The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser and Jonson (Routledge Studies in Renaissance Literature)

The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson As a powerful vehicle for the creation and circulation of mean...

Author: Mary Ellen Lamb

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The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson

As a powerful vehicle for the creation and circulation of meanings, literature played a crucial role in the early modern production of popular culture. This book uses literature by Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson to investigate the social narratives of several social groups – an urban, middling group; an elite at the court of James; and an aristocratic faction from the countryside. Under the pressure of increasing economic stratification, these social factions created cultural identities to distinguish themselves often in relationship with lower status groups with which they yet retained complex entanglements. As they re-imagined an older, traditional culture according to their own agenda, literature provided a site for the circulation of their self-narratives which, in turn, shaped writings by well-known authors. Focusing on Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Merry Wives of Windsor, Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, and Jonson’s Oberon, The Fairy Prince and The Sad Shepherd, Mary Ellen Lamb explores the ways in which early modern literature formed a particularly productive site of contest for deep social changes, and how these changes in turn played a large role in shaping some of the most well-known works of the period. This book breaks new ground by considering productions of popular culture from above, rather than from below. Drawing from theorists of cultural studies, such as Pierre Bourdieu, Roger Chartier, and John Fiske, this project synthesizes work from disparate fields to provide new readings of well-known literary works. It will be of particular interest to literary scholars, to cultural and social historians, and to general readers interested in fairies, old wives’ tales and hobby-horses. Mary Ellen Lamb is Professor in the Department of English, Southern Illinois University, in Carbondale, Illinois, USA. She is the author of Gender and Authorship in the Sidney Circle, and has published widely in journals such as Shakespeare Quarterly, Shakespeare Survey, English Literary Renaissance, Review of English Studies, Spenser Studies, and Criticism. She is currently editor of the Sidney Journal.

Routledge studies in renaissance literature and culture

1 Stillness in Motion in the Seventeenth-Century Theatre P.A. Skantze 2 The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson Mary Ellen Lamb 3 Forgetting in Early Modern English Literature and Culture Lethe’s legacies Edited by Christopher Ivic and Grant Williams 4 Luce Irigaray and Premodern Culture Thresholds of history Edited by Theresa Krier and Elizabeth D. Harvey 5 Writing, Geometry and Space in Seventeenth-Century England and America Circles in the sand Jess Edwards 6 Dramatists and their Manuscripts in the Age of Shakespeare, Jonson, Middleton and Heywood Authorship, authority and the playhouse Grace Ioppolo

The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson

Mary Ellen Lamb

First published 2006 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2006 Mary Ellen Lamb

This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2006. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN10: 0-415-28881-9 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-203-50685-5 (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-28881-1 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-50685-1 (ebk)

For John, my only son

Contents

1

Acknowledgments

ix

Producing popular cultures

1

PART I

Fairies, old wives’ tales, and hobby-horses: rising to (in)visibility

25

2

Taken by the fairies

29

3

Old wives’ tales

45

4

Hobby-horses and fellow travelers

63

PART II

William Shakespeare

89

5

A Midsummer Night’s Dream: breeching the binary

93

6

The Merry Wives of Windsor: domestic nationalism and the refuse of the realm

125

PART III

Edmund Spenser

161

7

163

The Faerie Queene: vanishing fairies and dissolving courtiers

viii

Contents

PART IV

Ben Jonson 8

195

Oberon, The Fairy Prince (1611) and the great fairy caper; The Sad Shepherd (c.1637) and the topography of the devil’s arse

197

Conclusion

229

Notes Bibliography Index

232 241 264

Acknowledgments

A decade ago, I never would have thought that my few scattered thoughts gathered together in short conference papers could have developed into the abiding passion that this book has become. As I look back to those first papers, I feel gratitude to those many colleagues who offered encouragement, asked hard questions, and volunteered bibliography. I would particularly like to thank colleagues from the Shakespeare Association of America, from the Renaissance Society of America, from the International Medieval and Renaissance Conference held annually at Kalamazoo, and from the Spenser conferences held in New Haven in 1996 and 2001. Without these gatherings, I would never have understood the wider implications of my initial readings. I owe a debt to all of those unnamed colleagues who asked what I was working on and then listened with real interest as I described a project that only gradually took shape. I am inspired by their example to try to listen as carefully to others who are struggling with insights that are not yet fully formed. I thank my students for their willingness, on an almost daily basis, to entertain unfamiliar ideas and to offer their own as we worked through difficult passages in early modern writings. I feel very fortunate to be part of this profession. I owe even more gratitude to colleagues who generously took time from their own busy lives and work to read drafts of individual chapters. Their thoughtful comments helped me to think through core issues on a deeper level. I would like to acknowledge Bruce Smith, Dympna Callaghan, Heather Dubrow, Linda Woodbridge, Garrett Sullivan, Arthur Kinney, Clare Kinney, Lauren Silberman, William Oram, Gail Kern Paster, Naomi Liebler, Phyllis Gorfain, Ryan Netzley, Peter Millington, Pam Brown, Peter Berek, and Zoltan Markus. I thank Robert Weimann, Diane Purkiss, Donald Stump, and Marlo Belschner for encouraging conversations. I especially thank Barbara Hodgdon. I thank Liz Thompson and Terry Clague of Routledge for their continuing faith in this project. Any remaining infelicities of thought or expression are mine alone. Finally, I wish to thank my immediate family, my husband Bill, my son John, and my mother Irene, for their patience in the inevitable ups and downs that are part of my writing process. Without their support, this project would not exist. The authors and publishers would like to thank the following for granting permission to reproduce material in this work:

