandro, prince of Naples. King Atticus of Sicily orders a public debate at Court to ascertain which of the two lovers is guilty of having initiated the affair: the man or the woman. Aurelia, the Queen, fights to have the feminine case vindicated, with the support of the Amazon Atlanta (actually the disguised prince Lorenzo, Atticus’ and Aurelia’s son). Whereas there is a question to be decided in publike disputation before an Honourable Assembly of both parts, that is, whether the man or the woman in loue commit the greatest offence, by giuing the first and principall occasion of sinning: therefore know, that if any woman will vndertake to defend the innocency of women, against false imputations of detracting men, let her repaire to the Court, shee shall be honourably entertayned, graciously admitted, and well rewarded. God saue the Queene. (3.3.122-30)

But the judges, careful not to contravene Atticus’ will, decide that the woman was the temptress, and Leonida is condemned to death (3.3.29599). The terms of the debate clearly rehearse the original sin which was committed by Eve, one of the central doctrines, alongside Galenic medical lore, which founded early modern convictions of women’s inferiority. For instance, The Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights reiterates Eve’s part in the fall of man in a passage cited above, adding: “See here the reason of that .... Women have no voyce in Parliament, They make no Lawes, they consent to none, they abrogate none .... The common Law here shaketh hand with Divinitie.”55 Thus, in the play, the judges’ sentence has general validity as a “sentence past against the female Sex” (4.1.19). It is not the moralizing force of the debate which of interest here so much as the public context in which it was carried out, obviously with a 54 55

Orgel, Impersonations: The Performance of Gender in Shakespeare’s England, 74-75. T. E., The Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights, 6. See also Margaret R. Somerville, Sex and Subjection: Attitudes to Women in Early Modern Society (London: Arnold, 1995), 25-29.

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feminine audience in mind, and with their approbation – which would translate into takings at the theatre doors – clearly in view. Exactly what attitudes these debates actually reflected is of course impossible to establish. Of greater significance is the patently decisive weight of feminine opinion to inflect the content of stage plays in the first three decades of the seventeenth century – that is, to influence, and to some extent at least, to participate in discourses in the public sphere. The court of law portrayed on stage obviously referred in a highly self-conscious manner to the theatre in which it was performed. The court-on-stage, with its debating lawyers, its spectators and its uncertain outcome, was a synecdoche of the theatre with its actors, spectators and dramatic tension. This inner synecdoche is not complete, however, without a further, outer synecdoche: the debate sparked off by the inflamatory text published by the eponymous protagonist Swetnam, a debate in which the stage-play also took part. In the detail of its wording, the stage debate clearly alluded to the terms of Swetnam’s diatribe against women. The biblical intertext of Eve’s guilt referred to on stage, calqued by Swetnam’s reiterated accusation that women bring about the corruption of men, was itself reversed by women such as Constantia Mundia, who detected in Swetnam the selfsame immorality which he found in women.56 Moreover, the stage debate imitated its pamphlet predecessor, from the level of the vocabulary (“Base snarling dogge” at 3.3.207 echoed Munda’s The Worming of a Mad Dogge), to the level of the scene itself: the court case against Swetnam enacted in Ester Sowernam’s pamphlet57 is replicated in the debate at Court performed on stage. The play is of little dramaturgical interest in itself, as it merely offers a rather wooden imitation of arguments already rehearsed in the pamphlets. But it functions as a significant multiplicator for the already well-known terms of the debate. For instance, Ester Sowernam’s argument to the effect that women were corrupted by men, and not the reverse,58 as Swetnam claimed, recurs almost verbatim at 3.3.66-137. Act 3, Scene 3 in its entirety effectively dramatizes the traditional exchange of pamphlets debating the nature of women (the Renaissance “formal debate”) which culminated in Swetnam and his feminine critics. It 56

57

58

Constantia Munda, The Worming of a Mad Dogge: Or, A Soppe for Cerbervs the Iaylor of Hell (London, 1617) [Facsimile included in Female Replies to Swetnam the Woman-Hater, ed. Charles Butler, 24-26. Ester Sowernam, Ester hath hang’d Haman: Or An Answer to a lewd Pamphlet .... (London, 1617) [Facsimile included in Female Replies to Swetnam the Woman-Hater, ed. Charles Butler, 27-40. Ibid, 33-35.

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renders public in an act of performance what had been carried on in the merely textual public space of pamphlet skirmishes. Constantia Munda noted that the theatre was often the place of rehearsals of misogyny. Euery fantasticke Poetaster which thinks he hath licked the vomit of his Coriphaeus can but patch a hobling verse together, will striue to represent unseemly figments imputed to our sex, (as a pleasing theme to the vulgar) on the publique Theatre: teaching the worser sort that are more prone to luxurie, a compendious way to learne to be sinfull.59

Now that theatre, by proffering on stage in the form of the Court a miseen-abyme of itself, had become a site of contestation of misogyny. Itself a prominent part of the early modern public sphere, the theatre, through the pressure exerted by its own audiences, functioned in part as a platform for representations of women’s agency in that same public realm. To that extent the theatre too had become a site of contra-diction and a place where literal communicatitional events problematized rather than reinforced the contours of the early modern gender system. The theatre system was clearly engaged in the reinforcement of its own systemic coherence: the high degree of self-reflexivity, the capacity to absorb topical issues and integrate them into the dramatic fabric, the readiness to respond to audience reactions in order to maintain profits – these were all aspects of the ongoing autopoesis of the very successful early modern theatre system. By paying careful attention to the tastes of female spectators, the theatre merely obeyed the dictates of its own commercial self-perpetuating logic. Paradoxically, however, in this way the theatre participated in and affirmed women’s self-assertiveness in the public world, and in so doing contributed to the process of adjustments of systemic self-perpetuation in the early modern gender system and its successor which took place to some extent before the civil war and to a much greater degree after the turbulent events of the Interregnum. Here, systemic interpenetration took on the very characteristics of “civil war” which Parliament would eventually give as the principal reason for the closure of the theatres in 1642.60

59 60

Ibid, 3. See A Declaration of the Lords and Commons Assembled in Parliament, For the appeasing and quietting of all unlawfull Tumults and Insurrections in the severall Counties of England, and Dominion of Wales and also an Ordinance of both Houses for the Suppressing of Stage-Playes, 2 September 1642, in Commonwealth Tracts, 1625-1650, ed. Arthur Freeman (New York: Garland, 1974), A4r-v.

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Female agency in the public space on the stage It is instructive to compare Swetnan the Woman hater Arraigned by Women with an play written some years earlier by Beaumont and Fletcher and entitled The Woman-Hater (1606-1607), which reserved a much less active role to the central female character, Oriana, and a much milder punishment for the woman-hater, Gondarino. In the space of a little more than a decade, a similar misogynist title aroused greater controversy, occupied more discursive space, and ostentatiously offered women representations of their own agency within the public sphere. In the final sections of this chapter and the opening sections of the next, I wish to look at several Renaissance plays which deliberately thematize the mobility and agency of women within early modern society. I focus here upon the manner in which female characters play a prominent mediating role, connecting distinct social spaces, beginning with the shrewish Paulina in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. Paulina maintains the link with the absent Hermione, banished by her husband Leontes upon suspicion of adultery and ostensibly dead, thereby rescuing the play from its otherwise tragic outcome. Leontes is consistently an agent of ruptures. He alienates his best friend Polixenes; effectively forces his servant to choose between himself and Polixenes; removes his son too early from the nurturing female context, a separation from which the son’s death ensues; imprisons his wife and is indirectly responsible for her death – or at any rate, her death-in-life for sixteen years; and expels his daughter. A succint list of the considerable relational havoc Leontes wreaks in the course of the first half of the play is provided in Act 3 (3.2.184-99). In contrast, Paulina is an agent of connection, moving, in the early part of the action, between prison and court. For the sixteen years following the queen’s death, during which time she “[has] the memory of Hermione” (5.1.50), she ensures that Leontes does not break off, by marrying anew, the now purely virtual relationship to his wife (Act 5, Scene 1). Even during this period of purely latent connection, Paulina remains the go-between: as the “resurrected” Hermione testifies, “I, | Knowing by Paulina that the oracle | Gave hope thous wast in being, have preserved | Myself to see the issue” (5.3.126-29). It is Paulina who announces Hermione’s “death” (Act 3, Scene 2), and it is Paulina, in the last scene, who brokers the reunion of estranged king and queen (Act 5, Scene 3). Not only the diachronic connection to Hermione upheld by Paulina’s tireless rhetorical activity, but also the synchronic link across

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space maps out the crucial role of the woman go-between in Shakespeare’s drama. “Advocacy” is one of the key terms describing this diplomatic shuttleservice function within the play. Paulina declares that the king must be informed of the birth of a daughter in prison. “If she dares trust me with her little babe | I’ll show’t the King, and undertake to be | Her advocate to th’ loud’st” (2.2.40-42). She emphasizes that such an activity is the special domain of women: “The office | Becomes a woman best. I’ll take it upon me” (2.2.34-35). There is of course an association here with maternity; the burden of this “becomes” is however less the maternal bond than established feminine socio-economic practices, as demonstrated above, of moving between disparate domains and performing a bridging function. When Paulina arrives with the baby, this mobility is specifically foregrounded by the go-between woman as an ethical value in its own right. A Lord: You must not enter Paulina: Nay rather, good my lords, be second to me. Fear you his tyrannous passion more, alas, Than the Queen’s life? – a gracious, innocent soul More free than he is jealous.

(2.3.26-30)

One meaning of “free” in this last line is “guiltless”. But equally, given that jealousy is the driving force behind Leontes’ obsessive impulse to limit human agency, freedom figures even more importantly in this context as the counterpoise to the masculine trammelling of human scope. “Free” here denotes the fluidity, social, mental and relational, which forms the positive face of the misogynous “too free” of the gossips’ incontinence in A Chaste Maid in Cheapside (2.3.111). In contrast, Paulina’s very appearance as Hermione’s messenger does not merely “represent” the interests of the incarcerated queen. Far more, the gobetween’s own dynamism embodies, by proxy, the moral “freedom” which the queen, sanctioned by masculine restrictions, cannot herself bear out at this moment. Advocacy can function on several levels, and in several directions at once. Responding to the jailor’s concern that he might be held responsible for allowing Hermione’s daughter to leave the prison, Paulina reassures him: “Do not you fear. Upon mine honour, | I’ll stand twixt you and danger” (2.2.68-69). The “ ’twixt” marks out the space taken up by the mobile woman messenger, a space which can be

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understood not only as a communicative, but also as a protective interval. Given the ways in which feminine agency in the public world was customarily interpreted by male commentators, it is hardly surprising that Paulina’s energetic and voluble activity on behalf of Hermione is received with ill will by Leontes. The monarch storms, “Out! | A mankind witch! Hence with her, out o’door – | A most intelligencing bawd” (2.3.67-69). Leontes’ tirade bundles together a host of early modern conceptions about unruly femininity. Paulina’s action of taking up an assertive public role is constructed as an impingement upon the prerogatives of masculinity, thus she is for Leontes a mannish virago. Her verbal assertiveness associates her with the traditional witch figure, whose power, like that of the more everyday shrew, was primarily verbal. The tongue itself was sometimes described as a “witch” in early modern parlance.61 Moreover, Paulina’s shuttle-service diplomacy is construed as communicating by illicit paths, as an underground espionage activity, as treasonable intelligence. Leontes describes her as a “bawd”, pairing off prostitutes and clients, a go-between furtively creating illicit alliances.62 The Merry Wives of Windsor similarly speaks of Mistress Quickly in her capacity as romantic messenger between Mistress Ford and Falstaff as a “she-Mercury”, as a “punk” and “one of Cupid’s carriers”, and as a “spokesmate, or go-between” (2.2.78-79, 131, 253). Leontes deliberately stresses the spatial character of Paulina’s activity by invoking the classic trope of unbridled feminine speech, raving “O boundless tongue” (2.3.92). Paulina is clearly aware of the tongue stereotypes: “If I prove honeymouthed, let my tongue blister, | And never to my red-looked anger be | The trumpet any more” (2.2.36-38). In other words: speak now, or forever hold your peace. Thus she calculatingly affirms the stereotype of shrewishness, and confirms the power of the tongue, often the only power a woman had. A treatise on witchcraft, the ultimate patriarchal weapon which could be brought to bear upon unruly women (as does Leontes, with his “mankind witch”), and which concentrated upon the ostensibly diabolical power of female word, implicitly acknowledged this last-resort power of the powerless. Perkins dismissed “vertue in the matter or frame of her words, for she was ignorant and had no learning. 61 62

St George, “Heated Speech”, 280. William Shakespeare, The Winter’s Tale, ed. Ernest Schanzer (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), 181.

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By power she could not effect it, beeing a weake woman .... The main reason was, her league made with Satan.”63 However, Paulina endows these attributes with a positive value: “Tell her Emilia, | I’ll use that tongue I have. If wit flow from’t | As boldness from my bosom, let’t not be doubted | I shall do good” (2.2.54-57). And to the king she stresses the socially therapeutic function of her action: Paulina: ... I Do come with words as medicinal as true, Honest as either, to purge him of that humour That presses him from sleep. Leontes: What noise there, ho? Paulina: No noise, my lord, but needful conference About some gossips for your highness.

(2.3.36-41)

Here the articulate woman mobilizes a range of topoi which allude to feminine agency in the public sphere. The first image is that of the woman as healer or surgeon (later on also as physician), a still fairly common feminine practice of public life, which would be progressively marginalized in the course of the seventeenth century. The second image is that of the gossips’ crew. Both functions are presented as salutary social functions working in the king’s best interests: Paulina’s words are “true”, and thus “medicinal”, just as the gossips’ conference is “needful”. She also invokes the figure of the female political counsellor at court, thus going beyond the range of known, if ridiculed and marginalized female functions: “Good my liege, I come – | And beseech you hear me, who professes | Myself your loyal servant, .... | Your most obedient counsellor” (2.3.52-55). Here Paulina usurps the world of masculine activities even more radically. There were no women political counsellors in the Renaissance.64 Within the play, Paulina does indeed take up the stance of the king’s counsellor, giving advice that for many years preserves his putative widowerhood until the moment of Hermione’s revelation in the last scene. The fairytale tenor of the conclusion allows Shakespeare to place a woman in a position of political power which he is normally reluctant to cede. Perhaps it is this fairy-tale rider upon the dramatic narrative which

63 64

William Perkins, A Discourse of the Dammed Art of Witchcraft (Cambridge, 1608), 44. Hilda L. Smith, “Introduction: Women, Intellect and Politics”, in Women Writers and the Early Modern British Political Tradition, ed. Hilda L. Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 7.

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permits the rehearsal of a scenario so radically foreign to the fundamental horizon of selections of the early modern gender system.

