Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance (Studies in Renaissance Literature)

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Studies in Renaissance Literature Volume 11

CHIVALRY AND ROMANCE IN THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE

This volume offers a reinterpretation of the place and significance of chivalric culture in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and explores the implications of this reconfigured interpretation for an understanding of the medieval generally. Received wisdom has it that both chivalric culture and the literature of chivalry – romances – were obsolete by the time of the Renaissance, an understanding epitomised by the figure of Don Quixote, the reader of chivalric fictions whose risible literary tastes render him absurd. By way of contrast, this study finds evidence for the continued vitality and relevance of chivalric values at all levels of sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury society, from the court entertainments of Elizabeth I to the civic culture of London merchants and artisans. At the same time, it charts the process by which, throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the chivalric has been firstly exclusively identified with the medieval and then transformed into a virtual shorthand for ‘pastness’ generally. Dr ALEXANDER DAVIS is Lecturer in English at the University of St Andrews.

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Studies in Renaissance Literature ISSN 1465–6310 Founding Editor John T. Shawcross General Editor Graham Parry Editorial Board Helen E. Wilcox John N. King Graham Parry Paul Stanwood

Previous volumes are listed at the back of this book

Studies in Renaissance Literature offers investigations of topics in English literature focussed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries; its scope extends from early Tudor writing, including works reflecting medieval concerns, to the Restoration period. Studies exploring the interplay between the literature of the English Renaissance and its cultural history are particularly welcomed. Proposals or queries should be sent in the first instance to Graham Parry at the address below, or to the publisher; all submissions receive prompt and informed consideration. Professor Graham Parry, Department of English, University of York, Heslington, York YO1 5DD, UK

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CHIVALRY AND ROMANCE IN THE ENGLISH RENAISSANCE

Alex Davis

D. S. BREWER

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© Alex Davis 2003 All Rights Reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owner

First published 2003 D. S. Brewer, Cambridge

ISBN 0 85991 777 0

D. S. Brewer is an imprint of Boydell & Brewer Ltd PO Box 9, Woodbridge, Suffolk IP12 3DF, UK and of Boydell & Brewer Inc. PO Box 41026, Rochester, NY 14604–4126, USA website: www.boydell.co.uk

A catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Davis, Alex. Chivalry and romance in the English Renaissance / Alex Davis. p. cm. – (Studies in Renaissance literature, ISSN 1465–6310 ; v. 11) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–85991–777–0 (acid-free paper) 1. English literature – Early modern, 1500–1700 – History and criticism. 2. Chivalry in literature. 3. Literature and history – England – History – 16th century. 4. Literature and history – England – History – 17th century. 5. Medievalism – England – History – 16th century. 6. Medievalism – England – History – 17th century. 7. Romances, English – History and criticism. 8. Knights and knighthood in literature. 9. Middle Ages in literature. 10. Renaissance – England. I. Title. II. Series: Studies in Renaissance literature (Woodbridge, Suffolk, England) ; v. 11. PR428.C45 D38 2003 820.9'353 – dc21 2002154557

This publication is printed on acid-free paper Printed in Great Britain by St Edmundsbury Press Ltd, Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk

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CONTENTS Acknowledgements Note on Transcription Introduction

vii viii 1

Chapter 1 ‘Not Knowing Their Parents’: Reading Chivalric Romance

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Chapter 2 The Progress of Romance (I): Kenilworth, 1575

73

Chapter 3 Castles in the Air: Quixotic Representations on the Seventeenth-Century Stage Chapter 4 ‘Gentleman-Like Adventure’: Duelling in the ‘Life’ of Lord Herbert of Cherbury Chapter 5 ‘The Lady Errant’: Katherine Philips as Reader of Romance Chapter 6 The Progress of Romance (II): Kenilworth, Chivalry, and the Middle Ages

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169 202

Conclusion: ‘The Chronicle of Wasted Time’

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Bibliography

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Index

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS This book originated as a doctoral thesis under the supervision of Professor Lorna Hutson, to whom I owe my greatest debt of gratitude. Without her encouragement, support and input, this project might never have been completed; if it can even come close to matching the intelligence and originality of her own work, I will be more than satisfied. I would like to thank Helen Hackett and Robert Maslen, who examined the thesis, for their insightful commentary and suggestions; I am also grateful to the former for looking at my work in its early stages. Thanks are also due to two colleagues at St Andrews who were good enough to read my thesis and offered advice on translating it into book form: Michael Alexander and, in particular, Neil Rhodes. Mr Robert York, archivist of the College of Arms, was most helpful when I came to examine the records of the Court of Chivalry. Finally, I should like to acknowledge a debt to my family and friends, whose contribution to this book is in no way diminished by the fact that it was not academic in nature.

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NOTE ON TRANSCRIPTION I have silently regularised early modern textual conventions such as long -s and consonantal i and u in accordance with modern usage.

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INTRODUCTION When in the chronicle of wasted time, I see discriptions of the fairest wights, And beautie making beautifull old rime, In praise of Ladies dead, and lovely Knights, Then in the blazon of sweet beauties best, Of hand, of foote, of lip, of eye, of brow, I see their antique Pen would have exprest, Even such a beauty as you maister now.1

The opening lines of Shakespeare’s 106th sonnet introduce many of the themes of this study. Fittingly, for a collection of verse much concerned with questions of reading and writing – questions about the power of literary discourse – the poem opens by referring to the poet reading a book. But what sort of book? ‘Chronicle’ seems to have been applied to a wide range of historical works (including a number of Shakespeare’s plays) in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and so hardly helps us to pinpoint the sort of text being mentioned. As if aware of this vagueness, Shakespeare rapidly moves to narrow the field of reference. First we have the self-consciously archaic word, ‘wights’; next we are told that the people featured in this text are beautiful; then that it comprises ‘old rime’. Taken with the preceding clues, ‘Ladies dead, and lovely Knights’ suggests that when he describes himself reading in ‘the chronicle of wasted time’, it is likely that Shakespeare is studying what we would now call a romance, or, more specifically, a chivalric romance.2 This may come as something of a surprise, since such volumes do not normally feature in accounts of his reading. But the poem also gives voice to an attitude that is far more in tune with modern assumptions about romances: they are ‘the chronicle of wasted time’ – that is, they deal with time past (‘wasted’), but reading them in itself constitutes a ‘waste of time’, time squandered on unprofitable pursuits. In fact, the argument of this book is that writers on sixteenth- and seventeenth-century culture have, consciously or unconsciously, gone one

1

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William Shakespeare, Shakespeare’s Sonnets, ed. Stephen Booth (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1977), Sonnet 106. Patrick Cheney argues that the volume in question is, quite specifically, The Faerie Queene. ‘Shakespeare’s Sonnet 106, Spenser’s National Epic and Counter Petrarchism’, English Literary Renaissance 31 (2001), pp. 331–64.

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Introduction step further, unpacking Shakespeare’s pun into logical form: narratives about ‘Ladies dead, and lovely Knights’ are a waste of time, and they are a waste of time because they deal with time past. ‘Romance’ as a genre is notoriously hard to define. That it tends to refer to a non-naturalistic mode of writing is generally accepted, but the variety of texts that might plausibly be grouped under that heading is daunting, ranging from medieval verse to contemporary novels published by Mills and Boon. As a subsection of this larger category, ‘chivalric literature’ or ‘the chivalric romance’ is somewhat clearer. We might define it as a tale written in an idealising mode, concerned with the deeds of those of noble rank – Shakespeare’s ‘Ladies’ and ‘Knights’ (whose status is advertised by their possession of ‘blazoned’ coats of arms) – and typically featuring plot elements such as: tourneys and trials by combat; magicians; giants; dragons; epic journeys through distant lands; and so on. But the key to the genre lies in its name. The chivalric romance is a literary form that evolved in tandem with chivalry – that is, the code of conduct, ethos and trappings characteristic of the knightly classes that sprung up during the European Middle Ages. Shakespeare’s placement of ‘the chronicle of wasted time’ in the past is thus superficially appropriate. It is certainly true that many of the chivalric romances so avidly consumed in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England were of medieval origin: Malory’s Morte Darthur and anonymous texts such as Bevis of Southampton and Guy of Warwick fall into this category. Yet other chivalric narratives must have been experienced as excitingly new books. The Spanish and Portuguese romances were of relatively recent origin. The first known edition of Amadis de Gaule, for instance, dates from 1508, whilst the equally popular Mirror of Knighthood was first published in 1562. It should be remembered that Cervantes’ satire on chivalric literature, Don Quixote, specifically associates these books with the print technology that was in the process of transforming the cultural landscape of Renaissance Europe: in the second part of Cervantes’ classic, Don Quixote is a publishing phenomenon, the first fictional celebrity of the age of print; he even visits a printing house where one of the workmen is correcting proofs of the second instalment of his adventures. Subsequently, English literary culture saw the introduction of still more novel generic variants upon the chivalric romance: Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia, which in turn influenced Mary Wroth’s Urania – and then, into the midseventeenth century, the French heroic romances such as Cassandra and Cleopatra. Each of these types of narrative has its own distinctive characteristics, and it may be possible to see a gradual diversification away from the medieval origins of the genre; but for all that, as I shall be arguing, even relatively late productions such as Cassandra are still distinctively rooted in the concerns of medieval chivalric narrative.3

3

See below pp. 176–8.

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Introduction Chivalric romances, then, might be simultaneously new and old. Nowadays, it is possible to speak of a text’s ‘gendering’, its distinctive inflection towards the supposed attributes of the male or female sexes. It seems unfortunate that there is no equivalent term to refer to the temporal signature of a piece of writing. Romances are almost invariably weighted towards the past; they set their action in the past, and often accompany this act of placement with disparaging comments about the morals of the present day.4 In the sphere of social action, too, chivalry as a code of conduct was pervaded by this spirit of ‘pastness’. Chivalry has been studied as a method of waging war, based around the use of mounted warriors, and as an ethical system worthy of emulation, but it was also a system of social distinction. The knights of the Middle Ages were not just warriors, they were also an elite and (eventually) hereditary class of society.5 The assertions this study makes about the continued relevance of chivalry in the early modern period centre on just this aspect; it is viewed as an ideology distinctively concerned with justifying rank and precedence through assertions of pedigree and lineage – assertions intimately related to the narrative strategies of romance. The complex temporalities through which these concerns articulated themselves are analysed in detail in Chapter 1 of this study. For the moment I should simply like to suggest that the implication that chivalry and romance both represented ‘wasted time’ in Shakespeare’s England may rest upon a sort of category error. Drawn in by romances’ assertions of their own antiquity, we may be too ready to attribute to them a genuine obsolescence. In fact, I shall be arguing, both the literature of chivalry and chivalric ideology itself were both alive and well in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England. This introduction aims, through an analysis of the issues surrounding the popularity of chivalric romance in the Renaissance, to offer an anatomy of modern attitudes to the genre. When Edmund Spenser published the first three books of his Faerie Queene in 1590, he did so in the knowledge that there were those who might find fault with his work. The Faerie Queene thus entered the public sphere elaborately armoured against such criticisms. Appended to the poem itself were numerous dedicatory sonnets, one of which addressed William Cecil, Lord Burghley. Having commended Burghley’s management of ‘grave affaires’ of state, Spenser went on to emphasise his own serious intentions, but in strangely ambiguous terms: Unfitly I these ydle rimes present, The labor of lost time, and wit unstayd: Yet if their deeper sence be inly wayd, 4

5

Whereas satire, no matter how conservative and reactionary in tendency – and despite being a much older literary form – nevertheless seems to have a natural propensity to appear ‘modern’. See Maurice Keen, Chivalry (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984).

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Introduction And the dim vele, with which from comune vew Their fairer parts are hid, aside be layd. Perhaps not vaine they may appeare to you. Such as they be, vouchsafe them to receave, And wipe their faults out of your censure grave.6

Spenser suggests that his work has allegorical meanings, a ‘deeper sence’, and hence substance (a formulation that in itself hints at a certain nervousness about the way in which these meanings are conveyed), and yet, at the same time, he seems compelled to describe the poem in terms that suggest its worthlessness – as ‘ydle rimes’, ‘the labor of lost time’, ‘wit unstayd’, as possibly ‘vaine’; merely to offer such a thing to the Lord Treasurer of England represents a serious breach of decorum, something ‘unfitly’ done. We might offer a number of plausible explanations for Spenser’s anxiety. His poem, Mother Hubberds Tale, is thought to conceal a satirical attack on Burghley as a ‘fox’; possibly he was worried about Cecil’s reaction.7 Again, such extravagant professions of worthlessness tend to characterise any sort of approach to a figure as powerful as Burghley. They have even been considered as a particular feature of the prefatory apparatus of many printed works published in this period.8 Yet it is not his appearance in print that appears to be at issue here. Spenser seems to suggest that his work is shameful, published or otherwise – but, again, we are also familiar with the notion that sixteenth- and seventeenth-century assessments of the value of poetry might not tally with our own.9 All these interpretations seem plausible. Without being dogmatic about the true nature of Spenser’s problems, however, I would like to suggest that there is another, less obvious possible explanation for the characterisation of his work as ‘ydle rimes’. Although it managed for the most part to avoid such criticisms – far more so than many other works we shall be looking at – The Faerie Queene was intermittently attacked throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as an example of one of the most ‘vaine’ and ‘ydle’ of all literary genres, the chivalric romance. In 1597, John King fulminated against ‘frivolous stories’ such as ‘Arcadia, & the Faëry Queene, and Orlando Furioso’, 6

7

8

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Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A.C. Hamilton (London and New York: Longman, 1977), Appendix 3, ‘To The Right Honourable the Lo. Burleigh’. Complaints (London: W. Ponsonbie, 1591). Despite the date of publication, the poem, according to Spenser’s preface, was written earlier. The classic treatment of this phenomenon, with its implication that appearing in print is somehow shameful, is J.W. Saunders’‘The Stigma of Print: A Note on the Social Bases of Tudor Poetry’, Essays in Criticism1 (1951), pp. 139–64, in which it is noted that printed Renaissance literature tended to reach its readers encrusted with such protective devices as: anonymity (143), professions of modesty (147), and claims that publication was little more than a ‘reluctant surrender to the insistence of friends’ (145). The prejudice against poetry is discussed in Russel Fraser, The War against Poetry (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1970).

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Introduction the favourite reading matter of ‘the wanton students of our time’ (King’s point being that these people ought to be reading scripture),10 whilst Nicholas Ferrar complained in the 1630s that ‘not oneley Virgill & Homere, but Ariosto & Spenser & all other books of Chevalry, bring in their fayned worthies . . . defective in Patience’.11 The Faerie Queene, then, is a ‘book of Chevalry’. One might have thought that this was a logical enough act of classification, for, like such little-read works as Amadis de Gaule and Bevis of Hampton, The Faerie Queene concentrates upon the deeds of armed knights (a fact announced in its opening line); like Bevis, it features fantastic creatures such as giants and dragons (the final episode of Book I of the poem is actually adapted from Bevis). Ferrar’s complaint, about the lack of Christian patience displayed by the heroes of such works, was one often sounded against the romances. The French soldier François de la Noue had commented that, amongst numerous other faults, such books of chivalry foster ‘the poyson of revendge’, since they ‘avoweth that the highest point of knights honour consisteth in cutting one anothers throate for frivolous matters’.12 Finally, here as in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 106, accusations of vanity and idleness were very much a part of the language favoured by detractors of the chivalric romance. The association between The Faerie Queene and other examples of romances could not be clearer. They are tied together both by their formal properties and by their shared involvement in a critical discourse within which they can be identified as ‘vaine’ books, as literature not worth the reading. Along with all the other explanations for the attitude Spenser adopts towards Cecil, then, we might add the theory that it was a pre-emptive defence of his work in generic terms, against the sorts of criticism that were to be sounded by the likes of King and Ferrar – that, in short, he was defending it as a chivalric romance. This, however, is an act of literary classification that modern critics seem reluctant to reproduce – and with good reason. It is one of the claims of this study that, whilst we are perfectly comfortable with many of the other explanations we might offer for the stance taken in Spenser’s dedicatory sonnet, even if they conflict with our assumptions about (for example) the value of vernacular poetry, it is only an emphasis on the chivalric content of The Faerie Queene that might cast serious doubts upon its canonical place in literary history – that, in fact (and whatever the determining factors that actually shape Spenser’s sonnet), the terms in which modern literary historians view the genre are precisely those outlined in the poem ‘To the Right Honourable the Lo. Burleigh’. Most modern writers on English 10 11

12

Lectures Upon Jonas (Oxford: Joseph Barnes, 1597), sig. Z2r. BL MS Add. 34657, ff. 108–9. More stringently, Ferrar also commented elsewhere that ‘the having an Orlando in the house, is sufficient ground to have it burnt down over their heads, that truly have God.’ See A.D. Nuttall, Overheard by God (London and New York: Methuen, 1980), p. 20. The Politicke and Militarie Discourses, trans. E.A. (London: T. Orwin, 1587), sig. G7r.

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Introduction Renaissance literature, one feels, cast their eyes over the genre of romance like so many Lord Burghleys – not the real Cecil, who actually owned a copy of Amadis de Gaule, but the public image of the man, the censorious authority figure addressed by Spenser – the brief moments when they deign to notice such a trifling thing being given over to satirical commentary and admonitory injunctions aimed at unwary readers, urging them to turn their attention to something more profitable.13 Until very recently, critics of Spenser, whilst not exactly denying the chivalric nature of his work, have almost invariably preferred to concentrate on his relationship to more prestigious sources – classical epic, Aristotelian philosophy, allegorical verse – anything that can help them to dignify the form Spenser chose to work in.14 To lay stress upon the chivalric basis of The Faerie Queene would be to open the poem up to the suspicion that, insofar as it belonged to the genre, far from being one of the classics of English literature, it might actually be nothing more than a collection of ‘vaine’, ‘ydle’ rhymes – nothing more, in fact, than ‘the labor of lost time’. It is not hard to find condemnations of chivalric romances in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Indeed, the general perception among literary historians seems to be that the period saw a mounting attack upon the genre. Commonly, we read that this ‘new’ attitude can be traced to a particularly significant element in Renaissance culture – humanism, the movement that promoted the study of classical texts as the cornerstone of a programme that aimed to reform society through education. It is this phase of intellectual history that takes centre stage in the work of the most prominent historian of English Renaissance chivalry, Arthur Ferguson. His earliest book on that topic, The Indian Summer of English Chivalry, aims to chart developments in English society through a study of attitudes to chivalry and romance. It was the transition from a ‘living’ chivalric tradition to an exotic, decadent or dead one which was, Ferguson states, ‘an important strand in that tissue of changes which brought about the English Renaissance – which was, in a sense,

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Burghley’s ownership of a copy of Amadis is discussed below. Richard Helgerson’s The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1976) discourses at length on Burghley as ‘parens patriae . . . the archetypal father’ (29) of the Elizabethan state. Spenser’s poem is, Paul Rovang (a rare exception to the rule) comments, ‘commonly thought of as a Renaissance version of the classical epic, retaining only vestigial links with the old tales of chivalry’. See his Refashioning ‘Knights and Ladies Gentle Deeds’ (London: Associated University Presses, 1995), p. 17. This is despite the fact that there is, as Rovang notes, no precedent in any of these favoured sources for Spenser’s division of his poem into ‘Legends’ concentrating on a single figure, rather like Caxton’s Malory. Andrew King’s The Faerie Queen and Middle English Romance (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 2000) goes some way towards rectifying this critical gap by offering a very full account of Spenser in relation to native romance traditions.

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Introduction the English Renaissance’.15 Within this context, Ferguson is emphatic both about the role humanism played in promoting a new set of secular values, and its correspondingly hostile attitude towards chivalry and therefore chivalric literature. His thesis of the decline of chivalry is supported by examples of sixteenth-century attacks on romances – most notably, Roger Ascham’s condemnation of Malory, whose work, so popular ‘in our forefathers tyme’, incites its readers to ‘open mans slaughter, and bold bawdrye’.16 Ferguson directs the reader’s attention to the first half of Ascham’s comments in particular. ‘Within the lifetime of Henry VIII it was possible for Roger Ascham to condemn in good set terms the literary tradition upon which the court in the monarch’s earlier years drew so heavily for its forms and even for its ideals. That he condemned it as morally vicious is well known to students of the period. It should be remembered that he also branded it as old fashioned.’17 Ascham’s comments (which in fact only occur as preliminaries to an attack on translations of Italian fiction, the point being that such works are far worse than Malory) are thus reproduced within a context that suggests the obsolescence of chivalric literature in the Renaissance. The formulation manages to suggest that, in the war between ‘the humanists’ and ‘chivalry’, the latter represented the old and the former the new, and that, consequently, an interest in romance – the literature of chivalry – could signify only a lack of modernity, to say nothing of a deplorable lapse in literary discrimination. It is precisely the nature and implications of this modern appropriation of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century commentary on chivalric literature – the way in which such commentary is first designated as the product of a ‘movement’, this movement then being presented as the dominant factor in sixteenthand seventeenth-century English culture – that I would like to examine. The first thing to note is that the attacks that modern critics quote from so readily are only rarely made on strictly ‘literary’ grounds – and not always by writers who can easily be defined as ‘humanists’ at all. Thomas Nashe’s ridicule of Bevis of Southampton’s rhymes in The Anatomie of Absurditie stands as the exception rather than the rule.18 More often, critics of the chivalric romances take their stand on moral or theological issues. We might begin with the way in which the Protestant Reformation, laying stress on salvation by faith rather than works, transformed expectations of what an individual’s reading might do for the state

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The Indian Summer of English Chivalry (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1960), p. ix. The Scholemaster (London: John Daye, 1570), sig. I3r. Ferguson (1960), p. 26. ‘Who is it, that reading Bevis of Hampton, can forbeare laughing, if he marke what scambling shyft he makes to end his verses a like?’ Nashe goes on to list a few of these choice ‘absurdities’ for the reader’s ‘recreation’ (‘This almes by my crowne Gives she for Bevis of South-hamptoune’). See The Works of Thomas Nashe, ed. Ronald B. McKerrow (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1966), 5 volumes, I: 26.

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Introduction of his or her soul. An unpublished ‘Declaration of the Faith, and a Justification of the Proceedings of King Henry the Eighth in matters of Religion’ of 1539 declared (over-optimistically, as it turned out) that, contrary to accusations that England had forsaken religion to become a nation of heretics: Englishmen have now in hand in every Church and place, almost every Man, the Holy Bible, and New Testament, in their Mother Tongue, instead of the old fabulous and phantasticall Books, of the Table round, Launcelot du Lac, Huon de Bourdeux, Bevy of Hampton, Guy of Warwick, &c. and such other whose impure Filth and vain Fabulosity, the Light of God has abolished utterly.19

Just after the dissolution of the monasteries, chivalric romances have a surprisingly prominent role to play in this document’s justification of the reformed English polity. For this writer, chivalric works appear to have stood out as the pre-eminent example of ungodly, idle vernacular literature, to be cited before any others, and in explicit contrast to the Bible in English. Compare this with William Tyndale’s The Obedience of a Christen Man. Tyndale refers to those who would like to prohibit study of the Bible in the vernacular: that this thretenynge and forbiddynge the laye people to reade the scripture is not for love of youre soules (which they care for as ye foxe doeth for the gysse) is evidente & clerer then the sonne/ in as moch as they permitte & sofre you to reade * Robyn hode & bevise of hampton/ hercules/ hector and troylus with a tousand histories & fables of love & wantones and of rybaudry as fylthy as herte can thinke/ to corrupt ye myndes of youth with all/ clene contrary to the doctrine of christ & of his apostles . . . now seinge they permitte you frely to reade those thinges which corrupt youre mindes and robbe you of ye kyngdome of god & christe & brynge ye wrath of god apon you how is this forbyddinge for love of youre soules?20

The marginal comment is, ‘Reade what thou wilt: ye and saye what thou wylt save the trueth.’ Tyndale condemns those powerful men who willingly let the people indulge themselves with frivolous and lying fictions whilst starving them of proper reading, all the while claiming that they are acting in everybody’s best interests. Tyndale, of course, had first hand experience of the 19

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Quoted in Jeremy Collier’s Ecclesiastical History of Great Britain (London: Samuel Keeble and Benjamin Tooke, 1708–14), 2 volumes, II: ‘Collection of Records’, no. 47. Collier comments that the design of this ‘Apology’, written by ‘some single Hand’, was ‘to justifie the English Nation from the Charge of deserting the Catholick Church. It is likewise a Defence of the Administration’ (II: 172–3). Similar comments, condemning chivalric reading matter, may be found in Peter de la Primaudaye, The French Academie, trans. Thomas Bowes (London: George Bishop, 1602–5), 2 volumes, II: ‘The Epistle to the Reader’, sig. B1v, and Eusebius, The Auncient Ecclesiasticall Histories, trans. Meredith Hamner (London: Thomas Vautroullier, 1577), dedication. William Tyndale, The Obedience of a Christen Man (Menston: The Scholar Press, 1970), sig. C4r. A facsimile of the 1528 edition.

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Introduction suppression of scripture in English that he is referring to here. In 1526, Cuthbert Tunstall, the Bishop of London, had both preached against Tyndale and burned copies of his translation of the New Testament, an episode that prompts his biographer (who emphasises Tyndale’s humanistic scholarship and rhetorical education) to contemplate the shock Tyndale must have felt when he discovered that his enemy was ‘Erasmus’s friend, who had worked with Erasmus in Bruges on his edition of the Greek New Testament’. Tunstall is condemned for ‘betraying his Christian humanist learning at the direction of the Church’.21 Examination of the manner in which this argument over Biblical translation evolved through a series of controversial exchanges serves to clarify the sense in which Tyndale’s reference to romances operated within exactly this context of shared humanistic learning. Much later, Tyndale was to make scornful reference to the friendship of another of his opponents, Thomas More, with Erasmus, implying a double standard: How happeth it that .M. More hathe not contended inlykewise against his derelynge Erasmus all this longe while? Doeth not he change his worde ecclesia in to congregacyon [as Tyndale’s English Testament did] and that not seldem in the new testament? Peradventure he owith him favoure because he made Moria [the Praise of Folly] in his housse, which boke if it were in Englishe/ then shulde every man se/ how that he then was ferre other wise minded than he nowe writeth.22

More’s response was to declare that he would burn both his own and Erasmus’ works if they were translated into ‘Englyshe’.23 As Alan Stewart has pointed out, this was a controversy, not so much over scholarship as its reproduction in vernacular tongues – and within such a context, we can begin to see what a calculated affront Tyndale’s reference to romances was. Understanding his opponent, Tunstall, in terms of his humanistic, Latinate, culture of amicitia between ‘derelynges’, Tyndale also consistently associates him – and in fact his opponents generally – with exactly the sort of vernacular literature they would have had the least time for – but which they were not prepared to prohibit.24 Such exchanges imply that ascriptions of a taste for chivalric literature were in fact far more complex than a formulaic opposition between humanism and chivalry might suggest. Humanism, here, figures as something less than a unified movement, and the manner in which romances function in Tyndale’s attack on the likes of Tunstall suggests a more sophisticated relationship between humanistic learning and such books than one in which the former discredits the latter. The sixteenth-century assault on chivalric literature 21

22 23 24

David Daniell, William Tyndale: A Biography (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), p. 191. An Answere unto Sir Thomas Mores Dialogue (London, 1530), sig. A7v. Thomas More, The Confutacyon of Tyndales Answere (London: William Rastell, 1532), sig. R1r. Alan Stewart, ‘The Trouble with Tudor Humanism: More, Erasmus, Tyndale, and Proper English Words’, paper given at the Warburg Institute, November 1999.

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Introduction begins to look increasingly mobile, less like the expression of a decisive cultural shift, and more like a rather tendentious strategy of insult. Tyndale’s writings actually manage at times to suggest that the whole body of Catholic doctrine he opposed, with its ‘lyes and false myracles’, its ‘dome [dumb] ceremonies’, was little more than a crowd-pleasing, popular, ‘idle’ romance. Discussing scriptural interpretation, he writes that, when Paul enjoins us to take up the sword of the spirit, this is ‘not to beleve a tale of Robyn hode or Gestus Romanorum or of the Cronycles’.25 Books of chivalry, then, take their place in a reformist polemic about the exploitation of an undiscriminating people through such fantastic devices as relics and miracles, a theme developed in greater depth by Tyndale’s successors. We might consider the relationship between his complaints about the people being fobbed off with worthless fictions, Roger Ascham’s association between the romances and ‘idle’ monks,26 and the full-blown anti-Catholic conspiracy theory propounded in John Harvey’s Discoursive Probleme Concerning Prophesies. Prophesies of the sort contained in works like ‘king Arthur, Bevis of Southampton, Launcelot du Lake, Sir Tristram . . . Guy of Warwicke, Orlando Furioso, Amadis du Gaule’ (the list goes on) served, we are told, ‘to busie the minds of the vulgar sort, or to set their heads aworke withal, and to avert their conceits from the consideration of serious, and graver matters’ such as ‘private or publicke affairs of higher value, matters of state or religion, politicke or ecclesiasticall government’. Harvey ironically applauds the ‘idle Cloistermen, and merry friars, and lustie Abbey-lubbers’ for this ‘trim worke’ of deception.27 We can see a similar line of borrowing and modification initiated by William Perkins’ The Foundation of Christian Religion (1591). This work opens with ‘The Epistle’, addressed ‘To all ignorant people that desire to bee instructed’, asserting that ‘ye lead your lives in great ignorance, as may appeare 25

26

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Tyndale (1970), sig. T4r. Attacking John Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester, Tyndale also says that he might as well cite ‘Robyn hode’ as Origen in support of his arguments (H8v), and compares the Pope to ‘Robyn goodfelow’ (T1r). Roger Ascham, Toxophilus (London: Edward Whytchurch, 1545), sig. a1r, and The Scholemaster (1570), sig. I3r–v. The same association between monks and romances occurs in William Vaughan’s history of the church in verse, The Church Militant (London: T. Paine for H. Blunden, 1640), sigs. N2v–3r: Onely some Foppish Tales they left behinde, Thereby to cheat, not edifie the Minde . . . Like Oberons imagin’d Fairy Dance, Or Arthurs Knights, or the Twelve Peeres of France . . . With such Fond Tales [as romances] they gull’d the Multitude That ’tis no marvell we account them rude. A Discoursive Probleme Concerninge Prophesies (London: John Jackson for R. Watkins, 1588), sigs. K2v–3r. On the prophetic content of chivalric literature, see Howard Dobin, Merlin’s Disciples: Prophecy, Poetry and Power in Renaissance England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). The phrase ‘abbie-lubbers’ was also used the following year in The Anatomie of Absurditie in the context of an attack on romances. See Nashe (1966), I: 11.

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Introduction by these your common opinions which follow’. Fourteenth on the ensuing list of unenlightened attitudes is the notion ‘that merry ballads and bookes, as Scoggin, Bevis of Southampton, &c. are good to drive away time, & to remove hart qualmes’.28 Arthur Dent’s The Plaine Mans Path-way to Heaven, first published in 1601, serves to clarify Perkins’ last phrase. In this religious dialogue, Asunetus (‘an ignorant man’) has been convinced of his sins by one Theologus: the first step to redemption. However, Antilegon (‘a caviller’) tries to comfort his troubled companion: ‘if you wil goe home with me,’ he says, ‘I can give you a speedy remedy: for I have many pleasant and merry bookes, which if you should heare them read, would soone remedy you of this melancholy’ – among them, Bevis of Southampton. ‘Which al,’ he continues, ‘are excellent and singular bookes against hart-quames: and to remoove such dumpishnesse, as I see you are now fallen into.’ Asunetus is not impressed. ‘Your vaine and frivolous bookes of Tales, Jestes and lies’, he says, ‘would more increase my griefe, and strike the print of sorrow deeper into my heart.’ Again we encounter chivalric literature being attacked in a religious context. Perkins’ ‘Hart-qualmes’ are the convictions of sin that must precede conversion, and a romance such as Bevis is presented as one among many godless texts that might impede this process.29 The comments of Philagathus (‘an honest man’) which follow this exchange make the link to the strain of anti-Catholic polemic discussed previously quite clear. The likes of Bevis are goodly geare, trimme stuffe. They are good to kindle a fire, or to scoure a hotte Oven with-all. And shall I tel you mine opinion of them: I doo thus thinke, that they were devised by the divel: seene, and allowed by the Pope: Printed in hel: bound up by Hobgoblin: and first published and dispearsed, in Rome, Italy and Spaine. And all to this ende, that thereby men might be kept from the reading of the scriptures. For even as a Lapwing with her busie crying, draweth men away from her nest: So the Popish generation, by these fabulous devices, draw men from the scriptures.30

This passage, moreover, also seems to echo an earlier one, in The Bryefe and Necessary Catechisme of Instruction by Edward Dering. Dering writes that men of his time ‘have fulfilled the wickednesse of our forefathers, and overtaken them in their sinnes’, which included the reading of romances such as those of Guy, Arthur and Bevis. Such works, and others worse, ‘Satan had made, hell had printed, & were warranted unto sale, under the Popes priviledge, to kindle

28 29

30

The Foundation of Christian Religion (London: T. Orwin for J. Porter, 1591), sig. A2v. On the necessity of despair as a prelude to salvation in Protestant theology, see John Stachniewski, The Persecutory Imagination (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1991). The case of Antilegon is discussed on p. 229. Arthur Dent, The Plaine Mans Path-way to Heaven (London: Robert Dexter, 1601), sigs. DD5v–6r. Note that, although I will be speaking of ‘readers’ of romance, Dent seems to suggest that Asunetus might actually have the offending books read to him.

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Introduction in mens hearts the sparkes of superstition, that at last it might flame out into the fire of purgatorie’.31 Dent seems to echo both the phraseology and subject matter of this passage, which in turn depends upon the sort of contrast seen in Tyndale between religious literature which is both godly and conducive to one’s salvation, and other vernacular literatures, which are at best idle and at worst positively dangerous.32 The emphasis is not solely on romances; many other categories of popular literature are condemned by these writers – jest books are probably the second most popular target – but it would be a rare one who did not mention chivalric narratives somewhere in his list of ungodly books. Not all criticisms of romances were the product of a desire to promote pious reading habits. Frequently, chivalric literature is presented as offering an incitement to immoral behaviour. The locus classicus here is Roger Ascham’s attack on the ‘open mans slaughter, and bold bawdrye’ promoted by texts such as Malory’s Morte Darthur.33 These charges are pressed with relish by a host of later commentators. Thomas Underdowne, for instance, echoes Ascham when he attempts to differentiate his translation of Heliodorus from volumes of ‘like argument’: ‘Mort Darthur, Arthur of little Britaine, yea, and Amadis of Gaule, etc., accompt violente murder, or murder for no cause, manhoode: and fornication and all unlawfull luste, friendly love.’34 The Politicke and Militarie Discourses of François de la Noue contain a whole chapter contending ‘That the reading of the Bookes of Amadis de Gaule, & such like is no lesse hurtful to youth, than the works of Machiavel to age’. Like Ascham, de la Noue considers the romances to be responsible for inciting both violent and lustful behaviour. Amadis de Gaule, we read, presents the reader with such dangerous but tempting toxic agents as ‘the poison of Impietie’, ‘the Poison of pleasure’, ‘Impudent and foule loves’, ‘Pollution of holy Matrimonie’, and ‘the poyson of revendge’.35 Nor does he end there. One of his numerous objections to the chivalric romances is their endorsement of what he sees as ‘forgetfulnesse of trew duetie’: This likewise was another custome of the knights of those daies, That if any one had made promise to goe about any adventure with one of these pilgrimes, who alwaies travailed alone with them: though their soveraigne Lord, or their father

31

32

33

34

35

A Briefe and Necessary Catechisme of Instruction (Middelburg: Richard Schilders, 1590), sig. A1v. First published 1572. On the interaction between fears of Catholic subversion and prose fiction generally, see R.W. Maslen, Elizabethan Fictions (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1997). In fact, Ascham does mention religion, but most commentators seem to ignore this element of his argument in favour of the famous anti-chivalric ‘sound-bite’. Thomas Underdowne trans., An Æthiopian Historie (London: Francis Coldocke, 1587), ¶3r. The first edition of Underdowne’s translation (1569) does not contain these comments; evidently, the publication of The Scholemaster in 1570 influenced later versions. Ironically, Book 20 of Amadis is based upon Heliodorus. See John J. O’Connor, Amadis de Gaul and Its Influence on Elizabethan Literature (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1970), Appendix C. A selection of de la Noue’s marginal comments.

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Introduction or mother should command them even with lordlike authoritie & fatherly power, to desist therefro to the end to serve in some other necessarie service, yet if they gave it over, it was a perpetuall infamy to them, for they were bound by the order of knighthood to follow their gentlewoman, who sometimes was of a reasonable disposition.36

The discursive structure of some of Vives’ comments on women readers of romance also seems to connect that topic with social disorder. Writing on ‘the discipline and instruction of women’, he opens with a discussion of a ‘wel instituted & governed’ city, in which the ‘citezins mai be wel manerd and have wholsom doctrine’. In such a city, ‘it shalbe no labour nor payne at al to commaund them nor to forbid them, nor it shall not greatly nede to feare them with paines, nor with rewards to provoke them to live wel’. Our flesh, however, is corrupted with sin, and the mind all too often perversely attaches itself to hurtful things. Therefore, ‘to extirpate and weede out such sinister opinions and judgement, we have nede of displine the whiche with the knowledge of good letters may easelye be obtayned and gotten’ – and from here, locating the possibility of indiscipline in unruly females, Vives proceeds to discuss the question, whether or not women should be learned, and to attack inappropriate forms of reading. Books ‘written in the vulgar tonge, as of Trystram, Launcelote, Ogier, Amasus and of Artur’ are to be condemned; ‘so much knowledge of naturall thynges as suffiseth to rule & governe thys life withall, is sufficient for a woman’.37 Vives prefers forms of reading that might correct rather than reinforce the natural defects of the female reader. Erasmus, by way of contrast, discussing the young male student – and therefore with an entirely different notion of the potentialities of the reader of the wrong sort of books in view – seems to have regarded romances as an incitement to the assumption of excessive ‘lordlike authoritie’, excessive order, citing them in the context of his treatise on the education of princes. Pondering the sorts of reading matter that might be appropriate for the young prince, Erasmus warns that texts dealing with the exploits of the likes of Alexander and Caesar may act as an incitement to tyranny; fictions of Arthur and Lancelot, however, are ‘non solum tyrannicis, verum etiam prorsus ineruditis stultis & anilibus’ – not only tyrannical, but illiterate, foolish and anile, like old wives’ tales.38 Of course, there is no clear-cut distinction between ‘religious’ and ‘civic’ critics of romance; often, they voice more or less identical complaints. My point is that there is very little here that a twenty-first-century literary critic would necessarily feel comfortable about endorsing. What such comments do

36 37

38

De la Noue (1587), sig. G7r–v. Juan Luis Vives, The Office and Duetie of an Husband, trans. Thomas Paynell (London: John Cawood, 1550), sigs. O6r–7v. Desiderius Erasmus, Institutio Principis Christiani (Basel: J. Frobenuis, 1516), sig. I1r.

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Introduction exhibit, however, is a fruitful vein of ridicule. Critics of chivalric fictions tend to take great delight in pointing out their palpable absurdities as a part of their attacks – it is, in fact, one of their most frequently used strategies. Edward Fenton notes that such books ‘passe all likelihode of truth’, and it is a rare writer on this topic who can resist the opportunity to provide examples.39 Vives mocks the way a romance hero can kill twenty men, or receive a hundred wounds, yet be well enough the next day to overcome ‘two gyants’.40 François de la Noue, concerned with the proper discipline of soldiers, and making reference to romantic narrations of ‘imaginarie valiancies’ in which one man kills 200 opponents, or single combats that last for hours on end, ridicules the notion that one might learn how to fight from such fatuous reading matter: although the wiser sort do account such knightly prowesses and giantlyke strength, wherewith the reader is so importuned, to bee but fables, yet the more undiscreete, under so sweete a charme of wordes cannot forbeare, but remember some such draughts as are most conformable to their affections, to the end afterward as occasion may serve to try them, thinking thereby to be more active than others.41

Chivalric texts had always been open to the accusation that they were little more than collections of lies, a vulnerability magnified in this period by the scholarly attack on Arthurian history.42 Viewed within the context of sixteenth-century poetics and rhetorical theory, however, comments such as those above can be seen as a specific assault on the discursive inadequacies of romantic narration, one focused on its improbabilities. At issue here is the inability of such texts to produce their extraordinary circumstances within a rhetorical structure that might promote strategic thought about literary form – rather than (as in de la Noue) an unthinking and self-flattering identification with their protagonists. Humanist literary criticism was not, in fact, programmatically opposed to fantastic narrative; the Æthiopian Historie, for instance, is just as improbable as any medieval chivalric narrative when viewed in terms of modern canons of verisimilitude. But whilst both native romances and fictions of the sort approved of by humanistic authors include scenes of shocking recognition – indeed, one chapter of this study will be examining just one such narrative trope, that of discovered parentage – what is valued in the latter class is the ability to ‘amaze the audience by an outcome which defies expectations yet appears in retrospect to be a logical outcome’.43 39 40

41 42 43

Certaine Secrete Wonders of Nature (London: H. Bynneman, 1569), sig. A3v. The Instruction of a Christen Woman, trans. Richard Hyrde (London: Thomas Berthelet, 1541), sig. D3r. De la Noue (1587), sig. G7v. See T.D. Kendrick, British Antiquity (London: Methuen, 1950). Terence Cave, Recognitions (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1990), p. 31.

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Introduction What is at issue is the rhetorical utility of literary texts. Jacques Amyot’s translation of Heliodorus into French had contended that the superiority of his text over the likes of Amadis lay in ‘its disposition or narrative structure: by beginning in medias res, says Amyot, Heliodorus engenders in his readers a passionate desire to hear the beginning . . . but keeps them waiting until the end of the fifth book; thereafter, they have an even greater desire to hear the end’.44 Attention to this order of ‘emplotment’ allows readers to reproduce such persuasive structures for their own rhetorical ends – this, presumably, being the point of Sidney’s reference to the Cyropaedia, when he says that it works, ‘not onely to make a Cyrus . . . but to bestow a Cyrus upon the world to make many Cyrusses, if they will learne aright, why and how that maker made him’.45 Romances, from such a viewpoint, simply fail to produce the possibility of forming prudent and self-conscious readers. Hence the emphasis in many attacks – relevant to both the anti-Catholic objections to chivalric texts we looked at earlier, and to the figure of the Quixotic reader, below – on the reader of romance as someone unable to secure any sort of control over his or her reading experience, and hence left at the mercy of the most absurd and improbable sort of narrative structures. In this sense, romances fill a space logically implied by and created by humanistic literary theory: the structurally necessary Other of Erasmian reading practices. Erasmus had advocated strategies of reading that, by fragmenting and digesting other authors’ texts, were supposed to give the reader mastery over his books as they became verbal resources at the fingertips of the confident, eloquent humanist.46 The portrait of the reader of romance painted by many Renaissance authors is in this sense an image of the humanistic nightmare: of books that gain mastery over their readers; that the books in question should be conceived of as, variously, immoral, profane, idle and (worst of all) deeply silly merely sharpens the piquancy of this vision. As we shall see, it is a theme that has proven most productive for later commentators on the genre. Yet even here, it is worth noting that matters may be more complex than they seem at first glance. Sometime after 1572, there was published a translation from the French that represents what must look, from the modern perspective, like a rather curious

44

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Cave (1990), p. 16. See also Marc Fumaroli, ‘Jacques Amyot and the Clerical Polemic Against the Chivalric Novel’, Renaissance Quarterly 38 (1985), pp. 22–40, on protests against the improbabilities of romance in France. This characteristic is attacked as a monstrous absence of proportion, and compared, even, to the dreams of a fevered man (30). Sir Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesie (London: William Ponsonby, 1595), sig. C1r. See also Lorna Hutson, ‘Fortunate Travellers’, Representations 41 (1993), pp. 83–103, which explicitly contrasts such fictions with the chivalric romance. See Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1979), and Desiderius Erasmus, On the Copia of Words and Ideas, trans. Donald B. King and H. David Rix (Milwaukee: Marquette University Press, 1963).

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Introduction attempt at synthesis between humanistic reading practices and romance literature. The Treasurie of Amadis of France is, in effect, a printed commonplace book, offering a series of extracts – ‘eloquent orations, pythie epistles, learned letters, and fervent Complayntes’, as the titlepage puts it – from the Amadis series of books.47 It is a far cry from the more familiar notion of the reader of romance as someone seduced by idle and disreputable literature. Instead, reading Amadis is said to offer a means of transforming oneself into an eloquent, socially productive member of the early modern commonweal. The dedication of this volume declares that, of all human accomplishments, the one that surpasses all others is to be ‘an excellent Oratour, singular in orations, pythie and ingenious in writing Epistles, for thereby is brought to passe the most excellent things for publike government, as also for every mannes private cause and use’ – a sentiment that might have come from the pen of one of Erasmus’ or Vives’ translators. As, indeed, it almost did. The Treasurie’s prefatory matter was written by Thomas Hacket; but the translation itself was done by Thomas Paynell – who we may recall elsewhere Englishing Vives’ attack on the likes of ‘Trystram, Launcelote, Ogier, Amasus and . . . Artur’ in The Office and Duetie of an Husband. If nothing else, Paynell’s experiences as a translator would seem to indicate the sheer appetite for discussion of romances as a form of reading in sixteenth-century Europe – and once again, the line between critics and defenders of chivalric romance comes out looking rather more blurred than it appears at first glance. The clear implication of Arthur Ferguson’s account of attacks upon chivalric literature is to suggest that its popularity was declining as the form became intellectually discredited. But attacks upon the romances did not begin with Roger Ascham, nor even with Erasmus and Vives. On the contrary – long before these authors, Dante’s Inferno provides us with the case of Paolo and Francesca, who fell in love after their eyes met over a copy of the romance of Lancelot. The book, Francesca explains to Dante, acted as a Galetto, the intermediary between Lancelot and Guinevere, and ‘that day we read in it no farther’.48 In her study of the Anglo-Norman romances (such as Guy and Bevis), Susan Crane cites a number of ecclesiastical objections to chivalric literature dating from the medieval period, similar in both tone and strategy to many of the writers examined above. One Abbot Gevard made his point in a sermon by crying out, ‘there once was a king named Arthur!’ ‘You see,

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The Treasurie of Amadis of Fraunce, trans. Thomas Paynell (London: Henry Bynneman for Thomas Hacket, n.d). Helen D. Moore discusses the publication date of Paynell’s work in her critical edition of Anthony Munday’s translation of Amadis, ‘The Ancient, Famous and Honourable History of Amadis de Gaule: A Critical Modern Spelling Edition of Anthony Munday’s Translation’ (D.Phil., University of Oxford, 1996), p. 25. The Divine Comedy, trans. John D. Sinclair (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961), 3 volumes, I: 78–9.

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Introduction my brothers,’ he went on, ‘to how sad a pass we have come; when I was speaking to you about God, you fell asleep; but as soon as I began a secular story, you all woke up and began to listen with eager ears.’ Similarly, William of Nassington opened his Speculum Vitae by distinguishing his work from ‘veyn carpyng’ of the sort found in Guy and Bevis.49 If Renaissance attacks on romance are nothing new, neither (as Ferguson seems to imply) did they pass unopposed. Few people, certainly, seem to have been prepared to openly state that reading chivalric literature was a profitable or even enjoyable activity – although Henry Peacham admits that ‘there is no book so bad, even Sir Bevis himself . . . but some commodity may be gotten by it’.50 Even Philip Sidney’s comment, that Amadis de Gaule, ‘God knoweth, wanteth much of a perfect Poesie’ – but may move men to virtue, all the same – is grudging.51 Evidently, an open statement of one’s taste for such disreputable reading matter was not the done thing (although this did not stop the likes of Sidney from consuming just such books), and, to this extent, the notion that romance was a discredited genre may be borne out.52 But, and leaving aside the fact that it is just as hard to find endorsements of the genre from the medieval period, we do have the texts themselves. In the contrast between the views expressed in the scattered, frequently condemnatory references to chivalric works, and the defences against such accusations established, not in literary commentary, but rather in the prefatory apparatus to the texts themselves, one can see what Arthur Ferguson failed to find in the works he studied, a genuine assertion of the continuing value of chivalric literature, phrased in direct opposition to the characteristic discourse of its detractors. In Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages, Glending Olson explores the possibility of looking at medieval writing, not in terms of the layered, allegorical structures employed by so many writers of the time, but as a recreational activity.53 The debate over chivalric romance in the Renaissance also seems to have centred on this concept of recreation. Roger Ascham’s Toxophilius declares of the romances of ‘our fathers tyme’ that, ‘Yf any man suppose they were good ynough to passe the time with al, he is decyved’;54 his Scholemaster notes that the romances were written ‘as they sayd, for 49

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51 52

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Insular Romance (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1986), pp. 94–5. Henry Peacham, The Complete Gentleman, ed. Virgil B. Heltzel (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1962), p. 66. Sidney (1595), sig. E2r. For an analogy, however, see Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction, trans. Richard Nice (London, Melbourne and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1984), on the tendency of his survey respondents to claim familiarity with more ‘highbrow’ cultural goods than they in fact habitually enjoy, p. 318. Glending Olson, Literature as Recreation in the Later Middle Ages (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1982). Ascham (1545), ‘To all Gentlemen and Yomen of Englande’, sig. a1r.

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Introduction pastime and pleasure’.55 Thomas North’s The Diall of Princes plays with this idea of ‘passing the time’ by claiming that those who read ‘vayne bookes (that is to say) as Orson and Valentine, the Courte of Venus, and the .4. sonnes of Amon . . . passe not the tyme but in perdicion’.56 ‘Passing the time’ thus acquires a pejorative implication in these attacks – one of an idle, profitless use of one’s leisured moments, merely using them up in amusement rather than doing something constructive with them. Again and again it is claimed that such works are ‘vayne woordes’, that they are idle in themselves, that they were ‘made but for idel men and women to read’, that they were written, even, by ‘idle’ monks.57 William Vaughan, writing as ‘Orpheus Junior’, understands Don Quixote to be an attack on ‘prodigious, idle, and time-wasting Bookes’ such as The Mirrour of Knighthood and Palmerin, describing them as ‘pretended recreations’.58 The romancers themselves, and their English translators and publishers, seem to be concerned to establish a defence against such charges of prodigality and ‘idleness’. One way they do this is to describe their creations in terms of the established Horatian formula of pleasure combined with profit. The titlepage of one of the later books of the ‘Amadis’ series, Amadis of Greece, for example, declares that narrative to be ‘no less Useful, than Pleasant’59 – and in fact, it is a rare romance that does not attempt to justify itself in similar terms. The ‘profit’ that one is supposed to derive from such texts is their presentation of exemplary literary figures, who can be taken as a spur to action. Margaret Tyler says of The Mirror of Knighthood that she translated it into English for ‘profite & delight . . . The authors purpose appeareth to be this, to animate thereby, and to set on fire the lustie courages of young gentlemen, to the advancement of their line.’60 This defence is, moreover, often specifically phrased in such a way as to address the accusation of ‘idleness’. ‘Records of Chivalrie’ such as those in the Mirror of Knighthood, we are told, ‘animate others unto imitating the like’ and are ‘a spur to instigate and prick us forwards unto prowesse, who else would be idle and live in obscuritie’.61

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57 58 59

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Ascham (1570), sig. I3r. Thomas North, The Diall of Princes (London: John Waylande, 1557), sig. B1v. North has ‘anglicised’ the works referred to in the work by Antonio de Guevara he is translating. The Libro del Emperado Marco Aurelio (Valladolid: Nicholas Tierri, 1529), ‘Prologo General’, f. vii verso mentions Amadis and Primaleon, not The Four Sons of Amon. See, for example, Ascham (1545); Vives, trans. Hyrde (1541), sig. D1v. Orpheus Junior, The Golden Fleece (London: F. Williams, 1626), sig. C2r. The Most Excellent and Famous History of . . . Amadis of Greece (London: J. Deacon and J. Blare, 1694). Diego Ortuñez de Calahorra, The Mirror of Princely Deeds and Knighthood, trans. Margaret Tyler (London: Thomas East, 1578), sig. A3r. Tyler’s preface offers one of the most extended defences of the genre in this period – as well as of the propriety of a woman translating such matter. ‘R.P.’, The Second Part of the First Booke of the Myrrour of Knighthood (London: T. Este, 1599), dedication.

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Introduction Whereas the critics of the romances employ the term ‘idle’ to signify uselessness, writers of the title-pages of and prefaces to the works themselves use the word in its more specific sense of inactivity: romances will inspire men to heroic action, or whatever its equivalent might be in the contemporary world, thus helping them to avoid ‘obscuritie’. They are thus recreational in the sense of being pleasant works which prepare and refresh one for one’s real ‘work’, even whilst, for their detractors, they represent mere profitless ‘amusement’. Most modern critics are, one suspects, responsive to only half of this debate, their attitudes apparently determined for the most part by Roger Ascham (who is regularly cited whenever the topic of chivalric texts is raised),62 rather than an analysis of the books in question themselves. It is on the basis of this partial view that chivalric literature is regarded as a minor factor in the history of English Renaissance culture. Indeed, if one wants to find out what modern critics think of these texts, one has to look for the most part in histories of the reading public – in literary history as opposed to literary criticism. Put another way, the most accurate indicator of how modern writers estimate the importance of romance is their silence. Leaving aside the likes of Spenser and Sidney – who are more often treated in relation to classical sources than in terms of their genre – one of the most comprehensive studies of the chivalric romances in England remains R.S. Crane’s book of 1919 on that topic (and it is only recently that this tradition has begun to attract serious critical attention once more).63 Consider the manner in which chivalric literature is treated when it does attract the notice of some modern critics.64 Margaret Schlauch’s Antecedents of the English Novel opens with the declaration that the novel can be most clearly defined in opposition to other forms, such as the romance; viewed in such a context, the latter is always likely to be found imperfect, and so it proves. For Schlauch, chivalric fictions are characterised by ‘endless repetitions and duplications’, are absurd, ‘trite’, and marked by ‘unconscious humour’.65

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A tendency that reaches its apotheosis in Lilian Winstanley’s suggestion that Ascham ‘probably . . . dissuaded or helped to dissuade Spenser from making much use of Malory’s Morte d’Arthur’ (quoted in Rovang (1995), p. 17). R.S. Crane, The Vogue of Medieval Chivalric Romance During the English Renaissance (Menasha, Wisconsin: The Collegiate Press, George Branta Publishing Company, 1919). At about the same time, we also have the publication of Henry Thomas’ book on The Spanish and Portuguese Romances of Chivalry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920), and, somewhat later, Mary Patchell’s The Palmerin Romances in Elizabethan Prose Fiction (New York: Columbia University Press, 1947) – after which, until very recently, very little at all. It should be emphasised that I am speaking here, and throughout, of critics who deal with the traditions of English literature and even history. Those who study Spanish traditions seem to have far fewer problems with this sort of material. Antecedents of the English Novel, 1400–1600 (London: Oxford University Press, 1963), pp. 1, 56, 171, 166.

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Introduction Superficially, Schlauch’s criticisms are aesthetic. However, as a socialist driven into exile by the McCarthy regime, her hostility to the chivalric genre may at root be driven by a sense that it acts as propaganda for the aristocracy.66 Yet many of her critical strategies find their origins in Renaissance attacks on chivalric romances – which one might expect her to find just as ideologically unacceptable. Just like sixteenth- and seventeenth-century detractors of such books, she affects to find them indistinguishable. ‘Such romances as Amadis de Gaula, Palmerin de Oliva, Palmerin of England, and Sir Belianis’ are ‘of the type that drove the good knight of La Mancha mad’ (and where individual works are analysed, it is made clear that they are representative of the breed in general).67 Only occasionally do characters in romances behave ‘like human beings’. A fiction such as Arthur of Little Britain is ‘fantastic’, full of matter ‘inauspicious for narrative even remotely approximating the realistic vein’. And in a strategy that finds its roots in Renaissance attacks on the improbabilities of chivalric narrative, these elements are listed in such a way as to amplify our sense of absurdity: ‘here are giants and other monstrous creatures a-plenty, Dark Towers, magic storms, a perilous enchanted bed, a whirling castle, animated statues.’ Such ‘jejune romantic concoctions’ are, we are told, barely a part of literary history at all, little more, in fact, than a ‘detour’ on the road to a properly modern fiction.68 This suspicion is further buttressed by a historical vision that sees the Renaissance as the period in which class groupings below the level of the aristocracy began to make their presence felt in fiction – although this again is a perception that is articulated in terms of the language of propriety. Whatever Schlauch’s literary reservations, it seems clear that her rejection of the chivalric romance is based upon the notion that it really ought not to be there (that is, in the Renaissance, rather than the Middle Ages) at all. Caxton’s fictions ‘remain actually remote from the needs of a new age’ in fiction; discussing Malory, she regrets the way in which ‘the persistence of old motifs could hamper the adaptation of a plot to new conditions and aesthetic requirements’.69 Margaret Schlauch’s hopes for a new ideal of fiction are met only towards the end of Antecedents of the English Novel, where the ‘remarkable’ Deloney, who wrote for the ‘middle classes’, is praised for his ‘brilliantly lifelike’ dialogue and declared to be ‘prophetic’ of the novels of Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding – this being the Thomas Deloney whose Jack of Newbury tells the grittily realistic tale of its eponymous hero’s rise from a

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I am grateful to Robert Maslen for this point. I should add that I would say she is largely right, but underestimates the extent to which chivalric values and iconography might permeate beyond the closed social circle for which they were originally designed; a phenomenon which is one of the main themes of this book. Schlauch (1963), p. 165. Schlauch (1963), pp. 168, 69, 165. Schlauch (1963), pp. 54, 77.

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Introduction clothworker’s apprenticeship to military success to plain-speaking favourite of Henry VIII.70 Margaret Spufford’s work offers a serious look at seventeenth-century reading habits, but here too chivalric literature is presented in such a way as is hardly likely to encourage anybody to actually read it. Her presentation of the facts is skewed so as to undermine subtly the case she is making for their popularity among actual readers of the period. Bevis is ‘a typical, breathless medieval chivalric romance, in which adventure follows adventure in quick succession’. Her account of the narrative action makes it clear that she finds this work ludicrous. ‘There is no attempt at characterisation, and the whole piece of blood-and-thunder writing seems aimed at pre-adolescent or adolescent males.’71 Guy of Warwick offers a hopeless ‘historical hodge-podge’: along with Saxons and Danes are thrown, ‘as equally realistic, giants and dragons, lions and even a monstrous cow 10 ft long and 6 ft wide’. It is full of ‘enormous amounts of bloodshed’, the hero killing ‘incredibly large numbers of men’. ‘Genuine medieval figures’ such as Guy and Bevis are, however, contrasted with translations of Spanish and Portuguese romances and their imitators. These represent ‘pure escapism’, ‘the verbose equivalent of comics portraying heroics, bloodletting and violence’. Amadis de Gaule, we are told, begot a ‘prolific [and, we infer, undifferentiated] tribe’. But here again the worst is yet to come. Just as Bevis and Guy are said to be superior to the likes of Amadis (something we would never have guessed when Spufford was actually dealing with these former works, where they are presented as the acme of unreadability), so too books of the Amadis series are ‘sensible’ when compared to something like Richard Johnson’s Tom-a-Lincoln.72 This potentially infinite regress into literary awfulness is halted only by the appearance – once again – of Thomas Deloney. Deloney’s works are contrasted with ‘pot-boiling’ chivalric works as giving us ‘the beginnings of the “realistic” novel’. Jack of Newbury is said to demonstrate the ‘capitalist ethic’, and, although Spufford cannot disguise the fact that this work is no less a fantasy than some of the chivalric ‘pot-boilers’ she has previously lampooned, instead of this lack of verisimilitude being emphasised and exploited for its comic potential, it is disguised through references to a reading public who were most likely in trade, just like Jack.73 By way of contrast, Paul Salzman’s history of English prose fiction does devote considerable space to the romance (as it could hardly fail to do).

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Schlauch (1963), pp. 241–5. In fact, as Laura Caroline Stevenson demonstrates in her Praise and Paradox: Merchants and Craftsmen in Elizabethan Popular Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), fictions such as Deloney’s are substantially influenced by chivalric value systems. Small Books and Pleasant Histories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), pp. 7–8. Spufford (1985), pp. 226–7, 233–4. Spufford (1985), pp. 145, 242.

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Introduction Nevertheless, it makes every effort, through a system of subtle distinctions, to dissociate the works he is dealing with from overtly chivalric fiction. The Spanish and Portuguese books of chivalry represent, for Salzman, a ‘debased form’ of the ‘medieval romance tradition’. Sidney, it is emphasised, saw Amadis de Gaule as ‘outmoded’; his own practice in the Arcadia, influenced by Hellenistic fiction, is presented as ‘sophisticated’.74 Both native romances and the Spanish and Portuguese variety are quite neglected in Salzman’s book – possibly, in the latter case, because they are translations; but such a position would be inconsistent with his own practice, since English Prose Fiction opens with a discussion of translated continental novellas by the likes of Fenton. It is true that Salzman’s antipathy to the genre of romance does not seem as pronounced as in the case of Spufford or Schlauch. On the contrary, he produces a fine section that emphasises the relevance of the genre during the Civil War and Interregnum periods, and discusses translations of French heroic romances. But it is repeatedly stressed that these are ‘sophisticated’ works, works that are not ‘outmoded’, works that reject the ‘marvellous in favour of verisimilitude’, and that display a ‘complex structure’ rather than an ‘endlessly proliferating narrative’ – that, in short, they are hardly the same thing as Amadis or Bevis at all.75 Critics often try to distinguish between ‘sophisticated’ romances (French, Italian or Sidneyesque) and their medieval or Iberian counterparts in this fashion, focusing on the mutations of the basic romance paradigm into pastoral and heroic forms. It is as if Salzman feels that to call a work a ‘chivalric romance’ would be automatically to devalue it, and that he therefore erects a structure of literary categorisations to rescue as much of early prose fiction from this taint as he possibly can. One would not want to deny that fashions in romance shifted during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (although the likes of Amadis continued to be read), but it is all too easy to narrate such changes in such a way as obscures the chivalric content that persists at the heart of these texts. In such a context, it seems important to stress the numerous points of contact between these different sub-categories of romance (knights, Amazons, trial by combat, imprisoned princesses, and improbable adventures all feature even in quite late French heroic romances – see Chapter 5). The early modern romance certainly underwent generic diversification, but that need not necessarily imply the replacement of older varieties. These were, moreover, distinctions that were not necessarily recognised at the time. As we have seen, Nicholas Ferrar classified both The Faerie Queene and Orlando Furioso alike as ‘books of Chevalry’, whilst 74

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Paul Salzman, English Prose Fiction, 1558–1700 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1985), p. 5. Like Margaret Spufford, Salzman makes rhetorical appeals to the authenticity of medieval romance as against the degenerate likes of Amadis, but in both cases they evidently have little taste for the genuine article. Salzman compares the ‘rough but vigorous’ narrative of Gamelyn unfavourably with its ‘witty’ adaptation in As You Like It (3–4). Salzman (1985), p. 98.

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Introduction Thomas Underdowne felt he had to distinguish his translation of a sophisticated Greek romance from volumes of ‘like argument’, such as Amadis. Wye Saltonstall similarly connects the Arcadia and Amadis as ‘loves historyes’.76 In Salzman’s account, however, focusing on the likes of the Arcadia seems to function as a way of diverting attention from the sorts of chivalric romance that are unreceptive to such an approach, that cannot plausibly be categorised as something else. The likes of Amadis de Gaule are barely mentioned. Barely; at one point Salzman does explain that ‘the popular chivalric romance is perhaps the least interesting of all the modes of Elizabethan fiction for the modern reader’ – although, he immediately adds, ‘it is an important part of the milieu which nourished Deloney’s fiction’, which rejected the ‘fantasy world’ of romance to ‘depict the world of the skilled artisan and successful merchant’.77 It is not that any of these are bad books. On the contrary. But one cannot fail to notice something odd in their treatment of the chivalric romance. Histories of reading such as these are baffled by the popularity of chivalric literature, unable to suggest why these works should have retained their appeal, beyond an addiction to escapist fantasies. They are not interpreted, merely described, and in such a way as to make their absurd content absolutely clear; and if such histories do indicate the extraordinary popularity of this form of reading material, they also manage to suggest the terms on which it is to be rejected. For both Schlauch and Spufford, the sections of their respective books that deal with such texts provide a venue for licensed comedy, of a sort that they do not seem prepared to countenance elsewhere in their work. The romance offers light relief from the heavy business of cataloguing the literary predilections of the early modern reading public – rather than forming an important part of such a project. Whilst Spufford and Schlauch enjoy themselves, Paul Salzman works hard to achieve much the same sort of effect, erecting a cordon sanitaire of literary distinctions around the offending material, salvaging what he can by claiming, in effect, that the works he does consider worth reading are ‘not really’ chivalric romances at all.78 In the first instance romances are simply absurd, in the second they are worthlessly crude (as opposed to ‘sophisticated’). The cumulative effect is to imply, often in the face of their own evidence, that chivalric romances were not worth reading in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and that they certainly are not a profitable object of study nowadays. This position is, with its emphasis in particular upon the improbability of chivalric narratives, clearly developed out of the representational strategies of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century detractors of romance – but without any 76 77 78

See Picturae Loquentes (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1946), p. 47. Salzman (1985), p. 101. Salzman does give some prominence to the reading of romance in the Civil War and Interregnum periods, but in such a way that one might infer that it was only the unexpected new range of political significance that events conspired to reveal in these texts that could ever make people want to read them.

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Introduction attention to the fact that these writers attack romances at least in part as a way of promoting alternative canons of reading, canons in which, in many cases, these authors might themselves hope to occupy a significant space.79 By appropriating sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literary commentary, modern critics also reconfigure how we might read such Renaissance attacks on romance. In reality, as we have seen, these came from a variety of different constituencies, but they are often made to look like a concerted assault upon the outmoded. Writers such as Tyndale and Dering are quite explicit in the way they connect their assault upon vernacular fiction with a stated desire to move towards more ‘godly’ reading habits. More subtly, the tendency of writers such as Erasmus to attack romances can, as Alan Stewart points out, be seen as part of a programme devoted to producing a caricature of an unenlightened feudal aristocracy – less an accurate representation of the facts than an attempt to create a demand for the sorts of services they themselves could provide. As Stewart notes, the image of the ignorant, hunting, hawking aristocrat (which often seems to lie in the background of many accounts of the decline of chivalry and the irrelevance of chivalric romance) can in fact be traced back to early humanist writings – and can hardly be considered an accurate portrait of an often learned grouping.80 In effect, by riding roughshod over differences of opinion that might separate their own critical position from that of Ascham, Underdowne or Nashe, Schlauch and Spufford have taken this attack on chivalric literature as normative. And once we have noticed it, this peculiar affinity between twentieth-century literary critics and Renaissance authors becomes increasingly obvious in other aspects of the discourse that surrounds the topic of chivalric romance. We can see a similar pattern – of Renaissance attacks taken on board without consideration of the original rhetorical conditions of their production – emerging when we come to considerations of readership. Although modern treatments tend to imply through the selective quotation of detractors such as Ascham (with his convenient suggestion that nobody reads Malory anymore) that an interest in such material was a dwindling minority pursuit, it is worth noting that, if Renaissance criticisms of the genre indicate anything, it is that romances were among the most popular of literary kinds in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. François de la Noue may have complained about the uselessness of chivalric literature, but he was also bemoaning its popularity.

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Shakespeare’s Sonnet 106 seems, in this manner, to define his own literary project against the chivalric romance. Whereas the ‘chronicle of wasted time’ is devoted to eulogising the beauty of dead aristocrats, the Sonnets seem to delineate a shift from the glorification of noble lineage (‘lines’ of descent) to an implicit and hesitant celebration of the power of the poet’s own ‘lines’ of verse to outlast the wasting effects of history. See Alan Stewart, Close Readers (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997), xxxiv.

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Introduction Nor is it hard to find examples of readers who were interested in such texts. But beyond such examples of actual readers of romance, we also have a large body of commentary – mostly negative – that gives us portraits of the sort of readership chivalric literature might have enjoyed. Here, it is repeatedly suggested that romances are the particular property of the poor and the ignorant. The attack on romances thus takes place on two fronts. On the one hand, it is suggested that such books are worthless in themselves; on the other, that those who did read chivalric literature were worthless people. For Edward Fenton, it is the ‘unlearned sorte’ who delight in ‘the fruitlesse Historie of king Arthur and his round table Knights’.81 John Harvey, as we have seen, considers them to be directed at the ‘vulgar sort’; Robert Tofte referred to ‘Clownes’, and the ‘Stile, of peasantes’.82 Romances are supposed to be particularly popular among country people. A 1615 collection of satires and epigrams contains a poem in which various customers visit a stationer’s shop. We see a puritan, and a statesman, and a ‘Countrey-Farmer’; of this last man, we are told that ‘King Arthur, Bevis, or Syr Guye . . . are the Bookes he onely loves to buye.’83 Again, the anonymous English Courtier and Cuntry-gentleman, a dialogue from 1579, includes a discussion of ‘fowle weather passtimes’ in the countryside. The speaker is not, this time, a peasant, but rather the country gentleman: wee want not also pleasant mad headed knaves, that be properly learned, and will reade in diverse pleasant bookes and good Authors: As Sir Guy of Warwick, the four Sonnes of Amon, the Ship of Fooles, the Budget of Demaundes, the Hundreth merry Tales, the Booke of Ryddles, and many other excellent writers both witty and pleasaunt. These pretty and pithy matters do some times recreate our mindes, cheefly after longe sittinge, and losse of money.84

Presumably we are meant to laugh at the notion that a ‘properly learned’ man might consider the likes of Guy to be the production of a ‘good Author’. Women, too, are considered particularly susceptible to the charms of romance narration – a logical enough notion, in many respects, since both tend to be located within a discourse of idleness: the two can mutually reinforce one another. Often, as we have already seen, the concern is with the virtue of young ladies (Henry Parrot notes that ‘Maides . . . take delight, In bookes of Ladies or some valiant Knight’).85 But there was also a long-standing convention that associated chivalric literature with ‘old wives’, a tradition

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Fenton (1569), sig. A3v. See Franklin B. Williams, Jr., ‘Robert Tofte’, Review of English Studies 13 (1937), pp. 282–96, 405–24. Henry Parrot, The Mastive (London: Thomas Creede, 1615), sig. I1r. Anon, The English Courtier, and the Cuntrey-gentleman, in W.C. Hazlitt ed., Inedited Tracts: Illustrating the Manners, Opinions, and Occupations of Englishmen during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (New York: Burt Franklin, n.d.), pp. 56–7. Parrot (1615), sig. I1r.

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Introduction invoked by Erasmus in his Institutio Principis Christiani. Similarly, The Cobler of Caunterbury, first published in 1590, advertises itself – or pretends to advertise itself – to just this audience: ‘the old wives that wedded themselves to the profound histories of Robin Hood, Clim of the Clough, and worthie Sir Isembras, may here learne a tale to tell amongst their gosseps’.86 In the early years of the seventeenth century, however, a tradition seems to have sprung up associating romances with domestic servants. Evidently, the combination of low social status and femininity was a compelling one. Sir Thomas Overbury, characterising ‘A Chamber-Mayde’, declared that ‘shee reads Greenes workes over and over, but is so carried away with the Myrrour of Knighthood, she is many times resolv’d to run out of her selfe and become a Ladie Errant’.87 Such comments are not necessarily inaccurate; but they ought, I think, to be regarded with suspicion. For one thing, they are contradictory – romances are said to be the particular cultural property of both the poor and the gentry, of old and young women.88 The only thing that such representations have in common is the way that their ascription of a taste for romances to a certain section of the population can be taken, in itself, as a sort of satirical comment on those texts. Furthermore, a chambermaid might, of course, read her mistress’ copy of a chivalric text, but, as Lori Newcomb notes, such works were probably too expensive for her to buy herself. Quarto volumes such as Pandosto (which she is concerned with, but also books of chivalry) would not have been ‘affordable by the general servant. The elite however were undoubtedly familiar with [Greene’s] work’ (Newcomb adds that such comments might reflect an anxiety about the way in which a penniless servant could obtain easy access to her mistress’ culturally elevated goods). For Newcomb, such representations are instances of what Pierre Bourdieu has called ‘distinction’, the mapping of social boundaries through the ascription of cultural preferences. Overbury’s hostile commentary seems to be an attempt to stigmatise cultural tastes that cross social divisions, and might mask the fact that, far from ‘falling’ into the hands of women and the lower classes, romances continued to be popular at many levels of society – including the aristocracy.89

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Anon, The Cobler of Canterburie, ed. Frederic Ouvry (London: J.E. Taylor, 1862), ‘The Cobler’s Epistle to the Gentlemen Readers’. Sir Thomas Overbury, New and Choise Characters (London: Thomas Creede, 1615), ¶4v–5r. This tradition is discussed in Chapter 5, below. Notice also how, in Overbury’s portrait of the chambermaid, a book such as The Mirror of Knighthood figures both as authentically ‘lower class’ reading and as a repository of aristocratic values, something that might induce one to develop ideas above one’s station. See Lori Humphrey Newcomb, ‘The Romance of Service: The Simple History of Pandosto’s Servant Readers’, in Constance C. Relihan ed., Framing Elizabethan Fictions (Kent, Ohio, and London: The Kent State University Press, 1996), pp. 117–40. Newcomb’s arguments are presented in their fullest form in her Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), which appeared too late for me to make as much use of as I would have liked. See also Bourdieu (1984).

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Introduction Inevitably, one comes to suspect that identifications of this sort are more concerned with a sort of cultural policing, sketching artistic preferences in an attempt to delineate social boundaries, than any real attempt to represent the sorts of people that read romances. That is not to say that chambermaids never read The Mirror of Knighthood; they may well have done so. But comments such as Overbury’s ought not lead us to discount the possibility that her mistress – and, quite plausibly, her mistress’ husband – were reading it too. It is important to recognise this, not simply because such comments obscure the breadth of readership that romances could attract, but also because they seem to provide such a fertile ground for modern critics’ denigration of romance. Modern treatments of the topic, building upon commentary of the sort we have been discussing, often like to suggest that the social profile of romances ‘slipped’ during this period, to the point where they became the chosen reading matter of commoners, whilst their betters amused themselves with more ‘sophisticated’ reading. Thus, Louis B. Wright claims that the ‘appeal’ of chivalric romances was ‘made more and more to readers of the less favoured classes’;90 and Henry Thomas, discussing the ‘decline’ of romances to a ‘lowclass public’, states that such works ‘never appealed to the cultured classes in this country as they did on the continent’, and (having cited Overbury and others) concludes that they ‘attracted very few people outside the ignorant and lower classes’.91 And whilst Edwin Miller contends against Thomas and Wright that romances ‘maintained their fascination for upper class readers into the first quarter of the seventeenth century’,92 we still find critics who either state or manage to imply that romances found an audience among the least favoured classes of society. Thus, Margaret Spufford endorses an account by Peter Burke of how ‘the English gentry abandoned the romance of chivalry to the lower classes’ from the mid-seventeenth century, but adds that schoolboys might have mediated between ‘high’ and ‘low’ cultures,93 and Tessa Watt chronicles the fall of romances from their ‘literary and genteel’ origins into chapbooks and broadside ballads.94 Stressing the cultural impoverishment of the audience of chivalric literature becomes a prelude to confining such texts to the backwaters of literary history. As Lori Newcomb suggests, ‘modern criticism reproduces early modern anecdotes that claim romance’s misfortune is being popular’, although why such writers should be so eager to present what is, if anything, an indication of broadening appeal as a ‘fall’ must remain a puzzle.95 Such an 90 91 92

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Middle Class Culture in Elizabethan England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1958), p. 376. Thomas (1920), pp. 261–2, 293. The Professional Writer in Elizabethan England (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1959), p. 78. Spufford (1985), pp. 50, 72. Cheap Print and Popular Piety (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 14. Newcomb (1997), p. 100.

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Introduction approach not only obscures the genuine diversity of the medieval audience for chivalric fictions, which was by no means confined (as most of the critics we have discussed seem to imply) to the gentry and aristocracy.96 The ‘anecdotal’ history of romance also contrasts strikingly with the historical record of actual readers. Such a record has its own inherent bias, of course, in that the reading of the ‘lower class’ audience that historians of literary taste seem to want to emphasise is far less likely to leave a mark that might survive into the twentyfirst century. Nevertheless, what evidence there is suggests that chivalric romances – of both the ‘naïve’ and the ‘sophisticated’ variety – were consumed at all levels of society during the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries, from the very top down. Mary Queen of Scots was, so far as one can tell, an avid reader of romance. Her library included, in 1569, ‘The Historiee of Palmerin’, and, in 1578, ‘The first buik of Amades de gaule’, ‘Twa volumes of Lancilot de Laik’, ‘The nynte buk of Amadis de gaule’, ‘the levint buik of the Amades de Gaule’, and ‘Orlando Furioso’.97 The Scottish connection is continued by the youthful Charles Stewart who in 1571 translated ‘out of Frenche’ the first book of Amadis de Gaule, ‘at the comandment of the right honourable my lady of Lennox her grace his mother’.98 In 1599, the poet Alexander Hume addressed ‘the Scottish youth’, berating them for their attachment to the ‘naughtie subject of fleshly and unlawful love’ as exemplified in profane literature. The ‘chiefe passtime’ of these youngsters ‘in Princes courts, in the houses of great men, and at assemblies of yong gentilmen and yong damsels’ is ‘to sing prophane sonnets, and vaine ballets of love, or to rehearse some fabulous faits of Palmerine, Amadis, or other such like raveries’.99 Normally, one regards such accusations with the deepest suspicion, but, as the two aforementioned cases suggest, there does indeed appear to have been something of a vogue for the likes of Amadis among the Scots. Similarly, the English gentry and aristocracy teemed with readers of romance, to a surprisingly late date. Again, we can start at the very highest levels of society. An illuminated manuscript of French romances, once owned by Elizabeth Woodville, queen of Edward IV, and read by her daughters – as their signatures on the flyleaf show – also contains the signature of Ascham’s 96

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See Derek Pearsall, ‘Middle English Romance and Its Audiences’, in Mary-Jo Arn and Hanneke Wirtjes eds, Historical and Editorial Studies in Medieval and Early Modern English (Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff, 1985), pp. 37–48. Pearsall notes that the Auchinleck manuscript, one of the most important sources for the texts of medieval romances, seems to have been made for ‘an aspiring member of the London merchant elite’ in the mid-fourteenth century (42), and evidently does not consider such an audience exceptional. ‘Lists of Queen Mary’s Books’, in George F. Barwick, A Book Bound for Mary Queen of Scots (London: The Chiswick Press, 1901), Appendix 2. BL MS Lansdowne 766. See The Poems of Alexander Hume, ed. Alexander Lawson (Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons, 1902), p. 6.

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Introduction pupil, Jane Grey.100 Another reader of romance was William Cecil, Lord Burghley. Surviving bills amongst Cecil’s papers include a ‘running account with William Seres, a London bookseller, for books purchased from January 1554 to December 1555’, mostly Latin and Greek classics. These purchases do, however, contain two books in French – one of them an edition of Amadis de Gaule.101 He also owned a copy of Amadis of Greece. It was a taste he shared with the mathematician John Dee (himself a rather ‘romanticised’ figure), who also owned books of chivalry.102 It simply does not appear to be the case that the English aristocracy and gentry abandoned the likes of Guy and Bevis to the lower classes. George Peele, for example, celebrated the appearance of the Earl of Southampton at an Elizabethan joust. The Earl ‘ran As Bevis of South-Hampton’ (‘certes,’ Peele adds, ‘Bevis was a mighty man’); other courtiers adopted Arthurian personae.103 Admittedly, the Earl had the local connection to explain such a lapse in taste, but this still presents a slightly different picture of Elizabethan chivalry from the usual, which associates it more with the witty impresas and literary sophistication of the likes of Sir Philip Sidney, rather than native, medieval traditions of romance. In fact, the general assumption appears to be that, by the end of the sixteenth century, the higher ranks of English society had moved on to ‘sophisticated’, literary and even pastoral romances. In 1599, however, Sir Robert Sidney received the following note from his secretary regarding his request to borrow a book from William Herbert, the third Earl of Pembroke: ‘My Lord, I have wrytten this morning to my Lord Herbert, for that Spannish Amadis de Gaul, you speake of, and very earnestly desire hym to have yt sought out.’104 As late as the 1630s, Sir Kenelm Digby was being 100

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103 104

BL MS Royal 14. E. III. This manuscript is discussed, and the signature ascribed to Lady Jane Grey, in Jennifer R. Goodman, Chivalry and Exploration, 1298–1630 (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1998), p. 35. The British Library catalogue claims only that the signature,‘Jane Grey’, must have come from ‘one of the family of Elizabeth Woodville’s first husband’, Sir John Grey. Ascham’s pupil does, however, fit the description, albeit at quite a remove. Her great grandfather, Thomas Grey, the first marquis of Dorset, was the son of Elizabeth Woodville and Sir John. See Conyers Read, Mr Secretary Cecil and Queen Elizabeth (London: Jonathan Cape, 1955), p. 114. See Gustav Ungerer, ‘The Printing of Spanish Books in Elizabethan England’, The Library, 5th series, 20 (1965), pp. 177–229, Appendix II (on Cecil) and Appendix I (on Dee). Ungerer suggests that such reading might have represented an ‘escape’ from Dee’s more serious pursuits. George Peele, Anglorum Feriae (Ipswich: R. Root, 1830), p. 17. Quoted in Arthur Collins, Letters and Memorials of State (London: T. Osborne, 1746), 2 volumes, II: 150. See also Dick Taylor, ‘The Third Earl of Pembroke as a Patron of Poetry’, Tulane Studies in English 5 (1955), pp. 41–68, p. 42. Anthony Munday’s translation of Amadis (London: Nicholas Okes, 1619) was dedicated to William’s brother, Philip Herbert. It has been suggested that the ‘truly vertuous lady’ (Dedications, Books II and IV) who importuned Munday to produce his translation was Philip’s wife Susan – also the dedicatee of Wroth’s Urania. When one considers their relation to Sir Philip Sidney, all this makes the Herberts a thoroughly ‘romantic’ family. Alternatively, one might just conclude that they reflected the prominence of the genre throughout Elizabethan and Jacobean culture.