x

Acknowledgments

AMS Press, Inc. for permission to reprint material from the essay, “The Red Crosse Knight, St. George, and the Appropriation of Popular Culture,” by Mary Ellen Lamb, originally published in Spenser Studies 18 (2004: 185–208). University Press of Kentucky for permission to reprint the essay, “Gloriana, Acrasia, and the House of Busirane: Gendered Fictions in The Faerie Queen as Fairy Tale,” by Mary Ellen Lamb, in Patrick Cheney and Lauren Silberman (eds), Worldmaking Spenser, University Press of Kentucky, 2000, pp. 81–100. Critical Survey for permission to reprint the essay, “Old Wives Tales, George Peele, and Narrative Abjection,” by Mary Ellen Lamb, published in Critical Survey 14.1 (2002): 28–43. Morris Library, Southern Illinois University Carbondale, for permission to reprint a photograph from Vol. 2, part 1 of Roxburghe Ballads (1872), p. 60. The Johns Hopkins University Press for permission to reprint “Taken by the Fairies: Production of Popular Culture in A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” Shakespeare Quarterly 51.3 (2000): 277–312. © Folger Shakespeare Library. Reprinted with permission of The Johns Hopkins University Press. Folger Shakespeare Library for permission to reprint STC 12017 Robin Good-Fellovv, His Mad Prankes and Merry Iests . . . title page. By permission of the Folger Shakespeare Library. Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders for their permission to reprint material in this book. The publishers would be grateful to hear from any copyright holder who is not here acknowledged and will undertake to rectify any errors or omissions in future editions of this book.

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The use of the same term “popular culture” to refer to very different concepts has caused significant confusion in academic discussions in recent years. Sophisticated scholarship from a number of disciplines defines “popular culture” in at least three ways: (1) through an engagement in oppositional politics with mainstream groups, (2) as a simple majority of the population below the level of gentry, and (3) as participants in the traditional festive practices of an increasingly beleaguered “merrie England.” Proponents of cultural studies have powerfully argued the first of these concepts of popular culture. Stuart Hall, for example, has described the popular as the culture of an oppressed population engaged in perpetual struggle with a dominant culture or “power bloc” (1992: 238), while John Fiske has argued that “popular culture is formed always in reaction to, and never as part of, the forces of domination” (1989: 43–7). Drawing on Bahktin’s theory of carnival, Michael Bristol has ably applied this essentially political model to Shakespeare’s plays to explore the purposeful resistance by a plebeian culture to “any tendency to absolutize authority” (1985: 213). Similarly, Annabel Patterson links festival practices to popular protest to identify “an intense political skepticism” followed by “a mature radicalism” in Shakespeare’s deepening social vision (1989: 10). Recent studies by social historians, on the other hand, tend to define “popular” in terms of a larger “populace.” In his anthology of essays Popular Culture in Seventeenth-Century England, Barry Reay combines the middling sort with lower status groups to define “popular” as composing 90 or 95 percent of the population (1985a: 1), while in Peter Burke’s essay, “popular” comes to mean “ordinary”: “the unlearned, the non-elite, the people who had not been to grammar school or university” (1985: 31). By referring to a majority or mainstream group, this concept of “popular” naturally discovers more continuities than conflicts. As part of a larger critique, Tim Harris’s introduction to Popular Culture in England (1995) stresses the degree of interaction or cooperation between a large populace composed of diverse groups and an elite social fraction. Scholars of the Reformation also use this concept of “popular” to stress continuities more than divisions (Collinson 1996b; Byford 1998: 44). Tessa Watt’s influential study Cheap Print and Popular Piety 1550–1640 counters confrontational models by stressing “consensual values, shared at many levels of