CHAPTER 9 Redrawing the Boundaries: Emergent Gender Spaces on the Stage Says Posthumus towards the end of Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, “To shame the guise o’the world, I will begin | The fashion – less without and more within” (5.1.32-33). His epithet is a comment on costume and on the nation, as he returns from flamboyant Italy to modest Britain. It is also a comment on the feminized home, the domestic space as a “within” which is increasingly identified in gender discourse as a place of womens’ virtues. In this third chapter devoted to the theatrical presentation of women at the transitional moment as the early modern gender system ceded to an emergent modern gender system, I look at the ways in which the drama foreshadowed shifts in the systemic configurations shaping feminine gender. In particular, I assess indices of an emergent solution to such gender-political dilemmas: namely in the gradual redefinition of female bodies and the place where they belong. Here the drama can be seen to function as a sensitive barometer registering incipient discursive transformations of the spaces of and around female bodies within the emergent modern gender system. Cymbeline, significantly, contains a revealing contrast to Paulina in the character of Innogen. The action of Cymbeline turns upon an isomorphism of the assault on the woman’s virtue and the assault upon the kingdom. At each turn, the feminized kingdom is vulnerable because at the moment of crisis masculine helpers are absent. Manifestly, Innogen’s position as female heir to the throne cannot be admitted by the play’s ideology, which is fundamentally in agreement with Cymbeline’s determination to replace Innogen with a male heir. Innogen’s role as heir to the throne is thus only a transitional structure: for she cannot fulfil the role of masculine defender of the nation, particularly as she herself plays the symbolic role of the feminized nation itself, two gendered actantial categories which would appear to be mutually exclusive. The aporia is resolved by the romance conclusion of the drama, which reveals that the lost princes have been close at hand all along, raised in the wild Welsh forest by Belarius. The romance denouement, which restores the rightful (male) heirs to the throne, simultaneously eases the inappropriate (female) heir into a marginalized

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political position. Upon discovering the true lineage of Belarius’ apparent sons, in reality the king’s stolen sons, Cymbeline says: “O Innogen, | Thou hast by this lost a kingdom”, a loss graciously accepted by his daughter: “No my Lord, | I have got two worlds by’t”, meaning her brothers (5.6.373-75). Political and affective rifts are healed in quite distinct ways, so that female power is relegated to the sphere of the family, and the political domain is rendered invulnerable by the restoration of male inheritors. Here the romance genre permits Shakespeare to reaffirm the dynastic, self-generating fabric the early modern gender system in this nationalist-political parable of patriarchal power. This play from the end of Shakepeare’s productive working life is replete with signs of the imminent transformation of the gender system.

Ambivalence and resolution The boisterous Moll Cutpurse in Middleton and Dekker’s The Roaring Girl exemplifies a rather more differentiated attempt to deal with the figure of the woman in the public arena. At one level, the real Mary Frith, upon whom the character of Moll Cutpurse was based, appears to have been a colourful public figure popular enough for the playwrights to advertise her 1611 appearance on stage in person at the Fortune Theatre at the end of the play (Epilogue, 35-38). As Sebastian says to Moll, “Pish! Let ’em prate abroad! Thou ’rt here where thou art known and loved” (4.1.98-99). At another level, however, the figure of a crossdressing, streetwise woman was clearly a figure of moral reprobation. Both of these aspects of the woman about the town collided when Mary Frith was charged by the Consistory Court with “being at a play about 3 quarters of a year since at the Fortune in man’s apparel & and in her boots & with a sword by her side .... And also sat there upon the stage in the public view of all the people there present in man’s apparel & played upon her lute & sang a song.”1 The authors of The Roaring Girl were concerned to mobilize both of these attitudes to the woman who occupied a public space. They did so by making the tension between polarized visions of women in the public the mainspring of one of the central plot strands: the facilitation of the marriage of Sebastian Wengrave and his fiancée Mary Fitzallard. In the early years of the seventeenth century, and culminating in the controversies of the 1620s, the cross-dressing woman was perceived as a 1

Consistory Court of London, Correction Book, fols. 19-20 (27 January 1612), cited in Renaissance Drama by Women: Texts and Documents, eds S. P. Cerasano and Marion Wynne-Davies (London: Routledge, 1996), 172.

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genuine threat to patriarchal power. As Sir Alexander Wengrave, Sebastian’s rather dour father, observes Moll having her measurements taken for a new pair of breeches, he mutters: “heyday, breeches! .... What age is this? If the wife go in breeches, the man must wear long coats like a fool” (2.2.73-75). Sir Alexander has read the signs of the times aright. Much of Moll’s stage discourse can be understood in terms of a conservative defence of the value of virginal purity. At the same time however, her speeches often contain other less docile impulses. She vigorously resists the gallant Laxton’s attempts at sexual exploitation while presenting in rare clarity (for the period) the socio-economic consequences of prostitution for women:2 Thou’rt one of those That thinks each woman thy fond flexible whore. If she but cast a liberal eye upon thee, Turn back her head, she’s thine; or, amongst company, By chance drink first to thee, then she’s quite gone, There’s no means to help her .... How many of our sex, by such as thou, Have their good thoughts paid with a blasted name That never deserved loosely .... There is no mercy in’t.

(3.1.69-85)

She even goes as far as lucidly rejecting marriage as an oppressive social institution: I have no humour to marry. I love to lie o’ both sides o’ th’ bed myself; and again, o’ th’ other side, a wife, you know, ought to be obedient, but I fear me I am too headstrong to obey; therefore I’ll ne’er go about it .... I have the head now of my self, and am man enough for a woman. Marriage is but a chopping and changing, where a maiden loses one head, and has a worse i’ th’ place. (2.2.35-43).

Here Moll emerges, in the words of Mary Beth Rose, “as a defiant champion of female freedom from male sexual domination, a role symbolized by her male attire”.3 But in so far as the crossdresser, via her manly apparel, is able to enjoy masculine mobility in the public world, and because that domain is thought of as that of the street, she also becomes identified with the prostitute. Sir Alexander is concerned by Moll’s ostentatious visibility, 2 3

On the absence of economic considerations in the early modern debate about women, see Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance, 132. Mary Beth Rose, “Women in Men’s Clothing: Apparel and Social Stability in The Roaring Girl”, English Literary Renaissance, XIV (1984), 381.


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mobility, and thus immodesty: “Nay, more, let this strange thing walk, stand, or sit, | No blazing star draws more eyes after it” (1.2.134-35). Moll’s voice, foregrounded in the class- and gender-oxymoron of the play’s title (she’s a common roaring girl in contrast to the aristocratic roaring boys4), “a voice that will drown all the city” (2.1.172), calls forth ready stereotypes of volubility and incontinence. Other dramatists and commentators identified the belligerent crossdressing woman as a whore. In Jonson’s Volpone, for instance, Lady Politic Would-be takes Peregrine for a cross-dressing prostitute, calling him “a lewd harlot, a base fricatrice, | A female devil in a male outside” (4.2.55-56). Similarly, Thomas Becon made the clear connection between clothing and sexual mores: it is muche to be feared, that the woman, which so trimmeth and setteth forth her selfe, passing her degree and estate in costlye apparel, keepe her selfe within the bounds of honesty .... Is this to please her husband, which is at home, or rather to sturre up the luste of other towards her, which are abrode? The lightnesse of apparel, is a plaine demonstration of the lightnes of the minde: so that what so euer woman delight in gorgious garments, she setteth forth her selfe to sale and declareth euidently her incontinency bothe of body and minde.5

Thus the gallant Laxton sees Moll’s masculinity as a challenge, and her femininity as a lewd invitation: Methinks a brave captain might get [beget] all his soldiers upon her, and ne’er be beholding to a company of Mile End milksops, if he could come on and come off quick enough .... I’ll lay hard siege to her ... where the walls are flesh and blood, I’ll ever pierce through with a golden auger [a tool for boring holes]. (2.1.172-79)

Moll is loath to be fixed in this manner. She constantly stresses her mobility: “I cannot stay”; “I cannot stay now, i’faith; I am going to buy a shag ruff. The shop will be shut in presently”; “I go but to th’next shop” (2.1.166, 184-85, 198). This mobility could be interpreted, within early modern conceptions of femininity, as harlotry. Goshawk enthuses: “’Tis the maddest, fantastical’st girl! I never knew so much flesh and so much nimbelness put together” (2.1.186-87). “Nimbleness” in this context is clearly sexually coded, as in John Taylor’s verses on “A Whore”, which 4 5

See, for instance, Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, 2.1.17, with its quarrelsome “valiant” roaring boys. Thomas Becon, The Catechisme, in Worckes, I, (London, 1564), cccccxviv, cccccxxxiiir.

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claimed that “Shee’s nimbler than a tumbler, as I thinke, | Layes downe and takes vp whilst a man can winke”.6 Laxton describes Moll’s movement in a curiously phallic turn of phrase: “She slips from one company to another like a fat eel between a Dutchman’s fingers” (2.1.188-89). This odd phallic note is perhaps unsurprising, as one central accusation against immoral women in the public sphere was the usurpation of brazen masculine sexual behaviour. The cross-dressers of early modern London were a threat partly because of their ostensibly masculine provocation, with their low-cut bodices. The stereotypical woman cross-dresser “Hic-Mulier” is characterized not merely by her manly garb but also by her “loose, lasciuious ciuill embracement of a French doublet, being all vnbutton’d to entice”, by her “naked, lasciuious, bawdy Bosome”.7 Indeed, Sebastian appears to be relishing just this semi-homoerotic thrill of the male-attired woman when he kisses his fiancée in disguise (“Methinks a woman’s lips tastes well in a doublet” – 4.1.49-51). Various characters may perceive Moll as a “common woman”,8 but this charge is vigorously denied by the play. “Call you this a lecherous voyage?” wonders a bewildered Laxton, who thinks his rendezvous with Moll will culminate in easy sex for an appropriate fee (3.1.125). Despite the opinions expressed by some characters, Moll’s mobility is explicitly dissociated from prostitution. Unease about Moll’s morals remains active enough, however, in the mind of Sir Alexander. In a paradoxical reversal, the common woman will be put to the service of the common weal, in the persons of Sebastian and Mary Fitzallard. Sir Alexander opposes the marriage of Sebastian and Mary, so Sebastian mimes an alternative betrothal to Moll – the figure his father calls “A scurvy woman, .... A creature ... nature hath brought forth | To mock the sex of woman” (1.2.126-69). The father’s horror at this prospect is such that he then agrees to the lesser evil, the marriage with the rejected Mary Fitzallard. Sebastian accurately describes Moll’s role in this intrigue: “’Twixt lovers’ hearts she’s a fit instrument, | And has the art to help them to their own” (2.2.193-94). Moll acts as a mediator between Sebastian and Mary, 6 7 8

John Taylor, “A Whore”, All the Workes of John Taylor the Water Poet (London 1630), 106. Hic Mulier: or The Man-Woman (London, 1620), A4v; Haec-Vir, or The Womanish-Man: Being an Answere to a late Booke intituled Hic-Mulier (London, 1620), A4r. See Peter Stallybrass, “The World Turned Upside Down: Inversion, Gender and the State”, in The Matter of Difference: Materialist Feminist Criticism of Shakespeare, ed. Valerie Wayne (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991), 210, for the connotations of this expression.


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and between Sebastian and his father. She mediates between “the licit and the illicit”, in the words of Stephen Orgel.9 In her person, gender subversion is brought back into harmony with the licit world of patriarchal hegemony. As Jardine has pointed out, the Amazon on stage is a much less threatening figure than the more familiar shrew – a figure potentially closer to home. 10 “It is no accident that Sebastian’s fiancée is also named Mary: the Roaring Girl declares herself, beneath her costume, a model of middle-class feminine behaviour.”11 In allowing Mary to take the place which Moll threatens to occupy as Sebastian’s wife, the conventional marriage is confirmed in its cultural priority. As a mediator, Moll constantly makes space for those separated instances she reconciles. In the last moments before revealing their ostensible marriage plans to be a farce, Moll maliciously taunts Sir Alexander by stressing the advantages of a union between his son and a transvestite streetwise tomboy: “You do not know what benefits I bring with me: | No cheat dares work upon you with thumb or knife, | While you’ve a roaring girl to your son’s wife” (5.2.159-61). Such jocular irony aside, however, the play in all seriousness sketches a socially integrative model of gender transgression. It is Moll’s masculine dress which appears to invest her with masculine mobility (as we have seen, one that many women did indeed possess, but which conservative discourses tended to suppress) and which in turn endows her with masculine agency in social processes. Yet precisely the suspicion that such a woman can only be a harlot or a monster – a status which the play both intimates and denies – is the lever upon which Moll’s socially positive value, the “simple service” she does father and son (5.2.206) depends. To this extent The Roaring Girl prevaricates between two versions of public women, binding them together in an attempt to cater to several audiences. By the same token, Middleton and Dekker can artfully recuperate the elements of incipient feminism for an essentially bourgeois, conservative view of gender relations, thus dispelling (but also laying bare, as Majorie Garber shows12) contemporary anxieties about assertive women usurping the place of men via their public appearance. 9 10 11 12

Orgel, Impersonations, 144. Lisa Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters: Women and Drama in the Age of Shakespeare, 2nd edn (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1989), 105. Orgel, Impersonations, 152. Marjorie Garber, “The Logic of the Transvestite: The Roaring Girl (1608)”, in Staging the Renaissance: Reinterpretations of Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama, eds David S. Kastan and Peter Stallybrass (New York: Routledge, 1991), 229-30.

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In both The Winter’s Tale and The Roaring Girl, the active, public female characters have the task of negotiating between men and women, between closed-off spheres of public duty and domestic pleasure, and thus of resolving the dramatic conflicts which drive the plays’ plots. It would appear that this attribution of active go-between roles by male dramatists oscillates between two functions: confirmation of the subordinate role of the reproduction of social relations, at the same time, the underhand recognition of go-between as a figure of female capacities to intervene in the public sphere. In the face of masculine anxiety about feminine activity, dramatic figures such as Moll and Paulina represent attempts to negotiate between the patent evidence of feminine agency, and the patriarchal ideology which insisted that women’s place was not on the market or on the streets. A Winter’s Tale, analyzed at the conclusion of the previous chapter, Cymbeline and The Roaring Girl present a range of different strategies to deal with the threat active women posed to the early modern gender system by their socio-economic mobility, a mobility which resonated unpleasantly with the already weak inaugural differentiation mobilized by that system. A Winter’s Tale tolerates that agency, on the condition of integrating it to fantasy, Cymbeline refuses such agency, albeit exploiting romance to cushion its blunt refusal, and The Roaring Girl seeks a compromise solution between gender transgression and traditional gender hegemony. Such strategies evince the lengths to which the theatre went to accommodate audiences whose own social practice in many ways did not square with the gender system which purported to structure their understanding of the world. It is therefore no surprise that as the emergent modern gender system began to implement communicational acts which would more clearly stress the inaugural gender division, this new development was registered by the sensitive discursive antennae of contemporary dramatists. In the concluding section of this chapter, I wish to examine four plays which appear to have been responding to the gradual emergence, at least in gender discourse, of a clearer delineation of feminine spaces – even if the concrete everyday divisions of public and private appear to have remained porous.