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Introduction commissioned by Edward, Lord Conway to procure romances for him in Paris. Digby promises Conway ‘La conqueste du sang real’, and ‘the legend of Sir Tristram’, and ‘can procure him an entire collection of all the books of that kind, and in particular a curious Amadis’ in 12 volumes.105 Later still, an inventory compiled of the library of Robert Devereux, the third Earl of Essex, at his death in 1646 lists copies of the Iberian romances Amadis de Gaule, The Mirror of Knighthood, and Palmerin; Huon of Bordeaux; a copy of Quarles’ Argalus and Parthenia (but not of the Arcadia, written by his mother’s first husband); and manuscript versions of ‘Polixande’ – probably Gomberville’s Polexandre, first printed in its fullest form in 1637 in France.106 At a slightly lower social level, that of mere gentlemen, we have the likes of the Elizabethan translator and founder of the library of the Middle Temple, Robert Ashley. In an autobiographical account of his early years, Ashley describes how, during his studies, he ‘snatched time from play, sleep, meals, and even his more serious studies and occupations, to read the great deeds of such heroes as Bevis of Hampton, Guy of Warwick, Valentine and Orson, and King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table’. Appropriately enough, he went on to produce a treatise on the true nature of honour.107 Sir William Cornwallis was another youthful devotee. In 1600, he wrote of his younger years that ‘I was bound then to Arthur of Brittaine, and things of that price, for my knowledge was not able to trafficke with any thing more rich.’ ‘Yet,’ he added, ‘I have found good use of them, they have added to my experience.’108 George Puttenham reported that, at what must have been a much earlier date, he himself had composed ‘for pleasure’ a ‘litle brief Romance or historicall ditty in the English tong of the Isle of great Brittaine’. Despite his association of such performances with tavern culture elsewhere, Puttenham here declares that his work was arranged so as to be ‘song to the harpe in places of assembly, where the company shalbe desirous to heare of old adventures & valiaunces of noble knights in times past, as are those of King Arthur and his knights of the round table, Sir Bevys of Southampton, Guy of Warwick and others like’.109 The commonplace book of Thomas Dugard, rector of Barford, Warwickshire, and headmaster of the grammar school there, a man of sufficient substance to send his son Samuel to Oxford, shows that he read the Arcadia in 1642 (some time after it had been declared the proper reading of maids) alongside theological, logical and classical texts – apparently without any sense of 105

106

107

108 109

Calendar of State Papers: Domestic, 1636–7 (London: Longmans, Green, Reader and Dyer, 1867), pp. 378–9. Letter dated January, 1636/7, from Paris. Vernon F. Snow, ‘An Inventory of the Lord General’s Library, 1646’, The Library, 5th series, 21 (1966), pp. 115–23. Robert Ashley, Of Honour, ed. Virgil B. Heltzel (San Marino, California: The Huntington Library, 1947), pp. 8–9. Essays (London: Edmund Mattes, 1600), sig. I8r. The Arte of English Poesie, ed. G.D. Willcock and A. Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), p. 42; see also p. 83.

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Introduction incongruity.110 Again, the manuscript taken by Thomas Percy as the basis for his edition of ballads in the eighteenth century – the ‘Percy Folio’, containing verses on Lancelot, on Gawain, and a version of the romance of Sir Launfal – is of mid-seventeenth-century (rather than medieval) origin; Percy himself suggested that the compiler of this collection was Thomas Blount, author of Glossographia.111 John Milton was another youthful reader of romances. When younger, he informs us in one of his polemical tracts, he read ‘Lofty fables and Romances’, and, contrary to those who consider such texts to be ‘the fuell of wantonnesse and loose living’, found them to be teachers of the virtue of chastity.112 The same was true of Thomas Hobbes, who, after leaving Oxford, found employment as a servant to the Earl of Devonshire (his duties included riding ‘a hunting and hawking’ with his master). During this period, according to John Aubrey, Hobbes ‘spent two yeares in reading romances and playes’.113 Even the young Samuel Johnson, growing up just after the turn of the century, was a devotee of this form of literature as a boy.114 Nor were high and low audiences mutually exclusive. Merchants, too, were interested in chivalric literature, just as much as gentlemen. During the reign of Henry VIII, the London mercer John Colyns had transcribed into his commonplace book the only surviving text of the stanzaic Le Morte Arthure (which opens with an address to an implied audience of ‘lordinges’). Evidently, this text, along with that of the romance of Ipomydon, sat quite easily with the other entries – the petitions, letters, statutes, and poems by Skelton – that Colyns had a scribe copy for him.115 Another chivalric text, The Treasurie of Amadis of Fraunce, was dedicated to Thomas Gresham.116 Much later, The Most Excellent and Famous History of the Most Renowned Knight, Amadis of Greece (1694) follows its dedication ‘To the Beauties of Great Britain’ with an advertisement of other volumes of interest to the reader. Many of these texts appear to be aimed at merchants or traders. One book, for example, is ‘The Key of Commerce’; another promises to teach arithmetic to

110 111

112

113

114

115 116

BL MS Add. 23146, fol. 7r, item 17. See John W. Hales and Frederick Furnivall eds, Bishop Percy’s Folio Manuscript (London: N. Trübner, 1867–8), 3 volumes, I: xii–ix. An Apology Against A Pamphlet (London: E.G. for John Rothwell, 1642), sigs. B4v–C1r. Milton’s father also wrote a prefatory poem to his friend John Lane’s Corrected Historie of Guy of Warwick, praising Guy as an exemplary Christian figure. See Velma Bourgeois Richmond, The Legend of Guy of Warwick (New York and London: Garland, 1996). See Aubrey’s Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick (London: Secker and Warburg, 1958), p. 149. Hobbes later considered this period as lost time; Aubrey counters that his reading might have furnished him with ‘copie of words’. See Eithne Henson, ‘The Fictions of Romantick Chivalry’: Samuel Johnson and Romance (London and Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1992). BL MS Harley 2252. Ipomydon is to be found from fol. 54r, Le Mort Arthure from fol. 86r. Paynell trans. (1567).

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Introduction ‘such Trades-men as are ignorant in that Art’.117 Still other texts, however, are romances – suggesting again that they were being read by merchants. A prose edition of Bevis of Southampton dating from 1689 has a similar booklist, offering a combination of chivalric and mercantile texts (such as a history of the Merchant Tailors’ Company).118 The Coventry mason Captain Cox was in possession of an extensive library that featured a mass of chivalric texts. He, however, was apparently a man of substance, with a prominent part to play in the civic ceremonies of Coventry.119 But at a far lower social level, that of the chapbook readers studied by Margaret Spufford, we have the tinker’s son, John Bunyan. Later in life, Bunyan bemoaned his previous, unreformed taste in light reading, mimicking the voice of his younger self: ‘Alas, what is the Scripture, give me a Ballad, a Newsbook, George on horseback, or Bevis of Southampton, give me some book that teaches curious arts, that tells of old fables, but for the holy Scriptures I cared not.’120 And yet Bunyan incorporated many of these chivalric tropes into his Pilgrim’s Progress.121 Clearly, the historical record hardly offers a perfect fit with the picture of romance readership offered by Thomas Overbury or other critics of chivalric literature. Romances – of all varieties – seem to have been enjoyed by all sections of the reading public well into the seventeenth century. How, then, are we to account for this phenomenon, evinced by writers in both the sixteenth and twentieth centuries, this readiness to ridicule and present as negligible what was evidently a popular – in the sense of ‘widely-read’ – form of literature? Lori Newcomb would have us put this disdain down to the operation of deep-seated cultural anxieties, and it is undoubtedly true that the possibility of any definitive statement about the readership of chivalric literature has probably disappeared forever, as a result not only of the inevitable gaps in the documentary record, but also of the play of Bourdieu’s cultural ‘distinction’, the encoded social hierarchies and literary tropes that so obscure the subject. It might also be argued that works such as Guy and Bevis are simply not worth careful attention, in literary terms. Certainly many modern commentators, coming from a critical tradition in which the novel is accepted as normative, find it hard to deal with the ‘unrealistic’ character of much chivalric literature, declaring it to be both childish and incomprehensible. Yet even whilst they make sport with the improbabilities of Amadis de Gaule,

117 118

119 120

121

Anon (1694). The Famous and Renowned History of Sir Bevis of Southampton (London: W. Thackery and J. Deacon, 1689). Captain Cox is discussed in Chapter 2, below. John Bunyan, ‘A Few Sighs From Hell’, in The Miscellaneous Works of John Bunyan, gen. ed. Roger Sharrock (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1980–94), 12 volumes, I: 333. See Harold Golder, ‘Bunyan’s Valley of the Shadow’, Modern Philology 27 (1929), pp. 55–72.

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Introduction they seem prepared to accept – even to gloss over – the same qualities in Jack of Newbury. There is something more, something that precedes and sanctions all these stances, by positioning the romance as already automatically inferior, pre-packaged as a suitable object of derision. The first thing to notice is that this problem with chivalric literature is not shared by medievalists, who are both appreciative of the diversity of romances and clearly consider them capable of supporting sustained reading. For students of medieval literature, it would appear, romances constitute a legitimate and even interesting object of enquiry; a stark contrast to the attitudes of many of their colleagues who study Renaissance literature. Thus, Susan Crane writes on the ‘Anglo-Norman’ romances, such as Guy and Bevis, considering them as a distinct grouping, shaped by and reflecting the social and cultural conditions of their production, rather than lumping them together either with Arthurian romances modelled on French traditions, or with much later Iberian productions such as Amadis.122 Stephen Jaeger, on the other hand, studies the origins of courtly literature (such as Arthurian romance), tracing it back to the cathedral schools of Germany, and seeing it, not as a reflection of aristocratic ideals so much as a didactic appeal to just that audience from a courtly, clerical standpoint, one influenced by texts such as Cicero’s De Officiis. Unencumbered by a formulaic opposition between ‘classical’ humanism and ‘romantic’ chivalry, it is Jaeger’s hope that we shall ultimately come to ‘regard medieval chivalry as a neo-classical institution’.123 This analysis is extended by Ad Putter, who studies the influence of French, courtly romances – distinctively preoccupied, in his view, with matters of social decorum and ethical responsibility – on the likes of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Putter attempts to temper the notion of chivalric literature as ‘dream’, ‘an idealised and reactionary self-representation by the feudal nobility’, preferring again to see in it a reflection of clerical values.124 One of the arguments of this study is that the ‘problem’ of chivalric romance only appears as such within the context of a narrative of burgeoning Renaissance modernity; medievalists, without such disabling assumptions, seem free to exercise their critical intelligence upon chivalric literature as they please. There are, of course, modern studies by historians of Renaissance culture that do take chivalric romances seriously – possibly prompted by the revival of interest in Elizabethan chivalry as a cultural force started by Frances Yates and Roy Strong; Richard McCoy’s study, The Rites of Knighthood, for instance, 122

123

124

Crane (1986). Crane views these texts as distinctively concerned with topics such as land ownership, inheritance and lineage. C. Stephen Jaeger, The Origins of Courtliness (Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1985), xii. Ad Putter, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and French Arthurian Romance (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1995), p. 197.

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Introduction seems to be best situated in this tradition.125 More recently, there has been a critical edition of Antony Munday’s translation of Amadis de Gaule, as well as monographs by Jennifer Goodman and Helen Hackett on chivalry and voyages of discovery, and women and chivalric literature, respectively.126 However, this still represents a slender yield, particularly when set against the proliferation of studies about works and genres that must have been, by any estimation, less culturally central than romances. More generally, the conviction seems to be that chivalric literature is negligible because, even though it may have been popular – perhaps, as we have seen, because it was popular – it was none the less barely ‘literature’ at all. But there is more. In many accounts, the chivalric romance exists as a sort of phantom presence in Renaissance culture. Popular and prolific though it may be, there is a sense that it represents a voice from the cultural past – implicitly, a rather reedy and ineffectual one, always liable to be drowned out by the more clamorous demands of a new age. I would suggest that we look again at the comments of the historians of the reading public we looked at earlier. The problem that someone like Margaret Schlauch has with chivalric literature is not, at bottom, a literary one, but rather a deep-seated historiographical conviction that such texts do not belong in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Schlauch is prepared to countenance the existence of the genre (albeit with reservations) up to the fifteenth century; thereafter, it becomes a focus for ridicule. Similarly, Paul Salzman refers to chivalric literature as ‘outmoded’, and Arthur Ferguson reminds us that Ascham’s complaints about Malory place the reading of such a text firmly in the past. It is this conjunction of attitudes to a genre of literature, and its emblematic status as the representative of a historical phase that is supposed to be passing away, that this study seeks to investigate. Ultimately, it is interested, not simply in the phenomenon we have been discussing, in which modern critics appropriate 125

126

See Frances A. Yates, Astraea (London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1975), Roy Strong, The Cult of Elizabeth (London: Thames and Hudson, 1977), and Henry Prince of Wales and England’s Lost Renaissance (London: Thames and Hudson, 1986), Richard C. McCoy, The Rites of Knighthood (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1989). Helen D. Moore (1996); Goodman (1998) has valuable things to say in her introduction about the historiographical traditions this book seeks to examine; Helen Hackett, Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000) – probably the clearest and most accessible introduction to the field of Renaissance romance generally, quite apart from its contribution to the study of women’s reading and writing. One should also mention an earlier study, John J. O’Connor’s book Amadis de Gaul and Its Influence on Elizabethan Literature (1970) – although even here, as O’Connor’s title indicates, Amadis is studied more as background to more important texts, than as an interesting work in itself – and Tina Krontiris’ ‘Breaking Barriers of Genre and Gender: Margaret Tyler’s Translation of The Mirrour of Knighthood’, in Kirby Farrell, Elizabeth H. Hageman and Arthur F. Kinney eds, Women in the Renaissance (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1990), pp. 48–68.

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Introduction and remodel the comments of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century detractors of romance, but also the way in which the resulting interpretations can be used both to illustrate and to buttress a historiographical narrative. Arthur Ferguson quite explicitly intends to use the topic of chivalry to chart the social and cultural changes that, in his view, constitute the English Renaissance: just why should it come so naturally to hand in this situation? This book seeks to answer these questions through a study both of the literature of chivalry, and of chivalry itself, arguing that in each case the same nexus of attitudes determines the treatment they receive in modern critical discourse. They are linked together, if by nothing else, by the figure of Don Quixote, who (with varying degrees of explicitness) dominates much of what follows. With romances, we have what I will be calling a ‘Quixotic’ theory of reading, Don Quixote being the paradigmatic reader who is eaten up from the inside by his books, to the extent of being driven mad by them. In this model, people do not so much consume chivalric romances as they are consumed by them. Consider again Overbury’s chambermaid; the active, even athletic terms in which her reading experience is formulated – its inculcating a desire to ‘run out of her selfe’ – disguise what is in reality an extraordinarily passive assessment of the interaction of reader and text. All that The Mirror of Knighthood can ever do for its readers is produce a desire to be like characters from The Mirror of Knighthood, a mania for the improbable; that the reader is, in this case, a female domestic servant, merely heightens the sense of incongruity. This is the flip side of the humanistic interest in mastery of one’s reading: a discourse of credulity, one that emerges particularly sharply in relation to romance. It seems an obvious comment to make, but Don Quixote actually offers an extremely bad model for any formulation of the sorts of exchanges that take place when we read books, no matter how fantastic they may be; and yet it is this model that is applied whenever reading chivalric romances is referred to in modern critical discourse. Modern critics seems unable to find in chivalric romances anything other than fuel for fantasy, on an analogy with the cinema or comic books. Such accusations of Quixoticism, I will be arguing, obscure for the modern reader the true nature of Renaissance readers’ investment in this literature. It is only when we realise how much was at stake in the reproduction of the lexicon of chivalric images in Renaissance society that we can develop a more active model of reading chivalric romance. In the sixteenth and seventeenth century, chivalric images were worth appropriating. But it is precisely this fact that many historians would deny. The figure of Don Quixote explicitly dominates many of those parts of my discussion which deal with the topic of chivalry in Renaissance England. For, if Don Quixote is the reader who is eaten up by his reading, he is also the anachronistic knight, stranded in a world in which he can only exist as the butt of others’ jokes; his archaism makes him ridiculous. It is, as I hope to show, a misappropriation of the original significance of the tropes of the ‘Quixotic’ reader and knight, both of which meant something quite different when they were originally produced 35

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Introduction in the seventeenth century; but the sense in which they can both be stigmatised in this way ought to suggest what they have in common: the notion that the onward march of history has rendered the reader of romance and the chivalric knight alike so obsolescent as to make them objects of comedy. Chapter 1 attempts to establish the interpretative framework within which this book will be dealing with matters of chivalry and romance, by reconstructing a strategy for reading Renaissance readers’ use of chivalric romances and their understanding of the ways in which early modern culture thought about social status. All too often, such texts are presented as mere contentless adventure. By relating one characteristic trope of romance, that of revealed parentage, to the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century culture of honour, it is hoped that this chapter might go some way towards combating such notions and making romance ‘readable’ once more. Here, and throughout, books of chivalry are taken as addressing themes of true nobility, considered as the product of the interplay between a repertoire of iconic signs – such as knighthood and coats of arms – and the inner virtue that supposedly gives body to them. The result is not so much a prescriptive theory of social status as it is a series of attempts to reconcile conflicting imperatives through narratives of ‘proven’ worth which, with their reverse temporality, within which achieved nobility is retrospectively vindicated through a revelation of inherent rank, require unusually complex strategies of reading. The end result is surprisingly flexible – a set of strategies for talking about, and ultimately justifying, both achieved social status and social mobility. The aim here is to get away from the figure of the passive, Quixotic reader, providing material proof that romance need not be either unintelligible or anachronistic by looking, not so much at what romances do to readers, as what readers can do with them. It may be impossible to overcome the modern prejudice against chivalric fiction in purely literary terms; but one can at least correct the assumption that such narratives were effectively contentless, by looking at how they ‘meant’ for a variety of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century readers. To this end the second half of Chapter 1 investigates in some depth the extraordinarily detailed testimonies of his reading experience left by the seventeenthcentury bookseller, Francis Kirkman. That Kirkman should have been born a commoner is particularly apt. What recent accounts there have been of Renaissance chivalry have tended to analyse that topic only in relation to the aristocratic culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.127 One of the 127

See the works by Yates, Strong and McCoy cited in note 124, above. Richard Helgerson, Forms of Nationhood (Chicago and London: The University of California Press, 1992), Chapter 1, ‘Two Versions of Gothic’, pp. 19–62, speaks of the tension between epic and romance as one between ‘the new monarchy and its values and the remnants of the feudal nobility’ (10), pointing out that Spenser ‘allows no place for the representation of a powerfully centralized and absolutist governmental order’ in The Faerie Queene (48). The English nobility make romance look retrograde, just as their affection for such books places them as backward-looking.

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Introduction things this study seeks to do is to counteract some of the limiting inferences that could be drawn from such an emphasis – the sense that chivalric iconography retained its appeal only amongst the most conservative and backwardlooking sections of society, another aspect of its supposed ‘pastness’ – by examining the influence of chivalric ideals and reading matter on those born below the level of the gentry. Chapter 2 examines the interaction between chivalric literature and social practice, through an analysis of the entertainments staged at Kenilworth castle during Elizabeth I’s royal progress of 1575. That much of the pageantry has its origin in Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur has long been recognised, and the relevance of chivalric imagery to the aristocratic mindset is one of the main themes of this chapter. But the Kenilworth shows are unusual in another respect: we actually have an account of the festivities that shows the same chivalric forms at work among countryfolk and ordinary townspeople who staged their own shows at Kenilworth. The festivities thus offer a panoramic view of Elizabethan society – one in which supposedly dead medieval social practices and forms of reading show themselves not only to be alive and well, but thriving in a surprisingly diverse range of cultural environments. This chapter also touches on the question of parodies and burlesques of romances, so often taken as heralding their slide into obsolescence. If anything, it is suggested, the reverse may be true: such satire might in fact indicate the value of chivalric forms. The subtext of such parody is not so much that chivalry is absurd, but that chivalry, aspired to by the unworthy, makes the unworthy ridiculous. It is an indication of the fierceness with which those who felt themselves to be properly entitled to such dignities might defend their prerogatives, and therefore of their continuing vitality. Chapter 3 extends this analysis, as the first of two chapters to examine the trope of Quixoticism, the idea that Renaissance chivalry could only ever exist as an object of humour, as a comic anachronism. The early-seventeenthcentury stage certainly teems with such figures, but the purpose of this section is to query whether or not they might have meant the same thing for writers such as Ben Jonson as they do for modern critics. It is simply not the case, it is suggested, that the Quixotes of the Jacobean stage necessarily signalled historical transgression or anachronism. Modernity does not seem to be an issue in these plays’ representations of false knights and Quixotic readers. Rather, it is matters of social transgression that excite Jacobean dramatists – and which the parvenu knight who has no right to the status he aspires to so vividly embodies. Seventeenth-century London, it is emphasised, was a place where social contests were played out through chivalric forms – as, for instance, in the assertion of citizen honour through annual archery contests in which the participants adopted Arthurian personae. In terms of themes of true nobility, the early modern stage seems certainly fascinated by the breakdown of the interplay between inner worth and outward prestige, but at the same time displays a clear understanding of the importance of chivalric signs 37

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Introduction of nobility as social tokens – something underlined by the sharpness with which it contests the right to such symbols. Taking Don Quixote as an emblem of obsolescence thus involves a systematic rereading through which signs of social indecorum are repositioned as indicators of temporal impropriety. Chapter 4 extends this analysis, examining the autobiography of Lord Herbert of Cherbury, and considering the ‘disease’ of duelling as an instance of apparently futile chivalric activity. It also looks at the representational strategies that have been used since the eighteenth century to deal with this text, and the way in which they present Lord Herbert as a Quixotic figure, comically marooned in a time-period in which he can only appear to be a figure of fun. Here, again, it is the ‘nobility’ of the duellist that is at issue, and it is again at this point – the point at which historical figures are identified as ‘Quixotic’ – that some of the questions raised by the dialectic between the outward signs of nobility and inner qualities examined in Chapter 1 come to the fore. Historians consistently read the iconography of chivalry as evidence of an ethos that possesses its devotees, of the internalisation of chivalric norms128 – even if, as here, that sense can be produced only negatively, as Quixoticism, as a blind attachment to standards of honour that leaves one incapable of dealing with the world around one. Rather than taking such representations as offering reliable access to inner states, this chapter seeks to make Quixotic projects such as duelling intelligible by noting the sense in which this production of an inner virtue is in itself a strategic effect. Chapter 5 moves into the interregnum and Restoration periods, focusing on an exemplary instance of the woman reader of romance – so prominent in the accounts we have been examining – in this case the poet, Katherine Philips. Philips’ reading is seen not as a futile incitement to ‘run out of her selfe’, but rather as a powerful interpretative tool for viewing contemporary events, and a startlingly effective means of constructing relationships of ‘friendship’ with her social betters – again, on the basis of a display of ‘true nobility’, and in a manner so similar to the relations of amicitia utilised by the likes of Roger Ascham as at the very least to query any formulaic antithesis between humanism and romance. Even at this relatively late date, and despite the mutations that the romance form had undergone by this time, we can still see the continued importance of chivalric iconography as the dominant component of the language of honour in seventeenth-century English culture, but also – again – we get a sense of the surprisingly broad range of uses that this language can be put to. Finally, Chapter 6 returns to the 1575 Kenilworth entertainments. By examining the subsequent fortunes of an account of these shows – most notably, in Walter Scott’s novel Kenilworth – I hope to trace the evolution of attitudes to

128

This to the extent that, as Chapter 6 tries to show, they find it difficult to account for the ‘decline’ of chivalry in any terms other than the absence of ‘inner’ virtue.

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Introduction both chivalry and romance from the eighteenth century, down to the present day. The preceding chapters argue for the presence of chivalry, not just as an aspect of literary culture, but also as a vital component of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century social relations. By narrating the shifts in historical vision between then and now, I hope to explain just how it should be important, even necessary, in modern critical discourse, that any representation of Renaissance chivalry should be reconfigured through tropes such as Quixoticism into an icon of futility – an exemplary instance of ‘wasted time’.

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Chapter 1 ‘NOT KNOWING THEIR PARENTS’: READING CHIVALRIC ROMANCE

I

T IS WELL known that chivalric fictions often display plots that revolve around the discovery of noble birth. This chapter examines the social uses of such fictions. Early on in Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, we read that, at the time of Arthur’s marriage, ‘ther cam a poure man into the courte, and broughte with hym a fayre yonge man of XVIII yere of age rydynge upon a lene mare’.1 The old man has a request to make of the king: Syr, it was told me that at this tyme of your maryage ye wolde yeve any man the yefte that he wold aske oute, excepte that were unresonable. That is trouth, said the kynge, suche cryes I lete make, and that will I holde, so it apayre not my realme nor myne estate. Ye say wel and graciously, said the pour man. Syre, I aske nothyng els but that ye wil make my sone here a knyghte.

‘It is a grete thynge thow askest of me,’ Arthur comments, on hearing this. The poor man, Aryes the Cowherd, goes on to explain that his request is at his son’s desire, not his own: For I shal telle yow, I have XIII sones, and alle they will falle to what laboure I put them and wille be ryght glad to doo labour, but this child wylle not laboure for me for onythyng that my wyf or I may doo, but alweyes he wille be shotynge or castynge dartes, and glad for to see batailles and to behold knyghtes, and alweyes day and nyghte he desyreth of me to be made a knyght.

The boy’s name is Tor; he is also (the king notes) ‘passyngly wel vysaged and passyngly wel made of his yeres’. Arthur then commands that Aryes’ other sons should be brought before him, observing that ‘al were shapen moche lyke the poure man, but Tor was not lyke none of hem al in shap ne in countenaunce, for he was moche more than ony of hem’. Arthur asks Tor for his sword, to make him a knight (it is not explained where a cowherd’s son

1

James W. Spisak ed., Caxton’s Malory (Berkeley and Los Angeles: The University of California Press, 1983), 2 volumes, I: 81.

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Reading Chivalric Romance acquired such an implement), and Tor draws his sword, ‘knelynge and requyrynge the kynge that he wold maake hym knyght, and that he myghte be a knyght of the Table Round’. In the event, Arthur merely creates him a knight, noting that Tor may aspire to the Round Table should he prove to be a man of sufficient ‘prowesse and worthynesse’. Finally, the king turns to Merlin, and asks him if Tor will prove a good knight. The magician’s answer surprises all present: Ye, syre, he ought to be a good knyght, for he is comen of as good a man as ony is on lyue, and of kynges blood. How so, syr? sayd the kynge. I shalle telle yow, sayd Merlyn, this poure man Aryes the Cowherd is not his fader; he is nothyng syb to hym, for Kynge Pellinore is his fader. I suppose nay, said the cowherd. Fetch thy wyf afore me, said Merlyn, and she shalle not say nay. Anon the wyf was fet, which was a fair houswyf, and there she ansured Merlyn ful womanly. And there she told the kynge and Merlyn that whan she was a maide and went to mylke kyen ther met with her a sterne knyght, and half by force he had my maidenhede, and at that tyme he bigat my sone Tor, and he toke awey from me my greyhound that I had that tyme with me and saide that he wold kepe the greyhound for my love. A, said the cowherd, I wende not thys, but I may bileve it wel, for he had never no tatches [qualities] of me. Sir, said Tor unto Merlyn, dishonoure not my moder. Syr, said Merlyn, it is more for your worship than hurte, for your fader is a good man and a kyng, and he may ryght wel avaunce you and your moder, for ye were begoten or ever she was wedded. That is trouth, said the wyf. Hit is the lasse gryef unto me, sayd the cowherd.2

I shall be returning to consider this episode in more detail in due course; for the moment, we need merely note that the careers of other knights in the Morte Darthur follow a similar pattern. The ‘Tale of Sir Gareth’ is also about an unknighted man arriving at Camelot, initially being considered ignoble (and being sent to work in the kitchens), then proving his worth and having his true ancestry revealed. Gareth is in fact Gawain’s brother and hence the king’s nephew. He proves his nobility through a series of combats, his defeated opponents surrendering their retinues as they attest to his innate worth (the Green Knight, for instance, declares that Gareth is ‘a full noble knyght’, and correctly predicts that he ‘shalle preve at the ende that he is come of a noble blood and of kynges lygnage’).3 The ‘Tale of Sir Gareth’ presents honour vindicated through violence; and, as in the tale of Sir Tor, this aptitude for violence is considered to be the sign of a born nobleman. Gareth, unlike Tor, is aware of his true parentage, but we as readers are not, so the effect of the delayed revelation of his ancestry is similar: a tale apparently about the rise of

2 3

Spisak ed. (1983), I: 82. Spisak ed. (1983), I: 166.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance a low-born boy through his own merits becomes, retrospectively, a vindication of inherited nobility. Nor are narratives of this type peculiar to Malory. Consider Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, which we might reasonably expect to differ from Malory’s text, firstly, since it is an allegory, and, secondly, because it was written some one hundred years afterwards. Yet if we were to reconstruct the biography of Spenser’s Redcrosse knight from both the ‘Letter to Raleigh’ and from the main body of the text, we would see that it repeats almost without variation the pattern we have been discussing. In ‘A Letter of the Authors’, we read of Gloriana’s ‘Annuall feaste’: In the beginning of the feast, there presented him selfe a tall clownishe younge man, who falling before the Queen of Faries desired a boone (as the manner then was) which during that feast she might not refuse: which was that hee might have the atchievement of any adventure, which during that feaste should happen, that being graunted, he rested him on the floore, unfitte through his rusticity for a better place.4

Presently there enters ‘a faire Ladye in mourning weedes’, complaining of oppression by a dragon. The ‘clownish person’ requests the adventure, ‘whereat the Queene much wondering, and the Lady much gainesaying, yet he earnestly importuned his desire’. Fitted out in the armour the Lady has brought with her, their objections vanish away: the vulgar young man now looks like a proper knight, and he and his lady set out on their adventure. We can see the elements this summary has in common with the knightly biographies from Malory discussed above: the feast with the custom of giving gifts, the apparently ignoble young visitor, even the motif of the lady initially despising her knight, which appears in the tale of Sir Gareth. As the narrative of the Redcrosse knight develops in the main body of the poem, the parallel becomes even clearer. Redcrosse is not a fairy (as he imagines), but an Englishman, and one of distinguished lineage rather than the son of a ploughman. Contemplation tells him that he is, again like Tor and Gareth, of royal blood – ‘thou springst from ancient race Of Saxon kings’ (I, X, 65). Redcrosse is a changeling, brought up as a commoner, but, once again, his essential nobility is manifested through a desire to perform martial deeds. Contemplation tells Redcrosse that his supposed father brought thee up in ploughmans state to byde, Whereof Georgos he thee gave to name; Till prickt with courage, and thy forces pryde, To Faery court thou cam’st to seeke for fame. (I, X, 66)

4

Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene, ed. A.C. Hamilton (London and New York: Longman, 1977), Appendix 1. Further references in the main body of the text.

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Reading Chivalric Romance Critics have been apt to play down the romance elements of Spenser’s poem, preferring instead to concentrate upon his classical sources or his allegorical intentions, yet, when Redcrosse thanks Contemplation for the ‘favours’ he has done him, it is having his ‘name and nation red aright’ – the fulfilment of the genealogical theme – that he mentions before his spiritual instruction, his having been shown the ‘way that does to heaven bound’ (I, X, 67). The tales of Tor, of Gareth, and of the Redcrosse knight clearly form a closely linked group, with various motifs in common – the feast, the gift-giving, the emphasis upon royal descent. Such ‘Fair Unknown’ narratives take their name from the hero of the romance Lybeaus Desconus, which appears in English in the fourteenth century, and which closely resembles the tale of Sir Gareth from Malory.5 They are, however, merely a sub-category of a far larger class of chivalric narratives that involve lost or disguised parentage. Often, the youngster in question is a foundling.6 We might gauge something of the status of this motif as a cliché of romance literature by noting its appearance in a number of parodies of the genre. The Heroicall Adventures of the Knight of the Sea, for example, shows us the Princess Almidiana, who has been kidnapped by the giant Ortolomorgantell, giving birth on his ship to a child. The Princess faces what a marginal note is pleased to call ‘An hard choyce’. Is she to keep the child, to be offered up perhaps by the giant ‘on the aultar; of his heathenish God Metrath Agorah’, or is she to ‘commit him to the mercie of the Ocean’ which is both ‘senselesse, and therefore mercilesse’? Naturally, she does the latter. The child is set to sea in a chest, and only re-encounters his family many years later, having captured them in an assault on Constantinople.7 Tom Pheander, the protagonist of Robert Anton’s Moriomachia, also has a concealed genealogy – he is in fact a cow, transformed into a man by the Fairy Queen, and, ‘for that she would at first let him understand the generall dangers of a knight errant’, set to sail in a ‘weather-beaten Barke with totter’d sayles . . . and so expos’d . . . to the Sea and fortune’.8 Clearly Anton assumed that his audience would be familiar enough with this particular romance trope to get the joke. One might adduce countless other texts – early and late medieval, sixteenthand seventeenth-century – from a variety of countries, all employing what is recognisably the same narrative trope of the young man cut off from his true heritage who nevertheless goes on to become a famous knight. As we have already seen, commentators on the Renaissance romance tend to feel baffled by works of such ‘pure escapism’, seeing in them little more than a loosely-strung 5 6

7 8

See M. Mills ed., Lybeaus Desconus (London: The Oxford University Press, 1969). In chivalric romance as I have defined it, a genre focused on the rank of knight, the foundling is generally male. But elsewhere, in Greek romances for instance, it is not unusual for the plot to feature a female protagonist – as is the case with Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale. The Heroicall Adventures of the Knight of the Sea (London: William Leake, 1600), sigs. D2r–3r. Moriomachia (London: Simon Stafford, 1613), sig. A3v.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance succession of implausible adventures, with little appeal other than that offered by juvenile self-indulgence.9 This chapter seeks to determine whether the extraordinary popularity and endurance of the plot structure we have been examining might not be explained in a less dismissive manner. We might begin to offer an explanation for this phenomenon by looking, not at a romance proper, but at a parody of the genre. In Robert Anton’s Moriomachia, as soon as Pheander, the Fairy Queen’s bovine champion, reaches land after being cast out to sea, he meets a peasant complaining about his landlord, who, despite being a base man, has acquired a knighthood: I wonder (quoth the Fayry Champion) much, that your Land-lord being no Gentleman, could come to be a Knight! (quoth the Husbandman) Chee ha oftentimes heard him zay, that it cost him well . . . When the Fayry Champion understood, there were more wayes then one to attaine to a Knightship, he held himselfe in the most fortunatest place of ye earth; for in the Fayry land they onely have it by desert: & on the sudden he grew to such an exceeding height of ambition, that with all haste he would be gone.10

Anton here provides a cynical comment upon the sale of knighthoods under James I. Whereas his predecessor, Elizabeth, had carefully regulated the rate at which she distributed titles of honour to her subjects, James opened his reign with a mass creation of knights, and continued in much the same vein. Ultimately, the process became a money-spinning opportunity for the crown, and early-seventeenth-century literature abounds with sour commentary about the attendant devaluation of the honour.11 Here, then, Anton is pointing up the disparity between contemporary practice and an idealised chivalric world in which one gets knighted only for ‘desert’. He also glances at the convention that, no sooner should the protagonist of such a tale hear about knights and knighthood, no matter how ignoble his supposed origins, he will immediately set off to become one, just as Tor and Redcrosse do. Innate nobility is here recast, rather more prosaically, as mere ‘ambition’ – Anton juxtaposes an idealised chivalric world with the seventeenth-century scramble for honours, to devastating effect. In his dedication to Moriomachia, Anton is careful to deny any subversive intent in his work: ‘Serious houres and grave designs must needes laugh, and amongst them, my studyes at this time, are turned merry Greeke. I writ them

9

10 11

Margaret Spufford, Small Books and Pleasant Histories (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 233. Anton (1613), sig. B1v. On which, see Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1965), ‘The Inflation of Honours’, pp. 65–128. See also Chapter 3, below. For a lively account of a similar market in honours operating in the College of Heralds, along with much incidental information relevant to this chapter, see Katherine Duncan-Jones, Ungentle Shakespeare (London: Arden, 2001), pp. 82–103.

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Reading Chivalric Romance in Dog dayes, and they must needes bite: but what? not vertue, not honor, not nobility: but error, ignorance, and that pesthouse of the time (foppery).’ Reading his work carefully, we can see why such a disclaimer might be necessary. Anton does far more than laugh at centuries-old narrative conventions; what is interesting is the ease with which his literary satire slides into a far broader attack on the early modern paraphernalia of social status, and in particular heraldry. Pheander’s own coat armour is absurd (‘checkerd motley, Vert and Argent, party per Pale, ribd with rowes of Gules and Or’),12 but the most extended passage on this topic deals with the lady Moriana, assaulted by a ‘Pigmy Giant’ whilst walking in a grove. She is identified by her ‘escuchion’, which the nobles of her country wear ‘to the end they may be knowne from private persons, and that the thronging multitude may give way, when they approach neere’. Moriana’s own arms are as ludicrous as Pheander’s: ‘the Escuchion she caryed before her . . . was charged in chiefe, a halfe Moone Gules, in a jagged cloud Sables, and the lower (or backe) charge was, three Drops Or, under a Fess Argent. This coate she gave, which was the most ancientst in al the Fayry Land, and ever continued hereditary to the heyres female of that house’ (as real coats of arms did not).13 Rather than being the proud symbol of her family’s virtue and innate superiority, then, Moriana’s coat of arms is presented as little more than a convenient badge by which she can be recognised by passing rapists. Anton’s claim that he is not attacking ‘vertue’ or ‘honour’ has the opposite effect to that intended: it alerts us firstly to the way in which his demystifying, satirical viewpoint severs these two qualities, and secondly to the fact that chivalric romance is characterised by their association. In ‘fayry’ land, the land of romance, one is knighted only for ‘desert’; in the England of James I, one can satisfy one’s ‘ambition’ in this respect merely by paying out the requisite sum of money to the proper authorities. Anton’s literary satire is amusing; but the ease with which his mockery of literary conventions leads into an attack on the trappings of hierarchy suggests that, if we wish to explain the sustained popularity of the romances of chivalry, we should consider them, not merely in terms of the narrative thrills afforded by such tales of adventure, but also by placing them in the social worlds within which they were produced and consumed. The tales we have been examining are, after all, narratives about rising in status – how, then, did the authors and readers of these texts think about where they stood in the social hierarchy? How did they justify and explain social difference? The knights of Anton’s fairy land are, as we have seen, knighted only for ‘desert’. Superficially, this would appear to be little more than a means of providing a satirical contrast between knighthood as it is produced in the

12 13

Anton (1613), sig. B4r. Anton (1613), sig. B4v.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance idealised atmosphere of the chivalric romance, and knighthood as it existed in the reign of James I, a commodity to be bought and sold. Yet the idea of ‘desert’ was an integral part of early modern thinking about status – indeed, it would be a rare social system that did not attempt to explain the inequalities that it generated with reference to some such idea. Renaissance England certainly offers no exception to this rule. Sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers on the subject liked to stress the intimate relationship between honour (in the sense of rank or social esteem) and virtue. James Cleland, for example, asserted that ‘no man is worthie to be accounted Noble, but he who is marked with the glorious Character of Vertue’.14 This theory often expressed itself through a vivid myth set in the distant past: ‘the very Pagans themselves’, Francis Markham tells us, ‘when they founded their Temples, they so joyned that of Vertue, and that of Honour together, that no man could passe to doe sacrifice to Honour, but he must first goe through, and doe reverence to Vertue.’15 Thomas Milles repeats the same story in his Catalogue of Honour.16 By stressing the relevance of ‘virtue’ to honour, these writers are giving expression to an old theme, that of vera nobilitas. The notion that virtue alone constituted true nobility had been first expressed in classical times, became extraordinarily prevalent during the medieval period, and retained its popularity into the sixteenth- and seventeenth-centuries.17 This theme of true nobility is, of course, always implicitly set forth in contrast to – indeed, as a topos, includes as a matter of course – a contrary idea, equally popular among the writers we have been discussing, of the importance of blood and heredity to the social hierarchy. From this perspective, nobility is an essence, a distinctive quality of blood or ‘kynde’ which constitutes an insurmountable divide between gentlemen and their inferiors. Consider the

14

15

16 17

The Institution of a Young Noble Man, ed. Max Molyneux (New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1948), sig. A2v. The Aristotelian origins of this theory of nobility are examined in Curtis Brown Watson’s Shakespeare and the Renaissance Concept of Honour (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1960). The Booke of Honour (London: A. Matthewes and J. Norton, 1625), sig. C1v. See also Watson (1960), p. 94. The Catalogue of Honor (London: W. Jaggard, 1610), sig. B1r. George McGill Vogt gives an extensive list of classical and medieval precedents for the idea that honour is dependent upon virtue, from Seneca and Boethius to Dante and Chaucer, in his ‘Gleanings for the History of a Sentiment: Generositas Virtus, Non Sanguis’, Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 24 (1925), pp. 102–24. Quentin Skinner’s Foundations of Modern Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 2 volumes, I: 237, lists a variety of early modern deployments of this notion, by (amongst others) Erasmus, Elyot, and John Heywood, whilst the theme of vera nobilitas is discussed in relation to Ben Jonson’s verse in Michael McCanles, Jonsonian Discriminations (Toronto, Buffalo and London: The University of Toronto Press, 1992). Maurice Keen’s Chivalry (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1984) contains an excellent survey of vera nobilitas in medieval heraldic literature, to which I am particularly indebted for my own treatment of that topic, pp. 143–61.

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Reading Chivalric Romance explanation of the origins of social inequality given in a late medieval text, the Boke of St Albans: Now for to devyde gentilmen from chorlis . . . in the sonnys of Adam and Eve was founde bothe gentilman and churle. By the soonnys of Adam and Eve Seth Abell and Cayn devyded was the royall blode fro the ungentill. A brother to sley his brother contrary to the law where myght be more ungentelnes. By that did Cayn become a chorle and all his offspryng after hym by the cursyng of god and his owne fadre adam. And Seth was made a gentilman thorow his fadres and moderis blissyng. And of the offspryng of Seth Noe come a gentilman by kynde. Noe had .iii. sonnys begetyn by kynde. by the modre .ii. were named Cham and Sem. and by the fadre the thirde was namyd Jafeth. Yit in theys .iii. sonnys gentilnes and ungentilnes was founde. In Cham ungentilnes was founde to his own fadre doon to discuver his prevytes and laugh his fadre to scorne. Jafeth was the yongist and repreved his brodre. Than like a gentilman take mynde of Cham. for his ungentilnes he was become a chorle.18

The Boke was first printed before the end of the fifteenth century, but was reissued some eighteen times before 1600,19 and its seemingly idiosyncratic view of social relations – which stretches so far as to make reference to Jesus’ coat of arms20 – was clearly influential, as it reappears in a variety of later texts. John Ferne’s Blazon of Gentrie, an Elizabethan heraldic treatise vehemently opposed to any prospect of social mobility, repeats much the same idea.21 Clearly, this sort of theory does not absolutely discard the idea of virtue – on the contrary, the Boke’s narrative is premised upon the sinfulness and virtue of Biblical figures – but deploys it in such a way as to present it as a hereditary quality. Equally clearly, these narratives are quite self-contradictory, since the initial divide between gentle and ungentle in Adam’s sons is repeated later on in Noah’s, so there is no good reason to think that their gentle children should breed true, any more than their forebears did. Yet the popularity of this myth in early modern treatises on honour would appear to indicate that its illogicality in no way impaired its ideological effectiveness. Virtue, here, is the possession of a class of people rather than of individuals primarily. This absolute distinction between different social levels is vividly demonstrated

18

19 20

21

The Boke of St Albans, ed. William Blades (London: Elliot Stock, 1881), the Book of Coat Armour, sig. A1v. It should be emphasised that this theory does have considerable Biblical authority: Noah says, ‘Cursed be Canaan [the son of Ham]; a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren’ (Genesis 9:25). See Blades ed. (1881), pp. 22–3. Rodney Dennys reproduces one version of the Arma Christi in his book The Heraldic Imagination (London: Barrie and Jenkins, 1975), p. 96. John Ferne’s Blazon of Gentrie (London: J. Windet for T. Cooke, 1586) reproduces a number of these fanciful coats of arms, including those of the female worthies, starting with that of Minerva (Gorgon Medusa Proper), sigs. P6v–7v. Ferne (1586), sigs. B1v–B2r.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance in Ferne’s own text (a dialogue) in the contrast between his gentle disputants – who include a herald, a lawyer and a knight, and who are variously characterised according to their professions, but who are invariably both courteous and articulate – and the ignorant ploughman, Columell, who speaks in dialect and serves in turn as comic relief, as an uninformed interlocutor, and as a graphic warning of the seditious ambitions of the lower classes.22 According to this social theory, then, nobles and commoners are (as in the tale of Sir Tor) practically two different races, clearly distinct and preferably to be kept that way, their distinguishing characteristics being inherited and hence preserved down the generations. So we have here two quite distinct theories of the nature of true nobility. Both, it should be noted, are hierarchical, but they differ in the degree of social mobility that they imply. Proponents of the theory that honour is hereditary – that is, a quality of blood – tend to be opposed to any advancement of the vulgar, no matter how talented, into the ranks of the nobility. At the other end of the scale, we have the position that links honour and virtue. This would appear to suggest some sort of a flexible meritocracy, with a good deal of social mobility, and writers in this tradition are indeed fond of warning the idle sons of gentlemen that, unless they start displaying some conspicuous signs of virtue, they are apt to lose all social distinction. Thus, the herald William Segar criticises young gentlemen for caring more about their hawks and hounds than for arms or learning, and warns them not to depend upon the fame of their ancestors, reminding them that good qualities ‘have from base birth and poore parentage, advanced many to great titles and dignity: and as those vertuous endeavors have preferred them, so discontinuance did utterly deface that honor in their posteritie’.23 In practice, however, the opposition between these two theories is not as clear cut as it has been presented here. On the face of it, they are mutually contradictory. Yet they often appear in the selfsame texts, and in close proximity to one another. Burton’s Anatomy of Melancholy perhaps provides the most striking example of this tendency. Burton sets out by declaring that ‘baseness of birth is a great disparagement to some men’, going on to mock those parvenus who scorn their family and friends because of this feeling of shame; this in turn becomes an assault upon the symbols of aristocratic status, such as coat armour, which such upstarts overvalue, and then on gentry itself – ‘a mere flash, a ceremony, a toy, a thing of nought’; it is only wealth, he declares, which maintains gentle status; gentlemen are idle, they swear and gamble, hunt and hawk; the virtuous man ‘born of Thersites’ is as noble as they; yet he does not mean to offend proper gentlemen: ‘I do much respect and honour true gentry and nobility; I was born of worshipful parents

22

23

See Ferne (1586), sig. Cc2r–v for a seemingly unjustified outburst against the ‘envie’ of the ignoble. Honor Military and Civil (London: R. Barker, 1602), sig. R6r.

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Reading Chivalric Romance myself ’; upstarts can easily be distinguished from the ‘true gentleman’, as a consequence of their ‘innate rusticity’; and finally he concludes that humble birth is, in fact, no disparagement.24 Clearly, Burton’s extravagantly contradictory passages on the topic of true nobility are far from typical; but they do usefully indicate that a text dealing with the theme of nobility need not necessarily have any problem with emphasising both blood and virtue. Characteristically, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers on the subject of honour attempt to resolve these competing theoretical demands through a strategy of combination. Francis Markham, having asserted the importance of virtue early on in his Booke of Honour, returns to the subject later on in that work, where he divides honour into ‘three especiall Heads or Members; the first Blood, which is a good proportion; the second Qualitie, which is a better possession, and the third a combination or knitting of these two together, which is both Blood and Qualitie in one subject, and is the best perfection’.25 Similarly, John Ferne – a man who, when it comes to the practicalities of social advancement, is almost totally opposed to the elevation of commoners – is nevertheless quite content on the theoretical level to divide nobility into the selfsame three categories: ‘noblenes of bloud and auncestry’ (which ‘the vulgare sort of men, account for the chiefest’), ‘noblenes atchieved, through the proper vertues, and merites of a man’, and the nobility which mixes these two, ‘which noblenes, we exalt as most worthye, and excellent above the rest’.26 Similar formulae are repeated ad nauseum throughout early modern treatises on honour. In fact, the assertion that virtue is the source of all honour rarely stands alone. Faced with contradictory theories as to the origins and nature of true nobility, these writers characteristically attempt to neutralise the problem either by making pithysounding and apparently definitive statements on the topic, which they later contradict – as Burton does – or, more usually, by trying to concoct some sort of combination of the two. It is my argument that the chivalric narratives discussed above attempt to effect a similar reconciliation between these competing theories of blood and virtue. It may seem odd to place medieval romances alongside sixteenth- and seventeenth-century treatises on nobility in this way, but there is, I would argue, no necessary discontinuity between medieval and Renaissance attitudes in this respect. We have already seen how a late medieval text such as the Boke of St Albans could be reprinted throughout this later period, and the idea that virtue was the source of all true nobility was, moreover, just as prevalent during the period Malory was writing in as it was at any later date. In fact, one sixteenth-century heraldic work actually makes extensive reference to the medieval Chaucer as a source of sufficiently antique and hence authoritative 24 25 26

The Anatomy of Melancholy (London: Chatto and Windus, 1887), pp. 381–7. Markham (1625), sig. G2r. Ferne (1586), sigs. B7v–8r.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance statements on the topic of vera nobilitas, printing a selection of ‘sentences concerning generosity, collected out of sundrye Authors’; thus, for example, the Wife of Bath’s Tale (another narrative about honour featuring a rapist knight) is quoted as saying that ‘Christe wolde we claymed of hym oure gentlenesse Not of our elders.’27 That the narrative structures we began by discussing are the product of an attempt to negotiate between different and competing accounts of the origins and nature of nobility may be confirmed by the reappearance of a peculiar temporal effect characteristic of a certain type of romance in what is an apparently totally unrelated context, the grant of arms, contrasted here with the practice of visitation. Visitations, practised from around 1530, involved heralds from the College of Arms touring the country, recording the coats of arms, crests and pedigrees of all those entitled to them, under the supervision of the two provincial Kings of Arms directly subordinate to Garter, the chief herald. These were Clarenceux, who dealt with the South of the country, and Norroy, of the North. No record of the procedures used by the heralds at visitation exists from before the Civil War, but we do have a manuscript written by William Dugdale, Norroy, from the late seventeenth century, in which we learn that the herald conducting a visitation must obtain from the undershreeve of each County the name and place of habitation of every person who maketh use of Armes, or Stileth himselfe Gentleman Esquire Knight or Baronett or who is soe written in the book which every Shrieve hath from the Bayliffs of each hundred every yeare commonly called the Freeholders Book.

Each one of these people is obliged to manifest what Right, & Title, he hath to the bearing of Armes, which proof is to be by Grant, or prescription, and if by prescription, it is to be shewed from some auntient Decree, sealed with an Impression of the Armes he pretends to, or some sculpture upon Tombes and Monuments, Armes in Glasse windowes, auntient paynted Tablets, or some such Authenticque Testimoniall as may demonstrate that his lineall auncestors have made use of them above 80 Yeares last past at the least.28

Those who could not prove their gentility, either by producing a grant of arms, or some material, antiquarian evidence suggesting that their families 27

28

John Bossewell, Workes of Armorie (London: Richard Totell, 1572), sig. B7r. Both this work, and the Elements of Armories of ‘E.B.’ or Edmund Bolton (London: George Eld, 1610), sig. X2v unsmilingly discuss Chaucer’s tale of Sir Thopas as a source of heraldic information – Bossewell’s marginal comment on the passage he quotes being ‘Here note th’antiquitie of Creastes’ (sig. U3v). Quoted in Anthony Richard Wagner, Heralds and Heraldry in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), p. 3.

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Reading Chivalric Romance had made use of that title for a good length of time would have been obliged to disclaim it. This procedure was intended to be as public and humiliating as possible (‘his Ma:ties Trumpetters, & divers other attendants’ attended a disclaiming).29 It was proclaimed in some public space that the monarch wished people to be ‘known in their Estates, and Mysteries without confusion and disorder’, and the herald was therefore said to be authorised to ‘reprove comptroll & make known infamous by proclamation’ those who have laid unjust claim to a title of honour. He then read out the names of all those considered to have ‘presumptiously without any good ground or authority . . . usurped the name & title of a Gentleman’.30 So far as the heralds involved in a visitation were concerned, then, a gentleman was one who had a right to a coat of arms by inheritance, and could prove it. Hence the emphasis placed upon material evidence. Those examined were supposed to appear with their arms and crests, as well as their pedigree, but also such ‘antient writings & evidences, or other testimonialls of credit, as may, if need require, assert and justify the same’.31 The mere reputation of a gentleman was inadequate. Thus we find one Edmund Bradbury writing to William Dugdale, Norroy King of Arms after the Restoration, that The Coate of Armes which I make use of hath beene my predecessors for this many hundred yeares and never questioned. Ancient writings I have as any have in our parts, and for the coate, it is to bee seene at Warrens of Pointon in Cheshire who were Knights and deserve the saime title at this present and at Mr Hydes of Norberrys in Cheshire and hath remained there ever since wee matched with Warrens. Alsoe it is to bee seene upon a tombe in Yorkshire at a place called Thurbeck, beeing the tombe of West of Thurbecke. I feare not but that I can give you further proofe of my tytle to these Armes if there bee any need for it.32

The plight of those without any such material evidence is indicated by another letter to Dugdale from 1663/4. Here, one Moses Foxcroft states that he has done his best to ‘make out my Title to a Coat of Armes, which I am assured hath anciently beene given by our Family; & because I had nothing to exhibite but what I have received by tradition, I desired a Cossin-German of my 29

30

31 32

Letter to the herald, William Dugdale, from his agent, Richard Hall; this was after the Civil War, but there seems to be little reason for supposing that the heralds’ practices had altered greatly since the period we are concerned with. G.D. Squibb ed., Dugdale’s Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire Visitation Papers (London: The Harleian Society, 1987), p. 69. BL MS Add. 6297, fols 5v–6r. ‘The Disclaimage of Persons taking upon them the name of Gentlemen, and be not, to be published at the high Cross or marketplace by the Bayliff ’ – the standard proclamation used at the disclaiming of those who had unjustly claimed gentle status, dating from the reign of Elizabeth. This folio volume is a collection of heraldic documents prepared for one Andrew Coltree (1713–85), civilian and antiquary. Norroy to a bailiff, 1662/3, in Squibb ed. (1987), p. 2. Squibb ed. (1987), p. 45.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance Fathers to wayte upon you & endeavour your satisfaction out of such Records as he hath in his hand’.33 He has little other hard evidence, it being lost. Clearly, grants of arms and visitations were supposed to work together in producing an integrated system for the regulation of titles of honour, in particular claims to the title of a gentleman. Visitations often make reference to grants of arms as evidence of gentility, and it was indeed commonly thought that to be awarded coat armour made one a gentleman. A heraldic work of 1610, The Elements of Armories, defines coats of arms as ‘such painted, hereditable, and Armoriall marks, as by which Gentlemen are knowne, first from the ignoble, and then one from the other’. Yet there is something problematic in this idea of a gentleman. Further on in the same text, a gentleman is only provisionally defined: he is ‘simply, and onely for the present, the lawfull bearer of such markes, or tokens of Noblesse’. This idea of a gentleman is reiterated later in the work, again with the promise of a ‘more exquisite’ definition later on, which never appears.34 Examination of the legal situation serves to clarify some of these equivocations: technically, a coat of arms did not make one a gentleman, but only a gentleman could be awarded a coat of arms. The Court of Chivalry was a civil law court, which dealt with disputes over honour and arms.35 In the case brought by one John Stepkin of Stepney against Daniel Dobbins, for writing himself ‘esquire’ and assuming a false coat of arms, the heralds, called upon to assess the case, wrote to the Earl Marshal to declare that wee doe not fynde by any thing exhibited in Court or otherwise produced before us that the said daniell dobbyns is, or any of his auncestors were gent. of Coat Armour, yet we finde that his Grandfather and some others of his name inhabiting about the place where his father now dwelleth were written Gentlemen in divers Evidences. And we doe not fynde the Escutcheon of Armes produced by the said dobbins in Court, to belong unto him or his auncestors. Nor that the said daniell dobbyns hath any right to call himselfe Esqr. or assume the manner or style of Esqr.36

Dobbins was found guilty, and required as punishment to pay a fine of twenty pounds, twenty pounds costs, to enter into a bond for his continued good behaviour, and to make submission – that is, he had to disclaim publicly the status he had usurped, rather as at a visitation. Dobbins, however, appealed to the Earl Marshal on the grounds that the plaintiff, ‘whose malice hath not end or lymitt’, had required him as his punishment to make submission in the most public and shameful manner at the open sessions at Worcester, where he had to declare that both he and his ancestors were ‘plebeians and not 33 34 35

36

Squibb ed. (1987), p. 63. ‘E.B.’ (1610), sigs. B3r–v, I4r. See G.D. Squibb, The High Court of Chivalry (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1959). The following case is noted on p. 173. College of Arms MS. R. 19, fol. 174.

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Reading Chivalric Romance gentlemen’, which was (he claimed) not precisely the heralds’ judgement. It was Dobbins’ assertion, then, that although he may not have been an esquire, he and his ancestors were gentlemen without coat armour, and he begged that the sentence be suspended until he could prove his case.37 John Ferne’s Blazon of Gentrie bears this position out insofar as it classifies gentlemen in terms of their possession of gentle blood (the longer the pedigree the better) as well as their posession of a coat of arms – but the one need not imply the other. Ferne admits that one may be a gentleman ‘neither of bloud, nor of coat armour’ if, for example, one is ‘a student of the common lawes bearing no coat-armour’, or if one is ‘a Grome of the Soveraignes pallace, having no coat armour’, or ‘a churles son, being made a priest, Canon, & c.’, although (eager to preserve social distinctions) he disapproves of this practice, and has one of his disputants, Paradinus, a herald, say that ‘The name of noble-man, can not by common right, appertaine to any, except those of coat armours’; gentlemen without coats of arms should be denounced, he says, ‘although by the errour of custome we se, how they still possess, the name and title of gentry’.38 This slightly peculiar situation is reflected in the grants of arms themselves. Consider the following extract from a grant of arms and crest given by Gilbert Dethick to one John Fleetwood, from July 1548: To all Nobles and gentles theis present letters reading hearing or seeing Gilbert Dethicke alias Norrey . . . Sendeth greetinge Equitie willeth and reason ordeineth That men vertuous and of Noble Courage, be by their meritts and good renowne, rewarded not only in their persons in this mortall life soe breife and Transitory, but also after them those that shall be of their bodyes descended to be in all places of honour with other Nobles and gentles accepted and taken by certaine ensignes, and demonstracions of honnour and Nobles (That is to say) blazon healme and Timbre [the crest over the heraldic shield]. To the intent that by their ensample, others may the more enforce themselves to use their time in feates Of armes and workes vertuous, To gett ye renowne of ancient Nobles in their loynes and posterities. And therefore I the said Norrey King of Armes as abovesaid not only by the common renowne, but also by mine owne knowledge, and by the report of divers worthy to be taken of word and credence am advertised and enformed, that John Fleetwood of the County of Lancashire gentleman hath of long time, used himselfe soe vertuously and honestly and soe discreetly, soe that he hath well deserved from henceforth, he and his posteritie to be in all places of honnour accepted nombred and taken, by certaine ensignes and Demonstrances of honnour and Nobles in the nomber and companie of other Nobles and gentiles . . . [he goes on to describe the arms being granted].39 37

38 39

The case is summarised in G.D. Squibb ed., Reports of Heraldic Cases in the Court of Chivalry, 1623–1732 (London: John Whitehead and Son, 1956), p. 32. Ferne (1586), sigs. G5r–6r. Wiloughby A. Littledale ed., A Collection of Miscellaneous Grants, Crests, Confirmations, Augmentations and Exemplifications of Arms (London: John Whitehead and Son Ltd., 1925–6), 2 volumes, I: 78.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance This grant of arms is entirely typical, such documents displaying few variations in form over the period of some hundred years. The first thing to notice here is that, in contrast to the practice of the heralds at visitations, it is now virtue (rather than genealogy) that makes a gentleman. Indeed, reading a collection of such documents, one might almost believe that the whole elaborately graded social hierarchy of sixteenth-century England was little more than a system of incentives aimed at encouraging good behaviour. Fleetwood’s own elevation is, we read, supposed to encourage others in ‘feates Of armes and workes vertuous’ – a particularly chivalric formulation (although it often seems as if the idea of such ‘feates’ operates in these documents as little more than a verbal token for anything that might make one a gentleman, other than blood).40 Secondly, and again in contrast to the heralds’ practice during visitations, their judgements here are no longer solely based upon material evidence. Instead, a candidate’s reputation is of crucial importance. Fleetwood is known to have behaved himself in a virtuous manner through the ‘common renowne’, through Dethick’s own knowledge, and through the ‘report of divers worthy to be taken of word and credence’. Finally, however, we might notice that the language used in this document is rather odd. Being awarded a coat of arms, commonly considered to be the mark of a gentleman, it would appear that John Fleetwood in fact already is one. The grant, Dethick writes, is intended to ensure that Fleetwood’s descendants are accepted amongst ‘other Nobles and gentles’ (my italics), then Fleetwood himself referred to as ‘John Fleetwood of the County of Lancashire gentleman’, and by the end of the document it is both Fleetwood and his descendants who are to be accepted ‘in the nomber and companie of other Nobles and gentiles’. Visitations and grants of arms, it should now be clear, are actually quite contradictory in what they imply about the nature of true nobility, even though they formed part of the same system for the regulation of honours. Their differences of approach to the definition of a gentleman can be explained as an attempt to negotiate the contradictions between theories of blood and virtue that we discussed earlier. Visitations are organised according to the hereditary principle, as can be seen in the long lists of pedigrees that the heralds were obliged to compile on such occasions. Grants of arms, on the other hand, locate honour in virtue, and this may account for the peculiar ‘flickering’ effect in the language of such documents, where the person being granted arms both is and is not a gentleman already. Social practice here presses upon a linguistic contradiction in words such as ‘honour’ or ‘gentleman’. ‘Honour’ may refer to social status, fame or reputation, but it may also refer to ideas of behaving in an honourable way, to personal qualities, and 40

A grant of arms to William Pagett, clerk of the Privy Council, still mentions ‘feats of Armes, and workes vertuous’ (Littledale ed. (1925–6), II: 162), although these documents often prefer to use ‘or’ rather than ‘and’ in cases where the former is blatantly inappropriate – as in that of Anthony Rudd, Bishop of St Davids (II: 181).

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Reading Chivalric Romance it may be that the conceptual difficulties presented by these conflicts manifest themselves in the peculiar retrospective temporality of grants of arms. The temporality of visitations is that of genealogy, an unbroken line, problematic only insofar as its origin may be obscure, if the original grant of arms is lost. Grants of arms themselves, on the other hand, lack this linear quality. They resemble nothing so much as certain romance-derived plots – like that of Tor – in which we are obliged to backtrack and reassess what had previously looked like a meritocratic social rise as nothing more than the effect of innate social superiority. What good, we may ask, could Fleetwood’s grant of arms have as an incentive to others if, as is apparently the case, he has not risen or been honoured at all? Fleetwood would presumably have had to apply to the College of Arms for his grant; yet once his application has been accepted, it would appear that he has always been a gentleman. It is this peculiar temporality that keeps different and potentially contradictory ideas of nobility in play. Grants of arms, by locating honour in virtue and thus situating it prior to the honouring of the person being given arms, manage to ensure that hereditary honours are also marks of virtue. The form of these documents implies a certain unwillingness to concede that a gentleman can be made as well as born: those granted arms are said to have risen through their own efforts and merits, yet, even whilst we are being told this, it is also the case that they have not risen at all, since they were gentlemen all along. Significantly, some of the most sophisticated responses to these plots of nobility occur in chivalric romances and narratives that feature discovered parentage. The temporal ambiguities we have observed at play in the early modern system of honours find their echo in Spenser’s declaration that the purpose of The Faerie Queene is to ‘fashion a gentleman’ – a formulation that leaves it totally unclear whether he means that he will make his readers into gentlemen, or simply mould the qualities of his already gentle readers – and are exploited for comic effect towards the end of The Winter’s Tale, when the newly-ennobled clown happily declares that he has been a gentleman born for the past four hours.41 By isolating the protagonist from his ‘proper’ place in society, chivalric narratives of the sort discussed above offer a contrived test of the respective claims of blood and virtue, of nature and nurture, in relation to the idea of honour, in the sense of social esteem. Let us first of all consider how the tale of Sir Tor might have appeared to the readers of Caxton’s Malory, a folio volume directed (according to Caxton’s preface) to ‘noble prynces, lordes and ladyes, gentylmen or gentylwymmen’. From this perspective, the tale of Sir Tor is one of the importance of ‘blood’ to social status. Here, differences between nobles and commoners are so pronounced as to make them seem almost different

41

The Winter’s Tale, ed. J.H.P. Pafford (London: Methuen, 1963), v, ii, 137.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance species, and there is little doubt as to which of the two is to be preferred. Tor’s noble blood is indicated by the fact that he is physically superior to his supposed kin, taller and better looking, and by his disdain for manual labour; his warlike disposition is, retrospectively, a certain indicator of his essential nobility. The narrative negotiates the opposing qualities of blood and virtue in relation to honour in the following way: Tor shows a temperament which fits him for the position of a knight (honour derives from virtue); yet this temperament also marks him off from his low-born step-brothers (virtue derives from blood). The effect is to make honour, in the sense of social status, seem like an effect of individual virtue whilst preserving a clear sense of social distinctions. The position of a knight, then, ultimately comes to seem more like a hobby than a mark of high status – that is, it appears to be little more than the title given to those who like to undertake certain activities. Meanwhile, the lower orders are perfectly happy carrying out the tasks that their hereditary characteristics fit them for. Differences of status therefore appear as little more than differences of disposition or character (after all, what good would the likes of Aryes be in a fight?)42 and the chivalric class structure is made to seem both benign on the one hand and natural on the other. This basic distinction between nobles and commoners manifests itself even in the narrative organisation of these tales; the vulgar are relegated to roles which present them either as mere accessories to noble adventure (bringing up a king’s son in such low conditions as to make his later elevation all the more glorious) or as the objects of casual aristocratic violence (we might think of Tor’s mother). Note also that, when Tor is said to be the bastard son of a king, Tor protests against this slur on his mother’s honour. This makes him look all the more honourable since, firstly, he is following the dictates of a chivalric code which demands that he should defend women,43 and secondly because his judgement in this matter shows him displaying a remarkable lack of self-interest. He does not, we notice, protest because of any damage that the accusation of illegitimacy might do to his own reputation, but, more importantly, in rejecting Merlin’s words, he is also rejecting any ‘avaunce’ that he might be able to extract from this association with a king. Hierarchy is again made to look disinterested: Tor wishes to practise certain martial activities appropriate to the rank of a knight; he does not place value on nobility as social advancement (unlike the commoner Aryes, who is comforted by the prospect that his wife may do well out of Pellinore, despite the damage done to his honour). Tor is neither envious nor aspiring; the true noble, this tale seems to suggest, does not value nobility as rank, but rather as nobility in the sense of ‘virtue’. 42

43

Unlike the bellicose Tor, Aryes is, punningly, a ‘cow-herd’ or ‘coward’; his social status and his temperament are in perfect alignment. As Malory puts it, ‘alweyes to do ladyes, damoysels, and gentylwymmen socour’ (Spisak ed. (1983), I: 92).

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Reading Chivalric Romance Arthur’s gesture in proclaiming that he will grant any wishes asked of him bears a similar import – he is opening himself up to a series of requests which might endanger his ‘honour’ in the sense of social esteem, but his lack of regard for this merely shows him to be all the more ‘honourable’. It is true that Arthur does stipulate that he will grant nothing which might impair his ‘realme’ or ‘estate’ (and such prudent conditions are rare in these kinds of chivalric narrative),44 but the general impression given is that Arthur’s graciousness – Aryes says that his offer is made ‘graciously’ – outstrips his concern for his own advantage. As a vera nobilitas narrative, then, the tale of Sir Tor systematically confuses the interrelated terms of blood, virtue and honour. Honour in the sense of rank is, here, an effect of being honourable – in the sense of being virtuous – which in turn is an effect of one’s blood, hence of the social status of one’s parents.45 The retrospective revelation of Tor’s true parentage means that Malory’s narrative can have it both ways. Tor appears to rise – to be knighted – as a result of his own virtues; Merlin’s revelations mean that we are obliged to backtrack and reassess this judgement. Everything that appears to make such narratives into tales of meritocratic advancement simultaneously indicates that the character in question is merely drifting towards his proper level in the social hierarchy. The early chapters of the Iberian romance Amadis de Gaule are thematised along similar lines. This popular text – one that spawned a vast number of sequels – tells the tale of the eponymous Amadis, son of the King of Gaul, as, through a series of adventures, he progresses towards his goal of marriage to the Princess Oriana. The opening chapters, however, concern themselves with origins and lineage. In the first Book, King Perion of Gaul falls in love with the Princess Elisena whilst visiting her father. Her maid, Darioletta, arranges for them to meet in secret. After Perion’s departure, Elisena discovers that she is pregnant – for which crime, being unmarried, the penalty is death. Darioletta arranges for the child to be born in secret, after which she and her mistress make a chest, and put in it the infant, Perion’s sword, his ring, and other tokens, along with a letter: ‘This is Amadis without time, Sonne to a King’ (‘without time’ meaning that Darioletta ‘thought his death to be neere at hand’).46 The chest is then put out to sea.

44

45

46

Consider for example the episode in Amadis de Gaule, in which the king, Lisuart, promises a ‘Damosell’ to give her anything she wants; this oath displeases his court, but, we are told, Lisuart’s ‘heart was addicted to magnanimity, as (whatsoever happened) hee would not be reproved for cowardice’. In fact, the court’s anxiety is well founded, since the ‘Damosell’ aims to lead the king into a trap. Anthony Munday trans. (London: Nicholas Oakes, 1619), Book I: Q6v. It seems important that Tor was begotten ‘half by force’, ensuring that Malory’s readers should not regard his mother as a whore on the one hand, nor his father as a rapist on the other. I owe this point to Helen Hackett. Munday (1619), I: B6r.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance The baby, of course, does not die, but is rather picked up by the ship of Gandales, a Scottish knight, who takes it to be brought up with his own son Gandalin, under the name of ‘the Gentleman of the Sea’. One day, King Languines of Scotland and his Queen are visiting Gandales. The Queen sees the Gentleman of the Sea beat a boy who had been bullying Gandalin, and notes his courteous response to his governor when he is in turn threatened with a thrashing for this act; she also observes that the boy is ‘excellent faire’, whereas his supposed father Gandales is ‘somewhat heard favoured’ although still ‘most gentle’.47 Both boys are taken to be brought up in the Scottish court, where the Gentleman and the Princess Oriana (the king of England’s daughter) fall in love. Even at this early stage, then, we can see how Amadis (still without his name), cut off from his true family and proper position in society, nevertheless immediately starts to climb back up the social ladder, moving from household to household, quite without conscious effort, and merely as a result of his innate virtues and graces. This theme is continued throughout the subsequent chapters. The Gentleman of the Sea is tormented by the thought that Oriana is too far above him; his best scheme for winning her involves getting himself knighted – ‘to attaine the good grace of the Lady he loved, it was necessary he should take Armes’ to do ‘such exployts, as should deserve the favour of my lady’.48 It is at this point that a messenger arrives with the tokens from the chest that Amadis was cast out to sea in – the tokens that will eventually resolve his romantic problem by revealing his true rank. As with the tale of Sir Tor, the theme here is social status, the ‘honour’ that the Gentleman of the Sea must acquire to win Oriana, in relation firstly to virtue, and then to blood. First the former is stressed – he decides to become a knight, if he can – and then the latter – the contents of the chest arrive. The tokens from the chest, it should be noted, do not immediately resolve the Gentleman of the Sea’s problems; on the contrary, in that they show him to be a foundling, rather than the son of a knight, they compound them – again in relation to the idea of blood. Yet the Gentleman is not overly disconcerted by this revelation. ‘I thinke mye self a Gentleman, for my hart perswades me of no lesse’, he says, but adds that, ‘now therefore it is more necessary that I be Knighted then before, to the end I may labour to become such a one as may acquire honor and reputation, seeing I have no parents by whom I may be named, not knowing what I am.’ This speech Languines considers to be spoken ‘vertuously’.49 The Gentleman of the Sea gets Perion to knight him (unaware that he is in fact his father) and then rides off to aid him in his wars against Ireland. Meanwhile, in his absence, Oriana breaks open and reads the letter from the chest, which

47 48 49

Munday (1619), I: C4r. Munday (1619), I: D1r. Munday (1619), I: D2r.

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Reading Chivalric Romance declares Amadis to be the son of a king, along with his true name. Her relief is palpable – previously, he had been ‘esteemed (at the most) but the son of a simple Gentleman, or it might be of lesse’.50 Back in Gaul, Amadis goes to war with the Irish forces, defeating their leader, and, having proved his virtue, is made known to his parents by the ring from the chest. The purpose of the narrative trope we have been discussing could hardly be made any clearer than it is in these passages. By stripping Amadis of his birth status, the narrative is able to pose a series of questions about the nature of true nobility, focused through the theme of winning Oriana. One after another, the contrasting notes are sounded – blood, virtue – as if in an attempt to resolve the separate components of the noble persona. Isolated from his rightful place in society, Amadis is forced to prove himself through the virtuous deeds of arms he performs against the Irish forces; it is only once he has demonstrated this inherent virtue that his parentage can be revealed, and we realise that the natural qualities of this abandoned child point to his true origins just as emphatically as the paraphernalia of rings, swords, seals, letters, and other recognition devices that customarily clutter such narratives. The genealogical plots of romance and grants of arms, then, share a peculiar temporal quality whereby an apparent social rise is retrospectively cancelled even as it is accomplished. Far from being compendia of mere contentless adventure, I am suggesting that books of chivalry were in fact intimately bound up with medieval and Renaissance systems for the regulation of honours, on the levels of both theory and of social practice; even parodies of romance can address such themes. If, therefore, we want to understand the peculiar appeal of the romances of chivalry, we might do so in the context of a hierarchical, lineage-based society – but one which has evolved a quite complex set of ideas relating to the notion that status must also be merited; and interpreting them along these lines may, it is hoped, in turn offer some explanation of their sustained popularity with what are, on the face of it, quite diverse and even opposed audiences. At this point certain objections may be raised. Firstly, it might be said that the sorts of narrative structure discussed here, although highly characteristic of chivalric literature, are by no means particular to it. Secondly, that the practices for the regulation of honours discussed above refer primarily to the idea of a gentleman, whereas chivalric romances are overwhelmingly concerned with knights and knighthood. To the first objection, that a similar motif of abandoned children may be found in narrative genres as diverse as myth, fairy tale, and Roman New Comedy, the last of which in particular bears little or no relation to chivalric literature, it may be answered that this does not mean that they are not necessarily addressing similar issues; the problems of reconciling individual merit with a society based around the idea of lineage are common

50

Munday (1619), I: E6r.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance to many cultures, and a narrative which isolates a child from its parents provides a dramatic and effective way of dealing with these issues.51 The second objection is far more substantial. Although a knight was supposed to be a gentleman as well (witness Pheander’s shock at the knight who isn’t), it is nevertheless true that knighthood and gentry were fundamentally different institutions. The coat of arms was basically a family insignia. One became a gentleman by descent – indeed, many commentators were of the opinion that it took several generations of descent after the original grant of arms to make a ‘proper’ gentleman.52 Knighthood, on the other hand, was an individual title; one had to be dubbed. The contrast is apparently clear – but what is notable when we read a late medieval romance such as Malory’s is the way in which the narrative, for all its emphasis upon knighthood, still stresses the idea of gentility. Thus, a lady begs help from Sir Tor, requiring it of the ‘gentyl knyght’, she says, ‘as thow arte a gentilman’; Gareth tells the Black Knight that he is ‘a gentylman borne, and of more hyghe lygnage than thou, and that wyl I preve on thy body’; and Tristram’s book of hawking and hunting has been of benefit to all gentlemen, ‘for the goodly termes that gentilmen have and use, and shalle to the daye of dome, that thereby in a maner alle men of worship maye dissever a gentylman fro a yoman, and from a yoman a vylayne’.53 Gentility is important to Malory’s narrative precisely because it is a hereditary honour, as knighthood is not. Sometimes it is distinguished from royal descent, as when three knights of Gaul are mentioned, one a king’s son, and the other two merely ‘grete gentylmen’, but it is by no means clear that gentility need necessarily designate an inferior form of status; Lancelot is descended ‘of the VIII degre from our Lord Jhesu Cryst, and Syre Galahalt [Lancelot’s son] ys of the nynthe degree from oure Lord Jhesu Cryst; therfor I dar saye that they be the grettest gentilmen of the world’.54 Furthermore, the primary symbol of gentry, the coat of arms, was itself a chivalric symbol, associated by early modern writers with the ‘feates of arms’ they so often mention. Thus, William Dugdale asserts that heraldry was originally used to distinguish men on the field of battle, and complains that ‘such men as rise by their sciences, judgements, or skill in other arts, affairs, or trades (although they be to be reverenced for their wisdom and praiseful 51

52

53 54

John Boswell’s book on child abandonment, The Kindness of Strangers (New York: Penguin, 1988), does not treat these sorts of narrative structure in the terms I have proposed above. However it seems clear that the texts he examines may be open to such a treatment. For example, Boswell quotes a character from Chariton’s Chaereas and Calihoe: ‘How many children of gods and kings do we hear of brought up in slavery who later recover the status of their parents?’ (p. 90). John Ferne (1586) requires a gentleman ‘of bloud and coate-armour perfect’ to show ‘five discents successively & lineally, on the part of his father’ from the original grant of arms (sig. G4r). Spisak ed. (1983), I: 88, 164, 202. Spisak ed. (1983), I: 502, 432.

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Reading Chivalric Romance actions, and had in honour answerable to their vertues and dignities) have yet little to do with the marks or Badges of soldiers’.55 Evidently even a gentleman who was not a knight might have felt that he had some legitimate investment in chivalric matters in this period.56 When George McGill Vogt, compiling a compendium of references to the theme of vera nobilitas, found such a trope in a twelfth-century French romance, Le Livre de Lancelot del Lac, he commented that ‘probably the last place one would look for Generositas virtus would be in Arthurian romance’.57 By now it should be clear that chivalric romances are, on the contrary, frequently structured around that very idea. Advancing themselves through revelations of genealogy, such texts almost seem designed to focus just this theme. Vogt’s problem appears to be that he aligns vera nobilitas with the idea of meritocratic advancement. This is by no means stupid; treatises on honour often connect the idea of virtue with the promotion of deserving commoners. But it should also now be clear how complex the variations that could be played upon this theme were. Although heraldic manuals invariably say that they prefer ‘virtue’ as a source of nobility over blood, we can see how a literary text such as Malory’s constantly realigns the triangular relationship between blood, virtue, and honour in a way that is far from simple; one term is conflated with another, and then at another point it is set in opposition to it.58 It is perhaps only our own assumptions which lead us to presume that an emphasis upon individual virtue need necessarily threaten the aristocratic order; a narrative like that of Sir Tor might initially appear to suggest the exact opposite. Finally, it might be objected that the themes addressed here span an improbably wide time period. I have surveyed what may seem a quite

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The Antient Usage in Bearing of Such Ensigns of Honour As Are Commonly Call’d Arms (Oxford: Richard Davis, 1682), sigs. C7v–8r. This is Dugdale’s own view; in fact (as we shall see) one could assert status through educational display. Gerard J. Brault, Early Blazon (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1972) uses Arthurian literature to discuss early heraldry, and Richard Robinson, A Learned and True Assertion of the Original Life, Actes and Death of . . . Arthur, King of Great Brittaine (London: J. Wolfe, 1582), describes Arthur’s coat of arms (sig. B3v). Vogt (1925), p. 123. An emphasis upon virtue was always a component of chivalric ideology, as Maurice Keen’s book on that subject makes clear; knighthood was originally far more a sort of vocational, martial ethic, only gradually assimilated into a broader system of social relations: ‘Arms were family insignia, to which men were entitled because of their heredity, not because they had been dubbed knights. Their importance to the knightly world, and the growing importance of the heralds as experts in blazon, are here symptomatic of an increasingly sharp emphasis that was coming to be laid upon lineage in the chivalric world of the later middle ages – from the thirteenth century on’ (Keen (1984), p. 143). The relationship between ‘virtue’ and status is also historically variable. A term such as ‘gentleman’ has by now largely lost its significance in relation to class. Apart from certain ceremonial formulae, it now refers to moral qualities, in quite a restricted field (essentially, a man’s relations with women, and sport).