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society” expressed in inexpensive printed texts (1991: 3, 325). Watt points to the presence of “a core of good householders” to argue against Keith Wrightson and David Levine’s claim that a militant Protestantism “ ‘inserted a cultural wedge’ in the village of Terling, where ‘godly parish notables led the attack on a popular culture of communal dancings, alehouse sociability, and the like’ ” (1991: 324–5). As is apparent from Watt’s quotation, Wrightson and Levine use the term “popular culture” in this third sense, to refer to festive practices – dancing (whether morris dancing or dancing around maypoles), alehouse socialibility and also church ales, amateur theatrics of various kinds involving hobby-horses, May games and processions, Yuletide celebrations, and other entertainments that represented, for the citizens of Terling, “the traditional popular culture of their forefathers” (1979: 181). In a process of social differentiation largely due to inflation and a rapidly increasing population, the “better sort” of Terling owed “their social identity to their withdrawal from and hostility to a popular culture that was slowly being transformed into a culture of poverty” (182). The contrast between their conclusions and Watt’s may be attributed in part to a difference in perspective. A householder may well experience consensus in the same town where a morris dancer experiences opposition. Moreover, as shown by a recent anthology edited by Patrick Collinson and John Craig (1998), the diversity of the experience of the Reformation in English towns does not support any single model, whether an oppositional top-down suppression of popular culture by the godly or a consensual model based on community agreement. Sometimes slower, sometimes quite rapid; sometimes imposed from above; sometimes as a groundswell from beneath: the specifics of the movement of reform varied substantially among English cities. Yet however variant the specific dynamics, few historians would argue that from the early sixteenth through the early seventeenth centuries, a festive popular culture was becoming much less “popular” or widespread within the population. In fact, the significant social transformations of the early modern period were often expressed and in part experienced in terms of changes in attitudes towards a festive popular culture. In spite of, or more likely because of, their decline in status and frequency from the early sixteenth through the early seventeenth centuries, the traditional rituals of this popular culture, defined in this third sense, attained a heightened cultural significance as a social sign. In The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson, I use the term “popular culture” in yet another sense, related to its use as a social sign, to refer to a simulacrum existing in early modern imaginaries created from cultural materials assembled from various lower status groups. Especially as transmitted through written works, this popular culture associated with the festive or the folk was invented or produced by elite and middling sorts as a means of coming to their own self-definition. This is not to say that festive practices, from maypole dancing to ballads to old wives’ tales, did not exist among the lower sort. On the contrary, in many areas, they thrived. It was precisely their continuing appeal that rendered them especially attractive, and at times especially threatening, to

Producing popular cultures 3 the identities of higher status groups. This is also not to say that these festive practices thrived only among the low. On the contrary, they were widely shared among most social fractions. But by the late sixteenth century, such practices increasingly signified the low,1 even as they were enjoyed by other groups. To take a literary example from Shakespeare’s Othello, Desdemona’s choice to sing an old ballad of “Willow” shortly before her death eloquently testifies to its profound and personal meaning to her. The poignancy of her choice is deepened by her identification with her mother’s maid Barbary, through a shared suffering in their mutual betrayals by the men they loved. As social movements invested such practices as signifying the low, they revealed complex relationships ranging from identification to contempt, and often a mixture of these in variable proportions. I use the term “production” rather than “representation” to refer to a popular culture assembled of elements from such diverse groups as thieves, parents of retarded children, raped women, female caregivers, and amateur performers; for there was no group sufficiently homogeneous to “represent.” Their apparent homogeneity, or very different forms of homogeneity in different literary works, was in fact a principal effect of this production. Similarly, I break down the dominant culture into sometimes overlapping subgroups such as the humanisteducated male elite learned in Latin (Chapters 3 and 5), the middling sort forging its own nationalistic identity (Chapters 6 and 7), and the aristocracy of the Stuart court redefining itself in response to changing modes of consumption (Chapter 8). This project is, I believe, unique in its delineation of the specific techniques developed by each of these groups to define itself against and through lower status groups. These techniques of self-definition play a major role, I argue, in the culture and especially in the literature of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. To emphasize the centrality of these productions, I analyze works by three authors commonly perceived as canonical: Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson. The centrality of festive customs to texts by these authors has been thoroughly and persuasively demonstrated by a rich critical literature which explores, from a variety of approaches, the profound and often structural connections between early modern literature and the May Day celebrations, the ballads, and mimetic fools originating in what has been called a folk culture.2 I use this critical literature to consider further the ideological implications of forms of self-definition emerging from these texts. The complexity of this process of self-representation, both for the groups and for the individuals within them, is perhaps best demonstrated by a more complicated example taken from Jonson’s masque, Oberon, The Fairy Prince. Featuring Prince Henry in the title role, Jonson’s Oberon, The Fairy Prince stages courtiers dancing in the court of King James in representations that work simultaneously with and against established fairylore. A song near the end of the masque urges the courtiers to show by their energetic dancing that they, like the fairies of tradition, are made of air rather weighed down by the flesh of “knottie legs, and plants of clay” that “seeke for ease, or love delay” (Jonson 1941: ll.403–4). Yet courtiers must also strive to overgo merely ordinary fairies; and