A private space of her own One of the crucial components of the emergent gender system was an understanding of the companionate marriage as a space of private freedom from the public world of Machiavellian politics and dynastic corruption, much as seventeenth-century Dutch genre painting portrayed


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the domestic space as space constituted in opposition to and (ideally) out of reach of the state and militarism. It is worth beginning with a play which envisioned marriage according to a liberal conception. According to this notion, the domestic space is constituted by an individualized decision to marry for love, and inaugurates a new form of agency often conflicting with dynastic interests.13 The Duchess of Malfi, in Webster’s play of the same title, envies “The birds, that live i’th’ field | On the wild benefit of nature” and which “may choose their mates” (The Duchess of Malfi, 3.5.17-19). She protests “Why might not I marry? | I had not gone about, in this, to create | Any new world, or custom” (3.2.110-12). This, however, is ingenuous, because, as the Duchess’s own discourse demonstrates, the explicit opposition to the public space of the dynastic family generates the novel space of the private domestic world. When Antonio, newly married to the Duchess, anxiously enquires about her brothers Ferdinand and the Cardinal, she replies, “Do not think of them: | All discord, without this circumference, | Is only to be pitied, and not fear’d” (1.2.386-88). The space of domestic harmony emerges against the counterfoil of dynastic disharmony. In the stark contrast of polarized domestic and dynastic values, the domestic is figured, ideally, as a space of free choice and individual selfdetermination.14 Paradoxically, the domestic space thus owes its constitutive boundaries to that very domain which, in this play, subsequently overwhelms and dissolves it. The space of marriage-forlove is reconquered by dynastic patriarchy. It is under the regime of vitiated feminine agency that domesticity takes on a positive connotation which, I suggest in what follows, is complicated by later dramatic perspectives. A similar scenario of feminine agency configured according to an economy of scarcity, in which feminine action is directly sanctioned by the forces of dynastic patriarchalism, is dramatized in a coterie drama written by Elizabeth Cary, The Tragedy of Mariam, probably dating from 1602-4. In this play, between periods of massive dynastic control of feminine agency, there occurs a brief interval during which the shape of a emerging modern gender system can be glimpsed in sketchy form. 13

14

See Lisa Jardine, “Companionate Marriage versus Male Friendship: Anxiety for the Lineal Family in Jacobean Drama”, in Political Culture and Cultural Politics in Early Modern England: Essays Presented to David Underdown, eds Susan D. Amussen and Mark A. Kishlansky, 234-54. Cf. Jürgen Habermas, Strukturwandel der Öffentlichkeit, Preface to the 1990 edition, 13-14 (English translation: Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Bürger).

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Herod has been called to trial to Rome, and has ostensibly been executed there for his crimes. The sudden absence of the tyrannical monarch opens up an unexpected vacuum in which the various female characters, Herod’s wife Mariam, his sister Salome, and Graphina, the mistress of Herod’s brother Pherora, react in ways which point up the avenues of freedom potentially open to women in the early modern period. Herod’s subsequent return puts paid to the rumours of his death and reestablishes the sanctions customarily placed upon feminine aspirations towards freedom of action. The play evinces a tension between the various modes of gender control which were in place in seventeenth-century English society. Most prominent is the force of patriarchal authority which disciplines the eponymous heroine Mariam, wife of Herod, for her outspoken political criticism. She has consistently attacked figures of authority such as Caesar for his unscrupulous use of politically motivated murder, which has taken the lives of her grandfather Hyrcanus and her brother Aristobolus: “How oft have I with public voice run on, | To censure Rome’s last hero for deceit | Because he wept when Pompey’s life was gone?” (1.1-3). To this extent, her voice has transgressed the boundaries of submissive feminine decorum, a transgression carried symbolically by the mobility in her verbal “running on”. The patriarchal condemnation of this public voice is clearly expressed by the chorus: “she usurps upon another’s right, | That seeks to be by public language graced” (3.239-40). In this respect, the chorus accurately predicts Herod’s own opinion regarding the appropriate place of women: “certain ’tis, she lived too wantonly, | And therefore shall she never more be free” (4.255-57). Three decades later, the civil war period would present patriarchal men with an unsettling panorama of what a world of feminine freedom might look like: women preachers, women writers, women as sectarian dissenters, women meddling in politics, women defending London against military assault. By the same token, the 1640s made clear the inadequacy of monumental patriarchal authority to genuinely impose closure on women’s practices in the public world. The civil war thus fuelled the rapid emergence of modes of gender control more conducive to the sort of civic society necessitated by the smooth running of bourgeois capitalism. Cary gives a proleptic glimpse of a fictional moment of historical opening, and of its subsequent closing down with the re-establishment of the monarchy. However, her movement of closure is effected with the openly authoritarian means most obviously available to the patriarchal thought of the era – those means whose


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inadequacy was made so obvious by women’s public agency during the years of civil unrest. The tragedy ends with Mariam’s execution. At the same time, there is a strange note in the chorus’ condemnation of Mariam which can be found echoed in many conduct books of the period: “ ’Tis not so glorious for her to be free | As by her proper self restrained to be” (3.219-20). This judgement is a symptom of an emergent discourse demanding that the subject take on herself the work of gender control, thus relieving patriarchy of the onerous and uneconomical task of an open display of power. I will come back to this issue shortly. Such was Cary’s instinct for incipient social change that she was able to sketch a discursive mode which was as yet barely hegemonic. Significantly, the dramatic form taken by this exploration of the agency available to early modern women is also prophetic of emergent modes of gender control. It is important to situate the play in its probable context of production, that of the coterie drama and the small and intimate circle of family and friends in which it was possible for a woman dramatist to write and be received. The ultimate closing-down of spaces of feminine freedom as it would increasingly emerge is better figured in the play’s form than in its (monumentally authoritarian) content. For the domestic space, increasingly clearly demarcated from the public world, would become the most effective coercive component of the modern gender system. Thus Ros Ballaster is correct for the immediate context of the early modern theatre when she states that “The ‘closet’ play is a form of verbal power that appears to sidestep the problem of women’s speaking in public precisely because the play is not designed for performance”.15 Indeed, Rosemary Kegl argues that the play actively contains Mariam’s unseemly usurpation of a public voice just as it resists the generic disorder it implicitly attributes to the public stage.16 Thus in the broader context of the gender-systems transformations to come, Cary’s drama steps forward the future, in the very privacy of its dramatic mode, to gesture at new forms of restriction as yet barely visible. In Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness the dramatist registers the failure of traditional masculine strategies of control of women in more definite tones. The play persistently stresses the 15 16

Ros Ballaster, “The first female dramatists”, in Women and Literature in Britain 15001700, ed. Helen Wilcox, 273. Rosemary Kegl, “Theaters, Households, and ‘Kind of History’ in Elizabeth Cary’s The Tragedy of Mariam”, in Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage, eds Viviana Comensoli and Anne Russell, 135-53.

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relinquishment of naked power or violence to implement patriarchal authority in the face of female insubordination. The “kindness” of the title alludes to soft coercion rather than the coarser force of punishment. In the face of his wife’s adultery, with all its implications for masculine honour and for the transmission of family wealth, the wronged husband Frankford bares his sword, but, emblematically, desists from using it (4.4.65, sd). The husband’s study, which contrasts in a significant manner with the counting house of Arden of Faversham, becomes a metonymy of the moderate, rational deliberation which characterizes the emergent mode of discrete patriarchal hegemony.17 Frankford addresses his wife with a distant “Stand up, stand up”. Presumably Anne has thrown herself on the floor in supplication. This abnegation is an index of just the sort of direct hierarchical force which will be eschewed. “I will do nothing rashly. | I will retire awhile into my study, | And thou shalt hear thy sentence presently”, says Frankford (4.4.127-79). He then delivers what Anne calls “a mild sentence” (4.4.169). Here, the advice of moralists such as Whately is being followed: “This is the way to preuaile with the least burden to the inferiour, & toyle to the superiour, if with milde words hee wish this and this, rather then with imperious speeches enjoyne it.”18 This tactical mildness was espoused in distinction to the type of vengeful punishment described by Bullinger for the German context, where the offended husband might “stryppe [his wife] out of hyr clothes, thrust her out of his house, & beat her openly with roddes in the citie or towne, even before hir friends”.19 In contrast to this vicious counter-attack on the part of the wounded husband, Frankford intones, I’ll not martyr thee, Nor mark thee for a strumpet, but with usage Of more humility torment thy soul, And kill thee, even with kindness.

(4.4.151-54)

The refusal to “mark” Anne contrasts with the treatment Corsino reserves for his disobedient wife Celia in Volpone. Jonson has him “devising | Some monstrous crime, which I, in capital letters, | Will eat 17

18 19

Interesting comparisons with Montaigne’s “arrière-boutique” are made by Subha Mukherji, “Issues of Evidence, Interpretation and Judgement in Renaissance English Drama, c. 1580-1640” (PhD Dissertation, University of Cambridge, 2000), 36-40. William Whately, A Bride-Bush, or, A Wedding Sermon (London, 1617), 29. Heinrich Bullinger, The Christian State of Matrimony, trans. Myles Coverdale (London, 1541), Eviiir.


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into thy flesh with aquafortis, | And burning cor’sives, on this stubborn breast” (3.7.100-105). In stark contrast to these spectacular modes of torture, the main characteristic of Anne Frankford’s punishment is invisibility, by dint of removal: – Woman, hear thy judgement: Take with thee all thy gowns, all thy apparel; Leave nothing that ever did call thee mistress .... Choose thee a bed and hangings for a chamber, Take with thee everything that hath thy mark, And get thee to my manor seven mile off, Where live; ’tis thine; I freely give it thee.

(4.4.58-64)

The place of imprisonment is recognizable as a domestic space, explicitly “marked” as a place of possession and not of deprivation. It is clearly signalled as being the woman’s place, her “free” area of activity. Only its spatial position registers a restriction: its clear isolation from the outside world of masculinity. Similar tones heralding concepts of the domestic sphere as a space “severed” from its environment can be detected in Donne’s “Elegie VII”: Thou art not by so many duties his [i.e. her husband’s], That from the world’s Common having sever’d thee, Inlaid thee, neither to be seene, nor see, As mine; who have with amorous delicacies Refin’d thee’into a blis-full paradise.20

His addressee has been taught the arts of love only to pass into another man’s arms. “Common” plays upon the woman who is common property, and sets against this the private space which codes her as a possession; in the domestic context, she is “inlaid”, embedded in splendid isolation like a jewel in a ring. Something of this coercive isolation can be heard in Lady Anne Clifford’s journal entry for May 1616: All this time my lord was in London, where he had all and infinite great resort coming to him. He went much abroad to cocking, to bowling alleys, to plays and horse races, and commened by all the world. I stayed in the country, having many times a sorrowful and heavy heart, and being condemned by most folks because I would not consent to the agreements [demanded by her spendthrift husband, who attempted for years to force

20

John Donne, “Elegie VII”, in The Poems of John Donne, ed. Herbert Grierson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1964), 80.

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BODIES AND THEIR SPACES his wife to renounce her claims to her family estates in Cumberland]. So as I may truly say, I am like an owl in the desert.21

Heywood’s play articulates a response to the progressive fragmentation and pluralization of English social life under the force of economic change in the period from 1580 to 1640. Such changes undermined the previous community structures “wherein effective means of social control such as compact, nucleated village centers, resident squires, and strong manorial institutions weakened or disappeared”.22 With the collapse of residual external modes of control, internal, decentralized mechanisms of restriction became necessary. In A Woman Killed with Kindness, the porous, increasingly transgressible domestic-public space is replaced by another social space: that of the domestic prison. The stage dramatizes the transition to a new domestic space as the synecdochic site of a new form of gender identity, by figuring two new houses. Anne Frankford’s banishment to one of the manors on the Frankford estate “seven mile off” (4.4.163) expresses, in diegetic spatial language, the distance which separates the residual aristocratic household with its open structures and its visibility to the world (embodied in the all-seeing eyes of the prying, eavesdropping servants, and reinforced by the gaze of the audience), from the domestic home (to which we are privy only in the very last scene of the play). Thus the sequence of the play’s action also signifies a putative historical change which can only be given a terminal location in its chronological progress. In this way the play foresees the inauguration of an emergent understanding of domestic space, one which supposedly controls femininity not by physical force or by the authority of biblical precepts, but by assigning it a homely, “freely given” space of a putatively normal existence – but which, despite this facade of permissiveness, clearly belongs to the husband (“my manor”) and whose confines are rigorously defined by him. The space assigned to the woman assumes a new sort of female individual. Significantly, the interrogation treats her as a free subject:

21

22

Anne Clifford, Diary for 1616-17, in Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen, eds Elspeth Graham, Hilary Hinds, Elaine Hobby and Helen Wilcox, 42. Newman, Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama, xvii.

REDRAWING THE BOUNDARIES My God with patience arm me. Rise, nay rise, And I’ll debate with thee. Was it for want Thou play’dst the strumpet? Was thou not supplied With every pleasure, fashion, and new toy, Nay, even beyond my calling? .... Was it then disability in me .... ? ... Did I not lodge thee in my bosom? Wear thee in my heart?

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(4.4.104-13)

The woman is treated as a subject, a rational free actor, a nascent individual whose behaviour is attributed entirely to herself, and not to her environment or in the cosmic correspondences of the humours. The autonomous subject is isomorphic with the domestic space to which she will be assigned. The interrogation stresses her freedom, the lack of constraint under which she has chosen the way of adultery: there were no outside forces (material need, some form of disability in her husband, or lack of love and affection on his part) which have made her take the path followed. This freedom to assume one’s own subjection – understood both as the freedom to act and the willingness to assume responsibility for and punishment of those actions – is reinforced by the plot’s final twist. Anne Frankford voluntarily starves herself to death, an act of penitence which her brother puts down to the effectiveness of the husband’s “gentle” punishment (5.4.132-34). In Heywood’s play we see something akin to the emergent mechanisms of punishment-through-reform which have been described by Foucault as the soft coercion of modern disciplinary techniques. Such technologies work on the “person” of the criminal, and not upon her or his body, reaching their apex in internalized procedures of “self-control” by virtue of which the modern interiorized “subject” comes to being.23 The conduct literature of the seventeenth century encouraged the capture of the woman’s volition by male authority. In a peculiarly apt expression, Edmund Tilney wrote that the husband should “steale awaye hir priuate will, and appetite, so that of two bodies there may be made one onleye heart”.24 Dod and Cleaver were more direct: “The husband ought not to be satisfied with the vse of his wiues body, but in that hee

23

24

See Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1974). English translation: Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1982). Edmund Tilney, A Briefe and Pleasant Discourse of Duties in Marriage, Called the Flower of Friendshippe (London, 1573), [Bvir].