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance miscellaneous collection of documents and authorities on the subject of true nobility, with references to material stretching from the late Middle Ages to the Restoration. Such continuity of thinking and practice with respect to matters of rank and precedence is, however, very much to the point. Romances, of course, are more or less defined by their lack of verisimilitude, but historians of the reading public are often apt to consider the Renaissance chivalric romance an anachronism – with the clear implication that the medieval variety posesses a level of genuine social reference that has been obliterated by the time the same generic motifs are being enjoyed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Focusing on the culture of honour shows an element of continuity to English society that can tie together the Boke of St Albans in the fifteenth century and William Dugdale writing in the 1660s. Here we have a language used to discuss rank and status that is as prevalent in the medieval period as it is in the Renaissance. This is not to say that English culture survived unchanged during the transition from one period to another; far from it. Even within the field of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century social practices I have examined we find innovations, such as the introduction of the practice of visitations. What remains constant, however, is the tendency for thinking about questions of social status to take place between the two poles of inheritance and individual virtue. The formulae and permutations that can be derived from such a simple starting point are, I shall attempt to demonstrate, quite extraordinarily diverse – complex and adaptable enough to accommodate a wide variety of positions on the question of social mobility, and to survive even so deep a collective social trauma as the civil wars and interregnum of the 1640s and 1650s. What I would now like to consider is how such narratives – read above as more or less endorsing an aristocracy of ‘blood’ – might have been read, not by one of Caxton’s ‘noble prynces, lordes and ladyes, gentylmen or gentylwymmen’, but rather by a reader of common rank – a reader, for example, of the Blome-Stansby edition of Malory, published in 1634. This quarto volume basically reproduces Caxton’s text, with only minor alterations (spellings are modernised, oaths excised), and in fact also incorporates the preface to the fifteenth-century original, so that it too is notionally addressed to a noble audience. The contrast with previous editions suggests otherwise, however: this is a small and relatively inexpensive volume, printed on cheap paper with cheap ink. It is divided into three parts, with separate signatures, which suggests part-issue. Unlike its predecessors, which sometimes contained as many as 25 woodcut illustrations, the Blome-Stansby Malory has only one, a frontispiece depicting Arthur and his knights. This single picture, however, evidently reached a wide enough audience for Samuel Butler to make a glancing, satirical reference to it in Hudibras. In fact, so many copies of this book were printed that there were no more editions of Malory until the nineteenth century, when there were still copies of the Blome-Stansby 62

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Reading Chivalric Romance text in circulation.59 Everything would appear to indicate, then, that this edition of Malory was aimed at a far broader audience than Caxton’s claimed to be – just as many other chivalric texts, originally aimed at an often gentle readership, were reprinted in the seventeenth century in attempts to exploit popular interest in the genre. This interest in romance is, however, highly problematic. In his book on pastoral, William Empson writes that both that genre (which, with its nobles disguised as peasants, bears an obvious relation to the sorts of narrative we are discussing here), and that of ‘heroic’ literature ‘assume or preach . . . a proper or beautiful relation between rich and poor’.60 Clearly this is the case when one looks at such narratives from the perspective of ‘gentylmen or gentylwymmen’, as we have already seen. The relation between Aryes the cowherd and his betters is, indeed, ideal from this viewpoint. Aryes wants to work, and knights want to fight, so there is a perfect community of interest between the classes. We may wonder, however, just how ‘beautiful’ such texts appeared from the other side of the social divide they invariably stress. Chivalric and heraldic discourses tend to put forward one of two views of the lower orders, portraying them as either cowardly, ignorant, crassly materialistic, envious, and even potentially seditious, or as unchallengingly loyal figures, more or less irrelevant to the deeds of nobles that these texts centre upon. So how would such narratives appear from the perspective of a ‘common reader’? Clearly, if chivalric narratives became popular among the sorts of people who, when they appear in fictional form in the books they so enjoyed, are at best more or less ignored, and at worst put to the sword, then this phenomenon requires some explaining. Fortunately, we have a first-hand account from the seventeenth century of the literary tastes of one such ‘common reader’ of romance, an account which is highly suggestive in relation to the genre as a whole. Francis Kirkman’s autobiographical work The Unlucky Citizen was published in 1673 – at the very end of the period we have been discussing. Here, Kirkman, a bookseller who translated chivalric romances, relates his background: his father, although no gentleman, was a ‘Citizen of London’; his mother he describes as being ‘born of honest and wealthy Parents’.61 A plan to advance him in the church fell through, and, although not poor, his parents nevertheless bound Kirkman as

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See David Carlson, ‘Arthur’s Round Table in Hudibras’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 49 (1986), pp. 261–4, and ‘Arthur Before and After the Revolution: The BlomeStansby Edition of Malory (1634) and Britains Glory (1684)’, in Martin B. Shichtman and James P. Carley eds, Culture and the King: the Social Implications of the Arthurian Legend (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994), pp. 234–53. William Empson, Some Versions of Pastoral (Aylesbury: Penguin, 1966), p. 159. Empson considers the suppression of the rebellion in Sidney’s New Arcadia to be an anomaly. Francis Kirkman, The Unlucky Citizen (London: A. Johnson for Francis Kirkman, 1673), sigs. B4v–5r.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance an apprentice scrivener at the age of sixteen – presumably a considerable blow to his expectations. Of his earliest years, we hear this: Thus was I bred till it was time to be an Apprentice, and in all that time I do not remember that I was Master of any money onely once I happened upon a Six Pence, and having lately read that famous Book, of the Fryar and the Boy, and being hugely pleased with that, as also the excellent History of the Seven wise Masters of Room, and having heard great Commendation of Fortunatus, I laid out all my mony for that, and thought I had a great bargain, conceiting that the Lady Fortune would one time or other bestow such a Purse upon me as she did on Fortunatus; now having read this Book and being desirous of reading more of that nature; one of my School-fellows lent me Docter Faustus, which also pleased me, especially when he travelled in the Air, saw all the World, and did what he listed; but I was as much troubled when the Devil came to fetch him; and the Consideration of that horrible end did so much terrifie me, that I often dreamed of it. The next Book I met with was Fryar Bacon, whose pleasant Stories much delighted me: But when I came to Knight Errantry, and reading Montelion Knight of the Oracle, and Ornatus and Artesia, and the Famous Parismus; I was contented beyond measure, and (believing all I read to be true) wished my self Squire to one of these Knights: I proceeded on to Palmerin of England, and Amadis de Gaul . . . and reading how that Amadis and other Knights not knowing their Parents, did in time prove to be Sons of Kings and great Personages; I had such a fond and idle Opinion, that I might in time prove to be some great Person, or at leastwise Squire to some Knight: And therefore I being asked, What Trade I would be of? first scorned to be any, hoping that I was not born to so mean a Quality; but upon second thoughts, I resolved to be a Chirurgion, and that for several Reasons; as first, because I often found them mentioned in Books of Knight Errantry; and secondly, that I might travel, and thereby see all these several Countreys of Constantinople, Trezibond, and I know not what Places; and then I did judge that if I were a Chirurgion and did travel, and met with Knights Errant who were wounded; I should be very necessary and useful in dressing and healing their Wounds, therefore a Chirurgion I was resolved to be, and the onely Reason why I would be so, was that I might travel; which my Mother understanding, and not being willing to venture me abroad, would not permit me to be of that Trade, wherefore I was to think again, and then I could not think of any Trade that would please me so well as a Bookseller, because, by that means I might read all sorts of history Books, and thereby please my self with reading . . . I having read five parts of Amadis de Gaul, in English, procuring a Dictionary, began to hammer out the Sence of some part of [a French volume in the series]; and finally, I took so much pains therein, that I attained to an indifferent knowledge of that Language, and getting some old Books that were French and English, I made my self a kind of Dictionary from them . . . so that with a little pains taking, I could pretty well understand a French Author; especially if it treated of Knighthood . . .62 62

Kirkman (1673), sigs. B5v–B7v.

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Reading Chivalric Romance These passages have received little attention outside of histories of the reading public, where they are generally referred to in order to demonstrate the ‘middle-class’ and juvenile taste for such fictions.63 Yet Kirkman’s is a fascinating text, full of valuable information regarding the place and use of the ‘literary’ in the social arena of the mid-seventeenth century; it is, moreover, a richly ambivalent response to the chivalric romance, such as we do not have for any other genre of the period. We have already looked at chivalric literature in social terms. Kirkman’s earliest reading establishes that this is the context in which his attraction to romances should be examined. His favourite works would appear to be those which offer him some avenue for aspirational, escapist fantasies. Reading Fortunatus, he hopes that ‘Lady Fortune would one time or other bestow such a Purse upon me as she did on Fortunatus’; the tale of Doctor Faustus impresses him with its evocation of one who ‘travelled in the Air, saw all the World, and did what he listed’. Such stories clearly appealed to a boy who had no money, could not travel, and most certainly could not do ‘what he listed’. To acquire money, to travel, to do as one wishes all seem to involve some sort of ascent up the social ladder, out of the pinched circumstances Kirkman found himself in as a child. This suggests that his reading of romances proceeds along similar lines – although Kirkman’s affection for romances seems to involve a slightly more nuanced position than this, resembling more his double reaction to Faustus: on the one hand, he thrills at the prospect of release from the constrictions of his day to day life, yet on the other hand he appears to fear the sort of retribution dished out to the over-reaching magician (we might think of the punishments inflicted on those who aspired above their proper station in this period).64 Books of chivalry here seem to stand in for the world of social possibility that Kirkman aspires to; yet they occupy this role so powerfully as to actually force him away from his initial moment of 63

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Louis B. Wright, Middle Class Culture in Elizabethan England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1958), p. 86, refers to The Unlucky Citizen as ‘a story purporting to be the autobiography of the son of a London merchant’ which indicates the popularity of chivalric literature with this readership. In fact, Kirkman’s text, although obviously incorporating fictional inset narratives, actually tallies well with what can be recovered about his life from other sources – see R.C. Bald, ‘Francis Kirkman, Bookseller and Author’, Modern Philology 41 (1943), pp. 17–32. Spufford (1985), p. 72 cites Kirkman to show that children were interested in romance. The fictions of alchemy seen in the plays of the likes of Jonson (see Chapter 3) similarly seem to hint at a connection between romantic narrative and fantasies of social transformation. This connection between romance and social imposture or transgression is reinforced in Kirkman’s treatment of the story of Mary Carleton, accused of masquerading as a German princess. Kirkman’s account of her life notes her interest in romances, and seems to connect this with her career as an upstart – her reading chimes with his own social aspirations, but also with his anxieties about being exposed as an imposter. See Hero Chalmers, ‘The Person I Am, or What They Made Me to Be’ in Clare Brant and Diane Purkiss eds, Women, Texts and Histories, 1575–1760 (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), pp. 164–94.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance identification with the figure of the knight, back down the social ladder, rung by rung, from squire to surgeon to humble bookseller, as if retaining much of their original, discriminatory message. ‘Reading how that Amadis and other Knights not knowing their Parents, did in time prove to be Sons of Kings and great Personages’, Kirkman writes, ‘I had such a fond and idle Opinion, that I might in time prove to be some great Person.’ The fantasy of noble birth presents the attraction of chivalric narrative for Kirkman in its purest form;65 the rest of his chapter is mostly filled up with diminishing expectations. He hopes to ‘prove’ to be a great person, or, he immediately adds, ‘leastwise be Squire to some Knight’ – or if not that, a ‘Chirurgion’, so that he could experience the romance itinerary taking him round such ‘Countreys’ as ‘Constantinople, Trezibond, and I know not what Places’, giving assistance to knights just as a squire does, although the ‘Chirurgion’ is even more marginal to chivalric narrative than the squire – or, if not any of these, then at the very least a bookseller, so that he could spend more time with these tales of knights, squires, and surgeons. In fact, Kirkman later equates this trade with yet another stereotypical chivalric role, albeit rather whimsically, when he compares his role in expanding the narrative of Don Bellianis to that of the ‘Cunning-man’ of romance, ‘as Friston the wise, or Sage, as Bellona or Urganda the unknown [from Amadis]’ who recorded the histories ‘of the Knights of their times’.66 It was Kirkman’s fantasy, then, that he should ‘prove to be some great Person’. Does Kirkman hope to become some great person, or does he hope that he shall, as in romances, simply turn out to be one, by right of birth? Such a confusion, between a temporally extended test, and a moment of disclosure, is in fact central to the genealogical narratives we have been discussing, in which a knight never ‘proves’ to be a ‘great Person’ until he has ‘proved’ himself to be one through his actions. Kirkman’s comparison of himself to the ‘Cunning-man’ (actually often a woman) of romance is also suggestive in this respect, since it is these figures who often govern ‘proof’ in these narratives. It is the Merlins and Urgandas of the chivalric universe who know most about origins, and control moments of disclosure – as Merlin does in the case of Tor. Kirkman goes from identifying with the person proved to the person controlling that proof. Notwithstanding the complexity of his relationship with books of chivalry, and the whimsical tone in which he recounts his childhood fantasies,

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Kirkman’s ambitions bear an extraordinary resemblance to the situation outlined in Freud’s ‘Family Romances’ (in J. Strachey, Anna Freud, Alix Strachey and Alan Tyson trans., The Complete Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1953–64), 23 volumes, 9: 237–41), in which a child’s growing awareness of its parents’ social status is linked to fantasies ‘in which both [its] parents are replaced by others of better birth’ (239). Freud’s designation of this fantasy as ‘romance’ would appear to indicate that he was well aware of its generic antecedents. Kirkman (1673), sigs. C2v–3r.

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Reading Chivalric Romance everything appears to indicate that they had an aspirational significance for Francis Kirkman – this despite the generally derogatory terms in which men of his own rank were presented in such narratives. This is true even for his ‘real’, as opposed to imaginative, life. As an apprentice, he tells us, he had some money, ‘which I always laid out in purchasing of Books, especially such as treated of Knight Errantry, or else in buying somewhat to make me fine . . . being desirous to appear in every thing like a Gentleman’. He buys a pocket watch, and objects to being given ‘mechanical’ tasks by his master’s kitchen maids; he protests at the way that even well-born apprentices can be treated as domestic servants.67 In these passages, Kirkman’s taste for fantastic narrative appears to be intimately bound up with his own reputation: romance literature seems to authorise his attempts to climb up the social scale. Indeed, it actually represents a first step in this ascent, since Kirkman takes the possession of such books to be a status symbol, equivalent to ownership of a watch. The form that Kirkman’s attempt to better himself takes is, however, not chivalric – or not simply so. Not wishing to waste his talents, we are told, and mindful of ‘the glory and fame [he] should purchase by being in Print’, he decides to translate a text for the press: ‘believing all the world to be of my mind, Lovers of Knight Errantry, I pitch’d upon Amadis de Gaul.’ This labour of translation Kirkman describes, appropriately enough, as an ‘Adventure’; the book itself is printed at his own charge, and in fact he has to break up his ‘library’ of romances to pay for the paper. ‘I was very dilligent in publishing it, for the Titles were carefully posted up, and I not a little proud to see them in publick, walking the Streets and shewing them to several of my acquaintance.’68 Here again, Kirkman’s account is fascinating, since we can actually compare his stated intention in publishing his work with the book itself. Kirkman recalls himself aiming at self-aggrandisement; the prefatory apparatus to the text, however, is couched in terms of conventional modesty: ‘I have published this ancient History (Gentle Reader) partly, at the intreatie of some of my familiar friends, and partly, through the desire which I had to put to light, so worthy a worke . . . I had not the least intent to have it come into the publique view.’69 Nothing about ‘glory and fame’ here. This preface also contains a more or less overt plea for further employment, referring to his hope of ‘future engagements to my ability, in somewhat of the like nature, or some more worthy work’ from the ‘Gentle reader’ who is ‘well-affected to Learning’. The key to Kirkman’s bid for status is ‘Learning’. Throughout his life, Kirkman associated chivalric literature with education. His preface to

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Kirkman (1673), sig. D2v. Kirkman (1673), sigs. M8r, N2r. The Famous and Renowned History of Amadis de Gaule (London: Jane Bell, 1652), preface.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance Don Bellianis, for example, says that the Seven Wise Masters ‘is of so great esteem in Ireland, that next to the Horn-Book . . . Children are in general put to Read in this; and I know that only by this Book several have learned to Read well’. Those who don’t read romances risk being laughed at for their ‘Ignorance’.70 And Kirkman himself had of course learned French as a result of his infatuation with romances.71 Kirkman’s aim here is to convert the educational capital represented by this early reading into social status, advertising his textual skills in a bid for noble patronage. Nor was this an absurd idea. Litigation in the Court of Chivalry shows that education might indeed be used to buttress a bid for gentle status. In 1636, William Molins of Holborn petitioned the Earl Marshal, alleging ‘scandalous words provocative of a duel’ against John Waters. Waters, ‘being a person of meane birth and condition’, went to Molins’ house; but finding him out, uttered ‘in the hearing of many of your petitioners neighbours & others . . . scandalous words’, saying that Molins ‘neither had the breeding of a gent: but was a base condicioned man and came from a dunghill, with many other fowle and ignominious wordes’. To prosecute Waters for provoking a duel, Molins had to prove that he was a gentleman; the evidence he offered was that he has been ‘traynid up in both ye universitie & Inns of Court’. A warrant was issued against Waters, so Molins’ claims were, evidently, acceptable.72 Yet Kirkman’s translation of Amadis was not a success, neither financially nor in terms of gaining him further employment, he finding that ‘those sort of Romances that treated of old impossible Knight Errantry were out of fashion’ among his target audience. His next production was to be something more upmarket, although still ‘full of Love-sick Expressions, and Thunderthumping Sentences, there was Love and Arms, and some strange impossible Adventures, for which I liked it the better’.73 This new book was The Loves and Adventures of Clerio and Lozia, and Kirkman apparently felt that it was a more 70

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Francis Kirkman, The Famous and Delectable History of Don Bellianis of Greece (London: F. Kirkman, 1673), preface. The story about the educational value of the Seven Wise Masters is repeated in Kirkman’s own version of that text, The History of Prince Erastus (London: Anne Johnson for Francis Kirkman, 1674), sig. A2v. Fynes Moryson’s Itinerary (Glasgow: James MacLehose and Sons, 1907–8), 4 volumes, recommends romances as a good way to learn a foreign language: ‘I think no Booke better for his [the traveller’s] discourse then Amadis de Gaule, for the Knights errant, and the ladies of the Courts, doe therein exchange Courtly speeches, and these Bookes are in all Languages translated by Masters of eloquence’ (III: 378). College of Arms MSS. Curia Militaris 7/87, 7/91. Kirkman (1673), sig. N2v. The preface to Kirkman’s Don Bellianis (1673) indicates the same shift in taste. Spanish chivalric romances, and narratives like The Four Sons of Aymon which were printed by Caxton ‘are now grown so scarce that you can hardly purchase them’, being supplanted by more fashionable, courtly texts such as the Arcadia in English, and translations out of French (which are in turn being replaced by ‘our late English Stage Plays’). Kirkman, however, unlike some modern critics, clearly seems to regard these ‘sophisticated’ romances as belonging to the same general class of fiction as the likes of Amadis.

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Reading Chivalric Romance ‘gentile’ work than his first; again, the stress is upon learning as an indicator of status – he boasts of having assisted ‘the Gentry of England’ by coining new words in his translation. Kirkman furthermore notes that he gave it a more gentile Title, and the Name of the Translator being plac’d on the Title-page in large Characters, there was also added the honoured Word Gent. to import that the Translator was a Gentleman, that he was every Inch of him in his own imagination, and did believe that the so printing that word on the Title of the Book, did as much entitle him to Gentility, as if he had Letters Patents for it from the Heralds-Office: Nay, did suppose this to be more authentick because more publick: And let me tell you, this is a very great Itch in some people, I knew one that translated a Book, and caused it to be Printed meerly to have the Title of Esq; added to his Name, and now it is grown so common a Custom, that Book-sellers usually title their Authors Gentlemen, Esquires, and sometimes Persons of Quality, that are onely poor mercenary fellows, that the Book may have the better esteem, may sell the better.74

In the event, then, romances did provide Kirkman with a sort of access to a higher social rank, as a gentleman in print, if not in blood – although, as the title of The Unlucky Citizen indicates, his success in this respect was rather short lived, and he was dogged by misfortune throughout his career. Nevertheless, it seems quite inappropriate to present The Unlucky Citizen, as Michael McKeon does, as a narrative in which romance is something to be left behind. McKeon’s treatment of Francis Kirkman delineates a movement from the ‘passive and futile imitation of romance’, with its constricting social imperatives, to something more upwardly mobile, as the young entrepreneur leaves behind him his vain fantasies of noble parentage to strike out on his own. Associated with the least forward-looking elements of society, romance (for McKeon) can only feature in a narrative of capitalistic advancement as something to be superseded.75 In fact, what Kirkman’s reading of romance indicates is precisely this ambition, admittedly ambivalently viewed, to rise socially. Not only does his status as an author represent a profitable return on the social capital embodied in his earliest reading, romance continues, through its deployment of images of true nobility, to provide an interpretative shape to Kirkman’s activities well into his adult life. Although he recalls his early enthusiasms with a good deal of irony, chivalric romance remains the filter through which Kirkman presents the most important events of his career. When he sets up a shop in the ‘Tower Liberty’, financed by his father, it makes itself felt again: ‘for this was I thankful, and as well pleased as if I had been Dub’d a Knight’ – that is, finally entered into maturity. Free at last from all ‘Commands’, Kirkman was finally free, 74 75

Kirkman (1673), sig. N3r–v. Michael McKeon, The Origins of the English Novel (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), pp. 244–8.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance like Faustus in his childhood reading, to do ‘what he listed’. His textual (and financial) accomplishments are rephrased as chivalric achievements. Evidently Kirkman felt that his past tribulations ‘proved’ the fitness of his new-found prosperity, an attitude signalled by another image drawn from the romances, but this time one of a satisfactory end to a career of adventure: ‘I had read in my Romances of the Pleasant lives of Hermits, how they lived without all trouble or care, and so did I, and was as well pleased as might be, I had the Sole Rule and Command of my Shop and Books, and that I thought was equal to the government of any Enchanted Island’76 (although this idyll is presently shattered by the outbreak of civil war). Financial security completes the circle begun by Kirkman’s youthful reading of romances – rather than indicating a progression beyond them.77 Kirkman need not be taken as typical, but he does provide a basis for understanding the sustained popularity of chivalric romance across such a long period of time. Evidently, it has something to do with social ambition. The romances Kirkman so enjoyed were probably written for an audience of a higher class than his own. Yet it would appear that there was something in these texts that allowed them to be read as Kirkman did, as aspirational – and without modification of the original texts.78 This factor, I would suggest, was the often contorted attempts that these narratives make to reconcile the qualities of blood and virtue. We have previously looked at grants of arms as a sort of parallel to the genealogical narratives of romance, in that they appear to involve a similar form of retrospective temporality. It may be that the parallel extends further than that. Chivalric narratives of the sort we have been discussing could not help but emphasise the idea of virtue. Like the grant of arms – which was at one and the same time a means of ascending the social ladder, and, as a hereditary symbol, of pulling that ladder up after oneself – they faced two ways, on the one hand functioning as a statement about the importance of blood to the social hierarchy, and, on the other, speaking of the possibility of rising up that very hierarchy as the result of one’s proven virtues. Looked at from a noble viewpoint, isolating the hero of romance from his original environment serves to prove the element of ‘merit’ inherent in hereditary honours; yet such texts at the same time cannot but give play to the counter-narrative that they eventually suppress – that of the young man who rises because of his virtues, but does not eventually turn out to be of noble birth. The case of Francis Kirkman clearly shows that, when

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Kirkman (1673), sig. P6r–v. Many of the adventures Kirkman narrates in The Unlucky Citizen have at the very least a flavour of the chivalric about them, being full of unexpected coincidences and sudden reversals of fortune. Although, as Margaret Spufford notes, seventeenth-century chap-book versions of Guy of Warwick did in fact tend to omit Guy’s genealogy, preferring to concentrate upon his individual prowess instead (Spufford (1985), p. 225).

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Reading Chivalric Romance people read chivalric romances in this period, one of the things they were doing was thinking about where they stood in society; and that such narratives are by no means as bleakly repressive, in social terms, as they appear at first sight to be. An early modern reader of romance literature, Kirkman’s account suggests, could read these texts ‘against the grain’: chivalric literature was also a literature of aspiration.79 It is no exaggeration to say that early modern society was obsessed with status. Lacking anything that we might recognise as an effective apparatus for law enforcement, it nevertheless felt the need for a variety of institutions and practices – the Court of Chivalry, the College of Arms, visitations – all devoted to the regulation of honours. Squabbles over place and precedence formed part of the common currency of day to day life for many of the members of such a culture; often minute social discriminations were conveyed through a wealth of detail; dress was regulated by rank rather than income; coats of arms were displayed everywhere – on churches, monuments, paintings and seals, in houses and during funerals; and, if we are to believe John Ferne, this habit of discrimination extended to the most trivial of details – gentlemen, he claims, may sit on ‘benches, or seates of yvorie’, and ‘drinke in gold or pretious mettals’, being honoured in ‘excellencie of utensils’.80 Yet this ornate, visual culture of status was always balanced by an emphasis on the inner qualities – the true nobility – that supposedly justified and explained such privilege. Accounts of the impact of humanism have traditionally tended to emphasise the ways in which it transformed these attitudes to status; it is seen as involving a new development in the debate over vera nobilitas, an emphasis on learning rather than arms.81 Such work tends to polarise chivalric and humanistic attitudes, perhaps taking the statements of humanistic writers too much at face value; within such a paradigm, it is only humanistic literature than can be socially efficacious in the way that romance seems to be for Francis Kirkman. One thing this chapter hopes to demonstrate is the extent to which rhetoric about the value of learning, far from displacing the dominant chivalric system of honours (centring around the ‘feates of armes’ that reveal the inner qualities that underwrite such status), is assimilated into it. As an author and a reader of chivalric romance, Francis Kirkman stands at the crossroads between these two ideals of nobility. His position is, perhaps, not a

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This need not necessarily surprise us. As Georges Duby points out, romances may originally have been written for an audience of juvenes, young knights, often younger sons, on the lookout for rich heiresses – see The Chivalrous Society, trans. Cynthia Postan (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1977). Ferne (1586), numbers fourteen and fifteen in his list of gentlemanly privileges, starting at sig. F7r. For example, Fritz Caspari, Humanism and the Social Order in Tudor England (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1954).

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance wholly comfortable one; some such conflict between an ideal of learning and an attraction towards martial glamour may be indicated by the rather whimsical tone with which he recalls his early enthusiasms, and it is worth remembering that his attempts to convert his romance reading into advancement were far from totally successful. Yet it should be clear that to read Kirkman’s account of his early life merely in terms of its significance for assessing the readership of popular literature is to impoverish his text. The same may be said of chivalric romance in general. I have already tried to indicate the breadth and diversity of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century audience for this sort of reading matter, and, although they may not have left behind such a full account of their reactions to it, there is no reason to suppose that the responses of other such readers to the experience of reading chivalric romance were any less rich and complex than Francis Kirkman’s. Concentrating on the lack of verisimilitude displayed by such narratives can only distract attention from the way in which they spoke to their readers in a language they understood – a language that, far from indicating an ‘escape’ from reality, or even a repressive social ideology necessarily, could provide a lexicon of attitudes that might actually help to achieve and justify a rise up the social ladder. For Francis Kirkman, books of chivalry were, in Kenneth Burke’s phrase ‘equipment for living’.82 What follows attempts to indicate something of the diverse uses this equipment could be put to in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

82

The Philosophy of Literary Form (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1979).

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Chapter 2 THE PROGRESS OF ROMANCE (I): KENILWORTH, 1575

As for [her] lighter points of character, – as that she allowed herself to be wooed and courted, and even to have love made to her; and liked it; and continued it beyond the natural age for such vanities; – if any of the sadder sort of persons be disposed to make great matter of this, it may be observed that there is something to admire in these very things, which ever way you take them. For if viewed indulgently, they are much like the accounts we find in romances, of the Queen in the blessed islands, and her court and institutions, who allows of amorous admiration but prohibits desire. But if you take them seriously, they challenge admiration of another kind and of a very high order; for certain it is that these dalliances detracted but little from her fame and nothing at all from her majesty, and neither weakened her power nor sensibly hindered her business.1

W

ITH THE benefit of some four hundred years’ worth of hindsight, we might go further than Francis Bacon’s famous analysis of the way in which relations between Elizabeth I and her courtiers tended to gravitate towards an explicitly fictional ideal of conduct. Far from detracting, however slightly, from her subsequent fame, the atmosphere of ‘romance’ that surrounded that Queen has now come to constitute a major element of her posthumous reputation. We tend to think of amorous ‘dalliance’ an as inherently private thing, but the subsequent resonance of many encounters between the monarch and her desiring subjects might be put down to the fact that, far from being intimate affairs, they were actually often just about as public as the late-sixteenth-century state could make them. The theme of ‘courtship’ was the constant burden of royal pageantry, and Elizabeth I’s reign abounds with romanticised set-pieces that have held their historical currency for artists and writers of subsequent ages.2 Although less embedded in the 1

2

‘In Felicem Memoriam Elizabethae’, in James Spedding, Robert Leslie Ellis and Douglas Denon Heath eds, The Works of Francis Bacon (London: Longman et al., 1857–74), 14 volumes, VI: 317. See Catherine Bates, The Rhetoric of Courtship in Elizabethan Language and Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 45–88.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance popular consciousness than some, few episodes from her reign can have been as frequently reproduced and reinterpreted – in novels and paintings, on the stage, and even in opera3 – as the entertainments held at Kenilworth Castle in Warwickshire as part of the Queen’s royal progress of 1575. Indeed, much of the enduring appeal of this fortnight of pageantry might be put down to its supposed contribution to the ongoing narrative of the ‘romance’ between the Queen and her favourite, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester. Nineteenth-century popular interest in the festivities was initiated by Walter Scott’s novel of 1821, Kenilworth, which used the entertainments as the backdrop to an (utterly anachronistic) tale of amorous intrigue, centred around the murder of Dudley’s wife, and his love for the Queen – as if the performance of desire in state pageantry was unthinkable if not accompanied by genuine passion. But the Kenilworth shows were also ‘romantic’ in a more technical sense. Francis Bacon’s comments identify the Elizabethan court as a place where fictional paradigms might dominate real behaviour; and the celebrations of 1575 were adorned with – structured to a large extent in terms of – narrative patterns drawn from romances, from the literature of chivalry. The Kenilworth shows stand as the centrepiece of Elizabethan pageantry. Over two weeks, the queen was regaled with a variety of devices, many of a chivalric character, several clearly derived from Malory. The immediate aftermath of the entertainments prompted three separate publications. One, the Pastime of the Progresse, is lost, but referred to in the printer’s preface to the second of our works, George Gascoigne’s Princelye Pleasures, which provides the text for many of the entertainments;4 and finally Robert Laneham’s Letter: Whearin, part of the entertainment untoo the Queenz Majesty . . . is signified.5 Composed in a highly distinctive orthography, this Letter purports to be written by the ‘Clark of the Counsel chamber door’, one Laneham or Langham, to his friend, the London mercer Humphrey Martin.6 Although it digresses on a number of points, such as Laneham’s personal history and present duties, the main value of his text lies in its detailed and idiosyncratic description of the festivities themselves.

3

4

5

6

Sir Walter Scott’s novel, Kenilworth, first published in 1821, is the key here. It sparked off a vogue for re-tellings of his own treatment of the pageantry of 1575 that encompassed innumerable dramatic and operatic adaptations, both within the British Isles and on the Continent. See Chapter 6, below. The Princely Pleasures at Kenelworth Castle, in John W. Cunliffe ed., The Complete Works of George Gascoigne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1907–10), 2 volumes, volume II. A Letter: Whearin, part of the entertainment untoo the Queenz Majesty . . . is signified (London: Edward Aldee, 1575). Further references to Laneham and Gascoigne will be given in the main body of the text. It is Walter Scott who introduces ‘Robert Laneham’ as a character in his novel. The name has stuck, and I use it here for convenience, but in fact the Letter itself refers to its author as both ‘Laneham’ and ‘Langham’. To complicate matters further, the true author of the Letter may in fact be a man called William Patten. See below, pp. 94–5.

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Kenilworth, 1575 Elizabethan pageantry once tended to be seen as offering a more or less uncritical celebration of the monarch and her reign. And indeed hard-headed historians such as G.R. Elton have argued that attention to the glamorous superficies of sixteenth-century court culture can only stand in the way of a clear grasp of the colder reality of Elizabethan politics. ‘No more reveries,’ he begged (with pointed reference to the work of Frances Yates and Roy Strong), ‘on accession tilts and symbolism, no more pretty pictures of gallants and galliards.’7 Yet it is possible to see an interest in courtly spectacle, not as an obstacle, but rather as offering an insight into the dynamics of courtly intrigue. Recent work on Laneham’s and Gascoigne’s texts has seen differences over the very programme of events that were to be staged at Kenilworth as a sort of courtly warfare, a struggle for maximum selfaggrandisement that was also a debate over the course that national foreign policy should take. According to Susan Frye, who has produced the most detailed and convincing account of these shows, the festivities of 1575 are best viewed in terms of a contest for the control of the Queen’s image, played out between the monarch and her host.8 It was also a contest over the nature of the chivalric narrative the court entertainments were to present. For Frye, these shows fall into two categories. The first, lasting some ten days, gave voice to Dudley’s personal and political ambitions, viewed in the context of foreign policy debates over the advisability of intervening in support of the Dutch revolt against the Spanish. The second consisted of those devices that the Queen is said to have substituted for Dudley’s planned entertainments, which were offensive to her. First, then, the Earl took the opportunity to promote his political ideals through the programme of entertainments he had scheduled for the Queen’s stay; after which Elizabeth took charge, re-structuring the pageantry in a way that neutralised any such implications. This division thus neatly resolves itself into one between the two surviving accounts of the festivities, since Gascoigne, recently returned from the Netherlands, and angling for the patronage of the Earl, prints the entertainments Elizabeth is said to have ‘censored’ (that is, he gives texts for shows that were planned but not performed) – whilst Laneham gives an account of what really happened.9 As an account of political antagonism encoded within

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8

9

Quoted in Richard McCoy, ‘The Lord of Liberty: Francis Davison and the Cult of Elizabeth’, in John Guy ed., The Reign of Elizabeth I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), pp. 212–28, p. 214. Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). This division is, in Frye’s account, underpinned by a theory of authorship. She accepts David Scott’s identification of the true author of the Letter as William Patten, in a way that allows her to emphasise the division between Gascoigne, who had already fought in the Netherlands, and Patten, a retainer of Lord Burghley – a leading opponent of intervention there.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance courtly spectacle, this is clearly over-schematic, since both texts must operate within a rubric of royal panegyric, but Frye’s account is exceptional in its sensitivity to the tensions that swarm underneath the bright surfaces of the pageantry – from the very moment that Elizabeth set foot on the grounds of the castle. Almost immediately, she found herself in a world in which tensions between monarch and courtier were played out through the medium of Arthurian mythology. The Queen arrived at Kenilworth Castle on the evening of Saturday 9 July, and passed through to the gatehouse, guarded by a giant porter. Initially bursting out ‘in a great pang of impatiens to see such uncooth trudging too and fro’ (A5v), the porter, subdued by the mere presence of Elizabeth, yielded up his keys to the monarch, bidding his trumpeters – also giant, and standing upon the wall – to ‘soound up a tune of welcum’. Laneham’s account digresses at this point upon the ‘artificially foormed’ (A6r–v) trumpets, but Gascoigne provides more information about the ‘dum shew’. The giants signified that ‘in the daies and Reigne of K. Arthure, men were of that stature. So that ye Castle of Kenelworth should seeme stil to be kept by Arthurs heires and their servants’ (92).10 This Arthurian theme continued within, where the Queen was met by the Lady of the Lake, ‘famous in king Arthurz book’: emerging ‘from the midst of the Pool, whear, upon a moovabl Iland, bright blazing with torches, she floting to land, met her Majesty with a well penned meter’ (A6v). These verses are recorded by Gascoigne; in effect a brief review of the castle’s history, they end with a gesture of homage: . . . as my love to Arthure dyd appeere, so shalt to you in earnest and in sport, Passe on Madame, you neede no longer stand, the Lake, the Lodge, the Lord, are yours for to commande.

(94)

This display of what Laneham’s Letter refers to as ‘offering up’ emerges in his text (and Frye’s) as an act of self-aggrandisement on Leicester’s part, the clue here being the queen’s tart response to the verses:11 ‘we had thought indeed the

10

11

Frye considers this celebration of ‘the restoration of Kenilworth’s glory under Dudley’ as one of a long string of insolencies, substituting his own ancestry (stained by treason) with an Arthurian pedigree that significantly links the Earl and his monarch in terms of (fictitious) genealogy. I would argue that the text as Gascoigne prints it leaves it unclear as to whether ‘Arthurs heires’ refers to Leicester and his line, or the Queen’s. But the contrast with Laneham – who opens his Letter with a topographical and historical account of the castle and its environs which quite fails to mention either Arthur, or Leicester’s ancestors – is interesting. Which, Gascoigne informs us, were ‘devised and penned by M. Ferrers, sometime Lord of misrule in the Court’. Frye’s account never quite gets to grips with the collaborative nature of the Kenilworth entertainments.

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Kenilworth, 1575 Lake had been oours, and doo you call it yourz noow: Wel we will heerin common more with yoo heerafter’ (A6v–7r). Renowned for her impromptu interventions in the entertainments her subjects offered her, Elizabeth here suggests that, in giving, the Lady – and, by implication, the Earl – arrogates too much to herself. If the verses do not constitute a calculated act of presumption on Dudley’s part, the Queen’s reply certainly has the effect of cutting him down to size, effectively rendering all the foregoing gestures of welcome redundant. Since Kenilworth is the property of the Queen, Leicester is deprived of the title of host (although not the responsibilities and costs attendant upon that position). Her words are a sharp reminder that, far from being an inherited possession – as Laneham felt the verses suggested – Kenilworth Castle had in fact been bestowed on Dudley in 1563.12 This introduction of the Lady was merely a prelude to a later entertainment. Her first appearance saw her fearful and ‘lowring’, for no specified reason. Later events served to clarify matters. The evening of Monday 18 July, the Queen was accosted on her return from a hunting expedition by Triton, who informed her, at the request of his lord ‘Monarch Neptune’, ‘how a cruel Knight, one syr Bruse sauns pitee, a mortall enmy untoo Ladiez of estate, had long lyen about the banks of this pooll in wayt with his bands heer to distress the Lady of ye lake, whearby she hath been restrayned . . . from having any use of her ancient liberty and territoriez in theez parts’ (C6r). Neptune begs assistance of the queen ‘az of his good leag and deer freend’. ‘Yoor only prezens,’ she is informed, ‘shallbe matter sufficient of abandoning this uncurtess knight, and putting all his bands too flight, & also of deliverauns of the lady oout of this thralldom’ (C6r–v). Laneham offers a prose summary; Gascoigne prints Triton’s verses, which identify Sir Bruse with Mars, and emphasise that ‘to defend and set at large’ ladies whose ‘virgins state’ is threatened is indeed a ‘worthy worke’, culminating in a celebration of ‘soveraigne maidens might’ (102–4). Liberated, as Triton has promised, by the mere ‘prezens’ of the monarch, the Lady makes her reappearance. As a token of thanks, the Lady offers ‘for her highness recreation’ a song – delivered, according to Laneham, by Arion, but by Proteus in Gascoigne.13 12

13

Laneham considers that the verses on ‘the auncientee of the Castl’ stated that it had been kept ‘most allweyz in the hands of the Earls of Leycester’ (A6v), although the verses printed in Gascoigne’s volume fail to state this outright. In fact, although Kenilworth had once been in the possession of Simon de Montfort, it fell into the hands of Henry IV, was granted to Dudley by Elizabeth, and eventually reverted to the crown after his death. Neither, however, mentions what we find recorded in a late-seventeenth-century collection of humorous anecdotes, that ‘Arion’, ‘finding his voice to be very hoarse and unpleasant when he came to performe it, he teares of his Disguise, and sweares he was none of Arion not he, but eene honest Har: Goldringham; which blunt discoverie pleasd the Queene better, than if it had gone thorough in the right way’ – BL MS Harley 6395, section 221. Goldringham is mentioned along with Hunnes and Ferrers as author of the verses used in the Lady of the Lake entertainment.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance ‘Protheus’ (in the Princely Pleasures) emphasises the helplessness of Neptune’s servants in their efforts to defend A Dame: whom none but you, deliver could from thrall: Ne none but you deliver us, from loitring life withall. She pined long in paine, as overworne with woes: And we consumde in endles care, to fend her from her foes. (105)

The plight of Neptune’s retainers here receives equal billing with that of the Lady. Simultaneously idle (‘loitring’) and strenuously ‘consumde’ by their duties as defenders, Arion–Proteus’ speech brings us to what Susan Frye considers to be the central concern of this interlinked series of entertainments: the desire of courtiers such as Robert Dudley to promote English intervention in the Netherlands against the Spanish.14 As in Spenser’s Faerie Queene, the Netherlands are figured here in romantic imagery permeated with political vocabulary – as a damsel in distress, her ‘fortresse’ ‘fenst’ in with Neptune’s ‘floods’, her ‘virgins state’ (my emphasis) imperilled by a ‘tyrant’ knight and his ‘bragging bands’ (103–4). For Susan Frye, Neptune’s servants represent, not the Netherlanders themselves, but rather the pro-intervention party at the English court. That the Lady’s defenders should be eaten up by a nagging sense of futility and restlessness would therefore seem apt: the concern is as much with humiliating English passivity as with any desire to secure the Lady’s ‘liberty’. The two extant sources for the Kenilworth entertainments are, for the most part, agreed as to what occurred. Gascoigne, however, informs us that this piece of Malorean pageantry had been significantly abbreviated: it had been planned that, ‘two dayes before the Ladie of the Lakes deliverie’, there should have been a battle on the water between ‘twentie or thyrtie shotte’ upon ‘heapes of bulrushes’ and Sir Bruse’s forces, with the latter being put to flight, before an appeal was made to Elizabeth to deliver the Lady permanently from her oppressor. ‘This,’ we read, ‘had not onely bene a more apt introduction to 14

Susan Frye quotes from a diplomatic dispatch by Antonio de Guaras of 18 July 1575, reporting rumours of ‘troops raised in support of the Dutch revolt’ and of ships being fitted out in Plymouth to transport soldiers to the Continent (56). For more detailed accounts of the international scene during this period, see R.B. Wernham, Before the Armada (London: Jonathan Cape, 1966), pp. 315–28, and The Making of Elizabethan Foreign Policy (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: The University of California Press, 1980). Wernham’s thesis is that English policy towards the Netherlands was concerned to remove the Spanish forces without replacing them with the French. Charles Wilson concentrates instead on the day to day shifts in emphasis among the Queen and her advisers – Queen Elizabeth and the Revolt of the Netherlands (London: Macmillan, 1970). It is interesting how the stress on ancient ‘liberties’ at Kenilworth correlates with the arguments made by William of Orange in support of his anti-Spanish position.

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Kenilworth, 1575 her deliverie, but also the skirmish by night woulde have bene both very strange and gallant: and thereupon her Majestie might have taken good occasion to have gone in her barge upon the water for the better executing of her deliverie’ (105–6). Gascoigne does not specify why this ‘skirmish’ was cancelled. Frye is of the opinion that it was censored, as speaking too strongly in favour of those ‘gallant’ courtiers who wished to give support to the Dutch revolt. In the entertainment as recorded by Laneham, Elizabeth liberates the Lady of the Lake by the mere virtue of her presence as a ‘worthier maide’. The night-time skirmish planned by ‘master Hunnes’, on the other hand, adds an intermediate term to this narrative: Sir Bruse is actually ‘put to flight’ by the troops from the Lady’s Castle, and her ‘deliverie’ by the Queen is therefore far more of a formality than it appears to be when the episode is cut. Without the skirmish, Sir Bruse remains an absent threat. It is the Queen alone, in this version, who possesses the power to enfranchise the Lady; she stands alone at the centre of the drama – rather than having a walk-on part at the end. In this series of linked entertainments, we see the characteristic narrative patterns of books of chivalry – and, in this case, Malory in particular – being used to articulate a complex debate between courtier and crown on matters of foreign policy. The Lady of the Lake in the Kenilworth show is evidently the one who presents Arthur with Excalibur and imprisons Merlin in Malory. ‘Breuse saunce Pyte’ is a minor character who appears intermittently throughout the middle of the Morte Darthur (generally in pursuit of some distressed damsel or other); he is described at one point as the ‘mooste meschyevoust knyght lyvynge’.15 Working within the characteristic narrative structures of chivalric literature, then, ‘the [proposed] military skirmish assails the royal claim to autonomy by denying that women may secure their own physical safety’, something as ‘unacceptable to Elizabeth’s foreign policy’ in its implications as it was to her ‘concomitant iconography of autonomy’.16 The Queen’s riposte thus involves more than just ‘romance’ in the sense of enforced romantic abjection; the cancellation of the skirmish sees Elizabeth inserting herself into Malorean narrative to take on the heroic role aspired to by her courtiers. Rather than incorporating a statement about the efficacy of masculine military prowess, the story told by the Lady of the Lake entertainment becomes one of virginity rescued by maidenhood from the clutches of an aggressive, rapist knight.17

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See James W. Spisak ed., Caxton’s Malory (Berkeley and Los Angeles: The University of California Press, 1983), 2 volumes, I: 294. Frye (1993), p. 82. Phillipa Berry notes that Elizabethan entertainments often represented the Queen herself ‘as a questing knight, committed to extending her own state of perfection through aggressive action’, and links this to the presence of female knights in Renaissance romances such as Amadis de Gaule and Orlando Furioso. See Of Chastity and Power (London and New York: Routledge, 1989), p. 86.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance Susan Frye’s argument about the true significance of the Kenilworth shows is a hard one to prove; the pageantry recorded by both Laneham and Gascoigne lacks any overt reference to anything much in the real world beyond the Queen and the castle she stands in. Her hypothesis is, however, buttressed by the fact that the Kenilworth pageants are not alone in representing foreign policy debates over the Netherlands in chivalric terms – in fact, one might suspect that subsequent English engagements with that issue are significantly shaped by the shows of 1575. As Frye points out, George Gascoigne’s own Spoyle of Antwerp presents that city as a dishevelled lady.18 Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene shows us Lady Belge and her sons – that is, the Low Countries and its seventeen provinces – requesting aid from the court of queen Mercilla against the tyrant Geryoneo – and here, as perhaps in 1575, Robert Dudley is allegorised as Arthur. Finally, Dudley’s own entry into the Netherlands in 1585 was packed with chivalric imagery of just the sort we find at Kenilworth. At one point, he was greeted in the Hague by a pageant comparing him to Arthur of Britain; at another, Leiden was represented as a ‘fair woman’ alternately assaulted and liberated by various allegorical characters.19 Whatever the true nature of the political subtext to the Kenilworth entertainments, what they do not seem to show is a culture in which chivalry is obsolescent or declining – on the contrary, it seems to be functioning as a language within which the most important matters of state may be articulated. Moreover, we can see that this language may be employed with both flexibility and nuance. One reason why Susan Frye’s case is so hard to prove, if she is right, is that the chivalric themes of the Kenilworth pageantry have so effectively accomplished their work. Open dissent in such a public context would clearly have been unacceptable. What these Malorean borrowings do is to produce whatever protests they might contain within a context that is almost totally unintelligible to non-courtly outsiders. It is in fact only through the minutest attention to details of language and context that one can find a suggestion of an oppositional subtext beneath what is, overtly, an entirely celebratory narrative, and it is notable that commentators on Kenilworth have failed to reach any consensus as to the theme of the shows. For many, they are uncomplicated panegyric. Others, taking their cue from a cancelled masque of Diana and Juno by Gascoigne, which concludes with an endorsement of the joys of marriage (‘never wight felt perfect blis but such

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The Spoyle of Antwerp (London: Richard Jones, 1576). An eyewitness account of the sack of Antwerp, The Spoyle presents the Spanish troops as committing ‘tyrannies’ (A4r), ‘barbarous cruelty’ (B7v), and ‘shamful rapes’ (C1v). Rather like Sir Bruse, they also display ‘obstynate pride and arrogancie’ (C3v), and ‘lien in wayte continually’ in hopes of finding a pretext to attack the city (A3v). R.C. Strong and J.A. Van Dorsten, Leicester’s Triumph (Leiden: Leiden University Press, 1964), pp. 47, 60.

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Kenilworth, 1575 as wedded beene’ (120)) feel the festivities have a matrimonial theme: Alan Young suggests that the entertainments were supposed to suggest that together in marriage Leicester and Elizabeth could revive the golden age of Arthur.20 This seems unlikely. Dudley may well have abandoned his hopes of a literal marriage to the Queen by 1575, having fathered a son by Lady Sheffield (who claimed he had also married him), and may also have begun his affair with Lettice Knollys – who he did marry three years later. The interpretation of Susan Frye seems far more probable: that the ‘marriage’ proposed is as much metaphorical as actual – a symbol of political alliance against the Spanish. And Susan Doran summarises the entertainments’ coded message as follows: should the Queen elect to remain chaste, she should free Dudley from his ‘thrall’ and desires, leaving him free to become a liberator in the name of Protestants abroad.21 One might take such a diversity of opinions as a warning against the overinterpretation of such a text, but this I think would be mistaken. Frye’s account is in many ways convincing, for the reasons given above – but it is a mark of the success of the entertainments that what would be clear to the courtly insider has to be construed from the outside out of hints and suggestions.22 The Kenilworth entertainments are not, of course, exclusively chivalric in tone. They contain many shows (such as Gascoigne’s masque of Juno and Diana) that seem far more in tune with the notion of a Renaissance revival of classical culture, and in fact seem to mix classical and romantic themes in a quite haphazard manner. But they certainly serve to suggest the continuing value of the language of chivalry as the currency of social esteem in the Elizabethan court. This is more than simply a matter of imitating literary forms. The narratives contained within romances such as the Morte Darthur, fantastic though they undoubtedly were, were not ‘escapist’ in any simple sense. Rather, they represented a literary tradition that articulated (albeit in idealised form) models of conduct that retained their force into the sixteenth century. Leicester’s men did not assume Malorean guises simply because to do so provided a diverting spectacle, although that is no doubt the case. They did so because those roles spoke to the courtiers’ conception of themselves as aristocrats and men. The burden of the Lady of the Lake entertainment in its original state is that military intervention on behalf of the Netherlanders is honourable work, consonant with the elevated rank of Elizabeth’s courtiers, and that to neglect such duties would constitute a disgrace. That such a

20 21 22

Tudor and Jacobean Tournaments (London: George Philip, 1987), pp. 153–4. Monarchy and Matrimony (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 69. I would argue that Susan Frye attempts to make her case look rather more solid than it actually is – by, for example, producing a theory of authorship that fits her argument, by asserting that cancelled entertainments must have been ‘censored’, and by systematically reading every event in what she considers to be the Dudley-sponsored half of proceedings as thinly coded abuse of the Queen.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance representation held some force is indicated by the manner in which the Queen moved to quash it, and to realign the focus of the entertainments back where it belonged – onto the spectacle of her own royal femininity. But there is more. The interest of Robert Laneham’s text lies in the fact that it is not simply, like Gascoigne’s, a script of the 1575 pageantry. Rather, it gives a full account of events throughout the Queen’s stay. Most studies of the Kenilworth festivities concentrate on the activities of a courtly elite. Yet, fascinatingly, Laneham’s Letter presents us with a social world permeated with chivalric forms at all levels. The Letter is not, in fact, exclusively courtly in its focus – or, rather, it is prepared, within the confines of this aristocratic context, to admit non-courtly material, parodically. Sunday 17 July saw the celebration of a ‘solem brydeale’ of a local couple (B6v), starting in the tiltyard of the castle. From here, Leicester’s parishioners proceeded to ‘make thear sheaw before the Castl in the great coourt’ (B6v), below the Queen’s window. The ‘lustie lads and bolld bachelarz’ of the parish, described in parodically military language, each armed with a rod of alder ‘for a spear’, entered first, arranged ‘in marciall order . . . too & too in a rank’ (B6v–7r), followed by sixteen men on horse. Laneham devotes particular attention to the bridegroom: . . . in hiz fatherz tawny worsted jacket . . . a payr of harvest glovez on hiz hands, az a sign of good husbandry: a pen & inkorn at his bak. for he woold be knowen to be bookish Lame of a leg that in his yooth was broken at football: wellbeloved yet of hiz mother that lent him a nu mufflar for a napkin that was tyed too hiz gyrdl for lozyng [so as not to lose it]: It was no small sport too marke this minion in hiz full apointment. (B7r)

There followed a morris dance; three ‘puzels’ (maids), ‘as bright az a breast of bacon’ (B7v); and a ‘gentl’ bearer of the bridal cup, pestered by flies attracted by the confections therein, but, ‘like a tall fello’ (B8r), beating them off (killing scores at a time, like a romance hero; Laneham’s parenthetical comment is, ‘see what manhood may do!’). Following up the rear of this rustic procession came the bride – some thirty years old, ‘ugly fooul ill favourd’ (B8r), but thrilled – mistakenly, as it turned out – by the prospect of dancing before the Queen.23 The centrepiece of these celebrations was the quintain, originally a training exercise for cavalry troops. This sport involved tilting at a target hung from a cross-bar, the other end being weighted with a bag; the object was to hit the target without being subsequently upended from behind by the bag as the cross-bar spun round under the impact. Laneham’s language,

23

Elizabeth preferred to be entertained by ‘delectabl dauncing’ in her own chamber instead. We are told that she did catch something of the Coventry Hock-Tuesday show, and commanded that it be shown again two days later (C4v).

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Kenilworth, 1575 which has hitherto mixed high and low styles as a way of sending up the wedding party, at this point modulates into the overtly mock-chivalric: The Brydegroome for preeminens had the fyrst coors at the Quintyne, brake hiz spear treshardiment: but his mare in hiz manage did a littl so titubate [trip]. that mooch a doo had hiz manhod to sit in his sadl, & tooscape the foyl of a fall: with the help of his band yet he recooverd himself, and lost not hiz styrops (for he had none too his saddl): had no hurt as it hapt, but only that hiz gyrt burst, and lost hiz pen & inkorn that he waz redy to wep for. But hiz handkercher, az good hap waz, found he safe at his gyrdl: that cheerd him sumwhat, & had good regard it shoold not be fyeld. For though heat & coolnes upon sundry occazions made him sumtime too sweat, and sumtime rumatick: yet durst he be bollder too blo hiz noze & wype hiz face with the flapet of his fatherz jacket, then with hiz mothers mufflar. tiz a goodly matter, when yooth iz mannerly brought up in fatherly loove & motherly aw. (B8v)

Far from being an aristocratic hero of the tiltyard, this rustic buffoon inadvertently disgraces himself for the amusement of his betters. Unable to control his horse (an important skill in chivalric romances)24 the bridegroom is neither manly nor mannerly, two qualities Laneham ironically attributes to him. Wiping his nose on his sleeve, as his upbringing in an inverted regime of paternal love and maternal authority has taught him, this sickly child represents a comic mismatch with his ageing bride to be. He is, in fact, practically a parody of the Elizabethan courtier – a ‘minion’, effeminised by a female authority figure, mindful of his deportment, dressed to the nines (with an analogous sense of clothing as symbol, his gloves a ‘sign of good husbandry’), and desperate to show himself to be as literary as he is martial.25 Failure at the quintain, an aristocratic training exercise, thus serves to define all his inadequacies. The effect is not to undermine, but rather to reinforce the courtly identity; Laneham, at any rate, seems oblivious to the sense in which the bridegroom might be considered to resemble a courtier. Instead, his obvious relish in sending him up merely underlines his own assumed superiority; inferior status is produced here as a deficiency of chivalric ‘manhood’. The rest of the rustics are, of course, no more competent: the paragraph Laneham devotes to their subsequent attempts at the quintain is a catalogue of pratfalls, the ‘specialty of the sport’ for the tutored, courtly eye being to watch how ‘sum for hiz slakness had a good bob with the bag, and sum for his haste too toppl dooun right, & cum tumbling to the post’ (C1r). Eventually, however, the riders leave off tilting at a wooden target to run at one another. 24

25

Consider for example Arundel, the horse in Bevis of Southampton, which refuses to be ridden by anyone other than the eponymous hero. Note that the bridegroom’s ineptitude here makes him a particularly bad match for that ‘stale stallion’, his bride. ‘Tam marti quam mercurio’ – as Gascoigne’s personal motto puts it.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance ‘Thear to see the stearn countenauns, the grym looks, the cooragioous attempts, the desperat adventurez, the daungeroous coorvez [curves], the feers encoounterz,’ of the wedding guests is a ‘lively pastime’ indeed (C1r–v). What interests Laneham in these festivities is their distance from the aristocratic forms they ape. Larding his discourse with French terms (‘puzels’, ‘tres hardiment’) and a vocabulary reminiscent of romances, Laneham’s narrative voice inevitably reminds us that this drama is being played out in front of a spectator of higher rank; higher rank in this case being equated with greater right of access to the rituals of chivalric identity Leicester’s parishioners inadvertently burlesque. It is worth noting that, in the projected programme of entertainments, this ‘brydeale’, and the Hock-Tuesday show that follows it, would have been placed alongside the ‘skirmish’ Gascoigne describes, and the deliverance of the Lady of the Lake by the Queen, thus reinforcing their message about the chivalric basis of the aristocratic persona: the skirmish was to have taken place two days before the Lady was liberated – that is, on a Saturday; whilst the bride-ale occurred on Sunday, 17 July. The maladroit efforts of the wedding guests in the tiltyard exist in an antithetical relationship to the ‘gallant’ mock-warfare that was to have been played out on the lake the day before – just as, possibly, the ill-favoured bride, ‘hot az the weather waz’ (B8r), might echo the unmarried Elizabeth.26 Laneham’s account shows us two things. Firstly, it suggests the degree to which the basis of the aristocratic point of view in this period was, at some level, an inherently chivalric one: the distance separating court from commoners is most clearly articulated for the former here when the rustics mimic knightly conduct. Secondly, however, the culture of chivalry is not exclusively aristocratic. Obviously it is nearly impossible to reconstruct the world view of the wedding guests through the thick layers of condescension Laneham buries them under, but it is clear that they are not intending to be absurd – indeed, their lack of self-consciousness is one of the main reasons they are funny. What the courtly eye fails to take into account – fails, at any rate, to recognise to any degree more than enhances its comic pleasure – is that the wedding guests, unaware that they were providing material for mocking pamphlets, might have their own investments in their activities. The bride-ale celebrants perform their quintain within a context of rural tradition. Burton mentions it as one of the ‘common recreations of the countryfolks’,27 Quarles includes ‘ceremonious Quintils’ among those ‘harmlesse 26

27

Frye (1993) suggests that this spectacle should be regarded as directed at, rather than performed before, the Queen. The bride-ale, she writes, presents ‘an unflattering paraphrase of Elizabeth as an unmarried middle-aged woman’ (62) – which would indeed be an affront. But what paraphrase then does the bridegroom present of Leicester himself, with his chivalric and cultural aspirations? The Anatomy of Melancholy (London: Chatto and Windus, 1887), p. 340.

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Kenilworth, 1575 sports . . . that belongs To shepheards rurall mirth’,28 and Thomas Blount defines it as ‘a game or sport in request at Marriages’, being set up ‘in the Highway, where the Bride and Bridegroom are to pass’ – the ‘yong-men’ at a wedding ‘run a Tilt on Hors-back; and he that breaks most Poles, and shews most activity, wins the Garland’.29 Yet this rural pastime originated as a knightly training exercise for tournaments and battle. Most chivalric rituals and institutions are hedged round with restrictions and prohibitions designed to exclude those not of gentle status; trial by combat, for instance, was supposedly forbidden those below that rank.30 The quintain seems to have been an exception, practised by both high and low. Nor is it the case that the practice died out once it was appropriated by commoners. Catherine de Medici’s courtiers ran at the quintain at a tournament in Bayonne as late as 1565.31 One might conjecture that the appeal of the quintain for Laneham’s bride-ale guests was to some degree at least aspirational. A commoner could not normally participate in the sort of tournaments that one might more usually expect to be staged in the tiltyard of Kenilworth castle. Both aristocratic and yet not restricted to the aristocracy, the quintain thus appears to be an example of festive inversion, a brief moment during which commoners could appropriate and participate in that most socially elevated of sign systems, chivalry. It may be that the bride-ale sports offered a period of licence during which local tensions could be asserted and defused without serious consequences; it seems significant that the Kenilworth quintain is described as quickly degenerating into an all-out brawl of sorts. In the context of a marriage, however, the quintain also seems to constitute a ritualised assertion of the manliness of the participants, before one of the young men becomes to some degree at least detached from his peer group through marriage – a sort of stag night with weaponry. The rustic men are ‘lustie’ and ‘bolld’, they display ‘coorage’, are ‘stearn’, ‘grym’ and ‘fers’ – in short, they present an epitome (or rather, seen through Laneham’s eyes, they try and fail to present such an epitome) of much of what sixteenth-century England considered essential to the masculine

28 29

30 31

The Shepheards Oracles (London: M.F., 1645), sig. K3r. Glossographia (London: Thomas Newcomb, 1656). According to John Brand, the quintain was a ‘common sport at weddings, till the breaking out of the civil wars, even among people in the lower rank of life’ – see his Observations on the Popular Antiquities of Great Britain, revised Henry Ellis (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1853–5), 3 volumes, I: 177 and II: 163–4, and Joseph Strutt’s The Sports and Pastimes of the People of England, revised J. Charles Cox (London: Methuen and Co., 1903), pp. 33, 105–10. The examples given by Brand suggest that, by Laneham’s day, the quintain was practised by commoners in mainly rural areas. See Chapter 4, below. Richard Barber and Juliet Barker, Tournaments (Woodbridge: The Boydell Press, 1989), pp. 16, 136.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance persona.32 It seems worth noting that, so far as one can tell, the wedding guests inhabit this world of rural chivalry without any sense of indecorum – it is the Letter that describes them in this way. The image of the chivalric quintain thus seems to circulate between social levels – developed as a training exercise for knights, practised by the peasantry of Warwickshire, and, finally, readapted by Robert Laneham for his own humorous purposes. We might discern a similar contrast between popular festivity and courtly appropriation in the subsequent entertainment, the Hock-Tuesday show performed by the citizens of Coventry that same day. Although the bride in the previous show is said to be accompanied by two honest ‘toounsmen’ of her parish, it seems fairly clear that the bride-ale, with its ‘harvest glovez’ and morris dancing, operates within a context of rural festivity. The Coventry play, on the other hand, despite its being paired with the bride-ale as one single ‘sheaw’ at one point, gives expression to a distinctively urban point of view. Laneham’s tone is more respectful on the surface, but still so exuberant as to suggest irony: heertoo folloed az good a sport (me thooght) prezented in an historicall ku, by certain good harted men of Coventree, my Lordes neighboors thear: who . . . made petition that they moought renu noow their olld storiall sheaw: Of argument how the Danez whylom heere in a troubloous seazon wear for quietnesse born withall & suffeard in peas, that anon by outrage & importabl insolency, abuzing both Ethelred the king then and all estates everie whear byside: at the grevoous complaint & coounsell of Huna the kings chieftain in warz, on Saint Brices night. Ann. Dom. 1012 (Az the book sayz) that falleth yeerely on the thirteenth of November, wear all disptcht and the Realm rid. And for becauz the matter mencioneth how valiantly our English women for loove of their cuntree behaved themselvez: expressed in actionz & rymez after their maner, they thought it moought moove sum myrth to her Majestie the rather. (C1v–2r)

The show itself involved a mock battle between Anglo-Saxon and Danish forces, and is described by Laneham as a chaotic affair, developing from a ‘hot skirmish’ into a ‘blazing battail’, horses and riders tumbling in the dust, the Danes ‘eager for purchaz of pray’, their opponents ‘stoout for redemption of libertie’. ‘Twise the Danes had ye better, but at the last conflict, beaten doun, overcom and many led captive for triumph by our English weemen’ (C4r).

32

Love versus chivalry is of course one of the most prominent themes in romance literature (in Chrétien’s Erec, for instance), which frequently plays off the genealogical imperative to reproduce against the masculine persona that embodies the status that these duties are meant to sustain and propagate. It is, however, hard to tell whether the rustic quintain constitutes a ritual assertion that the groom’s masculinity will survive his marriage, or something in the nature of a last fling in that direction.

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Kenilworth, 1575 It is striking that Susan Frye fails to discuss this ‘storiall sheaw’ at length in her account of the Kenilworth festivities, since it fits her argument rather better than some of the examples she does give. Here we have an entertainment that speaks directly to the theme of national liberation, explicitly said to be sanctioned by the Earl of Leicester – and one which, moreover, employs a rhetoric of flattery rather than abuse. For whilst most of the ‘shews’ discussed by Frye are construed by her as implicitly insulting, we might read this traditional entertainment, appropriated by the Earl for his own political purposes, as attempting to make an argument for intervention in the Netherlands, not by relegating the Queen to the wings of a drama in which ‘gallant’ chivalric defenders take centre stage, but by offering a persuasive depiction of the role of valiant ‘English women’ in such a project. Once again, it seems possible to draw a distinction between the significance of a traditional show for its players, and the meanings it may have had superimposed upon it when placed in the context of a series of entertainments for the Queen. On the face of it, the Coventry citizens’ show simply celebrates patriotic resistance to the Danish yoke, but, according to one recent commentator, it may have had other, sociological functions. Originally Hock-Tuesday, in the week following Easter, had been paired with Hock-Monday, when, ‘on both days the men and women, alternately, with great merriment intercepted the public roads with ropes, and pulled passengers to them, from whom they exacted money, to be laid out in pious uses’.33 For the women, Hocktide must have represented a pleasant reversal of their customary social position, a time when they were granted license to venture out into the community and dominate their menfolk. (The custom was often regarded as a source of disorder, and one bishop condemned it as a ‘disgraceful sport’ in 1450.)34 In the urban environment of sixteenth-century Coventry, however, this festive inversion of the sexual order – with its dubious display of kidnap and bondage on the public highways – was significantly toned down, and replaced by the show of resistance to the Danes, in which women defeated men in battle. Were these female parts played by boys, as in the public theatre? Regarding the HockTuesday show as a development of the traditional holiday, involving both men and women, might suggest otherwise.35 For Charles Phythian-Adams, who believes that women played the women’s parts in the Coventry show, the mock-battle is significantly less threatening

33

34

35

Quoted in Brand (1853–5), I: 187. See also Ronald Hutton, The Rise and Fall of Merry England (New York and Oxford: The Oxford University Press, 1994), pp. 26, 59–60. Hutton (1994), p. 60. He also notes that the women ‘seem . . . not only to have carried it out with gusto but to have found more willing victims. At any rate they inevitably raised considerably more money’ (26). Benjamin Griffin suggests that the women’s parts were taken by men, although he is candid about the lack of conclusive evidence. ‘The Breaking of the Giants: Historical Drama in Coventry and London’, English Literary Renaissance 29 (1999), pp. 3–21.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance than the traditional Hocktide. In this new civic ritual of inversion, ‘those in subordinate roles encroached in some way only on certain attributes of socially superior positions. At Hocktide representatives of the women overcame the menfolk in their unaccustomed masculine role as warriors and not as husbands and householders’, as was previously the case.36 Nevertheless, this inversion of the conventional gender assignments of romance, with women beating men, contained and limited within a patriotic narrative, is still said to have had a therapeutic function. For its participants, the Hock-Tuesday show offered, within limits, an institutionalised ‘safety-valve’ for tensions created by what Phythian-Adams describes as a thoroughly hierarchical and exclusionary society, through a temporary relaxation or inversion of that order. It is, moreover, appropriate that the show should have been presented in tandem with a wedding in 1575. Phythian-Adams contrasts Hock-Tuesday with May Day celebrations, which were ‘primarily a festival of unmarried young people’, as against one which concerned ‘the women or the wives’.37 In our discussion of the rustic bride-ale, we saw marriage regarded, from the male point of view, with what might have been some trepidation, as a potential threat to the masculine persona. Here, it is the losses incurred in the transition from maid to wife that are addressed through a simulation of warfare, as the Coventry women exact symbolic revenge for their inferior domestic status.38 There are further issues at stake in the staging of the Hock-Tuesday skirmish. In the sixteenth century, Coventry was a city in decline from her late medieval heyday. Formerly the third-largest provincial city in England, exporting textiles internationally, Coventry’s prosperity had been successfully challenged by her overseas competitors, and by the time of the Kenilworth entertainments, the community was only just beginning to recover from a catastrophic economic collapse. Charles Phythian-Adams suggests that in 1563, the city’s population may have even halved since the start of the century, and although there may have been a demographic resurgence after that point, there is some evidence that it was attributable to the appearance of numbers of poor immigrants.39 Even if the city was recovering by the time of the royal 36

37

38

39

‘Ceremony and the Citizen: The Communal Year at Coventry, 1450–1550’, in Peter Clark and Paul Slack eds, Crisis and Order in English Towns, 1500–1700 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), pp. 57–85, p. 69. Phythian-Adams (1972), p. 66. For May Day celebrations, see Leah Marcus, The Politics of Mirth (Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 1986), p. 151. For Laneham, the show is merely another example of ‘good pastime’. Nevertheless, he does appear to acknowledge something of this regulatory function: Hock-Tuesday, he writes, ‘did so occupy the heads of a number, that likely inoough woold have had woorz meditationz’ (C2r). It is also clear from his account that the show was performed with the approval of the civic authorities of Coventry. See Charles Phythian-Adams, Desolation of a City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), p. 237 and n. 27. Phythian-Adams also discusses the collapse of medieval social institutions such as guilds and monasteries.

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Kenilworth, 1575 progress of 1575, the fact remains that Coventry was undoubtedly much reduced from its late-medieval state of prosperity and influence. What the Hock-Tuesday show seems to do is to substitute for this unpalatable reality a consolatory vision of the city as a ‘valiant’ community of honour. Importing aristocratic ideals as a means of urban self-definition, the Hock-Tuesday show allows the townspeople of Coventry to assert their value to the Tudor state in terms of a martial, as opposed to an economic, historical pedigree. It not only articulates the town’s sense of itself as a communal grouping, it makes a statement about that group’s nature. ‘Unaccustomed’ (as Phythian-Adams puts it) though the townsfolk might have been to martial roles in their day-to-day lives, the Hock-Tuesday play clearly asserted that some such element was in fact a distinctive part of their identity as citizens of Coventry. If we were to define a chivalric narrative as one centring on the deeds of knights, it is clear that the Hock-Tuesday show could not have been ‘properly’ chivalric, dealing as it did with the heroic deeds of mere townspeople. What is interesting is that Laneham chooses to give this re-enactment of medieval warfare a specifically chivalric overtone, thus linking it to the more overtly romance-derived shows that were being played out elsewhere in the programme of entertainments. The players were led by one Captain Cox, ‘by profession a Mason’, but also a ‘good Marshall at musters’. It is Captain Cox who provides an overt connection between this world of provincial festivity, courtly entertainment, and the culture of literary chivalry. He is introduced by Laneham with a literary allusion: an ‘od’ man, ‘right skilfull, very cunning in fens, and hardy az Gawin’ (C2r–v). The reference to Arthurian romance also serves as a preface to his other distinguishing feature. Captain Cox is no mere would-be soldier. Rather, like the Warwickshire bridegroom before him, and like the stereotypical Elizabethan courtier, he presents a curious blend of literary and martial aspirations. For the Coventry stonemason is in possession of a library – probably including a number of editions printed by Caxton – that would be the envy of any modern scholar: great oversight hath he in matters of storie: For az for king Arthurz book, Huon of Burdeaus, The foour suns of Aymon, Bevys of Hampton, the squyre of lo degree, The knight of courtesy, and the Lady Faguell, frederik of Gene, Syr Eglamoour, Sir Tryamoour, Syr Lamwell, Syr Isenbras, Syr Gawyn, Olyver of the Castl, Lucres and Eurialus, Virgils life, The castl of Ladiez. The wido Edyth, The king & the Tanner, frier Rous, Howle-glas, Gargantua, Robinhood, Adambel, Clim of the clough & William of cloudesley, The Churl & the Burd, The seaven wise Masters, The wife lapt in a Morels skin, The sak full of nuez, The seargeaunt that became a Fryer, Skogan, Collyn cloout. The fryar & the boy, Elynor Rumming, and the Nutbrooun maid, with many moe then I rehearz heere: I beleeve hee have them all at hiz fingers endz. (C2v–3r)

Besides which, Captain Cox is a collector of books of ‘Philosophy both morall & naturall’ and ‘Allmanaks of antiquitee’ (C3r). But it is the Captain’s books of 89

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance ‘storie’ that are of interest here. Although they contain examples of other types of reading matter, such as jestbooks, they are predominantly books of chivalry – ‘king Arthurz book’, for instance, is usually identified as Sir Thomas Malory’s Morte Darthur, possibly in Caxton’s edition.40 Captain Cox, in short, has been reading the exact same books as the men who planned the Lady of the Lake entertainment that was to reach its conclusion the very next day. And although his subsequent interest has been seen to lie in his presence as a witness for the reading habits of the non-gentle ranks of early modern England,41 it is evident that what we have here is a genuinely popular literature – ‘popular’ not simply in the sense of ‘appealing to the lower orders’, but ‘popular’ in the sense of being of general appeal. Nor is this reading matter ‘escapist’ in any simple sense; rather, it finds echoes in social ideals and practices, again amongst high and low alike: Elizabeth’s courtiers see their own aspirations figured in a narrative of knights and maidens, whilst the Earl of Leicester’s parishioners engage in nuptial rituals adapted from the medieval training ground; and it may well be that the Coventry show constitutes yet another example of a chivalric representation at Kenilworth. As we have already seen, Caxton’s Malory purported (according to its preface) to have been written for an audience of ‘noble prynces, lordes and ladyes, gentylmen or gentylwymmen’, and although no doubt a substantial figure in Coventry life, Captain Cox’s own social world was as far from that of the heroes of his favourite reading matter as it was from that of the lords and ladies who had temporarily descended upon Warwickshire in the summer of 1575. Romances may feature commoners as protagonists – herdsmen or kitchen boys – but these unfortunates have a distinct habit of turning out to be members of the nobility, whether in disguise or lost at birth. Such books’ focus is in fact resolutely aristocratic, their emphasis on heroic deeds (which might seem to lend them a meritocratic air) notwithstanding, for it is their common assumption that a heroic temperament is in itself a class attribute. Seen from one point of view, then, the rustic bride-ale and Hock-Tuesday show operate within a context of time-honoured tradition, and reflect the capacity of chivalric iconography to extend far beyond the narrowly drawn and exclusive social circles they supposedly apply to. From another, they could look like something quite different and altogether more suspicious, more like attempts to infringe the prerogatives of their betters. As he appears in the Letter, Captain Cox is a figure of civic and local pride, heading the players in a show designed to celebrate Coventry’s place in a narrative of national liberation. Moreover, as a statement about the corporate honour of the citizens, the show represents a civic variation upon those 40

41

F.J. Furnivall ed., Robert Laneham’s Letter (London: Chatto and Windus, 1907) considers the exact editions that might have made up Captain Cox’s library, xv–cxxxvii. See below, Chapter 6. Captain Cox eventually attained such importance that one of F.J. Furnivall’s many editions of the Letter is named after him, as Captain Cox, his Ballads and Books.

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Kenilworth, 1575 themes dealt with by romances, making them the protagonists of a narrative about their own heroic attributes. In presenting the Hock-Tuesday show, the citizens of Coventry were laying claim to a language of honour that others might have felt was in fact their rightful and exclusive possession. Laneham’s attitude to this piece of pageantry is on the face of things positive, although possibly slightly patronising (the show is good ‘sport’, the citizens ‘good harted men’) and ultimately, perhaps, indeterminate. His treatment lacks the overt mockery lavished on the rustic wedding, being altogether more muted in tone; on the other hand, passages that seem to be on the face of things merely descriptive reportage about horses and riders tumbling in the dust are strongly reminiscent of the previous entertainment.42 But that this was the case – that communities might lay claim to chivalric attributes and iconography, and that such attempts might receive a hostile reception from those who considered themselves the proper objects of such representations – might be confirmed by the presence in the Kenilworth entertainments of a final piece of Malorean spectacle. This was ‘a ridiculoous devise of an auncient minstrell, & hiz song’ (C8v).43 Presenting his entertainment before a ‘woorshipfull company’, this performer wore on his chest a representation of ‘the auncient armez of Islington’ (D1v). A coat of arms was the visible sign of gentility, and as if to bring out the inconguity in such a locale laying claim to a title of honour – Islington being at that time little more than a village and famous only as a centre of dairy production – the minstrel proceeded to deliver a ludicrous encomium of Islington’s excellence in that field as part of the blazon of this coat of arms: a field argent, as the field and groound in deed, whearin the milkwivez of this woorthy tooun, and every man els in hys faculty doth trade for hiz living: on a fess Tenny [an orange band] three platez betweene three milke tankerds proper . . . For Creast, upon a wad of ote strawe for a wreath, a boll of furmenty: Wheat (az yee kno) iz the most precious gyft of Ceres, and in the midst of it, sticking a doozen of hornspoonz in a bunch az the instruments meetest too eate furmenty porage wythall . . . This scoochion with beastz very aptly agreeing both to the armz and to the trade of the bearerz, gloriously supported. Between a gray Mare (a beast meetest for carying of mylktankards) her pannell on her bak, as alwayz reddy for servis at every feast and brydale at neede . . . In the sro undergraven . . . a proper woord, an hemistichi, well squaring with al the rest, taken out of Salerns chapter, of things that most noorish mans body: Lac, Caseus infans. That iz good milke and yoong cheez. (D2r–3r)

According to Laneham, the minstrel (unaware of the satirical point of this show) seems to expect praise for this ‘Beauparlar’ (D3r), but finds himself 42 43

In both cases, the participants are ‘feers’ (C1v, C4r), and display ‘coorage’ (C1r, C4r). The ‘devise’ was never, in the end, played; the Letter simply seems to describe a rehearsal before a courtly audience.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance sorely mistaken. One might have thought that he had made himself sufficiently ridiculous with this laughable blazon – indeed his part seems to have been written with this aim in mind44 – but, just to underline the point, a ‘good fello of the cumpany’ weighs in with his own interpretation of the coat of arms: Three milk tankerds proper in a fielde of cloouted cream, three green cheesez upon a shealf of cakebread. The fyrmenty boll and hornspoonz: cauz their profit coms all by horned beastz. Supported by a Mare with a gald back, & thearfore still covered with a panniell, frisking with her tail for flyez, and her filly fole neying after the dam for suk. This woord Lac, Caseus infans. That is, a fresh cheez and cream, & the common cry that theez milk wivez make in London streetes yeerly.

Scarecely different from the original blazon, one might have thought. Nevertheless, ‘heerat,’ Laneham tells us, ‘every man laught a good, save the minstrell’, whose humiliation at finding himself ‘crost with a contrary cue’ has to be assuaged before the entertainment can continue. Eventually, he delivers a song, ‘warraunted for story oout of king Arthurz acts, the first booke and 26. Chapter’ (D5r) – that is, a versified tale from Malory. This narrative is, significantly, one of aspiration to glory and a challenge to courtly authority from the margins. Towards the start of the Morte Darthur, with Arthur newly installed as King of England, he receives a messenger from King Ryons of North Wales, informing him that Ryons has lately overcome eleven kings in battle, taking their beards as trophies to make a fringe for his ‘mantel’. Ryons now less than politely requests Arthur’s own facial hair to supplement his collection – the alternative being war. This threat Arthur describes as ‘the most shamefullest message that ever I herd speke of ’. He refuses to do Ryons this ‘homage’ – instead, he declares, ‘he shall do me homage on bothe his kneys, or els he shall lese his hede’.45 In the Letter this tale undergoes minor modifications. ‘Ryons’ features as ‘Ryens of Northgalez’, and the messenger becomes a dwarf (who is described as entering the hall ‘peartly’). More significantly, the pertness of both King and messenger is implicitly rebuked by an addition to Malory, describing the courtly manner of Sir Kay the seneschal’s handling of the dwarf, as he takes control of the situation in the panicked ‘stoound’ that follows the challenge: Sylens, my suffrainz quoth the courteyz Knight, And in that stoound the chearm becam still, 44

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The minstrel is disappointed by his reception, even though he has been ‘made privy, [that] all waz but for sport’ (D3v), and the text actually seems reluctant to accept that he is a performer, rather than a real ridiculous minstrel: we are told for instance that he was ‘apparelled partly as he woold himself ’ (C8v). The Letter’s particular preference is always for those who make inadvertent fools of themselves. Spisak ed. (1983), I: 60.

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Kenilworth, 1575 The Dwarfs dynner full deerly waz dight, For wine and wastell [fine bread] hee had at hiz will, And when hee had eaten and fed hiz fill. One hundred peeces of coyned gould, Wear given the Dwarfe for hiz message bolld.