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so the masque invents a clownish country fairy very unlike the ethereal trooping fairies and dangerous fairy queens of ballads and folk-tales. Spurring the courtiers towards yet greater efforts in the upward leaps of the corantos and galliards of the third masque-dance, the next song warns that if they “use the smallest stay,” then the “beauties” of the audience will suspect that they “have no more worth/Then the course, and countrey Fairy,/That doth haunt the harth, or dairy” (ll.412–49). What did these fairies signify in the court of James I? Why did Jonson’s masque simultaneously stage affiliation with and also distinction from traditional fairylore? As Chapter 8 will demonstrate, the answers to these questions will take us deep within the social signifying systems of the early seventeenth century. They involve the use of dance by courtiers to increase personal charisma, and the underlying discourses of bodily control able to confer status through a virtuoso performance. They involve the coming-of-age of young Prince Henry in a court strained by tensions between King James and Queen Anne, with the consequent conflicts in filial allegiances that must be declared, negotiated, or effaced. They involve the political necessity perceived within James’s court to discover, or invent, a relationship with the people of the countryside to promote an alliance against an increasingly powerful, and increasingly hostile, middling sort, while maintaining the forms of distinction on which aristocratic privilege depended. Central to the argument of this book is the relational nature of all three signifying systems – within the body, within the court, within the nation. As courtiers emulate “aery fairies,” these systems identify the court with an idealization of rural life. As courtiers distinguish themselves from the “coarse and country fairy,” these systems invoke an oppositional binary elevating the court at the expense of a debased agrarian culture. In both its idealized and debased aspects, this simulacrum that I will call a “popular culture” was as much a product of the imagination as Jonson’s rustic fairy, and undoubtedly bore as tangential a relationship to the diverse beliefs and varied experiences of the people of the countryside. Jonson’s production was not his alone; it was part of a larger cultural movement that forms the central subject of this book. By the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, as England became more urbanized and societal structures became more complex, a powerful field of force exerted pressure on social groups, whether newly emerging or already established, to determine modes of self-distinction inextricably linked with the legitimation of their own personal and political power. Jonson’s “coarse and country fairy” serves as a prototype for the large-scale production of multiple forms of popular culture within the imaginaries of elite and middling sorts according to these self-serving agendas. Their diverse narratives of self-definition included sometimes phantasmagoric versions of a popular culture as a distorted and distorting reflecting pool through which to interpret themselves. Rendered fantastic by the desires that called them into being, early modern productions of popular culture ranged from the grotesque to the ethereal. In The Popular Culture of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson, I undertake a study of what these often self-interested fantasies reveal

Producing popular cultures 5 about the evolving self-narratives of social groups. Their shared drive towards social distinction contributes a formative context for the productions of popular cultures by such authors as Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson. As this study will demonstrate, however, works by these authors resist as well as support these projects of distinction. Like the two contrasting species of fairy of Jonson’s masque, the figures used by early modern writers often reveal simultaneous desires to affiliate as well as to dissociate from the popular cultures they produce. These highly ambivalent productions reflect conflicted entanglements rather than clear-cut relationships. As these works suggest, this push and pull, this simultaneous desire and repulsion, often operated within individual subjects as well as between social groups. The struggles for symbolic domination waged within these works locate the site of contest within individual subjectivities. Thus, as I explore how the cultural meanings generated through the production of popular cultures played a determinative role in the formation of group identities, I will also argue for an understanding of a new centrality for these productions within early modern discourses of the self. This approach constructs a larger framework within which to revisit some now-canonical texts as productions of popular culture. As a powerful vehicle for the creation of meanings, early modern literature formed a particularly generative site for the circulation of these cultural narratives. A few examples serve to demonstrate the simultaneous affiliation and alienation within these texts to their own traditional sources. Identified in A Midsummer Night’s Dream as the country prankster Robin Goodfellow, Shakespeare’s Puck prevents milk from turning into butter and plays practical jokes on sexually aroused horses; yet like Jonson’s dancing courtier-fairies, Shakespeare’s well-spoken and deferential servant to Oberon distinguishes himself through his oppositions, rather than his similarities, to his original in the rude and hairy Robin Goodfellow. Sometimes it is the use, rather than the content, of orally circulated narratives that becomes transformed. The Merry Wives of Windsor, for example, appropriates the tale of Herne the hunter from “idle-headed eld” to discipline offenses by Falstaff against the values of the middling sort in a communal shaming performed by very bourgeois-seeming fairies. In the Red Cross Knight of his Faerie Queene, Spenser advances the cause of Protestant nationalism by incorporating and also redirecting the cultural meanings of the St. George once performed in often rowdy midsummer watches and early modern processions. In the same way, his series of fairy queens, including Gloriana herself, describe a highly ambivalent relationship with contemporary forms of narrativity performed primarily by women appropriated, and also deflected, to serve the interests of Spenser’s nationalist epic. Discussed in detail in the chapters below, these few examples suggest the complexity of these well-known texts as discursive productions. The participation of recognized authors such as Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson foregrounds the significance of these productions. While any one of these authors provides material sufficient for an entire volume from this approach, I have chosen to include works by all three in order to demonstrate the strikingly