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hath also the possession of her will and affections.”25 The failure of internalized masculine authority could produce perverse effects: “the heart goes against that which the hand performes; and thou are disliked inwardly, though perhaps obeyed in shew: and if obedience comes not from the heart, can it last long?”26 A wife who was not fully mentally and spiritually submitted to her husband was a “Shadow without Substance”.27 Heywood’s play rehearses the successful avoidance of such an outcome, with a perfectly willed submission on the wife’s part. At the conclusion of this process of self-punishment, Heywood’s play enacts a gruesome family reunion, with Frankford and Anne reconciled and symbolically re-married (5.4.116-23). At the point where Anne’s internalized assumption of her guilt, mirrored in her isomorphic accession to a new private dominion, culminates in her selfextinguishment, a ghastly avatar of the harmonious companionate marriage is performed in its emblematic place, the emergent domestic space. A rather different perspective on the companionate marriage is given in Lady Jane Cavendish and Lady Elizabeth Brackley’s civil war play, The Concealed Fancies. Like Elizabeth Cary’s Tragedy of Mariam, this play is notable for being one of the few extant plays written by women during the early modern period. The play rehearses debates between its aristocratic protagonists about the nature of marriage while their home, Ballamo Castle, is under siege. Thus the various ideals of domestic relationship proposed by the respective characters are all to be read against a public situation of military conflict and the as yet distant return of peace and civil existence. The domestic and political domains resonate inherently with one another. The siege provides a backdrop for the martial rule of domestic existence espoused by Presumption. His projection of a Perugio-like war of attrition against his own wife (3.3.10-44) is in turn mirrored in the siege laid to Ballamo Castle. This patriarchal mode of conjugal government is rejected by Courtley: “Your way with your wife is to educate her just so, as to hate her within two or three years, or else you are so proud you would have yourself the only valuable piece of perfection” (3.3.76-80). Courtley’s notion of marriage constitutes a refusal of the turbulent and conflicted public sphere of war, projecting a 25 26 27

John Dod and Robert Cleaver, A Godlie Form of Household Government (London 1630), L3r. Whately, A Bride-Bush, or, A Wedding Sermon, 29. Thomas Gataker, A Wife In Deed in Certaine Sermons (London, 1637), 149.


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peaceful state of private companionate marriage as a future alternative. “A true kind husband” – “That’s me!” he exclaims. He imagines that his wife “shall love me so well, as she shall think me worthy of my freedom, and so we will continue the conversation of lovers, without knowing the words of man and wife” (3.3.52, 65-69). Likewise, his lover Luceny says: “What, for as I hope for happiness I will continue my innocent freedom with Courtley, and he shall have a true piece of virtue of Luceny; and you need not be more jealous, sister, of Luceny’s language [what her sister Tattiney distainfully calls “the language of friendship and conversation”], than you are of yourself, of making who I please believe I am an obedient fool” (2.3.131-38). From the perspective of the besieged Welbeck Abbey, where the dramaturge sisters wrote their play, the prospect of a domestic space of “friendship and conversation” may well have appeared very alluring. But the play astutely points out, however, that the social transition from war to peace does not offer a reassuring synecdoche for a concomitant transition to a less conflicted form of conjugal life in the family domain. The play closes with a curiously chiastic reversal, in which “Courtley [is] become Presumption after marriage” (Epilogue, 6364) and vice versa. Have the two models of marriage, one patriarchal and authoritative, the other companionate and gentle, simply been exchanged, with the play thus ironically suggesting that plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. Moll Cutpurse’s intimation that “marriage is but a chopping and changing” (Roaring Girl, 2.2.41-42), interpreted rather broadly, would appear to be confirmed here. In contrast to the trope of inversion employed by one of the servants in the play, in the figure of “the world turned upside down” (5.5.18), the play closes with the somewhat static trope of chiasmus. At first glance, the play’s conclusion appears to be mischievously suggesting that no historical transition has occurred at all. Luceny describes her gentle husband turned tyrant, and criticizes the unequal distribution of power in cases where the wife brings more wealth to the union but nevertheless assumes the subordinate role (Epilogue, 43-48). In contrast, the formerly submissive Tattiney finally declares, “His mistress, this you may see is an equal [in?] marriage, and I hate those people who will not understand matrimony is to join lovers” (Epilogue, 84-87). But her husband, the once belligerent Presumption merely “sleights as being mad in love” and “when I am in company with him he becomes a compound of he-knows-not-what” (Epilogue, 64-69). Thus the lifting of the siege of Ballamo Castle does not inaugurate a

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placid domestic calm in accord with the political settlement, but merely complicates the terms of gender conflict, dissimulating them under a proleptic version of the superficially urbane manners of post-civil war society. The Concealed Fancies intimates that the patriarchal marriage can cede to the companionate marriage without gender struggle truly being laid to rest, and more problematically, that the companionate marriage can camouflage a latent state of war. The elision of real power relations within the new rhetoric of the companionate marriage is evinced in texts such as William Whately’s A Bride-Bush of 1617. Whately’s treatise proclaimed marriage as a union of equal partners joined by a “mutuall bond”, a relationship in which man and wife were “indebted to each other in a reciprocall debt”. Yet the description of their respective duties soon reveals the customary hierarchy, with the husband’s being “the keeping of his authority, and the vsing of it”, and his wife’s, “to acknowledge her inferiority: the next, to carry her selfe as inferiour”.28 To this extent Cavendish’s and Brackley’s play appears to offer an uncompromisingly lucid analysis of a still emergent form of conjugal existence. The companionate marriage assumed a consensual mode of managing gender power, with power differentials left largely intact but cushioned and masked by affective bonds.29 Making a highly significant connection with discourse as an element of power relations, Whately explained that “Authority is like the arts of Logick and Rhetoricke, that must in speaking be vsed, and yet concealed: and then thy most preuaile when being vsed, they are least seene”. Consequently, he advised the 28 29

Whately, A Bride-Bush, or, A Wedding Sermon, 1, 18, 36. Here I take issue with accounts of the companionate marriage such as that of Margaret J. M. Ezell, The Patriarch’s Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1987), or Germaine Greer, Shakespeare (Oxford: Oxford University Press/Past Masters, 1986), 109-26, which stress its consensual, democratic character. In a sense, this is no surprise. Catherine Belsey points out in The Subject of Tragedy: Identity and Difference in Renaissance Drama, that with the demise of models of the family as a microcosmic commonwealth, power relations within the companionate marriage were excluded from political analysis (193). To that extent, however, Ezell and Greer’s analyses remain complicit in the ideological mechanisms that structured the very emergence of the companionate marriage. An refreshingly sceptical analysis of the specific working of such ideologies at their moment of formation can be found in R. Valerie Lucas, “Puritan Preaching and the Politics of the Family”, in The Renaissance Englishwoman in Print: Counterbalancing the Canon, eds Anne M. Haselkorn and Betty S. Travitsky (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), 224-40, to which I owe a number of references to contemporary writers. A cogent contemporary critique of ideologies of the family is contained in Michèle Barrett and Mary McIntosh, The AntiSocial Family (London: Verso, 1982).


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husband to behave towards his wife in such a way “that she may perceiue herselfe to have entred, not into servile thraldome, but louing subiection”.30 The structural function of the companionate marriage was thus to shut off the endless spiral of masculine conceptions of feminine voracity, of concomitant fears of infidelity, and of striving for (structurally impossible) closure on feminine mobility. Yet the companionate marriage, with its concentration upon the affective bonds of two individuals, necessarily tended to look inwards, thus itself generating a counterweight to an earlier mode of disturbing feminine peregrination across heterogeneous social spaces; while affective bonds inevitably tended to function as internalized modes of discipline and selfcontrol, inner sanctions far more efficient than forms of dominance imposed from without. Once again, Whately, in a statement quoted above, espoused a mode of female self-monitoring by which “her-selfe shalle bee Iudge against her-selfe”.31 Thomas Becon recommended that the godly wife “remember secretly with her selfe, what a great diuersity there is betwene an honest married wife and a strumpet or whore”.32 In mechanism of self-control, the “secrecy” of the private individual self emerged as the direct result of, but also as the psychological basis for new systems of gender coercion. Therefore the chiastic structure which The Concealed Fancies imposes upon the broader plot progression from war to peace does not imply a static vision of historical gender relations, as might first seem to be the case. Far more, chiasmus itself, as the balanced exchange of linked binary elements within a closed structure, figures the deceptive facade of placid reciprocity and mutually complementing give-and-take that is the central core of the ideology of the companionate marriage. This form of mutual exchange rests upon the dichotomy of two biologically gendered subjects which complement each other and supply each other’s lacks (the provision of financial support on the one hand, and of warmth and emotional support one the other). Under this gender system, a far more efficient production of systemic boundaries was ensured. The new regime was initiated by a massive intensification of gynaecological discourse in the years between 1540 and 1700, which gradually redefined the female body in its biological difference within the progressive transition from the humoral to the nervous economy – an economy which destined woman for her rightful place in the 30 31 32

Whately, A Bride-Bush, or, A Wedding Sermon, 29, 28. Ibid, 42. Becon, The Catechisme, in Worckes, I, cccccxiiir.

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household.33 The novel private body and its domestic boundaries both worked to reinforce processes of psychic autopoesis. This emergent individual consciousness, also crafted through novel techniques of selfinculcated discipline, rapidly generated a high level of negative feedback which guaranteed extremely stable systemic definition. At the same time, the emergent individual relieved patriarchy of the work of maintaining the hierarchy of males and females in social interaction. The unequal distribution of gender power was perfectly integrated into systemic autopoesis, thus becoming virtually invisible and completely naturalized. The double establishment of what would increasingly be understood as a feminized private sphere and a privatized female body, assumed to be a women’s profound truth, was the solid foundation for the emergent gender system. Questions such as “Are you a Vvoman?” from the 1620 cross-dressing pamphlet Haec-Vir had became non sequiturs by the end of the eighteenth century.34 The gradual eradication of the state of discursive confusion evinced in Haec-Vir’s question only became possible, though, with the demise of notions of performance of gender. In the transformation from the pre-1642 stage to the re-opened Restoration theatres, a decisive shift in notions of gender and performance would take place.

33

34

Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman: A Study in the Fortunes of Scholasticism and Medical Science in European Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980), 46. Haec-Vir, or The Womanish-Man: Being an Answere to a late Booke intituled Hic-Mulier, A3v.

CONCLUSION The Alteration in Apparel: Cross-Dressing and the Emergent Gender System Middleton and Dekker’s cross-dressing play The Roaring Girl opens with a remarkable reference to its own theatrical practice. In an intriguing aphoristic epithet, the Epistle-character announces: “The fashion of play-making I can properly compare to nothing so naturally as the alteration in apparel” (Epistle, 1-2). Given that this play announced the imminent appearance of its real-life model on the same stage (Epilogue, 33-38), it is no surprise that the cross-dressing plot included a mise-enabyme gesturing towards the theatre’s own work with gender. The “alteration in apparel”, whether on stage or off, and thus the assumption of other roles and other identities, both social and gender-related, was perceived by the dramatists as the core of their undertaking. As demonstrated in the previous chapter, Moll’s cross-dressing, and by extension the theatrical business in general, was presented as possessing a beneficent function for the broader common weal. Other early modern commentators took a rather more jaundiced view of this aspect of the player’s profession. The anti-theatrical writer J. Cocke appeared to believe that cross-dressing had such an allpervasive influence within the actor’s world that it rendered him incapable of telling men, women and boys apart, whether on or off stage: “If hee marries, ... mistakes the Woman for the Boy in Womans attire, by not respecting a difference in the mischiefe: But so long as he lives unmarried, hee mistakes the Boy, or a Whore for the Woman; by courting the first on the stage, or visiting the second at her devotions.”1 The theatre was perceived by apologists and critics alike as mixing up social and sexual categories – the difference lay in whether this was seen to be a beneficent or a corrupting influence. In this concluding chapter, I wish to explore the implications, for a residual early modern gender system still determined by the humoral theory of gender, of a theatre largely based upon conventions of boyactors’ cross-dressing. I suggest that the onstage performance of the “alteration of apparel” was a striking mode of ostention or showing 1

Cited in E. K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1923), IV, 256-57.


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forth of the central assumptions of the early modern gender system, an ostentatious concretization which aggravated already tensions in gender legitimation. The closing of the theatres in 1642 represented a watershed in the theatrical representation of gender. After that date, a new mode of onstage representation increasingly came to the fore, and that the new mode embodied – literally – the emergent modern gender system.

Playing their parts There is a short exchange in Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley’s The Concealed Fancies of 1645 which crystallizes the changes which would occur in the representation of gender on the English stage after the Restoration. Two minor characters discuss their performance during a private masque in the besieged Ballamo Castle. This performance forms a mise-en-abyme of a play which itself was probably only ever staged within a private coterie context by aristocratic lay actors: Sh: Pray, how did I look in the posture of a delinquent? Cicelley: .... Faith, as though you thought the scene would change again, and you would be happy though you suffered misery for a time. And how did I look? Sh: As yourself: that’s great, though in misfortune. Cicelley: So did you. Sh: How should I do otherwise, for I practised Cleopatra when she was in her captivity. (3.4.4-14)

“Sh” claims that she has only been playing what she is (a noble woman), and miming a situation which is hers in reality (captivity during the siege). Moreover, if this play was performed as a coterie drama, then fictional and real place Ballamo Castle/Welbeck Abbey also coincided with one another. The play-within-the-play thus ostentatiously performed the real corporeal gender-place in which the actor was situated. This performance-of-what-one-is constrasts sharply with the theatrical intertext to which Cavendish and Brackley’s characters explicitly refer. In Shakespeare’s drama, a boy-actor-in-drag who takes the role of Cleopatra disdains the thought of some other boy actor playing her part. Cleopatra refuses the prospect of being carried captive to Rome and having to endure “some squeaking Cleopatra boy my greatness” (5.2.219). Cavendish and Brackley’s coterie drama consciously distances itself from such cross-dressing performance of female roles. In a play which is persistently metatheatrical, and which constantly underlines the parodic

THE ALTERATION IN APPAREL

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mimicry of female subservience within marriage, it might appear odd that the ipseity of gender as a mode of performing what one is, can be so easily postulated. The play may cast a sceptical gaze on the ostensibly reciprocal caring and mutual respect of the companionate marriage, as suggested above at the conclusion of chapter three. But within the bounded space of the besieged house, it does seem to accept the emergent stability of physically anchored gender which it is the actor’s role not to “personate”, but simply to embody. Thus I take issue with Alison Findlay’s contention that the play’s ubiquitous topoi of metatheatricality would have underlined the “performative”, that is, merely discursively constructed character of embodied gender within the actors’ “appropriate” bodies.2 On the contrary, the play constitutes a contradictory moment of transition – the “interregnum” of the siege – in which the body emerges as naturally itself and naturally gendered within a residual episteme of aristocratic spectacle where the actors were playing extensions of their everyday “scene-selves” (1.1.3-4).3 In the words of a character from Shirley’s The Ball (1632), the women actors simply “play their own parts”.4 At this particular historical moment, the sexually appropriate bodies are not unambiguously given and present, but, I would argue, are in the throes of being produced, in ways which can only be gestured towards at this mid-century juncture. It is surely no coincidence that it is in the home that the actors perform their biological as well as their social function. Off the commercial stage and out of the sight of a mixed public, the principal objections to women’s active participation in the theatre would have been eliminated. Thus, in contrast to the scandalous all-women performances at the Caroline court orchestrated by Henrietta Maria, where women “set [themselves] at gaze”, in the words of Richard Brome,5 the coterie play implicitly conformed to the domesticizing injunction of a Richard Braithwait: “Make then your Chamber your priuate Theatre, wherein you may act some deuout scene to Gods honour.” Braithwait’s imperative stood in explicit contrast to the risk to 2

3 4 5

Alison Findlay, “Playing the ‘Scene Self’: Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley’s The Concealed Fancies”, in Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage, eds Viviana Comensoli and Anne Russell, 169. See also Suzanne Gossett, “ ‘Man-maid, begone!’: Women in Masques”, English Literary Renaissance, XVIII/1 (1988), 108-10. James Shirley, The Ball, in Dramatic Works and Poems, eds William Gifford and Alexander Dyce (London, 1833), III, 79. Richard Brome, The Court Begger, in The Dramatic Works of Richard Brome (London: John Pearson 1873), III, 206.