An insulting message is repaid with impeccable courtesy, and Arthur’s wouldbe antagonist is defeated in the arena of diplomatic one-upmanship, just as he will shortly be beaten on the field of battle. What we see here seems to be the tale from Caxton’s Malory being drawn into the significatory ambit of the ‘devise’ of the minstrel. Ryons’ challenge is implicitly analogous to that presented by the minstrel himself, who, with his coat of arms, is an overreaching visitor at court afflicted by delusions of grandeur. In reality, he is no more going to be admitted to the sort of parity of esteem with the gentlemen of the court that he seems to claim than Ryons is going to triumph over King Arthur. ‘Bolld’ pertness is precisely what the character of the minstrel is diagnosed as suffering from, albeit in a comic vein. The parallels are hardly exact, to be sure. Ryons in Malory is evidently a great King, his territories encompassing not merely ‘North Wales’ but also ‘Ireland and . . . many isles’ (although these additional territories are omitted in the Letter). Yet for a Tudor audience, it may be possible that such references betokened a degree of provinciality that actually facilitated the mapping of a powerful monarch onto a small metropolitan outpost famous primarily for excellence in milk and cheese. What we have with this minstrel ‘devise’ is satire; its theme is that of the tale adapted from Malory – the aspirations of the unworthy. Translated into a sixteenth-century context, the targets are no longer contests within the chivalric community, but rather appropriations of the language of honour beyond the confines of the chivalric classes as strictly defined. We have already seen the Coventry citizens putting on a show ‘in an historicall ku’ that made a bold statement about their corporate honour and martial identity, and the precise attitude the Letter takes to the Hock-Tuesday show is unclear. The ‘ridiculous devise of an auncient minstreel’, on the other hand, leaves no such ambiguity. So far as the courtiers Laneham is mixing with are concerned, communities such as Islington – and, possibly, Coventry – have no business laying claim to any sort of ‘historicall’ pedigree. Indeed, the minstrel-show has been staged to make precisely this point. The ‘devise’ of the minstrel has the effect of filtering one community’s world-view through that of another. Civic pride becomes – just pride; the heroic collapses bathetically into the mock-heroic and comic. Seen through the eyes of the seasoned courtier, the ‘good harted’ and valiant men and women of Coventry could easily be as absurd as a coat of arms designed to commemorate a town’s pre-eminence in dairy produce. That the Letter is in some degree an instrument of satire is, then, certain. What is less clear is exactly how far its ridicule is supposed to extend. For the 93

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance Letter itself may be an elaborate piece of mockery, directed at its supposed author. Much scholarly energy has been expended in attempts to track down Robert Laneham, possibly fuelled by covert suspicions about the author of a familiar letter that none the less finds it necessary to digress at length on the author’s past and present duties. Muriel Bradbrook, for example, suggested that the Letter was actually written by ‘John Laneham, one of the leading members of Leicester’s men’.46 Susan Frye, however, follows David Scott’s research in viewing the account as an elaborate courtly joke on one Langham, a court officeholder, by its real author, William Patten, Teller of the Exchequer and a friend of Lord Burghley. Scott prints a letter from Patten to Lord Burghley of August 1575: May it lyke yoor honorabl Lordship. This day receyved I aunswer fro my good freend the mr of Requests hoow the book waz to be supprest for that Langham had complayned upon it, and ootherwize for that the honorabl enterteinment be not turned intoo a jest.

Scott identifies the complainant as one Robert Langham, Keeper of the Council Chamber (but not ‘Clark of the Counsel chamber door’, the office the author of the Letter awards himself, but which, according to Scott, did not exist at the time).47 As he notes, Patten’s orthography bears a marked resemblance to that of the Letter, and he was present at the festivities, one ‘Paten’ being identified by Gascoigne as the author of some Latin verses displayed over the castle gateway. In this interpretation, the Letter is thus associated with a leading proponent of arguments against intervention in the Netherlands (in contrast to Gascoigne, who had already fought there in a private capacity). Rather than offering localised instances of mockery, the whole Letter might be read as an attempt to turn ‘the honorabl [and Leicester-sponsored] enterteinment . . . intoo a jest’. After all, if Laneham is a fool, this hardly reflects well upon his employer. It is an attractive and plausible theory, although matters are more complicated than it makes them seem. Humphrey Martin, the recipient of the Letter, is described by Frye as the ‘fictitious’ (64) pretext for a satirical view of courtly manners. Yet R.J.P. Kuin’s critical edition of Laneham – not referred to by either Frye or Scott – informs us of a ‘Humfrye Martin’ admitted to the Mercer’s Company in 1570.48 Renaissance writers certainly fully appreciated the possibilities for satire and subterfuge afforded by the genre of the fraudulent or staged

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‘Drama as Offering: The Princely Pleasures at Kenelworth’, The Rice Institute Pamphlet, 46: 4 (1960), p. 66. ‘William Patten and the Authorship of “Robert Laneham’s Letter” (1575)’, English Literary Renaissance 7 (1977), pp. 297–306. ‘Robert Laneham’s Letter: A General Critical Edition’ (Thesis, University of Amsterdam (1973)), xv.

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Kenilworth, 1575 personal letter.49 That this Letter should be a clever practical joke seems entirely plausible. But that the same letter should be addressed to a real life mercantile figure positioned well outside of that courtly game seems somewhat superfluous to the satirical intent Scott ascribes to ‘Laneham’. It seems impossible to tell for certain. But the implications of the possibility Scott raises are interesting. One aspect of his character that might make ‘Laneham’ a worthy target of another’s humour is his propensity to mock others. Can it really be appropriate for the author of the Letter to lavish so much disdain on peasants and townspeople when he himself is only a very minor court functionary?50 Does he have ideas above his station? Laneham’s comments on the rustic wedding could be a maliciously effective piece of characterisation on the part of the Letter’s true author, allowing us to intuit the insecurities that seethe beneath Laneham’s self-satisfied account of his own place and precedence. Conversely, if ‘Laneham’ is the target of the Letter’s satire, does this mean that the people he ridicules are not in fact absurd after all? If you are the object of a fool’s laughter, does this mean you are actually above reproach – or is the process cumulative, are they all absurd? It seems significant that more or less every participant in the Kenilworth entertainments has at some time or other been marked down as an appalling parvenu. (Elizabeth, as the pinnacle and guarantor of the social pyramid they are all seen as trying to scale, seems immune to such aspersions.) The attacks on Leicester during his lifetime are well known, and George Gascoigne’s hapless attempts to curry favour at Kenilworth stand as a locus classicus of the probably well-earned humiliations that lie in wait for the aspiring courtier (taking the role of a Savage Man, according to Laneham, he startled the Queen’s horse, which nearly threw her).51 Subsequent treatments of the shows, however, have given an unusual prominence to the minor players in the drama. For Walter Scott, who gives him a minor role in his novelisation of the festivities, Laneham is ‘as great a coxcomb as ever blotted paper’.52 J.H. Burn’s edition of the Letter quotes at length from and endorses this piece of characterisation, and then extends the field of mockery by making reference to that ‘humorous personage’, Captain Cox. (The extent to which this volume considers the two equally absurd is indicated by the way it refers to suggestions that Cox

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As for example with the famous Epistolae obscurorum virorum (1515), in which simpleminded monks intervene in a dispute over the study of Hebrew literature in such a way to make fools of themselves and the position they are (supposedly) supporting. ‘Laneham’ describes himself as supervising the antechamber to the Privy Council’s meetingplace. In reality, the Keeper of the Council Chamber – the office held by Robert Langham – was merely employed to keep it furnished with ‘flowers, boughs, fire-tongs, and other amenities’. Scott (1977), p. 299. See Richard McCoy, ‘Gascoigne’s “Poema Castrata”: The Wages of Courtly Success’, Criticism 27 (1985), pp. 29–55. Walter Scott, Kenilworth, ed. J.H. Alexander (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999), p. 291.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance may be a covert portrait of Laneham himself.)53 Similarly, for F.J. Furnivall, Captain Cox is ‘the great Captain . . . the valiant Coventry mason’; Laneham a ‘coxcomb’, ‘a most amusing, self-satisfied, rollicking chap’.54 But if the likes of Laneham are to be ridiculed for their over-inflated sense of self importance, as expressed in his tendency to crow over those he perceives to be of lower rank, how is this insight to be articulated without falling into the same trap? If Laneham is an amusing and self-satisfied character, what then of Walter Scott or F.J. Furnivall, making sport with his inadequacies just as he had those of the rustic wedding guests? If the voice of the Letter is a satirical device designed to disgrace the real Robert Langham, then there can be no small degree of irony involved when later commentators not only ignore this possibility, but actually start mocking him in his own accent. It is as if there is no end to the game of satirical one-upmanship initiated at Kenilworth Castle, no way of not being drawn into this ever-widening circle of merry derision, no point of solid ground on which matters can be brought to a close and the genuinely worthy distinguished from those who merely mime the attributes of an honourable identity. The exact tone and import of the Letter are hard to gauge because the signs that mark one out as a personage of honour are precisely the same signs that indicate incongruity, that declare that one is playing out of one’s league in the competition for precedence. The text provides an extraordinary density of focus on these tokens of status at exactly those points where it is being suggested that their possessors are unworthy of them: we can be sure that the Letter is sending up the wedding guests and the ridiculous minstrel precisely because, whenever these characters are introduced, the text is suddenly replete with extravagant details about coats of arms, colours, fabrics, styles of dress. Such minutiae, it is implied, are mere externals when not backed up by some sort of substance. Yet Laneham himself is lavish with details about his own place and precedence in the court hierarchy; he even adopts a chivalric persona of sorts when he informs us that he sometimes goes by the nickname of the ‘blak Prins’ (A2r). Honour, as the entertainments described in the Letter suggest, is always a jealously guarded attribute, almost inevitably comparative and competitive in its implications; but the fierceness with which the rights of access to it were contested can only have been amplified by the sense of radical instability and even reversibility that accompanied such a persona. At any moment, one feels, it might be turned inside out. The notion that the Letter might be a document designed to ridicule its supposed author is predicated upon the feasibility of such a translation: Laneham the valued officer of the

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Laneham’s Letter Describing the Magnificent Pageants Before Queen Elizabeth, at Kenilworth Castle in 1575; repeatedly referred to in the Romance of Kenilworth (London: J.H. Burn, 1821), viii, 105. Furnivall ed. (1907), ix–xi.

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Kenilworth, 1575 court becomes Laneham the affected coxcomb; but in either case his status is indicated by (for instance) the way he awards himself the title of the ‘Black Prince’. Robert Laneham’s Letter presents us with a world permeated with images derived from books of chivalry, a fact that has hardly gone unnoticed by previous commentators.55 But contrary to what we might expect, these images are not restricted to one level of the late-sixteenth-century hierarchy. Rather, they circulate between different social groupings. The aristocratic training exercise of the quintain, for example, is practised by countryfolk, whose practices are in turn appropriated by a royal panegyric which may itself harbour a dissenting counternarrative. We see romance forms manifesting themselves amongst nobles and amongst commoners; in urban and in rural communities; amid metropolitan and provincial groupings. Throughout the entertainments described by Laneham, moreover, these chivalric conventions also serve as a medium through which relations between male and female may be articulated – between courtier and Queen, bride and groom, husband and wife. Most importantly, they perform this work in both their unironic, ‘heroic’ form, and through parody and satire. Traditionally, the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries have been seen as a time when chivalry was in decline; and this decline has often been thought to be marked by the way in which the credibility of chivalric representations was undermined: what had once been heroic collapsed in upon itself, descending into pastiche and burlesque. The potential for doubleness manifested by such imagery in the Letter in itself suggests that such a trajectory is over-schematic: it is not always clear what is burlesque and what is not, and I have suggested that the two might co-exist within the same set of signs.56 Moreover, this characteristic of reversibility if anything actually points towards the prevalence of chivalric forms in the Elizabethan world picture. The Letter’s tendency is to read any bid for esteem in chivalric terms because their significance extends far beyond a whimsical courtly entertainment, deep into the social fabric of Elizabethan life. The language of chivalry is a language in which sixteenthcentury groups and individuals can stage defences of their special interests, place and prerogatives. It is a ground – simultaneously both cross-cultural, and socially exclusive – upon which social contests can be played out, between those desirous of honour and those who would deny their antagonists any right to such a privilege. Such representations are unstable because

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J.H. Burn’s 1821 edition elaborates on this atmosphere by designating the Elizabethan period a ‘reigne of faerie’ (ix), and commenting that every bibliographer has been as anxious to possess Captain Cox’s library ‘as Sir Lancelot du Lake was to win the holy vessel’ (105). Chivalric burlesque almost always aspires towards the condition of a comedy of incongruity, mingling signs from different social levels – as for example with Thomas Nashe’s portrait of the Earl of Surrey, his helmet adorned with a ‘water-pot’ (The Unfortunate Traveller (London: T. Scarlet for C. Burby, 1594), sig. H4r) – but need not succeed.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance Elizabethan society was not, in fact, the orderly hierarchy so beloved of Tudor homiletics and subsequently eulogised by E.M.W. Tillyard. Far from being comfortably certain of their place in the Elizabethan pecking order, the participants in the Kenilworth entertainments seem defensive, insecure, and nervous. The Letter is full of humour – indeed, in its exuberance of language it might seem to approach something like a carnivalesque tone – but the celebratory intent on closer examination seems superficial, and the comedy is pointed. To portray another as having access to signs of honour only in an inadvertently burlesque form is to attack his social credibility, and reaffirm one’s own. Far from indicating a decline in the credibility of chivalric values, then, the parodic elements of the Letter could be read as indicating the tenacity with which those who felt they had a right to them would fight to avoid having to share them. Burlesques that feature mock-chivalric figures, then, need not necessarily represent the opposite of chivalric values; they might actually reinforce them. The royal progress was a valuable tool of Elizabethan government. It offered the Queen a stage upon which she could present herself as a monarch; her interactions with hosts and spectators served to foster national unity by presenting a vision of England as a community one might participate in.57 Similarly, the themes of romance beloved of Elizabethan state pageantry like to suggest that the nation is closely bound together in mutual adoration of and devotion to its figurehead, the Queen. As Francis Bacon notes, this ongoing love affair or romance between the monarch and her people was in a sense a fiction. But it is precisely by paying attention to the romantic themes of such occasions – ‘romantic’ this time in the sense of deriving from the literature of chivalry – that we get a very different picture of the social life in the late Tudor polity. Although capable of assuming corporate forms, status in late-sixteenth-century England was always, one way or another, a zero-sum game. And rather than being comfortably subsumed into a master narrative in which all the Queen’s loyal servants can be said to have ‘done well’,58 much of day-to-day life in such a culture seems to have been made up of an nearincessant round of mockery, envy and competition. It is an emphasis continued in another, later arena in which chivalric representations in their parodic variant are prominent – the early seventeenth-century stage.

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See Mary Hill Cole, The Portable Queen (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999). Cole, however, is clear about the different agendas Queen and subject might bring to these interactions. The reference here is to Richard McCoy’s account of Elizabethan tournaments, in which the heralds stopped keeping score, preferring instead to state that all the competitors ‘did well’. The Rites of Knighthood (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 1989), p. 23.

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Chapter 3 CASTLES IN THE AIR: QUIXOTIC REPRESENTATIONS ON THE SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY STAGE

E

DMUND Gayton’s Pleasant Notes Upon Don Quixot (1654) are, amongst other things, an extended homage to his supposed mentor, ‘Father Benjamino’ Jonson. A large folio volume which comments upon each chapter of the first part of Thomas Shelton’s translation of Don Quixote in turn, using Cervantes’ work as a jumping-off point for his own display of wit, Gayton’s book is riddled with references to the Elizabethan, Jacobean and Caroline drama.1 The first English commentary on Cervantes – possibly the first anywhere in Europe – the Pleasant Notes approach their subject in what we might consider to be a curiously back-to-front manner: rather than directly celebrating the talents of the Spanish author, they aim to construct a cultural bridge to their subject matter out of the materials provided by native dramatic productions of some twenty or thirty years earlier. Thus, the host of the inn at which Don Quixote stays is, on account of his demands for money, said to be ‘of that wise and provident house of the Iagas [sic], where this Maxime is intailed upon the Family . . . My son, put money in thy purse’.2 Don Quixote himself is regularly identified with what, to English eyes, was evidently the epitome of dramatic lunacy: having decided, in imitation of Amadis de Gaul, to go mad for love, and having selected an appropriately desolate venue for his insanity, Quixote is said to be ‘worthily taken with the site of his Stage, whereon he means to outdoe Ieronymo’; earlier, we have seen him ‘act Jeronimo in his short shirt’.3 The vast majority of Gayton’s allusions, however, are to the work of Ben Jonson. He makes specific reference to The Alchemist: ‘Which would move

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Edmund Gayton, Pleasant Notes Upon Don Quixot (London: William Hunt, 1654), sig. D2r. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, The History of the Valorous and Witty Knight-Errant, Don Quixote, trans. Thomas Shelton (London: Richard Hodgkinsonne for Andrew Crooke, 1652). Shelton’s translation first appeared in 1612, but Gayton appears to have used this later edition. Gayton (1654), sig. C1r. Gayton (1654), sigs. T4v, D1r.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance laughter most, our Dons encountring his Windmill, or his Lordship at the Furnace? Being Subtle, Face, Lungs, and all: Bestow a brace of tassled Caps upon them both and so exeunt.’4 The ‘Biscaine Squire’ who threatens Don Quixote is a ‘Castrill, a very Foighter’.5 After his overnight beating on his second visit to the Inn, Don Quixote calls for his squire. Gayton comments that ‘such a shrill Note gave Abel Drugger, when after a nights expectation in the Privy-house (his gagge of Ginger-bread dissolv’d) he was to crave a blessing of his Mother the Queen of Fairies, and her Ti-ti-ties.’6 At a distance of several centuries, many of Gayton’s references can seem gratuitous or simply random; not so here. Both Don Quixote and The Alchemist deal with figures who are in some way gulled because of an excessive investment in matters chivalric – in this case, an absurd expectation of patronage from the Queen of the Fairies, Spenser’s Gloriana recast as a tart in a fancy costume. The most complex of these allusions occurs during the commentary on the destruction of Don Quixote’s library. Having returned from his first adventure back to his home village, Don Quixote eventually falls asleep, thus offering the Barber and the Curate the opportunity to conduct an ‘inquisition’ upon the books responsible for their friend’s madness. Some volumes (such as Amadis de Gaule) are saved; others, deemed to be beyond redemption, are cast out of the window and burned in the courtyard. Commenting on this episode, Gayton refers the reader to Jonson’s poem ‘An Execration Upon Vulcan’. Around November 1623, Jonson’s library was destroyed by fire, thus giving occasion for a long poem packed with references to books of chivalry. Here, Jonson addresses Vulcan, saying that, had his library been ‘compil’d’ from the likes of ‘Amadis de Gaule, Th’Esplandians, Arthurs, Palmerins, and all The learned librarie of Don Quixote’, then the fire might have been a just punishment for his ‘serious follies’. Indeed, had he known it was Vulcan’s intention to hold such a ‘Triumph’, Jonson would have gladly supplied a more appropriate fuel than his own works: that is, ‘The whole summe Of errant Knighthood . . . The Trisrams, Lanc’lots, Turpins, and the Peers’.7 Jonson’s poem – which

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Gayton (1654), sig. B2v. Gayton (1654), sig. E4r – another reference to The Alchemist. Kastrill is himself, it should be noted, familiar with romances; he abuses Surly, who had questioned his ‘valour’, as ‘an AMADIS de Gaule, or a Don QUIXOTE’, whereupon Abel Drugger chips in to call him the ‘Knight o’th curious cox-combe’. The Alchemist (iv, vii) in C.H. Hertford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson eds, Ben Jonson (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1925–52), 11 volumes. All further references in the main body of the text. Gayton (1654), sigs. L3v–4r. Gayton, however, is mistaken: it is Dapper who is gulled with the device of the fairy ‘aunt’ (not mother). The poem is numbered XLIII in The Under-wood. Hertford and Simpson conjecturally date the fire as November 1623 because one of the works burnt, a translation of Barclay’s Argenis, was entered on the Stationer’s Register on 2 October. This work might in itself be described as a romance, but Jonson seems to regards it as different in kind to the books of chivalry he mocks, praising it as a book ‘not afraid/ To speake the fate of the Sicilian Maid/ To our owne Ladyes’.

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Quixotic Representations on the Seventeenth-Century Stage itself alludes, as we can see, to the very episode the Pleasant Notes are commenting on – provides occasion for Gayton to compliment his poetic ‘father’. He begins by quoting the final lines of the ‘execration’: Pox on thee Vulcan, and if that wont doe, Thy Wives Pox on thee, and Besse Broughtons too. Which verses were made upon the like mishap, when the Annals of the famous City of Madrid, that is the acts Chivalry of the twenty four single Signiora’s Combates of the two Consuls. The Turnaments of the common Consiliarii, the quarterly prizes of the Deputies of the Wards, and their seconds, the Questmen. Besides the Annuall Amphipoliticall and tumultuary certamina, or Feasts of the Greenmen, Whistlers, Marshals, and his Ministers: Besides, the Navall expedition of the Gallyfoist, and many other renowned workes, were all burnt to ashes, not so much as a line surviving or escaping, in that never to be forgotten conflagration of Father Benjaminos study; Wherein, besides these books of Infamous losse, were the severall duels, onslaughts, stormes, and military performances, of the two never to be reconciled families . . . of enraged Sr John Daw, and incensed Sr Amorous La-Fool.8

Again, Gayton’s text is almost impossible to make sense of: so densely written it seems hard to tell where literary allusion ends and deliberate nonsense begins. Nevertheless, the pattern of textual references, so far as they are decipherable, suggests that Gayton’s intention is to make some link between the two fires – the one in Jonson’s, and the other in Don Quixote’s, study; and then to interweave a further specific allusion to Jonson’s work – in this case, Epicoene. The joke here seems to concern non-existent books (such as the ‘acts Chivalry of the twenty four single Signiora’s Combates of the two Consuls’). The volumes containing the ‘duels, onslaughts, [and] stormes’ of John Daw and Sir Amorous La Foole are said to have been lost in the fire – whereas the true aficionado of Jonson’s work will know that there were never any such military encounters between them. Sir John (or ‘Jack’) Daw and Sir Amorous La Foole are both false knights; like the objects of satire in Robert Laneham’s Letter, they lack the substance that ought to validate the station they aspire to. Daw is ‘a fellow that . . . buyes titles’ (i, ii, 75–6), desperately concerned to flaunt a learning that he does not possess. La Foole is suspiciously obsessed with his pedigree, being (by his own account) ‘descended lineally of the french LA-FOOLES’ and bearing for his coat of arms ‘Yellow, or Or, checker’d Azure,

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Joseph Loewenstein’s ‘Personal Material: Jonson and Book-burning’, in Martin Butler ed., Re-presenting Ben Jonson (London: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 93–113, discusses this poem at length. The manner in which he suggests that the poem gives expression to Jonson’s own literary anxieties is particularly suggestive in terms of this chapter’s focus on chivalric fakes. Jonson seems to hint at the inability of his own carefully contrived representational strategies to save him from the fate of bad books: the failure of his own signs of true nobility. Gayton (1654), sig. D2r.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance and Gules, and some three or four colours more . . . a very noted coate’, as its owner comments, apparently unaware of its motley connotations, before going on to regretfully muse that ‘antiquitie is not respected now’ (i, iii, 40–46).9 As we discover, however, La Foole’s claim to ancient nobility is bogus: I have beene a mad wag, in my time, and have spent some crownes since I was a page in court, to my lord LOFTY, and after, my ladies gentleman-usher, who got mee knighted in Ireland, since it pleas’d my elder brother to die – I had as faire a gold jerkin on that day, as any was worne in the Iland-voyage, or at Cadiz, none disprais’d, and I came over in it hither, show’d my selfe to my friends, in court, and after went downe to my tenants, in the countrey, and survai’d my lands, let new leases, tooke their money, spent it in the eye o’the land here, upon ladies – and now I can take up at my pleasure. (i, iii, 57–68)

La Foole, far from coming from a distinguished aristocratic family, as he has claimed, is a younger son, forced to work as a gentleman-usher in his youth – suggesting a less impressive pedigree than he lays claim to.10 The superficially exotic biography he boasts of only serves to further expose the shallowness of his pretences. Essex’s adventures in Ireland and Cadiz were noted for his creation of knights en masse, and the ‘Island voyage’ to the Azores of 1597 was similarly notorious for the fashionable gallants who signed up for the adventure, eager to fight the Spanish. The expedition was characterised by an excessive consciousness of matters of rank and precedence, which ultimately broke out into open dissent between its leaders. Arthur Gorges’ account of the voyage reprimanded the English for their ‘unproper and vaine manner of going to the warres . . . rather like Maskers then Souldiers’,11 whilst John Donne’s verse letter, ‘The Calme’, written at the time, noted ruefully how ‘all our beauty, and our trimme, decayes, Like Courts removing, or like ended plays’ as the flotilla lay becalmed.12 To have one’s land surveyed, finally, was frequently a prelude to intensified economic exploitation: La Foole’s status is maintained through the abuse of his dependants.13 In short, La Foole’s potted account of his upbringing, apparently designed to evoke a chivalric persona appropriate to his rank, merely serves to suggest the hollowness of his claims. 9

10

11

12

13

It should also be noted that La Foole’s motley coat of arms flouts the rules of heraldry, laying metal (‘Azure’) on metal (‘Or’). Gentleman-ushers are something of a running joke in the drama of this period – see John Hazel Smith’s edition of Chapman’s play, The Gentleman Usher (London: Edward Arnold, 1970), Appendix C. Arthur Gorges, ‘A larger Relation of the . . . Island Voyage’, in Samuel Purchas, Purchas his Pilgrimes (London: W. Stansby, 1625), Book X, 14, § 2. The passage quoted is marked in the margin as ‘Advice for Gallants’. John Donne, Poems . . . With Elegies on the Authors Death (London: John Marriot, 1633), sig. I2r. See Andrew McRae, God Speed the Plough (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).

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Quixotic Representations on the Seventeenth-Century Stage In reality, he is very much a part of the increasingly mercantile, commodified metropolis that provides the setting for Jonson’s play.14 Daw and La Foole, then, are two fake knights, whose attempts to construct chivalric characters for themselves only expose their desperate social insecurities to the mockery of Jonson’s young wits, who dominate the play. In a scene which draws upon the comic duel between Viola and Andrew Aguecheek in Twelfth Night, the distance between this pair and ‘proper’ knights is finally exposed for all to see. Jonson’s protagonists have decided to dupe the unworthy pair into thinking that each means to fight with the other. The young gentleman Truewit informs Jack Daw that La Foole, offended in some point of honour, seeks to engage him in combat; Daw’s reaction is one of abject cowardice: ‘I’ll give him any satisfaction, sir – but fighting’ (iv, v, 75). Daw is fed a terrifying picture of his enraged adversary, armed with ‘some-bodies old twohand-sword’, as well as ‘pikes, halberds, petronells, callivers, and muskets . . . if hee could but victuall himselfe for halfe a yeare,’ Truewit comments, ‘ . . . hee is sufficiently arm’d to over-runne a countrie’ (iv, v, 109–19). With this pun, Jonson taps into a well-established tradition of satire on romances and matters chivalric, a tradition that focuses on the improbabilities of such literature. His comedy is strongly reminiscent of Thomas More’s parody of Germain de Brie’s verses celebrating a naval battle between English and French fleets in August 1512. ‘Brixius’ had commemorated the battle in his Choridigera, reserving especial praise for one Hervé de Porzmoguer, the commander of the French warship the Cordelière, who he described making his way through the enemy’s ranks, wounding some with a javelin, some with a spear, some with a sword, others with an axe.15 More’s reaction was scornful; his 1518 volume of epigrams contained a series of mocking parodies of this treatment of what More evidently considered to be an unworthy theme. As Dominic Baker-Smith points out, the humanists of the Erasmus–More circle were at the very least sceptical about ‘the institution of chivalry . . . and all the social customs which served as an anodyne to the miseries of war’,16 and More’s refutation of Brixius’ verse mockingly undercut the conventions he had used to amplify Hervé’s heroism: ‘I think’, he wrote, ‘that in this passage you omitted something. For when you represented heroic Hervé fighting with four weapons and a shield all at the same time, perhaps the fact slipped your

14

15

16

On this aspect of the play, see Karen Newman, ‘City Talk: Women and Consumption in Epicoene’, English Literary History 56 (1989), pp. 503–18. ‘ferit hos misso per tempora telo./ Transigit huic gladio costas, huic illa nudat,/ Decutit his caput impacta per colla bipenni,/ His latus, his humeros hasta perstringit actua.’ Germanus Brixius (Germain de Brie), Chordigerae Navis Conflagratio (Strasbourg: Schürer, 1514), sigs. B2v–3r. Translated in The Yale Edition of the Complete Works of St. Thomas More, various editors (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1963–97), 15 volumes, vol. III, part II, ed. Clarence H. Miller, Leicester Bradner, Charles A. Lynch, and Revilo P. Oliver (1984), p. 453. Dominic Baker-Smith, More’s Utopia (London: Harper Collins, 1991), p. 60.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance mind, but your reader ought to have been informed in advance that Hervé had five hands.’17 Jonson’s comic description of La Foole, ‘arm’d’, as it were, to the teeth, is recognisably within the same tradition as More’s anti-chivalric epigram. Gayton’s invocation of Epicoene in commenting on the burning of Quixote’s books of chivalry is not therefore, for all its obscurity, haphazard. Both John Daw and Amorous La Foole are, like More’s Hervé, essentially phoneys. They are no more capable of the ‘manly’ violence expected of a knight than a man is capable of wielding five weapons in one hand. And in his cowardly reaction to Truewit’s absurd description of La Foole, bristling with a veritable arsenal of weaponry, John Daw displays, not only his own abject cowardice, but also his miserable susceptibility to chivalric imposture – of exactly the sort that he and La Foole perpetrate when they take upon themselves the title of knight, and of the sort practised (in More’s view) by Brixius upon his readership. One of the things this chapter will be concentrating on is just this focus on themes of imposture, in conjunction with the emphasis on the inherent improbability of that imposture, and the way in which both relate to the idea of chivalry. Later critics have generally taken a rather dim view of Gayton’s volume. His place in the history of Cervantes studies has generally been marked more with scorn than even the minimal recognition one might expect to be granted simply on the basis of being a pioneer, no matter how undistinguished. Thus, E.M. Wilson takes issue with Gayton’s ‘insensitiveness to Cervantes’ finer qualities’, complaining that ‘the commentator takes Don Quixote purely as a burlesque’, and therefore concluding that the Pleasant Notes are ‘not criticism’.18 Such a lack of appreciation is in itself symptomatic of a shift in the emphasis of interpretations of Cervantes. All the evidence suggests that its early readers tended to view Don Quixote as an essentially satirical, corrective and parodic work. Its elevation to the status of a great classic – linked to a corresponding inflation of the text’s meaning beyond the limits of burlesque – really came with the advent of European Romanticism. From around 1800, readers began to see in Don Quixote a work that transcended its parodic elements. Cervantes’ protagonist started to be taken at his word; the final irony, it seemed, was that in the end Don Quixote really was all the things he so absurdly claimed to be – honest, noble, brave and true. Don Quixote thus became a text in which Quixote himself might finally appear not so much in the character of a fool as that of an emblem of Romantic subjectivity, one on which grand philosophical oppositions between the Ideal (as represented by 17

18

‘Namque ubi magnamimum produxeris Hervea, telis/ Pugnantem pariter quatuor, & clypeo. /Forte tibi exciderat, sed debuit ante moneri/ Lector, tunc Herveo quinque fuisse manus.’ Thomas More, Epigrammata (Basle: J. Frobenius, 1518), sig. G4r–v. Translated in the Yale edition of More’s works, vol. III, part II: 222–3. E.M. Wilson, ‘Cervantes and English Literature of the Seventeenth Century’, Bulletin Hispanique 50 (1948), pp. 27–52, p. 33.

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Quixotic Representations on the Seventeenth-Century Stage Don Quixote) and the Real (everybody else) might be projected.19 Matters are not quite so clean-cut as this broad outline suggests, of course – proponents of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ readings of the text continue to vie for interpretative supremacy – but none the less, this must represent a fairly momentous reversal of critical opinion. Yet it is not perhaps as unpredictable as it seems at first sight; it is suggestive to compare the pattern of inversions we previously observed in Robert Laneham’s Letter, where a man of importance can, as if by some optical trick, instantly be transformed into a figure of fun (merely a figure of self-importance). The history of Cervantes criticism is in a sense the same operation performed in reverse. Gayton’s volume represents the pre-Romantic preference for farcical and satirical readings of Don Quixote in what was for the likes of E.M. Wilson its most unacceptable form: comedy, and vulgar comedy at that. (Thus, Don Quixote’s madness prompts an extended discourse on the unfortunate and messy digestive effects of his diet of herbs.)20 Nevertheless, Gayton’s volume is not devoid of critical interest. His evocation of the ‘Execration’ in the context of a commentary on Don Quixote, for instance, is far more than an attempt to glorify himself by association with a greater literary talent. The Pleasant Notes are interesting, if for nothing else, for the way in which they hint at a genuine continuity of interest between Cervantes’ mockery of books of chivalry, and the early-seventeenth-century English drama. Why, then, this sudden interest in Quixotic figures? To describe someone as ‘quixotic’ need imply no more than that they are afflicted by unrealistic expectations of life, but with respect to Cervantes’ text, another definition has emerged, centred around the notion of anachronism. One persistent interpretation of Don Quixote reads that book in relation to perceived patterns of historical development in Spanish, and, ultimately, European society. The prevalence of this notion may be suggested by the popularity of a linked trope, the notion that (as Byron put it) Cervantes ‘smiled Spain’s chivalry away’, so cutting was his satire on that institution,21 a formula endorsed by, amongst others, William Temple, Steele, and the Third Earl of Shaftesbury.22 Modern critics, whether they favour ‘hard’ or ‘soft’ interpretations of Don Quixote, also tend to concur on this point (although it is rarely at the forefront of their readings): the text’s significance can be established in relation to a historical narrative. Whether he is viewed positively – as an idealist, out of step with

19

20 21

22

See Anthony Close, The Romantic Approach to ‘Don Quixote’ (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). Gayton (1654), sig. X1r. T.G. Steffan, E. Steffan, and W.W. Pratt eds, Don Juan (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), canto XIII, stanza 11. See Ronald Paulson, Don Quixote in England (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998), pp. 32–6.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance a world he is too good for – or negatively (as a comic anachronism) it seems to be agreed that part of Cervantes’ intention is to portray Don Quixote as the representative of vanished values. When L.A. Murillo comments, ‘that a middle-aged member of a decaying social class should take up a career as a knight, when the age of chivalry is long past, is a situation only a little less comical than the many he [Don Quixote] brings about as his transformation unfolds’, he is writing within this tradition.23 The same might be said of Eric Ziolkowski, who declares that ‘one of the Quixote’s most salient motifs is the anachronicity of the knight. Though an abundance of knights-errant had inhabited Spain in the previous century, the chivalric spirit had waned before Cervantes’ time.’24 Again, Michael McKeon sees Don Quixote as mediating, through its treatment of the theme of chivalry, ‘the historical transition from feudalism to capitalism’.25 Quixotic figures achieved their popularity, it is suggested, because they were emblematic of the way in which times were changing. Like Don Quixote, the seventeenth-century stage teems with references to books of chivalry and characters whose significance is established in relation to the position of knighthood. We have already seen Gayton referring us to The Alchemist, and other examples immediately spring to mind – we might think of Puntarvolo in Jonson’s Every Man Out of His Humour, for instance. Indeed, the theme of chivalry might actually be considered to be a primary structuring device in the plays we will be examining here – Eastward Ho, The Isle of Gulls and The Knight of the Burning Pestle. On the face of things, this may seem odd. Jacobean citizen comedies of this sort are usually (and correctly) regarded as representatives of a rather hard-hitting, grittily urban and satirical genre – everything, in short, that romances supposedly are not. But of course this particular problem seems easy enough to resolve. Far from offering uncritical celebrations of the world of chivalry, these plays, it is generally assumed, are sending it up: more evidence for the thesis that, in early-seventeenth-century literature, the values of chivalry are ‘smiled away’. Urban comedies such as these seem, as Lawrence Manley puts it, ‘actively concerned to discredit magic and romance as viable frameworks for the representation of the city’.26 Events generally are conducted in an atmosphere of mistrust – more precisely, of a fear of trickery – and matters pertaining to chivalry and romance are no exception. Here, we might draw a distinction 23 24

25

26

A Critical Introduction to Don Quixote (New York: Peter Lang, 1990), p. 1. The Sanctification of Don Quixote (University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1991), p. 19. The Origins of the English Novel (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), p. 283. Literature and Culture in Early Modern London (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 433. Indeed, in the chivalric romance, the early modern drama finds a literary form against which it can establish its own generic respectability – the stage itself being otherwise open to accusations of prodigality and foolishness.

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Quixotic Representations on the Seventeenth-Century Stage between Cervantes’ knight, and his English analogues. Don Quixote is in a sense self-deceived, his own worst victim; whereas plays of this period often favour a splitting action, producing knights more explicitly fraudulent than Cervantes’, knights whose predatory instincts draw them to those whose susceptibility to chivalric trappings marks them out as potential victims. An interest in the iconography of knighthood in such plays generally means one of two things: that one is a phoney, or that one is a dupe. The knights who appear in comedies of this period are, all too often, impostors of one sort or another, preying on those gullible enough to lend credence to their bogus social personae. We have already seen how Jonson treats ‘Jack’ Daw and Amorous La Foole in Epicoene, and how Gayton significantly links these figures with those in the library of Don Quixote, ‘gulled’ into absurdity by his excessive interest in books of chivalry. Another such example is the ‘adventurer’, Sir Petronel Flash, in the multi-authored Eastward Ho. A knight without a hint of true nobility – or, even, money (his air of affluence is a sham) – Sir Petronel effectively transforms those foolish enough to be taken in by his romantic persona into Quixotic figures, into objects of ridicule, whilst the fraudulence of his own social credentials is pinpointed through a series of allusions to the chivalric implications of his knightly rank – references to the literature of chivalry. Petronel has, it should be noted, only recently been ennobled. Washed up on the Isle of Dogs, he is quickly identified by a passing gentleman as ‘one of my thirty pound Knights’, one knighted on the ‘grand day’ of James’ coronation.27 That is, he is considered to be a beneficiary of James I’s lavish creation of knights at his accession to the English throne. Whereas Elizabeth I had distributed titles of honour sparingly, James dubbed 432 knights at a single sitting on the day of his coronation, and ultimately began to exploit his powers of ennoblement for financial gain; there was talk of knighthoods being sold for as little as seven pounds. It was even rumoured that James had set out to create a thousand knights, ‘in imitation of King Arthur, who had created that number, but among those who had followed him into battle’ – whereas James’ knights, it is implied, owed their position more to financial muscle than military distinction. Thus, an act of royal munificence ended up causing great resentment, and was finally perceived to have devalued the honour.28

27

28

George Chapman, Ben Jonson and John Marston, Eastward Hoe (London: William Aspley, 1605), sig. F4r. Further references will be signalled in the main body of the text. Critics have identified this line – spoken, it is imagined, with a Scottish accent – as the reason why the authors of Eastward Ho were committed to prison for a time. The gentleman’s companion, it should be noted, disagrees with this assessment of Petronel: ‘this is he,’ he comments, ‘that stole his knighthood o’the grand day for foure pound giving to a Page, all the money in’s purse.’ See Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1965), pp. 74–6.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance Petronel is not so transparent to all the characters in the play. No doubts as to his authenticity cross the mind of Gertrude, the goldsmith’s daughter, who has high hopes of an alliance with the knight. Obsessed with the idea of being a lady, Gertrude spends most of the first act of the play savouring the prospect of being able to dress in fine clothes, to eat fine foods, and ‘take place of ’ – claim precedence over – her mother and father once she is married (B1v). For his part, the penniless Sir Petronel is after the hundred pound ‘Land her Grandmother left her’ (B1r), which he plans to convert into capital to finance an expedition to Virginia, the land where, as Captain Seagull puts it, ‘Golde is more plentifull . . . then Copper is with us . . . all their dripping Pans, and their Chamber pottes are pure Gold; and all the Chaines, with which they chaine up their streetes, are massie Golde; all the Prisoners they take, are fetterd in Gold’ (E3v). Virginia here is More’s Utopian state, so blissfully free from the love of precious metals that the chamberpots are made of gold, reconfigured as a land of easy wealth. For Sir Petronel, Virginia has one further advantage – his wife, who he quickly comes to view as an expensive and irritating impediment, will not be present. Instead, Gertrude is induced to sign away her inheritance to the usurer, Security, and is dispatched to Sir Petronel’s non-existent castle, whilst the knight makes his way overseas. For both man and wife, however, these dreams of wealth and power come to nothing. Petronel is shipwrecked on the Isle of Dogs, having failed even to leave English waters; and Gertrude returns to London humiliated, having found that her husband’s castle is made, as he himself has joked, of nothing but air.29 The collapse of Gertrude’s social ambitions exposes her to ruthless mockery. Family and friends assemble to call her to order for her failed attempt to rise above the group – and this ridicule takes a quite specific form; she is sent up as a Quixotic character, one tempted into absurdity through her excessive susceptibility to chivalric iconography. The ribbing starts as soon as she returns home, and her father Touchstone is first in line: God save your Ladiship; ’save your good Ladiship: your Ladiship is welcome from your inchanted Castell; so are your beautious Retinew. I heare your Knight errant is travayld on strange adventures. (G3r)

Eventually, Gertrude herself seems to start to see her predicament in these essentially literary terms, as she converses with her ‘waiting-woman’, Sindefy (who is not all she seems; to add a further irony, the passage seems to be

29

Even as she sets out eastwards, the conversation of Mistress Fond and Mistress Gazer, assembled to see Lady Flash ‘take coach’, serves to suggest the fantastic nature of her journey. ‘But there are no Gyants in the Castle, are there?’; ‘O no, they say her Knight kild ’hem all and therefore he was knighted’ (D3r).

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Quixotic Representations on the Seventeenth-Century Stage parodying the conventional romance relationship between the heroine and her servant-confidante): Ger.

Sin. Ger.

Sin.

Ah Sinne! hast thou ever read i’the Chronicle of any Lady, and her waiting-woman, driven to that extremity, that we are, Sinne? . . . God blesse us. Would the Knight o’the Sunne, or Palmerin of England, have usd their Ladies so, Syn? or sir Lancelot? or sir Tristram? I doe not know, Madam. Then thou know’st nothing, Syn. Thou art a Foole, Syn. The Knighthood now a daies, are nothing like the Knighthood of old time. They rid a horseback Ours goe a foote. They were attended by their Squires. Our by their Lacquaies. They went buckled in their Armor, Ours muffled in their Cloaks. They travaild wildernesses, & desarts, Ours scarce dare walke the streets. They were still prest to engage their Honour, Ours stil ready to paune their cloaths. They would gallop on at sight of a Monster Ours run away at sight of a Serjeant. They would helpe poore Ladies, Ours make poore Ladies. I, Madam, they were Knights of the Round-Table at Winchester, that sought Adventures, but these of the Square Table at Ordinaries, that sit at Hazard. (H1v–2r)

Within the tradition of interpretation of the figure of Don Quixote discussed above – what I shall be calling the ‘temporal’ interpretation, since it takes Cervantes’ hero to be an icon of historical discontinuity – this moment must be pivotal. In such a scheme, it is the moment of recognition at which Gertrude identifies herself as a Quixotic reader of the social life of Jacobean London, and crucially, this moment of self-knowledge emerges out of a perception of historical development – ‘the Knighthood now a daies, are nothing like the Knighthood of old time’. It is passages like this that take centre stage in Arthur Ferguson’s interpretation of Jacobean comedy as sounding the death knell of English chivalry. Having discussed the Elizabethan chivalric revival, Ferguson devotes a chapter to ‘The Revival in Decline’.30 Citing Eastward Ho, he argues that James I’s inflation of honours undermined the credibility of chivalric representations. It did more than just devalue a title, however. It symbolised the increasing irrelevance of chivalric values generally. ‘As the real world itself was changing from the society that had given birth to the chivalric tradition’, Ferguson writes, ‘the contrast [between a ‘sublime’ ideal and the ‘sordid’ reality] was becoming more and more obvious.’31 This sense of discontinuity, we infer, finds expression in satirical, Quixotic representations of fake knights and their credulous admirers, such as Sir Petronel Flash and Gertrude.

30

31

The Chivalric Tradition in Renaissance England (Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1986), pp. 139–52. Ferguson (1986), p. 146.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance We shall move on to discuss the accuracy of this ‘temporal’ version of Don Quixote later, but it is worth noting that Eastward Ho’s involvement with the theme of chivalry does not stop here. Quite apart from offering a series of satirical portraits of modern knighthood, plays such as these often employ the theme of chivalry as a structural device. Eastward Ho in fact offers a detailed exploration of ‘adventure’ and ‘hazard’ in both chivalric and mercantile contexts.32 The topic is introduced when Quicksilver, the prodigal apprentice, leaves his master, and, in conversation with the usurer Security and his mistress, Sindefy, begins to wonder how he is to support himself. His decision to become a courtier almost immediately modulates into an extended passage on the risks that merchants undergo, ‘but Tennis Balles for the windes to play withall’. Sindefy, however, acknowledging that the seas are ‘uncertaine’, warns Quicksilver that ‘hee that sayles in your Court Seas, shall finde ’hem tenne times fuller of hazzard’ (C1v). She counsels him that there is nothing prejudicial to his gentility in serving out his apprenticeship: ‘A Prentise, quoth you? tis but to learne to live, and does that disgrace a man? hee that rises hardly, stands firmely: but hee that rises with ease, Alas, falles as easily.’ (C1v)33 At this point Security interjects with his own philosophy of risk: Sec. all Trades complaine of inconvenience, and therefore tis best to have none. The Marchaunt, hee complaines, and sayes, Trafficke is subject to much uncertaintie and losse: let ’hem keepe their goods on dry land with a vengeaunce, and not expose other mens substances to the mercie of the windes . . . where I, and such other honest men as live by lending money, are content with moderate profite; Thirtie, or Fortie i’ th’hundred, so wee may have it with quietnesse, and out of perrill of winde and weather, rather than runne those daungerous courses of trading, as they doe. Qui. I, Dad, thou mayst well bee called Securitie, for thou takest the safest course. (C2r)

(As a usurer, Security has cut himself off from the element of risk inherent in most exchanges. Rather than having to enter the commercial world of risk himself, Security can stand on the sidelines, in ‘quietnesse’, assured of his profit: from his point of view, amusement at the hazardous ventures undertaken by merchants is well founded.) From here, conversation passes to the ‘venture’ proposed by Sir Petronel. So far as Security is concerned, the knight offers a risk-free opportunity for both himself and Quicksilver: ‘Doe but bring Knight Petronell into my Parchment Toyles once, and you shall never neede to toyle in any trade, 32

33

This conjunction of the chivalric and the economic through a vocabulary of ‘adventure’ is discussed at length in Michael Nerlich’s The Ideology of Adventure, trans. Ruth Crowley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987). Whether or not apprenticeship extinguished gentility was quite an issue at the time. See Edmund Bolton, The Cities Advocate (London: W. Lee, 1629) – which argues that it did not.

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Quixotic Representations on the Seventeenth-Century Stage a’ my credit!’ (C2v).34 The voyage to Virginia, on the other hand, is described, again, through the filter of chivalric imagery, as a knightly ‘adventure’: Qui. Well Dad, let him have money: All he could any way get, is bestowed on a Ship, now bound for Virginia: the frame of which voiage is so closely convaide, that his new Ladie nor any of her friendes know it . . . Sec.

. . . we have too few such knight adventurers: who would not sell away competent certainties, to purchase (with any danger) excellent uncertainties? your true knight venturer ever does it. (C2v–3r)

Petronel’s is, however, a sham ‘venture’. Rather than exposing himself to any genuine uncertainty or danger, his scheme is actually conceived as both foolproof and cost-free. The voyage is funded, not by himself, but by his unwitting wife, and its ultimate end is, more than anything, an end to risk – that is, residence in the golden land of Virginia, where gold is as common as copper, and where, therefore, one may enrich oneself without exposing oneself to any great hazard.35 Gertrude’s chivalric ‘adventure’ to her husband’s mythical castle is yet another false venture. It is, as the play repeatedly suggests, both illusory and belated; she has in fact already gambled on the substance that ought to give body to Sir Petronel’s outward show of rank, and lost. Her husband’s winnings go towards financing his American journey. Not that attempting to ‘insure’ oneself against such perils is always effective, either. Even Security, the jealous husband, puts what he most values at risk in the hope of profit. Still hoping to catch the knight in his ‘Parchment Toyls’, he invites Sir Petronel to dinner, whose comment is, ‘I see desire of gaine makes Jealousie venturous’ (C4v); he ends up as the unwitting pander of his wife to the knight.36 In fact, both Security and Petronel end up as losers in the ventures they have entered into. Both are interested in minimising their risks in so far as is possible, and both end up losing what they didn’t think they had gambled – in Security’s case, his wife, and in Petronel’s, ‘his’ money and reputation. Rather ironically, the knight’s ‘venture’ turns out to be genuinely risky; crewed by drunkards, his ship is wrecked without even leaving the immediate environs of London. Eastward Ho thus offers a series of deflating perspectives on the various sorts of opportunistic venture that an inhabitant of early modern London 34

35

36

The phrase ‘a’ my credit’ is ambiguous, meaning both ‘believe me’, and ‘I’ll fund you’. Note also the repetition of ‘toyle’ – Security’s plan is not only risk-free, it requires a minimum of effort. The conjunction between chivalric imagery and New World voyages is fully explored in Irving A. Leonard, Books of the Brave, ed. Rolena Adorno (Berkeley and Oxford: University of California Press, 1992), which argues that sixteenth-century reading matter was directly linked to the ways in which such voyages were perceived and advertised. For material on misers who risk their sexual capital in plays of this period, see Douglas Bruster, Drama and the Market in the Age of Shakespeare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 55–62.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance might be tempted into. It is only the honest citizen couple, Mildred and Golding, and the former’s father, Touchstone, who avoid being shipwrecked (whether metaphorically or otherwise) as a result of their desire for gain. Instead, they rise, apparently, by standing still; their discourse is characteristically seasoned with commonplaces about the need for hard work, thrift, honesty, and, above all, modesty, expressed as a respect for social decorum. Mildred’s homily addressed to her upstart sister Gertrude is typical: ‘Where Titles presume to thrust before fit meanes to second them, Wealth and respect often growe sullen and will not follow’ (A4v).37 Eastward Ho’s attack on Sir Petronel thus satirically associates knightly ‘adventure’ with mercantile ‘venture’ – satirically, because the former supposedly embodies a high-minded disdain for all forms of gain not centred around the notion of honour. In theory, the chivalric persona is supposed to reject any interaction between these two spheres – as Francis Markham explains, honour is ‘unvaluable, & not within the compasse of any rate or price’, and one must therefore die rather than ‘sell’ it.38 Petronel, on the other hand, is that most incongruous of creatures, the commercialised knight; his title is purchased, and the only adventure he attempts involves fleeing to a far-off country in the hope of easy money. At the same time, the play also structures much of its action through a thoroughly chivalric theme, that of ‘adventure’. One of the most spectacular instances of this tendency, the use of chivalry as an organising element, is to be found in John Day’s comedy, The Isle of Gulls. Published in 1606, this adaptation of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia produced quite a scandal when first played on the Blackfriars stage. Like Eastward Ho, it is a play topically anchored in its early Jacobean context. Sir Edward Hoby, in a letter of March 1606 to Thomas Edmondes, commented that ‘at this time was much speech of a play in the Black Friars, where, in the “Isle of Gulls”, from the highest to the lowest, all men’s parts were acted of two divers nations: as I understand sundry were committed to Bridewell.’39 That is, the two ‘nations’ in the play, the Arcadians and the Lacedaemonians, were used to glance at contemporary problems between the two ‘nations’ of the English and the Scots. In giving offence in this manner, Day and his company, the Children of the Revels, were only following a well-established precedent. The Isle of Dogs had led to the imprisonment of Jonson and two other actors from his company in 1597, and the Blackfriars children had produced another controversial work, Eastward Ho, only the previous year. 37

38 39

The play may not uncritically endorse such moralising; Eastward Ho is often suspected of harbouring parodic intentions towards its too-perfect heroes. See, for example, L.C. Knights, Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson (London: Chatto and Windus, 1962), p. 252, note. The Booke of Honour (London: A. Matthewes and J. Norton, 1625), sig. B1r. Quoted in E.K. Chambers, The Elizabethan Stage (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1923), 4 volumes, III: 286.

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Quixotic Representations on the Seventeenth-Century Stage In a clever, allusive induction to his play, Day is careful to both hint at and disavow this tradition. Three gentlemen, appearing ‘as to see a play’ question the boy, Prologue. ‘Whats he,’ they ask, ‘that discoverd your new found Land, the Ile of Gulls?’ The answer being, ‘a meere stranger’. ‘A stranger? the better welcome: comes hee East-ward, West-ward, or North-ward hoe?’ Whereupon the boy offers reassurance: ‘none of the three waies I assure you’. Again, the gentlemen ask about theatrical antecedents: ‘why doth he call his play The lle of Gulls, it begets much expectation’. ‘Not,’ Prologue is careful to tell them, ‘out of any dogged disposition, nor that it figures anie certain state, or private government: farre be that supposition from the thought of any indifferent Auditor.’40 Instead, Day invokes an alternative genealogy for his work: the argument beeing a little string or Rivolet, drawne from the full streine of the right worthy Gentleman, Sir Phillip Sydneys well knowne Archadea . . . a Duke to make tryall of certaine experiments, retyres with his retinue into a Namelese desart. Now as well for fashion sake, as that all those which have to doe in that desart, are guld in the reach of their hopes, therefore hee [Day] calls it, (and as hee presumes, not improperlie) The Ile Of Gulls. (A2v)

Critics have generally preferred to follow up the theatrical and hence satirical precedents that Day somewhat ostentatiously disavows. Despite the fact that his induction explicitly denies any reference to notable individuals, those few who have studied The Isle of Gulls have generally done so in an attempt to discover its satirical intent. Thus, it has been observed that the printed edition of the play must have had some last minute changes to the dramatis personae designed to deflect any accusations of reference to specific persons. ‘Duke’ Basilius was evidently originally a king, the ‘duchess’ Gynecia a queen.41 As Richard Dutton points out, however, these efforts are ‘somewhat beside the point’: not only does Basilius signify ‘king’ in Greek, ‘his identification with James is about as clear as one could look for’.42 Specifically, the play gives us: a Duke prone to lavish treatment of his favourites; references to shortages of his Exchequer, and the unpopularity of the means used to remedy this situation (which include imposts and patents); references to his passion for hunting, ‘a notorious indulgence of James’, for which he often neglected urgent business’, and a detail absent from Sidney; and, finally, his love for an effeminised man (Lisander, the Pyrocles character, disguised as an Amazon).43 40

41

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John Day, The Ile of Guls (London: John Hodgets, 1606), sig. A2r–v. My italics, on ‘dogged’. Further references will be signalled in the main body of the text. Basilius is referred to as ‘King’ in the stage directions in the final act of the play (G4v). ‘Queen’ is also retained at one point (A3v), and there are instances of defunct rhymes which hint at revision – ‘Duke’ paired with ‘spring’, for example, or ‘Duchess’ and ‘spleen’. Mastering the Revels (London: Macmillan, 1991), p. 180. Day (1606), sig. E2v; Dutton (1991), pp. 180–1, and notes.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance Then there is the character of Dametas.44 Although Day specifically denied that he had ‘charactred’ any real person in his play, B.N. de Luna’s study of Jonson suggests that the creation of this corrupt upstart represents a subversive attack upon the Earl of Salisbury, Robert Cecil.45 Day plays upon the ‘comparative lowliness’ of Cecil’s origins,46 and then emphasises the deformity of Basilius’ ‘chiefe director’, who ‘expresses to the life the monstrous and deformed shape of vice’ (Cecil had a hunched back). We also seem to have references to Salisbury’s handling of the Gunpowder Plot. De Luna notes that ‘immediately following the “discovery” of the Gunpowder Plot, rumours began circulating that the conspiracy was, in part if not entirely, an invention of Cecil’s, calculated to solidify his position in the Government and to justify sterner measures against the English Catholics . . . These rumours took two main forms: one, that he had fabricated a non-existent plot, and two, that he had wilfully fomented an existent plot.’47 In Day, Dametas says that his patent allows him ‘24 knaves, 6 Knights, 10 fooles, 13 fellons, and 14 traytors by the yeere, take em, howe, why, when, and where I please’ (B2r). At another point in the play, Dametas tricks Aminter and Julio, two princes, into attempting to kidnap Basilius’ daughters. When they are rescued by Lisander, Dametas ponders whether or not to expose the princes, to ‘attach em for traytors, and begge their lands for my labour’ (C4r). So what are we then to make of Day’s declaration of indebtedness to Sidney? Is it merely a convenient device for disclaiming his play’s ‘dogged’ ancestry? Michael Andrews, after wondering whether the play should be read ‘as political satire’, suggests that the satirical content of The Isle of Gulls is only intermittently present, reading it instead as a conscious ‘travesty’ of its acknowledged source. ‘The object’, he writes, ‘is not faithful adaptation but comic vulgarisation.’ This ‘travesty’ is Sidneyean pastoral recast in the basest possible terms. Rather than using the lives of shepherds and goatherds to allude to the affairs of their betters, Day, in Andrews’ account, makes princesses talk like fishwives. This process is described in explicitly class-based terms, as a ‘vulgarisation’ of Sidney’s noble romance. W.W. Greg is quoted, approvingly: ‘it must have made the courtly Sidney turn in his grave to see his 44

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Another favourite of Gayton’s, although he refers to Sidney rather than Day. The combat between the ‘Biscaine Squire’ identified with Kastrill, and Don Quixote is described as the meeting of two ‘high spirits’, ‘more implacable than Clinias and Dametas’ (Gayton (1654), sig. E4r). B.N. de Luna, Jonson’s Romish Plot (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1967), pp. 146–9. See also Pauline Croft, ‘The Reputation of Robert Cecil: Libels, Political Opinion and Popular Awareness in the Early Seventeenth Century’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6th Series, 1 (1991), pp. 43–69, on satires of Cecil. Dutton (1991), p. 181. Dametas is, however, a far less rustic figure than in Sidney, though still an upstart; he is introduced discussing his tennis play. Nevertheless, Dametas himself proudly proclaims that he is a gentleman ‘of the best and last edition, of the Dukes own making’ (B2r). de Luna (1967), p. 46.

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Quixotic Representations on the Seventeenth-Century Stage gracious puppets debased into the vulgar rogues and trulls of the lower class London drama.’ The effect is thus described as both disgusting and funny. Day, Andrews writes, is quite conscious about what he is doing, although ‘whether he is to be forgiven is another matter’.48 In fact, The Isle of Gulls itself asks the question, ‘what sort of play is this?’ – thus preparing the ground for a quite spectacular manipulation of the audience’s expectations. In the ‘Induction’, three gentlemen question the boy, Prologue, as to what kind of entertainment they are to be offered. The first wants to see something ‘Criticall’: ‘Are Lawyers fees, and Cittizens wives laid open in it . . . is there any great mans life charactred int?’ – which prompts the passage on Dametas the ‘monstrous and deformed shape of vice’ quoted above (ironically offered as a denial of any such specific intent). The second gentleman wants a bawdy play of the sort that features a ‘good cuckolding’ and a ‘couple of young-setters up’ learning ‘to do well int’, and the third and final one would prefer something in a more heroic vein – a ‘stately pend historie, as thus, The rugged windes, with rude and ragged ruffes, &c.’ Given such diversity of taste, the boy exclaims, ‘how ist possible to content you?’ (A2v). Uncertainty about exactly what sort of play The Isle of Gulls really is clearly develops out of the highly self-conscious generic teasing that Day’s Induction undertakes. We are presented with three options – satirical commentary, what looks like a citizen comedy along the lines of Eastward Ho, and heroic drama. Of these, the first corresponds exactly with Dutton and De Luna’s accounts of the play, whilst Andrews’ might be described as a monstrous conjunction of the second two. Once the plot proper is in progress, however, it becomes clear that what the audience is being offered is not any one of these options, but a disorienting combination of all three. The very first scene opens in a dignified vein, with Basilius offering an explanation for his unexpected ‘retirement’ to a ‘desart Ile’: the choisest treasure Nature indow’d us with, is mynde up in the vaines of my two daughters: howe much their quiet, and the smothe streame of our government in Arcadia, was troubled by the impetuous concourse of unruly suters, is familiar with your knowledge; this to avoyde, I here have for my Image there in my absence appointed my brother, and undertooke this private retirement. (A3v)

Extended metaphor, circumlocution (‘familiar with your knowledge’), and a measured flow of words – in contrast to Basilius’ studied disdain for disorderly 48

Michael C. Andrews, ‘The Isle of Gulls as Travesty’, The Yearbook of English Studies 3 (1973), pp. 78–84. W.W. Greg is quoted from Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama (London: A.H. Bullen, 1906), p. 323. The point is not that analysis of pastoral in class-based terms is inappropriate; far from it. But Andrews underestimates Sidney’s stylistic range. There is a good deal of the Arcadia which is more or less ‘travesty’ to begin with, particularly those passages which deal with Mopsa (Day produces a mock-blazon of her in imitation of Sidney at sig. D4r – although, here, Mopsa speaks in praise of herself).

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance suitors – all create an appropriately stately opening to the play. The prophecy that motivates Sidney’s monarch, however, is discarded; instead, Basilius aims only at marrying off his daughters, the idea behind the retirement being a sort of natural selection for schemers: he has sent a ‘generall challenge’ to the ‘youthfull bloods of Affrica’, to the effect that, whoever can ‘wooe, win, intice, or any way defeate Me of my charge’ shall have his daughters as wives (A4r). Day’s gradual shift down the social register and the hierarchy of genres – vulgarisation, in Andrews’ terms – is complete when Basilius’ daughters, Hippolita and Violetta, air their views about this arrangement. ‘A prize, a prize,’ the first says, ‘rare worke for Fencers’. Violetta agrees: ‘What coward would not venter a crackt crowne for such a bootie?’ Despite this attitude – sardonic, at the very least – the sisters are soon discussing what sort of ‘hap-hazard’ they might end up with. Violetta, for example, expresses a preference for a good-looking one, but suggests that she will cuckold him (‘a country-gentlewoman taught me how’). At this point, the conversation takes a new direction, as the princesses begin to discuss Basilius’ lackey, Dametas. Evidently, the pair are not admirers: ‘the very fall & garbidge of gentry . . . he becomes the great chamber worse than a Gentleman-usher with wry legges’ (A4r). This opening scene thus traverses all the options laid out in the induction. Beginning with Basilius’ formal announcement to the court, we shift into a decidedly more colloquial mode when Hippolita and Violetta discuss their marriage prospects, and end up with a ‘satiric’ anatomy of the failings of Dametas – or Robert Cecil, if B.N. de Luna is correct. Thus far, there is little here that might contradict Michael Andrews’ account of the play. Yet The Isle of Gulls does not characteristically remain in the ‘vulgar’ mode. Rather than the unremitting parody of a ‘nobler’ literary source, which the audience was already familiar with, Day shuttles between ‘high’ and ‘low’ styles. At points, for example, we have a version of pastoral that is in no way at odds with the Arcadia proper. Here, the sisters have gone hunting. Hippolita comments on their activities: . . . Forresters, like Images set forth The tyrannie of greatnesse without pitie, As they the Deare, so covetous wealth pursues The trembling state of their inferiors, And to claspe up the volume of their sinnes, They drinke theyr blood, and clothe them with their skinnes, Then cease to presse poore beasts with tyrannie, You love your lives, thinke they are loth to die. (C3r)

If such passages might seem incongruous when placed in a play such as (say) As You Like It, that is because they are if anything too hard-edged for Shakespeare’s pastoral drama, not because they suffer from an excess of vulgarity. There is nothing here inconsistent with Sidneyean pastoral, which aims ‘sometimes 116

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Quixotic Representations on the Seventeenth-Century Stage under the prettie tales of Woolves and sheepe, [to] enclude the whole considerations of wrong doing and patience’, or to ‘shewe the miserie of people, under hard Lords and ravening souldiers’ with the ‘poore pipe’ of the shepherd.49 It is, in fact, most important that the action of the play should not descend into out-and-out travesty. Were it to do so, the finale of The Isle of Gulls would not be as shocking as it undoubtedly is. For the most part, Day’s plot carefully follows that of the Arcadia. Both the Duke and the Duchess fall in love with Lisander, dressed as an Amazon, whilst Demetrius, as the woodman Dorus, advances his suit with Hippolita by pretending to court Dametas’ daughter, Mopsa. There are only four new elements – Manasses, Dametas’ ‘scribe-major’, a man as corrupt and base as his master, his wife, and the two rival princes, Aminter and Julio, who do not figure prominently after their failed kidnap attempt on the princesses in the forest – until the final scene. By the end of the play, Lisander and Demetrius are confident that their plans are close to fruition. As the latter comments, ‘the Ladyes themselves are willing’ (E3v); all that remains is to find some way of conveying them off the island, without alerting the suspicions of their guardians. A complex sequence of machinations ensues, in which the Duke, Duchess, Dametas, Manasses and their families, as well as the captains set to guard Basilius’ daughters are all duped into abandoning their posts. (‘Dorus’, for example, tells Dametas of a treasure under Diana’s oak, in the forest; Dametas hurries off to investigate.) All seems to be going well. The prince Lisander, having rid himself of the obstacles standing in the way of his ambitions, relishes the thought of his coming triumph: . . . my teeming hopes Are now delivered of a gratious birth, Which I have Christened, opportunitie. (F4r)

The happy fortunes of the protagonists are at this point further emphasised by contrast with the dismal progress being made by their rivals, Aminter and Julio, who, having failed in their kidnap attempt, have returned to the island disguised as a pair of Lacedaemonian intelligencers, but are increasingly disheartened by their lack of success. ‘Onely our disguises hold firme,’ one comments (F4r). They even reach the point of contemplating a return home, but ultimately decide to at least expose Dametas for the upstart he truly is. At which point, Lisander and Demetrius come on stage, discussing their plans; their only remaining complication is to find some way of conveying the princesses off the island – and, accordingly, they request that the ‘intelligencers’ take them on their boat to Lacedaemon. Events now begin to move very rapidly indeed, as the deceptions the disguised princes have engineered successively come to light when the duped 49

Sir Philip Sidney, The Defence of Poesie (London: William Ponsonby, 1595), sigs. E3v–4r.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance parties meet at ‘Adonis Bower’. All find that they have pursued their own deluded interests, in the mistaken belief that the next ‘gull’ in line will be guarding the sisters. When Lisander and Demetrius appear on stage, boasting of their success, and the Duke sportingly congratulates them on their ingenuity, commenting that it ‘deserves applause’ (H3v), we might reasonably expect the play to be over. It is not. The farcical sequence of self-deceptions that has marked the final act of the play is given one last twist as the two rival princes, Aminter and Julio, who the audience have hitherto been encouraged to regard as mere accessories to the action, reappear.50 Having surrendered their prizes to Aminter and Julio, in the mistaken belief that they are mere bit-players in the drama that is unfolding, Lisander and Demetrius have fallen at the last hurdle – the gullers gulled. All their ingenuity has come to nothing; the princesses will marry their rivals. The Gulls of the title of Day’s play, then, are not simply Basilius and his court, nor even just the two defeated princes, Lisander and Demetrius. It is the audience, too, who have been abused, on account of their misplaced confidence in Sidney’s chivalric plot structures. Our expectation that the nobility of the disguised princes should find its retrospective validation in an advantageous marriage is revealed to be a mere, literary fantasy. The play thus both encompasses and defies all the conventional audience expectations outlined in the induction. It is, fairly consistently, satirical, being full of complaints against the devaluation of honours, which in no way conflicts with the ‘heroic’ ethos of the Arcadia, or of chivalric romance generally;51 it also contains numerous passages written in a burlesque style, as with the mock blazon of Mopsa – and this, again, is not necessarily at odds with Sidney. The shock produced by the conclusion of The Isle of Gulls demonstrates the extent to which the ‘heroic’ Sidneyean model still dominates our narrative expectations.52 No matter how disrespectfully Day treats his source material, we still expect the princes to win the princesses at the end – and they do, except that it is the ‘wrong’ pair of princes who do so. This, it should be agreed, is something quite different from ‘travesty’ as Andrews describes it. Day has not debased Sidney’s romance, he has turned it on its head.

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The stage directions at this point indicate that it is Julio and Hippolita who enter, but the 1606 edition of the Ile of Guls is riddled with printing errors, and it seems clear that it is Aminter and Julio who are meant. On romance’s involvement with themes of vera nobilitas, see Chapter 1. The Isle of Gulls is full of comments along these lines. Dametas for example is said to be one of those who ‘eate into the credite of true borne gentrie, undermine and worke out the true nobilitie, to inroote & establish themselves’ (B2v). On the other hand, the passages in which ‘Dorus’ courts Hippolita via Mopsa are also full of these tropes, but they refer instead to his hidden nobility: ‘you should studie to ennoble your deserts’, the princess advises him, ‘and beget effects worthy to court and win your Ladies acceptance.’ (D4r) The way in which the names of the main characters seem to allude to A Midsummer Night’s Dream – one of Shakespeare’s most neatly-plotted plays – also promotes the expectation that the play’s intrigues will be resolved in the most orderly manner possible.

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Quixotic Representations on the Seventeenth-Century Stage Day’s is possibly the most elaborate and thematic treatment of chivalric ‘gulling’ in the early modern drama; it is also – despite the play’s critical neglect – one of the subtlest, and even most conceptual expressions of this theme. By superimposing his own narrative on that of a familiar predecessor – Sidney’s Arcadia – Day exploits the theme of chivalry, not merely as a thematic element that can be used to bring disparate threads of the action into a significant relation with each other (as in Eastward Ho), but as a device that structures his play’s relation to its audience. The toying with dramatic genre that opens The Isle of Gulls is very much to the point. By the end of the play, we realise that we have encountered a text that revels in its ability to secure the audience’s (or reader’s) consent to a system of narrative promises that it has no intention of keeping. Eastward Ho presents us with the example of Gertrude, the Quixotic reader; The Isle of Gulls positions its audience as a mass of Quixotic playgoers. The most sustained engagement in the early modern drama with chivalric romance – and its readership – is, of course, Francis Beaumont’s The Knight of the Burning Pestle.53 Critics are divided as to the exact nature, if any, of the influence that Cervantes’ work may have exerted on Beaumont. Walter Burre, publisher of The Knight, makes a point of denying any such debt in his dedicatory epistle: ‘Perhaps it will be thought to be of the race of Don Quixote: we both may confidently sweare it is his elder above a yeare, and therefore may (by vertue of his birth-right) challenge the wall of him.’54 Some have felt that Burre protests too much; others, that a relationship between The Knight and Don Quixote cannot be proven on internal evidence alone, in the absence of clear verbal parallels.55 Whatever the exact relationship between these two texts, the similarities are striking, and it is hard not to feel that the authors are working at similar effects. The Knight of the Burning Pestle, presented at the Blackfriars theatre, opens with the Prologue to a play, The London Merchant, which no sooner begins 53

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The Knight of the Burning Pestle (London: Walter Burre, 1613). Further references in the main body of the text. First printed anonymously, the play was attributed to both Beaumont and Fletcher in subsequent seventeenth-century editions, but is now generally considered to be the work only of the former (although the publisher of the text, Walter Burre, speaks of the plays ‘parents’ in the plural). Burre proceeds to launch into a Gaytonesque fantasy about the two knights joining forces: ‘I doubt not but that they will meet in their adventures, and I hope the breaking of one staffe will make them friends; and perhaps they will combine themselves, and travell through the world to seeke their adventures.’ See the Introduction to The Knight of the Burning Pestle, ed. Sheldon P. Zitner (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), pp. 39–40, for a summary of views. Herbert Murch’s edition of the play, which he attributes to both Beaumont and Fletcher (New York: Henry Holt, 1908) argues against direct influence, on the grounds that there are no similarities between the two texts that cannot be explained through a shared acquaintance with chivalric literature (xxxiii–lvi). Zitner inclines toward a verdict of ‘not proven’ although he does so in part because he sees Don Quixote, in the Romantic fashion, as an ‘illumination of the limits of relativism’, and thus different from the play he is editing.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance than it is interrupted by a citizen from the audience, and his wife. Fed up with productions full of ‘girds at Citizens’, as he puts it, this grocer demands instead ‘something notably in honour of the Commons of the Citty’ (B1r–v). Thus, the grocer’s apprentice, Rafe, is introduced on stage as the Knight of the Burning Pestle, and thereafter his story intertwines with the narrative of The London Merchant, in which an apprentice, Jasper, wins the hand of Luce, his master’s daughter, in marriage. Whether or not Beaumont was directly inspired by Cervantes, The Knight of the Burning Pestle is riddled with ‘Quixotic’ characters and situations. Although the context might suggest that Beaumont’s satire is directed primarily at ‘citizen’ plays such as Heywood’s Four Prentices of London, it is notable that The Knight actually concentrates to a large extent on printed texts. As in Cervantes, almost everybody in this play is a reader of chivalric romance. Rafe’s first appearance on stage shows him reading Palmerin of England, which he goes on to quote from out loud. This leads to a meditation, interspersed with comments from his mistress, on contemporary knighthood, and his own decision to take up arms: Rafe. There are no such courteous and fair well spoken Knights in this age, they will call one the sonne of a whore, that Palmerin of England, would have called faire sir; and one that Rosicler would have cal’d right beauteous Damsell, they will call dam’d bitch. Wife. I’le besworne will they Rafe, they have cal’d mee so an hundred times about a scurvy pipe of Tobacco. (C2r–v)

Another complaint about contemporary knighthood that might serve to illustrate the thesis of the death of chivalry, and the irrelevance of chivalric romance. As Rafe’s references to swearing knights suggest, it must be his intention to ‘revive’ the order of knighthood, just as it is Don Quixote’s. Once embarked upon his chivalric career, Rafe naturally commits a host of Quixotic misinterpretations: his adoption of a chivalric persona leaves him utterly unsuited for the task of dealing with the contemporary world from which he originated. Thus, we have an inn scene, in which a plain hostelry becomes ‘an ancient Castle’, staffed by ‘the old Knight Of the most holy order of the Bell’ (it is the Bell Inn), his ‘Lady’ wife, and their three ‘Squires’, Chamberlino, Tapstero, and Ostlero, who make it their business to entertain their knighterrant guest (E2r). Like Don Quixote, Rafe is unable to pay the reckoning, and his master has to come on stage to foot the bill. From its preface onwards, which elegantly parodies the characteristic genealogical plot structures of romance by describing the play as an ‘unfortunate child’, exposed to the inhospitable world (that is, the public), saved by its dedicatee, Robert Keysar, and finally ‘fostred’ by Walter Burre,56 The Knight of 56

These passages go far beyond the conventional identification of an author’s work as his ‘child’, moving into a more generically-specific parody.

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Quixotic Representations on the Seventeenth-Century Stage the Burning Pestle represents as sustained an engagement with the matter of romance as the early modern drama has to offer. Its density of reference to chivalric texts suggests an audience familiar with the genre, yet the attitude is clearly satirical. In an interesting introduction to the play, Sheldon P. Zitner moves from discussing the possible influence of Cervantes to suggest that The Knight of the Burning Pestle might be seen as a festive, carnivalesque work. As he points out, the fourth and fifth acts of the play are full of episodes and references with ‘ritual antecedents’: references to Shrove Tuesday, to hobby horses, to the training ground at Mile End, and, in particular, an extended burlesque of the speeches of the May Lords – that is, the men elected annually to lead the festivities on May Day. ‘This inspired miscellany,’ Zitner writes, ‘has . . . a common denominator: carnival, the festive excess that celebrates the survival of the folk, of which patriotism and guild attachments are both the instrument and symbols.’ The resulting account of what the play is doing – one clearly based upon Bakhtin – is, accordingly, an extraordinarily positive one: For the participants, carnival was its own justification: a throwing off of the restraint of every-day social forms – of ‘place’ and role, dress, prudence – for indulgent play acting, feasting, sexuality and aggression . . . Processions, competitions, the acting of farces, mock funerals, mock battles, violence and sexual licence acted or verbalised – all these elements of the carnivalesque are gathered into the fourth- and fifth-act skits demanded by the Citizens in preference to the tame show offered by the professional theatre . . . The rudeness and unselfconsciousness of the carnivalesque are presented with an amusement and critique short of mockery, and with the participatory enjoyment of imitation that defines the spirit of carnival itself.57

This passage develops the arguments offered in Jackson Cope’s The Theatre and the Dream, in which it is asserted that the satire on taste in The Knight is ‘ephemeral’ and ‘topical’, but that it serves to ‘express the eternal validity of ritual action’, incorporating Rafe’s absurdities into a vision of seasonal renewal – ‘what spring always brought’.58 Superficially accurate, in terms of the ritual content of the play, this description seems to quite miss its attitude. Such interpretations are underpinned by the assumption that any work that deploys ‘carnival’ forms must necessarily conform to the spirit outlined in Bakhtin’s work on Rabelais. Yet ‘amusement and critique’ of the sort offered by The Knight are simply alien to the ‘participatory enjoyment’ of the carnivalesque. For Bakhtin, carnival is defined by this sense of participation. Having discussed 57 58

Zitner ed. (1984), pp. 41–2. The Theatre and the Dream (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), pp. 203, 209. Such benign interpretations of what the play is doing seem typical. Michael Hattaway’s edition of The Knight (London: Ernest Benn, 1969) discusses its festive elements, before going on to say that the play has ‘genial fun’ at the expense of the citizens (xiv).

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance the relationship between carnival and spectacle, and having concluded that the former ‘belongs to the borderline between art and life’, he goes on to say that carnival does not know footlights, in the sense that it does not acknowledge any distinction between actors and spectators. Footlights would destroy a carnival, as the absence of footlights would destroy a theatrical performance. Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live in it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people.59

Clearly, such an account has its uses in interpreting a play that begins with a violation of the boundary between stage and audience.60 Equally clearly, simply to reproduce such an account leaves one open to the risk of ignoring the ‘privy marke of Ironie’ (A2r) which, according to its publisher, defines Beaumont’s play. Just as the play of the rustic marriage celebrants at Kenilworth castle fails, once reconfigured through the eyes of a courtier, to give expression to any sort of popular spirit, becoming instead antics that serve to confirm their social inferiority, so too The Knight of the Burning Pestle presents us with a carnival in which the participants are the objects of the (real) audience’s attention. Rather than soliciting the enthusiastic involvement of the audience’s emotions, The Knight seems to demand that we stand back, observe with amusement, and engage in acts of critical discrimination. Over and over again in his account of Rabelais, Bakhtin hammers home the point that carnival ‘marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions . . . all were considered equal during carnival’.61 Yet, far from dissolving social distinctions in a gleeful celebration of common humanity, The Knight of the Burning Pestle ultimately underlines and reinforces these boundaries through its treatment of Rafe’s transgressive progress as a ‘grocer-errant’. Fantastic though his adventures may be, we are never allowed to forget that Rafe is only a grocer’s boy, nor that he is only dressed up as a knight as a direct consequence of the risible literary tastes of his employers. Time after time, Rafe is cut down to size. When the citizen’s wife proposes that the ‘King of Cracovia’s’ daughter should be presented falling in love with her apprentice, the players (apparently pushed too far) finally protest at this interference: Boy. . . . wee cannot present a house covered with blacke velvet, and a Lady in beaten gold [as the wife has demanded]. Cit. Sir boy, lets ha’t as you can then. Boy. Besides it will shew ill-favouredly to have a Grocers prentice to court a kings daughter.

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Rabelais and his World, trans. Helene Iswolsky (Bloomington: The Indiana University Press, 1984), p. 7. More than that, in fact: some Blackfriars’ spectators were allowed on stage – but they were gentlemen, and the citizen is not. Bakhtin (1984), p. 10.

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Quixotic Representations on the Seventeenth-Century Stage Cit. Will it so sir? you are well read in Histories: I pray you what was sir Dagonet? was not he prentice to a Grocer in London? read the play of The Foure Prentices of London, where they tosse their pikes so. (H1v)

The citizen’s final comments compress together allusions to two distinct but interrelated things – one a play, and the other a piece of civic pageantry. Thomas Heywood’s The Four Prentises of London is a play that celebrates the citizenry and institutions of London. It concerns itself with the adventures of the four sons of the Earl of Bulloigne, all of whom, despite their noble ancestry, have been brought up in trade. Ultimately they travel to Jerusalem, where they perform feats of arms appropriate to their true station in life – but, crucially, they remain proud of their urban upbringing. (Thus, Eustace bears the guild arms of the grocer’s company on his shield, just as Rafe bears a pestle.) Such a plot is hardly likely to strike us nowadays as a full-blown assertion of the class interests and ‘honour’ of the tradespeople of early modern London. The ‘apprentices’ are, after all, aristocrats in disguise, a fact that would seem to neutralise any such implications; a tale in which apprentices went out and did great deeds without turning out to be of noble birth was evidently a step too far. Heywood is not attempting to oust the nobles from their place at the top of the social order; far from it. He simply wants the likes of London apprentices to bask in the reflected glory afforded by the heroic deeds of their betters. Yet in context, and despite the efficiency with which Heywood might seem to sabotage his own stated aims, even such a limited attempt to apply the language of honour to mere citizens could be construed as a threat – as we shall see. Heywood’s play ‘cross-dresses’, as it were, aristocrats as apprentices with the aim of making a statement about the relevance of chivalric values to the economic ethos of early modern Londoners. The object of the first of the citizen’s allusions, to Sir Dagonet, involves a similar act of social transvestism, performed with similar ends in view – this time, one in which citizens dressed up as knights. As with Justice Shallow’s more famous recollection of his days playing ‘Sir Dagonet in Arthur’s show’,62 the reference here seems to be to the archery displays held annually in London, in which the participants adopted noble or Arthurian personae. One seventeenth-century historian of these pageants traces this tradition back to the reign of Henry VIII, who decided to honour one of the King’s Guard for his skill in archery, ‘and for that this Barlo did dwell in Shoreditch, the King named him Duke of Shoreditch’; participants in a show of 1583 included Marquesses of Clerkenwell, Islington and Hoxton, among others.63 The other archery company mentioned in contemporary 62 63

The Second Part of King Henry IV, ed. A.R. Humphreys (London: Methuen, 1966), iii, ii, 275. William Wood, The Bow-Mans Glory, or Archery Revived (London: S.R., 1682), sig. D5r. The 1583 show included, in what may have been a deliberate reminiscence of the Kenilworth pageantry, a ‘monstrous Giant’ defending Houndsditch, ‘which since that Giant lived belonged to Prince Arthur’ (E4r).