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different appropriations of figures signifying a popular culture. In this study, I focus on works by William Shakespeare (A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Merry Wives of Windsor), by Edmund Spenser (episodes from The Faerie Queene), and by Ben Jonson (his masque Oberon, The Fairy Prince and his unfinished play The Sad Shepherd) to explore the diversity of the forms of entanglement encountered by often ambivalent early modern subjects. In each text, a heightened awareness of traditional material, however much it was reworked, also encodes alternative readings as stubborn reminders of what, in the creation of new social definitions, must be forgotten: the pranks of the uncouth Robin Goodfellow, the ghost tales of superstitious elders, the vigorous dance-battles of the earlier sixteenth century, ballads of fairies remembered from childhood, and through all these, a relationship to a “merrie England” that was, or was imagined to be, less complex and fragmented than the rapidly evolving society of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This process of forgetting recorded in literary works participated in a larger process of a cultural forgetting made visible in the studies of the calendar and the ritual year by David Cressy (1989) and Ronald Hutton (1994, 1996). Tracing the elimination of most saints’ days as well as the decline of traditional festivities marking the agrarian cycle, these studies foreground a forgetting that entails, paradoxically, a heightened consciousness of what must be forgotten. Duffy (1992) and other scholars have demonstrated the impossibility of obliterating the traces of Catholic rituals in Protestant England. Elizabeth Mazzola’s argument for the “afterlife for abandoned symbols” (1998: 1) of the Catholic Church applies at least as well to traditional festive practices. Similarly, Linda Woodbridge argues from another perspective for the stubborn persistence of even discredited ways of thought, such as a medieval form of magical thinking whose traces “linger to structure the unconscious” (1994: 6). The mental habits of early moderns were no more susceptible to absolute change, and certainly not at the rapid rate of the social transformations from the late sixteenth through the early seventeenth centuries. As John Barrell has pointed out, ideologies are to be discovered not only within classes, but also within individual subjects (1999: 232). Studies pertaining to early modern ways of thinking, and more specifically to ways of forgetting, move the domain of social and political transformations inward into the psyche of early modern subjects. Rather than a Freudian model, my approach to the connections between outward events and inward experiences of the self follows an insight expressed by Peter Stallybrass and Allon White, that the social cannot be separated from the psychological, and the sublimation of instincts within the self cannot be considered separately from a larger strategy of cultural domination (1986: 197). For this profound connection between the social and the psychic, I draw particularly on Norbert Elias’s concept of the civilizing process (1978) and Pierre Bourdieu’s discussion of taste as a mode of social distinction (1984). Their theories provide ways to understand the increasingly diverse forms of self-differentiation offered to early moderns by profound economic and religious changes as unquestionably political in nature. In forging

Producing popular cultures 7 a personal, as well as a national identity, early moderns of middling and elite sorts enacted a form of cultural domination over lower status groups. It is the premise of this study that lower social fractions remained capable of their own forms of resistance and that they shaped early modern culture, to an extent not acknowledged in most studies, through the responses – the desires and fears – they elicited through their ordinary interactions with more elite subjects. Since these interactions are inevitably mediated by literate social groups, my focus remains on the subjectivity of the middling and elite early moderns by whom and for whom productions of popular culture were constructed. It is within, as well as outside, this inner domain that the great social revolutions of the period took place. To theorize this model of the early modern subject as the site of social forces, an internalized version of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony usefully moves the negotiations between cultures to a locus within divided subjects (2000; Hebdige 1988: 203–7). According to an internalized Gramscian paradigm, the early modern self becomes not merely ambivalent, but more specifically composed of what Tony Bennett calls “a mobile combination of cultural and ideological elements derived from different class locations” (1985: xv). For some early modern bourgeoisie, the consensus achieved within the self required the accommodation of opposing values that rendered its own social affiliations open to negotiation and compromise. To refuse to accommodate was to risk an instability of self that, like rigid political structures, became subject to overthrow by unresolved allegiances. Productions of popular culture enacted these inner negotiations with ideologies derived from a range of possible forms of interactions with members of the lower sorts. As this book will demonstrate, the type and intensity of negotiation varied according to the primary forms of interaction. An elite male inculcated as a child by his female caregivers into the mysteries of prophesy by analyzing the burning coals of the hearthfire experienced a different ideology, and experienced that ideology differently, than a haberdasher parodied by grotesques in a raucous Whitsuntide procession in seventeenth-century Wells.3 For some early moderns, such as those tradesmen whose interactions with the lower sort were characterized by mutual hostility, the creation of a bourgeois self in opposition to the values of lower status groups would require little ideological negotiation. For others, such as young men who experienced loving intimacy from caregivers of childhood, the achievement of an inner hegemony required more complex accommodations yielding a more unpredictable and perhaps a more volatile form of inner consensus. It is the premise of this project that many early modern subjects remained on a continuum in-between, neither entirely rejecting nor entirely comfortable with common traditions once shared with lower status groups; and that productions of popular culture served to negotiate among the tensions emerging from contradictions that were experienced at once within and without, as psychological and social. Since this paradigm represents the psychological as inextricably connected to the social, it is useful to situate this discussion in terms of an ongoing and relatively testy debate concerning the place of popular culture within the