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a woman’s chastity “when shee leaues her Chamber to walke on the publike Theatre”.6 Paradoxically, however, this meant that in the privacy of the home, the actor no longer needed to act the female body, but, as woman, could simply be it. Cavendish and Brackley’s play, apparently a marginal theatrical event during the interim between the closure of the theatres and the Restoration, enacts the imminent changes in the performance of bodies which would characterize the emergent modern age. If, as Findlay suggests, the play consciously defines itself in opposition to the popular theatre,7 it would appear that the linkage of biological gender and the space of the home in opposition to the public space of prosthetic-sartorial gender is central to that definition. Why was such a change necessary? It would appear that the early seventeenth century increasingly registered cross-dressing as the focus for a sense of unease in gender relations, a sense of unease which was concretized in an acute form on the early modern stage: for, in the words of Middleton and Dekker, “The fashion of play-making” is epitomized in “the alteration in apparel” (The Roaring Girl, Epistle, 1-2). It is significant that most of Shakespeare’s transvestite plays were written in the 1590s when masculine attire for women was not in fashion. The plays Shakespeare wrote which were contemporary with the controversial 1610s and 1620s revival of masculine attire among women – Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, Coriolanus – all display an interest in women who are unnaturally assertive. At the moment when crossdressing became a theme of debate in the immediate social context, however, the dramatist shied away from addressing it directly.8 Rackin suggests that Shakespeare’s “later plays depict heroines who are either weaker or less sympathetic and, although still played by boy actors, almost never dressed in boys’ clothing”. Innogen and Cleopatra are exceptions; but Cleopatra never dons male attire on stage, and Innogen cross-dresses only upon male behest, becoming completely passive in her boy’s role.9 Moreover, a marked shift in generic emphasis can also be 6

7

8 9

Richard Braithwait, The English Gentlewoman, 48, 43. For this section of my argument I am indebted to Sophie Tomlinson, “She that Plays the King: Henrietta Maria and the Threat of the Actress in Caroline Culture”, in The Politics of Tragicomedy: Shakespeare and After, ed. Gordon MacMullan, 189-207. Findlay, “Playing the ‘Scene Self’: Jane Cavendish and Elizabeth Brackley’s The Concealed Fancies”, in Enacting Gender on the English Renaissance Stage, eds Viviana Comensoli and Anne Russell, 154-60. Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance: Literature and the Nature of Womankind, 1540-1620, 155. Phyllis Rackin, “Androgyny, Mimesis, and the Marriage of the Boy Heroine on the English Renaissance Stage”, PMLA, MCII (1987), 31, 39 n9.


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observed in the later period, from the fluidity of romance to the rigidity of tragedy.10 Shakespeare is only one among many playwrights working at the time, yet it is possible to detect here symptoms of incipient wariness regarding theatrical cross-dressing, probably because theatrical cross-dressing thrust into the foreground the increasingly conflicted character of the early modern gender system which marked many, if not all, sectors of early modern thought. The stage focused and performed a model of gender fluidity increasingly a node of social tension.

Clothes and the body The socially visible body of the early modern period was constituted from outside, metonymically, and not from within. A commentator of 1630 registered clothes as the essence of femininity, thus locating female gender in a prosthetic, exchangable commodity, rather than in the body beneath the costume: “Attires & ornaments are so proper to this sexe, that by most they are esteemed as the very essence of the woman, and by some againe, the purest Quintessence.”11 How can a mere supplement or accoutrement constitute an “essence”? David Wootton suggests that “because 17th-century people kept their clothes on, the boundary between flesh and cloth was indeterminate. According to the Book of Job, in the King James version, we are clothed in skin and flesh; but one might equally well describe early modern men and women as fleshed in clothes”.12 In expressions which for modern sensibility can only be oxymorons, HicMulier complains of women who become “man in bodye by attire”, who “mould their bodies to euery deformed fashion”.13 It is no coincidence, for instance, that early modern spelling conflated two meaings of “bodies”, denoting both the body of flesh, bone, muscle, and the bodice, or more often, the “pair of bodies”, two pieces of material laced together. In Middleton’s It’s a Mad World, My Masters, Maworm, dressing Follywit in women’s costume, asks “But what shift will you make for upper bodies, captain?” (3.3.99-100). The “bodice” was/were the materials which constructed a body, with the materials having

10 11 12 13

See Linda Bamber, Comic Women, Tragic Men: A Study of Gender and Genre in Shakespeare. Martin Day, A Mirror of Modesty (1621) in A Monument of Mortality (London 1630), 1011 [A6v-A7r]. David Wooton, “Never Knowingly Naked”, London Review of Books, XXVI/8 (15 April 2004), 26. Hic Mulier: or The Man-Woman, B2r, B[1]v.

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ontological priority over the physical body and giving shape to it.14 Barnabe Rich could execrate tailors as “Body-makers”, “Idol-makers”, or as “the Deuils engineers” who “mocke the whole world with their new inuentions” because they usurped God’s creative work.15 In an expression which makes clothing tantamount to skin, Camillo in The Winter’s Tale, stage-managing a costume-swap, impatiently says to the still hesitating Autolycus, “Nay prithee, dispatch – the gentleman is half flayed already” (4.4.641-42). The gentleman Florimel’s loss of his clothes strips him of his very epidermic superficie. Anne Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass observe that to understand the significance of clothes in the Renaissance, we need to undo our own social categories, in which subjects are prior to objects, wearers to what is worn. We need to understand the animatedness of clothes, their ability to “pick up” subjects, to mold and shape them both physically and socially, to constitute subjects through their powers as material memories.16

As far as gender is concerned costume did not instantiate a vertical, quasi-metaphorical relationship to the gender of the body beneath. Rather, its function was quasi-metonymical, being determined far more by horizontal, syntagmatic relationships to the context of fashion or social status which it materialized, and to previous contexts in which it may have been worn. Paradoxically, the situation was the opposite with regard to social stratification, more clearly associated with the verticality of hierarchy, whence the proliferation of sumptuary legislation. Kuchta suggests that aristocratic attire was understood as mediating the inherent nobility of the wearer. The aristocratic identity was supposed to be visible through the costume, itself construed as a transparent signifier. 17 The relationship between rank and clothing was a metaphorical, essentialist one. To usurp the costume was not so much to appropriate the signifier, so that it would confer nobility (as in A Winter’s Tale: “Whether it like me or no, I am a courtier. Seest thou not the air of the court in these enfoldings? Hath not my gait in it the measure of the court? ... I am courtier cap-à-pie” – 4.4.730-36) but to pervert the signifier. Outside the aristocratic context, however, it was metonymy rather than 14 15 16 17

Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 85. Barnabe Rich, The Honestie of this Age (London, 1614), 22-24; see also Rich, My Ladies Looking Glasse (London, 1616), 12. Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory, 2. David Kuchta, “The Semiotics of Masculinity in Renaissance England”, in Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images, ed. James Grantham Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 233-46.


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metaphor which structured sartorial semiosis. The memory of an identity born by the clothing and reactivated around the current wearer, or the clothes’ history of circulation from one owner to another, constituted a metonymic series of social contexts concretized in the garment itself.18 These metonymic relationships of identity can be seen at work when Stubbes, in his catalogue of abuses, wrote, “Our Apparell was giuen us as a signe distinctive, to discerne betwixt sexe and sexe”.19 Gender identity is not constituted in the inner/outer of gendered body and appropriate clothing, but in the “betwixt” of male and female garments. At this juncture the crucial role of clothing in marking the boundaries of the early modern gender system becomes evident. The metonymic “betwixt” indicated an inaugural division, between the gender sub-systems “men” and “women” and positing the system’s constitutive Other, femininity. Stubbes concluded his train of thought with the logical equation of clothing and social status: “therefore one to weare the apparel of another sexe is to participate with the same, and to adulterate the veritie of his own kinde.”20 Whence the sense of threat evoked by cross-dressing women. The early modern preoccupation with cross-dressing was concentrated not in the notion that it conflicted with a putatively true gender beneath, as in modern attitudes towards transvestitism, but rather that cross-dressing perverted gender-identity at the for us superficial level of the clothing itself in ways which questioned the power of patriarchy. Contemporary critics’ unease about cross-dressing focused upon the possibility of women usurping the place of men via the assumption of their attire. This fear is articulated in Hic-Mulier: But such as are able to buy all their owne charges ... will bee man-like not only from the head to the waste, but to the very foot, & in euery condition: man in bodye by attyre, man in behauiour by rude complement, man in nature by aptnesse to anger, man in action in pursuing reuenge, man in wearing weapons, man in vsing weapons.21

The sequence is significant: “attire” precedes and triggers the chainreaction of resultant social agency attained by the cross-dressing woman. The quick-change act could confuse gender hierarchies at a very pragmatic level of social practice. For Stubbes, the exchange of costumes

18 19 20 21

See Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory, 11, 196. Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses (London, 1584), 38v. Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses, 38v. Hic Mulier: or The Man-Woman (London, 1620), B2r.

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appears to have represented a first step on the way to the exchange of social role, and gendered “deeds”: The women also ... haue dublettes and Ierkins, as men haue here, buttoned up the breast, and made with winges, weltes, and pinions on the shoulder poyntes, as mannes apparel is, for all the world, and though this be a kind of attire, appropriate onely to man, yet they blushe not to weare it; and if they coulde as well change their sexe, and put on the kinde of man, as they can weare apparell assigned onely to man, I think they would as verily become men in deed.22

And as Middleton’s comic rogue Follywit climbs into women’s gear, he quips: “Why the doublet serves as well as the best and is most in fashion. We’re all male to th’middle, mankind from the beaver to th’bum. ’Tis an Amazonian time; you shall have women shortly tread their husbands” (A Mad World My Masters, 3.3.103-106). Lisa Jardine, then, is doubtless correct in suggesting that the anxiety around female appropriation of male fashions was based upon the suspicion that the “elimination of dress difference between men and women implies a narrowing of the gap between man and his subordinate”.23 Here the loss of differentiating boundaries, which threatens systemic autopoesis, also threatens the rationale of such systemic self-perpetuation, namely, the maintenance of power. Contemporaries’ complaints about the impossibility of distinguishing women from men in the early seventeenth-century rage for crossdressing are clearly exaggerated. Thus, when Harrison anxiously noted in his Description of England, “I have met with some of these trulles in London so disguised that it passed my skill to discern whether they were men or women”; or when Thomas Adams expressed concern that the figures he saw upon the streets were “both he and shee. For if they had no more euident distinction of sexe, then they have to shape, they would be all man, or rather all woman: for the Amazons beare away the Bell”,24 what was registered was above all a loss of systemic, hierarchical distinctions. The danger was perceived less in the confusion of some putatively real gender, but in the social symbolism which sanctioned social agency. On the stage, it was probably of little importance whether the gender beneath the costume was visible to the audience, as is patently the case 22 23 24

Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses, 38r-v (emphasis added). Jardine, Still Harping on Daughters, 156. William Harrison, Description of England (1577), ed. Georges Edelen (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1968), 147; Thomas Adams, Mystical Bedlam, or the world of man-men (1615), cited in Woodbridge, Women and the English Renaissance, 142.


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with Moll Cutpurse in The Roaring Girl, or whether the disguise effectively concealed the “real” gender of the character and/or the actor (as with the many female Shakespearean characters in disguise, or, to take a contemporary example, as was the case when Toby Cockerell played Katherine in the 1997 Henry V at the Southwark New Globe Theatre).25 The crisis of gender representation lay in the implications of the symbolic undercutting of patriarchal power. In January 1620 the bishop of London called together all his Clergie about this towne, and told them he had expresse commaundement from the king to will them to inveigh vehemently and bitterly in theyre sermons against the insolencie of our women, and theyre wearing of brode brimd hats, pointed dublets, theyre hair cut short or shorne, and some of them stillataes or poinards, and such other trinkets of like moment, adding withall that yf pulpit admonitions will not reforme them he wold proceed by another course.26

What was at stake was the disturbance of the symbolic legitimation of patriarchal power, embodied in the king himself as head of the commonwealth-as-macro-family. If a gender truth is to be found at all in this period, it is located in a site which we would categorize as appearance rather than reality. Thus Camillo, in The Winter’s Tale, says to Perdita: “Dismantle you, and as you can, disliken | The truth of your own seeming” (4.4.653-54). The oxymoronic “truth of ... seeming” refers to the socially determined and immensely powerful gender truth of what we might take to be mere sartorial appearance. But the power of such conventions was waning. Tradition and biblical injunction, the principal legitimizing instances which buttressed early modern notions of social order, were becoming inadequate. Dollimore observes that “Shorn of its metaphysical sanction, law in the Renaissance was always in danger of losing its prescriptive power”.27 In the second pamphlet in the cross-dressing debate, Haec-Vir, the character Hic Mulier engages in a frontal attack upon the force of tradition: “for then Custome, nothing is more absurd, nothing is more

25

26

27

Interview with Toby Cockerill, in Pauline Kiernan, Staging Shakespeare at the New Globe (London: Macmillan, 1999), 130. My own experience of showing videos of this performance to my students confirms the audience’s difficulty in distinguishing gender identity in the boy actor. Letter of John Chamberlain, 25 January 1620, The Chamberlain Letters: A Selection of the Letters of John Chamberlain Concerning Life in England from 1597 to 1626, ed. Elizabeth McClure Thomson (London: John Murray, 1966), 271. Jonathon Dollimore, Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 295.

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foolish”; “Custome is an Idiot.”28 Other instances of identity-formation and identity-maintenance were weakened because dependent on something beyond themselves. As demonstrated in Chapters 2 and 3 above, the humoral world view linked masculinity too overtly to its constitutive environment; and regarding clothing, the outside could be all too easily transferred to or adopted by a new wearer, thus usurping the social status denoted by the costume. The cross-dressing debate thus laid bare the broader vulnerability of a gender system which was overly dependent upon its outside. In the long run, the solution would be to revamp the system so that it carried its legitimizing instances within. At the same time, however, it must be noted that the threat of crossdressing, for all its symbolic force, was at no time so concrete that any legislation was passed against it.29 It was only the civil war and the gender unrest unleashed by the collapse of institutions of social order which would truly provoke a more efficient enforcement of gender hierarchy within English society. After that moment, gender and social status would be based on putatively inherent factors such as biological sex, or human reason and the social contract.