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance writings favoured Arthurian titles. Richard Mulcaster’s Positions make reference to the ‘friendly and franke fellowship of prince Arthurs knights in and about the citie of London’, which had lately revived the practice of archery; and names one member of this society, ‘maister Hewgh Offly [a wealthy member of the Leather-seller’s Company], and the same my noble fellow in that order Syr Lancelot’.64 Richard Robinson also traces the history of this order back to Henry VIII, saying that it was this monarch who instituted the practice of ‘chusing Knights of ARTHURES traine to maintaine Archery’ (adding that Henry himself practiced the sport at ‘Myle end’).65 Robinson prints a series of coats of arms attributed to the Knights of the Round Table, some with initials alongside – evidently the initials of those citizens who played that knight in the shows; thus, Sir Lancelot’s arms are flanked by the initials H.O. (Hugh Offley, presumably). But Sir Dagonet is not one of the knight’s whose arms are featured in Robinson’s volume; nor is this absence surprising. Although Dagonet is one of the 24 knights whose names decorate the edge of the Round Table at Winchester,66 he is most famous as Arthur’s jester in Malory. It is not mentioned there that he is a grocer – his title appears to be a mere courtesy – and he certainly gets nowhere near to wooing any princesses; such martial deeds as he attempts serve purely as light relief, and generally end in embarrassing failure. It is hardly surprising, then, that ‘Sir Dagonet’ had some currency as an insult in the early seventeenth century67 – and such a reference seems particularly pointed when invoked in the context of the archery shows. The joke about Dagonet is, quite simply, that by dressing up as knights, far from lending themselves the heroic stature they aspire to, these citizens are actually making fools of themselves. In his characteristically confused manner, the citizen is responding to the player’s sense of dramatic decorum by making a statement about the ‘honour’ of his class – a statement that is significantly focused around rituals and fictions that express this honour in military terms.68 And yet, such is the nature of the play he appears in, his muddled defence is really equivalent to him

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Richard Mulcaster, Positions Wherein Those Primitive Circumstances be Explained, Which are Necessarie for the Training up of Children (London: Thomas Vautrollier, 1581), sig. N3v. R.R. [Richard Robinson], The Auncient Order, Societie, and Unitie Laudable, of Prince Arthur, and his Knightly Armory of the Round Table (London: John Wolfe, 1583), sig. B1r. Charles Bowie Millican, Spenser and the Table Round (London: Frank Cass, 1967), p. 176. Millican gives the fullest modern account of the London archery shows, to which I am indebted. Ben Jonson was particularly fond of it: Zeal-of-the-land Busy is called a ‘Dagonet’ in Bartholomew Fair, for instance (v, v, 97); it appears as an insult in Cynthia’s Revels (v, iii, 549); and gets applied to the fantastical knight Puntarvolo in Every Man Out of his Humour (v, iv, 118–19). Thus, Richard Robinson is both emphatic that the shows are ‘specially for CITIZENS’, and appends to his work a versified chronicle of all those archers who have ‘accomplisht chevalry’ down the ages. Robinson (1583), sigs. B1r, M3v.

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Quixotic Representations on the Seventeenth-Century Stage condemning himself out of his own mouth. Faced with objections to the inappropriate mingling of clowns and kings that they seem bent upon, Beaumont’s citizen couple can only respond in terms which reveal their poverty of learning and what the play presents as a narrowly partisan bias in favour of their own kind. Rafe’s characteristic mode of speech, which mingles chivalric diction with prosaic London detail, only serves to underline, in stylistic terms, this fundamental lack of decorum.69 In fact, from the moment that they step on stage to disrupt the prologue of The London Merchant, the citizen, his wife, and thus their surrogate, Rafe, are characterised by their lack of respect for boundaries, their indecorousness – something ironically at odds with their own inflated pretensions and the sense of propriety that goes with them. Basically, the citizen and, in particular, his wife, are presented as deeply embarrassing. They are constantly engaging in public displays of affection, being unable to talk to each other without calling each other ‘cunny’,70 ‘lamb’, ‘mouse’, or some such other term of endearment. They make indiscreet bodily allusions: one of the theatre boys is, in the wife’s opinion, ‘troubled with the wormes’ (F4v). In fact, the wife is something of an expert in matters medical. She gives advice to Mistress Merrythought on dealing with her son’s ‘chilblanes’ – rub the foot with a mouse’s skin, or roll it in warm embers, ‘and you may make him put his fingers betweene his toes & smell to them, it’s very soveraigne for his head if he be costive’ (F3r). At another point, the wife happily relates a dirty joke made at her expense – recalling how she lost her child at Puddle Wharf, and Rafe had commented, ‘peace, Mistresse . . . I’le get you another as good’ – without, apparently, realising its content (E1v). She seems to have a talent for inadvertent obscenity; when a Dutch strongman comes up in conversation, she comments that he was ‘a goodly man, if all things were answerable to his bignesse’ (F4r). Practically every time she opens her mouth, the wife commits yet another faux pas, and her husband is only marginally less outrageous. For Bakhtin, carnival is basically life-affirming; it deals with a shared physicality, asserting that we are none of us above our appetites. The Knight, on the other hand, is shot through with revulsion at the thought of other people’s bodies. Consider the scene in which the giant Barberoso’s prisoners are released. The first, has been lured into the giant’s den ‘under pretence of killing of the itch’ – that is, probably either lice or skin disease (G1v). The second, Sir Pockhole, is evidently syphilitic (hence his presence in the giant’s cave – barbers were often called on to treat this complaint). His ancestors were ‘French-men’, an allusion to the ‘French disease’, and his bones ache – a symptom of the 69

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In contrast to carnivalesque language as described by Bakhtin, which also employs extravagant contrasts of high and low, but to a very different end. Bakhtin (1984), Chapter 2, ‘The Language of the Marketplace in Rabelais’, pp. 145–95. Possibly with an obscene implication; Zitner’s text consistently gives the less ambiguous variant, ‘cony’.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance ailment in its advanced form. Barbaroso, Pockhole complains, ‘with sharpest instrument of purest steele, Did cut the gristle of my Nose away, And in the place this velvet plaister stands’ (G2r). Finally, we have a knight and his lady, who have been fed only on bread and water, together with burned mutton, whilst captive. ‘But onely,’ the knight adds, pulling out a syringe, ‘twice a day for novelty, He gave a spooneful of this hearty broth, To each of us, through this same slender quill’ (G2v) – a reference, according to Murch, to the ‘subcutaneous injection of nutriment’; more forthright, Zitner glosses the reference as being to ‘clysters: medicine or nutriments in enema form’. Beaumont’s play mimes the outward forms of carnival, but uses them to induce repulsion, rather than to promote fraternal feelings. Beaumont’s play is indeed shot through with ritual forms, but, far from being a Rabelaisean, festive play, The Knight of the Burning Pestle seems to regard such ‘festivous’ elements at best with irony, and at worst inverts them to produce an utterly disenchanted vision of corporeal life.71 The ritual aspects that The Knight refers to relate to nothing so vague as the cycle of the seasons; rather, they give expression to the aspirations and corporate self-image of the London mercantile classes, and it is this aspect of these ritual forms that the play responds to. Rather than celebrating the shared humanity of its characters, the play seems instead to be committed to distinctions – between stage and audience, grocer and knight, body and body – which the citizen and his wife constantly reinforce through their absurd, ‘errant’ transgressions. If the play is to be related to a popular form, we might see it instead in terms of the charivari, a communal ritual dedicated to putting in their place those deemed to have ideas above their station.72 But even here we can see the difference; Rafe and his employers are more pushed than dragged down by the play’s comedy. So what are we to make of the contention that these plays indicate a growing disenchantment with the matter of chivalry? This would appear to be the opinion of (amongst others) John Doebler, who feels that The Knight of the Burning Pestle satirises ‘the present state of knighthood’, makes the connection with Eastward Ho when he comments that ‘the magnanimous chivalric hero 71

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Consider for instance Rafe’s address to London, spoken in his capacity as ‘May Lord’. Not only are these lines spoken from the head of a cistern, they open with a series of bathetic references to his ‘not ignoble’ ancestry, deflating the genealogical tropes of romance; far from being a prince in disguise, he is, he declares, even inferior to the sheepish ‘Flocke’ of Grocers (I2r–v). Gayton’s Pleasant Notes, it is worth noting at this point, seem originally to have been entitled the Festivous Notes, and are referred to as such in the dedicatory matter. See Peter Burke, Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London: Temple Smith, 1978), pp. 198–200. Burke describes the charivari as a ‘carnival’ ritual, but one dedicated to putting people in their place by publicly defaming them; it is an instrument of ‘social control’, allowing a community ‘to express its hostility to individuals who stepped out of line and so to discourage other breaches of custom’ (p. 200). Jonson’s Epicoene would be an example of a play structured around the charivari.

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Quixotic Representations on the Seventeenth-Century Stage was everything Sir Petronel Flash is not’, and concludes that honour was a ‘dying ideal’ in seventeenth-century London.73 Such commentary seems consistent with the ‘temporal’ interpretation of Quixoticism discussed earlier. Disillusion with the matter of chivalry features here as an index of modernity, of the transition to an urban, commercialised, even capitalistic society. And, certainly, the manner in which these playwrights approach chivalric themes seems thoroughly negative. As we encounter it in Jacobean drama, chivalry forms part of a world of intrigue and ‘gullery’. The knights in these plays are phoneys, their adoption of chivalric stances a mere front; those who are prepared to lend credence to such representations are fools. As the disenchanted Gertrude finally realises, ‘The Knighthood now a daies, are nothing like the Knighthood of old time.’ If we are to accept the ‘temporal’ interpretation of Quixotic figures, it must be the case that tropes of this kind have a sort of historical value; they must bear witness to a general loss of faith in contemporary knighthood. Characterisations such as these, in which the believer in chivalric value structures is presented as an object of comedy – as a gull, a Don Quixote – must in themselves be expressive of a changed cultural climate. Without ignoring the negative view of knighthood in these plays, such a construction, I believe, utterly misinterprets the nature of such themes, in part because it neglects to pay attention to the weight of literary tradition that lies behind them. Consider again Eastward Ho, which presents us with the conjunction of two quite separate systems of tropes, one that speaks of the decay of knighthood (‘The Knighthood now a daies . . .’), and one about the woman reader of romance. It is precisely at the point at which these two discourses intersect that each begins to unravel. Gertrude’s laments about seventeenth-century knights are simply an instance of what we have already seen to be a quite socially interested representation of the woman reader as excessively credulous, always liable to ‘run out of her selfe and become a Ladie Errant’.74 When Gertrude bemoans the state of contemporary knighthood, she is comparing the knights of the Jacobean inflation of honours – drunk, gambling, foulmouthed and impecunious – with real knights, knights who are as virtuous as they are valorous, knights who are as ready to rescue a damsel in distress as they are loath to leave a wrong unrighted: that is to say, she compares them, not (as the ‘temporal interpretation’ of Quixoticism requires) with the knights of the Middle Ages, but with the knights in books of chivalry. This is not so much a moment of disillusioned recognition, as a continuation of her earlier errors. Comments such as Gertrude’s and Rafe’s (‘there are no such courteous and fair well spoken Knights in this age’), even if they seem to refer to the past, are jokes about literary credulity, not historical commentary.

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John Doebler ed., The Knight of the Burning Pestle (London: Edward Arnold, 1967), xx–xxi. See Introduction, pp. 26–8 and Chapter 5, below.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance Gertrude’s complaints about seventeenth-century knighthood actually only recapitulate one of the major themes of her favourite reading matter. Even romances written hundreds of years before the likes of Eastward Ho contain passages of this sort. Consider for example the fourteenth-century English adaptation of Chrétien de Troyes, Yvain and Gawain. This poem opens with the evocation of a great feast, at which the assembled lords and ladies speak Of dedes of armes and of veneri And of gude knightes that lyfed then . . . Thai tald of more trewth tham bitwene Than now omang men here es sene. For trowth and luf es al bylaft [forsaken]: Men uses now another craft.

The passage ends with a eulogy of Arthur and his ‘curtayse cumpany’, the ‘flowre of chevallry’.75 The events of chivalric romance are almost always set in the past, as in Yvain and Gawain, and are just as frequently phrased as an explicit rebuke to a corrupt present. As Louise K. Horowitz points out, ‘Nostalgia for the “knights of old” is a traditional convention of Renaissance romance . . . “old”, of course has no historical meaning whatsoever. Rather, it provides a loaded allusion to old texts, to earlier literary production.’76 Why should we give more weight to Gertrude’s comments in Jacobean England than to those of Chrétien in the twelfth century, or his English translator in the fourteenth? Nor is it clear why seventeenth-century mockery of knights should be taken to signify the decline of an institution, when fourteenthcentury instances (such as Chaucer’s Sir Thopas) are not. Gertrude’s complaints in Eastward Ho reveal far more about both her gullibility and her familiarity with chivalric literature than they could ever do about the state of seventeenth-century knighthood. Again, when Don Quixote (like Rafe) sets out to revive the order of knighthood, he does so, not because the modern world is sorely lacking such a thing, not in a failed attempt to reverse the passage of time, but because he has been reading books of chivalry. So far as Cervantes’ hero is concerned, the world is in error in not renewing that most happy Age, in which the Order of Knight-Errantry did flourish . . . Most of your Knights now-a-daies are such as rustle in their silks, their cloth of gold and silver, and such rich stuffs as they weare rather than Maile, with which they should arme themselves: You have no Knight now that 75

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Yvain and Gawain, ed. Maldwyn Mills (London: J.M. Dent, 1992), lines 26–36. Chrétien’s twelfth-century original differs from this only in that it prefers to emphasise the amorous accomplishments of former times, in contrast to a grim contemporary reality, rather than the martial aspect. ‘Where Have All the “Old Knights” Gone? L’Astrée’, in Kevin Brownlee and Marina Scordilis Brownlee eds, Romance (Hanover and London: The University Press of New England, 1985), pp. 253–64, p. 253.

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Quixotic Representations on the Seventeenth-Century Stage will lye upon the bare ground subject to the rigour of the aire armed Cap a pie . . . none now, that coming out of this Wood, enters into that Mountain, and from thence tramples over a barren and desart shoare of the Sea, most commonly stormy and unquiet; and finding at the brink of it some little Cockboat, without Oares, Sail, Mast, or any kind of Takling, casts himself into it.77

And so on. Like Gertrude and Rafe, Don Quixote bemoans the present state of knighthood; but it ought to be clear that reading such passages as contributions towards a historical thesis requires a degree of interpretative violence. Fairly obviously, Don Quixote is referring, not to any former period of Spain’s past, but to a utopian state that only ever subsisted between the pages of a book. If we were in any doubt about the sources of his historical vision, we have the comments of his friend the Curate, who declares he ‘can by no meanes be perswaded that all of that Troop of Knights Errant which you named, were ever true and really persons of flesh and bone in this world’.78 An interpretation that wishes to see in these texts evidence for the decline of knighthood is obliged to systematically reconfigure these tropes, reinterpreting them as bald statements of historical fact, whereas in fact such passages merely replay in a different key the joke that is central to The Isle of Gulls, a joke about our own credulity in the face of persuasive literary structures. If we can detect in these plays a disenchantment with the chivalric, it is in a quite specifically literary sense, one developed out of humanistic programmes for the mastery over one’s reading, rather than any broader historical thesis.79 Weaving a discourse about the improbabilities of romance and the credulity of its readers around a gallery of representative social types (chambermaid, knight, citizen), such representations are concerned, however, not so much with the literary qualities of romance, as with a sort of social and cultural distinction. Romance literature presents us with a world in which, however complex the variations played upon the theme, virtue and social status ultimately coincide – for its heroes, at least. Conversely, on the early seventeenthcentury stage, there are no such assurances, and chivalry is produced as mere imposture; signs of nobility that are unquestioningly respected in books of chivalry are relentlessly demystified in these plays (hence their obsession with clothes, another way of addressing the same theme). But characters such as Sir Petronel Flash are deemed fascinating because of their ability to exact respect for their status, despite their inability to bring any substance to the roles that they adopt, and it is at this point that seventeenth-century concerns about social mobility start to intersect with a critical tradition that emphasised the artlessness of the reader of romance. Essentially, notions of the improbability 77

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Shelton trans. (1652), sig. Nn4v. Often, Don Quixote’s statements about his mission to renew the ‘erraticall knighthood’ (C3v) of former times are also jokes about his own ‘errant’ progress. Shelton trans. (1652), sig. Oo1r. See Introduction, pp. 14–16.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance of romance are deployed to suggest the futility of the social aspirations of the likes of Gertrude. Jacobean drama is obsessed with imposture, with the way in which the face one presents to the world can exact ‘credit’ – the acceptance of and belief in that social persona, but also, often, money – from one’s fellow citizens. This is exactly the strategy of Sir Petronel Flash, who both adopts a chivalric identity convincing enough to gull the ‘Quixotic’ Gertrude – that is, to get her to ‘credit’ his role as knight – and, on the strength of his marriage, attempts to secure ‘credit’ from the usurer, Security. Presenting these manoeuvres in chivalric terms is ideal, not simply because Petronel is a knight, but because detractors of romance – the literature of chivalry – had already produced a critical language that stressed the credulity of the reader of such improbable texts.80 It is this same notion that provides the central joke of the Isle of Gulls, a play that revels in its ability to dupe its audience, to secure their mistaken assent (‘credit’) to a chivalric narrative that is not, in fact, going to take place. Without the capacity displayed by a Rafe to engage (however absurdly) in chivalric, martial action, a female figure such as Gertrude presents us with the trope of Quixoticism stripped to its bare essentials; what remains is the desire to rise socially, produced as a ridiculous faith in fantastic narrative. Eastward Ho considers the supposed reality of Gertrude’s elevation through marriage to be as unlikely as the most monstrous improbabilities of romance – as unlikely, in fact, as a contemporary, giant-killing knight who lives in an enchanted castle. Naturally, the castle turns out to be made of air, just as Gertrude’s attempt to rise above her origins collapses, ‘naturally’, into ridicule of this absurd notion. By placing the woman reader at the centre of its chivalric themes, Eastward Ho serves to suggest just how little tropes of Quixoticism as they were originally produced in the seventeenth century have to do with the sorts of temporal transgression they signify for modern critics. Their focus is always on figures who are in some way anomalous in a strictly graded social hierarchy. Even in Cervantes, Alonso Quixano himself is not, the text makes clear, a knight by birth. He is a mere hidalgo, the lowest rank of the Spanish nobility (Shelton translates the term as ‘gentleman’). Cervantes actually extracts far more comedy from his hero’s attempts to elevate himself socially than he does from his supposed anachronism; the opening chapters of Don Quixote are focused around just this theme. At his first sally, having armed himself in a

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Ceri Sullivan’s essay, ‘Silly Money, Fantastic Credit’, in Ceri Sullivan and Barbara White eds, Writing and Fantasy (London and New York: Longman, 1999), pp. 122–36 discusses the manner in which plays such as The Alchemist revolve around the notion of credit, producing a ‘fantasy of value’, but always with the risk that ‘there is nothing substantial behind the credit’ (129). The plays I have been discussing have the added depth provided by the element of believing or not believing in somebody as fantastic as Sir Petronel Flash – a cross-fertilisation with a discourse about the improbabilities of romance.

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Quixotic Representations on the Seventeenth-Century Stage manner (as he imagines) befitting his newly-assumed status, Don Quixote has his dreams of chivalric accomplishment shaken when he realises ‘he was not yet dub’d Knight; and therefore by the Laws of Knighthood, neither could nor ought to Combat with any Knight’.81 Don Quixote achieves the rank he covets only in a farcical parody of real ceremonies of knighthood, performed in an Inn. In the case of The Knight of the Burning Pestle, we actually have contemporary evidence that the play was understood to address such themes. It was probably first performed in 1607, but apparently flopped and was not restaged until 1635. Walter Burre, in his dedicatory epistle to the printed text of The Knight, was thus reduced to complaining that the play had been misunderstood, whilst nicely compounding the insult given to those who had condemned it: the audience, ‘not understanding the privy marke of Ironie about it (which shewed it was no of-spring of any vulgar braine) utterly rejected’ the play (A2r). A manuscript note in the British Library copy of The Knight is rather more specific about the reasons for the play’s failure: ‘Oh how the offended citizens did nestle [squirm] To be abused with Knight of Burning Pestle.’82 That is, The Knight was perceived to be an attack on the honour of the citizens of London, as it found expression in rituals such as the archery exercises in which participants were given Arthurian names – rituals that placed the citizens ‘on stage’, visibly at the heart of the life of the city. The Knight ruthlessly satirises the pretensions of citizen honour as transgressive. This transgressiveness is figured, quite specifically, as an infringement of the prerogatives reserved for those of higher social status – of the ability to appear on stage, in the first instance, but most importantly, of their exclusive right to representational strategies such as knighthood that supposedly body forth the inner nobility of character that justifies that status; and every line of the play’s comedy is devoted to making the notion that a citizen might have the right to such signs look as absurd as possible. Far from having missed the ‘Ironie’ of his play, Beaumont’s first audience seem, rather, to have understood it all too well. 81 82

Shelton trans. (1652), sig. A2v. See William Hunt, ‘Civic Chivalry and the English Civil War’, in Anthony Grafton and Ann Blair eds, The Transmission of Culture in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia: The University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), pp. 204–37. Hunt discusses at length the manifestations of citizen honour that the play seems to satirise, which he goes so far as to call a ‘political movement’ (213). It should be noted at this point that statements about the audience composition of the Blackfriars theatre are controversial, following Alfred Harbage’s identification of a gentlemanly audience for such indoor theatres, in contrast to the more ‘lower class’ fare offered elsewhere. Harbage felt that the play failed because it mocked the citizens ‘without animosity’, and thus failed to satisfy the prejudices of its predominantly gentle audience (Shakespeare and the Rival Traditions (London: Frank Cass, 1968), p. 107). The manuscript note discussed above seems to suggest that, as Andrew Gurr puts it, the ‘citizen element’ of the Blackfriars audience was ‘stronger than Beaumont bargained for’ – and that his intentions were far less genial than Harbage assumed (The Shakespearean Stage, 1574–1642 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 216).

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance I am suggesting that Quixotic themes, commonly taken as an index of the redundancy of chivalry, may in fact be nothing of the sort. More than anything else seventeenth-century representations of Quixoticism seem to address issues of social, not temporal, transgression. Seventeenth-century literature – even those works which we might consider to be the most ruthlessly cynical in their attitude to chivalry – seem to deploy this trope as a way of reflecting upon persons who are socially out of place, like Don Quixote, the hidalgo who aspires to knighthood, or Gertrude, the citizen who wants to be a lady, or Rafe, the grocer dressed up as a knight. What it is important to realise is that this is in no way an odd or unlikely choice. Chivalry offers a perfect opportunity to reflect upon such issues. What we see in these plays is not chivalry adapted to distinctively seventeenth-century concerns, but chivalry lying at the very heart of them, as a primary language for talking about matters of status. Complex though their attitude to the subject might be, for the authors we have been discussing, the scandal of the upstart is manifested in its most outrageous form precisely when the parvenu in question lays claim to the privileges of knighthood – a fact that, far from suggesting its irrelevance, ought to hint at the extent to which chivalric iconography retained its prominence in the social vision of the seventeenth century. Rather than indicating a decline in the ideals of honour, these plays suggest their persistence, as they mount a defence of their own social interests, of ‘true’ nobility, through the deployment of images of false valour. We have already studied Robert Laneham’s Letter as dealing with the way in which communities and individuals might focus their ambitions through chivalric symbols. Plays such as Eastward Ho and The Knight of the Burning Pestle fight back against appropriations of this sort by presenting them as instances of the most ludicrous sort of fantasy – a belief in the literal truth of books of chivalry. We might then be too eager to attribute to these playwrights, through their use of the trope of Quixoticism, a burgeoning sense of modernity. Of far more pressing interest to the likes of Jonson and Beaumont were the narratives of power and ambition, the dynamics of precedence, that they saw played out around them every day of their lives. These plays do not seek to satirise the presence of amusingly old-fashioned knights in contemporary society. By recasting the Renaissance knight as an object of comedy, such an interpretation of these themes secures the idea of the ‘death of chivalry’ as a historical trope. What is interesting about such a move is the way that it completely ignores the literary aspect of the joke, and therefore logically requires – although it only rarely openly states – that the medieval period must have really been like a chivalric romance. By overlooking the distinctions such tropes seem to be trying to make between literature and life, such an approach actually produces the history of the Middle Ages as a seamless blend of the two. Taking Don Quixote as an icon of anachronism implies that there must have been a point when his assumption of a chivalric persona would not have 132

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Quixotic Representations on the Seventeenth-Century Stage made him a figure of fun. For both Don Quixote and his modern interpreters the fundamental ground of the judgements they make is a idealised vision of the medieval past as an era of true nobility, a time when (to quote Eric Ziolkowski, whose opinion, note, tallies exactly with that of Cervantes’ hero) ‘an abundance of knights-errant had inhabited Spain’.

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Chapter 4 ‘GENTLEMAN-LIKE ADVENTURE’: DUELLING IN THE ‘LIFE’ OF LORD HERBERT OF CHERBURY

T

HE CLIMAX of the subplot of King Lear comes in the fifth Act of that play, when the Duke of Albany accuses Edmund, bastard son of the Earl of Gloucester, of ‘capital treason’. This claim he proposes to uphold, not through any due process of questioning of witnesses or examination of proof – which would be perfectly possible, since Albany is in possession of a letter from his wife, Goneril, to the same Edmund which insinuates ‘a plot upon her virtuous husband’s life’1 – but rather through an altogether more archaic legal form, the trial by combat. Albany declares that ‘if none appear to prove upon thy person/ Thy heinous, manifest, and many treasons’, he will undertake the combat himself. In the event, Edmund is challenged by his disguised half-brother, Edgar, the Earl of Gloucester’s natural son. Having refused to reveal his identity, Edgar turns to his brother and accuses him of being a traitor. Should he deny the accusation, ‘This sword, this arm, and my best spirits are bent/ To prove upon thy heart . . . Thou liest’. His brother responds: In wisdom I should ask thy name; But since thy outside looks so fair and war-like, And that thy tongue some say of breeding breathes, What safe and nicely I might well delay By rule of knighthood, I disdain and spurn; Back do I toss these treasons to thy head, With the hell-hated lie o’erwhelm thy heart, Which, for they yet glance by and scarcely bruise, This sword of mine shall give them instant way, Where they shall rest for ever. Trumpets, speak. (v, iii, 141–50)

1

William Shakespeare, King Lear, ed. Kenneth Muir (London: Methuen, 1952), iv, vi, 269. All further references will be given in the main body of the text.

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Duelling in the ‘Life’ of Lord Herbert of Cherbury Early modern readers were fascinated with the idea of trial by combat, in a manner quite out of proportion with the likelihood of their ever participating in one (which was more or less nil). Countless contemporary treatises on a variety of themes contrived to introduce this favourite subject, offering elaborate instructions as to the ‘proper’ conduct of such an event. Thus, John Ferne’s Blazon of Gentrie informs us that combats ‘maye not be appointed in secreat places’, whilst William Bird’s Magazine of Honor, Andrew Favine’s Theater of Honor and Knighthood, and William Segar’s Booke of Honor and Armes all contain detailed accounts of the ceremonies involved in the trial by combat. John Selden’s The Duello, or Single Combat is concerned exclusively with the topic.2 But what are we to make of John Despagne’s Anti-Duello, which, having attacked the practice of private combat exhaustively as barbaric, unlawful, and incapable of proving anything, nevertheless appends to this text a treatise on ‘The Manner and forme of Combats anciently observed before the Kings of England’, with ‘A Catalogue of Certaine Combats, Granted by the Kings of England’?3 The modern playgoer, by way of contrast, most likely approaches this episode with little more in mind than the desire to see a good fight, culminating in the defeat of the dastardly Edmund. Most of the lines given above are superfluous to such a purpose, amounting to little more than rather too much in the way of preliminary defiance. Yet it is precisely the ceremoniousness of such an occasion that attracts the attention of early modern writers on the subject of judicial combat – the arrangement of the field of combat, the election of weapons, the oaths that the participants are obliged to swear, the fees due to the heralds at the end of the combat, and so on. The actual business of fighting is passed over almost without comment. Comparison of Shakespeare’s text with such treatises shows that he omitted a good deal of this sort of matter – necessarily, since the conduct of such a combat as described by these writers was both long drawn out and elaborate. He also significantly modified the emphasis of these preparations. The ceremonies surrounding the trial by combat, as described by early modern writers, tended to centre upon formal declarations of what the participants held to be the case, and solemn denials of any intention to use witchcraft or foul play. The lengthy speeches that precede Shakespeare’s combat are far more explicitly concerned with the status of the participants. Edmund is not obliged to accept a combat with an unnamed – and hence potentially ignoble – opponent, as

2

3

John Ferne, The Blazon of Gentrie (London: J. Windet for T. Cooke, 1586), sig. X7v. William Bird, The Magazine of Honor (London: A.N. for Matthew Walbanke and Richard Best, 1642), sig. H6. Andrew Favine, The Theater of Honor and Knighthood, trans. W.I. (London: W. Jaggard, 1623).William Segar, The Booke of Honor and Armes, ed. Diane Bornstein (Delmar, New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1975), sigs. E1–4. John Selden, The Duello, or Single Combat (London: G.E. for J. Helme, 1610). John Despagne, Anti-Duello (London: T. Harper for B. Fisher, 1632).

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance Goneril reminds him after his defeat: ‘By th’ law of war thou wast not bound to answer/ An unknown opposite’ (v, iii, 151–2); a point on which all writers on trial by combat were agreed.4 Edgar, it is true, does seem to imply that he is a knight (and hence noble) when he refers to his ‘oath’ and ‘profession’, but everybody involved is clear that his brother could have refused to fight. Once again, then, we find the characteristic tropes of chivalric romance intimately bound up with questions of status.5 Commenting upon this episode, Rosalie Colie contends that Edmund finds the prospect of participation in such a quintessentially aristocratic ritual too flattering to be passed up – a ‘world of chivalry’, Colie notes, ‘to which, under normal circumstances, Edmund the bastard could never have aspired’. Thus, with a nice moral symmetry, the upstart brother is brought low by the same impulses that compelled him to climb the social ladder at his father’s and brother’s expense in the first place.6 Alan Rosen disagrees. Edmund, he writes, quoting Colie, ‘has the same opportunity to affirm “the full dignity of the high-born” by refusing the challenge as by accepting it’. This would ‘reinforce his own superior rank. His allegedly high-born status would also be proclaimed by his firm adherence to the aristocratic code of the trial-by-arms.’7 That is, it would be more ‘noble’ for Edmund to pull rank and refuse to fight an unnamed man. For Rosen, Edmund’s participation in the combat is instead determined by the principles enunciated in his ‘anti-aristocratic manifesto’, ‘Thou, Nature, art my goddess’. Rosen draws attention to the way in which Edmund declares that he will forgo his aristocratic privileges because of Edgar’s ‘fair and war-like’ countenance; this, he contends, is best understood in relation to Edmund’s own earlier complaint that he himself is as ‘well compact’ in ‘shape’ as any natural son (i, ii, 7–8). Thus, Edmund accepts the combat for essentially un-aristocratic reasons. Both critics are, I believe, wrong. There is nothing to indicate that Edmund is particularly seduced by the glamour of chivalric ritual (and such an interpretation seems at odds with the cynicism of the character); but neither does he engage in it for anything approaching what we might call meritocratic reasons.

4

5

6

7

William Segar (1975) writes that ‘forsomuch as the triall of Armes apperteineth onelie to Gentlemen, and that Gentilitie is a degree honorable, it were not fit that anie persons of meaner condition, should thereunto be admitted’ (E3v). Segar actually expresses some doubt as to whether a man like Edmund could even engage in a judicial combat: ‘for that by lawe no Bastard can inherit the lands and honors of his supposed father, it may be reasonablie doubted, whether he be of such condition as may challenge a Gentleman to trial of Armes’ (E4v). Judicial combat is one of the most important themes in medieval chivalric works. See R. Howard Bloch’s Medieval French Literature and Law (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: The University of California Press, 1977), pp. 189–214. Rosalie L. Colie, ‘Reason and Need; King Lear and the “Crisis of the Aristocracy” ’, in Rosalie L. Colie and F.T. Flahiff eds, Some Facets of King Lear (Toronto and Buffalo: The University of Toronto Press, 1974), pp. 185–219, 208. Alan Rosen, ‘King Lear and the Legacy of Dramatic Catastrophe’, Cahiers Elisabethains 48 (1995), pp. 17–30, 25.

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Duelling in the ‘Life’ of Lord Herbert of Cherbury On the contrary, Edmund seems to commit himself to the combat with what is, basically, an aristocratic flourish of defiance; he does not simply decide to waive the privileges attendant upon his status, he ‘disdain[s] and spurn[s]’ them as beneath him.8 And there is something peculiarly compelling about the manner in which Edmund affirms his own (new-found) status by overruling the aristocratic code that underwrites it. Edmund, faced with an unknown challenger, has options open to him – the verbal exchanges between the brothers clearly indicate this, as does Goneril’s comment after Edmund has been beaten; and the audience is aware of and responds to this fact. Edmund would quite consciously appear to select the route which threatens the greatest danger, but which, in part because of this, also offers the greatest reward. It is generally acknowledged that Edmund belongs to the class of attractive villains; the fact that we are conscious of a calculated recklessness in the way he stages his reputation, selecting the most dangerous yet flamboyant option at each turn, must contribute to this particular appeal. Colie’s and Rosen’s analyses are both about the extent to which Edmund may or may not have internalised an aristocratic ethos. I would suggest that they are looking in the wrong place. There is little to suggest that Edmund is seduced by the glamour of chivalric ritual; but his deliberate commitment to it has certainly proved most attractive to his audiences. The fight between Edmund and Edgar in King Lear is a curious hybrid. Formally, it is a trial by combat, performed with the express intention of demonstrating Edmund’s treachery. Yet the obsessive concern for honour demonstrated in the preliminaries to the combat itself suggest a quite different aristocratic institution – the duel. Certainly, the text seems to require Edgar to appear in full armour, since his face must be disguised, and Edmund refers to his ‘war-like’ appearance, which suggests a quite different image to that of the duellist, protected by nothing more than his shirt. Yet the encounter that Shakespeare describes is as much concerned with the vindication of honour – and the staging of it – as with any formal proof; or rather, the two interests coincide. As a prelude to his accusations, delivered in an appropriately archaic register, Edgar manages to call into question his brother’s lineage, saying that he will fight, ‘if my speech offend a noble heart’; whilst Edmund ‘proves’ this nobility by condescending to fight with one who may have had ‘some’ breeding. Each gives the other the lie (‘thou liest’,

8

Nothing, in fact, could be more chivalric than to accept someone merely because of their fair features or gentle speech. As we saw in Chapter 1, when discussing Malory’s tale of Sir Tor, the way that the chivalric discourse of status most characteristically operates is to disguise itself in terms of natural, inherent virtue. In fact, Edmund’s acceptance of his brother’s challenge almost looks like an inversion of this sort of romance trope. Tor is accepted as a knight merely on the grounds that he is taller and better looking than his half-brothers. Here, however, it is the bastard son who admits a natural-born outsider to a chivalric institution – before his true identity as the legitimate heir and good son is revealed.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance ‘the hell-hated lie o’erwhelm thy heart’) – a clear point of contact with the duel, and of contrast with the judicial combat, in which the participants characteristically swore that their case was true, rather than that their opponent’s was false. It is my argument, then, that the climax of the subplot in King Lear can be used to understand the dynamics of the early modern duel. With its chivalric overtones, its concern with the honour of the participants, and the sense it gives of strategic manoeuvring to find the optimal way of displaying this status – which often involves apparently denying it – the trial by combat in King Lear offers a paradigm for interpreting a phenomenon which even contemporary commentators often found utterly baffling. With this in mind, then, I would like to turn from the realm of dramatic representation to the autobiography of a seventeenth-century duellist, Edward Herbert. Some 120 years after his death, Edward, first Lord Herbert of Cherbury and elder brother of the poet George, was the laughing-stock of fashionable society. Such, at any rate, is the impression given by the delighted correspondence of the editor of his Life, Horace Walpole. His letters relate that, after finding the manuscript of ‘the philosopher’ Lord Herbert’s autobiography at the house of one Lady Hertford, who had been lent it by Lord Powis, Herbert’s descendant, he read it out for the benefit of another, recently widowed, noblewoman: Gray and I read it to amuse her – we could not go on for laughing and screaming. I begged to have it in print – Lord Powis, sensible of the extravagance, refused. I insisted – he persisted. I told my Lady Hertford it was no matter, I would print it, I was determined. I sat down and wrote a flattering dedication to Lord Powis, which I knew he would swallow: He did, and gave up his ancestor.9

The Life of Edward Lord Herbert of Cherbury was published by Walpole’s Strawberry Hill Press in 1764, and was an instant success, being reprinted at least four times before the end of the century, and throughout the succeeding one. ‘The thing most in fashion’, Walpole wrote, ‘is my edition of Lord Herbert’s Life; people are mad after it.’ And again: ‘I rejoice Lord Herbert has diverted you. I own, it appears to me the most singular book that was ever written. I am overpaid if it has answered my purpose in amusing you.’ ‘All the women in London’, we read, ‘are in love with Lord Herbert.’10 As these comments indicate, Walpole’s intentions in publishing the Life were not

9

10

Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W.S. Lewis (New Haven: The Yale University Press, 1970–83), 48 volumes, X: 129–30. It should be noted at this point that Edward Herbert did not become Lord of Cherbury until some time after the events recounted in his autobiography. Lewis ed. (1970–83), X: 139–140; XXXV: 452; X: 143.

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Duelling in the ‘Life’ of Lord Herbert of Cherbury merely (or even, possibly, at all) antiquarian. Walpole had previously dealt with upper-class eccentrics;11 in Edward Herbert he evidently felt that he had stumbled upon an instance of aristocratic folly to cap them all, an attitude all too accurately reflected in the prefatory matter to the work itself. As Walpole himself explained: ‘I was resolved that the world should not think I admired it seriously (though there are really fine passages in it and good sense too) – I drew up an equivocal preface, in which you will discover my opinion; and sent it with the dedication. The Earl gulped down the one under the palliative of the other.’12 Walpole’s edition of the Life is therefore couched in outwardly respectable but consistently ambiguous tones. Dedicating his work to the Earl of Powis, he informs him that ‘hitherto Lord Herbert has been little known but as an Author. I much mistake, if hereafter he is not considered as one of the most extraordinary characters which this country has produced.’ The ‘Advertisement’ starts off by discussing Herbert as a philosophical writer – which was what, at this time, he was mainly known for – but goes on to comment that ‘I will anticipate the Reader’s surprize, tho’ it shall be but in a word: to his astonishment he will find, that the History of Don Quixote was the Life of Plato.’ Spenser is invoked to emphasise the point: ‘as a Knight, [Herbert’s] chivalry was drawn from the purest founts of the Fairy Queen.’13 His commitment to ‘Truth’, emphasised in the context of his philosophical interests (Herbert was the author of a treatise entitled De Veritate) modulates, when discussing the Life, into Quixotic naiveté: Foibles, passions, perhaps some vanity, surely some wrong-headedness; these he scorned to conceal, for he sought Truth, wrote on Truth, was Truth: He honestly told when he had missed or mistaken it. [. . . ] Nothing is more marked than the air of veracity or persuasion which runs thro’ the whole Narrative. If he makes us wonder, and wonder makes us doubt, the charm of his ingenuous integrity dispells our hesitation. The whole relation throws singular light on the manners of the age, tho’ the gleams are transient . . . I will not point out instances, as I have already perhaps too much opened the contents of a book, which if it gives other readers half the pleasure it afforded me, they will own themselves extraordinarily indebted to the noble person, by whose favour I am permitted to communicate to them so great a curiosity.14 11

12 13

14

Walpole’s A Catalogue of the Royal and Noble Authors of England (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1759), 2 volumes, might be regarded as a trial-run for the Life. It features such specimens as the Duke and Duchess of Newcastle (‘a picture of foolish nobility’), and George Digby, Earl of Bristol, ‘a singular Person, whose life was one contradiction’, and who was noted for his ‘romantic bravery’ (II: 13, 25–6). Lewis ed. (1970–83), X: 130. Walpole had presented a copy of the Life to Thomas Warton, hoping that ‘you will not find him unworthy of keeping company with those paladins, of whom you have made such charming use in your notes on Spenser’ (Lewis ed. (1970–83), XL: 368). Horace Walpole ed., The Life of Edward Lord Herbert of Cherbury, written by Himself (Strawberry Hill, 1764).

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance (By implication, Lord Powis is as much an innocent as his ancestor.) What, then, was the object of all this irony? The Life of Lord Herbert survives in manuscript form in two copies, one written in the hand of Herbert’s secretary, Rowland Evans, with corrections by the author himself, and a later version dating from 1698 to 1729, used by Walpole in his edition.15 Written in the 1640s, after Herbert had retired from active life, it recounts his history up to the publication of his treatise De Veritate in 1624, providing an account of his ancestors, a treatise on education, a relation of his early travels in Europe, his adventures at home, and finally the narrative of his years as James I’s ambassador to the French court. However, it is the middle section of the work that particularly interests Walpole. Here, Herbert recounts a number of incidents, focused on the duel, which his editor highlights in constructing a picture of the author as a man acting under the influence of absurdly misplaced chivalric ideals. The most prominent of these incidents occurs during Herbert’s early travels in France; he is staying at the house of the Duc de Montmorency: It hapned one Evening that a daughter of the Dutches of about ten or eleven yeares of Age, going from the Castle to walke in the meadows, My selfe with divers Frensh Gentlemen attended her and some Gentlewomen that were with her; This young Lady wearing a knot of Reband on her head A Frensh Cavelier tooke it of suddainlye and fastned it to his hatband; The young Lady offended herewith demaunds her Reband But he refusing to restore it the young Lady addressing her selfe to mee said Monsieur I pray you get my Reband from that Gentleman; Hereupon going towards him I courteously with my hatt in my hand desired him to doe mee the honor That I might deliver the Lady her Reband or Bouquet againe, But he roughly answering mee, doe you thinke I will give it you when I have refused it to her? I replyed Nay then Sir I will make you restore it by Force, whereupon also putting on my hat and reaching att his he to save himselfe run away and after a long Course in the meadow finding That I had almost overtooke him he turned short and running to the young Lady was about to put the Reband in her hand when I seasing upon his Arme said to the young Lady It was I that gave it you. Pardon mee, quoth she It is hee that gives it mee; I said then, Madam I will not contradict you But if hee dare say That I did not constraine him to give it you, I will fight with him. The Frensh Gentleman answered nothing thereunto for the present, and soe I conducted the young Lady againe to the Castle; the next day I desired Mr. Aurelian Townsend to tell the Frensh Cavellier, That either hee must confesse That I constrayned him to restore the Reband or fight with mee, But the Gentleman seeming unwilling to accept this Challenge, went out from the place, whereupon I following him some of the Gentlemen that belonged to the Conestable 15

See J.M. Shuttleworth ed., The Life of Edward, First Lord Herbert of Cherbury (London, New York and Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1976), xviii–xxiii, and N.W. Bawcutt, ‘The Manuscripts of Lord Herbert of Cherbury’s Autobiography’, The Library 6:12 (1990), pp. 133–6. Both manuscripts now reside in the National Library of Wales.

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Duelling in the ‘Life’ of Lord Herbert of Cherbury [Montmorency] taking notice hereof acquainted him therewith, who sending for the Frensh cavelier checked him well for his Sawcynesse in taking the Reband away from his Grandchild and afterwards bid him depart his house; And this was all that ever I heard of the Gentleman, with whome I proceeded in that manner because I thought my selfe obliged thereunto by the oath taken when I was made Knight of the Bath.16

Herbert is here referring to an earlier episode in his autobiography, when he was knighted at the time of James I’s accession to the throne. Then, Herbert swore to defend ‘Ladyes and Gentlewomen that shalbe wrongd in theire honor. . . and many other Poynts not unlike the Romances of Knights Errands’ (38). Like the incident in France, this episode involves both ‘Ladyes’, and exchanges of decorative bands. Herbert records that, on the second day of the ceremonies he underwent at his investiture, he wore on his left sleeve certaine strings weaved of white silk and gould tyed in a Knott and Tassells to it of the same which all the Knights are obliged to weare untill they have done something famous in Armes or till some Lady of honor take it of and fasten it on her sleeve saying I will answer hee shall prove a good Knight. I had not long worne this string but a principall Lady of the Court and certainly in most mens opinion the handsommest took mine of and said she would pledge her honor for myne. (38)

Seen in context, the Order of the Bath and its oaths take their place in a highly stylised ceremonial world, as one of many rituals of a similar sort conducted between aristocrats which reinforced a certain idea of what their status implied. As with the duel in King Lear (where the unnamed Edgar’s ‘fair’ countenance serves as his ticket of admission to an aristocratic institution), a comely ‘person’ suggests that Herbert will conform to this standard, in advance of any actual ‘proof ’ in deed, which comes later, an assumption that underwrites the actions both of the unnamed lady, and those of the Earl of Shrewsbury, who ‘voluntarily’ came up to Herbert, and attached his right spur, saying, ‘Cozen I beleive you wilbee a good knight and therefore I will put on your spurr’ (37). The position of women in these passages seems particularly interesting, and would appear to involve far more than a mere mechanical adherence to an oath to protect those who cannot defend themselves. Instead, ladies (even if they are only ten) seem to offer a site for the validation of male honour, in terms of both status and inherent virtue. The lady at the ceremonies of the Bath ‘pledges’ her honour for Herbert’s; women’s capacity to mediate ‘honour’ is intimated in the way in which these passages are filled with references to acts of exchange: pledging and giving (voluntary acts of exchange); constraint and 16

Shuttleworth ed. (1976), pp. 42–3. Further references to this edition of the Life will be signalled in the main body of the text.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance theft (coercive transfers).17 The French gentleman teasingly attempts to ingratiate himself with the Duc’s grandchild by taking her ribbon and fastening it to his hat – an action that, given the standing of headwear as a status symbol, seems almost allegorical of his desire to ‘borrow’ the honour of the Duc’s house to enhance his own. Indeed, the dynamics of the whole episode are played out in terms of the language of hats, alternately having ribbons attached to them, being courteously doffed, replaced as a sign that the person addressed is unworthy of the respect due to a gentleman, and finally snatched at as a direct challenge. Herbert takes the opportunity offered by the girl’s request to retrieve the band as a platform on which to stage a display of his own chivalrous instincts. By initially asking for the ribbon back in a courteous manner, Herbert puts himself in a situation where, so long as the Frenchman is unwilling to duel with him, he cannot lose. To return the ribbon as requested would, one imagines, have been slightly humiliating; ignoring Herbert’s overt challenges, however, the ‘Cavellier’ looks like a coward, and is dismissed from the household. Either way Herbert benefits. He does not even have to duel, merely to show himself willing to do so. Whatever we may think of the incident of the ‘reband’, however, it should be clear that the use that Herbert’s editor makes of it substitutes comedy for complexity. The episode elicits one of Walpole’s longest footnotes: This Oath is one remnant of a superstitious and romantic Age, which an Age, calling itself enlightened, still retains. The solemn service at the investiture of Knights, which has not the least connection with any thing holy, is a piece of the same profane Pageantry. The Oath being no longer supposed to bind, it is a strange mockery to invoke Heaven on so trifling an occasion. It wou’d be more strange if every Knight, like the too conscientious Lord Herbert, thought himself bound to cut a man’s throat every time a Miss lost her topknot!18

In short, the incident is used to suggest that Herbert is both quarrelsome and frivolous, too bound up in fantasies of romantic ‘Pageantry’ to take a just view of the world in its due proportions. In spite of what Walpole says about his Life revealing the ‘manners of the age’, the ‘too conscientious Lord Herbert’ reveals himself as comically incapable of reading the world around him correctly: he is a real life Don Quixote. This impression of Herbert as misguidedly chivalric is further buttressed by the inclusion of an engraving of Isaac Oliver’s miniature portrait of the author as a frontispiece. Herbert mentions several portraits of himself in his autobiography, and there is evidence that he carefully controlled the manner in which 17

18

Walpole’s own account of stumbling across Herbert’s manuscript, discussed above, almost seems to unconsciously mimic such manoeuvres, in a negative vein. Women act as couriers for the text out of the safety of Lord Powis’ household, and into Walpole’s hands. He in turn schemes to use it to enhance his own literary credit, at the expense of Herbert’s line. Walpole ed. (1764), p. 60.

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Duelling in the ‘Life’ of Lord Herbert of Cherbury he was represented.19 Oliver’s miniature is not, however, one of the likenesses referred to in the Life; Walpole seems to have selected it so as to shape responses to his edition, with some success. George Montagu, for example, wrote to him to declare that he ‘never saw so charming a figure so well graved, so sweet a romantic landscape – all Tasso, all Spencer’, whilst William Cole wished that Walpole ‘had given us some little history of that print, which from its manner, shield and ornaments, seems to be as romantic as the Life itself ’.20 From somewhere, the tradition has grown up that Oliver’s portrait represents Herbert resting before or after a duel.21 An odd notion – Herbert nowhere speaks of his using a shield in a duel, to say nothing of the plate armour and lance depicted in the background of the picture. Furthermore, the motto on his shield, ‘Magica Sympathia’, and its impresa, a heart rising from flames, point to a quite different and altogether more learned set of significances.22 The portrait suggests a combination of chivalric and philosophic interests; in Walpole’s hands, it becomes a rather quaint, ‘romantic’ emblem of the Quixotic nobleman he wants to stress. Through a variety of textual devices – preface and dedication, footnotes, frontispiece, and even his correspondence relating to the Life – Walpole quite consciously draws his own portrait of Lord Herbert as a figure he can satirise. Walpole’s edition has two key themes, contradiction and Quixoticism: firstly, the notion that Herbert’s obsession with duelling seriously conflicts with his philosophical interests, and secondly, the idea that the chivalric colouring that he chooses to give to his activities indicates that Herbert was seriously out of touch with reality. This latter point is particularly apt in terms of Walpole’s purpose, since Cervantes’ text offers a ready-made repertoire of stunned reactions to just such a character. Walpole’s point appears to be not merely that Herbert, with his interest in the duel, is in some ways like Don Quixote, but also that he should be viewed with the same combination of incredulity and delight that characteristically greets that character on his travels (and we might also remember that, in the second part of his history, Don Quixote is a 19

20 21

22

A portrait by William Larkin, for example, depicts Herbert in a gown decorated with the mullets – heraldic stars – of the barony of Montgomery, which had in fact been conferred on another Herbert, Philip, in 1605. See Alistair Laing, ‘Lord Herbert of Cherbury’, National Art Collections Fund Review (1991), pp. 147–52. Lewis ed. (1970–83), X: 133–4; 1: 71–2. Sidney Lee claimed that the painting was of ‘Lord Herbert lying on the ground after a duel’ (The Autobiography of Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (London: George Routledge, 1886), xv). David Piper is more reasonable in suggesting the tilt (‘in which he will be defending his lady’s honour’) as a context (The Image of the Poet (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1982), p. 24), but again the inference that Herbert is going to engage in a serious fight rather than a ceremonial event – which is what the decorated arms might suggest – is drawn from the Life, not the picture. Roy Strong glosses the image from Wither’s Emblems, with the winged heart representing the desires through which, with the aid of study, the ‘Reasonable-soule’ aspires to knowledge. The English Renaissance Miniature (London: Thames and Hudson, 1983), p. 184.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance publishing phenomenon whom everybody has heard of and talks about). Walpole’s correspondence indicates that his readers accepted Herbert’s Life on the terms that it was offered them: in 1777, one George Hardinge wrote to him ‘in the Quixot spirit of your hero, my Lord Herbert’, whilst the Reverend William Cole wondered that ‘the philosophic author of De Veritate could have lived and acted the part of Don Quixote in reality’.23 Walpole’s edition of Herbert’s Life has set the tone for all subsequent criticism. It is not only that later editions of that work have tended to reproduce his textual devices (Oliver’s miniature remains a favourite illustration). Modern critics have also tended towards the unreflective reproduction of Walpole’s editorial rhetoric. John Shuttleworth’s recent edition of the autobiography considers Herbert ‘as self contradictory as the . . . age in which he lived: a gentleman adventurer and dilettante philosopher, the last knighterrant and the first deist’; what hints the Life contains as to Herbert’s philosophical interests are ‘almost shyly introduced’ (perhaps Shuttleworth here attributes his own embarrassment at the lack of any such matter to the author himself); he contrasts ‘the superficial frivolity’ of the autobiography with Herbert’s ‘real accomplishments in philosophy’.24 Basil Willey initially contends that, in Edward Herbert, ‘the Middle Ages and the modern world were blended: knightly qualities fusing with the new rationalism, Quixotry with Deism’, but ultimately returns to the idea of contradiction when he notes that the ‘natural philosopher’ in Herbert ‘contrast[s] strangely with the knightly side of his character’.25 Again, speaking of the contradictions of Herbert’s life, Sidney Lee observes that ‘romancers have figured men living two lives, men combining two distinct personalities in a single corporeal frame. Such freaks of nature are commonly believed to find their homes in dreamland’, he comments, but the life of Edward Herbert proves that ‘romancers do not always romance’.26 The result is to turn Herbert into a figure of fun. Even Herbert’s biographer, Mario Rossi, considers his chivalric posturing ‘comica’, commenting on his juvenile ‘mania per i duelli’.27 Eugene Hill’s book on Herbert, aware of this tendency, attempts to break new ground by positing a radical break between the Herbert who writes the Life, the author of De Veritate, and the Herbert it describes – ‘all the events recounted in the Life take place, so to speak, ante veritatem: before the coming of truth . . . The error here [he is speaking of the ‘reband’ incident] lies not in the reader’s laughing, but in missing the point that the author is laughing all the way’.28

23 24 25

26 27 28

Lewis ed. (1970–83), XXXV: 585; I: 70. Shuttleworth ed. (1976), x, xiii. ‘Lord Herbert of Cherbury: A Spiritual Quixote of the Seventeenth Century’, Essays and Studies 28 (1941), pp. 22–9. Lee ed. (1886), xl. La Vita, Le Opere, I Tempi di Edoardo Herbert di Chirbury (Florence, 1947), 3 volumes, I: 142. Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury (Boston, Massachusetts: Tulane Publishers, 1987), pp. 108–9.

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Duelling in the ‘Life’ of Lord Herbert of Cherbury That is, Edward Herbert is engaged in sending up his younger self in his autobiography. Hill’s seems to be a critical strategy designed to heal the rift between Herbert-as-philosopher and Herbert-as-knight errant, whilst preserving the comedy that it generates, by reproducing it on another, chronological, level; a sort of variant of the sinner-become-saint lifeplan produced by Augustine. What I would like to do is reassess the relevance of this Quixotic framework to an understanding of Edward Herbert’s Life. It is generally acknowledged that Herbert is unaware that he is funny, which only adds to the joke, but if his actions seem misplaced, breaching some hidden principle of decorum or proportion – by fighting over a ribbon, for example – may it not be instead that the eighteenth century’s perceptions of what is congruent are misplaced in a seventeenth-century context? So far as Herbert himself is concerned, his actions are eminently honourable – and, moreover, totally in tune with society at large, since, he tells us, in France at that time there was ‘scarce any man thought worthy the looking on that had not killed some other in Duel’ (45). If Herbert truly was the ‘extraordinary character’ that Walpole’s edition contrives to suggest, then what are we to make of the Constable of France, who not only dismisses the French gentleman as a result of the ‘reband’ incident, but also, on leaving his castle, left it under Herbert’s command, with orders that the neighbouring villagers should attend him when hunting (45–6)? Herbert himself suggests that he emerged from the episode with his reputation enhanced; yet the tendency is to read the mirth that his Life occasioned a century after it was written back into his own time. It is straining credibility to suggest that Montmorency, like the Duke and Duchess in the second part of Cervantes’ book, is indulging his guest’s Quixotic fantasies for his own amusement, but if this is not the case, then it must be admitted that Herbert is not quite as singular a figure as Walpole might like to make out. What I should like to do is to look at the autobiography of Edward Herbert afresh, stripped of the comedic overtones that Walpole’s textual apparatus has created. There is nothing wrong in finding Herbert’s Life funny, but it is surely improper to read this reaction back into his own time, particularly at the wellburied level of assumptions, as most of his critics have hitherto done. As we have already seen, Don Quixote was a popular work in seventeenth-century England, and has a number of English analogues, but there is no record of anybody comparing Herbert to a Rafe or a Sir Petronel Flash during his own lifetime (even if he was knighted on the same day as the latter). On the contrary: scholarly reaction to his philosophical works – reaction that came from such serious thinkers as Thomas Hobbes – remained quite uncoloured by the comic overtones that distinguish Walpole’s account.29 Bearing in mind

29

See R.W. Serjeantson, ‘Herbert of Cherbury Before Deism: The Early Reception of the De veritate’, The Seventeenth Century, 26: 2 (2001), pp. 217–38.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance our earlier analysis of King Lear, we need to set aside our own reactions of boredom or amusement, and look at these sorts of honour exchanges on their own terms. The phenomenon of duelling needs to be examined, not as an instance of folly, whether collective or individual, but in terms of the social dividends it could bring to its practitioners, and in relation to the other aristocratic practices of the time. Those who condemned the practice of duelling often did so in terms reminiscent of attacks on books of chivalry. François de la Noue accuses romances of fostering ‘the poyson of revendge’, since they ‘avoweth that the highest point of knights honour consisteth in cutting one anothers throate for frivolous matters’. ‘Peradventure,’ he concludes, ‘such impressions have multiplied the quarels in our France within these 30. yeres, to such quantitie as we now see.’30 That de la Noue is referring to the duel is confirmed by the presence of a reference to his work in a French tract against duelling, in which we read that ‘The lord de la Noue, in one of his discourses, blames Amadis for decyphering with a loftie, and as it were a magicke style, a false Valour, and Chymeras of Valour.’31 De la Noue makes the connection between reading romances and duelling explicit; other writers do not, but they do use almost exactly the same language in attacking the duel as others had in attacking chivalric romances. Francis Bacon noted that James I had called them ‘bewitching Duells’, ‘nourished by vaine discourses, and greene and unripe conceipts’.32 This notion of duels as enchantment recurs throughout anti-duelling literature. A Proclamation of his Majesties Edict . . . Against Private Combats and Combatants, for example, written by the Earl of Northampton, and part of the same propaganda offensive against duelling that produced Bacon’s work, says that objections to his proposals may be ‘answered by any man, that hath not drunke up the very dregges of Circes her inchanted Cup’.33 James I’s 1614 proclamation ‘against private Challenges and Combats’ again uses the image of Circe, just as his earlier proclamation of 1613 against ‘the publishing of any reports or writings of duels’ had referred to them as ‘unlawfull and bewitching Duels’.34 In such accounts, duelling is a madness of sorts, a spirit of folly that possesses a young man – as in de la Noue, the emphasis upon the youth of its devotees offers another point of connection between the duel and reading romance – strips him of his reason, and sets him to quarrelling with his fellows.

30 31

32 33

34

The Politicke and Militarie Discourses, trans. E.A. (London: T. Orwin, 1587), sig. G7r. Guillaume de Chevalier, The Ghosts of the Desceased Sieurs, de Villemor, and de Fontianes, trans. Thomas Heigham (Cambridge: Cantrell Legge, 1624), sig. B1v. The Charge of Sir Francis Bacon . . . touching Duells (London: Robert Wilson, 1614), sig. B2r–v. A Publication of his Majesties Edict and Severe Censure against Private Combats and Combatants (London: R. Barker, 1613), sigs. D4v–E1r. James F. Larkin and Paul L. Hughes eds, Stuart Royal Proclamations (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1973), I: 303, 295.

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Duelling in the ‘Life’ of Lord Herbert of Cherbury For Lodovik Bryskett, the duel is in instance of ‘where men forsake to follow reason, and like mad and desperate people are transported by rage and fury’; duellists are ‘moved surely by some divellish spirit’, a ‘mad’ and absurd ‘fancie’, they follow their ‘rage and furious appetite of revenge’.35 According to John Eliot, the duellist ‘in stid of true honour bringeth forth to his minde monsters and fantasticall Chimeres, where nothing is to be had but meere illusions, and lying images of true honour’.36 The duel ‘is a magicke which surpasseth all the characters of the Cabalists, which dazeleth and decayeth their eyes, and judgements, and teareth a man violently from himselfe’.37 The connections with writings against romances should be clear. The supposedly compulsive effect of reading chivalric literature is, reflexively, frequently described in terms of the sorts of enchantment that lie in wait to seduce the heroes of the books themselves. Nor do the parallels end here. The emphasis upon bloodshed offers another connection of this sort; Roger Ascham famously condemned what he considered to be the romances’ endorsement of ‘open mans slaughter’. Chivalric literature was, moreover, famously ‘idle’ reading matter; Thomas Heigham’s book is conceived as ‘my best remedie against that contagious disease of Idleness’, which results in duelling.38 A final point of contact is offered once again by François de la Noue, who, in his analysis of the destructive effects of romance literature, claims that it preaches ‘forgetfulnesse of trew duetie’.39 This, too, is a constant complaint of anti-duelling pamphlets, which deploy a rhetorical opposition between public and private against the duellist. Lord Herbert recalls that, when he was made ambassador, he was told ‘that being now made Ambassador and a publick Person, I ought not to entertain private Quarrels’ (90). The author of DuellEase comments that duelling is theft: ‘your life, God hath given it, to your king; and unto you, but the loane of it . . . you may take the use of it, in your owne affaires, only during the kings pleasure’. Interiority, here, is definitively enlisted in the service of the state: the truly ‘valorous’ man conquers himself. ‘Doe you know’, our author asks, ‘where the most potent lord Selfe raigneth?’ – recommending that this insurrectionary baron be put in his place.40 35 36

37 38 39 40

A Discourse of Civill Life (London: Edward Blount, 1606), sigs. K4r, L1v, L4r. Bertrand de Loque, Discourses of Warre and Single Combat, trans. John Eliot (London: John Wolfe, 1591), sig. I4v. Heigham trans. (1624), sig. A8v. Heigham trans. (1624), sig. ¶5v. De la Noue (1587), sig. G7r–v. G.F., Duell-ease (London: Ann Griffin, 1635), sigs. E3r, I1v. This is not to say that we can formulate any simple opposition between an emergent ‘state’, and residual feudal elements, which are described in the language of romance. It is true that Herbert deploys the notion of ‘honour’ in defence of his conduct; but the oath he took on becoming Knight of the Bath was in itself part of the ceremonial celebration of the new king, who marked his accession with the creation of a substantial chivalric retinue, but who was in turn opposed in self-consciously chivalric terms by his own son, Henry, employing the rhetoric and iconography of militant Elizabethan Protestantism.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance To describe Herbert’s duelling as Quixotic, then, is perhaps not automatically anachronistic; Herbert himself makes the connection with chivalric romance, and many of his contemporaries seem to be condemning the two with a similar language. But we might wonder at just how accurate such a description is. By making use of a discourse of Quixoticism, Horace Walpole applies to Herbert’s Life for purposes of comedy a rhetoric that is, in its early modern manifestations, both self-interested and deceptive. In this context, the deployment of such language against the fashion for duelling expresses bafflement; duelling is a madness, or sorcery41 – it constitutes irrational behaviour, and there can therefore be no rational explanation for it. This is likely to be a view with which the modern reader has a good deal of sympathy; certainly, the manner in which modern critics produce multiple explanations for this form of conduct seems an index of their perplexity.42 To describe the duel as a madness is, however, a highly rhetorical move on the part of these sixteenth- and seventeenth-century writers – essentially, it leads to a call for treatment, which, of course, they are happy to provide. At other moments, however, they seem to display a clear understanding of the psychological dynamics of duelling. Consider for example the prosecution in the Star Chamber in 1614, of ‘William Priest Gentleman, for writing and sending a Letter of challenge . . . [and] Richard Wright Esquire for carrying and delivering the said letter’. This was in effect a test case for James I’s proposed new legislation against the practice of duelling. Priest and Wright were found guilty, and condemned to the Fleet, the former also being fined 500 pounds, the latter the same in marks.43 Francis Bacon’s speech against the two offenders, along with an account of the case, was then written up and published. Priest and Wright, it should be noted, were both men of honour, the one a gentleman and the other an esquire. It is all the more remarkable, therefore, that having stated that he intends to proceed ‘without respect of persons in this businesse’, Bacon should go on to deny them this status. ‘It passeth not amisse some-times in government’, he comments, ‘that the greater sort be admonished by an example made in the meaner, and the dogge to be beaten before the lyon.

41

42

43

Or a disease, a ‘fiery distemper, a Consumption, or waste of blood fatall to the noble bowels of [the] kingdome’ (G.F. (1635), sig. A3v), a ‘distemper’ (Larkin and Hughes eds (1973), p. 303), even a ‘poysonous antidote, more pernicious then the mischiefe, which one should prevent’ (Despagne (1632), sig. G3r). Here, again, the language suggests involuntary action (nobody deliberately catches a disease), but the main rhetorical emphasis would appear to be on duelling as an infection of the body politic – and hence on the necessity of rooting it out. See Francois Billacois, The Duel, ed. and trans. Trista Selous (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1990). V.G. Kiernan, The Duel in European History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988) variously mentions the idleness of a class bereft of military function (François de la Noue however noted that the civil wars in France did nothing to halt the fashion for duelling), defiance of an increasingly powerful monarchy, the influence of chivalric ideals, as well as the importance of honour. Bacon (1614), sigs. E3v–4r, H1r.

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Duelling in the ‘Life’ of Lord Herbert of Cherbury Nay I should thinke (my lords) that men of birth and quality will leave the practise, when it begins to bee vilified and come so low as Barbers-surgeons and Butchers, and such base mechanicall persons.’ For its part, the court, having heard the evidence, went on to deplore the fact that duels ‘now did overspread and grow universall, even among meane persons’.44 It is true that the likes of Priest and Wright were ‘meane’ people indeed when compared to the dignitaries who assembled to condemn them, but the fact that they were so calculatedly insulted, and that the insult was then distributed around the country as an official publication, as well as the fact that as ‘some more publique example’ they were obliged as part of their sentence to publicly acknowledge and repent of their crimes45 – all this suggests a concerted attack on the public standing of the offenders. Early modern writers proposed a variety of explanations for the duel, but they kept returning to the notion of honour: duelling is founded upon a ‘false conceipt of honour’;46 far from gaining honour through his actions, the duellist ‘looseth whatsoever honor or reputation he had before’;47 the ‘point of honor’ is a ‘vaine and light opinion, invented by the devil’.48 The very public humiliation of Priest and Wright was thus an attempt to get to the root of the problem by attacking the supposed cause of their behaviour – not madness, or an enchantment, but a concern for personal honour and status. This factor is brought out even more strongly by the treatment of duelling in the surviving records of the Earl Marshal’s Court, also called the High Court of Chivalry.49 This was a civil law court that dealt with disputes over honour and arms; it was also charged with enforcing anti-duelling legislation. Occasionally the Court dealt with an actual challenge to a duel, but more often the litigation arose out of the accusation of having offered ‘scandalous words provocative of a duel’, an offence not actionable elsewhere. This Court had been the object of the degree of jurisdictional dispute during the period 1613–14, when James I was preparing his initial campaign against the practice of duelling. Although the royal proclamations issued during this period all ‘spoke’ as it were in the king’s voice, they were drafted by different men with different interests. The Publication of His Majesties Edict and Severe Censure against Private Combats and Combatants of 1613, for example, was in fact written by Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton,

44 45 46 47 48 49

Bacon (1614), sigs. A3v, G3r. Bacon (1614), sig. H1v. Bacon (1614), sig. C1r. Bryskett (1606), sig. K3v. Eliot trans. (1591), sig. I2r. See G.D. Squibb, The High Court of Chivalry (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1959); G.D. Squibb (ed.), Reports of Heraldic Cases in the Court of Chivalry, 1623–1732 (London: John Whitehead and Son, 1956), hereafter Her. Cas.; and Francis W. Steer, A Catalogue of the Earl Marshal’s Papers at Arundel Castle (London: The Northumberland Press, 1964), hereafter Arundel.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance one of the Commissioners for the office of Earl Marshal. This document recommends that those offended in point of honour should ‘repaire themselves in the Marshals Court’.50 Francis Bacon, on the other hand, favoured the prosecution of offenders in the Star Chamber, and even went so far as to attack the Earl Marshal’s Court as offering an implicit encouragement to duellists. Without wishing to offend the ‘great and noble Commissioners Marshall’, he wrote, ‘the compounding of quarrells . . . is so punctuall, and hath such reference and respect unto the receyved conceipts, whats before hand, and whats behinde hand, and I cannot tel what, as without all question it doth, in a fashion, countenance and authorise this practise of Duells, as if it had in it some-what of right.’51 As Markku Peltonen points out, Northampton, accepting the dynamics of insult and retribution that structured duelling ethics, simply wanted to institute a court of honour as a means of peacefully mediating between disputants; whereas Bacon was far more radical in his attack on the intellectual framework (if it can be called that) that underpinned such behaviour. His own attack on Priest and Wright is expressive of his view that acceptance of notions of honour necessarily entailed acceptance, on some level, of the duel itself.52 By the 1620s, however, this jurisdictional squabble seems to have been resolved; the Court’s records are dominated by prosecutions for ‘scandalous words’. Actions of this sort are notable because they explicitly involve questions of status. For the allegation that the defendant had attempted to provoke one to a duel to hold any water, one had to be of the rank of a gentleman or above. Effectively, duelling was (in theory at least) a class privilege – even though it was illegal. John Ferne’s Blazon of Gentrie has a long passage listing the privileges and immunities due to one of gentle status.53 The very first thing he mentions is that ‘if the honor of a Gentleman be detracted by a churle, his remedy is in action, or in suite of trespasse . . . but if one Gentleman shall detract from the honor of another . . . let combat be guaged’. Secondly, ‘if any do grevously anoy the honor of another, yea he may kill him for the defence of the same, even as for the safeguard of his life’. Finally, ‘the ungentle may not challenge the Gentleman to the combate’.54 Ferne’s points seem to refer to the practice of judicial combat. Nevertheless 50 51

52

53

54

A Publication . . . (1613), sig. Q2r. Bacon (1614), sig. B4v. For the preceding section on disputes over the authority to prosecute duellists, I am indebted to Alan Stewart, ‘ “Purging Troubled Humours”: The Duelling Debate, 1613–4’, paper given at the ‘1614’ Conference at Birkbeck College, London, July 1998. ‘Francis Bacon, The Earl of Northampton, and the Jacobean Anti-Duelling Campaign’, The Historical Journal 44: 1 (2001), pp. 1–28. Ferne’s speaker recites thirty four of these privileges before he is stopped, and says he could continue with up to a hundred; it should be emphasised that this lawyer is characterised as rather tedious and wordy, and that not all the things he mentions would have been recognised by all people in all places. Ferne (1586), sigs. F7r–G2v.

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Duelling in the ‘Life’ of Lord Herbert of Cherbury it is clear that one of the privileges of a gentleman was the privilege of doing violence on others, and it would appear that the rule that a commoner could not challenge a gentleman applied to the duel also. Defendants in the Court of Chivalry often pleaded that they could not have intended to provoke a duel on the grounds that the plaintiff was incapable of challenging them. Thus, in one case of 1638, ‘the defendant pleaded that his admitted striking of the plaintiff was not intended to provoke a duel because the plaintiff was a clergyman’.55 To say that the plaintiff was a commoner had a similar import. So it was essential in such cases that the Court determine at the outset whether or not the litigants were men of honour. Consider the documents below, the first being a petition of complaint from one William Baker, with the added comments of Henry Matravers, acting as the Earl Marshal’s deputy; the second from the herald William Le Neve, Clarenceux: To the right honourable Thomas Earle of Arundell and Surrey Earle Marshall of England The humble petition of William Baker gent Humbly. Sheweth unto your lordshipp that your petitioner having some occasion of conference with Adam Spenser of Broughton under the Bleane in the County of Kent on or about the 28th day of July last he the said Adam did in most base and opprobrious tearmes abuse your petitioner calling him lying base fellow with divers other abusive words tending to his reproach as by the two Affidavits hereunto annexed appeareth. May it therefore please your Lordshipp the premises considered to graunte your Lordshipps warrant to your said petitioner to [bring?] the said Adam Spenser before your Lordshipp & there to answere the former objections. And your petitioner in duty ever bound shall pray & c. Arundell house November 21. 1637. This complaint being this day brought before me it was alleaged on the defendants behalfe that ye plaintiffe is noe gent & soe not capable of redresse here. I doe therefore desire that William Le Neve knight Clarencieux king of Arms to examine that poynt & satisfie the truth thereof unto me betweene this & the Saturday next. H. Matravers. ..... May it please your honour In observance of your Lordshipps Commaunds & reference hereunto annexed touching the gentry of one William Baker; I doe certifie that upon examinacion of the premises I fynde that Robert Cooke esquire Clarencieux 55

Squibb (1959), p. 168. Ferne (1586) notes that ecclesiastics are among those debarred from single combat, sig. X6r.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance king of Armes did make a declaracion (dated the x.th day of May Anno Domini 1573) under his hand & Seale of Office that George Baker of London Gentleman, sonne of Christopher Baker of Tenterden; sonne of Symon Baker of Heversham in the County of Kent gentleman was a bearer of tokens of Honour: And that the sayd Clarencieux being requested to sett forth and allow unto him his auncient Armes with such differences in bearing as was proper to be borne by his posterity, did thereuppon Confirme & allow unto the aforesayd George Baker theise Armes viz. Or: a Greyhound Currant in ffece betweene two Barrs Sables. To have & to hould unto the said George Baker and to his posterity, and to all the posterity of Christopher Baker father of the said George with their due differences; as more at large appeareth by the same. And that further there hath beene proofe made unto me by severall Affidavitts that the Peticioner William Baker was the sonne of William Baker of Kingesdowne in the County of Kent who was the brother of George Baker and the sonne of Christopher Baker aforementioned. All which I humbly submitt unto your Lordshipps wisdome & judgement. 30. Novemb. William Le Neve 1637 Clarencieux56

William Baker was, then, a gentleman, albeit one from a family ennobled within living memory; the case could proceed. The records of the Court often make reference to the plaintiff ’s gentility in this way, as in the case Hopton v. Bolton (1638), where it is noted ‘that the said Hopton was & is an Esquire and that he and his Ancestors for above 100: 200: 300. yeares past is & have bin Gentlemen & c. And that ye said Bolton & his ancestors is & were plebians and not Gents’.57 The Earl Marshal’s Court thus became a forum for deciding that most difficult of questions – what is a gentleman? Plaintiffs put forward a variety of evidence to support their claim of being offended in point of honour: documentary evidence, such as old deeds in which their ancestors were referred to as gentlemen, as in the case of William Baker, above; evidence from trade; evidence from education; evidence from the type of service they have carried out; one’s reputation; and so on.58 56 57

58

College of Arms MS R. 19, fols 135–6. College of Arms MS R. 19, fol. 3r. Unlike the previous documents, this is not an actual bill submitted by the plaintiff, but comes from a long section of abstracts of cases. In 1637, John Leeming accused William Clopton of saying he was ‘a base knave’. Clopton countered that Leeming was ‘notorious’ for being a soap boiler, and hence no gentleman. Thus, the whole question of the gentility of soap boilers was thoroughly examined. The defendant’s witnesses were asked: whether the ‘soape boylers bee a Company of greate esteeme in the Citty of London’; whether ‘many Citizens of great worth and esteem discended of very ancient gentile familyes are soape boylers’; whether ‘the now Lo: Mayor of London bee by trade a Soape boyler’; and whether ‘Citizens so discended (notwithstanding their trade of soape boyleing) doe not enjoy the priviledge and dignitie of gentlemen, and are soe accounted reputed and taken’. Regrettably, the Court’s final decision in this case does not appear to have survived (Her. Cas. p. 26).

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Duelling in the ‘Life’ of Lord Herbert of Cherbury The very insults that appear in these records are highly revealing about the nature of status in this period. Evidently, some sort of editorial process is at work in these court records; the abuse that the litigants present to the Court is of a strictly limited range. Most commonly, the plaintiff complains of being called a ‘base rogue’, a ‘base fellowe’, a ‘villaine’, a ‘Jack’, ‘noe Gentleman’, or similar terms, of being given the lie, or of being told by the defendant that he is as good a gentleman as he is. This lack of variety suggests something held in common: all of the categories of insult given above in some way impugn the gentility of the plaintiff. Sometimes this is quite blatant – one William Argent, for example, complained in 1637 that William Crayford had publicly declared that ‘neither [he] nor any of his Ancestors were gentlemen’.59 One man is called a ‘yeoman’,60 whilst another, Thomas Starkey, had his ancestry called in doubt by one Nicholas Bestney: [Bestney claimed] the sayd Thomas Starkey was a foundling, found in a ditch in Lancashire, and taken out of a ditche from under a hedge and that he was a base fellowe, or a base rascall, or rogue, and that he was fedd on the scrapps from his the sayd Bestneys brothers, and sisters trenchers.61

Other insults seem more oblique to the modern ear. When someone is called something as seemingly innocuous as a ‘base fellowe’, as one Abraham Chamberlaine is alleged to have called Henry Herne,62 we might feel that such an insult could have only very little in the way of genuine social weight. Yet, although some caution should be exercised, given that any appeal to a heraldic institution such as the Court of Chivalry would be liable to phrase itself in terms of abuses done to one’s gentility, it would appear that such insults were indeed felt to be attacks on the plaintiff ’s social standing. In the case of Leeming v. Clopton, the latter is said to have declared that Leeming was a ‘base knave, a base fellowe, and could shew no Armes’63 – ‘baseness’, it would appear, carries its full weight as an insult, and such attacks were, in fact, keenly felt. When John Peck was given the lie, and told he was ‘a base fellowe & noe gent.’, he felt, he says, ‘much blemisht in reputation’.64 John Aston objects, amongst other things, to having his name abbreviated to ‘Jack’ – a ‘Jack’ being an ‘upstart’.65 However much we may regard such insults as essentially innocuous and more or less interchangeable – ‘base rogue’, ‘base fellow’ – it would appear that the litigants in the Court of Chivalry both found them offensive, and carefully noted which particular variant on this general scheme 59 60 61 62 63 64 65

College of Arms MS, Curia Militaris 7/102 (hereafter, Cur. Mil.). Her. Cas. p. 5. Cur. Mil. 9/4/27. Cur. Mil. 7/50. Her. Cas. p. 25. Cur. Mil. 7/52. Arundel, p. 13.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance of abuse was offered them. And though such lists of insults seem repetitious to us, it should be noted that any one of them would be sufficient to provoke a duel; the careful enumeration of what is, strictly speaking, superfluous, suggests the extent to which each term was a grievously felt wound to the plaintiff ’s reputation. Perhaps the most interesting of these insults is the lie. This might seem a rather childish insult, and in duelling codes it often seems to function as a mere verbal token to assist the duellists in manoeuvring around the actual business of fighting. For example, William Segar’s Book of Honor and Armes gives detailed instructions on the giving of the lie: in everie Injurie by words, the Injurer ought to bee the Challenger: but in an Injurie by deedes, the Injured ought to challenge, as for example. Simon saith to Austen, thou art a Traitor. Austen answereth, Thou liest: then doth it behoove Simon to mainteine his words, and consequentlie to challenge Austen to the Combat. An Injurie by deedes is thus. Simon giveth a hurt, a cut, or other violence unto Austen; whereat offended, he saith, Thou hast given me offence, violence, injurie, or such like speach. Simon answereth, Thou liest. Then behoveth it that Austen do challenge Simon, and force him by fight to mainteine the hurt he offred.