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socio-political sphere. The degree of political engagement described by critics such as Bristol and Patterson has been challenged by Scott Shershow, who describes elite and popular, high and low, as only “participants in intricately interrelated fields of cultural production whose distinctions are merely selfconstructed and self-proclaimed” (1998: 24). This focus on discursive selfdefinitions has led Shershow to question the possibility of political action, as he objects to an insistence, in this case voiced by Frederic Jameson, on “the essentially polemic and subversive strategies that characterize the culture of subordinate or dominated groups” on the grounds that the existence of “autonomous and alternative subcultures” was not possible (30). In this claim, Shershow strikes a blow to a passionately held belief in radical resistance shaping studies not only of popular culture, but of cultural studies in general. Cultural historians have argued vehemently against the “linguistic turn” underlying positions such as Shershow’s. Protesting against the “the dangerous reduction of the social world to a purely discursive construction,” Roger Chartier argues for the formative effects of symbolic domination, a process by which the dominant culture attempts to subjugate less powerful groups by imposing an identity that they may, however, resist, so that “the history of the construction of social identities . . . becomes a history of relations of symbolic force” (1997: 4–5). Chartier quotes Pierre Bourdieu’s seminal text Distinction to affirm the experienced effects of symbolic discourse: The representation which individuals and groups inevitably project through their practices and properties is an integral part of social reality. A class is defined as much by its being-perceived as by its being. (1984: 483, quoted in Chartier 1997: 101–2) As Chartier insisted in an earlier work, “the representations of the social world are themselves the constituents of social reality” (1988: 44). In this project, I use Chartier’s perception of the experienced social effects of representations to modify, but not entirely to dismiss, Shershow’s discursive emphasis. In an important sense, I find myself in agreement with Shershow’s declaration that the versions of popular culture produced in the early modern period articulate a social force field through distinctions that are, in Shershow’s terms, “merely self-constructed and self-proclaimed” (1998: 24). From this perspective, I question the identification by Bristol and Patterson of a common or plebeian culture, even if consisting of interlocking constituencies, that is irremediably poised in political opposition to a dominant power bloc. Yet, with Chartier, I perceive the representations, or what I will call the productions, of a popular culture, however fictive, as expressing and also generating material effects in a process of domination that extends beyond the symbolic into the real. While no large subjugated group remained sufficiently homogeneous to express concerted and strategic opposition, local resistances were possible and, as I will argue in my discussion of fairies, such resistances in fact occurred through strategies all the more effective for remaining unobtrusive.

Producing popular cultures 9 In distinction from critics and historians who discuss popular culture from the perspective of beneath, this project explores the discursive productions of popular culture from above.4 More than the content – the beliefs, practices, and texts – of any one culture, I am concerned with how, as well as why, a group comes to awareness of itself as a social body, as expressed through literary texts, as well as the implications of that awareness for those represented as alien or different. In this way, the term “culture” defines a social group in the same way, and with many of the same difficulties, as “identity” defines an individual. Individuals come to a sense of their own identity through contact with others, often defining themselves against those whom they perceive, sometimes erroneously, as most unlike themselves. Subject to the self-delusions endemic to the human condition, an individual’s own sense of identity seldom correlates absolutely to a definition grounded in objective facts. In this and other respects, this project is profoundly influenced by Frederic Jameson’s argument that cultures, like individual identities, do not exist in themselves but as part of a social field through which at least two groups interact. For Jameson, culture represents an “objective mirage,” a “nimbus perceived by one group when it comes into contact with and observes another” (1993: 33). In this way, any perception of a culture is always already distorted by the agendas and desires of the observing group. These desires often, according to Jameson, affect the self-definitions of the observed group as well, for what we perceive as our own culture is “often the recuperation of the other’s view of us” (33). Jameson’s model of culture as an objective mirage provides a vehicle through which to accommodate the discursive and often essentially fictive self-definitions of groups with the potential for localized action. Just as a mirage deceives thirsty travelers into departing from their route, misrecognitions have real effects. While Jameson does not specifically address the early modern period in this discussion of culture, two primary forms of group relationship he describes – envy and loathing, often in oscillation – fit the simultaneous idealization and debasement of figures representing an older agrarian culture. As an act of “collective envy,” even powerful groups may pay tribute to subjugated social fractions by borrowing “forms of cultural expression” (1993: 35). This model applies well, for example, to courtiers attempting to enact the ethereal movements of the dancing fairies described in homely country narratives. At the same time, according to Jameson, a group may also defend its boundaries through loathing what are necessarily “collective abstractions” of the other group (35). Like the racism identified by Jameson as a form of cultural loathing, the masque’s invitation to despise the “coarse and country fairy” defends the boundaries of court culture precisely against the group for which the masque also expresses envy. This double movement of envy and loathing parallels the double movement of desire and shame in a more inward-looking model described by Peter Stallybrass and Allon White (1986: 5–6) to explain the continued power of popular carnival within the imaginative life of the dominant classes: The “top” attempts to reject and eliminate the “bottom” for purposes of prestige and status, only to discover . . . that the top includes that low