Drag on stage The theatre, by playing with class and gender costume, cristallized an ambient interrogation of the metaphysical and theological foundations of hierarchical gender duality. To that extent it exacerbated the gradual delegitimization of the early modern concepts underpinning the unequal distribution of social power. It has been rightly pointed out that theatrical cross-dressing “cannot simply be conflated with cross-dressing on the London streets or with instances of cross-dressing in disciplinary rituals such as charivari or skimmington”.30 None the less, stage performances, inherently dependent upon cross-dressing in the absence of female actors, and frequently integrating cross-dressing as a central plot motif, concretized, performed and thus focussed apprehensions about women’s appropriation of social agency. Critics of the theatre were quick to draw attention to this aspect of the early modern stage. John Rainoldes, quoting Dionysius Carthusianus, 28 29 30

Haec-Vir, or The Womanish-Man: Being an Answere to a late Booke intituled Hic-Mulier, B2r, B2v. Stephen Orgel, “The Subtexts of The Roaring Girl”, in Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage, ed. Susan Zimmerman (New York: Routledge, 1992), 15. Jean E. Howard, The Stage and Social Struggle in Early Modern England (London: Routledge, 1994), 94.


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claimed that on stage, the social identity of the actor’s costume took on its full effect regardless of the gender of the body which bore it: “the apparell of wemen (saith he) is a great provocation of men to lust and leacherie: because a womans garment beeing put on a man doeth vehemently touch and moue him with the remembrance & imagination of a woman; and the imagination of a thing desirable doth stirr up the desire.”31 William Prynne claimed that “in these Degenerous,Vnnaturall, and Vnmanly times .... diuers of our Masculine, and more noble race, ... are wholly degenerated and metamorphosed into women; not in Manners, Gestures, Recreations, Diet, and Apparell only ....”32 In this context, the stage represented a pernicious influence, for male actors were “daily ... metamorphosed into women on the Stage, not only by putting on the female robes, but likewise the effeminate gestures, speeches, pace, behaviour, attire, delicacy, passions, manners, arts and wiles of the female sex.”33 Of course the vector of transformation on the stage was the opposite to that of the crossdressing women of 1620s London, but the implications for the patriarchal gender order were almost as devastating. Thus the theatre itself, in its constitutive structure as a generally all-male profession, contributed to the erosion of the legitimation of social fixity. It consequently gave impetus to the increasingly urgent need to anchor gendered binary oppositions elsewhere than in the mobility of sartorial signifiers or bodily humours. The disturbance of clearly demarcated gender distinctions, performed on the stage, removed not only the legitimization of masculine superiority, but more problematically, its epistemological basis. A short exchange between George Wilkins’ characters Scarborrow and Clare in The Miseries of Enforced Marriage (1607), (quoted above in chapter one) foregrounded the risk blurred gender boundaries could pose for the legitimacy of male monopoly on social and sexual agency: Scarborrow: Prethee tell me: Are you not a Woman? Clare: I know not that neither, til I am better acquainted with a man .... Scarborrow: Why, I am a Man. Clare: Thats more then I know Sir. Scarborrow: To approue I am no lesse: thus I kisse thee. Clare: And by that proofe I am a man too, for I haue kist you ([A4v]).

The explosive potential of such a scenario can be gauged by the almost identical phrasing of the opening gambits of the dialogue between 31 32 33

John Rainoldes, Th’Overthrow of Stage-Playes (London, 1599), 97. William Prynne, The Vnlouelinesse of Lovelockes (London, 1628), A3r-v. William Prynne, Histrio-Mastix (London, 1633), 171

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the man-woman and the womanish-man in Haec-Vir a decade later. There too, neither of the two participants is unambiguously able to ascertain the gender of the other: Hic-Mul: .... I wovld haue you vnderstand I am a Woman. Haec-Vir. Are you a Vvoman? Hic-Mul: Are you a Man? O Iuno Lucina help me. Haec-Vir. Yes I am.34

Despite the patent absurdity of this situation, and the subsequent reversion of the two characters to their rightful gender categories so as to resolve the confusion, the threat posed was evidently powerful enough for pamphlets on the subject to attain considerable notoriety. The early modern age operated with a horizontal notion of the fluid continuity of the genders, and simultaneously, a vertical notion of contrasts, based on rigid, god-ordained hierarchies of social difference. The latter hierarchies became weaker in the wake of social mobility engendered by the inroads of emergent capitalism. As a result, the former continuities became increasingly problematic, fuelling a looming crisis of legitim ation within gender-hierarchies. The reassertion of sexual difference in Twelfth Night would appear, at first sight, to elide precisely such a suspicion of the nullity of gender difference. Viola welcomes the possibility of her imagination of her brother’s survival: “Prove true, imagination, O prove true, | That I, dear brother, be now ta’en for you! | .... I my brother know | Yet living in my glass” (3.4.367-72). This mirroring – for she is the spitting image of her brother – signals the imaginary resolution of romance, in which lack is filled. This will allow Viola to return to her place as woman. It will also restore the absolute difference which her cross-dressing threatens to undermine, and the differential and normally clear identity which her dissimulation threatens to obscure. For Viola’s assumption of male disguise does not make difference disappear, but reveals the substrate of proximity upon which difference depends and which it attempts to obfuscate. Sebastian’s return both abolishes that dangerous similarity, bringing the differentiation of heterosexual pairing back into its rightful order, and paradoxically, relies upon similarity for its effect. To reestablish her link to Sebastian, Cesario/Viola relinquishes her “masculine usurped attire” (5.1.248), thus, by the same token, making room for Sebastian to occupy the masculine space that they have been, to all intents and purposes, cohabiting since the wedding ceremony with 34

Haec-Vir, or The Womanish-Man, A3v.


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Sebastian/Cesario/Viola (the three identities can not, in effect, be told apart at that moment) arranged by Olivia a few hours earlier (Act 4, Scene 3). So twindom both abolishes difference and facilitates its restoration; twindom is the vehicle for re-establishment of difference, as it is precisely the similarity of the two twins which allows Sebastian to slip back into the space which the masquerading Viola has infiltrated, thereby definitively erasing her erasure of gender differentiation. However, Viola promises to prove her femininity by the oddest of means: “I’ll bring you to a captain in this town, | Where lie my maiden weeds” (5.1.252-53). Viola does not have recourse to some essential sexual identity to reassert her femininity identity, but rather, to another set of appearances. Even more disturbing, though, is the fact that the maidenly garments are never fetched, so that Viola ultimately fails to prove her femininity.35 For us, this tactic may possess a certain rigorous logic, for Cesario/Viola’s real identity beneath his/her costumes is that of a boy actor, and not, as she claims, that of a girl. But it would appear that Shakespeare himself is not particularly concerned to resolve this indeterminacy regarding Viola/Cesario’s gender. Orsino too accepts Viola’s changed status while apparently still enjoying the youthful manhood of Cesario (5.1.381-84), happily addressing him/her: “Boy, thou hast said to me a thousand times | Thou never shouldst love woman like to me. | .... Give me thy hand | And let me see thee in thy woman’s weeds” (5.1.265-71). There is no final and definitive moment of revelation. All we can be sure of is the persistent contradiction between Viola’s putative true gender, Cesario’s masqueraded gender and the true gender of the boy-player who plays this role – such that “what you will”, the play’s other title, asserts the constant collision of various possibilities of gender alignment. Ultimately, it is questionable whether, for the dramatist, there is any underlying gender truth to be expressed in outward appearances. Other plays also foreground this oscillation between putative true bodily gender and sartorial gender, with Lorenzo in Swetnam the WomanHater, already disguised as an Amazon, but known to Iago, carrying his male name in Act 3, Scene 2; but bearing the name “Atlanta” when appearing as the learned Amazon in Act 3, Scene 3. In The Roaring Girl, Lord Nolan continues to call Moll “Jack”, even when she is dressed in women’s clothes (5.2.212, 214). Jones and Stallybrass summarize these complex oscillations between undecidable gender alternatives as follows:

35

See Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory, 199.

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BODIES AND THEIR SPACES The actor is both boy and woman and he/she embodies the fact that sexual fixations are not the product of any categorical fixity of gender. Indeed, all attempts to fix gender are necessarily prosthetic: that is, they suggest the attempt to supply an imagined deficiency by the exchange of male clothes for female clothes or of female clothes for male clothes; by displacement from male to female space or from female to male space; by the replacement of male with female tasks or of female with male tasks. But all elaborations of the prosthesis which will supply the “deficiency” can secure no essence. On the contrary, they will suggest that gender itself is a fetish, the production of an identity through the fixation upon specific parts. The imagined truth of gender which a post-Renaissance culture would later construct is dependent upon the disavowal of the fetishism of gender, the disavowal of gender as fetish. In its place, post-Renaissance culture would put a fantasized biology of the “real”.36

These comments imply that already on the early modern stage, gender is intensely problematic, riddled with disturbing contradictions, and subject to strategies which attempt to supply deficiency. Most obviously, costume supplements the absence of women on the stage. But equally so, the plots themselves are frequently modelled around quest motifs, the action being driven by the search for a missing object. Alternatively, they consist of the search for a lost equilibrium or harmony which is to be restored (in romance or comedy), or record the impossibility of restoration (in tragedy). I would suggest that Renaissance drama is an attempt to deal with symptoms of a generalized systemic lack, focused upon contemporaries’ generic sense of the porosity of masculinity, in turn projected onto figures of women’s incontinence.37 It is of course ironical that narratives of womanly lack were performed by troupes of players who themselves lacked women and thus performed, via their compensatory strategies of cross-dressing, the very gender fluidity which women’s ostensible lack of boundaries, their so-called incontinence, intimated. Thus the drama, by parading that sense of lack in narrative36 37

Ibid, 217. Ursula K. Heise writes that “while ... the gender dynamics of the English Renaissance stage play out profound anxieties about the nature of male identity, it is doubtful whether this is due to the convention of male cross-dressing in particular.” She claims, on the basis of the Spanish evidence of the same period, where the antitheatrical rhetoric was very similar to that of the English context, that the presence of women on the stage would have had just as destabilizing influence upon male identity as the presence of transvestite boys (“Transvestitism and Stage Controversy in Spain and England, 1580-1680”, Theatre Journal, XXXXIV [1992], 371) thus playing off against each other two factors which are in fact intimately linked in the English early modern gender system. Cross-dressing boys on the stage and stage representations of the fluid agency of women were both manifestations of the fragility of patriarchal hegemony.


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performative form upon the stage, may have reinforced a sense of threat at the very moment of attempting to bind social apprehensions by casting them in the coherent logic of a narrative.

Crisis and resolution in the gender system Stage representation of gender in the half-century before the closure of the theatres in 1642 coincided with a broader societal anxiety about blurred gender boundaries. Cross-dressing was not unknown in England in the second half of the sixteenth century, but did not arise by any length the controversy unleashed by women’s usurpation of male attire in the 1620s.38 At the same time, the stage saw a shift from relatively tolerant plot paradigms of cross-dressing to a plots based upon the rejection of hermaphroditism. It was generally agreed by Renaissance authorities that hermaphrodites did not belong to a mid point between normal male and female births, but rather to the category of monster, that is, to the abnormal and unnatural.39 To this extent, English drama evinced a shift in emphasis which reflected a general trend in medical discourse from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries onwards, characterized by increasing attempts to sort out gender ambiguity and to privilege differentiation over a previously amphibious view of genital morphology.40 Galen’s genital parallelism had been refuted in medical circles by 1600, but it would take most of the seventeenth century before humoral theory, with its permeable interface between the sexes, lost its preponderance. Humoral theory would be superseded by a psychology of the sensations which anchored gender difference in an allencompassing vision of anatomy and physiology. The anatomist Thomas Willis located the soul in the brain and connected it to the outside world through the nervous system. Willis’ student John Locke systematized the new sensational psychology in his Essays Concerning Human Understanding (1690). The nervous theory of sensibility contributed to the emergence of a novel gender system whose very essence was the incommensurability of male and female sensibilities. The nerve theory swept humoral medicine aside and formed a basis for new physiological 38 39 40

Orgel, “The Subtexts of The Roaring Girl”, in Erotic Politics: Desire on the Renaissance Stage, ed. Susan Zimmerman, 16. Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman, 39. Michel Foucault, “Le vrai sexe”, Dits et écrits 1954-1988, eds Daniel Defert and François Ewald (Paris: Gallimard, 1994), IV, 116; Herculine Barbine dite Alexina B., ed. Michel Foucault (Paris: Gallimard/Folio, 1993).

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system combining biology, psychology and social attitudes into a powerful new concept of gender difference. “In the course of the period from 1660 to 1800”, states Fletcher, “women’s subordination in England was naturalised on the basis of their finer sensibility”.41 The English stage’s usage of boy actors was a local phenomenon which aggravated the English manifestations of a pan-European crisis in gender relations. In the 1630s, suggests Sophie Tomlinson, these crossdressing tensions were exacerbated by the conflation of Henrietta Maria’s organisation of flamboyant female performances at court (in which, in a disturbing avatar of the 1620s cross-dressing debate, male roles were taken by women, on occasions “disguised like men with beards”) with her interventions in the masculine world of politics. Here, gender fluidity had gone too far; the natural distribution of parts to which Tomlinson draws attention in Cartwright’s The Lady-Errant (published in 1651, but written between 1628 and 1643) represented less a shocking public performance by women, than a corrective to the dangerous assumption of male roles by women actors threateningly close to the centre of political power.42 The post-Restoration introduction of female actors on the public stage was thus a local gender strategy related to the specific political history of England, both theatrical, and gender-political. In England, the civil war triggered a middle-class backlash against possible sources of social strife. This reaction resulted in non-confrontational forms of social conservatism which predated comparable conservative middle-classes culture on the continent (with the exception of the Netherlands) by a good century. The period after 1660 saw the advance of economic changes which necessitated new and more discrete, flexible forms of social authority unlikely to hinder bourgeois commercial capitalism.43 The natural distribution of dramatic roles on the Restoration stage, for which the theatrical prominence of women at the Caroline court paved the way, was thus a solution which abolished the theatrical display of gender fluidity both for men and for women (on the public and private stages in the first case, and in Henrietta Maria’s court theatre in the second). The new distribution of parts reassuringly anchored gender, as a habitus, or a lived and performed discourse, in the empirical materiality of 41 42 43

Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England 1500-1800, 290-93. My account here is also largely based upon that of Ian Maclean, The Renaissance Notion of Woman, 33-39. Tomlinson, “She that Plays the King: Henrietta Maria and the Threat of the Actress in Caroline Culture”, 189, 192, 199. Compare Terry Eagleton, The Rape of Clarissa: Writing, Sexuality and Class Struggle in Samuel Richardson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), 1-17.