This is an ideal, schematic, exchange; as Segar notes, however, many duellists ‘at such occasion use many superfluous words, whereby further speach of offence doth followe, and so take opportunitie to give the Lie unto whom the hurt by hand was given’.66 In short, the lie is merely the trigger mechanism for the duel, and there is considerable room for manoeuvring one’s opponent into a position where he is obliged to give you the lie – and insulting him in the process. Touchstone in As You Like It delivers a pointed parody of such duelling manual talk: I did dislike the cut of a certain courtier’s beard; he sent me word, if I said his beard was not well cut, he was in the mind it was; this is called the Retort Courteous. If I sent him word again, it was not well cut, he would send me word he cut it to please himself; this is called the Quip Modest. If again it was not well cut, he disabled my judgement; this is called the Reply Churlish. If again it was not well cut, he would answer I spake not true; this is called the Reproof Valiant. If again it was not well cut, he would say, I lie; this is called the Countercheck Quarrelsome. And so to the Lie Circumstantial and the Lie Direct . . . O sir, we quarrel in print, by the book; as you have books for good manners.67

The joke is not simply the triviality of fighting over a haircut, nor the elaborate formalisation of violence to the point where it resembles instructions

66 67

Segar (1975), sigs. B1v–2r. William Shakespeare, As You Like it, ed. Agnes Latham (London: Methuen, 1975), v, iv, 89–67.

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Duelling in the ‘Life’ of Lord Herbert of Cherbury delivered in a conduct book, nor even the way in which these lines anatomise the potential for rapid escalation implicit in a trivial dispute. Indeed, Touchstone’s subdivided ‘degrees of the lie’ seem to operate as a means of endlessly deferring the necessity of actually fighting. Is this cunning manoeuvring (of the sort condemned by Segar’s volume), or sophisticated cowardice? Certainly it is not the straightforward code of honour it pretends to be – although it might represent a careful evolutionary adaptation to such a code. ‘The Lie Direct’ seems such a fearful accusation it is to be indefinitely postponed through a subtle scheme of discriminations in which even to say ‘you lie’ remains two degrees of insult away from ‘the Lie Direct’ – and, as Touchstone points out, even that may be tempered, with the addition of an ‘if ’. These passages mock the hyperinflation of the two words, ‘you lie’, in duelling culture to the point where habits of quarrelling might evolve means of calling one’s opponent a liar without actually saying as much. You may say I lie – but that, of course, is merely the ‘Countercheck Quarrelsome’; we can both live to fight another day – or not, as the case may be. For us, of course, such mockery seems entirely appropriate; it is hard to view the lie as much more than playground banter, of a singularly unimpressive kind. Nevertheless, the lie could not have operated in this fashion in the seventeenth century were if not assumed to be a serious insult. Accusations of dishonesty, and the giving of the lie, are also attacks on one’s social standing, as John Ferne’s list of privileges again makes clear. Legally, if Ferne is to be believed, ‘there ought more credence to be given by the Judge to the oth of two Gentlemen produced as witnesses, then to a multitude of ungentle persons’. Furthermore, ‘persons of base and ungentle estate, are no competent witnesses against a Gentleman of bloud, and coate armor perfect’.68 James Cleland instructs young gentlemen to ‘keep . . . your faith preciselie, as the onlie badge, and marke of your honour’.69 Thus, when Edmund Bolton called Ralph Hopton ‘an old cheating Rogue, [and] an old cheating Rascall’,70 or when (as so often happens in these cases) the plaintiff is accused of being a liar, the attack is upon his gentility in that he is said to lack the honesty which was assumed to be a characteristic of his class. Nothing else can explain the fact that to be told by one’s enemy that ‘he would not believe a word that [you] said’ can be considered (or presented as) provocation to a duel.71 And this, again, is a quite chivalric conception of what a

68

69

70 71

Ferne (1586). This last point (G1r) explains the eagerness of plaintiffs in the Court of Chivalry to claim that they were gentlemen of ‘100: 200: 300 yeares’ standing, since it required six generations after ennoblement (in Ferne’s scheme) to make a gentleman of both blood and coat armour, rather than just the latter. The Institution of a Young Noble Man, ed. Max Molyneux (New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1948), sig. Bb4r. College of Arms MS R. 19, fol. 3r. Cur. Mil. 7/50.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance nobleman ought to be. We have already seen François de la Noue identify the keeping of oaths, even in defiance of royal or paternal authority, as a particular characteristic of chivalric romances,72 and family memoirs such as those of Gervase Holles – and, indeed, Herbert himself – are full of vignettes of honour maintained in the face of what, it is implied, would for anybody else (such as a commoner) constitute irresistible temptations to break one’s word. Holles records that his grandfather, another Gervase, eloped to London with Frances, a rich heiress; her father then rashly swore ‘that he would never see hir face againe whilst he lived’ – which oath, Holles records, ‘he inexorably observed’, although not without some pain on his part, since he would often send for his daughter to his house and carve meat for her, ‘sending it to hir with his blessing, bidding (most comonly with teares) the servant tel hir he was sory he could not bring it hir himselfe’.73 In fact, the gentlemen whose lives are chronicled in these sorts of records – just like the knights in books of chivalry – seem positively eager to entangle themselves in these sorts of quandaries, just as they recklessly involve themselves in quarrels of the sort that lead to duels. This sense of men compulsively snaring themselves in affairs in which they can only maintain their personal integrity at some cost – whether the pain of never seeing one’s daughter again, or the pain of being wounded in a duel – may seem odd. This is particularly so, since, from another perspective, the records of the Court of Chivalry suggest the pragmatic basis of the fashion for duelling. Far from being a folly explicable only through the invocation of notions of madness or enchantment, the institution of the duel was inextricably involved with the personal honour of its devotees. In theory, the duel was defensive; accused of being a liar, a gentleman was obliged to respond with a challenge. More often than not, however, what the duel offered was an opportunity to assert oneself, and cement one’s status, at the expense of another man. Here, as in romances, the notion of proof is central. Formally, the duel resembled the judicial combat, with the elaborate exchanges that customarily prefaced such a fight tending to reduce a quarrel to a point of proof, through the giving of the lie. Vicentio Saviolo’s fencing manual makes the link with trial by combat explicit: ‘in the judgement and triall of armes, every one ought to present himself before the sight of God, as an instrument which his eternall majestie hath to worke with . . . for God giveth right unto him that is just, and overthroweth the unjust’.74 Opponents of duelling, on the other hand, insisted that having two men fight each other proved nothing. 72 73 74

See pp. 12–13, above. Memorials of the Holles Family, ed. A.C. Wood (London: Butler and Tanner, 1937), p. 118. James L. Jackson ed., Three Elizabethan Fencing Manuals (Delmar, New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1972), pp. 381–5. One should take the faith in God’s judgement displayed by duelling manuals with a pinch of salt; understood literally, it would render them redundant.

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Duelling in the ‘Life’ of Lord Herbert of Cherbury John Despagne compared the duel to the casting of lots, mentioning Jonah, but pointed out that ‘the Lot toucheth but one, but the Duell endangereth both, one whereof is innocent’; the duel condemns a man, in the absence of proof, to ‘danger of death’. The duel tempts God; it is equivalent to the actions of those who consult the entrails of animals to know the future.75 Modern critics similarly tend to draw distinctions between the medieval judicial combat, which aimed to reveal truth in the absence of more compelling evidence, and the duel, which concerns itself with ‘personal affairs’, even though it might retain the formal structure and legalistic vocabulary of the former.76 Yet, even allowing for the fact that the issues that the duel supposedly proved were generally trivial, and more often than not mere specious excuses for a fight, and that its forensic properties were non-existent, the duel did nevertheless ‘prove’ the honour of its participants, both in the sense of testing that honour, and of vindicating it. Writers on the lie such as Segar tend to give exemplary situations which present the duel as providing proof in the judicial sense. The catalogues of abuse preserved in the records of the Court of Chivalry, however, suggest that the duel had, in fact, little to do with such schematic exchanges. The insults they preserve are, as we have seen, almost exclusively concerned with status. The victor in a duel would be ‘proven’ not to be a liar, thus a proper gentleman; and he would have successfully defended the status his detractor had attacked. But the mere act of participation in the duel also gives form to the bare fact of this status. By willingly submitting to such an ordeal, the duellist reinforced a certain social persona. The way a man manoeuvres through the elaborate rules and regulations that surrounded duelling reveals ‘character’; the duel provides a socially acceptable translation of culture (status) into nature (inner ‘virtue’). Accordingly, the duel as proof of honour need not actually involve fighting. One of the most remarkable things about the Life of Lord Herbert of Cherbury is the way in which his attempts to ‘prove’ his honour in the duel never seem to get to the point of actual swordplay. Herbert mentions a number of incidents in which, as he puts it, ‘I engaged my selfe to Challenge men to fight with mee who I conceived had Injured Ladyes and Gentlewomen’ (43), all of which end up with his opponent failing to make an appearance (43–4). Of course, we only have Herbert’s word to go on in these cases. Fortunately, however, we also have an account of one of his (attempted) duels from the pen of one Thomas Peyton, the second of Theophilius, Lord Walden, with whom Herbert quarrelled in the Low Countries in 1610. This is not to 75

76

Despagne (1632), sigs. B4v, E3v, F4r. Despagne gives a list, supported by Biblical quotations, of the categories of ‘proofe’ he considers acceptable – ‘the verball deposition of two or three witnesses’, the ‘Oath’, ‘Writings and Seales in matters Civill’, and ‘presumptuous and strong conjectures’ (sig. F3r). See for example Frederick R. Bryson, The Sixteenth-Century Italian Duel (Chicago, Illinois: The University of Chicago Press, 1938), xi–xx.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance say that Peyton’s account totally corroborates Herbert’s; far from it. But it does employ similar justificatory strategies, in such a way as to suggest that, far from being an isolated figure, Herbert was only one of many noblemen who were interested in the duel, and who felt that they could obtain genuine social benefits from participating in it. Herbert records that, during the siege of Juliers, he happened to quarrel with Lord Walden during a feast, at which time I speaking merrily to him upon some slight occasion, he took that offence at me which he would not have done at another time, insomuch that he came towards me in a violent manner, which I perceiving, did more than half way meet him; But the Company were so vigilant upon us that before any blow past we were separated; howbeit because he made towards me, I thought fit the next day to send him a Challenge, telling him that if he had anything to say to me, I would meet him in such a place as no man should interrupt us. (54–5)

Briefly, a place and time having been arranged, Herbert records that he managed to acquire a horse, but that the quarrel had been discovered and that some thirty or forty men were dispatched to the wood where the two men were supposed to meet in an attempt to prevent the duel taking place. Herbert says that he waited for hours, but that, in the absence of Lord Walden, and with ‘still more company’ arriving, he felt justified in returning to camp. Peyton’s account differs from Herbert’s on a number of points, few of them to the latter’s credit (for example, it is suggested that the commander of the two men, Edward Cecil, had in fact reconciled the pair before Herbert rekindled the quarrel with another challenge, and that he repeatedly failed to manage to acquire a weapon of a length that matched Lord Walden’s). The ending of each account is, however, remarkably similar in each case. Each declares that they waited in vain for the other to show up, thereby implying that they were the more willing to fight, with Peyton adding that Herbert, when apprehended, had not even been in ‘the very place appoynted at all’.77 Exactly what happened between Herbert and Lord Walden on the night in question must remain unclear; we have only two competing and biased accounts to go on. But even this should be enough to make it clear that Herbert is no isolated figure. On the contrary, the sorts of exchange involved in the preliminaries to a duel, no matter how bitter the original quarrel, seem quite consciously designed to create some sort of community of honour between its participants. Peyton for example records Herbert as saying that he means ‘bravely with out malice to fighte for his owne honor and the honor of his nation’. What the duellists have in common – social status – is, in this sense, far more important than what divides them; according to Peyton, Herbert reissued his challenge because he had heard that the rumour of his being 77

BL MS Lansdowne 99, fols 265r–6v.

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Duelling in the ‘Life’ of Lord Herbert of Cherbury struck had got out, and he feared that it may be spread by ‘lacquayes, or people unworthy my revenge’. The elaborate courtesies that pass between duellists (and the exchanges of letters between the combatants in Peyton’s manuscript are notable for their mannered politeness) emphasise their shared gentility. We might recall Touchstone’s paradoxical comparison of duelling manuals to ‘books for good manners’, to conduct literature. Fighting somebody might seem the height of discourtesy, but, as Markku Peltonen wittily argues, in its way, duelling was a mode of politeness.78 The duel therefore flaunts the status of the duellist, just as much as (say) a coat of arms does, although in a quite different and paradoxical way. The duel offered a forum for a gentleman like Herbert to stage his status in a particular form, and he himself is quite clear that his activities as a duellist enhanced his reputation. Most treatments of the duel, as we have seen, locate its significance in the inner qualities of the duellist – his rage, his madness, his Quixotic folly (both duels and romances are conceived of as chivalric forms that master their aficionados); it is described as involuntary action, bewitchment. One would not want to underestimate the elements of genuine anger that went into some duels, but to describe them all as a form of pointless folly, as an enchantment or disease, can only obscure the fact that a duel could actually benefit one, and sometimes both, of its participants. And yet this production of inner value is precisely the point. The quality of ‘enchantment’ that critics of duelling identified is not wholly misleading, even though it forms part of a rhetoric that obscures the social dividends that the practice of duelling could pay. As we have seen, it is only important that the duellist show himself to be willing to fight; yet this disregard for one’s own safety is one of the most important – and seductive – aspects of the duel. Here, again, we might recall the trial by combat in King Lear. The wanton disregard for life – and therefore for the advantages attendant upon a high social standing – that the duel involves actually reinforces that status; the quality of temper displayed by the duellist actually underlines the status that it overtly presents as irrelevant. Central to the duel is a (flamboyantly displayed) willingness to gamble the benefits of one’s station to save one’s reputation: asked to explain his conduct after engaging in a bloody dispute with Gervase Markham and his men in 1598, Sir John Holles declared, ‘I strake him not but summoned him to gentleman-like adventure.’79 The duel is not mere peasant-like brawling; it is a highly refined form of chivalric ‘adventure’, with the sense of risk, of sublime disregard for material interest, very much to the fore. The duel is, then, indeed an enchantment of sorts, but that enchantment is directed outwards, in a highly rhetorical fashion, by the duellists themselves; rather than being beguiled by a chivalric ideology, they beguile others with it. To describe a man such as Edward Herbert 78 79

Peltonen (2001). Quoted in Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1965), p. 244.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance as Quixotic in a sense presents him as an unworldly innocent, under the spell of forces he cannot control. To that extent, it is those critics who employ these tropes who are the ones who have been, Quixote-like, enchanted. Even though they produce their understanding in a negative form, they have accepted the duel as a reliable indicator of inner states; taking duelling as an amusing folly, they ignore the pragmatic benefits of such behaviour: they too have fallen under the spell of chivalry. Apart from Quixoticism, the other major theme of commentary on Edward Herbert’s Life is contradiction. Walpole himself advised his friend Mason that ‘of 150 pages you had better skip the fifty first’,80 thus setting up a division between the earlier sections of the autobiography, which deal with family history and education, and those later ones which relate Herbert’s ‘Quixotic’ exploits. As developed by later writers, his view is generally buttressed by statements about the contrast between Herbert the deistic philosopher, and Herbert the madcap duellist, none of which really go beyond Walpole’s definitive and originary statement of the notion: ‘the history of Don Quixote was the life of Plato’. In opposition to this view, I should like to contend that the first third of Lord Herbert’s Life is both more interesting and less anomalous than critics following in Walpole’s footsteps have hitherto supposed. Reading the opening of the volume, it becomes clear that Walpole’s edition of Herbert’s Life might be said to represent quite a dereliction of duty on the part of his descendant, Lord Powis. This is not merely because he unwittingly exposed him to ridicule. Herbert’s Life is quite explicitly said to be left for the benefit of his ‘posterity’, as is made clear in his opening remarks: I do believe that if all my Ancestors had set down their Lives in writing, and left them to posterity, many documents necessary to be known of those who both participate of their natural inclinations and humours . . . might have been given for their instruction; and certainly it will be found much better for Men to guide themselves by such observations as their Father, Grand-father, and Great Grand-father might have deliver’d to them, than by those vulgar Rules and Examples, which cannot in all points so exactly agree unto them. Therefore whether their Life were private, and contained only precepts necessary to treat with their Children, Servants, Tenants, Kinsmen, and Neighbours, or imployed abroad in the University, or Study of the Law, or in the Court, or in the Camp their Heirs might have benefitted themselves more by them than by any else; for which reason I have thought fit to relate to my posterity those Passages of my Life, which I conceive may best declare me, and be most useful to them. (1)

Central to Herbert’s work, then, is an idea of ‘race’ defined by temperament. A life, so far as this autobiographer is concerned, is defined by character rather than circumstance. Herbert assumes that his advice will serve one of his heirs 80

Lewis ed. (1970–83), 28: 3.

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Duelling in the ‘Life’ of Lord Herbert of Cherbury better than any from an unrelated colleague, no matter which of a series of suitable aristocratic venues for action (public or private, court or camp) they participate in; his examples are, by virtue of inherited character, personalised even before their intended readers might have been born – this in contrast to those ‘vulgar’ collections of (printed) ‘Rules and Examples’ addressed to anybody who might happen to read them. Just how wrong Herbert was in his assumptions can be seen from the mirth that his manuscript produced only a century or so after his death, but here again, we see the outline of an aristocratic ideology that emphasises ‘inherent’ factors (such as temperament) over mere external factors (such as money or land or military power). Having made his introductory remarks, Herbert goes on to ‘say somewhat concerning my Ancestors’, starting with his father and working back down the male line to his ‘Great Great Grandfather’, Sir Richard Herbert. Edward Herbert was evidently inserted into chivalric ideology from and by right of birth, and his memoir attempts to place his heirs and forebears in relation to this tradition. The character that defines his ‘race’ emerges through a series of vivid anecdotal moments that Herbert relates at the start of the Life. The first of these mini-dramas of the chivalric temperament comes in a discussion of his father, Richard Herbert, who, we are told, held a variety of local posts of authority, being ‘Deputy Lieutenant of the County, Justice of the Peace, and Custos Rotulorum which he as my Grand-Father before him held’. Once, ‘at what time he would have apprehended a man who denyed to appear to justice’, Richard Herbert was assaulted by ‘many Men’ in a churchyard, and wounded in the head with a ‘forest Bill’: notwithstanding his skull was cutt through to the Pia Mater of the Brain, he saw his adversaries fly away, and after walked to his house at Llyssyn, where after he was cured, he offered a single Combat to the chief of the Family, by whose procurement it was thought the mischief was committed, but he disclaiming wholy the Action as not done by his consent, which he offered to testifie by Oath; and the Villain himself flying into Ireland, whence he never returned, My Father desisted from prosecuting the business any farther in kind. (2)

Richard Herbert fends off a host of lower-class adversaries whilst enforcing the law, until wounded by an appropriately ignoble weapon, a ‘forest Bill’. Even small details of vocabulary, such as the use of the term ‘Villain’, show the aristocratic ideology we have been discussing in process, confusing rank and character. Yet these peasants are faceless figures; Richard Herbert’s real business, it is suggested, lies with the noble ‘Family’ who may have procured the attack. Whereas the ‘Villains’ are openly condemned as barbarous, and presented in a situation which openly condemns them (the few versus the many), the opposing ‘Family’ is treated in a quite different way, as the account suddenly starts to develop lots of meaningful omissions. It is never stated that this family did procure the fight; on the face of it, the ‘Oath’ of the head of the family is given credence. Yet Herbert tells his father’s story in such a way as to 161

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance suggest, firstly, that the refusal of the combat may indicate a cowardice which makes the strongest possible contrast to Richard Herbert’s valour, and secondly, that the disappearance of the offending ‘Villain’ to Ireland may not be entirely coincidental. The implication is that there are two ways of treating people: inferiors can be treated with contempt and put to the sword if they offend one; with fellow noblemen, however, one must play the game of status, which (in this case) involves giving at least a show of credence to the word of a gentleman, even if one doesn’t believe it. This is clearly in harmony with the duelling ethic that Herbert espouses later on in his account. (It also contrasts strikingly with the view later expressed in the Life, that there is ‘noe Occasion to use your Fortitude against wrongs done by women, children or ignorant persons’ (25–6). The class interests of such an ideology invariably overrule the sorts of connotations that being ‘chivalrous’ might have for us nowadays, and Richard Herbert displays considerably more forbearance towards his peers than to the ‘ignorant’ masses who assault him.) The duel, fought with a fellow gentleman, surrounds itself with elaborate formalities and courtesies, in implicit contrast to the brawlings of the lower orders – who, as here, can be treated as they supposedly treat each other. This anecdotal series continues as we progress back up the male line. Thus, Herbert’s grandfather was a successful soldier, serving in France and suppressing rebellions in the North of England; his great-grandfather was also a ‘great Suppressor of Rebells, Thievs and Outlaws’ (4), being ‘Steward in the time of King Henry the Eight of the Lordships, and Marches of North-Wales, East-Wales, and Cardeganshire’.81 Finally, Herbert has passed so far back in time, one feels that he has practically entered the world of myth, a fact signalled by another reference to chivalric romance: ‘My Great Great Grandfather Sir Richard Herbert of Colebrook was that incomparable Heroe (who in the History of Hall and Grafton) as it appears, twice past through a Great Army of Northern men alone, with a Poll-ax in his hand, and returned without any mortal hurt which is more than is famed of Amadis de Gall, or the Knight of the Sun’ (5). Once again, Herbert presents a number of vivid anecdotes to demonstrate the chivalric virtues proper to his line. Besieging ‘certain Rebells in North-Wales’ at Harlech, this Richard Herbert, along with his brother, William, Earl of Pembroke, proposed to the rebels that the ‘principal person of them’ should surrender, on condition that Richard Herbert should plead for his life before Edward IV. The king refusing mercy, Richard Herbert desired that Edward should either return the rebel to the castle, 81

These passages have a strong law-and-order flavour to them, just as they stress the Herberts’ consistent involvement in local affairs – an emphasis that is continued in Herbert’s account of his own life; he depicts himself as the ideal Stuart gentleman, one not overly attracted to court life, hospitable, and well-connected locally – just the model set out in royal proclamations of the period that urged the nobility to return to the country. See Felicity Heal, Hospitality in Early Modern England (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1990).

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Duelling in the ‘Life’ of Lord Herbert of Cherbury and command someone else to take it, or else take Herbert’s own life in lieu of his captive’s (6). Herbert here is drawing up a pedigree for himself – obviously enough, given that this is an account of his forebears. Yet what makes this inheritance a valuable one, it is suggested, lies not so much in anything so straightforward as noble blood, as in the sort of values evoked by the image of Richard Herbert, fending off assailants single-handed in a country churchyard. The manner in which he assembles anecdotes such as these serves to suggest that what he has inherited is precisely the ‘noble’ character that will, he assumes at the start of the Life, in turn be passed down to his descendants and make his memoir the most appropriate of all possible guides to conduct, whatever their chosen sphere of activity. Nobility of temperament, it is implied, is what really matters. Yet his account also allows us to see a very different set of concerns driving the behaviour of his ancestors, alongside the heroic ethos that he suggests lies at the heart of their distinction. Herbert regrets that his grandfather (from whom most of his wealth descended) sold some of his lands ‘at an under value in his youth’, and would not permit his son to repurchase them, but on the whole he approves of his actions: ‘he brought up his Children well, married his Daughters to the better sort of Persons near him’, and sent his younger sons to university (4), and yet, despite all these ‘occasions of Expence’, his grandfather still ‘purchased much lands without doing any thing yet unjustly or hardly’. This, perhaps, is contradictory; at any rate, such a focus on the accumulation of wealth and property does seem at odds with the atmosphere of romance evoked elsewhere in these passages.82 Yet Herbert’s memoir tends to gloss over any such tension. After his account of his great-great-grandfather’s exploits at Harlech, there follows a digression on the descendants of the Earl of Pembroke (Richard Herbert’s brother and companion-in-arms), Herbert having married one of them, thus uniting the two lines again: ‘So that joyning of both houses together in my posterity, ought to produce a perpetual obligation of friendship and mutual Love in them one to another, since by these two Brothers, so brave an example thereof was given, as seeming not to live or die but for one another’ (7) – chivalric camaraderie, here, glosses over the baser realities of matrimonial strategy. The opening section of the Life of Edward Herbert offers a fascinating insight into the corporate strategies and ideology of a noble ‘house’, and there is, I would argue, nothing here that conflicts with the later passages on duelling. On the contrary, their basic method is the same: status translated into character. Herbert’s theme is the 82

Jokes in parodies of romances about the unworldliness of knights – as in Don Quixote, where Quixote admits to the Innkeeper who dubs him he has no money because he has never read of the hero of a chivalric romance carrying any – may also be sly allusions to this aristocratic ethos, which pretends disdain for material goods and interests (nobility of character being the thing that counts), all the while monopolising those very things it affects scorn for.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance distinctive temperament that defines his house; the chivalric glamour of his ancestors lends dramatic colour and, implicitly, justification, to the more sordidly rational accumulation of property that we can see going on in the background. There follows a long section on education, particularly pertinent to those who would have it that Herbert’s philosophical and martial interests are at odds. Although Herbert recommends two masters for the schoolboy, one whose charge is ‘to take Care of theire manners’, the other with responsibility for ‘Learning’ (18), the language in which this educational programme is described is in fact entirely social in emphasis. ‘Goodnes and vertuous manners’ are favoured above ‘learning and knowledge’. Herbert disapproves of too much study for elder brothers at university, since this involves too close an attention to ‘the subtilityes of Logicke which as it is usually practized enables them for litle more then to bee excellent wranglers, which Art though it may bee tollerable in a mercenary Lawyer I can by noe meanes commend it in a sober and well governed Gentleman’ (19). Herbert recommends only so much learning as may serve to distinguish between virtue and vice, and serve as an ornament. We are told that ‘it will become a gentleman to have some knowledge in Medicine’, not so much for ‘knowledge’ as for ‘credit’ (21), since he will be able to make diagnostic predictions, as in the anecdotes that Herbert relates at this point. In one of these, he cures his servant of a ‘malignant pestilent feaver’ when his doctors had given him up, using a ‘rare receipt’. Herbert rejects any implications of professionalism; he only steps in once the ‘Physitians’ have failed, besting them without actually threatening their position. Herbert wants to show superiority to such men, not to oust them from the positions that make them contemptible. Discussing eloquence, there is, we read, ‘noe litle vigor and Force added to words when they are delivered in a Neate and fine way and somwehat out of the Ordinary Rode, common and dull language Relishing more of the Clowne then of the Gentleman but herein also Affectation must bee avoyded’ (28). Herbert goes on to present this choice of style as the selection of a mean between extremes. He refers to Cicero and Quintilian, the former said to be ‘too long and tedious’ in style, the latter ‘too short and Concise’ (29), but in reality this is, again, a social negotiation presented in the guise of the ‘natural’ (his ideal being a ‘Native and clear Eloquence’). What Herbert really wants to avoid is neither the over-long nor the unduly concise, but the rhetorical vices of the vulgar on the one hand, and those of an over-scholarly, over-professionalised subsection of the gentry on the other. In short, Herbert’s ideal of learning is to acquire as much of it as may serve as an ornament appropriate to one’s station in life. There is nothing here to jar with the picture of himself that Herbert gives in the later parts of his autobiography. That he should compare the ideal style to fencing, commenting that ‘a mans witt is best shewed in his answer and his valour in his defence’ (28), only indicates the extent to which the two facets of his life coincide. 164

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Duelling in the ‘Life’ of Lord Herbert of Cherbury With respect to education, Herbert’s ideal is consistently one of ‘natural’ ease, of sprezzatura. He attacks those affected pedants who flaunt the labour that has gone into their learning. Both duelling and education as Herbert describes it thus aim to translate the benefits of status into ‘inherent’ virtue. Even his philosophical concern with ‘truth’, celebrated by Walpole and clearly articulated by his treatise De Veritate, can be understood in these terms. His comments at the start of his Life are entirely in tune with what our earlier analysis of the lie reveals about the aristocratic ethic of truthfulness: having ‘thought fit to relate to my posterity,’ Herbert tells us, ‘those Passages of my Life, which I conceive may best declare me . . . I profess to write with all Truth and Sincerity, as scorning ever to deceive or speak false to any’ (1). It might perhaps be argued that the passages on education in the Life are only as trivial as the rest of that work, and that the contradiction is therefore between the philosophical works themselves and the autobiography as a whole. But one need only look at these printed works to see that they too are replete with indicators of the author’s status. Consider, for example, De Veritate, first published in Paris in 1624, the titlepage of which openly advertises the status of its author as knight and ambassador: ‘Ed. Herbert, Miles Ord. Bal [balneum] et Leg [legatus]’.83 By the second edition of 1633, the name of the author, ‘Edoardus’, is printed as large as the title of the work, and his enhanced status is even more prominently advertised: he is ‘Baro Herbert de Chirbury in Anglia et Castri Insulae de Kerry in Hibernia’. There is, furthermore, a new preface, addressed to the ‘gentle reader’ (‘lectori ingenuo’), in which, talking of men who have stumbled on truths by accident, Herbert compares such men to ignorant fools who can neither read nor write (‘a rudiboribus illis (qui autem legendi vel scribendi ignorant)’). He is also quite clear that he is not a professional philosopher, having been employed in a military capacity in various places (‘armis in diversis regionibus’), having spent five years as an ambassador (‘quinquennali Legationi in Gallia’), employed in business both public and private throughout. He sides, he says, with no party, seeking instead truth without gain (‘veritatem sine dote’). Such a claim clearly resonates with Herbert’s deistic philosophical doctrines, which rejected Catholicism and Protestantism alike, but a delight in ‘truth without gain’ is just as much a feature of aristocratic ideals in the seventeenth century as it is a philosophic virtue.84 There is no need to posit some fundamental disjunction between Herbert the duellist and Herbert the philosopher. Both figures, it is true, pursue quite different activities, but it is only an overly idealistic image of philosophy that 83 84

Edward Herbert, De Veritate (Paris, 1624). Edward Herbert, De Veritate (London, 1633). Meyrick Carré’s translation of this work gives ‘lectori ingenuo’ as ‘candid reader’, but the word has connotations of good birth as well as frankness. Prefaces addressed to the ‘gentle reader’ are common in this period. De Veritate, trans. Meyrick H. Carré (Bristol: J.W. Arrowsmith, 1937).

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance necessitates any such idea of contradiction. Ben Jonson actually celebrated Herbert for his versatility. ‘If men get name,’ he declared, ‘for some one vertue:/ Then, what man art thou, that art so many men,/ All-vertuous HERBERT!’ Jonson’s poem is meant to indicate Herbert’s pre-eminence in a variety of fields; later commentators use much the same trope to suggest that he suffered from a split personality.85 The tradition of commentary that Horace Walpole’s edition of the Life of Lord Herbert of Cherbury initiates is profoundly misleading. Stripping both his philosophical interests and his concern for personal honour of their social nuances, it produces both as instances of idealistic, disinterested activity – in the latter case, as Quixotic folly, and in the former, as intellectual speculation so far removed from day-to-day life that any hint of worldly interests is perceived as ‘contradiction’. This superimposition of eighteenth-century opinion on a seventeenth-century text is of particular interest as regards the evolution of attitudes to the honour culture of the Renaissance aristocrat. The suggestion that Herbert’s diverse interests must necessarily indicate contradiction is particularly suggestive with respect to developing attitudes towards the intellectual; Walpole sees any interest in ‘honour’ as compromising Herbert’s position as a thinker. But we can also tackle this problem from the other side of the equation. There lurks behind these accusations of inconsistency a highly Quixotic notion of what knighthood entails. It is Don Quixote whose chivalric ideals authorise such a limited range of action and expression as to effectively disqualify him from genuine participation in the world around him. Critics who accuse Edward Herbert of being a contradictory personality essentially reproduce this idea. Refusing to see Herbert’s interest in the duel within a context of social action, they are left blind to the element of persuasion involved in such representations, and are therefore obliged to take their production of inner virtue at face value – even if they choose to give it a satirical twist, by designating it as Quixotic idealism. They have such a literary notion of what being a knight entails that they perceive any expression of outside interest as evidence of a split personality. In reality, of course, this was not the case. As Herbert’s memoir makes clear, his own ancestors – who he has a vested interest in describing in as idealised and chivalric a tone as possible – in fact passed most of their time in activities that were for the most part dull, onerous and decidedly non-military: they hold legal posts, they attempt to marry off their children, they attempt to acquire land, they even go to university to acquire learning. Attempts to prove that Herbert’s life is a mass of contradictions are, then, in their way, quite Quixotic. But the Life of Lord Herbert also offers a

85

Ben Jonson, Works, ed. C.H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1925–52), 11 volumes, VIII: 68.

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Duelling in the ‘Life’ of Lord Herbert of Cherbury fascinating instance of the cultural potential of images of chivalry. In the previous chapter, we looked at two different ways in which the tropes of Quixoticism might be deployed: one indigenous to seventeenth-century literature, and another, focused on temporal rather than social themes, apparently of a later date. Walpole’s treatment of Herbert of Cherbury’s Life offers a case study in how Quixoticism in this second version works. Examining the tropes used to frame it, we can see how the application of such a model to the Life serves to provide a basis for a variety of largely implicit judgements about history. This notion can take two contradictory forms. Either this was, in Walpole’s words, ‘an age of such mistaken and barbarous gallantry, of such absurd usages and false glory’,86 that Herbert fits in perfectly, or Herbert is a singular figure, and the world laughed at him just as much in his own time as we do in ours. Walpole’s Life seems happy to entertain both viewpoints – indeed it overtly comes out far more in support of the former – but its consistent emphasis upon Herbert as an amusing eccentric would ultimately appear to incline it towards the latter. Later critics tend to follow suit, often commenting that Herbert is the representative of a transitional era, as Shuttleworth and Willey do, but again, their tendency to suggest that he is so egotistical as to be unaware of the amusement he causes – when this amusement may only be the creation of a proficient eighteenth-century editor – would appear to incline them to the second point of view. This is not simply a matter of misapplied humour. Quixoticism is as powerful a trope of obsolescence as has ever been produced, and its appeal is compulsive; it only takes a few references on Walpole’s part, sufficient to indicate his attitude, to produce an image so attractive that generations of commentators follow suit. Thus, many critics, such as Basil Willey, like to refer to Herbert as the ‘last knight errant’. Others are so convinced of the obsolescence of the ideals Herbert invokes as to doubt whether he even merits such a title: consider the comments of Paul Delany, who writes that ‘the ideals of magnificence and knightly honour were accessible to a Sir Philip Sidney in a way they could not be to Herbert . . . Herbert’s real failure was his inability to realise that times had changed.’87 Clearly there is for these writers something incongruous in the spectacle of a man of the Jacobean era – the early modern period, no less – regulating his conduct in line with what they consider to be the ideals of a bygone age. Providing a means of making historical distinctions, representations of Lord Herbert as a Jacobean Quixote also serve to ease the discomfort generated by their breach. The critics we have been discussing are clear that chivalry is, properly, a medieval institution (possibly, at its upper limit, an Elizabethan one).

86 87

Walpole ed. (1764), ‘Advertisement’. British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1969), p. 127.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance The affront to their historical sensibilities provided by a Renaissance knight such as Herbert is resolved through his transformation into a figure of fun – to the extent that he can actually come to serve as a way of suggesting the irrelevance he seems actually to disprove. Recasting Herbert as an object of comedy is a way of suggesting the obsolescence of Renaissance chivalry, of presenting it as an anachronism or even denying its existence. Ironically, Herbert’s Life itself serves to confirm in a positive vein the pragmatic social value of chivalric iconography and ideology (rather than that value merely being implied through the vehemence with which an institution like the Jacobean stage seeks to fight against misappropriations of such imagery). But Walpole’s Quixotic strategy of misreading this text is so successful because it is nourished by precisely those signs and tokens which, in their original context, are meant to testify to Herbert’s eminent position within a national and even European community of honour. Rather than forcibly imposing its own representational scheme upon what it seeks to condemn, it merely readapts the tropes of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century language of honour, turning them against themselves. Herbert’s disquisition on his ancient pedigree begins to look like archaism; the Life’s emphasis on noble character becomes a sort of folly-ridden interiority, in which the sufferer is consumed by an obsession with the minutiae of honour to the point where he becomes a figure of fun. We might recall Borges’ fiction of Pierre Menard, which also contains two versions of Don Quixote, the same set of signs carrying distinct meanings. Quixoticism ‘periodises’ history by suggesting that certain images and categories of action are appropriate to certain points in time and no others; it is a theory of historical decorum, and all the more effective because it operates, not through abstract reasoning, but rather through culturally-bound perceptions of congruity and incongruity. As applied to Lord Herbert of Cherbury, it offers as fine an instance as one could wish for of the historical uses of comedy.

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Chapter 5 ‘THE LADY ERRANT’: KATHERINE PHILIPS AS READER OF ROMANCE

R

ENAISSANCE writers have plenty to say about women and romance, most of it disparaging – on both sides of the equation.1 On the one hand, romance itself tends to be identified with the feminine. The leisured experience of reading chivalric literature is metaphorically equated with the bewitching snares and diversions that are forever threatening to seduce the heroes of these books from their assigned quests, displacing them from the category of the ‘knight errant’ into that of the merely ‘errant’. Books of chivalry thus might themselves figure as tempting Acrasias or Lyndarazas, invitations to surrender oneself to present pleasure at the expense of one’s virtue.2 Time and again, we are warned of the propensity of such books to induce lustful thoughts. For François de la Noue, texts such as Amadis de Gaule are virtual handbooks of sexual misadventure, as alluring as they are dangerous, full of ‘impudent and foule loves’.3 This is the process that Patricia Parker describes, whereby romance ‘became increasingly synonymous with one of its own archetypes – the protective but potentially indolent bower’.4 Beyond this, we also have a large amount of commentary on the topic of women themselves reading romance, again almost invariably dismissive.

1

2

3 4

It should be pointed out that this is not exclusively a Renaissance habit – Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale speaks mockingly of ‘the book of Launcelot de Lake, That wommen holde in ful greet reverence’, The Riverside Chaucer, ed. Larry D. Benson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), p. 258. And for a complex eighteenth-century example of this tendency, we might turn to Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote, in which the heroine reads precisely the texts this chapter deals with, a century later on (the novel contains an extended analysis of speeches from Cassandra, for instance). Acrasia is the enchantress in Book II of the Faerie Queene, Lyndaraza an equivalent figure in Margaret Tyler’s translation, The Mirrour of Princely Deedes and Knighthood (London: T. Este, 1578), sigs. T8v–U2r. The two figures would bear some comparison. The Politicke and Militarie Discourses, trans. E.A. (London: T. Orwin, 1587), sig. G6r. Patricia Parker, Inescapable Romance (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1979), p. 8.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance Despite the gendering of the genre as female, the (presumed) danger seems, if anything, to have been amplified in the case of the lady reader. Again and again we are reminded of the threat to female virtue that such a figure represents. ‘It can not,’ Vives declared, ‘lyghtly be a chaste mayd, that is occupied with thinkyng on armour, and turney, and mannes valiaunce.’5 Romances as lexicons of affective objects and attitudes are by no means irrelevant to the topics that I will be dealing with in this chapter, but it is the persistent suggestion that books of chivalry might encourage the adoption of unorthodox social roles that is of particular interest here. ‘So much knowledge of naturall thynges as suffiseth to rule & governe thys life withall, is suifficient for a woman’, writes Vives – not, then, the fables of Lucian, and certainly not books ‘written in the vulgar tonge, as of Trystram, Launcelote’ and suchlike, which, it is clearly implied, constitute a deadly threat to feminine virtue.6 Thomas Powell, giving instructions for the education of gentlemen’s daughters, advises, ‘in stead of reading Sir Philip Sidneys Arcadia, let them read the grounds of good huswifery’.7 And Sir Thomas Overbury, characterising ‘A Chamber-Mayde’, declared that ‘shee reads Greenes workes over and over, but is so carried away with the Myrrour of Knighthood, she is many times resolv’d to run out of her selfe and become a Ladie Errant’.8 Until recently, critics tended to pick up on and reproduce this gendered reading. Louis Wright’s magisterial study of Elizabethan literary culture, for example, displays a thinly-veiled contempt for the female devotee of romance. Wright sees an interest in such books as essentially escapist, asserting that ‘the sixteenth- or seventeenth-century ancestor of the shopkeeper who now indulges in vicarious adventures in the shadowland of the cinema sought his escape from the humdrum existence of buying and selling, in the copious literature of romance’. Significantly, this distaste for popular entertainments is focused through the figure of their female consumer (‘women in general have never subscribed to realism’). While romantic works may seem dull to us, he writes, ‘to the Elizabethan they were as fascinating as the unrealities of cinema adventures are to present-day shop girls’.9 The parallel with Overbury’s chambermaid seems obvious. But Renaissance treatments of this topic have something that modern ones tend to lack – precisely what we identified earlier, the persistent

5

6

7 8

9

Juan Luis Vives, The Instruction of a Christen Woman, trans. Richard Hyrde (London: T. Berthelet, 1541), sig. D2r. Juan Luis Vives, The Office and Duetie of an Husband, trans. Thomas Paynell (London: John Cawood, 1550), sig. O7r–v. Thomas Powell, Tom of All Trades (London: B. Alsop and T. Fawcett, 1631), sig. G3r. Sir Thomas Overbury, New and Choise Characters (London: Thomas Creede, 1615), ¶4v–5r. Caroline Lucas, Writing for Women (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1989), pp. 15–6, gives more examples of such figures. See also Helen Hackett, Women and Romance Fiction in the English Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Louis B. Wright, Middle Class Culture in Elizabethan England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1958), pp. 375, 110, 614.

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Katherine Philips as Reader of Romance suggestion that female readings of romance are in some sense transgressive. For Wright, the parallel with modern cinema-goers is apt, in that romance is a lowlevel cultural product entirely fitted to the capacities of its ‘middle-class’ audience; it merely confirms the status of its aficionados. But we have already seen, in examining civic rituals in London and popular festivities at Kenilworth Castle in 1575, how the application of formulae derived from a literature – books of chivalry – concerned with members of a social class far above that of the participants in such rituals might have had a paradoxically liberating effect. There is little evidence that the reading of romances was in fact exclusively characteristic of chambermaids; we have instances of books of chivalry being read by men as well as women, and by members of almost all social classes. Such references seem more like an attempt to stigmatise a popular genre through association with a slighted segment of the population than an accurate indication of its demographic profile.10 Presenting the process of reading romance as a fatuous confusion of reality and fantasy, however, representations of Quixotic readers such as Overbury’s ‘Chamber-Mayde’ also hint at the genre’s capacity to induce ‘errancy’ – that is, ideas above one’s station (as opposed to the ‘reality’ of social inferiority). It is the argument of this chapter that the feelings of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century critics of romance, however unpalatable, are not necessarily misplaced, that reading romances might indeed have harboured potential for female ‘transgression’ of the sort suggested by the likes of Overbury. In particular, the figure of the romance-reading confidante or ‘friend’ who is placed in a subordinate position to her mistress, but whose reading is somehow linked to the prospect of upward mobility, may prove suggestive. The poet and dramatist Katherine Philips was born the daughter of a prosperous London merchant. Despite being married in 1648 to a man who was to become a prominent Welsh Parliamentarian, she composed verses under the name of ‘Orinda’ throughout the 1650s and into the Restoration period, poems addressed for the most part to the members of a basically Royalist literary coterie, a ‘Society of Friendship’ – the most famous being addressed to pseudonymous female friends such as ‘Lucasia’, ‘Rosania’, and so forth. That this work was, by and large, circulated only in manuscript does not seem to have blocked Philips’ rise to a point where she was in a position to address poems to members of the royal family. After her death, her talents were commemorated in a lavish posthumous collection of Poems – a volume that implicitly demands that she be ranked alongside the likes of Shakespeare and Jonson.11 10

11

See Lori Humphrey Newcomb, ‘The Triumph of Time: The Fortunate Readers of Robert Greene’s Pandosto’, in Cedric Brown and Arthur Marotti eds, Texts and Cultural Change in Early Modern England (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1997), pp. 95–123. Poems (London: H. Herringman, 1667) – a sumptuous folio, with an engraved frontispiece of the author and a mass of commendatory verses, which seems designed to recall the collected works of the early-seventeenth-century dramatists.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance As a reflection upon this extraordinary success, we might consider the portrait of an ‘Affected Poetess’ in a comedy of 1696, The Lost Lover by Delarivière Manley. Here, an ‘Orinda’ features as a minor character. An appalling, obsequious social climber, who pretends to despise the company of an alderman’s wife and daughter (the implication being that she is better fitted to their company than that of her aristocratic ‘friends’, and that she has ideas above her station), Orinda’s attempts at versification are simply seen as an extension of this attempt to ingratiate herself with her betters. It is her pretence that she suffers from a surfeit of ‘Addresses’ made to her, and is obliged to reply in verse: Lard, Marina, I finish’t a Copy of Verses last night, which I have sent to half a score of my Friends for their approbation, I bestow’d the last upon Sir Amorous Courtal, but I’le send you one of them . . .’twas upon the different Addresses I have had made to me of late; O Jesu, such a glut of Foppery and Mankind; I long to breathe a little of the Country Air, that I may get rid of this Town Lumber, and entertain my Muse alone with the reflections of what she has left behind.12

Poetry is demystified here, presented as an engine of social advancement – albeit a rather ineffectual one. That Katherine Philips is the target cannot be in dispute. Of course, ‘Orinda’ might in theory stand for any ambitious lady writer, but the parody – for example, of the praise of rural life one encounters in Philips’ verse – is quite specific. As Peter Beal points out in what is probably the most informative treatment of Philips’ publishing devices to date, Manley aims to deconstruct the strategies of self-presentation involved in Philips’ circulation of manuscript copies of her work – but, oddly, as approached through the medium of print.13 More specifically, the play seems to parody the letter from ‘Orinda’ to her friend Charles Cotterel, or ‘Poliarchus’ (‘Sir Amorous Courtal’, perhaps), which served as a preface to the posthumous 1667 edition of her Poems. Here, Philips had attempted to defend her reputation, denying that she had been responsible for the publication of an unauthorised volume of her verse in 1664.14 Referring to her life in Wales, Philips commented that she had ‘thought that a Rock and a Mountain might have hidden’ her from this unwelcome publicity. She feels, she says, like one ‘exposed to play the Mountebanks, and dance upon the Ropes to entertain all the rabble’, and is therefore unhappy with Cotterel’s proposal that she should retaliate with an authorised volume of her work: I am so little concern’d for the reputation of writing Sense, that provided the World would believe me innocent of any manner of knowledge, much less 12

13

14

Delarivière Manley, The Lost Lover (London: R. Bently, F. Saunders, J. Knapton and R. Wellington, 1696), pp. 12–15. Peter Beal, In Praise of Scribes (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1998), Chapter Five, pp. 147–91, p. 165, n. 48. Beal’s chapter opens with the suggestive juxtaposition of Manley’s Orinda, and the letter to Lady Fletcher, below. Poems (London: Richard Marriott, 1664).

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Katherine Philips as Reader of Romance connivance at this Publication, I shall willingly compound never to trouble them with the true Copies, as you advise me to do: which if you still should Judge absolutely necessary to the reparation of this misfortune, and to general satisfaction; and that, as you tell me, all the rest of my friends will press me to it, I should yield to it with the same reluctancy as I would cut off a Limb to save my Life.15

It is all too easy to see how this laboured disclaimer fits in with Manley’s portrait of ‘Orinda’ – the reliance on a group of ‘friends’, the scorn of the public, the praise of country life. Affecting to disdain any sort of public ‘approbation’, Manley suggests,‘Orinda’ is concerned about little else. And she has a rather cutting point to make about Philips’ preferred method of securing this fame, manuscript publication. As Peter Beal points out, the ‘half a score’ copies of Orinda’s work carry with them a sense of ‘indiscriminate circulation’, a sense that is all too apt in the context of the 1667 preface.16 For, if Richard Mariott did not get his copy of her poems from Philips herself, then they clearly were being distributed outside of the circle of ‘Friends’ she claims as her exclusive audience. Far from being bothered by a surfeit of ‘addresses’, The Lost Lover implies, it is Orinda who is foisting her attentions upon as many of her superiors as she possibly can. Manley’s play is in itself, then, an index of the fame Katherine Philips won in the seventeenth century – and an unflattering reflection on the means used to gain it. As a still later reaction to the same writer, we might consider the following, by Edmund Gosse; he is speaking of Philips’ ‘Society’ of Friendship, and of her relations with ‘Lucasia’, or Anne Owen, the addressee of many of Philips’ poems: Lucasia was the chief ornament of the Society, and the affection of Orinda was laid at her feet for nearly thirteen years, in a style of the most unbounded and vivacious eulogy. It is very delightful to contemplate the little fat, ruddy, cockney lady, full of business and animation, now bustling the whole parish by the ears, now rousing her rather sluggish husband to ambition, now languishing in platonic sentiment at the feet of the young Welsh beauty who accepted all her raptures so calmly and smilingly.17

Divided by some two hundred years, these two reactions to the phenomenon that was Katherine Philips bear some comparison. Each has a particularly

15

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Philips (1667), ‘The Preface’. See also The Collected Works of Katherine Philips, ed. Patrick Thomas, Germaine Greer, and R. Little (Stump Cross: Stump Cross Books, 1990–3), 3 volumes, (hereafter CW, followed by volume and page numbers), II: 128–30, and appendix 1. Beal (1998), p. 147. Edmund W. Gosse, Seventeenth Century Studies (London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Co., 1883), p. 208. Gosse’s comments would appear to be based on John Aubrey’s description of Philips as ‘very good-natured; not at all high-minded; pretty fatt; not tall; read pumpled face’. See Aubrey’s Brief Lives, ed. Oliver Lawson Dick (London: Secker and Warburg, 1958), p. 242. His description is primarily symbolic, however – Philips’ common origins are manifested as excessive corporeality.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance sharp sense of the social trajectory involved in her project of authorship, and each crystallises this perception around the theme of friendship. From this point on, however, Manley and Gosse differ; in fact, each writer’s treatment of the topic effectively excludes that of the other. So far as Manley is concerned, Orinda’s poetic vocation is an all-too-transparent piece of social climbing. The ‘Friends’ from whom she hopes to secure ‘approbation’ are, it is hinted, just acquaintances, or worthless fops like Sir Amorous Courtal, or, possibly, figments of her imagination, mere pretexts for self-promotion. From Gosse’s point of view, on the other hand, such a ‘pragmatic’ attitude is quite impossible. Manley’s Orinda is on the make; Gosse’s is, simply, an embarrassment, quite devoid of the calm sprezzatura that characterises the aristocratic Anne Owen. And whilst Gosse has a very clear sense of the ‘cockney’ tradesman’s daughter’s proper place in society (a sense focused through physical description), it is precisely this perception that his Orinda lacks. What Gosse evidently sees as a class distinction is displaced in her mind into the unselfconscious and dog-like affection she feels for the beautiful Lucasia. Bearing all this in mind, we might compare these two portraits of Orinda’s relations with her friends – Orinda the social climber, and an Orinda so prostrated by a genuine sense of admiration at the perfection of her companion as to be unaware of the social gulph that supposedly separates them – with that offered by a letter, recently discovered by Peter Beal, written by Katherine Philips herself in the 1650s: To the noble Parthenia The Lady ffletcher/ Madam Ther were no excuse for such a presumption as this from a person so unworthy & so unknowne, were it possible for me to be a stranger, where ever my dearest Rosamia [sic] hath an Interest. or for any one to want some kind of worth where she will recommend. All I can pretend is a Sympathy with her noble Soule. & an admiration of it. & both these speake me yr servant, though at so great a distance., ffor if I either love Rosamia, or honor goodnesse (wch indeed is all one) I must be yr votary, who are the Mistresse of a double happynesse. a freindship from the paragon of the world, & a vertue to give you title to it. Now since my devotion is as impossible to be concealed as supprest. be pleased to accept an Offering wch hath nothing can challenge so much as a pardon, but the relegion that tenders it, & ye Subject. for no language can be barbarous that speakes Rosamia though the fancye that gave these lines a birth, is really as barren as the Rocks & Mountaynes it inhabitts. Yr most humble servant Orinda18 18

Reproduced from a MS in University College, London in Beal (1998), Appendix v, where it is dated to the mid-1650s. ‘Rosamia’ must be ‘Rosania’, the name given to Philips’ friend, Mary Aubrey. Lady Fletcher has not been definitively identified.

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Katherine Philips as Reader of Romance Accompanying this letter was the poem, ‘Orinda, To Parthenia: A Shaddow of Rosamia’, which appears elsewhere as ‘Rosania shaddow’d whilest Mrs M. Awbrey’, dated 19 September 1651.19 The quality of Philips’ praise of her friend (another member of her Society) in this poem is as extreme as her letter to Lady Fletcher implies it would be. Over ninety lines of hyperbolic adulation, the highest acclaim is reserved for Her soule! that ray shot from the Deity . . . Which Earth can neither threaten, nor allure, Nor by false Joys defile it, or obscure. Such innocence within her Brest doth dwell, Angells themselves doe onely parallell. And should her whole sex to dissembling fall, Here’s one integrity redeems them all . . .20

In context, such extravagance can have only amplified the compliment to Lady Fletcher. To have attracted the attention of such a ‘noble Soule’ is indeed an achievement. The effect is, on the one hand, to exaggerate social distance to such an extent that only a language of religion can deal with the inaccessible spaces evoked; this authorises the posture of extreme self-abasement adopted by Philips as she pays her addresses to her social superior. On the other hand, however, producing this distance as one of virtue – of true nobility – has the effect of erasing any hint of ‘presumption’, as she puts it, in her letter. The assertion of a shared interest in ‘honor’, ‘goodnesse’, and ‘vertue’, focused through the figure of Rosania, is quite explicitly supposed to deflect any possible accusations of impropriety. We might be apt to concentrate on the bid for Lady Fletcher’s ‘friendship’ through the shared acquaintance with ‘Rosamia’, and the proof of Philips’ capacity for a devoted attachment embodied in her poetic eulogy of Mary Aubrey, but there is another, less obvious claim for attention. It is worth noting that the only ‘real’ name used in the letter is that of Lady Fletcher herself. Everybody else goes by some sort of pseudonym. Philips identifies herself only as ‘Orinda’, a name which, it has been suggested, derives from that of a character in Tasso’s Gerusaleme Liberata, Clorinda.21 Mary Aubrey is ‘Rosania’, after a character in James Shirley’s The Doubtful Heir.22 Nor is this an isolated phenomenon; such gestures are characteristic of Philips’ circle. Her husband, James Philips, was known as ‘Antenor’. Sir Edward Dering was ‘Silvander’, from Honoré d’Urfé’s pastoral romance L’Astrée, in which ‘Silvandre’ figures as a perfect lover. 19 20

21

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CW, I: 117–20. The vast majority of contemporary manuscripts of the poem make no mention of either ‘Parthenia’ or Lady Fletcher. See Beal (1998), p. 148. See Carol Barash, English Women’s Poetry, 1649–1714 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1996), p. 74. As suggested by Patrick Thomas, CW, I: 3.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance The same source, rather than Chaucer, may also have supplied the coterie name for Francis Finch, ‘Palaemon’.23 Philips’ sister-in-law, Cicely, was referred to as ‘Cassandra’, a title provided by Sir Charles Cotterell, who published his translation of the first part of La Calprenède’s romance Cassandre in 1652; whilst Cotterell himself was called ‘Poliarchus’, after a character in John Barclay’s Argenis. Other unidentified recipients of poems include a ‘Pastora’, a ‘Phillis’, and an ‘Argalus’ (this last name deriving from Sidney’s Arcadia). Katherine Philips’ biographer, Philip Webster Souers, chooses to call these names ‘classical’.24 They might more accurately be designated ‘romantic’. In many cases, a concentration upon classical references may be positively misleading. In this context, a ‘Cassandra’ is no neglected prophet of doom. We are rather meant to think of the daughter of the Persian king Darius, married to Alexander the Great, but persistently courted by a noble Scythian ‘cavalier’, Oroondates. The setting of La Calprenède’s romance may be classical; the action is nothing of the sort, featuring as it does squires, tournaments, disguised princes hopelessly in love with inaccessible princesses, exotic locations, and so on.25 In fact, although many of the names have a ‘classicised’ ring to them, they derive for the most part from the sort of fashionable reading matter that Francis Kirkman identified in 1673 as having supplanted native and Spanish chivalric works in the affections of the reading public. According to Kirkman, ‘The Mirror of Knighthood, Palmenus and Amadis’s, and several others, as the four Sons of Aymon, Arthur of Great Brittain, Arthur of Little Brittain, and the History of Mervine . . . are now grown so scarce you can hardly purchase them.’ Instead, the works ‘in great esteem with the French and English Nobility’ are the likes of Sidney’s Arcadia, and translations, predominantly French, such as ‘Astrea, Polexander . . . Grand Cyrus, Clelia, Cassandra, Cleopatra’ and so forth.26 Specifically, then, many of Philips’ pseudonyms reflect the interest of her circle in a new generic variant – the French heroic romance. Although more or less forgotten nowadays,27 as it appears within

23

24 25

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27

See Honoré d’Urfé, Astrea, trans. John Davies (London: H. Mosely, T. Dring and H. Herringman, 1657–8), 3 volumes. The ‘history’ of ‘Palemon’ appears in the first volume, sigs. Yy1r–Zz1r; he appears here as a lover rather than an exemplar of friendship. The Matchless Orinda (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931), p. 39. See Gautier de Costes de la Calprenède, Cassandra, trans. Charles Cotterell (London: A. Moseley, 1664). For more on the pseudonyms employed in Philips’ circle of friends and associates, see CW, I: 8–9, and ‘Commentary’. It should be emphasised that these names were not solely Philips’ invention, but were often used between her friends even in her absence. See Elizabeth H. Hagerman, ‘Katherine Philips’, in Katherina M. Wilson ed., Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation (Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1987), pp. 566–608, p. 571. Francis Kirkman, The Famous and Delectable History of Don Bellianis of Greece . . . (London, 1673), p. 2. Joan DeJean, Tender Geographies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991) argues that they constitute a suppressed prose tradition that leads towards the classic French novel,

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Katherine Philips as Reader of Romance the context of histories of the development of early English prose fiction, this sub-genre tends to be viewed relatively positively. It is commonly seen, along with texts like the Arcadia, as offering an altogether more ‘sophisticated’ and ‘courtly’ narrative paradigm than that of the traditional chivalric romance: an act of generic distinction functions as a way of confirming the obsolescence of chivalric material. Within this context, then, it may be worth pointing out that, firstly, there is abundant evidence that the likes of Amadis continued to be read well into this period and beyond, and secondly that, despite shifts in taste of the sort Kirkman identifies, he still evidently considers the likes of Palmerin and Amadis as existing within the same broad category as the French translations – a category he designates rather vaguely as ‘sorts’ of ‘History’ or ‘Books of this Quality’, but which seems structurally equivalent to the modern ‘romance’.28 In the seventeenth century, distinctions and taxonomies of the modern kind were possible, but not inevitable: many contemporary readers recognised these works as being of a similar species. Wye Santonstall bands Amadis and the Arcadia together as ‘loves historyes’.29 (And Margaret Anne Doody even provides a fine eighteenthcentury example, in which Horace Walpole, of all people, was teased by a friend about his boyhood reading: ‘I remember you buried in romances and novels; I really believe you could have said all the Grand Cyrus’s, the Cleopatra’s, and the Amadis’s in the world by heart.’)30 Critics perhaps tend to overestimate the differences between ‘sophisticated’ pastoral romances such as Astrée, as compared to ‘chivalric’ (Iberian or medieval) texts such as Arthurian romance or Amadis de Gaule. Although Astrée – probably the furthest of these works from something like Malory – is predominantly composed of debates on the topic of love, it nevertheless still features such generic markers as: references to the Round Table; knights; trial by combat; enchantresses; disguised parentage – even a Fountain of Verity in Love that seems designed to recall the test of the Floating Island in Amadis.31 And as we shall see, the sorts of themes and structures contained within such

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29 30 31

and given the same texts’ prominence in England until the eighteenth century, one might make a similar argument here. See, for instance, Charlotte Lennox, The Female Quixote, ed. Margaret Dalziel, intro. Margaret Anne Doody (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). Kirkman reserves the term ‘romance’ for the newer works. In fact, as Lori Newcomb points out, his main principle of generic distinction is price, not content: his account is distinguishing between cheaper quarto volumes such as the native romances, and large folio and multivolume works. Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), p. 153. Picturae Loquentes, ed. C.H. Wilkinson (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1946), p. 47. Lennox (1989), xv. See for example Davies trans. (1657–8), I: D3v, T3v, Qq4r–v. Nor is it immediately apparent that such works would necessarily have been received as offering something very new – Cassandre, at any rate, seems full of echoes of a native work, Sidney’s Arcadia. See below, note 34.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance texts can be seen to offer a source of social potential comparable to that we have observed in other chivalric romances. Both produce narrative patterns deeply bound up with the language of honour and questions as to the nature of true virtue. To return to Philips’ letter: this piece of writing seems to make a gesture of friendship precisely by bestowing a name derived from romance upon Lady Fletcher; she is now to be known as ‘Parthenia’, an unfortunate but constant lover in the Arcadia. Such a use of names, along with the emphasis upon a language of ‘honor’ and ‘goodnesse’, the exaggeratedly deferential courtly posturing, and the wilderness landscape of ‘Rocks & Mountaynes’ (by which Philips refers to her home in Wales) – all have the cumulative effect of ‘romanticising’ what appears to be, in effect, a bid for patronage. We might compare the epistolary exchanges that litter Charles Cotterell’s translation, Cassandra. Of these, the most interesting occur, not in the narrative proper, but in the material prefacing each section of La Calprenède’s work. At the start of Part I, we have ‘The Author to Calista’, which combines romantic pleading with what appears to be a justification for publication. The author addresses ‘Calista’: You have been pleas’d Calista, to command that my last follies should be made publick, and have given that to the diversion of the world, which I had destin’d only to your own . . . But why do I pretend you should take any care of the reputation of my writings, since you never took any for the conservation of my life; and that you have shewn your self more sensible of the fortunes of strangers, then of one which hath ever been of your own making?

The author asks for pardon for the ‘presumption’ that led him ‘to lift up his eyes to you’. Calista, we learn, is ‘accomplished’, and of ‘eminent’ quality, ‘too eminent for my hopes’. Romantic abjection becomes indistinguishable from social inferiority, and the letter gradually modulates into a plea for patronage: ‘’Tis therefore under your protection, that Cassandra coms to put her self ’.32 Just as Katherine Philips’ advances to Lady Fletcher are authorised by the virtue of Mary Aubrey, so Calista’s merits endorse the publication of this romance. The letters that preface each section of that work act as an elaborate apparatus for deflecting any criticisms that might be made of such a project. Cassandra, it should be explained, appears in La Calprenède’s work as something of a mystery. Cassandra tells the story of the romance between the Scythian Oroondates and Statira, daughter of Darius, against a backdrop of the Persians’ defeat by Alexander the Great, and then the collapse of Alexander’s own empire. It also deploys a cunningly convoluted time scheme, in which the onward flow of events is constantly interrupted by reminiscences of past actions. In a clever adaptation of the genealogical romance plot structure, the eponymous heroine first appears as a fair woman, ‘in a meer Country habit’, 32

Cotterell trans. (1664), sigs. A1r–2v.

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Katherine Philips as Reader of Romance near the start of the book.33 Bafflingly, next to nothing is heard of her until the beginning of Part III, some 350 closely-printed folio leaves later on, when we catch up with present events and learn that she is actually the heroine, Statira – who we have been introduced to in flashback, and who, at this point of the narrative, we are being encouraged to think of as dead – in disguise.34 As expected, the country girl turns out to be a princess – although this revelation is accomplished through a series of retrospective narrations, rather than a disclosure of true parentage. As the author addresses Calista, this plot of Cassandra’s hidden nobility is moulded to serve La Calprenède’s own ‘plot’ of courtship. ‘You shall see her come out of the dark’, Calista is informed, ‘when you hope least for it, and will know her again, by lineaments that are not common’ (my italics). The hidden plot behind the hidden plot of Cassandra’s mysterious absence from the better part of the work she gives her name to is, here, the author’s own virtue and worthiness. The author’s powers of organisation, his ability to tantalise the reader with the outrageous absence of his work’s eponymous heroine, and yet make that omission good, all give the lie to his protestations of inferiority. ‘I am certain’, he writes, ‘you will never inspire me with mean, low fancies.’ At the start of Part II, we have ‘Cassandra to Calista’. Still a mystery at this point, Cassandra further whets the reader’s appetite by hinting at the ‘misfortunes’ of her life, and at her true rank. At first, Cassandra places herself under Calista’s protection, as an inferior; she is in fact nothing of the sort, and as the author speaks through his heroine, the tone adopted towards his patron can become correspondingly more imperious: I come to wait upon you without murmuring, & I should say I establish my retreat at your very feet, if with all France I did not know you are too generous, and too good, to require such submissions from a person of my sex and quality . . . if your Soveraign will enjoyn my Author still to go on with them [her adventures], give me leave, Calista, to do an office below my self, and to forget both the greatness of my birth, and the severity of my sex, to implore your favour to him; if he be little worthy of your affection, he is also but little confident to beg it . . . it is just you should consider both the greatness of his respect, and the dignity of the person that intercedes for him.35 33 34

35

Cotterell trans. (1664), sig. B3v. Cotterell trans. (1664), sig. Bbb1r. The scene in which Statira’s death is faked to deceive her rival Roxana seems to parallel in many respects (a pair of innocent princesses and an evil queen, a mock-execution in a court viewed from an upstairs window) the false executions staged by Cecropia in the New Arcadia. We also have a wounded prince being taken in as a guest by an older man to a house with a picture gallery, whereupon he falls in love with a portrait and disguises himself as an Amazon to be near the lady depicted (sig. Oo1v – the parallel being Pyrocles in the house of Kalendar). Finally, the figure of Perdiccas, the troubled abductor of the woman he loves along with her sister, ‘a man of excellent natural parts, but his passions had extinguished them’ (sig. Nnnnn3r), might recall that of Sidney’s Amphialus. Cotterell trans. (1664), sigs. Z4v–Aa1r.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance The comparison with Philips’ letter to Lady Fletcher is not only in point of the tone of deference (here complicated by references to Cassandra’s true rank), the extravagant flattery, the elaborate phraseology, and the use of false names. In both cases the ‘presumption’ of the author’s courtship of a social superior is somehow sanctioned by being mediated through figures of virtuous women – Rosania on the one hand, Cassandra on the other. The upshot in both cases is to hint at the true nobility of the author, which in turn authorises publication – whether, as in Philips’ case both of herself and of her texts, or simply of a piece of writing, as with La Calprenède.36 The classic study of textual devices such as these remains J.W. Saunders’ article on ‘the stigma of print’, in which it is noted the Renaissance authors often attempted to offset the shameful implications of venturing into print with prefaces that suggested (for instance) that publication represented only a ‘reluctant surrender to the insistence of friends’.37 Similarly, even at this late date, publication is only at Calista’s ‘command’. And yet, at times, given that there are substantial numbers of texts from this period that manage to get by without such elaborate precautionary measures, one wonders whether what is at issue here is not in fact a sophisticated evolutionary response to the ‘stigma of print’ phenomenon, as opposed to what Saunders implies, a genuine expression of feelings of shame – whether the real point is not in fact to suggest one’s virtue, precisely by surrounding oneself with just such an elaborate protective textual armour as hints at an aristocratic discomfort with such brazen self-promotion through the medium of print. It is Katherine Philips’ use of false names such as ‘Parthenia’, the clearest indicator of her reading of romance, in relation to her desire for ‘publication’, for self-promotion in Mrs Manley’s sense, that I would like to concentrate on for the moment. Certainly, such names evoke a ‘chivalric’ or ‘romantic’ atmosphere, but is there more? Why engage in this peculiar form of behaviour? One explanation springs to mind immediately. Despite being married to an active and influential supporter of the interregnum regime,38 Katherine Philips was in fact a royalist by persuasion. Those of her poems

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Calista is not Cotterell’s invention – the Cinquiesme et Dernier Partie de Casssandra (Paris: Antoine de Sommerville, Augustin Courbé, Toussainct Quinet and Nicolas de Sercy, 1645) features a preface ‘A Caliste’, in which the author refers to himself as ‘votre fidele ⌽⌽’. This identification is repeated in the English versions – except that of 1664, where it is omitted. J.W. Saunders, ‘The Stigma of Print: A Note on the Social Bases of Tudor Poetry’, Essays in Criticism 1 (1951), pp. 139–64, p. 145. James Philips prospered as a consequence of his support for the Parliamentary cause. In 1649, he was appointed High Sheriff for Cardiganshire, and remained in Parliament from 1653 to the Restoration. He ‘distinguished’ himself suppressing a Royalist uprising in Cardiganshire in 1651, was added to the High Court of Justice to investigate the aforementioned uprising, and awarded a place on the Army Committee, a post which he profited from to the tune of £300 a year. See Souers (1931), pp. 26–8.

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Katherine Philips as Reader of Romance written post-1660 unabashedly celebrate the restored regime, and in the 1650s she had addressed verses to the likes of John Berkenhead (‘Cratander’), editor of the Royalist newsheet Mercurius Aurelius. Under such circumstances, a degree of discretion in one’s correspondence may well have been prudent. Certainly, the interception of private writing was an unwelcome fact of life in this period (most notoriously in the case of the letters passed between Charles I and Henrietta Maria), and Philips’ published correspondence is indeed full of strategies of indirection designed to exclude prying eyes. The object of this secrecy is not, however, some government agent, since the letters date from the Restoration period, but rather one of Philips’ closest friends. ‘Lucasia’, or Anne Owen, was being courted – unsuccessfully, as it turned out – by Charles Cotterell. The correspondence between Philips and Cotterell, published in 1705 as Letters from Orinda to Poliarchus, is constantly aware that Anne Owen might find out that she is being discussed behind her back, that either she or one of her relatives might want to see one of the letters. Accordingly, ‘Lucasia’ becomes, when Cotterell’s suit is being discussed, ‘Calanthe’ (a point we shall return to), and all correspondence from him on that matter is to be written in Italian: ‘be pleas’d to make use of it,’ writes Philips, ‘in whatever you intend should be private; for if I should be importun’d by CALANTHE or the Uncle, to shew your Letters, I might then explain them as I thought fit.’39 The fact is that the only use of a false name in Katherine Philips’ surviving works that we can definitively put down to a need for secrecy occurs between friends, and not against her enemies.40 Philips’ relation to her pseudonym is, in fact, distinctly odd – not at all, for example, like the relationship involved when Mary Ann Evans chose to take up the name ‘George Eliot’. Critics have quite rightly tried to separate out Katherine Philips and ‘Orinda’ as a strategy for analysing the former’s use of the latter to negotiate her way into a position of ‘public’ prominence. Elaine Hobby notes that Katherine Philips ‘has long been perceived as a model lady poetess, dabbling in versification in a rural Welsh backwater . . . modestly alarmed at the prospect of any public attention for her work’. This ‘Orinda’, she suggests, is a construct, ‘made necessary by the peculiar circumstances confronting this seventeenth-century woman poet’, and serves to define the terms on which she enters the literary canon.41 For Carol Barash, too, ‘Orinda’ is a persona, adopted so as to foster ‘myths’ that might protect Philips from accusations of impropriety.42 What she was not, however, was a way of

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CW, II: 25. See, however, Lois Potter’s Secret Rites and Secret Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), which discusses the adoption of a ‘philosophy of secrecy’ (113) among the royalist literary community. Elaine Hobby, Virtue of Necessity (London: Virago Press, 1988), p. 128. Barash (1996), p. 61.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance disguising Philips’ identity. We might consider at this point Peter Beal’s account of the furore over the publication of the unauthorised edition of her poems.43 ‘Poems, by the Incomparable, Mrs. K.P.’ was published – without the author’s consent, but apparently in good faith – by Richard Marriott in 1664. Although she objected to this volume as (amongst other things) ‘abominably transcrib’d’, Philips seems to have been reluctant to countenance a preemptive publication of her work under her pen-name.44 In fact, Philips had already appeared in print as ‘K.P.’ over a decade before, when she contributed a commendatory poem to the posthumous edition of the works of the poet and dramatist William Cartwright.45 Admittedly, such a signature disguises the sex of the author (as ‘Orinda’ does not), but one might have guessed from the fact that ‘K.P.’ is excluded from the ordering scheme of the other verses. Philips’ poem heads the list; the others seem to be arranged in order of rank.46 Moreover, in 1655 Philips contributed two works to Henry Lawes’ Ayres and Dialogues. One, another commendatory poem, is signed ‘Katherine Philips’. The other, ‘Mutuall Affection betweene Orinda and Lucatia’, set to Lawes’ music, is unsigned, but identified in the list of contents as the work of ‘Mrs. Catherine Philips’.47 In short, a perceptive reader might easily have inferred some sort of relationship between ‘Orinda’ and Katherine Philips, who had hardly gone to elaborate lengths to disguise her identity before 1664. Her real objection to the unauthorised Poems seems to have been, not that they were an inaccurate copy (for they were not),48 nor even that they were printed rather than circulated in manuscript (as we have seen, Philips had appeared in print before), but that they did not appear under the sorts of semi-official sanction her previous efforts had had. The Cartwright and Lawes volumes were collections of Royalist verse. Publishing in them, Philips might 43

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Beal’s concern is the extent to which Philips might be said to inhabit a manuscript culture, and the bearing this has on her capacity to advance herself; mine, how these factors illuminate her reading and use of printed romance texts. CW, II: 130. A letter of January 1663/4 has Philips responding to advice from her friends to ‘hasten to LONDON and vindicate my self by publishing a true Copy’ of her work – CW, II: 125. Comedies, Tragi-comedies, with Other Poems (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1651). The poem following that of ‘K.P.’ is signed ‘Monmouth’. Furthermore, as Beal (1998, p. 153) points out, at least one reader knew the author’s identity. Defending women’s right to appear in print, Sarah Jinner commented, ‘what rare poem hath one Mistris Katherine Philips near Cardigan writ, it is printed before Cartwrightes Poems, who, if her modesty would permit, her wit would put down many mens in a Masculine strain’ – An Almanack or Prognostication (London: J. Streater, 1658), sig. B1r. Henry Lawes, The Second Book of Ayres and Dialogues (London: T.H. for John Playford, 1655). Once again, Philips’ dedicatory poem heads the rest; the song appears as ‘Friendship’s Mysterys’ in CW. See Beal (1998), p. 162, and Germaine Greer, Slip-shod Sibyls (London: Viking, 1995), Chapter 5, pp. 147–72.

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Katherine Philips as Reader of Romance feel that she was in good company. Her other major pre-1664 production, a translation of Corneille’s La Mort de Pompée, had been written, and was eventually published, under the auspices of Roger Boyle, Earl of Orrery.49 The 1664 volume of Poems, by way of contrast, could have been construed as a damagingly brazen bid for public acceptance in a far wider sense. ‘By reaching an untargeted, indiscriminate, “vulgar” audience’, Peter Beal concludes, ‘the publication of a body of verse which celebrated the feelings, activities, and relationships of a “private” circle of genteel friends could only lower, not enhance, her prestige in the eyes of that social class whose approbation alone she sought.’50 Philips’ complaint was not that her secret identity had been threatened, but that she (under whatever name) had been presented in a way that might harm her reputation. Writing to Cotterell in January 1663/4, Philips worried ‘whether the exposing all my Follies in this dreadful Shape has not frighted the whole World out of all their Esteem for me’. She enclosed with this another missive, ‘my true Thoughts on that Occasion in Prose . . . to the end that you may, if you please, shew it to any body that suspects my Ignorance and Innocence of that false Edition of my Verses’ – that is, the letter that eventually was to preface her posthumous collected works.51 It was a tactic that placed Philips in a rather contradictory situation. After all, false disclaimers of the intent to publish were something of a feature of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century book trade.52 To get round this fact, Philips seems to have exploited the ‘private’, authentic character of the personal letter, as a way of suggesting that her protestations were genuine (as they probably were).53 Her letter of defence, however, which gives no sign that it was intended for circulation, or indeed enclosed with another, genuinely private communication, is, ironically, just the sort of fabrication it is supposed not to be – but for exactly the opposite reasons. An attempt to fence off the public from the private sphere seems, in this case, to have led to all sorts of bizarre inversions; particularly since her letter expands upon this very theme. Philips protests

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Pompey, (Dublin: John Crooke, 1663). Crooke is advertised on the title page of this edition as ‘Printer to the Kings Most Excellent Majesty’. Beal (1998), p. 164. CW, II: 126–7, 125. See p. 67, above. Philips does actually employ this trope, but with reference to manuscript circulation. ‘Some of [her] dearest friends’ having praised her ‘Ballads’, she ‘was betray’d to permit some Copies for their divertisement’, and this must be the ultimate source of Marriott’s copy of her work. CW, II: 130. Germaine Greer (1995) suggests that Philips – in need of money – was in fact responsible for the 1664 edition, and that she was only subsequently alerted to the danger it posed to her reputation, whereupon she disowned it. Beal, however, responds that the financial rewards Philips might have expected from such a publication were minimal, and that such an interpretation runs against the grain of Philips’ demonstrable sensitivity to her public standing (1998), pp. 162–4.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance that she would have thought that her rural seclusion might have protected her from the ‘malice’ of the world, and protests at having ‘to play the Mountebanks, and dance upon the Ropes to entertain all the rabble; to undergo all the raillery of the Wits’. The sense of horror at being thought a performer, one who profits from making a show of herself, is acute – or, from another angle, proficiently performed. Her response is to express an unqualified disgust for the public whose good opinion she fears she will have been thought to have solicited.54 As it turned out, Cotterell and John Jeffreys (‘Philaster’) persuaded the publisher to withdraw the book from circulation – the final irony being the letter’s use in 1667 to authorise the publication of her Poems. The whole episode serves to demonstrate that Philips’ concern was for acquiring the right sort of reputation. It was not the case that her activities were necessarily inherently shameful, and that her assumed name was a front designed to shield her from public criticism. Nor can such an explanation account for the fact that the bestowal of a name seems to function in her letter to Lady Fletcher as a token of friendship. As Peter Beal has shown, a simple dichotomy between publishing and not-publishing, or even print and manuscript culture, with ‘Orinda’ being a viable creation within only one of the terms, is inaccurate. ‘Orinda’s’ ambitions cannot be understood separately from the networks of friends and like-minded people who were her chosen audience, in whatever medium. And it is precisely these people who employ ‘romantic’ names in their personal interactions. The function of the pseudonyms that characterise Philips’ circle of acquaintances was something quite different from simple concealment. Most obviously, for them to figure as emblems of friendship between the sender and recipient of a letter or poem, as the gift of the name ‘Parthenia’ seems to do with Lady Fletcher, such names imply a shared interest in romance. It is an aspect of Philips’ life that critics have hitherto neglected – or (as we shall see) have attempted to play down. At any rate, they show little interest in actually reading the books that so interested her. Yet there is contemporary evidence that Philips was particularly associated with the genre in her own lifetime. John Davies’ translation of a section of La Calprenède’s Cleopatra is dedicated to ‘the most Excellently Accomplished Lady, The Lady Katherine Philips’, and notes her ‘curiositie to look into these things before they have hardlie taken English aire’. Philips is described as a devoted – even avid – fan of the series. When, he says, Davies reflects on your great affection and respect for the excellent CLEOPATRA, your particular enquiries after her welfare and adventures, and the tenderness which makes you wish the misfortunes of so great a Princess were at an end, I can think it but just, 54

CW, II: 128–31.