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Producing popular cultures symbolically, as a primary eroticized constituent of its own fantasy life. . . . The low-Other is despised and denied at the level of political organization and social being whilst it is imaginatively constituent of the shared imaginary repertoires of the dominant culture.

The Stallybrass/White model helps to explain the continued pull of figures signifying a popular culture within the imaginaries of the elite and middling sorts. Turbulent cross-currents within literary texts reveal that early moderns were yet prone to an irrational attraction, like Titania’s magically induced desire for lowly Bottom with his ass’s head, to that which they believed should be despised. As the optical illusion implicit in Jameson’s term “mirage” might suggest, any shimmering vision of a unified “people” and a coherent “popular culture,” whether celebrated by radicals or denigrated by elitists, dissipates upon closer inspection. The binaries that emerge when a group perceives itself, however erroneously, in terms of another group, often bear little resemblance to the messier and very human relationships they purport to represent. For historically based studies, the use of binaries has, in fact, become something of a red flag, and much recent scholarship by cultural historians vigorously dismantles binaries that have, for some critics, come to cast the entire enterprise of studying popular culture into doubt. Excellent scholarship has rigorously interrogated, for example, a common binary opposing popular and elite in terms of a familiar distinction between oral and literate social groups. Not only were many illiterate persons likely to have heard printed material read aloud, but the term “literate” itself suppresses a spectrum of levels of reading between barely literate and advanced (Spufford 1982; Barry 1995; Hackel 1999). Rather than clear-cut differences between oral and literate, critics have emphasized their mutual influence (Chartier 1987; Warner 1994: 24). For a number of genres – ballads, proverbs, nursery lore, tavern libels – Adam Fox has authoritatively shown the absolute interpenetration of oral and printed modes (2000). More generally, the terms “popular culture” and “elite culture” themselves imply a sense of false coherence among groups diverse in vocation, geography, and religion (Burke 1985; Hall 1992: 238; Harris 1989; 1995: 5). A London laundrymaid of a Calvinist persuasion, for example, would not likely have identified with boisterous miners from Wales. Tim Harris points out that the bipolar model implied in the opposition of “popular culture” to “elite culture” does not reflect the complexities of actual interactions and collaborations between groups (1995: 14; see also Barry 1985: 80). Individual affiliations do not uniformly conform to one’s position in a social formation; a person may identify herself as having more in common with a group higher or lower in social status. In one’s subjective experience, affiliations may be multiple. Because of their participation in festivities of common people in the sixteenth century, for example, Peter Burke has famously described elite males as “amphibious” or bi-cultural, educated in the classical or “great culture” but also participating in the “little tradition” of the people “as a second culture” (1978: 28). Finally, any binary

Producing popular cultures 11 opposing elite and popular must take account of the presence of a middling sort, increasing in numbers and prominence in the early modern period (Reay 1985a: 20; Wrightson 1991: 49; Leinwand 1993: 292). This increasingly influential middling sort tended to disappear in the early modern’s own bipolar model of elite and popular, identified by Peter Stallybrass (1986) as a means of effacing an emerging middling sort in the interests of the aristocracy. Perhaps most problematic for studies of popular culture is the inevitable mediation of the values and oral tales by lower status groups through transmission through written texts. Their relative powerlessness in the political sphere rendered the “low” especially vulnerable to distorted representations as a popular culture that were then reified in the discursive productions of enduring cultural texts. Much of what has been said of the “folk” comes from other groups. As Sullivan and Woodbridge have eloquently put it, “ ‘Popular’ culture keeps receding as we approach. Whether or not the Folk ever significantly contributed to what looks now like ‘popular’ literature, mediation by the educated seems always already in place” (2000: 282). Written versions of orally circulated fairy-tales provide striking examples of such distortions (Bottigheimer 1987: 4–20). In seventeenth-century France, a prominent collector Marie-Jeanne L’Héritier rationalizes her numerous refinements in a revealing metaphor comparing the mouths of common people to a ditch or sewer: These stories became filled with impurities as they passed through the mouth of the common people; in much the same way as pure water becomes defiled with rubbish as it passes by a dirty culvert. (quoted in Warner 1994: 174) Similar interpretive problems disturb written records of acts. Woodbridge has ably demonstrated that Thomas Harman’s descriptions of the workings of the Elizabethan underworld, supposedly obtained through firsthand interviews with perpetrators, fit the genre of jestbook more readily than realistic journalism (Woodbridge 2001: 39–79). Stephen Gosson’s prurient descriptions of how females were groped in the Elizabethan theaters bear suspicious resemblances to passages in Ovid’s Art of Love (Zitner 1958: 206–8). As evidenced by witch trials, official records even from court sessions do not represent transparent reports. As Tim Harris states, “We must not confuse what the elite perceived and feared with what ordinary people actually believed and practiced” (1995: 6). It was from what the elite perceived and feared and also, I would add, from what they desired, that popular cultures were produced within the early modern imaginary. These productions were never innocent of ideology. As Sullivan and Woodbridge have argued, “Once popular culture – the culture of the People, the Folk – had been created as a category, it was ever after available for ideological uses” (2000: 283). It is this creation of popular culture as a category that represents the primary project of this book. As these searching critiques suggest, while many of the practices and experiences of holiday pastimes, for example, may be identified, it remains unlikely that scholars will ever recover a pure and