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the ever more safely dichotomized body. Systemic differentiation was there to stay. To that extent, the new theatrical arrangement was an important public manifestation of a non-confrontational but none the less coercive gender system which served the interests of an emergent capitalist society. A precocious index of the gradual demise of cross-dressing in a context where the genders are gradually pulling apart can be found in Jonson’s Epicoene (1609). In that play, the eponymous cross-dresser’s female disguise is removed to reveal the boy beneath. This dramatic device allows the dissolution of Epicoene’s marriage with a desperate Morose, who is released from conjugal hell on condition that he cedes to Dauphine the latter’s impounded inheritance. In this configuration there emerges a sudden congruence between the actor’s body and the actor’s role. This congruence is not susceptible to oscillation or uncertainty about gender alignment. Jonson’s conclusion contrasts sharply with romantic comedies where the page’s disguise is lifted to reveal the maiden beneath, so that both masculine and feminine identities remain fictive and floating. In Epicoene we appear to have attained the corporeal bedrock of the actor’s body. Significantly, it is not marriage, the site where the genders met in daily engagement so that human subjectivities did genuinely interlock (the wife was “indeede an inferiour, but very neare and very familiar”; she could “make her Husbands house, his hell, by the strength of her will”44) which is the resolving event of the drama. Rather, the hindrance of marriage furnishes the denouement, literally, in the sense of disentangling the ostensible marriage partners. To this extent, Jonson radically separates the entangled genders. Significantly, it is Epicoene’s loquacity, indicative of woman’s capacity to transgress social boundaries and annex exclusively masculine territory, which propels the dissolution of the marriage. Jonson’s reconfiguration of the cross-dressing plot gives a preview of gender as a bodily attribute – an attribute which could be accessed neither by the fluid passage from one costume to another, nor by women’s fluid usurpation of gendered spaces. Here the dramatist prefigures clothes’ gradual relinquishment of their gendered and gendering aura, and their reduction to merely transmissible objects.45 In Epicoene, the power of costume to mould gender had already begun to 44 45

William Whately, A Bride-Bush, or a Direction for Married Persons (London, 1632), 155; Matthew Griffith, Bethel: or a forme for families (London, 1633), 327 [Y4r]. Jones and Stallybrass, Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory, 196.

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wane, so that the biological body was less intensely created by the clothes it wore, but now pre-existed and outlived them. There was a gradual shift to a metaphorical relationship between actor, costume and bodily gender which became hegemonic after the Restoration. This shift was isomorphic with the emergence of the proscenium stage and perspective representation as the embodiment of a single axis of spectator gaze in the Restoration theatre. The frequent oscillation between corporeal and sartorial gender on the early modern stage can be placed in parallel with the multiple axes of spectatorship facilitated by the early modern open stage, in which the relationship of spectator to spectacle to referent was metonymic (spatially determined rather than fixed by a representation-reality copula according to metaphorical correspondence), indexically connected (arising out of a set of causal or gestural circumstances), and synecdochic (each spectator view was only one part of a complex bundle of potential perspectives upon dramatic events). The multiple vectors of spectator gaze were replaced by the pictorial-iconic paradigm of perspective stages, which imposed a metaphorical relationship, determined by a single ideal axis of spectator gaze, between the action or the place portrayed on stage and the real to which it claimed to correspond. The pinning-down of rogue perspectives upon a theatrical event was clearly motivated by the same impulse to control as the pinning-down of gender to the private body beneath the costume.46 The transition from the early modern stage to the Restoration stage, from boy actors to women actors, from gender fluidity to the biologicalgenital anchoring of gender, from the “striated spaces” (in Deleuze and Guattari’s expression) of porous domestic and public spaces to the increased dominance of discourses of the bounded private home as the rightful place of women, were all driven by the necessity to give patriarchy a more efficient and more discrete basis for the maintenance of gendered power relations. Jones and Stallybrass highlight the central contradiction of the early modern gender system which historical change rendered increasingly evident: But if gender could not itself be grounded, it was paradoxically itself one of the main grounds for the distribution of political and legal power: rights of inheritance (for instance, the salic laws in France), forms of judicial punishment (petty treasons if a wife killed her husband), the claim to a political voice – all followed upon the differentiation of male from female 46

See my “Perplexive Perspectives: The Court and Contestation in the Jacobean Masque”, The Seventeenth Century, XVIII/1 (April 2003), 25-43.


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.... Gender was thus central (and had of course a variety of real effects in, for example, the punishment of scolds and witches and of hermaphrodites [in some seventeenth-century French legal cases] who abandoned the unisexual status they had chosen) at the very same time as it was indeterminable.47

It was the contradiction between the economic and socio-political centrality of gender, and the difficulty of clearly delineating its character which propelled the emergence of the modern gender system towards the end of the seventeenth century. The English stage, in exploiting the available materials for a dramatic exploration of the social dynamics of gender (a dramatic situation, a group of actors, costumes) within the immediate English context (which generally prohibited women as performers, but regarded gender transvestitism as an increasingly disturbing if not punishable offence) foregrounded the deep contradictions and tensions within the early modern gender order, at the very moment of attempting the dramatic and narrative resolution of such contradictions. On the one hand, the dramatists had no choice, for the extant gender system was the raw social material out of which their narratives had to be constructed. On the other hand, they were astute enough to know that precisely such tensions would generate narrative suspense, in other words, provide a story worth telling. At the end of the 1620s, John Earle’s characterization of a “player” perceptively made the connection between the actor’s success and the mobility of costume: “He is like our painting Gentle-women, seldome in his own face, and seldomer in his cloathes, and he pleases, the better he counterfeits.”48 But in a little more than a decade Earle’s simile would have lost its relevance. The possibility of equating woman and male actor, the possibility of shedding both clothes and face (a synecdoche for the transformability of the body through clothing), were soon to be abolished. In 1642 the players would be sent home to pursue professions where they were themselves and nothing but themselves, and in that private

47

48

Ann Rosalind Jones and Peter Stallybrass, “Fetishizing Gender: Constructing the Hermaphrodite in Renaissance Europe”, in Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, eds Julia Epstein and Kristina Straub, 105. John Earle, Micro-Cosmographie, or, A Peece of the World Discovered (London, 1628), E7r.

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space of their selfhood, a new sense of real, docile gender would gradually emerge.

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INDEX

acting, 88-90, 142 actors, 80; body of, 131, 223; boys, 6, 51, 207; male, 142, 217; women, 6, 51, 142, 177, 216, 222 Adam, 57 adultery, 39, 97, 101, 148 affective bonds, 204 Ages of man, 117 Alleyn, Edward, 95 Amazon, 193 analogy, 21-22, 29-30, 50, 67, 98, 101 anatomy, 3, 49, 127 androgyny, 163 Anne, Queen, 177 anti-humanism, 70 architecture, domestic, 31-33 Arden of Faversham (Anonymous), 28, 86, 88, 96, 101, 120, 198 aristocracy, 89-90 audience, 70, 75, 77, 79-80, 179, 193 authority, 58 autopoesis, systemic, 56, 69, 76, 164 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 45-46 Bartholin, Thomas, Batholinus Anatomy, 49 bawd, 185 Beaumont, Francis and John Fletcher, Bonduca, 103, 106; The Knight of the Burning Pestle, 6; The Maid’s Tragedy, 87, 103, 134, 156; The Woman-Hater, 148, 154, 183 Becon, Thomas, Worckes, 83, 101, 169, 171, 191, 205 Bilson, Thomas, The True Difference Betweene Christian Svbiection and Vnchristian Rebellion, 23, 101 binary oppositions, 54, 59, 67 Blackfriars Theatre, 77 blood, 137-40, 153; circulation of, 46; as dynastic signifier, 134 bodice, 211 Bodleian Library, 119 body, biological, 208; boundaries, 109, 136; collective, , 129-31; female, 39, 41, 47, 188, 206; grotesque, 46;

male, 41, 84; metaphors of, 136; politic, 141; porosity, 45, 112, 136; private, 41-42; public, 129-31; “single-sex”, 47; space, 41; as systemic model, 41; as theatrical sign, 137; of warrior, 128; boundaries, systemic, 147, 165 boyhood, 115, 117 Brackley, Lady Elizabeth and Lady Jane Cavendish, The Concealed Fancies (see Cavendish, Lady Jane) Braithwait, Richard, Art Asleep Husband? [under the name of “Philogenes Panadonius”], 57; The English Gentleman, 112, 135; The English Gentlewoman, 26, 44, 147, 156, 169, 210 breeching, 113-15, 139 Breton, Nicholas, The Good and the Badde, or Descriptions of the Worthies, and Vnworthies of this Age, 92, 112 Brome, Richard, The Court Begger, 209 Bullinger, Heinrich, The Christian State of Matrimony, 198 Burton, Robert, The Anatomy of Melancholy, 108 Busino, Orazio, 1 Butler, Judith, 89 Calvin, John, A Commentary on Genesis, 153 capitalism, 32, 43, 40, 64, 125, 127, 130, 196, 218, 223 Cartwright, William, The Lady-Errant, 222 Cary, Elizabeth, The Tragedy of Mariam, 195, 197 Cavendish, Lady Jane and Lady Elizabeth Brackley, The Concealed Fancies, 6, 202, 204-05, 208-09 CERTAYNE SERMONS OR HOMELIES, Appoynted by the Kynges Majestie, 23 Chamberlain, John, The Chamberlain Letters, 141, 215 Charles I, King, 46 Charles II, King, 143

INDEX chastity, 147 chiasmus, 203, 205 childbirth, 150 “citizen” drama, 40 Civil War, 4, 38, 63, 82, 173-74, 182, 196, 202, 216, 222 Cleaver, Robert and John Dod, A Godlie Form of Household Government (see Dod, John) Clifford, Anne, Diary, 76, 176 clothing, in early modern period, 21114; and femininity, 211 coats, 139 Cocke, John, 207 code, systemic, 55, 78, 147 codpiece, 119, 143 coercion, soft, 198, 201 coffee houses, 174 coherence, systemic, 182 comedy, 220 commodities, 32, 129-31 communicational events, systemic, 55, 57, 70, 182 companionate marriage, 194, 202-05, 209 conduct books, 43, 201 conduit, woman as, 152 Congreve, William, The Way of the World, 159-60, consistory court, 189 contingency, 57 contra-diction, 178, 182 contradiction, systemic, 81-82, 178 “copia”, 58 costumes, 77, 188, 191, 223 coteric drama, 197, 208 counting-house, 98, 198 court culture, 177 court theatre, 11 Cowper, William, The Anatomy of Humane Bodies, 49, 50 crisis, systemic, 74, 82, 96, 101 Crollius, Oswaldus, A Treatise of Oswaldus Crollius of Signatures of Internal Things, 22 Cromwell, Oliver, 173 Crooke, Helkiah, MIKPOKOΣMOΓPAΦIA [Microcosmographia], 42, 117 cross-dressing, 191, 207; demise of in theatre, 223; heroines in Shakespeare, 210; in sixteenth century, 221; theatrical, 211-24, 216

247 cucking, 41 cuckoldry, 119 Curtain Theatre, 72 dance, 34, 93 Davies, Edward, Military Directions, or The Art of Trayning, 102; The Art of War and Englands Traynings, 102 Day, John, William Rowley and George Wilkins, The Travels of the Three English Brothers, 6 Day, Martin, A Mirror of Modesty, 146, 211 debates about, cross-dressing, 189-92, 210, 213-16, 222; “Formal”, 182; Swetnam, 181-83 Declaration of the Lords and Commons Assembled in Parliament, 182 deixis, dramatic, 74 Dekker, Thomas and Thomas Middleton, The Roaring Girl (see Middleton, Thomas) Dekker, Thomas, The Guls Horn-Booke, 72 demonstrations, 173 Descartes, René, Discours de la méthode, 30, 31; Le Monde et le traité de l’homme, 30 dichotomy, systemic, 126 differentiation, systemic, 55-58, 105, 107, 116, 118, 124, 194, 214, 222 disciplinary techniques, 201 Dod, John and Robert Cleaver, A Godlie Form of Household Government, 23, 29, 146, 168, 201, 202 Donne, John, The Poems of John Donne, 199 dowry, 154 drama, and fantasy, 180; public form, 4 drinking, 151, 167 duelling, 141, 158 Dutch genre painting, 195 dynastic family, 195 E., T., The Lawes Resolutions of Womens Rights, 174, 180 Earle, John, Micro-Cosmographie, 225 eating, 43 Edwards, Thomas, Gangraena, 175 effeminacy, 91-92, 104, 107, 111, 123 elections, 38 Elias, Norbert, 43-46, 84 Elizabeth I, Queen, 147

248


e-mail, 15 embodiment, 209 entropy, systemic, 107, 118, 125 environment/system, 55, 69, 78, 216 Essex, Earl of, 134 Etherege, George, The Poems of Sir George Etherege, 50 eunuch, 161 Eve, 57 Fall, narrative of, 58 family, and common wealth, 23-24, 40, 99, 101, 215; dynastic, 195; early modern conceptions of, 22-24; extended, 28; nuclear, 16 femininity, leakiness, 111 flaying, 127 Fletcher, John and Francis Beaumont, Bonduca, The Maid’s Tragedy; The Knight of the Burning Pestle; The Sea Voyage; The Woman-Hater (see Beaumont, Francis) Flichy, Patrice, 15 Ford, John, The Broken Heart, 31, 156; ’Tis Pity She’s a Whore, 7, 68, 154, Fortune Theatre, 72, 75 Foucault, Michel, 13, 50, 55- 56, 64, 201 Frederick, Duke of Württemberg, 1 Frobisher, Sir Martin, 119 Gainsford, Thomas, The Rich Cabinet, 91, 104 Galen, same-sex model, 221 Galenic medicine, 47-49, 54, 114, 138, 148, 180 Gamarnikow, Eva, 9 Garber, Marjorie, 193 Gataker, Thomas, Certaine Sermons First Preached and After Published, at severall times, 44, 202 gender systems, 67; early modern, 85, 137, 148, 170, 182, 187-88, 216, 225; modern, 126, 144, 160, 188, 194, 196, 205, 208, 223, 225 gender, ambiguity, 221; binaries, 59; biological, 3, 54, 64, 66, 91, 142, 208, 216, 223; continuity, 54; difference, 118, 218-19; differentiation, 221; fluidity, 218; hegemony, 65-66; indeterminacy, 219; and legal discourse, 224; polarization, 126; and power, 4;

sartorial, 211, 219-20, 224; space, 2, 15, 66 general economy (Bataille), 131 genitals, 91 gentility, 63, 141 geography, 94 gestation, 100 Gibson, Thomas, The Anatomy of Humane Bodies Epitomized, 49, 50 Globe Theatre, 71, 72 Glyd, Anne, 149 God, 26 Gondomar, Spanish ambassador, 80 gossips, 149-50, 167-68, 171, 186 Gosson, Stephen, The School of Abuse, 5, 21, 72 Gouge, William, Of Domesticall Duties, 58, 59, 179 grain riots, 173 Gramsci, Antonio, 66 Gregorius, Petrus, Syntaxeωn Artis Mirabilis, 22 Griffith, Matthew, Bethel: or a forme for families, 23, 223 gynaecology, 205 Habermas, Jürgen, 18, 35, 174, 195 habitus, 89 Haec-Vir, or The Womanish-Man, 103, 192, 206, 215, 216, 218 Harvey, William, 46 Heale, William, An Apologie for Women, 174 heart, 46 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 33 hegemony, 81; patriarchal, 198 Henrietta Maria, 177, 209, 222 Henry VIII, King, 143 Henry, Prince, 134 Henslowe, Philip, Diary, 76-77, 176 hermaphrodites, 57, 221, 225 heterosexuality, 107 Heterotopia (Foucault), 73 Heywood, Thomas, An Apology for Actors, 131; A Curtaine Lecture, 56, 151; A Woman Killed with Kindness, 33, 92, 197, 200 Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan, 30 Holbein, Hans, 143 Holinshead, Raphael, Chronicles of England, Scotlande, and Irelande, 25 homoerotic relationships, 106 homosociality, 116