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Katherine Philips as Reader of Romance that the person, from whom she had, unknown, received those great Civilities, should accordingly be returned the particular acknowledgement thereof.55

Philips’ letters also suggest a familiarity with romances. She is knowledgeable enough about the genre to recognise when it is being sent up, and to express her appreciation. ‘HUDIBRAS,’ she writes, ‘is an excellent Droll, and in my Life I never read any thing so naturally and so knowingly Burlesque.’56 Her poetry reveals a similar competence. Philips is aware, for example, that it is appropriate to include a line on ‘Fairy Knights touch’d with Cambina’s wand’ – a reference to Book IV of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, devoted to the virtue of friendship – in a poem addressed to ‘the noble Palaemon’ (Francis Finch), regarding his treatise on Friendship (1654).57 The main evidence for Philips’ acquaintance with romance must, however, remain the pseudonyms employed within her literary circle. Often one would require quite incredibly detailed knowledge of the topic to ‘get’ a reference. During Philips’ correspondence with Charles Cotterell regarding his courtship of Anne Owen, or ‘Lucasia’, she is referred to as ‘Calanthe’ whenever that matter is being discussed. The reference here is to William Cartwright’s play The Lady-Errant.58 Itself a parody of romance material, featuring as it does an Overbury-type female Quixote, Machessa, who has taken it upon herself, in a startling reversal of gender roles, to attempt ‘adventures’ such as rescuing knights who are ‘imprison’d or inchanted’, Cartwright’s work seems to have been familiar to both Philips and Cotterell.59 The heroine of the play is named Lucasia – but the printed text contains evidence that she had originally been called Calanthe.60 The reference thus functions as a sort of in-joke, binding the two correspondents together. In the same set of letters, Cotterell’s rival, Colonel Marcus Trevor, appears as ‘Memnon’. Patrick Thomas suggests that this is an allusion to Beaumont and Fletcher’s The Mad Lover.61 It is far more likely that we have here another reference to Cotterell’s translation Cassandra, in which Memnon features as the lover of Barsina, also courted by Prince Oxyartes.62 A ‘Memnon’ also appears in the capacity as a good friend in Jeremy Taylor’s treatise on that topic, which takes the form of a letter to Katherine Philips. Discussing the relative merit of ties of kinship and ties

55

56 57 58 59 60

61 62

Robert Loveday, James Webb and John Davies trans., Hymen’s Praeludia (London: A. Moseley and J. Crooke, 1665). Davies’ dedication is to the ninth part of this work. CW, II: 80. CW, I: 83–4, and notes. Carol Barash (1996, p. 71) suggests that the name derives from Lovelace’s Lucasta. Cartwright (1651), sig. B2r. See for example sig. E6v, where the designation of the speaker, Lucasia, appears as ‘Cal.’. This issue is further discussed in G. Blakemore Evans ed., The Plays and Poems of William Cartwright (Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1951), pp. 67, 82. CW, II: 26, n.5. Cotterell trans. (1664). Barsina’s ‘history’ is related on sigs. Bbbbb4v–Eeeee4r.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance of friendship, Taylor declares that ‘it is not to be asked which is to be preferred, a Brother or a Friend, but which is the better friend; Memnon or my Brother?’63 What are we to make of this interest in romance? Attempting to place Philips’ reading in some sort of context, Patrick Thomas cites the instance of her contemporary, Mary North (d. 1662), of whom we learn that as a youngster for hours and hours together, she diverted her sisters and all the female society . . . with rehearsing by heart prolix romances, with the substance of speeches and letters as well as passages . . . She instituted a sort of order of the wits of her time and acquaintance, whereof the symbol was a sun with a circle touching the rays and, upon that in a blue ground were wrote ␣␷␶␣␳␬␩␴ [autarke¯s] in the proper Greek characters, which her father suggested. Divers of these were . . . dispersed to those wittified ladies who were willing to come into the order; and for a while they were formally worn, till the foundress fell under the government of another and then it was left off.64

By citing this instance, Thomas seems to situate Philips’ reading of romance within a context of sentimental friendships with other women (North’s mention of ‘prolix’ texts suggests notions of female verbosity) – as a youthful, light-hearted hobby. His critical study of Katherine Philips is more explicit: it was, we learn, ‘during her schooldays [spent at a Hackney boarding school] that Orinda acquired her passion for lengthy French romances’.65 By the same token, reading romances must have been a childish thing to be left off once Philips reached maturity – just as Mary North is forced to abandon her ‘order’ of wits when she marries (a change that is rather alarmingly linked in North’s narrative to the loss of the ‘selfsufficiency’ [␣␷␶␣␳␬␩␴] proclaimed by that order’s ‘symbol’). As we shall see when looking at other, humanistic curricula of reading, this focus on the school environment is far from irrelevant, but the treatment it is accorded here trivialises its significance. Neither Thomas nor North seems prepared to countenance the possibility that an interest in romance literature might figure anything other than essentially feminine, private concerns. Through quotation, Thomas hints – unwittingly, perhaps – at an equation between femininity and romance that is damaging to both. These books survived as popular reading matter well into the eighteenth century. The instinctive assumption that they could have constituted no more than fuel for foolishness – or juvenile entertainment, at best – trivialises their readers as much as the texts themselves. 63

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A Discourse of the Nature, Offices and Measures of Friendship (London: R. Royston, 1657), sig. D11r. Roger North, The Lives of the Norths, ed. A. Jessop (Heppeheim: Gregg International Publishers Ltd, 1972), 3 volumes, I: 46. Quoted, with minor differences, in CW, I: 3. Patrick Thomas, Katherine Philips (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1988), pp. 3–4.

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Katherine Philips as Reader of Romance Critics have generally been unwilling to consider Philips’ work within the context offered by her reading. Can her interest in romance really be as trivial as Thomas’ presentation of the facts seems to imply? Recent work on Royalist literary culture would suggest otherwise. Indeed, the period of the English civil war and interregnum remains one of the few areas of Renaissance culture in which romances have received the attention they deserve. As Annabel Patterson and Lois Potter have pointed out, the genre accumulated political resonance throughout the reign of Charles I, and subsequently.66 A text such as Sidney’s Arcadia had, of course, always had its political dimension. Sidney was clear about the ideological potential of pastoral verse, its ability to cloak covert and even oppositional messages in inoffensive forms; his own ‘Ister Bank’ poem from the Arcadia is a beast fable that hints at the author’s discomfort with unqualified monarchical authority.67 In the Caroline era, however, there seems to have been a definite attempt to develop an association between the royal image and matters of chivalry and romance. Following the assassination of the Duke of Buckingham in 1628, we can detect a concerted effort to revive the image of the court through institutions such as the Court of Chivalry, with a renewed insistence on the values of honour and nobility. The business of the Court – superficially concerned with rather petty, private squabbles over place and precedence – had in fact been distinctly ‘political’ from the moment of its revival.68 The Court seems to have been more or less dormant until the 1620s, possibly as a result of disputes over the jurisdiction of the Earl Marshal in the absence of the other officer of state who was supposed to preside over the Court, the Constable (that post being vacant), a matter settled in 1622 when letters patent were issued to Thomas Howard, the Earl Marshal, ‘authorising and commanding him to proceed “judicially and definitively” in all causes within the jurisdiction of the Court’.69 The very first case brought before this reconstituted Court of Chivalry might be interpreted as an attack by Howard on his enemy, the Duke of Buckingham. In his capacity as Earl Marshal, Howard seems to have tried to strike at Buckingham’s ability to accumulate influence through patronage, by supporting an attack on the gentility of one of Buckingham’s clients, Sir Thomas Harris.70 The greatest concentration of court documents from 66

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Annabel Patterson, Censorship and Interpretation (Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1984), Chapter 4, pp. 159–202; Potter (1989), Chapter 3, pp. 72–112. The Countesse of Pembrokes Arcadia (London: William Ponsonbie, 1593), sig. Kk6v. And before then, since the Earl of Essex had employed researchers to investigate the privileges of the post of Earl Marshal; antiquarian research of this sort became more and more controversial – ultimately, Robert Cotton’s library was sealed as a ‘source of sedition’. See Richard C. McCoy, The Rites of Knighthood (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 90–5. G.D. Squibb, The High Court of Chivalry (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1959), p. 46. Harris had been created a baronet in 1622, but had his right to this dignity challenged by a selection of the gentry of Shropshire, who, peeved that an upstart should claim precedence

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance before the Civil War, however, is to be found between the years of 1630 and 1640. The cases themselves do not appear to have been political in the way that the case of Sir Thomas Harris was, but the level of activity may in itself have represented a face-saving shift in emphasis. Putting a stop to the creation and sale of new titles and stressing the power of a court of honour were both intended to reassert traditional aristocratic values after the period of the ‘inflation of honours’ – that is, the period of the ascendancy of the upstart Duke of Buckingham.71 Correspondingly, we have attempts in the cultural sphere to harness the royal image to chivalric iconography. As Annabel Patterson notes, by having himself depicted by Rubens as St George in 1629, and by sponsoring a Historie devoted to proving the historicity of that figure, Charles ‘deliberately chose to identify himself with a romance figure, an emblem not only of his nation, but of a spiritualised and pacific chivalry’.72 As a result of what practically amounted to the royal patronage of a genre, interest in romances seems to have flourished – Sidney’s Arcadia, for example, was republished in 1627, 1628, 1629, 1633, and 1638, dramatised (twice), and adapted by Francis Quarles (such royal sponsorship being a rather ironic fate, given the political undertones of that text).73 At the same time, Charles’ queen, Henrietta Maria, was encouraging a vogue for pastoral romance, reviving plays such as John Fletcher’s The Faithful Shepherdess. The queen also introduced to the English court French codes of préciosité, the literary movement that originated in seventeenth-century French salons, its advent recorded by James Howell:74

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over them, claimed that Harris was no gentleman and hence not fit to be a baronet. This apparently allowed Howard the opportunity to strike an admittedly petty but none the less symbolic blow against the Duke of Buckingham. As it happens, this strategy (if it was that) was at best only a partial success. At the same time as proceedings against him were under way in the Court of Chivalry, Harris filed a bill against his accusers in the Star Chamber, which was seen as an attempt to libel them without due process, and he was summoned to defend himself. In 1624, further proceedings against Harris were initiated in the Earl Marshal’s Court, where it was now impossible for him to appear without prejudicing his appeal to the Court of Chancery in his other case. Sir Thomas was adjudged to be no gentleman, but the Court nevertheless noted that it had no power to revoke the baronetcy, thus leading to the absurd situation of the existence of baronet who was publicly declared to be no gentleman. See Squibb (1959), pp. 47–51; G.D. Squibb ed., Reports of Heraldic Cases in the Court of Chivalry, 1623–1732 (London: John Whithead and Son, 1956), pp. 1–5; and Rev. G.W. Fisher, ‘Sir Thomas Harris of Boreaton, Shropshire, and His Family’, Transactions of the Shropshire Archaeological and Natural History Society, 2nd Series, X (1898), pp. 77–92. Lawrence Stone, The Crisis of the Aristocracy, 1558–1641 (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1965). In 1629, Charles, ‘now freed from the influence of Buckingham, turned his face resolutely against any further sale of titles of any kind’, p. 95. See Patterson (1984), p. 168. See also Erica Veevers, Images of Love and Religion (Cambridge, New York, New Rochelle and Sydney: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 187–9. Patterson (1984), p. 171. See Veevers (1989), pp. 1–47.

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Katherine Philips as Reader of Romance The Court affords little news at present, but that ther is a Love call’d Platonick Love, which much sways there of late; it is a love abstracted from all corporeal gross impressions, and sensuall appetit, but consists in contemplation and Ideas of the mind, not in any carnall fruition.75

As a fashion, préciosité placed a high value on female virtue, encouraged the discussion of the topic of love within a Platonic framework, and favoured the adoption of romantic personae. Lady Carlisle, for example, ‘was commonly known as Aminta’ – even being addressed as such in a ‘totally serious family letter’ from her brother, Henry Percy.76 Indeed, the trend had in fact evolved in a sort of symbiotic relationship with a romance, d’Urfé’s Astrée, as Erica Veevers explains: ‘the first volume of this enormously long work was published in 1607, and the last (posthumously) in 1627, so that it developed side by side with the fashion of préciosité, and each acted on the other.’ 77 As a further indication of the romance’s capacity to bear political significance, we might note the way in which interpretation of the genre expanded beyond the sort of allusion suggested by Sir Philip Sidney, to the point where it became fashionable to discern in romances a subtext of references, not simply to topical themes, but of actual one-to-one correspondences between fictional characters and real historical personages: Barclay’s Argenis actually came complete with a key or clavis that allowed the reader to unlock this level of hidden political meaning. And, as the other side of the coin of this phenomenon, the mid-seventeenth century saw a proliferation of disguised autobiographies such as that of Sir Kenelm Digby, whose relationship with Lady Venetia Stanley he recounted in the form of a Sidneyesque romance.78 By the time of the Civil War, then – even whilst the descendants of many of Sidney’s own family and circle ultimately took sides for Parliament and against the monarchy – it made perfect sense for John Milton to attack in tandem both the King and the genre of romance. Eikon Basilike, presented to the reading public as Charles’ thoughts prior to his execution, had employed verses from Sidney’s Arcadia. Milton’s response, Eikonoklastes, is scathing

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James Howell, Epistolae Ho-Elianae (London: Humphrey Moseley, 1650), section vi, letter xv, dated 3 June 1634. J.B. Fletcher, The Religion of Beauty in Woman (New York: Macmillan, 1911), ‘Précieuses at the Court of Charles I’, pp. 166–205, p. 184, note. Veevers (1989), p. 16. Henrietta Maria’s own version of this fashion, however, tempered the ‘exaggerated woman-worship’ of D’Urfé, which was more characteristic of the circle of her rival, Lady Carlisle (37). BL MS Harley 6578 – which features a ‘Key’, explaining that James I is the ‘King of Morea’, and so on. According to Nigel Smith, Literature and Revolution in England, 1640–1660 (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1994), the scientist Robert Boyle produced a similar autobiographical romance (243), and his brother Roger, later Earl of Orrery and the patron of Katherine Philips, also experimented in the genre with his lengthy political romance Parthenissa.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance about the habits of mind revealed by such an appropriation. Here, if anywhere, was a time for serious, Christian reflection, yet the king’s first response had been to seek for consolation in the ‘polluted orts and refuse of Arcadia’s and Romances’, ‘sweet rapsodies of Heathenism and Knighterrantry’ such as Astrea, Amadis, and Palmerin.79 We have already noted the tendency of romance narratives to imaginatively encode a sort of ‘pastness’: because they are set in the past (‘the Knighthood now a daies, are nothing like the Knighthood of old time’), but also because their world view tends to be resistant to the notion of heroic achievement not backed up by some sort of pedigree. It is therefore perhaps unsurprising that nostalgia for past glories should so easily find expression in tropes borrowed from the literature of chivalry. This was the case during the reign of James I, when discontent with the new regime gave rise to representations of the age of Elizabeth as one of now-departed honour,80 and during the interregnum period it became the case again for the supporters of an absent monarchy. What the use of ‘romanticised’ names within Katherine Philips’ circle shows is an imaginative recreation of Caroline court culture. Deprived, during the interregnum years, of the rituals and ceremonies, the masques, dances, and plays that might have bound the adherents of such a culture together, this contact was sustained by a circle of ‘friends’ through the medium of shared reading. Romances written and published in the 1650s and afterwards tend to signal (with varying degrees of discretion) an allegiance to the royalist cause. Charles Cotterell’s Cassandra, for example, sports a dedication ‘To his Sacred Majesty, Charles II’, dated June 1653, and written in the Hague. Such works were often censured for their lack of verisimilitude; but according to the preface ‘To the Reader’, the action of Cassandra seems perfectly probable to one ‘whose eyes have . . . been witnesses of such Revolutions, as hardly any Romance, but sure no History can parallel’. Cotterell summarises some of the most resonant points in his translation: ‘the strange successe of the Graecian Conqueror [Alexander the Great], the fatal destruction of the Persian Monarchy, the deplorable end of unfortunate Darius, the afflicted estate of his Royal Family in Exile & Captivity, the easie compliance of his Subjects with the prevailing Party’. The edition of 1676 seems to make such parallels even more pointed by including an engraved frontispiece in which ‘Cassandra’ bears a distinct resemblance to Henrietta Maria.81 79 80

81

John Milton, EIKONOK⌳A’⌺TH⌺ (London: T.N., 1650), sigs. D2r–3r. See Anne Barton, Ben Jonson, Dramatist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984), ‘Harking Back to Elizabeth: Jonson and Caroline Nostalgia’, pp. 300–20. Barton cites the example of William Cavendish’s play The Variety, in which one character, Manly, dresses up in Elizabethan costume – his devotion to antique habits of virtue being further signalled by a host of references to chivalric themes: he is like ‘one of Arthurs Knights of the round Table’. The Country Captaine and The Varietie, Two Comedies Written by a Person of Honour (London: Humphrey Robinson and Humphrey Moseley, 1649), sig. C7v. Cassandra (London: Peter Parker, 1676).

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Katherine Philips as Reader of Romance Certainly the parallels with recent history are not exact. The character of Alexander, an enemy ‘to all Kings in general’, might initially be seen as a sort of Cromwell figure, as in the prefatory matter. His nobility and generosity of spirit are, however, emphasised, as is the fact that he is ‘an Enemy to those that were Traitors to their Princes’ (he is ultimately assassinated by the upstart Cassander).82 The fact that he can enjoy the respect of his enemies thus hints at a certain community of interest between all the main characters in the romance, all of whom are aristocrats, if not princes. As Mark Bannister points out, ‘the heroes . . . belong to a special caste of superhuman beings who have nothing in common with ordinary mortals . . . They feel drawn to each other regardless of the interests they might supposedly be representing and change sides freely if they think their status as généreux and free men is in any way threatened . . . Politics in the broadest sense is anathema to them.’83 Oroondates, the principal character of La Calprenède’s work, is a prince of Scythia. In the first part of the romance, he disguises his identity and fights for Darius of Persia against his own people. None of this matters, exactly, because his essential nobility is not compromised by such actions. In the world of shifting alliances depicted by La Calprenède, real condemnation is reserved solely for base-born upstarts such as Cassander. It is not too hard to see how such a vision might appeal to those of a royalist persuasion, for whom the imposition of parliamentary rule and the rise of Cromwell were not ‘politics’ as they recognised it, but rather an attack upon a whole system, upon honour and nobility. Placed within Cotterell’s textual frame, Cassandra gives soothing voice to an ideal of aristocratic solidarity that goes beyond mere disagreement, a vision consonant with that of supporters of the defeated monarchy. Despite the absence of any direct point-for-point correspondence between such romances and events of the mid-seventeenth century, it ought to be obvious that they functioned as a powerful interpretative tool for dealing with the trauma of recent events – just as much as classical history. This is not to say that an interest in romance was necessarily overtly oppositional. For one thing, the genre was hardly exclusive to those of a royalist persuasion. On the contrary: both ‘the royalist plotter and poet Edmund Waller, and the parliamentary leader Lord Saye and Sele, were both reported to have written romances’.84 It certainly need not have stood as a direct call to arms – following the defeat of Charles II at Worcester in 1651, compromise with the ‘de facto government’ came to look like an increasingly sensible option.85 Nevertheless, the patterns of exile or obscurity and vindication (whether romantic or political) that structure these works, in which nobility is laid low and enjoys restoration, must have had a certain appeal to the royalist community – dispossessed, 82 83 84 85

Cotterell trans. (1664), sigs. Mmmm4r, Pppp2v. Mark Bannister, Privileged Mortals (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 141. Smith (1994), p. 236. Potter (1989), p. 20.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance anxiously awaiting the moment of its reversion of fortune and the ‘discovery’ of the true king, Charles II. Similarly, Philips’ poem addressed to Cratander (John Berkenhead, editor of a royalist newsheet) ‘upon a composition of his, which he was not willing to own publiquely’ opens with the line,‘As when some Injur’d Prince assumes disguise’ an implicit signalling of Royalist sympathies that fuses political implications with reference to a paradigmatic narrative strand from romances under cover of paying a compliment to the publicity-shy Berkenhead.86 It is also worth noting that women played an important role in this fictionalised world of romance, retaining the visibility that they had been accorded under the reign to Charles I – whose marriage to Henrietta Maria encouraged the production of a variety of texts devoted to the idealisation of romantic love.87 Romances themselves, of course, present Amazonian warriors as something of a standard feature, and in the case of Cassandra this clearly bears some relation to the representations of femmes fortes (heroic women) that flourished under the regency of Anne of Austria; indeed, during the period of civil war in France known as the Fronde, aristocratic women took it upon themselves to operate as military leaders.88 Within an English context, however, such characters tend to look somewhat more fantastical, and they are always presented as special and exceptional cases. Perhaps of more interest is the way that a text such as Cassandra presents the figure of the loyal and virtuous lover or friend. Consider the princess Statira, Darius’ daughter. When her father dies, and his heir is thought dead, the court-in-exile that is Darius’ captured womenfolk effectively conserve both their dignity and the honour of their menfolk in their absence – even after the princess is married off to Alexander. In a world of crossed loyalties, in which one is hard pressed to know whether to stay loyal to one’s country, father, husband, friends or kin (since they almost invariably operate on different sides of whatever conflict is prevailing at any given time), La Calprenède sets a high value on the woman who can juggle these priorities, maintaining the honour of those closest to her whilst they live in obscurity or disgrace. The prominence of women in Philips’ verse is not, then, necessarily simply a reflection of the nature of her personal attachments. As we have seen, Philips did have male friends. Women, however, seem to have played a particularly important role in royalist culture. The heroic female as a repository for and mediatrix of the honour of others is the model within which Katherine Philips

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CW, I: 100–1. The Prince in question would be the future Charles II, forced to flee the country in a succession of disguises. To the extent that his parliamentarian opponents accused the king of being under female domination. Milton (1650) makes pointed reference to ‘effeminate and Uxorious Magistrates’ (K3v). See Ian Maclean, Women Triumphant (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1977), and Joan DeJean (1991), pp. 17–70.

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Katherine Philips as Reader of Romance could be an author, as Carol Barash suggests; mocking the notion that all Katherine Philips ever produced were ‘innocent little verses about her private life in Wales’, she notes that ‘Philips’ “Society of Friendship” was part of a discourse about liberty and political allegiances during the interregnum. Women’s friendship provided a model of political loyalty.’89 Hence the importance of figures of female virtue in royalist culture – and hence the fact that it is Katherine Philips’ circle of romance-reading friends that ‘authorise’ her own position as an author.90 That Katherine Philips’ poems should be to a large extent about friendship is therefore apt. Writers such as Philips’ biographer, Souers, tend to value the poems to Lucasia and Rosania above the royal panegyrics she produced in the 1660s, favouring expressions of personal feeling over statements about ideological allegiance, but, placed back into the context of manuscript circulation within which they were originally produced, we can see that Philips’ poems were themselves actually agents of friendship, a means of creating a sense of community and forging alliances at a time of political adversity. We ought to be suspicious of an easy equation between amatory verse – or verses on friendship – and the purely personal. It is only Philips’ sex, and with it the assumption that her interests are by definition ‘private’, that legitimises such a construction. Even the most seemingly ‘personal’ of Katherine Philips’ verses on friendship tend to be shot through with coded references to contemporary history. Consider for example the poem ‘To Pastora being with her Friend’: 1 While you that double joy obtain Of what you give, and what you gain: Friendship, who owes you so much Fame, Commands my Tribute to your Name. 2 Friendship that was almost forlorn, Sunk under every Critick’s scorn; But that your genius her protects, Had fled the World, at least the Sex.

89

90

Barash (1996), p. 56. Similarly, Earl Miner’s The Cavalier Mode From Jonson to Cotton (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1971) emphasises how the Cavalier poets responded to external hardship with a discourse of inner nobility – and the important part that friendship played in that, as an emblem of political constancy (298). As another example of a similar phenomenon, we might consider the translation of La Calprenède’s Cleopatra produced by Robert Loveday, James Webb and John Davies (1665). The book contains a multitude of dedications – all of them to women. The dedications as a whole tend to continue the conceit used in Cassandra, that the book is its heroine, seeking refuge from her enemies with an influential woman, a situation that allows all parties involved to demonstrate their generosity of spirit.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance 3 You have restored them and us, Whence both are happy; Caesar thus Ow’d Rome the glories of his Reign, And Rome ow’d him as much again.91

Elegant verses on the reciprocity of friendship – but it is a friend who can read between the lines, and remind herself just how well Caesar was paid for his services to the state, a reference that disrupts the up-to-this-point harmonious flow of debt and payment that structures the opening verses of the poem. In such a context, friendship becomes a submerged metaphor for the proper relationship between ruler and subject – and the ‘restoration’ of Friendship becomes something more than a slightly contrived conceit, paid as a compliment to a friend.92 Another poem, ‘L’accord du bien’ is even more explicit in its eulogy of ‘Order’ (the very first word of the poem), in which universal harmony is described in terms of friendship, chief of the virtues (stanza 7). Inner peace is offered, implicitly, as a substitute for an absent outer order: 24 Providence still keeps even state; But he can best command his Fate, Whose art, by adding his own voice, Makes his Necessity his choice. 25 Rightly to rule oneself must be The hardest, largest monarchy: Whose passions are his masters grown, Will be a captive in a Throne.93

Friendship proposed as a relief from external strife clearly gives the lie to the notion that it is simply a ‘private’ affair. Katherine Philips’ recipe for female heroism – self-control and internal restraint – clearly emerges out of a politicised context (‘monarchy’, ‘Throne’). Her emphasis upon privacy, similarly, is almost invariably produced in tandem with statements about the injustice and disorder of ‘public’ life. Although we cannot fail to notice Katherine Philips’ stated delight in privacy, we would also do well to recognise how its benefits are almost always defined in terms of a highly ‘public’ vocabulary. 91 92

93

CW, I: 235–6. As Laurie J. Shannon points out, the language of Renaissance friendship tended to be produced in monarchical terms. ‘Monarchs, Minions, and “Soveraigne” Friendship’, The South Atlantic Quarterly 97: 1 (1998), pp. 91–112. Katherine Philips’ verse abounds with things and qualities – Friendship, the ‘times’, and the ‘age’ – being variously ‘restor’d’, reformed, and redeemed by her friends. CW, I: 83–4, 103, 147. CW, I: 169–73.

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Katherine Philips as Reader of Romance Its appeal is, very precisely, that it contains what is absent without.94 As in romances, friendship between women becomes a repository for all the honour, sovereignty, and virtue that the interregnum world lacks. And within such a context – that of an inverted world – the transgression of female authorship (which is not always distinguishable from the sorts of negotiations that any author – such as La Calprenède – seems obliged – or ready – to undertake in ‘publishing’ their work in this period) is clearly neutralised, or at least diminished. The shared world of romance names is, then, in itself a claim to attention, to ‘friendship’ of a sort. We are told that it was Philips’ ‘custom’ to employ a ‘disguised Name’ ‘with most of her particular friends’.95 But in the world outlined above, friendship can signal political attachment just as much as it does a personal relationship. Consider Philips’ poem mourning the memory of her ‘much valued friend’, William Cartwright. Cartwright died at the siege of Oxford in 1643, when Philips was eleven; clearly her poem is a statement of allegiance to the royalist cause, rather than the personal tribute it purports to be.96 Katherine Philips’ ‘disguised’ names, then, far from obscuring the identity of their owners, instead serve to define or mark out a highly exclusive community of sorts – a community that in turn gave ideological sanction to her efforts at authorship. ‘Orinda’ existed because an interest in a quite specific (and now undervalued) literary genre could, in the mid-seventeenth century, function as a marker of political allegiance. Critics frequently stress the innovation involved in this emphasis upon female friendship (even though, as we have seen, it has its precedent in the sorts of works read by Philips and her circle). Travis DuPriest comments that ‘Katherine Philips begins a quiet intellectual revolution in her Welsh country home: as a woman she not only invades the male world of letters but the male subject matter of serious, virtuous, philosophical friendship.’97 How accurate is this estimate of the novelty of what Philips is doing? It is certainly the case that seventeenth-century literature regularly rehearses a repertoire of classically-derived formulae on the topic of friendship, and that these commonplaces give little or no space to the possibility of such a thing 94

95 96

97

Travis DuPriest considers Philips’ poetry of friendship to be ‘personal’, or at most a ‘metaphor for expressing God’s relation to the created world’. See Katherine Philips, Poems, ed. Travis DuPriest (Delmar, New York: Scholars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1992), pp. 10, 16. Philips (1667), ‘The Preface’. CW, I: 143. This political burden is quite plainly evident once we come to the poem itself. Philips laments the fact that ‘wit and honour’ are now ‘crimes’, and begs the spirit of the dead dramatist to ‘unsequester our fancys’. The volume is discussed by Potter (1989), pp. 21–2. It is also worth noting how frequently its publisher, Humprey Moseley, features in these pages. A reasonably discreet purveyor of royalist propaganda, romances formed a major part of his output. After his death in 1661, his business was continued by his wife or daughter, both of whom were named Anne. DuPriest ed. (1992), pp. 6–7.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance existing between women.98 Consider Jeremy Taylor’s Discourse on the Nature, Offices and Measures of Friendship – which actually takes the form of a letter to Philips, described as ‘eminent in friendships’, in answer to the question, ‘how far a Dear and a perfect friendship is authoriz’d by the principles of Christianity’.99 Although Taylor differs from ‘the morosity of those Cynics who would not admit your sex into the communities of a noble friendship’100 (and, to back that statement up, he offers the example of a wife, who can be a perfect friend), it is evident that he has his reservations. Taylor takes a distinctly pragmatic attitude towards his topic. Friendships, he emphasises, are not ‘Metaphysical nothings’; ‘although I love my friend because he is worthy, yet he is not worthy if he can do no good’. ‘He only is fit to be chosen for a friend, who can do those offices for which friendship is excellent’ – who can ‘give me counsel, or defend my cause, or guide me right, or relieve my need’ – an argument supported by numerous (often military) examples from Roman history.101 And within such a scheme, the friendship of a woman is of limited value – a woman cannot be as good a ‘counsellor as a wise man’, nor ‘so well defend my honour’. ‘A man is the best friend in trouble’, he concludes. Friendship between women is not mentioned.102 What is remarkable, however, is the extent to which Katherine Philips’ verse rehearses those very classical, Ciceronian commonplaces that supposedly exclude her from a perfect friendship – filtered through a Donnean language of alchemy. A friend is alter idem, a second self (‘Two bodyes and one minde’),103 although the emphasis falls not so much upon the identity of friends as their union, through a mingling of substances that confounds distinction: Our hearts are doubled by their loss, Here mixture is addition grown; We both diffuse, and both engrosse, And we, whose minds are so much one, Never, yet ever, are alone.104

Philips transforms Donne’s imagery of heterosexual love into a language that can be used to describe same-sex friendship. Friendship is ‘love refin’d and purg’d from all its drosse’,105 a formulation that at times gives the word ‘refined’

98

99 100 101 102 103 104 105

On the topic of friendship literature in general, see Laurens J. Mills, One Soul in Bodies Twain (Bloomington, Indiana: The Principia Press, 1937). Taylor (1657), sigs. B1v–2v. Taylor (1657), sig. E7v. Taylor (1657), sigs. B12r–C1r. Taylor (1657), sigs. E8v–9r. CW, I: 152. CW, I: 90. CW, I: 165.

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Katherine Philips as Reader of Romance something of its modern sense of ‘elegant, socially elevated’: at one point Philips describes herself as one of the ‘refined’, in opposition to the ‘dull brutish world’.106 Again, as in Cicero, friendship is based upon virtue (‘none can be a friend that is not good’).107 The fact is that Katherine Philips (whether consciously or not) actually seems to construct her female friendships in terms that are strongly reminiscent of humanistic, Ciceronian amicitia. It is not merely that she adopts and adapts tropes on the identity of friends, and the virtue of friendship. According to Alan Stewart, such a rhetoric was deployed throughout the sixteenth century in such a way as to foster a sort of social equality via intellectual equality or equality of learning.108 And, according to Lorna Hutson, what was distinctive about this humanistic language of friendship was the way in which it tended to articulate itself through imagery of shared reading. Sir Thomas Elyot’s tale of ‘Titus and Gisippus’ is, she argues, emblematic of ‘the textualisation of the medium through which relations of friendship and service between gently born men were . . . to take place for the good of the commonweal’. Henceforward, it is through the medium of letters that ‘the virtues of men are to be tried and known, and in which these virtues are to be recognised by the encouraging promise of further relationship’.109 We may not immediately connect the figure of Katherine Philips with the likes of Roger Ascham or Sir Thomas Elyot (particularly given the former’s famous hostility to the genre of romance), but it is worth noting the role that the detailed knowledge of a shared corpus of texts plays in her attempts to generate ‘friendships’ with people who were, for the most part, her social superiors. In the context of a critical tradition that favours distinctions between the classical (humanistic) and the romantic (chivalric), the atmosphere evoked by Philips’ use of Sidneyesque pseudonyms may be misleading, if it tempts us to locate her simply on one side of that dichotomy. In fact, to introduce oneself to a patron with the gift of a piece of writing, as Philips does to Lady Fletcher, was a quintessentially humanistic ploy. Elyot’s Boke of the Governour, extolling the benefits to the ‘publicke weal’ afforded by the ‘counsayle’ of the governor trained through the study of a curriculum of classical texts, downplays the significance of a ‘chivalric’ culture centred on such courtly sports as hawking.110 It also makes friendship

106 107 108

109

110

CW, I: 150. CW, I: 166. Alan Stewart, Close Readers (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997), xxv–xxix. Lorna Hutson, The Usurer’s Daughter (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), pp. 77–80, 111. See also Stewart (1997), pp. 151–3. Sir Thomas Elyot, The Boke Named The Governour (London: Thomas Berthelet, 1531). Elyot is prepared to countenance hunting as an ‘imitacion of batayle’ (I4v) if practised in the

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance grounded in the experience of shared reading a crucial part of its demonstration of these benefits.111 But need amicitia always remain tied to this rather strictly delimited body of texts? When Alan Stewart presents us with Roger Ascham studying Cicero’s De amicitia with one of his ‘friends’, John Whitney, we may agree that the choice of reading matter is appropriate – but it is hardly necessary or inevitable.112 In fact, once one subtracts the conviction that classical literature is the only reasonable food for the intelligent mind, it becomes clear that there is absolutely no reason why amicitiastyle relationships cannot form across the ground offered by any sort of shared reading matter. Within the royalist interpretative community that was her literary circle, Katherine Philips seems to have succeeded in forging exactly the sort of advantageous affective bonds that humanist scholars advocated and pursued. As Katherine Philips advances herself with her fellow royalists through manuscript circulation and textual appreciation, it is, arguably, only the curriculum of reading through which these relations are established that has changed from the early sixteenth century. Eager to celebrate the way in which Katherine Philips carved out a space for herself separate from the corporate interests of her husband and family (as she did), critics have perhaps tended to accept her celebration of friendship too much at face value, as a ‘private’ statement about feminine solidarity, a structure paralleling but opposed to just those interests – in effect reproducing (in less offensive terms) Gosse’s portrait of an Orinda for whom personal relations are all. In the face of such a tendency, it is important to resituate Philips’ ‘Society of Friendship’ within the elaborate social hierarchies that it tries to bridge – even as it attempts to disguise the necessity of doing any such thing. How many of Katherine Philips’ friendships, it is worth asking, were ‘patronage’-style relationships? How many were with her social superiors? How many were with her inferiors? Katherine Philips’ collected works do not exactly brim over with verses addressed to farmer’s daughters. She does however write to: the King; the Queen; the Countess of Carberry; Lady Elizabeth Boyle; the Countess of Thanet; the Countess of Roscommon; the Countess of Cork; various eminent poets, and Elizabeth of Bohemia – amongst others. In fact, although a tradesman’s daughter, Katherine Philips’ whole poetic manner involves a distinctly ‘aristocratic’ manner of address – consider, for example, the disdain for the vulgar masses expressed when she feared her work was to be

111

112

manner of Xenophon’s Persians. He is far less enthusiastic about hawking, finding ‘no notable remembrance/that it was used of auncient tyme’, noting it has less ‘utilitie’ than hunting, although he does say that, used ‘measurably’, it might give a man ‘good appetite to his souper’ (I8r–K1r). See Elyot (1531), sigs. S6v–U5r for Titus and Gisippus, who learn ‘good letters’ together. Friendship is given prominence in Elyot by being placed at the end of the second section of his book. See Stewart (1997), pp. 126–7.

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Katherine Philips as Reader of Romance published in 1664. Or, the poem ‘To the Queen of inconstancie, Regina, in Antwerp’. Regina Collier had evidently offended in some point of friendship. Rather ironically, given her background, Philips exploits the coincidence of Antwerp’s prominence as a centre of trade to berate Regina for selling her ‘heart merchandise’. An attack on Regina’s ‘treachery’ (another example of Philips’ politically-loaded language) is reinforced with a genteel disdain for trade.113 Katherine Philips’ use of a rhetoric of friendship equalises social relations, just as much as humanistic amicitia aimed to – or rather, it displaces any such distance into the emotional sphere, where postures of extreme abjection can in fact only assist her cause. The stances demanded by a culture that enforced deference in the most minute details of social life can thus be played out in affective terms, as Philips ‘pays court’ to her friends. And in such a context, that of an emotional relation predicated upon equal and genuine virtue, ‘Orinda’ can even at times dominate – cajoling or even berating her friends, as in the poem to Regina Collier. Philips’ practice of amicitia was quite spectacularly effective. It is not simply that she for the most part managed to avoid the sort of criticisms levelled at her contemporary, Margaret Cavendish.114 Nor is it that she was able to exploit her connections after the Restoration, firstly to protect her husband’s position and person, and then to have her work presented to a courtly audience, by Cotterell.115 Her evocation of a literary community – a circle of friendships created and maintained to a large extent through the exchange of texts – was so powerful that commentators on her work have often spoken of her ‘Society of Friendship’ as a literary salon, with regular meetings, a well defined membership, even a sort of heraldic seal of its own.116 In fact, it seems clear that many of these relationships were constructed through the medium of a manuscript culture, just as much as they were sustained by personal contact. It is true that Philips was apt to exaggerate the extent to which she was isolated from her friends in Wales, whereas in fact, as Carol Barash notes, ‘she actually travelled back and forth

113 114

115 116

CW, I: 120–1, and notes. Although not entirely. Beal (1998), Appendix vi, reproduces an attack on Philips (‘You dame of Corinth . . .’) taken from the very same miscellany that contains the letter to Lady Fletcher, and which he ascribes to John Taylor the ‘Water Poet’. If Beal’s dating of the manuscript to the mid-1650s is correct, this represents a remarkably early date for such an assault. Souers (1931), pp. 123–4, 176. This is the view that Gosse (1883) takes. The emblem of the Society of Friendship is, it should be noted, known only through a poem, ‘Friendship in Emblem’ (CW, I: 106–8). Souers (1931) comments that we ought to remember ‘when Katherine is held up as the head of a salon’, that ‘there was hardly a town in the entire kingdom which could have offered less encouragement to salon life than Cardigan’ (25). Souers considers the Society of Friendship to have been composed entirely of female members, her male ‘friends’, even those distinguished with a pseudonym, being ‘but literary acquaintances’ (58).

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance to London fairly often, and frequently travelled to visit women friends’.117 Nevertheless, it was with her literary skill and talent for self-promotion that Katherine Philips showed herself to be someone worth knowing. Feminist criticism often assesses texts for the extent to which they might provide female role models, whether positive or negative; and in this sense I have suggested the honourable woman of seventeenth-century romance as offering an exemplary (and politically loaded) figure that an author such as Philips might relate to. But analysis of Katherine Philips’ interest in such texts suggests that she might have been just as, if not more empowered by the context in which her reading took place, the act of reading itself, than she was by the content of the books she read. Much of this book has examined chivalric tropes as a medium for antagonism and social hostility; if Edward Herbert’s practice of the duel might be described as an act of class solidarity, then that is a deliberately paradoxical assertion, since it was also (and rather more obviously) an attempt to kill someone of the same class. Katherine Philips shows us that romance also harbours potential for association. She advances her own social interests by forming relationships with those who share an interest in a certain class of books. (Nor is she alone in this – we might find parallels in the female literary coteries associated with Aemilia Lanyer and the Countess of Pembroke, for instance.) What we see in Katherine Philips’ deployment of her reading in seventeenth-century romance is not, then, a ‘lady errant’ absurdly mastered by her favourite reading matter. She is not driven to imitate a romance heroine in any simple way – and yet the hint of transgression in Overbury’s formulation of the experience of reading romance may at the same time be apt. Katherine Philips’ familiarity with chivalric literature was placed in the service of her desire for distinction, as one of an array of tools intended to smooth her way toward some sort of ‘public’ prominence. Yet it accomplished this feat, not, as Overbury suggests, as an (absurd) fantasy of social advancement, although the parallel with his portrait of the romance-reading confidante of lower social status is suggestive, nor even as an expression of private, feminine interests, but rather as a medium across which relations resembling those of humanistic amicitia could be contracted, through a display of true nobility. Midseventeenth-century royalist culture actually seems to have reserved a special place for the figure of the woman reader of romance, as we have seen in examining documents such as the letter to Lady Fletcher and the prefatory matter appended to romances such as Cassandra. Such a figure could function as a sort of emblem, a means of focussing assertions of one’s own virtue. 117

Barash (1996), p. 61. Philips’ imagery of her seclusion in the ‘wilderness’ (which can take both positive and negative forms) seems to denote political isolation and a lack of influence as much as it does physical distance and the want of a vibrant social life, as most commentators take it to do.

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Katherine Philips as Reader of Romance The whole point of such presentational strategies is to assert, very precisely, that one is not ‘errant’, not out of place – an assertion that is phrased in thoroughly ‘romantic’ terms, through a repertoire of tropes of hidden nobility waiting to be revived, of courtly submissions that paradoxically demonstrate the gentility of the person who declares his – or her – inferiority. Within the context of Caroline and interregnum politics, then, far from being an anachronistic object of comedy, the figure of the ‘heroic’ female reader of romance was very much to the point. Such a formulation of female virtue is likely to appear restrictive to modern eyes, yet, as we have already seen with Philips’ near contemporary, Francis Kirkman, such structures of vera nobilitas are highly unstable, always susceptible to inversion and refashioning. From such unpromising material, Katherine Philips managed to construct a pathway to poetic fame; seen in context, her romance reading points outward, to the world of high politics and literary prominence.

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Chapter 6 THE PROGRESS OF ROMANCE (II): KENILWORTH, CHIVALRY, AND THE MIDDLE AGES

A

‘

N AGE becomes romantic as it recedes.’ Thus Arthur Johnston, in his study of the burgeoning scholarly interest in medieval romances in eighteenthcentury England.1 That Johnston should make such a statement is in itself a mark of the success of the process he describes. After all, it is by no means obvious (even allowing for the vastly expanded range of meanings that the term encompasses nowadays) that a given period in history, to say nothing of the past generally, should be identified with a single literary genre. By following the ‘progress’ of a sixteenth-century text suffused with chivalric imagery, this chapter argues that the atmosphere and trappings of romances have, in part as a result of the scholarly and literary-critical activities of the authors Johnston writes about, become central to and emblematic of a well-disseminated picture of the medieval past. This process is here analysed in an attempt to provide an account of the origins and nature of the critical positions towards Renaissance chivalry this book has attempted to deconstruct. The way in which representations of historical and literary figures as ‘Quixotic’ are positioned, it has already been suggested, might serve as a barometer of this growing popularisation of the desire to confine chivalry to the realm of the medieval. This formation, I argue here, distorts our perceptions of the nature of sixteenth- and seventeenthcentury investments in the chivalric, contributing to a historiography that finds itself compelled to insist that there was a glorious heyday of knighthood which was ‘waning’ by the Renaissance. It is in the eighteenth century that chivalry becomes decisively identified with the medieval, with the consequence that post-medieval images of knighthood have the potential to compromise the modernity of an age that takes as its starting point the Renaissance that superseded a medieval culture thus permanently relegated to ‘the past’.2 1 2

Arthur Johnston, Enchanted Ground (London: The Athlone Press, 1964), p. 12. Fred C. Robinson’s article ‘Medieval, the Middle Ages’, Speculum 59 (1984), pp. 745–56 amusingly chronicles his sense of the mutation of the term ‘medieval’ into ‘a vague pejorative term’, detached from any definite historical period, and synonymous with the ‘outmoded’,

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Kenilworth, Chivalry, and the Middle Ages * It is the summer of 1716. In the sort of desolate scene that is to become increasingly popular in the visual arts as the century progresses, three friends, gentlemen of wit and cultivation, survey the ruins of a medieval castle. The first, Dr Arbuthnot, is overwhelmed by a sensation of melancholy; ‘and yet,’ he adds, ‘a melancholy of so delightful a kind, that I would not exchange it, methinks, for any brisker sensation’. His colleague, Mr Addison, experiences no such mixed feelings. An altogether more robust character, he glories in the ruin of ‘this theatre of a great statesman’s pride’, launching into an extended ubi sunt showpiece speech, in which the decayed remains of Kenilworth Castle stand in for the ruined fortunes of their former master, Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I: Where, one might ask, are the tilts and tournaments, the princely shews and sports which were once so proudly celebrated within these walls? where are the pageants, the studied devices and emblems of curious invention, that set the court at a gaze, and even transported the high soul of our ELIZABETH? Where now, pursued he (pointing to that which was formerly a canal, but at present is only a meadow with a small rivulet running through it) where is the floating island, the blaze of torches that eclipsed the day, the lady of the lake, the silken nymphs her attendants, with all the other fantastic exhibitions surpassing even the whimsies of the wildest romance? What now is become of the revelry of feasting? of the minstrelsy, that took the ear so delightfully as it babbled along the valley, or floated on the surface of this lake? See there the smokeless kitchens, stretching to a length that might give room for the sacrifice of a hecatomb; the vaulted hall, which mirth and jollity set so often at an uproar; the rooms of state, and the presence-chamber; what are they now but void and tenantless ruins, clasped with ivy, open to wind and weather, and presenting to the eye nothing but the ribs and carcase, as it were, of their former state?

This is, however, no real conversation. Carefully stage-managed by the author, the digressive opening to the first of Richard Hurd’s Moral and Political Dialogues that deal with the reign of Elizabeth places the quintessential representatives of an ‘Enlightenment’ culture, Arbuthnot and Addison (both so memorialised in Pope’s verse) against the decayed backdrop of a romantic

‘antiquated’, or even simply ‘bad’. Surveying a variety of contemporary publications, Robinson found the following all described as ‘medieval’: ‘the British coal industry, General Electric Company, labour laws, the Carnegie Commission, streetcars, certain methods of photocopying documents, peep shows, the method of trash disposal in Los Angeles, and the weather in Northern Europe’ – to say nothing of the entire state of Tennessee, and most bizarrely of all, the future (the reference is to the science-fiction film Blade Runner; this is not quite as insane as it sounds, since the genre often indulges in the neomedieval). One might conclude from this that the term ‘medieval’ has floated free from even the most rudimentary historical context; as should become clear, I do not quite believe this to be the case, but, either way, the state of affairs Robinson describes is clearly a result of the processes outlined in this chapter.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance past which is, in this instance, quite explicitly identified as such.3 So far as Addison is concerned, this ‘romantic’ history, excessive in itself (‘whimsies of the wildest romance’), merely serves as a bitter contrast to the barbarities it glorified. When his friends wonder at his vehemence, Addison explains that he is ‘fired’ by the thought of the ‘fraud, the rapine, the insolence of the potent minister, who vainly thought to immortalize his ill-gotten glory by this proud monument’ – in fact, by the ‘the prosperous tyranny of those wretched times’ in general. Making ironic reference to the scene before him, Addison explains that the achievements of the Elizabethan age were founded upon ‘the ruins of public freedom and private property’. His opening gambit in this dialogue concludes with him congratulating himself on living under a ‘juster and more equal government’.4 Hurd’s essay on the virtues and vices of what Arbuthnot terms ‘the GOLDEN REIGN . . . OF ELIZABETH’ thus opens out through an elegantly constructed series of frames – firstly back some fifty years, then to an antiquarian tour of the county of Warwickshire, during which the sight of a monument to the Earl of Leicester in Warwick prompts the company to travel the short distance to Kenilworth Castle, there to view ‘the fragments at least of his supreme glory’.5 The castle itself in turn prompts recollections of the Elizabethan pageantry it once staged, and thus we find ourselves back at the source of this temporal and spatial movement – the Letter: Whearin, part of the entertainment untoo the Queenz Majesty . . . is signified describing the entertainments performed before Elizabeth at Kenilworth during her royal progress of 1575.6 This reappearance of the Letter at the distance of some two hundred years might come as something of a surprise, particularly if we are to follow David Scott’s researches in regarding that text as having been suppressed just after publication at the instigation of its target, Robert Langham.7 In fact, the Letter is distinguished by a long and remarkably diverse afterlife, as a series of writers re-read it in terms of their own historical and aesthetic interests; Hurd’s Essay is a fairly early but by no means unique instance of what was actually a quite widespread and enduring phenomenon. As has already been noted, the Kenilworth entertainments seem to have had some influence over subsequent representations of the wars in the Netherlands. But we can also trace a long chain of responses specifically to the Letter itself. First published in 1575,

3

4 5 6 7

Richard Hurd, Moral and Political Dialogues (London: W. Bowyer, 1765), 3 volumes, I: 147–50. The third participant in Hurd’s dialogue, Mr Digby, has only a minor role to play, serving as an enthusiastic but not particularly analytical defender of chivalry, in opposition to Addison. Hurd (1765), I: 153. Hurd (1765), I: 156, 144. Hurd underlines this relationship by quoting from the Letter in his footnotes. ‘William Patten and the Authorship of “Robert Laneham’s Letter” (1575)’, English Literary Renaissance 7 (1977), pp. 297–306.

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Kenilworth, Chivalry, and the Middle Ages it served as the inspiration for an enigmatic work by Ben Jonson, The Masque of Owls, presented before Prince Charles at Kenilworth in 1624. That the Letter lies somewhere in the background of this performance would seem to be confirmed by the fact that the ghost of Captain Cox – not, surely, otherwise a prominent figure in the entertainments of 1575 than in that text – features as the central character in this masque. There is also a degree of specific verbal reference – for example, to the length of Cox’s sword (the Letter says he bore a ‘tonsword’, a sword needing two hands to wield).8 After which, we have something of a gap. The high point of fascination with the Letter comes, not in the Renaissance itself, but rather in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was reprinted in 1784, and appeared in John Nichols’ Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth, a prodigious scholarly collection that must have done much to establish it as a showpiece display of Renaissance royal pageantry.9 The publication of Walter Scott’s historical romance Kenilworth in 1821 generated an explosion of interest in the text, and it was printed again that same year, and in a volume detailing the history of the castle, Kenilworth Illustrated.10 There appears to have been a brief lull in interest, but the Letter was published once more in a modernised version in 1870, and in 1871 F.J. Furnivall’s annotated edition, entitled Captain Cox, his Ballads and Books appeared – and continued to be reissued well into the next century, in a bewildering variety of guises.11 Merely listing editions of ‘Laneham’s Letter’ fails, however, to do justice to its popularity. Interest in the Letter in fact preceded, and no doubt inspired, the reprint of 1784. Thus, we find ‘Laneham’ referred to, not only in Richard Hurd’s Moral and Political Dialogues of 1765, but also in Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), Thomas Warton’s Observations on the Fairy Queen of Spenser (first published in 1754, and revised in 1762), and the same author’s History of English Poetry, the first volume of which appeared in 1774.12

8

9

10

11

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C.H. Hertford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson eds, Ben Jonson (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1925–52), 11 volumes, VIII: 781–6. Jonson also has Cox’s ghost declare that he fought with Henry VIII at Boulogne in 1544 (line 25) – a detail not in the Letter, but possibly a means of suggesting Cox’s martial pedigree, rather than evidence of Jonson’s independent knowledge of the Coventry mason. A Letter . . . (Warwick: J. Sharp, 1784); John Nichols, The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth (London: J. Nichols, 1788–1821), 4 volumes. Laneham’s Letter . . . repeatedly referred to in the romance of Kenilworth (London: J.H. Burn, 1821); Kenilworth Illustrated (Chiswick: G. Whittington, 1821). George Adlard, Amye Robsart and the Earl of Leycester (London: John Russel Smith, 1870); F.J. Furnivall’s edition was reprinted in 1890 as Robert Laneham’s Letter; I have used a later version with this second title (London: Chatto and Windus, 1907). Thomas Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (Dublin: P. Wilson and E. Watts, 1766), 3 volumes; Thomas Warton, Observations on the Fairy Queen of Spenser (London: R. and J. Dodsley, 1762), 2 volumes; Thomas Warton, The History of English Poetry (London: J. Dodsley, 1774–81), 3 volumes.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance To understand this extraordinary persistence on the part of a possibly rather bizarre and certainly uncanonical text, we must look to developing attitudes towards both the Middle Ages and chivalry, since it is the problematic relationship of the Letter to these topics that makes it an object of critical and historical inquiry. It can be no coincidence that interest in the Letter should have flourished in the period, and among these authors, which have frequently been designated as ‘preromantic’ – that is, as foreshadowing the development of English Romanticism. It has often been felt that Romanticism involves a shift in attitudes towards the medieval, and writers such as Warton, Hurd and Thomas Percy would indeed appear to be involved in a project that aimed at a revaluation of attitudes towards, not only the Middle Ages, but also authors such as Edmund Spenser – to say nothing of aesthetic standards generally.13 They also adopt a significantly new attitude towards the medieval romance. The literary criticism of the likes of Warton and Hurd repeatedly insists on what one might call a ‘historicist’ method, placing texts within the context offered by what they repeatedly refer to as the ‘manners’ of their age: one should not judge a work of art by aesthetic standards that are irrelevant to its principles of composition. This notion is given in its most succinct form by Hurd: ‘When an architect examines a Gothic structure by Grecian rules, he finds nothing but deformity. But the Gothic architecture has its own rules.’14 The utility of the Letter to this effort to reconstruct the social milieu in which The Faerie Queene was composed should be obvious; it is in the eighteenth century that it comes into its own as a historical source. Warton’s Observations discourse at length upon the taste for chivalric romances in Spenser’s day, as well as the culture of the Elizabethan court: ‘these miraculous books were highly fashionable, and chivalry, which was the subject of them, was still practised and admired, in the age of queen Elizabeth.’15 This assertion is backed up by reference to Malory. Firstly, Warton demonstrates the dependence of Spenser’s Sir Tristram upon Malory’s. He then notes a reference to ‘LADIES OF THE LAKE’ in E.K.’s notes to The Shepheardes Calendar. ‘It should be observed,’ he goes on to comment, ‘that the LADY OF THE LAKE was introduced to make part of queen Elizabeth’s entertainment at Kenelworth.’ The appearance of a character from Malory at Kenilworth is thus used to suggest the popularity of ‘the romance, which supplied this fiction’.16 13

14 15 16

See Johnston (1964), and Henry A. Beers’ History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1926), which deals at length with the likes of Warton, and tentatively defines Romanticism at the outset as ‘the reproduction in modern art or literature of the life and thought of the Middle Ages’ (2). Joan Pittock, however, condemns attempts to assimilate the interests of the Warton brothers to those of ‘the Romantic movement itself ’ as ‘superficial or inessential’; see The Ascendancy of Taste (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 218. Letters on Chivalry and Romance (London: A. Millar, 1762), p. 61. Warton (1762), I: 18. Warton (1762), I: 28, 31.

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Kenilworth, Chivalry, and the Middle Ages We also have a discussion of the Arthurian ballad sung at Kenilworth, and the section as a whole eventually concludes satisfied that it has ‘manifested, that our author’s imagination was entirely possessed with that species of reading, which was the fashion and delight of his age’.17 The second volume of the Observations gives further references – Captain Cox’s books are said to provide ‘a catalogue of several old pieces in the romantic and humorous kind’.18 Little is made of the point in this particular text, but Warton’s History frequently uses Captain Cox as a means of asserting the ‘popularity’ of a given text. Of ‘The Nutbrown Maid’, for example, he comments, ‘what degree of credit this poem maintained among our earlier ancestors, I cannot determine. I suspect the sentiment was too refined for the general taste. Yet it is enumerated among the popular tales and ballads by Laneham.’19 Similarly, Richard Hurd’s use of the Letter in his Moral and Political Dialogues is entirely consistent with his portrait of the ‘romantic Spirit’ of the Elizabethan age in his Letters on Chivalry and Romance; whilst for Thomas Percy, who quotes ‘Laneham’ at length, the presence of a minstrel at the Kenilworth pageants, reciting an Arthurian ballad, proves that ‘minstrels continued down to the reign of Elizabeth’.20 The social signifiers that weave their way through Warton’s comments on ‘The Nutbrown Maid’ (just as they did through the Letter itself) – ‘refined’, ‘general’, ‘popular’ – are very much to the point. Previous accounts of the preromantic moment had seen it as a period of cultural evolution that had its roots in the internal conditions of English literary history itself – as a time of change brought on by weariness with the stultifying standards of Augustan aesthetic decorum. More recently, however, Jonathan Brody Kramnick has diagnosed these shifts as being powered by the peculiar characteristics of lateeighteenth-century print culture. When Warton adopts Spenser as a major author, he does so in part as a reaction to the literary marketplace of his day. His emphasis is upon source study, contextualisation, searching out the books read by the author of the book you are reading, no matter how obscure or difficult they may be. By emphasising the necessity of a historical interpretation, he demands that the readers of sixteenth-century romance – unlike the readers of its contemporary equivalent, the novel – must be well educated.21 Spenser is thus received into the canon of English verse as a thoroughly ‘romantic’ poet, one whose work is nourished and made comprehensible by a thoroughly ‘romantic’ culture – of which the entertainments and habits of

17 18 19 20 21

Warton (1762), I: 65. Warton (1762), II: 44. Warton (1774–81), III: 139. See also III: 98, 416 n. Percy (1766), I: xv. See ‘The Cultural Logic of Late Feudalism: Placing Spenser in the Eighteenth Century’, English Literary History 63 (1996), pp. 871–92, and Making the English Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998).

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance reading described in the Kenilworth Letter provide primary evidence. ‘Too many readers’, Warton comments, ‘view the knights and damsels, the tournaments and enchantments, of Spenser, with modern eyes; never considering that the encounters of chivalry subsisted in our author’s age, that romances were then most eagerly and universally studied.’22 The reputation of The Faerie Queene is thus, oddly, salvaged through an emphasis on its verisimilitude; and the Letter has an important role to play in reconstructing a cultural landscape which can support this position. At the same time, however, Spenser is presented as attractively distanced, through his association with royal power, from the sort of ‘popular’ culture represented by Captain Cox’s library.23 His work, it is therefore implied, could not be more different from the modern romance, the novel. On the contrary, the general tendency of the criticism of Warton and Hurd is to emphasise the gulf between sixteenthcentury and ‘modern’ culture; at times it seems as though this is a gap that can be bridged only through the most prodigious effort of scholarship. (It was on precisely these terms that the landed gentleman and amateur critic William Huggins attacked Warton’s Observations. Making a stand for an ‘open and communicative’ criticism, he mocked the scholarly, contextualising method: ‘let us pass by the Chronicler of Seven Champions, Morte Arthur, St. Tristan, the Blatant Beast, the Questyn Beast’)24 In short, Spenser – and thus, because of their historicist method, Elizabethan culture generally – comes to seem more chivalric, hence, as we shall see, more medieval, than it had previously. Warton saves both himself and his author from the taint of eighteenthcentury literary commerce – but the gains made in this particular cultural game entail inevitable losses in another field. The achievement of critics such as Warton and Hurd has long been recognised as twofold – as offering on the one hand a major realignment of the canon of English literature, and, on the other, a development in attitudes to the Middle Ages. Previous studies of that period had tended to be what one might call very ‘ends-directed’: often polemical, frequently designed to prove some point or other in relation to some contemporary concern. Thus, for example, sixteenth-century Protestants study religious history in an effort to discover precedents for the form of ecclesiastical polity they favour, whilst research into medieval law is invoked in conflicts between the judiciary and Crown in the Stuart era, and throughout the Restoration period in Parliament.25 These are 22 23

24 25

Warton (1762), II: 87–8. It is no accident that the natural tendency of the critical tradition inaugurated by the likes of Warton is to belittle both Captain Cox, and Laneham for admiring him. The tendency is to make both figures appear as naïve readers of romance, mainly because Cox is seen as noncourtly, and Laneham as a parvenu. See Kramnick (1996), pp. 882–90. See Arthur B. Ferguson, Clio Unbound (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1979); Christopher Hill, ‘The Norman Yoke’, in Puritanism and Revolution (London: Mercury Books, 1965); J.G.A. Pocock, The Ancient Constitution and the Feudal Law (Cambridge: Cambridge

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Kenilworth, Chivalry, and the Middle Ages texts, I would argue, that do not engage with the concept of the ‘Middle Ages’ as such. It is a critical commonplace that, whilst the medieval period was not and could not be aware of itself as such, the Renaissance was conscious of itself as a period of cultural revival, defined in opposition to the ignorance of the previous era.26 Thus, the Renaissance created the Middle Ages, as writers such as Petrarch adapted medieval historiographical tropes, which opposed the light of Christ to the darkness of pagan ignorance, in an attempt to articulate their own sense of modernity.27 Early Renaissance historical texts in England, however, often take only the most superficial interest, if any, in the Middle Ages as a category. They are frequently as much devoted to establishing continuities as to drawing distinctions between medieval and modern. In fact, one sometimes wonders just how conscious they were of any such division. Examining a volume such as May MacKisack’s Medieval History in the Tudor Age, one finds that not one of the authors she quotes uses the terms medium aevum, media tempestas, ‘the Middle Ages’, or any of their cognates.28 Although many sixteenth- and seventeenth-century historians are quite prepared to rehearse clichés about the ignorance and barbarity of what we would call the medieval period, they often do so without specifically addressing the concept of a ‘Middle Age’. And although these authors are rightly praised for initiating antiquarian study of the medieval, so far as one can tell, the concept itself enjoyed only the most restricted circulation, primarily in Latin and highly scholarly contexts.29

26

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University Press, 1987); and R.J. Smith, The Gothic Bequest (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). The literature on the ‘historical revolution’ in Tudor and Stuart England is vast. See, for example, further to the books cited above, F. Smith Fussner, The Historical Revolution (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1962); D.R. Woolf, The Idea of History in Early Stuart England (Toronto, Buffalo and London: The University of Toronto Press, 1990); and Joseph M. Levine, Humanism and History (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1987). For example, Peter Burke’s book The Renaissance opens with a ringing declaration to the effect that ‘the Middle Ages never knew that they were the Middle Ages . . . But the Renaissance was quite conscious of the fact that it was a Renaissance’ (London: Longmans, 1964). See Theodor E. Mommsen, ‘Petrarch’s Conception of the “Dark Ages” ’, Speculum 17 (1942), pp. 226–42. Contrast this with the obvious utility of the expression so far as MacKisack herself is concerned – 76 uses in total, roughly one every other page. See May MacKisack, Medieval History in the Tudor Age (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1971). This volume clearly operates within the tripartite historiographical scheme of ancient, medieval and modern. Consider, for instance, MacKisack’s description of Robert Fabyan as one of those ‘seeking to preserve the memory of the medieval world for the new age of the Tudors’ (95). See George Gordon, ‘Medium Aevum and the Middle Ages’, S.P.E. Tract 19 (London: The Clarendon Press, 1925), which records only six instances in the English vernacular over a period of over one hundred years. Nathan Edelman’s ‘Early Uses of Medium Aevum, Moyen Âge, Middle Ages’, The Romantic Review 29 (1938), pp. 3–25, and ‘Other Early Uses of Moyen Âge and Moyen Temps’, The Romantic Review 30 (1939), pp. 327–30, provide an expanded list, mostly drawn from John Selden – and even here, as Edelman points out, the upper limit of Selden’s ‘middle times’ would appear to be around the year 1200. For Henry Spelman, the ‘middle-age’ is the Saxon period that precedes the Norman Conquest. The idea, then, of the medieval as a ‘lapse’ between ancient and modern cultures ‘has been lost’ (22) – or, rather, not yet discovered.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance By the eighteenth century, however, it is clear that ‘the Middle Ages’ were well established as a historiographic category. The likes of Warton and Hurd favour a variety of names for this period,30 but it would appear that, as an age, stretching from the decline of antiquity to the revival of letters, the ‘medieval’ had taken its distinctive modern shape.31 It is in the eighteenth century, with its interest in ‘manners’, that we begin to find a growing fascination with what we might call the cultural history of the Middle Ages, in the characteristics that define the Middle Ages as a period. Crucially, this appetite for information regarding the mores of that age was satisfied through the study, not of religious, legal or political texts, but by mining chivalric romances for details which could assist in reconstructing the social world of centuries past. Romances, Warton writes, contain amusing images of antient customs and institutions, not elsewhere to be found, or at least not otherwise so strikingly delineated: and they preserve pure and unmixed, those fables of chivalry which formed the taste and awakened the imagination of our elder English classics. The antiquaries of former times overlooked or rejected these valuable remains, which they despised as false and frivolous; and employed their industry in reviving obscure fragments of uninstructive morality or uninteresting history. But in the present age we are beginning to make ample amends: in which the curiosity of the antiquarian is connected with taste and genius, and his researches tend to display the progress of human manners, and to illustrate the history of society.32

This scholarly yet cultivated interest in the historical content of medieval fiction is, for Warton, a mark, not of a dusty ‘antiquarianism’ that mires itself fruitlessly in the past, but rather of his own refined modernity. His History at one point notes that one of the Rowley manuscripts faked by Thomas Chatterton advocates ‘SOME GREAT STORY OF HUMAN MANNERS, as most suitable for theatrical representation’. ‘But this idea’, Warton comments, ‘is the result of that taste and discrimination, which could only belong to a more advanced period of society’ – thus affirming his own, well developed sense of period as the mark of a superior and more completely evolved consciousness, whilst dismissing the authenticity of Chatterton’s forgeries on the grounds of anachronism.33 30

31

32 33

For example, Thomas Warton’s essay, ‘On the Introduction of Learning Into England’, which prefaces the first volume of his History, refers in turn to ‘the dark ages’ and ‘the middle ages’ (c1r), as well as to ‘the barbarous ages’ (k1v). Since the medieval, in this scheme, is essentially a negative category, much of the work defining its upper limit takes place through scholarly work on the origins of the Renaissance. Eighteenth-century historiography increasingly emphasised the fall of Constantinople as a crucial turning point. See J.R. Hale, England and the Italian Renaissance (London: Faber and Faber, 1954), and Herbert Weisinger, ‘The Study of the Revival of Learning in England from Bacon to Hallam’, Philological Quarterly 25 (1946), pp. 221–47. Warton (1774–81), I: 209. Warton (1774–81), II: 156.

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Kenilworth, Chivalry, and the Middle Ages These opinions are repeated over and over again by Warton and his contemporaries. Thomas Percy’s collection of ancient ballads was produced, he informs his patroness, the Countess of Northumberland, with a view of them ‘not as labours of art, but as effusions of nature, shewing the first efforts of ancient genius, and exhibiting the customs and opinions of remote ages’. Percy explains that he has selected for his collection those ballads which exhibit, amongst other qualities, ‘the progress of popular opinions’, or display the ‘peculiar manners and customs of former ages’.34 The ‘Bards’ who Percy considers to have composed the ballads in his collection ‘are thought to have performed the functions of the historian pretty faithfully’; at any rate, ‘succeeding historians have taken up with the relations of these rude men, and for want of more authentic methods, have agreed to allow them the credit of true history’. Evidently Percy is uncomfortable with the assertion that romances offer ‘true history’. He is unambiguous, however, about their value as a resource for a different sort of historical data: they ‘throw great light on the manners and opinions of former times’.35 This perception was just as prevalent outside of Warton’s immediate circle. A youthful David Hume, writing on ‘Chivalry and Modern Honour’, noted that ‘the Romances of Amadis de Gaul, & Lancelot de Lake, & others of that kind show’d the Notions of Bravery in the Age when they were devis’d.’36 Reliant though they may have been upon their English predecessors, it would appear that the inspiration for this decisive new turn in the writings of these eighteenth-century critics was continental. Richard Hurd, in his Letters on Chivalry and Romance, imagines his correspondent asking, what were his ‘authorities’ for his reconstruction of medieval life? ‘My information’, he answers, ‘was taken from its proper Source, the old Romances. Not that I shall make a merit with you in having perused these barbarous volumes my self ’ – instead, he refers his friend to the work of a French scholar and antiquarian, la Curne de Sainte-Palaye.37 Sainte-Palaye’s Mémoires sur l’ancienne Chevalerie was evidently a decisive influence for all these writers. Delivered to the Académie des Inscriptions between November 1746 and August 1750, this series of lectures was printed as a unit in Volume 20 of the Academy’s Mémoires, and separately in 1751.38 They were translated into English in 1784, but the translation merely underlined English interest in Sainte-Palaye’s work.39 The year 1762 had seen a spate 34 35 36

37 38

39

Percy (1766), I: ii, v. Percy (1766), III: ii, viii. See Ernest Campbell Mossner, ‘David Hume’s “An Historical Essay on Chivalry and Modern Honour” ’, Modern Philology 45 (1947), pp. 54–60, 59. Hurd (1762), pp. 24–5. M. de la Curne de Sainte-Palaye, Mémoires sur l’ancienne Chevalerie (Paris: Nicholas Bonaventure Duchesne, 1759–81), 3 volumes. Susannah Dobson trans., Memoirs of Ancient Chivalry (London: J. Dodsley, 1784). Dobson clearly conceives of her work as filling a gap in a historiographical scheme. She had already

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance of letters passing to and from Thomas Warton regarding Sainte-Palaye’s work. First, he promised to send Hurd a copy; then Percy wrote, requesting a reference from the Mémoires to one of his ballads; Warton responded with the required quotation, and later that same month he offered to send Percy a copy of his own.40 For Sainte-Palaye, as for the likes of Warton, an interest in things medieval was an indication of ‘emancipated moderne taste’, rather than a pedantic obsession with antiquarian details.41 His interest is not with such petty particulars, but rather with the history of customs, institutions, and manners – more grandly, ‘the nature and laws of human society in general’.42 Writing on ‘La Lecture des Anciens Romans de Chevalerie’, Sainte-Palaye asserts that C’est dans nos Romans, images des nos côutumes anciennes . . . que l’on trouvera les connoissances les plus détailées sur l’ancienne manière de faire la guerre, sur les droits & la dépendance des différens degrés des Feudataires, sur les gages de bataille, sur l’administration de la justice, sur la noblesse & la chevalerie, les armures, les armoiries, les tournois, & c. [It is in our romances, ‘images of our ancient customs’ . . . that one may find the most detailed information on the ancient manner of waging war, on the rights and the dependence of the different ranks of feudal society, on wagers of battle, on the administration of justice, on nobleness and chivalry, armour, heraldry, tournaments, and so on]43

In short, books of chivalry display ‘des moeurs, du génie & du goût des siècles dans lesquels ils furent écrits’.44 The whole question of the historical accuracy of romances, which had raged for a century, is neatly side-stepped: books of chivalry do not give us an accurate record of events (‘des faits’) – Sainte-Palaye frankly admits that they are fantastic; they do, however, provide a reliable guide to customs (‘des usages’) – medieval anachronisms, such as presenting Troy besieged by artillery, for example, offer a useful indication of contemporary habits: ‘ils appliquoient presque toujours au temps dont ils faisoient l’histoire vraie ou fabuleuse, des usages où ils vivoient’.45

40

41 42 43 44 45

translated a Life of Petrarch (1775) and Sainte-Palaye’s History of the Troubadours (1779). The three works, she comments, ‘placed in their chronological order’ will present a narrative of ‘ancient customs and manners, and the rise and progress that took place therein’ (vii–viii). See David Fairer ed., The Correspondence of Thomas Warton (Athens and London: The University of Georgia Press, 1995), letters 104, 107, 108, 112, and 115. For his influence on the likes of Gibbon and Scott, see Lionel Gossman, Medievalism and the Ideologies of the Enlightenment (Baltimore, Maryland: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1968), pp. 64–5, 293, 330. Gossman (1968), pp. 28–9. Gossman (1968), p. 163. Sainte-Palaye (1759–81), II: 126. Sainte-Palaye (1759–81), II: 131. Sainte-Palaye (1759–81), II: 126–7.

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Kenilworth, Chivalry, and the Middle Ages What emerges out of Sainte-Palaye’s work, however, is a thoroughly idealised account of medieval aristocratic life. Having admitted the element of the ‘merveilleuse’ in his sources so far as a chronological account of historical events is concerned, in his actual analyses Sainte-Palaye nevertheless treats them as documentary records of feudal society. This disconcerting habit is perhaps shown to best advantage in Susannah Dobson’s translation of the Mémoires, which integrates Sainte-Palaye’s scholarly footnotes into the main body of her text in the most confusing manner: ‘Lancelot’, for example, is often quoted as an authority on matters medieval, as though he were a real person. The original confirms that it is in fact a French romance of Lancelot that is being referred to – but Dobson’s mannerisms seem somehow emblematic of Sainte-Palaye’s method generally. Thus, for instance, we read that ‘the ancient writers of romance relate only the truth, when they say, that the ladies and young gentlewomen knew how to give the wounded all the necessary succour that a skilful and experienced hand was capable of bestowing’.46 The source for this assertion is the fourteenth-century romance of Perceforest. We see the same method at work here: Let us now pass to a view of the knights errant, and see of what use they appear to have been in these dark ages – Among these were the Knights of the Round Table, so famous in the romances that depicture those times . . . These wandering heroes, the knights errant, resided principally in forests, without any other equipage than that which was necessary for the defence of their persons. They lived wholly on venison.47

Sainte-Palaye’s original text footnotes the first half of this quotation with a reference to ‘le livre ou roman du Chevalier errant par F. Jean de Carthenay’; the second half directs the reader to the romances of Perceforest (once again) and Lancelot du Lac.48 Jean de Carthenay’s text seems a particularly bizarre choice: far from being written in the ‘dark ages’, this Bunyanesque religious allegory was first published in French in 1572, and could hardly be considered a reliable source of information on matters of social history. On the contrary, the ‘errant’ knighthood it deals with is a metaphor for spiritual wandering, as the protagonist sets out into the world guided by his governess, Folly, and the ‘equipage’ he takes with him is entirely allegorical, featuring as it does a ‘buckler of Shamelessnesse’, a ‘Sword of Rebellion’, and ‘a Lance, named Hope of Long Life’.49 This method is reproduced by Sainte-Palaye’s English disciples. Richard Hurd’s Arbuthnot comments that he is ‘ready to believe that what we hear censured in their [old poets’] writings, as false, incredible, and fantastic, 46 47 48 49

Dobson (1784), pp. 13–14. Dobson (1784), pp. 315–17. Sainte-Palaye (1759–81), II: 53–5. W.G. trans., The Voyage of the Wandering Knight (London: T. Este, 1607), sig. B3v.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance was frequently but a just copy of life, and that there was more of truth and reality in their representations, than we are apt to imagine’ (with a reference to Sainte-Palaye).50 The same author’s Letters on Chivalry and Romance claim that ‘it was usual, in the days of knight-errantry, at the holding of any great feast, for Knights to appear before the prince, who presided at it, and claim the privilege of being sent on any adventure, to which the solemnity might give occasion’.51 A situation familiar from any number of chivalric romances – and one which might find parallels in the historical record. Warton’s Observations, for example, quote John Stow on an episode from the reign of Edward III, in which a woman rode into court at Pentecost to petition the King by letter – offered as evidence that events of the sort described by Chaucer’s Squire’s Tale were ‘no uncommon incident’.52 Yet it should be obvious that such events are examples of life consciously shaped to imitate art, rather than a demonstration of the verisimilitude of books of chivalry.53 Thus, the eighteenth century sees a positive revaluation of romances, as they come into their own as mines of historical information. For these writers, medieval culture is thoroughly romantic, hence chivalric. ‘The very devotion of the Gothic times’, Warton writes, ‘was romantic.’54 In search of a paradigm that might give some shape and definition to an inherited historical category, they hit upon the chivalric romance. Rather like Burckhardt’s Renaissance a century later, a historical period is here produced as animated by an essence or Geist that can be demonstrated to underpin the vast majority of its cultural productions. In this case, that animating principle is concentrated in a single literary genre. It is at this point, the point at which history becomes romantic, that the two sides of the critical achievement of the likes of Warton and Hurd come into direct conflict with each other. As we have seen, these writers seem to have a well-defined historiographical ‘box’, that of the Middle Ages – even if they do not use the term with the regularity of modern scholars. This category they fill with chivalric romances. But, at the same time, the culture of Queen Elizabeth and Edmund Spenser, reconstructed through texts such as Laneham’s, is also defined as chivalric. We are now in a position to see just what is at stake in Richard Hurd’s dialogue on the age of Elizabeth. For, if the medieval, considered to be the antithesis of modernity, is romantic, then any post-medieval instance of chivalric iconography operating in the social life of an era that is, 50 51 52 53

54

Hurd (1765), I: 172. Hurd (1762), p. 62. Warton (1762), I: 146. The reign of Edward III was in fact marked by many such royal appropriations of romance material. See Susan Crane, Insular Romance (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: The University of California Press, 1986), pp. 178–80, 197; and Ruth Huff Cline, ‘The Influence of Romances on Tournaments of the Middle Ages’, Speculum 20 (1945), pp. 204–11 – which notes that Roger Mortimer staged Arthurian festivities at Kenilworth in 1279, and that this trend reached its ‘peak’ (207) under Edward III. Warton (1774–81), II: 462.

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Kenilworth, Chivalry, and the Middle Ages by definition, incipiently modern, has some disturbing things to say about any subsequent period as well. Ostensibly devoted to a discussion of the rights and wrongs of the Elizabethan polity, the real point at issue in Hurd’s dialogue is as much as anything else the modernity of his own era. When Addison condemns the ‘barbarous manners’ and ‘despotic government’ of sixteenth-century England, he does so in terms that emphasise his own sense of living under a more enlightened regime. This sense of historical discontinuity focuses itself around the theme of chivalry. As they continue their tour of the ruins of Kenilworth castle, Hurd’s disputants come to the tiltyard. Arbuthnot here proposes Philip Sidney as an exemplary instance of military skill formed by chivalric exercise. Addison, whilst content to give Sidney his due share of praise, nevertheless considers the institution primitive: it ‘shews the times, which favoured it so much, to have scarcely emerged from their original rudeness and brutality . . . Alas,’ he exclaims, ‘what affinity have such prodigies to our life and manners?’ He furthermore reminds his friend of Cervantes, ‘whose ridicule hath brought eternal dishonour on the profession of knight-errantry’ – to which Arbuthnot replies that he merely condemned ‘the abuses of chivalry, and the madness of continuing the old romantic spirit in times when, from a change of manners and policy, it was no longer in season’.55 Once again, then, we see Quixoticism employed as an agent of historical decorum. Both disputants consider chivalry to be proper to the Middle Ages. For Addison, it offers the crowning instance of the degeneracy of that period; for Arbuthnot, here at least, it is merely badly out of ‘season’ in any other era. This position is, however, slightly out of character. Elsewhere, Arbuthnot defends the Elizabethan era in terms that offer a far more direct contrast to the views of his friend. Chivalry appears, not merely as a civilising influence in the medieval period, but as a direct precursor of the refinement that Addison so prides himself upon. ‘No policy’, he states, ‘even of an antient legislator, could have contrived a better expedient to cultivate the manners and tame the spirits of a rude and ignorant people.’ Moreover, ‘the generous sentiments, it inspired, perhaps contributed very much to awaken an emulation of a different kind; and to bring on those days of light and knowledge which have disposed us, somewhat unthankfully, to vilify and defame it . . . the first essays of wit and poetry, those harbingers of returning day to every species of letters, were made in the bosom of chivalry.’ When Addison continues to scoff, Arbuthnot reiterates his point: ‘every elegance of art and genius’ was cultivated amongst these people.56 The vehemence with which Addison resists these moves suggests just how troublesome the culture of chivalry could be to the eighteenth century. 55 56

Hurd (1765), I: 181–2. Hurd (1765), I: 177–8, 186.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance Presenting his matter in dialogue form, Hurd is able to give a voice to the divergent cultural impulses created by the construction of the medieval past as romantic. Warton’s critical writings are more obviously self-contradictory. Although he asserts as a principle, that ‘we must not try the modes and notions of other ages, even if they have arrived to some degree of refinement, by those of our own’,57 time and again Warton finds himself unable or unwilling to shake off the artistic standards of his own day. Writing on Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, for example, he comments upon the ‘mixture of manners, the confusion of times, and the like violations of propriety, which this poem, in common with all others of its age, presents in almost every page’.58 And yet, at the same time, Warton finds himself drawn to the literature of these ‘barbarous ages’. At one point he is even so impressed as to find Chaucer’s General Prologue, despite the fact that it is said to present an ‘accurate picture of antient manners’, disconcertingly modern. Thus, the Prioress ‘has even the false pity and sentimentality of many modern ladies’; The Franklin is a figure ‘touched with the hand of Pope or Boileau’; the Monk is portrayed with ‘great elegance’; and the Sergeant-at-Law is ‘sketched with the spirit and conciseness of Horace’.59 But there is more. Time and again, we encounter in eighteenth-century writing on authors such as Spenser a sense of bafflement. Consider, for example, the opening remarks of Thomas Warton’s Observations on the Fairy Queen: When the works of Homer and of Aristotle began to be restored and studied in Italy, when the genuine and uncorrupted sources of antient poetry and antient criticism were opened, and every species of literature at last emerged from the depths of Gothic ignorance and barbarity; it might have been expected, that, instead of the romantic manner of poetical composition introduced and established by the Provencial bards, a new and more legitimate taste of writing would have succeeded.

This, as Warton notes, quite failed to happen: the prevailing taste of the age of Spenser was for the romantic epics of the likes of Ariosto and Tasso, and he ‘naturally followed’ in their footsteps.60 Warton is plagued by a nagging sense that the chivalric elements of Renaissance culture should, logically, simply not be there. His History remains incomplete, with only fragments of a fourth volume devoted to Elizabethan literature extant, but even as it stands his work

57 58

59 60

Warton (1774–81), I: 252. Warton (1774–81), I: 367. Warton goes on to deplore Chaucer’s anachronisms, such as the presence of knights and tournaments in classical Athens – a commonplace eighteenthcentury insight, adapted in the twentieth century as a way of separating out ‘medieval’ and ‘modern’ culture, the latter being defined, not by a knowledge of classical literature, but by the ability to treat such matter with historical ‘perspective’. See Erwin Panofsky, Renaissance and Renasences in Western Art (London: Paladin, 1970). Warton (1774–81), I: 435–51. Warton (1762), I: 1, 4.