INDEX honour, 135, 146; feminine, 157; masculine, 154, 157 Hope Theatre, 71, 72 Houlbrooke, Ralph A., 28-29, 37, 38, 113, 114, 173 household, 23, 64, 97 humour, 45-46, 58, 136, 138, 141, 158, 206, 215; control of, 109, 159; and effeminacy, 109; after the restoration, 160; water, 110 improbability, 57 incest, 68 incontinence, 148-51, 160, 220 infidelity, feminine, 120; topography of, 156 information technology, 15 instability, systemic, 82, 118 interaction, systemic, 62-63 internet, 15 interpenetration, systemic, 79, 182 Interregnum, 182 involution, 63 James I, King, 80, 177; Basilikon Doron, 32, 97, 131 Jardine, Lisa, 12-13, 26, 193, 195, 214 jealousy, 121, 148 Joannes Baptista Guardano Lodovico punto, The Skilfull Mountebanke, 104 Jonson, Ben, Epicoene, 151-53, 175, 179, 223; Volpone, 1, 151, 156, 191, 199 Julius, Philip, Diary of the Journey Through England in the Year 1602, 28 Kellie, Sir Thomas, Pallas Armata, Or, Militarie Instructions for the Learned, 102 Kristeva, Julia, 9, 59, 85, 162 lack, systemic, 220 leakiness, 45 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, Monadologie, 30; Vernuftprinzipien der Natur und der Gnade, 30 Lemnius, Levinus, The Secret Miracles of Nature, 104, 138, 145; The Touchstone of Complexions, 45, 101, 111, 114, 117, 138 liberties, 72, 79 libertine, 39 lineage, 134-35 liquidity, masculine, 159

249 Locke, John, 40; Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 221 love, 21, 50, 54, 59, 60, 90, 97, 105-13, 121, 124, 140, 143, 155, 161-62, 167, 190, 195, 199, 201, 203, 219 Luhmann, Niklas, 17, 20, 53-56, 59-62, 69, 70, 72, 78-82, 140, 141, 178 manliness, 89 manor house, 200 map, 95 Markham, Gervase, The English HouseWife, 2, 166 Marlowe, Christopher, Doctor Faustus, 94, 140; Edward II, 31; The Jew of Malta, 98; Tamburlaine the Great Part 1 & 2, 89-90, 94-95, 102-04, 108, 113, 128, 129, 136 marriage, 115, 190, 205, 223; companionate, 194 Marshall, Cynthia, 129 Marston, John, The Dutch Courtesan, 172 Marvell, Andrew, The Poems of Andrew Marvell, 29 Marx, Karl, 34 masculinity, and Ages of Man, 117; anxiety, 150; anxiety about female agency, 178; fluidity, 117; instability, 114, 117, 121, 142; manliness, 128; militant, 134; militaristic, 136; paranoid jealousy, 121; productive paranoia, 121; public 100; rank, 89; self-control, 111; separation from mother, 113, 115-16; and space, 93, 95-96, 124; and war, 102-06, 121-22 masterless men, 176 Maubray, John, The Female Physician, 86 medium, systemic, 56 memorial architecture, 135 menstruation, 45, 148 Meres, Frances, Palladis Tamia: Wits Treasvry, 21 metaphor, 224 metatheatricality, 181, 209 “Method” (Ramus), 59 metonymy, 224 Middleton, Thomas and Thomas Dekker, The Roaring Girl, 11, 28, 74, 78, 91, 189, 193-94, 207 Middleton, Thomas, A Chaste Maid, 96, 100-01, 111, 149, 155, 167, 184; A Game at Chess, 80; A Mad World, My

250


Masters, 2, 211 Milton, John, A Mask Presented at Ludlow Castle, 1634 (Comus), 11 mirrors, 44 mobile phone, 15 Monadology (Leibnitz), 30 monarchy, 196 Munda, Constantia, The Worming of the Mad Dogge, 120, 181 mystery plays, 67-68 neighbours, 27-28, 167-68 nervous system, 206, 221 New Globe Theatre, 80, 214 Newstead, Christopher, An Apologie for Women: Or, Womens Defence, 47, 92, 100 Niccholes, Alexander, A Discourse of Marriage and Wiving, 6 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 54 Northbrooke, John, A Treatise Against Dicing, Dancing, Play and Interludes. With Other Idle Pastimes, 5 nose-blowing, 43 observation, systemic, 55, 60, 69, 71 Ovid, Metamorphoses, 91 ovum, 50 pamphlets, 181 paradoxically, 221 paranoia, structural, 121, 125 parliament, 174, 178 patriarchal authority, 147 Peacham, Henry, Garden of Eloquence, 22 penetration, 87, 100 penis, 85, 87, 100, 143 perforation, 109 performance, 161 performativity, 10, 88-89, 142, 177, 209 Perkins, William, A Discourse of the Dammed Art of Witchcraft, 186; Christian Oeconomie, 24-25, 64, 99 perspective, 224 phallus, 119 Philips, Katherine, Pompey: A Tragoedy, 7 Platter, Thomas, Beschreibung der Reisen durch Frankreich, Spanien, England und die Niederlande 1595-1600, 1 porosity, systemic, 118, 160, 164 Potlatch, 131 privacy, 25

private property, 32; body as, 129-31 professionalisation of female work, 37 professions, “public and domestic”, 3 proscenium stage, 224 prostitution, 191 Protestantism, 31 proxemics, 131 Prynne, William, Histrio-Mastix, 177, 217; The Vnlouelinesse of Lovelockes, 217 public sphere (Habermas), 174 Puritan thought, 135 Puttenham, George, The Arte of English Poesie, 30 Rabelais, François, 46 Rainoldes, John, Th’Overthrow of StagePlayes, 79, 217 rake, 39 reading, 31 recuperation, 81 Red Bull Theatre, 72 reinforcement, systemic, 106 reputation, 28-29 Restoration, 39, 51, 54, 68, 76, 208 restricted economy (Bataille), 131 revenge, 156 rhetoric, 22 rib, 57, 116 Rich, Barnabe, My Ladies Looking Glasse, 168, 212; The Honestie of this Age, 212 Rochester, Earl of (John Wilmot), The Complete Poems of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, 143 romance, 188, 210, 218, 220 room, 97 Rose Theatre, 72 Rowlands, Samuel, The Bride, 167 Rowley, William, John Day and George Wilkins, The Travels of the Three English Brothers (see Day, John) rumour, 26-27 Sandys, George, A Relation of a Journey began An. Dom. 1610, 143 scolding, 39 secrets, 152 secularization, 68 selection, systemic, 56, 164 self-discipline, 197, 201, 205 selfhood, private, 3 self-perpetuation, systemic, 61, 182,

INDEX 214 self-punishment, 202 “separate spheres”, 3, 8-10, 38, 64 servants, 26, 200 sex, 68 sexuality, as work, 85-88, 92-93; feminine, 85, 99; masculine, 85-86 Shakespeare, William, All's Well That Ends Well, 86; Antony and Cleopatra, 25, 86, 110, 159, 208, 210; Coriolanus, 112, 126-44, 210; Cymbeline, 92, 111, 118, 147, 157, 188-89, 194; Hamlet, 24; 2 Henry IV, 88, 103; Henry V, 86, 112, 121; 1 Henry VI, 94; Henry VIII, 143; Julius Caesar, 112; Macbeth, 210; Measure for Measure, 86; The Merchant of Venice, 111; The Merry Wives of Windsor, 44, 109, 120, 185; A Midsummer Night's Dream, 27, 121; Much Ado About Nothing, 148, 158, 169; Othello, 88, 148, 155; Pericles, Prince of Tyre, 86; Romeo and Juliet, 78, 133; The Sonnets, 86, 140; The Taming of the Shrew, 169, 238; The Tempest, 149; Troilus and Cressida, 53, 87-90, 101, 105, 121, 152; Twelfth Night, 90, 116, 160, 218; The Winter's Tale, 24, 101, 115, 119, 121, 148, 183, 194, 212, 215 shame, 45 shaming, 40-41, 64 Shirley, James, The Ball, 209 shops, 171 shrew, 171, 178, 185, 193 Sidney, Mary, The Tragedy of Antonie, 107 Sidney, Sir Philip, The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, 107 skin, 127 slander, 39, 122 Smith, Henrie, A Preparative to Mariage, 2, 166 Smith, Sir Thomas, The Commonwealth of England, 64 social contract, 216 Southwark, 71 Sowernam, Ester, Ester hath hang’d Haman, 166, 181 space, civic, 26; domestic, 25-26, 31-33, 195, 199-201, 209, 224; feminine, 114; private, 25, 77, 199-202; public and private, 2-19, 20, 29, 31,

251 129; sequestration in domestic, 199-01; stage, 12, 135; striated (Deleuze/Guattari), 224; urban, 26; as woman’s place private, 199-202 spatial signs, 132 spectacle, 128, 131, 136, 141 spectators, axes of viewing, 224 Spenser, Edmund, A View of the State of Ireland, 104 sperm, 111 spitting, 43 stage, 68; proscenium, 224; space, 135 Stoppard, Tom, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, 71 Stow, John, A Suruey of London, 32, 97 Stubbes, Philip, The Anatomie of Abuses, 213 study, 198 subjectivity, self-coercing, 44 supplement, 119 surveillance, 64 Swan Theatre, 71-72 Swetnam the Woman-Hater, Arraigned by Women (Anonymous), 219 Swetnam, Joseph, The Araignment of Lewd, Idle, Froward and Unconstant Women, 2, 53, 57, 83, 108, 152, 158, 165, 169 sword, 119 synecdoche, 24, 203, 224; in theatre, 181 systems theory (Luhmann), 55-57, 6064, 69-72; contradiction, 178; environment/system, 55, 69, 78, 216; horizon of selection, 187; individual as organic-psychic system, 140; negative feedback, 206; porosity of boundaries, 164; power, 61-62, 214; systemic autopoesis, 56, 69, 76, 164, 206, 214; systemic boundaries, 147, 165; systemic code, 55, 78, 147; systemic coherence, 182; systemic communicational events, 55, 57, 70, 182; systemic contradiction, 81, 82, 178; systemic crisis, 74, 82, 96, 101; systemic dichotomy, 126; systemic differentiation, 55-58, 105, 107, 116, 118, 124, 194, 214, 222; systemic entropy, 107, 118, 125; systemic instability, 82, 118; systemic interaction, 62-63; systemic interpenetration, 79, 182;

252


systemic lack, 220; systemic medium, 56; systemic observation, 55, 60, 69, 71; systemic porosity, 118, 160, 164; systemic reinforcement, 106; systemic selection, 56, 164; systemic selfperpetuation, 61, 182, 214; systemic stability, 206 table manners, 43 talkativeness, feminine, 151-52, 169, 223 Taylor, John, All the Workes of John Taylor the Water Poet, 172, 192; The World Runnes on Wheeles, 92 tears, 111, 113-15 testing, 120-21 textile industry, 38 Theatre system, 80, 182 Theatre, The, 72, 94 theatres, Blackfriars, 77; Curtain, 72; Fortune, 72, 75; Globe, 71, 72; Hope, 71, 72; New Globe, 80, 214; Red Bull, 72; Rose, 72; Swan, 71, 72; The Theatre, 72, 94; Whitefriars, 77; closure of (1642), 4, 81, 88, 183, 208, 221, 225; at Court, 11; and monarchy, 131; post-Restoration, 76; private, 77; public, 75-76; as public space, 132; restoration, 206 theatrical sign, body as, 131 Thornton, Alice, A Book of Remembrances, in Her Own Life: Autobiographical Writings by Seventeenth-Century Englishwomen, 29 Tilney, Edmund, A Briefe and Pleasant Discourse of Duties in Marriage, Called the Flower of Friendshippe, 25, 120, 165, 201 tongue, 185-86; female, 169 tragedy, 220 training, 34, 102-103 Trapnel, Anna, 174-76 urination, 45 vagina, 50 Valverde, de Amusco, Juan, Historia del composicion del cuerpo humano, 127 Vaughan, William, Approved Directions for Health, both Naturall and Artificiall, 159

Vio, Thomas de, Cardinal Cajetan, The Analogy of Names and The Concept of Being, 22, 166-67, 171 virtue, 134 visual surveillance, 44 Vives, Juan Luis, The Instrvction of a Christen Woman, 166-67, 171 voice, feminine, 196 walls, 27 Ward, Robert, Animadversions of vvarre, 104, 159 wastefulness, feminine, 165 Webster, John, The Duchess of Malfi, 56, 153, 155, 195 Whately, William, A Bride-Bush, 65, 223; A Bride-Bush, or, A Wedding Sermon, 28, 65, 198, 202, 204-05 Whitefriars Theatre, 77 whore, financial independence, 171-72 whoredom, 157, 168 Wilkins, George, John Day and William Rowley, The Travels of the Three English Brothers (see Day, John) Wilkins, George, The Miseries of Inforst Mariage, 52 windows, 156 Wing, John, The Crowne Conjugall or the Spouse Royall, 39 witch, 185, 225 womb, 50 women, as actors, 6, 11, 177; advocacy, 184-86; agency, 182-87; audiences, 181; carers, 173; and domestic space, 33; as dramatists, 7; economic activity, 165; everyday practices, 164; exclusion from male professions, 36-37; humours, 145; identification with dramas, 180; incontinency, 146; and infidelity, 120; as mediators, 183-87; mobility, 165, 172, 191; passions, 146, 148, 155; as pawn brokers, 176; petitioning, 178; as playgoers, 1, 5, 179; as political counsellors, 18687; preachers, 174, 196; protestors, 173; restriction of, 2; sectarians, 196; spatial restriction, 166; talkativeness, 169; as theatre managers, 176-77; voting, 178; at war, 196; weakness, 145; work, 16; writers, 196; writings, 174 work, domestic, 15; gendered division

INDEX of, 34-35; professional, 15 wounds, 127 ff. Wright, Sir Thomas, The Passions of the Mind, 111, 146, 152

253 Wroth, Mary, Love’s Victory, 109 yard, 50, 85 A Yorkshire Tragedy (Anonymous), 24

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