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Kenilworth, Chivalry, and the Middle Ages provides us with ample evidence as to why his attempt to reconstruct the cultural context of Spenser’s verses should have caused him unease. Warton simultaneously wishes to promote a historicised understanding of chivalric institutions and literature, one that will recognise that such literary texts as The Faerie Queene are organised along very different principles of construction than those of the eighteenth century – even whilst doing so with a critical vocabulary which naturally tends towards awarding praise in exactly those neo-classical terms, commending texts for ‘decorum’, polish, and refinement. This clearly leads to some awkwardness, but Warton’s deeper problem is historiographical, and his critical ironies and inconsistencies are merely the outward sign of this. What, for Warton, are the steps, as his preface puts it, by which Western society has been raised ‘from rudeness to elegance’? On the one hand, Warton places a high, if ambivalently expressed, value upon the cultural achievements of the Middle Ages, and chivalry in particular. But on the other hand we have another historical narrative about the origins of modern civilisation, one that by its very nature rhetorically situates these achievements in an inferior position, as nothing more than another instance of the Gothic barbarity that engulfed Europe after the fall of Rome. This narrative concerns itself with ‘the revival of classical learning’, the symptom of a ‘restless disposition in the human mind to rouse from its lethargic state, and to break the bonds of barbarism’. Commencing in Italy, this phenomenon is said to have led to a ‘mighty deliverance, in which the mouldering Gothic fabrics of false religion and false philosophy fell together’.61 As his comments indicate, this process is not narrowly literary for Warton – it is a general cultural shift, from one Geist to another. It manifests itself, or can be discovered in, a whole variety of cultural products. In the reign of Henry VIII, we are told, even architecture ‘made frequent efforts to disentangle itself from the many incumbrances of the Gothic manner; and began to catch the correct graces, and to copy the true magnificence, of the Grecian and Roman models’.62 This is, of course, the familiar narrative of the ‘Renaissance’ of classical learning. It is a narrative that almost inevitably privileges the achievements of those fifteenth- and sixteenth-century scholars known as ‘humanists’. Just as he is inclined to take material from books of chivalry as documentary truth, so Warton develops his account of a post-medieval cultural revival out of what have increasingly been recognised as highly rhetorical and frankly selfinterested representations of the efficacy of humanistic learning. Warton’s work naturally reproduces humanist commonplaces – indeed, his historical assumptions are for the most part constructed out of just these tropes. Consider, for example, his picture of the medieval aristocrat. John Skelton’s patron, the fifth Earl of Northumberland, is praised in the third book of

61 62

Warton (1774–81), II: 408. The whole section deals with this topic. Warton (1774–81), III: 160.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance Warton’s History for having abandoned ‘the example of his brother peers, whose principal occupations were hawking and tilting; and who despised learning, as an ignoble and petty accomplishment, fit only for the purposes of laborious and indigent ecclesiastics’.63 Again, Warton informs us about the futility of scholastic philosophy, ‘barbarous and barren subtleties . . . [that] perverted the simplest expressions of the sacred text, and embarrassed the most evident truths of the gospel by laboured distinctions and unintelligible solutions’;64 about the ‘night’ of the Middle Ages as opposed to the ‘light’ of classical learning;65 and above all about the massive impact of the ‘new’, humanistic disciplines. The ‘revival of classical learning’ is presented as a ‘mighty deliverance’, and it is clear from Warton’s vocabulary that the qualities it is supposed to have introduced into European civilisation are exactly those which he feels characterise his own age – ‘elegance’, ‘grace’, and ‘taste’, as opposed to the ‘barbarism’ of the preceding age.66 It is true that at points Warton is prepared to align the medieval period with his own era, as when he remarks in a discussion of ‘romantic’ narratives that ‘there is no peculiarity which more strongly discriminates the manners of the Greeks and Romans from those of modern times, than that small degree of attention and respect with which those nations treat the fair sex’.67 Nevertheless, some of his deepest assumptions (and, indeed, his critical vocabulary) imply the exact opposite – that, on the contrary, the manners and polish that his society prides itself upon take their origin from the succeeding era, the Renaissance. Given this context, we can see why Spenser writing a chivalric romance in the sixteenth century should so disturb Warton. Like Lord Herbert of Cherbury for his later editors, he is a figure out of place in time. As the result to a large extent of their own work, the chivalric has become so associated with the medieval that the phenomenon of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century chivalry, when juxtaposed with the ‘humanist’ narrative we have been discussing, becomes, for these writers, profoundly disturbing. The sometimes extraordinary rhetorical contortions of the mid-eighteenth-century critics we have been discussing issue out of just this sense of incongruity. Each has his own tactic for smoothing over these contradictions. Richard Hurd’s dialogue on the age of Elizabeth has Dr Arbuthnot suggest first of all that the Kenilworth 63

64 65 66 67

Warton (1774–81), II: 340. Compare the image of the chivalric nobleman as disseminated by humanist polemicists, discussed by Alan Stewart’s Close Readers (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997), xxxiv–xliv – vain, ignorant, frequently drunk, obsessed with leisure pursuits such as hawking, and scornful of learning. Warton reproduces, not merely this (highly inaccurate) picture, but also the deployment of vera nobilitas tropes displayed by the writers Stewart discusses: true nobility lies, not in genealogy, but in the application of the mind to ‘lyberall science’. Warton (1774–81), I: ‘On the Introduction of Learning into England’, k3r. On which set of tropes, see Mommsen (1942). Warton (1774–81), II: 407, 409–10. Warton (1774–81), I: ‘On the Origin of Romantic Fiction in Europe’, I1r.

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Kenilworth, Chivalry, and the Middle Ages entertainment of the Lady of the Lake may be defended as a medieval vehicle for what are essentially Renaissance thoughts (the praise of a monarch). The Lady is, he comments, ‘the presiding nymph of the stream’, an appropriately classical notion, presented ‘under a name that romance had made familiar’. ‘What was this’, he asks, ‘but taking advantage of a popular prejudice to introduce his fiction with more address and probability?’68 For both Warton and Hurd elsewhere, on the other hand, it seems important that Spenser should be presented as not so much employing as resorting to allegory, thus artificially prolonging the life of a genre – the chivalric romance – beyond what they see as its natural lifespan. Elizabethan chivalry, as reconstructed through texts such as Laneham’s, is a problem, something to be explained away. Commenting on the tournaments and romantic pageantry of the Elizabethan age, Richard Hurd decides that ‘with these helps, the new Sprit of Chivalry made a shift to support itself for a time, when reason was but dawning’; romances only become allegorical once ‘feudal manners’ disappear – but even these remodelled varieties must succumb to the power of ‘reason’ in the end.69 For Warton, allegorical poetry can reconcile the conflicting critical impulses in his work – as an object of allegory, the culture of chivalry is curiously both present and not-present. The ‘subject and foundation of public shews and spectacles’, allegory is both highly visible in sixteenth-century culture and yet indicates that the romantic subject matter of the Middle Ages can no longer be approached as directly as was formerly the case.70 Yet a decade later, Warton had still, apparently, failed to resolve matters to his satisfaction. His History of English Poetry is incomplete, and therefore fails to deal with Spenser, but there is ample evidence scattered throughout that work that he was still perplexed by the relationship between the achievements of his own age, and those of that time when, as he puts it, ‘courage, devotion, and ignorance, composed the character of European manners’.71 It is, then, culturally-minded historical researches such as these that provide the context for Walter Scott’s novel of 1821, Kenilworth – the most influential of any of the Letter’s subsequent re-workings. Scott himself was possessed of a quite prodigious knowledge of chivalric romance, and was very much involved with antiquarian and editorial projects similar to those pursued by the likes of Percy some fifty years earlier – he corresponded, for instance, with George Ellis, editor of a volume of Specimens of Early English Metrical Romances (1805).72

68

69 70 71 72

Hurd (1765), I: 189. Note how the critical viewpoint of these writers seems to authorise the sorting of literary production into ‘classic’ and ‘romantic’ forms. Hurd (1762), pp. 117–19. Warton (1762), II: 89; and see also Kramnick (1996), pp. 878–81. Warton (1774–81), I: 243. See Jerome Mitchell, Scott, Chaucer and Medieval Romance (The University Press of Kentucky, 1987).

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance His methods were also analogous to those of Warton and his circle: Scott used Sainte-Palayé’s Mémoires as a source for an Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on the topic of chivalry, which continues the habit of illustrating historical narrative with examples drawn from fictional sources.73 He is similarly focused on the theme of ‘manners’, and similarly ambivalent about the value of chivalry in relation to his own, more enlightened age. Scott’s Encyclopaedia Britannica entry opens by simultaneously affirming and disavowing the relevance of the culture of chivalry to the nineteenth century: Those laws and customs have long been antiquated, but their effects may still be traced in European manners; and, excepting only the change which flowed from the introduction of the Christian religion, we know of no cause which has produced such general and permanent difference betwixt the ancients and the moderns, as that which has arisen out of the institution of chivalry.74

Chivalry figures as a key point of discrimination between historical eras, but where does it stand in relation to his own time? Is it ‘antiquated’, or is it to be categorised as in some sense ‘modern’? Scott is just as ambivalent about the value of the institution – at times idealising, and at others sceptical and disenchanted; he freely admits that the ‘professors of chivalry’ were more often than not ‘fierce’ and ‘intolerant’. With the advent of more ‘enlightened times, however, they came merely to seem ‘absurd, exaggerated, and impracticable’.75 It is in his fiction that these uncertainties find their richest expression. George Lukács revived interest in Scott’s practice of the historical novel by praising him for the way in which, in his treatment of times past, we have the ‘specifically historical’. There are books with historical settings before Scott, but, he asserts, they ‘are historical only as regards their purely external choice of theme and costume. Not only the psychology of the characters, but the manners depicted, are entirely those of the writer’s own day’ (and by way of example Lukács cites La Calprenède) – whereas in Scott, we see ‘the derivation of the individuality of characters from the historical peculiarity of their age’.76 As an instance of the explicitness of Scott’s interest in the ‘historical peculiarities’ of different ages, we might turn, not to Kenilworth itself, but rather to the preface appended to the ‘Magnum Opus’ edition of another of his novels, The Fortunes of Nigel – set in the reign of James I. Here, Scott took the opportunity afforded by the publication of a collected edition of the Waverley Novels to compose an introduction that reflected upon his own achievement and 73

74 75 76

See Gossman (1968), p. 293, and Walter Scott, Essays on Chivalry, Romance, and the Drama (London: Frederick Warne, 1888), pp. 1–65. The ‘Essay on Chivalry’ is garnished with allusions to Chaucer’s Knight’s Tale, Bevis and Huon of Bordeaux – amongst other such texts. Scott (1888), p. 1. Scott (1888), pp. 7, 60. George Lukács, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1981), p. 15.

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Kenilworth, Chivalry, and the Middle Ages practice in a manner impossible for the anonymous author he has previously been.77 ‘The most picturesque period of history’, he wrote, ‘is that when the ancient rough and wild manners of a barbarous age are just becoming innovated upon and contrasted by the illumination of increased or revived learning and the instructions of renewed or reformed religion.’ The early seventeenth century was one such period: The reign of James I. of England possessed this advantage in a peculiar degree. Some beams of chivalry, although its planet had been for some time set, continued to animate and gild the horizon, and although probably no one acted precisely on its Quixotic dictates, men and women still talked in the chivalrous language of Sir Philip Sidney’s Arcadia; and the ceremonial of the tilt-yard was yet exhibited, though it now only flourished as a place de carrousel. Here and there a high-spirited Knight of the Bath (witness the too scrupulous Lord Herbert of Cherbury) was found devoted enough to the vows he had taken to imagine himself obliged to compel, by the sword’s point, a fellow knight or a squire to restore the top-knot of ribbon which he had stolen from a fair damzel; but yet, while men were taking each other’s lives on such punctilios of honour, the hour was already arrived when Bacon was about to teach the world that they were no longer to reason from authority to fact, but to establish truth by advancing from fact to fact, till they fixed an indisputable authority, not from hypothesis, but from experiment.78

Writing about a later reign, Scott here also indicates the sort of concern for historical narrative that animates his novel of Elizabethan times, Kenilworth. Close acquaintance with that book may make this seem a curious comment, since Kenilworth abounds with the most flagrant (and, given the wide-ranging knowledge of the period Scott displays, surely conscious) anachronisms. For the literary critic, the most glaring of these violations of chronological sequence occur with respect to questions of reading. Set in 1575, characters in the novel are not only capable of quoting from books they would almost certainly never have laid eyes on; they also do so from books not, in many cases, to be written until several decades in the future. Not only is the dialogue pseudo-Shakespearean, practically everybody in the book is a devout admirer of his works – this despite that fact that he was at the time only eleven years old. (Thus, The Tempest is quoted, and Elizabeth herself is a fan of Troilus and Cressida.)79 Less obviously, the plot of the novel depends upon the amalgamation of two quite distinct historical moments. Kenilworth is a tale of intrigue and murder, in which Robert Laneham’s description of the 1575 pageantry provides a backdrop 77 78

79

Scott had acknowledged his authorship of the novels in 1827. Mark A. Weinstein ed., The Prefaces to the Waverley Novels (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1978), pp. 179–80. Walter Scott, Kenilworth, ed. J.H. Alexander (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999), pp. 126, 163. Further references in the main body of the text.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance for the climax of the action (Laneham himself also features as a minor character); yet this plot is itself based on the controversy surrounding the death of Leicester’s wife in 1560. In the novel, Leicester has secretly married Amy Robsart, and is keeping her hidden at his mansion, Cumnor-Place, whilst he himself courts the unmarried Queen. Through the intervention of Amy’s disappointed suitor, Edmund Tressilian, this secret marriage is ultimately made known to Elizabeth, but not before Leicester’s Machiavellian master of horse, Richard Varney – hopeful of a marriage between his master and the Queen – has contrived Amy’s murder. Anachronistic though it may be in its outlines, however, Kenilworth is nevertheless very much concerned with the ‘historical peculiarity’ of the age it recreates; and questions as to this nature are phrased as questions about the presence or absence of chivalry as a living ideal in sixteenthcentury England. The novel’s dialogue, as has already been noted, is based upon that of the Tudor and Jacobean drama. In this respect, then, it is no more than accurate imitation that many of the characters should pepper their speech with references to chivalric romance. In Scott’s hands, however, such allusions gradually begin to take on a more analytical nature. The character most prone to this habit is the drunken Michael Lambourne, a sort of miles gloriosus figure. In the second chapter (introduced with the epigraph, ‘Talk you of young master Lancelot?’, from The Merchant of Venice, Shylock’s servant Lancelot Gobbo being a clown with an incongruously heroic name), Lambourne chides the mercer Goldthread for his lack of curiosity about the mysterious lady held at nearby Cumnor-Place by asking, ‘what adventurous knight ever thought of the lady’s terror, when he went to thwack giant, dragon or magician, in her presence, and for her deliverance?’ (16). Later, Lambourne himself (the morning after a prodigious display of drunkenness) is referred to as ‘the hero of the proceeding night’ (19), and it rapidly becomes clear that these references are designed to comedically pin-point his vanity and self-aggrandisement. Lambourne may see himself as the hero of a chivalric narrative – as when he warns Amy’s keeper, Anthony Forster, ‘keep thee well from me, Sir Knight’ (29) – but the sense in which he falls short of the ideal he invokes is all too apparent. Instead, it is Tressilian (with whom Lambourne is paired at the start of the novel, as they set out in tandem for Cumnor-Place) who seems to fit the knightly model: a young nobleman, questing for his lady, to whom he is abjectly devoted.80 Matters, however, rapidly become more complex. Although Amy is repeatedly referred to as a damsel in distress, she does not in fact want to be rescued from her gilded ‘prison’ (32). Tressilian’s response to this unwelcome piece of news is to declare that she must be enchanted: ‘thou hast been bound by

80

Later, Varney is alluded to as a ‘monster’, and Tressilian as the ‘knight-adventurer’ who encounters him (84).

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Kenilworth, Chivalry, and the Middle Ages some spell – entrapped by some art – art now detained by some compelled vow’ (33). It is a total misreading – Amy regards her rejected suitor with some pity, and some respect, but her erotic attentions are in fact entirely fixed upon the Earl of Leicester, to the exclusion of all other men. Chivalry may be an ideal of personal conduct, but possibly Tressilian’s narrative expectations of the situation he finds himself in render him as absurd, in his way, as those of the romance-quoting Lambourne; possibly they render him as out of date and irrelevant as the disregarded volumes in the old Abbot’s library at CumnorPlace, defaced during the Reformation (27–8). Less obviously vain than Lambourne, Tressilian’s consolatory reading of the situation at Cumnor is in its way just as self-flattering as that of his companion. And yet, we reflect – as the text continues its permutations of these tropes of knightly rescue and fatal bewitchment – then again, maybe Amy is in a sense enchanted – maybe not literally, but the narrator himself describes her reaction to her plushly furnished apartments at Cumnor as being like ‘the wild and unrestrained joy of a rustic beauty, who finds herself suddenly invested with a splendour which her most extravagant wishes had never shaped for her, and at the same time with the keen feeling of an affectionate heart, which knows that all the enchantment which surrounds her, is the work of the great Magician Love’ (48). Amy’s dreams of social advancement are ultimately to lead to her death. By way of evidence as to just how explicitly this chivalric theme is signalled, we might consider the scene in which Leicester visits Amy at Cumnor-Place. Amy has requested that her husband visit her in his finery (the doom-laden echo of the legend of Semele, who begged to see her lover in all his glory, seems appropriate). Leicester thus gets to show off all his honours: ‘The embroidered strap, as thou callest it, around my knee,’ he said, ‘is the English Garter, an ornament which kings are proud to bear. See, here is the star which belongs to it, and here the Diamond George, the jewel of the order. You have heard how King Edward and the Countess of Salisbury’ – ‘O, I know that tale,’ said the Countess, slightly blushing, ‘and how a lady’s garter became the proudest badge of English chivalry.’ (58)

(And so on – Leicester is lavishly garlanded with tokens of this sort). The scene raises the question, to what extent does Dudley match up to the ideals embodied by such honours? He is a great figure in the land, certainly, but hiding one’s wife away in the countryside because one is terrified of the reaction that news of the marriage might prompt from one’s (female) monarch hardly seems to constitute heroic behaviour; and as the novel progresses, Leicester’s conduct becomes ever more disreputable, even whilst his public standing is magnified. On the other hand, when he is later seen disrobing and referring to his honours mere ‘chains and fetters’, ‘bonds which knaves invented to fetter fools’ (‘my neck last night was well nigh broke with the weight of them’), this seems a mark of Dudley’s essential good sense (63). Is chivalry a valid source of values in the Elizabethan age? Or is it a mere 223

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance illusion, nothing more than the effect of strategically displayed gold and fine cloth? Chivalry can feature as a benchmark against which Scott can measure the conduct of his characters, even whilst the novel’s references to the matter of romance contrive to query whether or not it is really anything more than a deluded and self-flattering fantasy. The action begs the question, is this a world of romance or not? Kenilworth portrays an age in transition, a sense reinforced through the structure of the novel, which is divided into three volumes (originally published as separate texts). Volume One is set in rural England. The opening passages of the novel (set in the country around Cumnor-Place) introduce us to ‘the old days of merry England’ (1), a small world of rural communities and local reputations, in which London districts that will eventually become major urban settlements feature only as mere villages. Indeed, the temporal signature of this setting is initially forced back even further than the Elizabethan age, as the innkeeper Giles Gosling is compared to Chaucer’s Harry Bailley, and the dialogue between Lambourne and his fellow villagers commences with a flurry of references to medieval romance. Yet as we are drawn into Scott’s narrative of courtly intrigue, as Avrom Fleishman notes, we begin to encounter characters who stand as types of ‘the new men and manners of the time’, such as ‘the nouveau-riche religious trimmer, Forster’, ‘the Machiavellian courtier, Varney’, or the ‘factotum equipped with a “blunt conscience”, Lambourne’.81 The juxtaposition of old and new suggests a darker vision of the historical process than that suggested by the Preface to The Fortunes of Nigel – modernity, here, seems to be equated with sophistication and duplicity, whilst authentic values are to be found best represented by the likes of Tressilian, the Devonshire country gentleman – but Scott’s interest in a period when ‘the ancient rough and wild manners of a barbarous age are just becoming innovated upon’ seems clear. The Second Volume divides its attentions between the court in London, and further events at Cumnor-Place. Here, it might be argued, we get a somewhat more positive portrait of change, as we see the Queen clamping down on the feud between the Earls of Leicester and Sussex, a baronial power struggle prosecuted through the use of bands of armed retainers – what might, in modern terminology, be analysed as an extension of the Tudor state’s monopoly of violence. Even here, though, the intrigue endemic amongst the courtly characters continues apace, and even takes on an increasingly sinister tone, breaking out into outright villainy with the introduction of the alchemist hired by Varney to poison the Earl of Sussex. Yet it is in Volume Three of Kenilworth that these historiographical questions really come to a head, as court and country meet at the Earl of Leicester’s Warwickshire castle. Beyond just articulating perceptions of historical change, the novel’s achievement lies in the way in which its design actually contrives

81

The English Historical Novel (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1971), p. 62.

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Kenilworth, Chivalry, and the Middle Ages to problematise questions of chronological progress. Once again, this effect centres on chivalric imagery, as Scott recreates in prose the Malorean pageantry described in the Letter of 1575. Firstly, he actually amplifies the chivalric content of the original entertainments, thereby making the connection to his earlier references to the business of reading romance in Volume One of the novel. The giant porter is said to be proportioned in such as way as ‘would have enabled him to enact Colbrand, Ascapart, or any other giant of romance’ (these two being figures from Guy and Bevis, respectively). ‘In fine,’ the narrator sums up, ‘he represented excellently one of those giants of popular romance, who figure in every fairy tale, or legend of knight errantry’ (259–60). In the novel, Captain Cox does not just collect romances; the Quixotic nature of his imaginative investment in his reading matter is spelt out, as he re-enacts in inadvertently burlesque form the exploits of his ‘favourite heroes of chivalry . . . whether Amadis, Belianis, Bevis, or his own Guy of Warwick’ (364). Secondly, Scott invents a piece of pageantry that serves to focus the historiographical questions the novel has raised. Entirely in keeping with the tenor of the original entertainments, this masque consists of ‘four separate bands . . . each representing one of the various nations by which England had at different times been occupied’ (349). Thus, the dancing begins with the ‘aboriginal Britons’, succeeded by the Romans, ‘who came to civilize as well as to conquer’, then the Saxons, and lastly ‘the knightly Normans, in their mail shirts and hoods of steel, with all the panoply of chivalry’ (349). All these peoples act out a dance, in which are represented ‘the conflicts which had taken place amongst the various nations which had anciently inhabited Britain’, only to be interrupted by the entrance of one final figure: ‘the fiendborn Merlin, dressed in a strange and mystical attire, suited to his ambiguous birth and magical power’ (350). The reference to ‘ambiguous birth’ can hardly be accidental, since it is precisely this theme that the masque addresses (appropriately enough – we have already seen how, in the tale of Sir Tor for example, magician-figures like Merlin often function in romances to pose or answer questions about birth and genealogy): Merlin having entered and advanced into the midst of the hall, summoned the presenters of the contending bands around him by a wave of his magical rod, and announced to them, in a poetical speech, that the Isle of Britain was now commanded by a Royal Maiden, to whom it was the will of fate that they should all homage, and request of her to pronounce on the various pretensions which each set forth to be esteemed the pre-eminent stock, from which the present natives, the happy subjects of that angelical Princess, derived their lineage. (351)

Does Renaissance England represent the summation of all these different traditions? Or has it in some sense gone beyond them? In particular – given that this question in posed in masque that features as one of a series of 225

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance entertainments of a notably chivalric cast, in a novel that abounds with references to romance – what relation does Elizabethan England bear to the ‘panoply of chivalry’ introduced into the land by the Normans, the most recent of the cultural innovations the masque mentions? Is it still a part of the national story or not? It is almost exactly the question posed by Hurd’s Addison, which is also in a sense the question posed by any historical novel of reasonable sophistication, but which Scott seems to have deliberately set out to highlight: ‘what affinity have such prodigies to our life and manners?’ The Queen’s assessment of the ‘lineage’ of her subjects is authentically evasive: each nation is worthy in its own way, since ‘the Englishman had from the ancient Briton his bold and tameless spirit of freedom, – from the Roman his disciplined courage in war, with his love of letters and civilization in time of peace, – from the Saxon his wise and equitable laws, – and from the chivalrous Norman his love of honour and courtesy, with his generous desire for glory’ (351). Lost amid the general outpouring of compliment, the answer to Merlin’s question as to the status of Elizabethan England never gets answered, either by the Queen or by Scott himself. Instead, the novel proceeds onwards to its inevitable conclusion: the death of the Countess of Leicester. At the end of the novel, there is, as a contemporary reviewer noted, little in the way of the customary allocation of reward and punishment. ‘Tressilian, Sir Hugh Robsart, Varney, Forster, Demetrius, Lambourne, almost every agent in the story, perish prematurely or violently. Elizabeth is reserved for the sorrows of disappointed love and betrayed confidence, and Leicester for misery, such as even our author has not ventured to describe.’82 Despite his involvement in his wife’s death, Leicester continues his career of public prominence as the Queen’s favourite, but Scott informs us that we may wish to believe the rumours that he died ‘swallowing a draught of poison, which was designed for another person’ (391). It is hard to tell which option is the more depressing. Yet such is the novel’s persistent ambiguity, it seems possible to discount such a negative reading. Published in the year of the coronation of George IV, Kenilworth proved immensely popular, and spawned a whole host of imitations and adaptations all across Europe.83 Such a vogue was presumably premised more on the novel’s melodramatic treatment of the private life of one of England’s most famous monarchs, than on its sceptical historical themes. 82

83

Anonymous review by Nassau Senior in the Quarterly Review, 1821, reprinted in Scott: The Critical Heritage, ed. John O. Hayden (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), p. 254. These include: Le Chateau de Kenilworth, Mélodrame en Trois actes (1822); Gaetano Barbieri’s comedy in 5 acts, Elisabetta al Castello di Kenilworth (1824); Giovanni Galzerani, Elisabetta, Regina d’Inhilterra al Castello di Kenilworth. Ballo Tragico in Cinque Atti (1823); T.J. Dibdin, Kenilworth: An Historical Drama, in Two Acts (1832); Samuel Heath’s play, The Earl of Leicester, A Tragedy (1843); an opera by Donizetti, Il Castello di Kenilworth; and Andrew Halliday and Frederic Lawrance’s Kenilworth, or ye Queene, ye Earle, and ye Maydenne: A Comic Operatic Extravaganza.

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Kenilworth, Chivalry, and the Middle Ages Scott’s portrait of the Queen, ‘at once a high-minded sovereign and a female of passionate feelings, hesitating betwixt the sense of her rank and the duty she owed her people on the one hand, and on the other her attachment to a nobleman who, in external qualifications at least, amply merited her favour’,84 is unlikely to find many modern admirers, and would probably be regarded as an example of ‘romantic’ historiography at its worst. Such an attitude would be analogous to that of early reviewers of Scott’s books, who felt that the notion of a ‘historical romance’ was a contradiction in terms.85 Yet, even whilst he sacrifices strict historical accuracy in the interests of narrative thrills, and to narrow the meaning of ‘romance’ slightly so that it refers specifically to medieval chivalric narrative, it is precisely by inserting such elements into a tale set in a later period that Scott lends his novel a level of historical sophistication that goes beyond the merely biographical. As we have already seen, so much in terms of the modernity of the Renaissance period comes to depend upon the presence or absence of chivalry as a living force at that time. Kenilworth weaves into its narrative fabric allusions to the matter of romance in such a way as to prompt reflection about the exact relationship of Elizabethan England to its past and future. With respect to his treatment of the historical status of the age through the theme of chivalry, modern treatments of that topic represent, if anything, a coarsening of Kenilworth’s ambiguities. Whereas Scott’s fictional format allows him to address such questions allusively, modern historians of Renaissance chivalry are obliged to resort to bald statement, the contradictions forced on them by the tradition they work in being pushed to the fringes of the narratives they relate. Trapped within the conceptual framework established by the likes of Thomas Warton, Renaissance chivalry, and, for historians of England, Elizabethan chivalry in particular, remain an interpretative stumbling block. It is a mark of the extent to which chivalry has become identified with the medieval that it seems impossible to discuss the topic with reference to any point between, roughly, the fourteenth and the seventeenth centuries, without making some reference to or being influenced by the grand tripartite division of history into classical, medieval, and modern periods – with the Renaissance standing as the first truly modern phase of history. Most twentieth-century work on chivalry has been decisively influenced by the work of the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, whose Waning of the Middle Ages describes in vivid detail his sense of a civilisation in decline in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century Burgundy.86 Late medieval life is, for Huizinga, characterised 84 85 86

Weinstein (1978), p. 170 – Preface to Kenilworth. See Hayden ed. (1970), p. 12. The Waning of the Middle Ages, trans. F. Hopman (London: Penguin, 1987). This translation was first published in 1924. Huizinga was also familiar with the work of Sainte-Palaye, whose work he briefly makes reference to on p. 89.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance by its violent contrasts, a ‘perpetual oscillation between despair and distracted joy, between cruelty and pious tenderness’,87 and this same play of opposites is said to characterise the chivalric way of life. ‘The thought of all those who lived in the circles of court or castle’, Huizinga writes, ‘was impregnated with the idea of chivalry. Their whole system of ideas was permeated by the fiction that chivalry ruled the world . . . This illusion of society based on chivalry curiously clashed with the reality of things’ – and he goes on to discuss the barbarities of medieval warfare. Chivalry is ‘an aesthetic ideal assuming the appearance of an ethical ideal’, but it is continually dragged down by its ‘earthly origin’.88 Huizinga’s penetrating account of the chivalric mindset is thus founded upon Hegelian antithesis – ideal and real, virtue and vice, form and content; chivalry he sees as a highly formalised art imposing itself on the messy details of day to day life, with only limited success.89 Huizinga has been criticised for his ‘excessively entropic’ theory of causation, his inability to account for the ‘waning’ that gives his book its title: ‘things run down. One culture is exhausted and slowly is replaced by a vital new one. There is no base of causal economic and social forces.’90 Yet, although he undoubtedly fails to provide an explanation as such, Huizinga certainly devotes great metaphorical skill to the embellishment of his portrait of a decadent culture. Time passes, and civilisations decline and fall, on analogy with the cycle of the seasons.91 The overwhelming impression is one of petrifaction or crystallisation. Medieval culture, in Huizinga’s view, is characterised by its insistent formalism, its tendency towards generalising symbolic statements; its ‘waning’ may be accounted for in the way in which this tendency hardens into mere externality, an addiction to imagistic embodiment. The interplay of ideal and real breaks down. Accordingly, Huizinga’s account of late medieval chivalry emphasises the glamour of tournaments and chivalric orders such as the Golden Fleece in such a way as to suggest their superficiality. Tournaments are artificial, the chivalric orders mere clubs. Chivalric vows are dying out, not through scarcity, but rather because they have become ‘a fantastic ornament, after having been a serious element of earlier civilisation’. The old forms are observed, even elaborated upon, but the spirit is dying.92 In many ways, Huizinga’s thesis is phrased as an attack upon that of Jacob Burckhardt’s work on the Renaissance. He denies, for example, that the yearning for individual glory is a quintessentially Renaissance trait, and that

87 88 89

90

91 92

Huizinga (1987), p. 10. Huizinga (1987), pp. 65, 67. On Huizinga’s Hegelianism, see E.H. Gombrich, In Search of Cultural History (Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1969), pp. 29–30. Norman B. Cantor, Inventing the Middle Ages (Cambridge: The Lutterworth Press, 1991), p. 380. The title of his book has been more accurately translated as The Autumn of the Middle Ages. Huizinga (1987), p. 89.

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Kenilworth, Chivalry, and the Middle Ages medieval men sought honour only in collective forms.93 Nevertheless, it would appear that any such surviving traces of medieval culture are merely formal, being animated by an entirely new spirit. With the advent of the Renaissance, however mixed up it may be in medieval forms in its initial stages, an age is ending – as Huizinga says in concluding his volume, ‘the tone of life is about to change’.94 The Waning of the Middle Ages must (as its title suggests) ultimately endorse an account of the Renaissance as a new chapter in human history. Thus, and despite his hesitations, Huizinga’s work sees chivalry as being in decline, and sees this decline as a fundamental and important part of the ‘waning’ of the Middle Ages as a whole – that is, the chivalric and the medieval are, as in the eighteenth century, identified. Huizinga’s work thus takes its place within a minor historiographical tradition, one of accounts of the death of chivalry. Raymond Kilgour, more schematic than his master, saw chivalry, ‘like all aristocracies’, as passing through three stages of development: ‘the age of superiority, the age of privilege, and the age of vanity’. This final period, beginning in the fifteenth century, sees chivalry ‘bent upon mad, exaggerated display, as if to hide its impotence and its sordid vices under gilded armour and flowered silk’. Chivalry becomes ‘only . . . a splendid pageant’, without ‘deeper value for society’.95 Extending his analysis somewhat further than Huizinga in terms of chronology, Kilgour condemns sixteenth-century chivalry in similar terms, as nothing more than a ‘luxurious game to charm the leisure of a courtly society’ – although Sir Philip Sidney is mentioned as one of those few who ‘did honor to the spirit of chivalry’.96 For Arthur Ferguson, too, chivalry plays a pivotal role in delineating the transition from medieval into Renaissance. Like Huizinga’s, Ferguson’s is a narrative of accelerating obsolescence, made plausible through the assemblage of a rhetoric of superficiality around the material accessories of what he call the ‘chivalric mind’. Heraldry, jousts, tournaments – ‘there is about all these practices the unmistakable taint of decadence. Through all runs the same selfconscious pursuit of form, often at the expense of the originally moving spirit.’97 The dialectical relationship between the ideal and the actual is broken – like Huizinga, Ferguson detects in such displays a ‘hardening process’, 93

94 95

96 97

In the Middle Ages, ‘human consciousness . . . lay as though dreaming or half awake beneath a common veil . . . Man was conscious of himself only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation – only through some general category.’ The Civilzation of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S.C.G. Middlemore, ed. Irene Gordon (New York and Toronto: Mentor Books, 1960), p. 121. Huizinga (1987), p. 318. The Decline of Chivalry as Shown in the French Literature of the Late Middle Ages (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1937), pp. 3–4. Kilgour (1937), p. 40. The Indian Summer of English Chivalry (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1960), p. 14.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance form crystallising at the expense of content. His imagery is carefully designed to promote a view of chivalry as over-rigid, set in its ways, fossilising into beautiful but dead shapes in temporary defiance of the natural seasonal order – Ferguson’s governing metaphor, as it is Huizinga’s. Late fifteenthcentury chivalry is ‘exotic and decadent . . . like all Indian Summers, it was an illusion bearing little relationship to the actual procession of the seasons’.98 Nevertheless, Ferguson does develop Huizinga’s ideas in one important respect. He is at pains to distinguish between fifteenth-century ‘revivals’ of chivalry, attempts to breathe life into an ideal that is merely declining, and the Elizabethan attitude to chivalry, which he defines as ‘the expression of a conscious romanticism, freed from the hypocrisy and the absurdities inherent in an ideal that is merely outmoded’.99 Ferguson’s position here is analogous to that of Erwin Panofsky, who sought to distinguish between a multitude of ‘revivals’ of the classics. Which was the ‘real’ one? Ferguson’s position is an exact inversion of Panofsky’s, but substantiated through an exactly analogous method. The Elizabethan revival of chivalry, he declares, is the first genuinely and self-consciously ‘false’ revival of chivalry, just as Panofsky’s Renaissance is the first ‘real’ Renaissance, precisely because of the historical spirit in which the material to be revived is approached. For Panofsky, ‘the’ Renaissance is characterised by the way in which ‘the classical past began to be looked upon from a fixed distance, quite comparable to the “distance between the eye and the object” in that most characteristic invention of this very Renaissance, focused perspective’100 – in short, by the development of a sense of anachronism. This, in Ferguson’s account, is precisely what distinguishes Elizabethan chivalry from any preceding revival. According to his later work on the subject, The Chivalric Tradition in Renaissance England, it was ‘romantic in the special historical sense of a more or less conscious attempt to evoke the spirit of an age admittedly gone beyond recall except through the good offices of the historical imagination’.101 Sixteenth-century chivalry he describes as a fashion statement rather than an ethos. Any resemblance to earlier varieties is purely superficial, for the spirit differs, just as the spirit of fifteenth-century chivalry is said to differ from that manifested in the heyday of chivalry. For Ferguson, chivalry remains inextricably intertwined with the medieval; indeed, it serves as a means of distinguishing the medieval from the modern. Chivalry dies with the Middle Ages – its last flourish, in the fifteenth century, when examined closely, merely indicating its inner decay. Elizabethan chivalry, by way of contrast, is ‘not really’ chivalry at all – merely, as for Warton, an allegory emptied out of its original meanings. 98 99 100 101

Ferguson (1960), pp. 16, 222. Ferguson (1960), p. 23. See Panofsky (1970), p. 108. The Chivalric Tradition in Renaissance England (Washington: Folger Shakespeare Library, 1986), p. 12.

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Kenilworth, Chivalry, and the Middle Ages All these accounts, then, rely upon a scheme whereby chivalry falls into a betrayal of its true ‘spirit’ – suicidally elaborating itself into the cosmetic, the superficially glamorous, into pastiche and inauthenticity. Powerfully articulated though they are, I believe that there is good reason to be suspicious of them. For one thing, the death of chivalry is itself a chivalric trope. Raymond Kilgour in fact notices this when, quoting Peter of Blois (‘The knighthood of to-day! Why, it consists of disorderly living’), he notes that ‘according to the views of some early writers, chivalry was in a state of decline in the twelfth century’.102 Although all the historians we have been discussing are prepared to use such complaints to prove their point about the decline of chivalry in their respective periods, equivalent evidence that does not refer to a point of time close to the (highly imprecise) boundary between the Middle Ages and Renaissance is discounted as merely a trope. All of them need to posit a period when chivalry was thriving and authentic; all of them trace their theories of decline from a point of departure that is more or less imaginary. Even Johan Huizinga, commended in a recent study for his awareness of a permanent tension between the ideal and real in the character of chivalry as an institution,103 speaks of those periods when ‘the function of knighthood is most vital, as in the times of the early crusades’, when an ascetic ideal still had some force.104 For Kilgour, too, the crusades show us an age when ‘knights were true soldiers’.105 In short, to substantiate their thesis of a betrayal of the spirit of chivalry, they are obliged to assume that, once upon a time, there had been a period of vigorous and simple knighthood – that is, a period of true nobility. As Maurice Keen has pointed out, such a distinction between the genuine and the decadent is, at the very least, overstated. The twelfth century is full of complaints about the parlous state of contemporary knighthood, ‘so similar to those levelled by later generations as to make one wonder how seriously the latter should be taken’. ‘Lavish display was a feature of the cult of chivalry a long time before the age of the Valois Dukes of Burgundy.’ And, on the other side of the equation, late medieval chivalry offers rather more than ‘the mere desire to create a heroic illusion’. The absurdly extravagant chivalric ceremonies that Huizinga so lovingly chronicles might in fact have had a serious political purpose, and cannot be dismissed as mere make-believe.106 102 103

104 105 106

Kilgour (1937), pp. 4–5. He immediately disagrees with this view. Lee Patterson, Chaucer and the Subject of History (London: Routledge, 1991). According to Patterson, Huizinga sees chivalry as always having been ‘essentially cosmetic’. Both Kilgour and Ferguson are criticised for watering down this trenchant analysis, by positing a time in which there had indeed been an ‘authentic chivalry’ (pp. 170–2). I would say that Huizinga is more idealistic than this. Huizinga (1987), p. 75. Kilgour (1937), p. 17. Maurice Keen, ‘Huizinga, Kilgour, and the Decline of Chivalry’, Medievalia et Humanistica 8 (1977), pp. 1–20. Recent research has only served to confirm Keen’s analysis. Malcolm Vale’s War and Chivalry (London: Duckworth, 1981) seriously discusses the Orders of Chivalry

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance Under such circumstances, it seems appropriate to reverse the terms in which writers such as Huizinga and Kilgour have drawn up this historical contrast. In fact, the ‘dream’, the fantasy and elaboration that supposedly characterise late medieval culture, lie entirely on the side of the early medieval half of the equation, confected as it is out of romance tropes. This study has tried to stress the efficiency with which the chivalric persona and chivalric literature can create a sense of true, inner nobility. They aim precisely to generate that very sense of an ethos or ‘spirit’ that lies at the heart of accounts of the decline of chivalry. Once such a construct is established as characteristic of a given historical period, once we have acquired a peripheral sense that medieval life really was in some way like a romance, it is all too simple to represent any later manifestation of similar chivalric traits more stringently examined as subtly inauthentic. Such a construct represents a formidable obstacle to the understanding of a text such as Robert Laneham’s Letter, and indeed of Renaissance chivalry generally. In the Letter, we may agree that chivalric forms – high politics and popular culture alike – may seem indecipherable at times, their ‘inner’ meanings necessarily a matter of conjecture, as we speculate about the significance of ritual forms such as the quintain, or the precise political nuances of an entertainment based around a text written over a hundred years previously. The latter perhaps comes closest to the notion of a Renaissance chivalry that can only bear allegorical meaning, yet the Kenilworth Letter’s treatment of the rustic wedding suggests the extent to which chivalric forms remain available as a way of articulating something fundamental to the courtly, male persona, even as it hints at a similar function among the countryfolk he is satirising. The entertainments at Kenilworth serve to suggest the continued capacity of the iconography of chivalry to mediate meaningful messages.107 The general tendency of the historiographic tradition this chapter has examined is to deny any such thing; to state that, by the time of Renaissance, chivalry was dead or at the very least dying. This is, of course, a trope adapted from romance texts themselves, which love to wonder, ‘where have all the old knights gone?’ The fictional resonance may be appropriate. At any rate, the way in which this trope can be reproduced with reference, not just to the

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as something more than glorified gentleman’s clubs, denies that the tournament was a ‘hollow pastime’, a fiction offering a stark contrast to the reality of war (64–87), and presents chivalric warfare itself as being in the mainstream of technological and tactical thinking. Conversely, the picture of early medieval warfare offered by Matthew Strickland’s War and Chivalry: The Conduct and Perception of War in England and Normandy, 1066–1217 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996) differs starkly (and explicitly – see pp. 18–19, 282) from that implied by the likes of Huizinga and Kilgour, revolving as it does around a profitable economy of ransoms, brutality towards the lower orders, economic attrition, and siege warfare. Contrast Alice Miskimin’s ‘Ben Jonson and Captain Cox: Elizabethan Gothic Reconsidered’, Renaissance Drama 8 (1977), pp. 173–202, which compares Laneham with Ben Jonson’s Masque of Owls as a means of asserting the superior modernity of the latter.

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Kenilworth, Chivalry, and the Middle Ages Renaissance, but to a wide range of historical periods, ought perhaps to prompt a qualified scepticism. Commenting in his Preface to The Fortunes of Nigel on the differences between the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras, Walter Scott wrote that the courtly entertainments of the former monarch’s reign ‘had an air of that decent restraint that became the court of a maiden sovereign; and in that earlier period, to use the words of Burke, vice lost half its evil by being deprived of all its grossness’108 – this in contrast to the depravity of the Jacobean court. Scott is quoting from the famous passage of Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France in which Burke bursts out into a hymn of indignation at the treatment of Marie Antoinette: little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leapt from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. – But the age of chivalry is gone. – That of sophisters, oeconomists and calculators has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever . . . It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.109

Burke’s great realisation, that ‘the age of chivalry is gone’, occurs during the French Revolution; Scott introduces his quotation into a passage immediately following one that claims chivalry had died out by the Jacobean period. The thematic resonance seems, at the very least, playful. The notion of the ‘death of chivalry’ might be viewed negatively, as in Burke, or positively – as it broadly is in Scott’s Preface – but in either case what is at issue is the modernity of the age commented upon, whether that be one of enlightenment or of petty-minded ‘oeconomic’ calculation. It is this concern that underpins the tradition that has dominated interpretation of Renaissance chivalry ever since the eighteenth century. There are few exceptions to this rule. Clara Reeve’s study, The Progress Of Romance, convinced that romances may be said to be ‘the polite literature of earlier ages, and . . . the favourite amusements of later times’ aimed ‘to trace the progress’ – that is, the development – ‘of this species of composition’, from Hellenistic romances, through the Middle Ages and Renaissance, up to the modern novel.110 Although she acknowledges in her preface a debt to the scholarship of Warton, Percy, and Hurd, as well as

108 109

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Weinstein ed. (1978), p. 181. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), pp. 169–70. William C. Dowling, ‘Burke and the Age of Chivalry’, Yearbook of English Studies 12 (1982), pp. 109–24 notes that in this passage, chivalry has become less a historical period than a ‘moral attitude’ (114), albeit one perpetually located in the past. Clara Reeve, The Progress of Romance (Colchester: W. Keymer, 1785), 2 volumes, I: iii–iv.

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Chivalry and Romance in the English Renaissance to Susannah Dobson’s translations, her project could not be more at odds with the underlying intentions of those writers, whose preference is, rather, to stop this ‘progress’ dead in its tracks. Struggling with their own self-inflicted historiographical problems, these writers evolve a variety of strategies to reduce literary and cultural history to some sort of order. Each writer differs, but their natural tendency as a whole is to attempt to confine romance to a ‘progress’ of a different sort, something closer to that undertaken by Queen Elizabeth I in the summer of 1575. Instead of an open-ended development, extending threateningly close to and even into their own times, they envisage instead a sort of circular and stately movement, deprived of any narrative energy, one that ultimately ends where it begins, safely bounded within the category of the ‘medieval’. It is a pattern that their modern heirs have, on the whole, been only too happy to follow, one that has ensured that events such as those described in the Letter ascribed to Robert Laneham have had to be viewed through a distorting critical lens – from which perspective the progress of romance in the sixteenth century can only ever be a process of decline.

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CONCLUSION: ‘THE CHRONICLE OF WASTED TIME’ In 1839, an estimated crowd of one hundred thousand people assembled at Eglinton Castle in Scotland. Converging on the tents and pavilions pitched in the park of the castle were to be found the aristocracy in droves, foreigners drawn to the great spectacle to be held there, gentlemen and burghers, farmers, shepherds and peasants, to say nothing of thugs and pickpockets, along with the policemen whose duty it was to control them. They were there to witness a piece of pageantry planned by Archibald Montgomery, the Earl of Eglinton – a great tournament in imitation of the tournaments of the Middle Ages, complete with jousting and even jesters. Thirteen carefully selected members of the aristocracy were to compete under titles that reflected the origins of the entertainment in a taste for chivalric romance: The Knight of the Red Lion, the Knight of the Burning Tower, the Knight of the White Rose. It was also, perhaps, a testament to the influence of Walter Scott, whose fiction did so much to encourage the nineteenth-century fascination with medieval culture. Exhaustively planned and staged at great expense, the event was, none the less, a fiasco. Delayed by some three hours, the procession of all the knights and officers of the tournament, whose duty it was to escort the Queen of Beauty to the lists, finally set out from the castle – to the sound of a clap of thunder. It began to rain. Umbrellas went up. The ground of the lists was churned into mud, through which the knights bravely struggled, mostly missing each other. The jesters, predictably, were not funny. What had been planned as a celebration of the relationship between medieval values and nineteenth-century gentility turned out to be a laughing stock, as the incongruity of the proposed marriage between historical periods became clear for all to see. ‘A knight under an umbrella became the symbol of the tournament, and to many people seemed sufficiently ludicrous to burst the bubble of modern chivalry forever. The tournament became the subject of cartoons, satires, squibs, jokes, and burlesques innumerable.’1 This time, it seemed certain, the distance between the medieval and the modern had been established for all to see. 1

Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1981), p. 103.

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Conclusion Such confidence was misplaced. As Mark Girouard’s account of the nineteenth-century fascination with medieval knighthood – to which I am indebted for this account of the Eglinton tournament – amply makes clear, chivalry in this instance was not so much killed as rained off. The values the Eglinton tournament was supposed to celebrate continued to inspire works of art and patterns of behaviour for decades to come. If chivalry did not die at Eglinton, then where? In Revolutionary France, as Edmund Burke seems to suggest? On the battlefield at Zutphen, with Sir Philip Sidney? Surely it had passed away by the time Edward Herbert tried to retrieve a French girl’s decorative ribbon from one of her countrymen. Did it finally expire in the trenches of the First World War2 – or was Peter of Blois correct in supposing it past its best even in the twelfth century? One of the most remarkable things about chivalry seems to be its capacity to sustain repeated – indeed, innumerable – deaths and rebirths. It is a characteristic born out of the insistent ‘pastness’ encoded in the narrative temporalities beloved of chivalric romance and chivalry as a code of conduct, which render the trope of the ‘death of chivalry’ perpetually available as the marker of an imaginary crisis point, one that ushers in a new age.3 This is not to say that invoking the ‘death of chivalry’ need preclude any reference to actual social or cultural change. But one would not want it to act in such a way as to render almost invisible a genuinely important aspect of any past culture. The tradition developed out of eighteenth-century accounts of chivalry and romance has had just such a serious impact upon critical attitudes towards these subjects as they feature in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Historiographical schemes such as that distinguishing between the ‘medieval’ and the ‘Renaissance’ are not merely dry lines of division cutting across the onward progress of time. They are held in place by a variety of institutional reinforcements, tropes, and representations that can generate and maintain a sense or ‘feel’ for a period. Chivalry is, undoubtedly, one such trope; its presence contributes to our ‘feel’ for the Middle Ages, just as its supposed absence or decline secures the novelty of a new age. And within such a context, as we have seen, early modern chivalry becomes a problem, something to be explained away, its disturbing lack of respect for historiographic boundaries something to be defused through humour. We are left with a situation within which Renaissance readers of romance, or Renaissance exponents of chivalry, can be viewed comfortably as such only if they are seen as objects

2

3

Paul Fussel, The Great War and Modern Memory (London, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977) sees the trauma of the First World War as offering a starting point for ‘modern’ irony, an argument phrased in generic terms, as a rejection of romance: ‘the Western Front is not King Pellam’s Land . . . it will not be restored and made whole, ever, by the expiatory magic of the Grail’ (154). For a general discussion of such fictions of crisis, see Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000).

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‘The Chronicle of Wasted Time’ of comedy – as Quixotic readers, made ridiculous by their ‘escapist’ literary predilections, or as Quixotic knights, whose every attempt to prove their honour merely demonstrates their own irrelevance to the world around them. On this level, chivalry and romance cannot be separated; both are, ultimately, supposed to suffer from a lack of connection to the real world, because that world is assumed to have left them behind. This book has tried to stress the extent to which this represents a misreading, not only of such tropes as they were originally produced in the seventeenth century, but also of the genuine diversity and significance of chivalric representations in that period. To stress the continued relevance and efficacy of chivalric representations is not to deny the quite massive changes that European civilisation underwent between the twelfth and seventeenth centuries – but in most cases, the historians we have been discussing seem reluctant to phrase any such change in any other terms than the absence of the inner qualities chivalric forms are supposed to denote. Such histories of the ‘death’ of chivalry are themselves, I have suggested, inextricably bound up with the ideological strategies they attempt to confine to the past, unable to see beyond what this study has tried to stress, chivalry’s involvement with themes of true nobility.4 Yet this production of ‘inner’ virtue is as essential a component of medieval and Renaissance thinking about status as the merely ‘external’ paraphernalia of titles, coats of arms and tournaments that Arthur Ferguson emphasises whilst attempting to demonstrate the defunct character of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century chivalry. Viewing attempts to ‘prove’ one’s inner nobility of spirit as an essentially strategic effect, however, offers a route out of the impasse that the likes of Ferguson find themselves in. This study has tried to show individuals using, rather than embodying (or being possessed by), chivalric forms, precisely so as to create this legitimating impression of an authentic spirit. And it is precisely the efficacy of such representations within the social world that their authors were addressing that gives the lie to the notion that chivalry and books of chivalry alike must necessarily have been signs of futility, of backward-mindedness and archaism, or even, at the extreme end of such formulations, of insanity. Chivalric iconography and romance tropes are deployed by Francis Kirkman, to articulate his own rise from apprenticeship to a position of commercial independence; by Katherine Philips, in forming relations of friendship with her social superiors; and by Edward Herbert, in an assertion of the ‘honour’ proper to his lineage; even Jacobean drama, seemingly so scathing about the emptiness of such representations, in the viciousness with which it contests the right of the unworthy to 4

It is perhaps unsurprising that narratives of this sort should remain so popular. To this day, themes of war remain a compelling way of securing the modernity of an age – of any age, up to the present day. See, for example, Michael Ignatieff ’s The Warrior’s Honor (London: Chatto and Windus, 1998), which invokes ‘warrior codes’ such as chivalry (117–18) in discussing newer, modern methods of waging war.

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Conclusion them, and in its focus on their ability to gull the unwitting, actually serves to suggest something of their continued importance. Surely it is stretching credibility to suggest that all of these figures must have been Quixotically deluded as to the real impact of such manoeuvres on their intended audiences? Rather than asserting their automatic obsolescence, this study has tried to suggest something of the diversity, the sheer flexibility, of chivalric forms; their appeal to groupings and individuals both noble and common, male and female, urban and rural. Recognition of the ‘romantic’ elements of Renaissance culture has, I would suggest, a healthily destabilising effect on the various narratives of modernity so popular among historians who deal with the period (it also suggests the extent to which chivalry figures as an essential component of such schemes). Certainly, the institution of chivalry undergoes innumerable changes between the eleventh and seventeenth centuries – most importantly, perhaps, in its military role, with innovations such as the use of pikes compromising the efficacy of the mounted knight in battle5 – but, as this study hopes to have shown, chivalry was always far more than just a system for waging war; it is a system of social distinction, and as such enduringly influential. Militarily, chivalry may have been waning in significance. But as a way of thinking about social status as rooted in a virtuous (or belligerent) temperament, the narrative patterns this book has examined continue to be of importance.6 We ought to be wary of the ease with which, in a critical system which naturally tends to parcel its objects of study into such categories as the old and the new, the progressive and the retrograde, the classical and the romantic, chivalry almost inevitably gets assigned to the ‘past’ half of the equation. It would be far more accurate, rather than subscribing to a fixed predictive thesis that always finds in an institution such as chivalry the same values, one due to be superseded by a new set, to see change being played out through these forms. One can certainly find reactionary or conservative figures fashioning their selves in terms of romance imagery, but this need not be the case. The death of chivalry is often counterpointed with complimentary narratives about (for instance) the rise of capitalism, but we have already seen how Arthurian and chivalric imagery offered a means of self-assertion 5

6

See Michael Roberts, Essays in Swedish History (London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson, 1967), ‘The Military Revolution, 1560–1660’, pp. 195–225. It is striking how small a part the horse has to play in many of the early modern representations of chivalry discussed in this book; yet as a signifier of nobility, its importance seems to have continued undiminished. As a late instance of the influence of this peculiar idea, that our masters ought to be better people than we are, one might consider a novel such as Dickens’ Great Expectations. Rather like early modern writers on honour, Dickens’ tale asks, what does it mean to be a gentleman? Is it about money, or education, or manners, or does it reside in an indefinable inner nobility? Rather like the chivalric narratives we have been examining, Great Expectations ultimately settles on the last option – although, equally characteristically, Pip gets all the other things as well, albeit with difficulty. Morally compromised and financially embarassed though he may be, a permanant return to the forge does not seem to be in prospect.

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‘The Chronicle of Wasted Time’ for the mercantile classes of early modern London. Chivalry was a language, not a political position, and there is abundant evidence that it was a language that continued to be spoken by any number of early modern men and women well into the seventeenth century, that it continued to be a persuasive and plausible mode of self-presentation. Chivalry was not an ideological straitjacket to the figures I have discussed in this book, but rather a way of asserting and defending their individual interests and social mobility – and attacking those of others. Its continued relevance is suggested by its ability to serve different and even conflicting interests and ends. It is wrong to assume automatically that chivalry and the literature of chivalry must have been an irrelevant or even retarding force in Renaissance society. So long as we refuse to see that it was still the single most important discourse regarding honour in this period, and therefore offered a route for new forms of social action to attain some sort of definition, chivalry will always remain the significant other of anything that we might care to define as progressive – always, in short, be confined to the past, and thus always remain, for the present, a waste of time.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY Works in Manuscript British Library MS Add. 6297. British Library MS Add. 23146. British Library MS Add. 34657. British Library MS Harley 2252. British Library MS Harley 6395. British Library MS Harley 6578. British Library MS Lansdowne 99. British Library MS Lansdowne 766. British Library MS Royal 14. E. III. College of Arms MS R. 19. College of Arms MSS Curia Militaris, 7/50, 7/52, 7/87, 7/91, 7/102, 9/4/27.

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INDEX Amadis de Gaule, 2, 5–6, 10, 12, 17–19, 20–3, 28–30, 32–3, 57–9, 64, 66–8, 79 n. 17, 99–100, 146, 162, 176–7, 190, 211, 225 Amadis of Greece, 18, 29, 31 amicitia, 9, 38, 195–200 Amyot, Jacques, 15 Andrews, Michael, 114–16 Anton, Robert, 43–5, 60 Ariosto, Ludovico, 4–5, 10, 22, 28, 79 n. 17, 216 Arthurian romances, 2, 6–8, 10, 12–14, 16–17, 20, 25, 28, 30–1, 33, 37, 76–7, 86 n. 32, 100, 103–5, 107, 176 Arthur of Little Britain, 12, 20, 30, 80, 176 Ascham, Roger, 7, 10, 12, 17–18, 24, 28, 34, 38, 147, 197–8 Ashley, Robert, 30 Aubrey, John, 31, 173 n. 17 Bacon, Francis, 73–4, 98, 146, 148–50, 221 Baker-Smith, Dominic, 103 n. 16 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 121–2, 125 Bald, R.C., 65 n. 63 Bannister, Mark, 191 Barash, Carol, 175 n. 21, 181, 185 n. 58, 193, 199–200 Barber, Richard, 85 n. 31 Barclay, John, 176, 189 Barker, Juliet, 85 n. 31 Barton, Anne, 190 n. 80 Bates, Catherine, 73 n. 2 Bawcutt, N.W., 140 n. 15 Beal, Peter, 172–4, 175 n. 20, 182–4, 199 n. 114 Beaumont, Francis, 185; The Knight of the Burning Pestle, 106, 119–28, 131–2, 145 Beers, Henry A., 206 n. 13 Berkenhead, John (‘Cratander’), 181, 192 Berry, Phillipa, 79 n. 17 Bevis of Southampton, 2, 5, 7 n. 18, 8, 10–11, 17, 21–2, 25, 29–30, 32–3, 83 n. 24, 89, 220 n. 73, 225 Billacois, Francois, 148 n. 42 Bird, William, 135 Bloch, R. Howard, 136 n. 5 Blount, Thomas, 31, 84 Boke of St Albans, The, 47, 49, 62 Bolton, Edmund, 50 n. 27, 52, 110 n. 33 Borges, Jorge Luis, 168

Bossewell, John, 50 n. 27 Bosswell, John, 60 n. 51 Bourdieu, Pierre, 17 n. 52, 26, 32 Boyle, Robert, 189 n. 78 Boyle, Roger, Earl of Orrery, 183, 189 n. 78 Bradbrook, Muriel, 94 Brand, John, 85 n. 29 Brault, Gerald J., 61 n. 56 Bruster, Douglas, 111 n. 36 Bryskett, Lodovik, 147 Bryson, Frederick R., 157 n. 76 Bunyan, John, 32, 213 Burckhardt, Jacob, 214, 228–9 Burke, Edmund, 233, 236 Burke, Kenneth, 72 n. 82 Burke, Peter, 27, 126 n. 72, 209 n. 26 Burn, J.H., 95, 97 n. 55 Burre, Walter, 119–20, 122, 131 Burton, Robert, 48–9, 84 Butler, Samuel, 62, 185 Byron, George Gordon Lord, 105 Calahorra, Diego Otuñez de, The Mirror of Knighthood, 2, 18, 26–7, 30, 34 n. 126, 35, 109, 120, 162, 169–70, 176 Cantor, Norman B., 228 n. 90 Carlson, David, 63 n. 59 Carthenay, Jean de, 213 Cartwright, William, 182, 195; The Lady-Errant, 185 Caspari, Fritz, 71 n. 81 Cave, Terence, 14 n. 43, 15 n. 44 & 46 Cavendish, Margaret, 199 Cavendish, William, 190 n. 80 Cecil, Robert, Earl of Salisbury, 114, 116 Cecil, William, Lord Burghley, 3–6, 29, 75 n. 9, 94 Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de, Don Quixote, 2, 18, 20, 35–8, 99–101, 104–9, 119–20, 127–33, 139, 142–5, 148, 163 n. 83, 166–8, 185, 215, 225, 237–8 Chalmers, Hero, 65 n. 64 Chapman, George, 102 n. 10; Eastward Ho (with Ben Jonson and John Marston), 106–12, 115, 119, 126–30, 132, 145 Charles I, 181, 187–90, 192 Charles II, 190–2 Chatterton, Thomas, 210

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Index Chaucer, Geoffrey, 49–50, 128, 169 n. 1, 176, 214, 216, 220 n. 73, 224 Cheney, Patrick, 1 n. 2 Chivalry, 3, 7, 24, 81–2, 84–5, 97–8, 215–19, 221, 227–33, 235–9; and humanism, 7, 33, 71–2, 103, 197–8, 217–19; and historiography, 105–6, 126–33, 142–5, 166–8, 202–39; in the Renaissance, 7, 35–8, 60, 71–2, 80–9, 97–8, 105–9, 123–5, 126–33, 135, 187–91, 215–19, 225–34, 236–9; ‘the death of chivalry’, 105, 109, 126–33, 167, 202, 217–19, 221, 227–39 Cicero, Marcus Tullius, 33, 196–8 Cleland, James, 46, 155 Cline, Ruth Huff, 214 n. 53 Close, Anthony, 105 n. 19 Cobler of Canterburie, The, 26 Cole, Mary Hill, 98 n. 57 Cole, William, 143–4 Colie, Rosalie, 136–7 Colyns, John, 31 Cope, Jackson, 121 Cornwallis, Sir William, 30 Cotterel, Charles (‘Poliarchus’), 172, 176, 178–81, 183–5, 190–1, 199 Cotton, Robert, 187 n. 68 Court of Chivalry, The, 52–5, 68, 149–57, 187–8 Cox, Captain, 32, 89–91, 95–6, 205, 207–8, 225, 232 n. 107 Crane, R.S., 19 Crane, Susan 16–17, 33, 214 n. 53 Croft, Pauline, 114 n. 45 Cromwell, Oliver, 191 Dante Alighieri, 16 Davies, John, 184–5 Day, John, The Isle of Gulls, 106, 112–19, 129–30 de Brie, Germain (‘Brixius’), 103–4 ‘Declaration of the Faith, and a Justification of the proceedings of King Henry the Eighth in Matters of Religion’, 8 Dee, John, 29 de Guaras, Antonio, 78 n. 14 DeJean, Joan, 176 n. 27 de la Noue, François, 5, 12–14, 24, 146–7, 148 n. 42, 156, 169 Delany, Paul, 167 de la Primaudaye, Peter, 8 n. 19 Deloney, Thomas, 20–1, 23, 33 de Luna, B.N., 114–16 Dennys, Rodney, 47 n. 20 Dent, Arthur, 11 Dering, Edward, 11–12, 24 Despagne, John, 135, 157 de Troyes, Chrétien, 86 n. 32, 128 Devereux, Robert, Second Earl of Essex, 102, 187 n. 68 Devereux, Robert, Third Earl of Essex, 30 Dickens, Charles, 238 n. 6

Digby, Sir Kenelm, 29–30, 189 Dobin, Howard, 10 n. 27 Dobson, Susannah, 211 n. 39, 213, 234 Doebler, John, 126 Donne, John, 102, 196 Doody, Margaret Anne, 177 Doran, Susan, 81 Dowling, William C., 233 n. 109 Duby, Georges, 71 n. 79 Dudley, Robert, Earl of Leicester, 74–82, 86–7, 95, 203–4, 222–7 Duell-ease, 147, 148 n. 41 Duelling, 38, 68, 85, 103–4, 137–8, 140–3, 145–60, 200 Dugard, Thomas, 30–1 Dugdale, William, herald, 50–1, 60–2 Duncan-Jones, Katherine, 44 n. 11 DuPriest, Travis, 195 D’Urfè, Honorè, 175–8, 189–90 Dutton, Richard, 113, 114 n. 46, 115 Edelman, Nathan, 209 n. 29 Eliot, George, 181 Eliot, John, 147 Elizabeth I, 37, 73–84, 87, 95, 97–8, 107, 109, 203–4, 206, 214, 221–7, 234 Ellis, George, 219 Elton, G.R., 75 Elyot, Sir Thomas, 197–8 Empson, William, 63 English Courtier and the Cuntry-gentleman, The, 25 Erasmus, Desiderius, 13, 15, 26 Eusebius, 8 Evans, Rowland, 140 Favine, Andrew, 135 Fenton, Edward, 14, 25 Ferguson, Arthur, 6–7, 16, 34, 109, 208 n. 25, 229–30, 237 Ferne, John, 47–9, 53, 60 n. 52, 71, 135, 150, 155 Ferrar, Nicholas, 5, 22 Finch, Francis (‘Palaemon’), 176, 185 Fleishman, Avrom, 224 Fletcher, John, 188 Four Sons of Aymon, The, 18, 25, 68 n. 73, 89 Fraser, Russel, 4 n. 9 Freud, Sigmund, 66 n. 65 Frye, Susan, 75, 76 n. 10, 78, 79 n. 16, 80–1, 87, 94 Fumaroli, Marc, 15 n. 44 Furnivall, F.J., 96, 205 Fussel, Paul, 236 n. 2 Fussner, F. Smith, 208 n. 25 Gamelyn, 22 n. 74 Gascoigne, George, 83, 94, 95; The Princely Pleasures at Kenelworth Castle, 74–81, 84; The Spoyle of Antwerp, 80

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Index Gayton, Edmund, Pleasant Notes Upon Don Quixot, 99–107, 119 n. 54, 126 n. 71 Gibbon, Edward, 212 n. 40 Girouard, Mark, 235 n. 1, 236 Golder, Harold, 32 n. 121 Goldringham, Harry, 77 n. 13 Gombrich, E.H., 228 n. 89 Goodman, Jennifer R., 29 n. 100, 34 Gordon, George, 209 n. 29 Gorges, Arthur, 102 Gosse, Edmund, 173–4, 198, 199 n. 116 Greene, Robert, 26 Greer, Germaine, 182 n. 48, 183 n. 53 Greg, W.W., 113–14 Grey, Jane, 29 Gresham, Sir Thomas, 31 Griffin, Benjamin, 87 n. 35 Gurr, Andrew, 131 n. 82 Guy of Warwick, 2, 8, 10, 17, 21, 25, 29–31, 33, 70 n. 78, 225

Humanism, 6–10, 14–16, 24, 71–2, 103, 129, 197–9, 217–18 Hume, Alexander, 28 Hume, David, 211 Hunt, William, 131 n. 82 Huon of Bordeaux, 8, 30, 89, 220 n. 73 Hurd, Richard, 203–8, 210–16, 218–19, 233 Hutson, Lorna, 15 n. 45, 197 Hutton, Ronald, 87 n. 33 & 34 Ignatieff, Michael, 237 n. 4 Ipomydon, 31 Isle of Dogs, The, 112–13

Hackett, Helen, 34, 57 n. 45, 170 n. 8 Hale, J.R., 210 n. 31 Harbage, Alfred, 131 n. 82 Hardinge, George, 144 Harris, Sir Thomas, 187–8 Harvey, John, 10, 25 Heal, Felicity, 162 n. 81 Hegel, Georg, 228 Heigham, Thomas, 147 Helgerson, Richard, 6 n. 13, 36 n. 127 Heliodorus, 12, 14–15 Henrietta Maria, 181, 188–90, 192 Henson, Eithne, 31 n. 114 Heraldry, 45, 47–8, 50–5, 60–1, 69, 91–2, 96, 101–2, 143 n. 19, 229 Herbert, Edward, Lord Herbert of Cherbury, 38, 138–68, 200, 218, 221, 236–7; De Veritate, 139–40, 144, 165; Life, 138–45, 147–8, 156–68 Herbert, William, Earl of Pembroke, 29 Heroicall Adventures of the Knight of the Sea, 43 Heywood, Thomas, The Four Prentices of London, 120, 123 Hill, Christopher, 208 n. 25 Hill, Eugene, 144–5 Hobbes, Thomas, 31, 145 Hobby, Elaine, 181 Hoby, Sir Edward, 112 Hock-Tuesday show, 82 n. 23, 84–9 Holles, Gervase, 156 Holles, John, 159 Horowitz, Louise K., 128 Howard, Henry, Earl of Northampton, 146, 149–50 Howard, Thomas, Earl of Arundel, 187–8 Howell, James, 188–9 Huggins, William, 208 Huizinga, Johan, 227–32

Jaeger, C. Stephen, 33 James I, 44, 46, 107, 109, 113, 140–1, 146, 147 n. 40, 148–50, 190, 221 Jinner, Sarah, 182 n. 46 Johnson, Samuel, 31 Johnston, Arthur, 202, 206 n. 13 Jonson, Ben, 99, 112, 124 n. 67, 166, 171; The Alchemist, 99–100, 106, 130 n. 80; Eastward Ho (with George Chapman and John Martson), 106–12, 115, 119, 126–30, 132, 145; Epicoene, 101–4, 107, 126 n. 72; Every Man Out of His Humour, 106; ‘An Execration Upon Vulcan’, 100–1, 105; The Masque of Owls, 205, 232 n. 107 Keen, Maurice, 3 n. 5, 46 n. 17, 61 n. 58, 231 Kendrick, T.D., 14 n. 42 Kenilworth festivities, 37, 74–98, 122, 123 n. 63, 171, 202–7, 214, 221, 224–7 Kermode, Frank, 236 n. 3 Kiernan, V.G., 148 n. 42 Kilgour, Raymond, 229–32 King, Andrew, 6 n. 14 King, John, 4–5 Kirkman, Francis, 36–7, 63–72, 176, 201, 237; Amadis de Gaule, 67–8; Clerio and Lozia, 68–9; Don Bellianis, 68, 176; The Unlucky Citizen, 63–72 Knights, L.C., 112 n. 37 Kramnick, Jonathan Brody, 207, 208 n. 24 Krontiris, Tina, 34 n. 126 Kuin, R.J.P., 94 la Calprenède, Gautier de Costes de, 195, 220; Cassandra, 2, 176, 178–80, 185, 190–2, 200; Cleopatra, 2, 176–7, 184, 193 n. 90 La Curne de Sainte-Palaye, Jean Baptiste de, 211–14, 219 Laing, Alastair, 143 n. 19 Lancelot du Lac, 8, 10, 16, 28, 61, 170, 211, 213 Laneham, Robert, A Letter: Whearin, part of the Entertainment Untoo the Queenz Majesty . . . is Signified, 74–98, 101, 105, 122, 132, 204–8, 214, 219, 221–2, 232, 234 Lanyer, Aemelia, 200

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Index Larkin, William, 143 n. 19 Lawes, Henry, 182 Lee, Sidney, 143 n. 21, 144 Le Morte Arhture, 31 Lennox, Charlotte, 169 n. 1, 177 n. 27 Leonard, Irving A., 111 n. 35 Leowenstein, Joseph, 101 n. 7 Levine, Joseph M., 208 n. 25 Lucas, Caroline, 170 n. 8 Lukács, George, 220 Lybeaus Desconus, 43

O’Connor, John J., 12 n. 34, 34 n. 126 Oliver, Isaac, 142–4 Olson, Glending, 17 Overbury, Sir Thomas, 26–7, 32, 35, 127, 170–1, 200

MacKisack, May, 209 Maclean, Ian, 192 n. 88 Malory, Sir Thomas, Morte Darthur, 2, 6 n. 14, 7, 12, 24, 34, 37, 40–2, 49, 55–7, 60–3, 74, 79–80, 89–90, 92–3, 124, 137 n. 8, 177, 206, 208, 225 Manley, Delarivière, 172–4 Manley, Lawrence, 106 Marcus, Leah, 88 n. 37 Markham, Francis, 46, 49, 112 Marston, John, Eastward Ho (with George Chapman and Ben Jonson), 106–12, 115, 119, 126–30, 132, 145 Martin, Humphrey, 74, 94–5 Mary, Queen of Scots, 28 Maslen, R.W., 12 n. 32, 20 n. 66 McCanles, Michael, 46 n. 17 McCoy, Richard, 33–4, 75 n. 7, 95 n. 51, 98 n. 58, 187 n. 68 McKeon, Michael, 69, 106 McRae, Andrew, 102 n. 13 Miller, Edwin, 27 Milles, Thomas, 46 Millican, Charles Bowie, 124 n. 66 Mills, Laurens J., 196 n. 98 Milton, John, 31, 189–90, 192 n. 87 Miner, Earl, 193 n. 89 Miskimin, Alice, 232 n. 107 Mitchell, Jerome, 219 n. 72 Mommsen, Theodor, 209 n. 27, 218 n. 65 Montagu, George, 143 Moore, Helen D., 16 n. 47, 34 More, Thomas, 9, 103–4, 108 Moryson, Fynes, 68 n. 71 Mulcaster, Richard, 124 Murch, Herbert, 119 n. 55, 126 Murillo, L.A., 106 Nashe, Thomas, 7, 10 n. 27, 24, 97 n. 56 Nerlich, Michael, 110 n. 32 Newcombe, Lori Humphrey, 26–7, 32, 171 n. 10, 177 n. 28 Newman, Karen, 103 n. 14 Nichols, John, 205 North, Mary, 186 North, Thomas, 18 Nuttall, A.D., 5 n. 11

Palmerin romances, 18, 20, 28, 30, 64, 100, 109, 120, 177, 190 Panofsky, Erwin, 216 n. 58, 230 Parker, Patricia, 169 Parody and burlesque, 43, 96–8, 99–133, 166–8 Parrot, Henry, 25 Patchell, Mary, 19 n. 63 Patten, William, 74 n. 6, 75 n. 9, 94 Patterson, Annabel, 187–8 Patterson, Lee, 231 n. 103 Paynell, Thomas, 13, 16 Peacham, Henry, 17 Pearsall, Derek, 28 n. 96 Peele, George, 29 Peltonen, Markku, 150, 159 Perceforest, 213 Percy, Thomas, 31, 205–7, 211–12, 219, 233 Perkins, William, 10–11 Peyton, Thomas, 157–9 Philips, James (‘Antenor’), 175, 180, 199 Philips, Katherine (‘Orinda’), 38, 171–87, 192–201, 237; Poems (1664), 172–3, 182–4; Poems (1667), 171–3, 184; Pompey, 183 Phythian-Adams, Charles, 87–8 Piper, David, 143 n. 21 Pittock, Joan, 206 n. 13 Pocock, J.G.A., 208 n. 25 Pope, Alexander, 203, 216 Potter, Lois, 181 n. 40, 187, 191 n. 85, 195 n. 96 Powell, Thomas, 170 Puttenham, George, 30 Putter, Ad, 33 Quarles, Francis, 30, 84, 188 Quixotic readers, 14–16, 35–6, 107, 109, 127–33, 159–60, 200, 202, 225, 237–8 Read, Conyers, 29 n. 101 Reeve, Clara, 233–4 Richmond, Velma Bourgeois, 31 n. 112 Roberts, Michael, 238 n. 5 Robinson, Fred C., 202 Robinson, Richard, 61 n. 56, 124 Romance, as genre, 1–3, 5, 40–5, 55–9, 128–30, 176–7, 187–92, 210–14; attacks upon, 4–5, 6–18, 19–24, 32, 43–4, 104–9, 119–33; defences of, 17–19, 33–4, 214; ‘improbability’ of, 14–16, 20–1, 129–30, 212; ‘pastness’ of, 1–3, 34–5, 37, 54–5, 128, 190, 236; readership, 24–32, 55, 62–72, 89–90, 106, 120, 169–71; as a Renaissance genre, 2, 6, 10, 13, 20, 22–3, 33–4, 176–7, 214, 216–19

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Index Rosen, Alan, 136–7 Rossi, Mario, 144 Rovang, Paul, 6 n. 14

Strong, Roy, 33–4, 75, 80 n. 19, 143 n. 22 Stow, John, 214 Strutt, Joseph, 85 n. 29 Sullivan, Ceri, 130 n. 80

Saltonstall, Wye, 23, 177 Salzman, Paul, 21–4, 34 Saunders, J.W., 4 n. 8, 180 Saviolo, Vincentio, 156 Schlauch, Margaret, 19–24, 34 Scott, David, 75 n. 9, 94–5, 204 Scott, Walter, 96, 212 n. 40, 219–21, 235; The Fortunes of Nigel, 220–1, 233; Kenilworth, 38–9, 74, 95, 205, 219–27 Segar, William, 48, 135, 136 n. 4, 154–5 Selden, John, 135, 209 n. 29 Serjeantson, R.W., 145 n. 29 Shakespeare, William, 171; As You Like It, 22 n. 74, 116, 154–5; A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 118 n. 52; Henry IV Part II, 123; King Lear, 134–8, 141, 146, 159; The Merchant of Venice, 222; Othello, 99; Sonnet 106, 1–2, 24 n. 79; The Tempest, 221; Troilus and Cressida, 221; Twelfth Night, 103; The Winter’s Tale, 43 n. 6, 55 Shannon, Laurie J., 194 n. 92 Shelton, Thomas, 99, 130. See also Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel de Shuttleworth, John, 144, 167 Sidney, Mary, Countess of Pembroke, 200 Sidney, Sir Philip, 15, 17, 22, 29, 116–17, 167, 215, 221, 229, 236; The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, 2, 4, 22–3, 30, 68 n. 73, 112–19, 170, 176–8, 179 n. 34, 187–90, 197, 221 Sidney, Sir Robert, 29 Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, 33 Sir Launfal, 31 Sir Tristram, 10, 13, 16, 30, 170, 208 Skinner, Quentin, 46 n. 17 Smith, Nigel, 189 n. 78, 191 n. 84 Smith, R.J., 208 n. 25 Snow, Vernon F., 30 n. 106 Souers, Philip Webster, 176, 193, 199 n. 116 Spelman, Henry, 209 n. 29 Spenser, Edmund, 206–8, 214, 216–18; Complaints, 4; The Faerie Queene, 1 n. 2, 3–6, 22, 36 n. 127, 42–3, 55, 80, 100, 139, 143, 169, 185, 206, 214, 216–18; The Shepheardes Calendar, 206 Spufford, Margaret, 20, 22–4, 27, 32, 44 n. 9, 65 n. 63, 70 n. 78 Squibb, G.D., 52 n. 35, 187 n. 69 Stachniewski, John, 11 n. 29 Stevenson, Laura Caroline, 21 n. 70 Stewart, Alan, 8, 24, 150 n. 51, 197–8, 218 n. 63 Stewart, Charles, 28 Stone, Lawrence, 44 n. 11, 107 n. 28, 159 n. 79, 188 n. 71 Strickland, Matthew, 231 n. 106

Taylor, Dick, 29 n. 104 Taylor, Jeremy, 185–6, 196 Taylor, John, 199 n. 114 Thomas, Henry, 19 n. 63, 27 Thomas, Patrick, 175 n. 22, 185–6 Tillyard, E.M.W., 98 Tofte, Robert, 25 Treasurie of Amadis of Fraunce, 15–16, 31 Tyler, Margaret, 18 Tyndale, William, 8–10, 24 Underdowne, Thomas, 12, 23–4 Ungerer, Gustav, 29 n. 102 Vale, Malcolm, 231 n. 106 Van Dorsten, J.A., 80 n. 19 Vaughan, William, 10 n. 26, 18 Veevers, Erica, 188 n. 72 & 74, 189 Villiers, George, Duke of Buckingham, 187–8 Vives, Juan Luis, 13–14, 170 Vogt, George McGill, 46 n. 17, 61 Wagner, Anthony, 50 n. 27 Waller, Edmund, 191 Walpole, Horace, 138–45, 148, 160, 165–8, 177 Warton, Thomas, 139 n. 13, 205–8, 210–12, 214, 216–20, 227, 230, 233 Watson, Curtis Brown, 46 n. 14 Watt, Tessa, 27 Weisinger, Herbert, 210 n. 31 Wernham , R.B., 78 n. 14 Willey, Basil, 144, 167 William of Nassington, 17 Wilson, Charles, 78 n. 14 Wilson, E.M., 104–5 Wilson, Katherina M., 176 n. 25 Women and romance, 13, 25–8, 38, 127, 130, 169–71, 176–80, 184–7, 192–3 Wood, William, 123 n. 63 Woodville, Elizabeth, 28–9 Woolf, D.R., 208 n. 25 Wright, Louis B., 27, 63 n. 63, 170–1 Wriothsley, Henry, Earl of Southampton, 29 Wroth, Lady Mary, The Countess of Montgomery’s Urania, 2, 29 n. 104 Yates, Frances, 33–4, 75 Young, Alan, 81 Yvain and Gawain, 128 Ziolkowski, Eric, 106, 133 Zitner, Sheldon P., 119 n. 55, 121, 125 n. 70, 126

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Studies in Renaissance Literature PREVIOUS VOLUMES

Volume 1: The Theology of John Donne Jeffrey Johnson Volume 2: Doctrine and Devotion in Seventeenth-Century Poetry Studies in Donne, Herbert, Crashaw and Vaughan R.V. Young Volume 3: The Song of Songs in English Renaissance Literature Kisses of their Mouths Noam Flinker Volume 4: King James I and the Religious Culture of England James Doelman Volume 5: Neo-historicism: Studies in Renaissance Literature, History and Politics edited by Robin Headlam Wells, Glenn Burgess and Rowland Wymer Volume 6: The Uncertain World of Samson Agonistes John T. Shawcross Volume 7: Milton and the Terms of Liberty edited by Graham Parry and Joad Raymond Volume 8: George Sandys: Travel, Colonialism and Tolerance in the Seventeenth Century James Ellison Volume 9: Shakespeare and Machiavelli John Roe Volume 10: John Donne's Professional Lives edited by David Colclough