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unmediated understanding of the popular culture of early modern England. What would seem to be a loss, viewed from another angle, becomes a gain. If isolating the “purely popular” has become an exercise in futility, a focus on the interactions between elite and popular cultures themselves provides a valuable subject of study (Harris 1995: 10). If the binaries emanating from this illusory cultural mirage bear little relationship to the lived experience of lower status groups, they remain immensely informative about the agendas of those members of the bourgeois and elite who produced them. From this perspective, then, Popular Culture takes as its primary project not the recovery of an originary, unmediated common culture, but its early modern portrayals. In this understanding of popular culture as an artificial category produced by and for other social formations, I avoid the numerous and knotty problems discussed by recent scholars in some detail. Rather than a reconstruction of what has been lost – it is, for the most part, truly gone – this project explores the ideological uses to which representations of a popular culture were put. If popular cultures served primarily as objective mirages through which social fractions constructed their own self-narratives, these diverse fabrications were yet constructed from shared forms of contact with lower status groups. In particular, three distinct forms of interaction become embodied, repeatedly and over time, in three figures: fairies, old wives, and hobby-horses. As later chapters will demonstrate, all three figures make their way together, one way or another, into Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream and Merry Wives of Windsor, prominent episodes from Spenser’s Faerie Queene, and Jonson’s Oberon, The Fairy Prince and The Sad Shepherd. As re-imagined within the self-defining narratives of dominant cultures, these figures suggest a great deal about the nature of interactions with members of various lower status groups. Rather than a unified culture, these three figures suggest the diversity of the forms of entanglement encountered by often ambivalent early modern subjects. In their variety, they represent what Foucault would call “genealogical fragments” of illegitimate and subjugated knowledges that yet bear marks of historical struggles (1980b: 82–3). Their repeated inclusion together in the same works shows the effect of a centralizing force designed to generate a false sense of homogeneity among these groups classed together as lower status. Little is known of these groups themselves. No one can legitimately identify for them any single, specific population or a shared social consciousness. Rather like black holes that become visible only in their effects on stars circling around them, what remains known of these groups is a record of their interactions with other of higher status groups who represent their influence, sometimes in the process of denying it. Chapters 2 through 4 discuss the figures of fairies, old wives, and hobby-horses in more detail, as they rise to (in)visibility to become at once more discernible and less understood. A brief discussion at this point describes how very different interactions between groups come to form common raw material for the production of various popular cultures. Chapter 2 traces allusions to fairies in cross-class collaborations designed to

Producing popular cultures 13 evade the strictures of early modern society. This is not to say that all fairy allusions forwarded cross-class collaborations. Wendy Wall has ably detailed references to fairies in the domestic sphere of housekeeping, especially among the middling sort (2002: 112–26). Not all collusions crossed class lines. Explanations of “found” or stolen goods allegedly given by the fairies, the murder of deformed or otherwise unwanted infants left as “changelings,” instances of rape and extra-marital pregnancy by “fairies,” rebel claims to deer in the name of “Queen of the Fairies”: these evasions of social controls function as what James C. Scott would call a “weapon of the weak” benefitting those of lower economic status marginalized from established modes of power (1985). But for early moderns belonging to dominant social formations, collaborations with lower status groups constituted the most visible aspect of the popular; and it is these collaborations with literate groups that become recorded in plays, diaries, and prose tracts. To illustrate with one example from Shakespeare’s Winter’s Tale, the Old Shepherd’s identification of the infant Perdita as a changeling child left by fairies glosses over his assumption of her presumably illegitimate origin. When he first finds Perdita as an exposed baby, he expresses unambiguously his conviction of her illegitimacy: Sure some scape. Though I am not bookish, yet I can read waiting-gentlewoman in the scape. This has been some stair-work, some trunk-work, some behind-door-work. They were warmer that got this than the poor thing is here. I’ll take it up for pity. (1997: 3.3.70–4) Yet when he presents the baby and the money placed with her to his son, he swerves from this conviction to describe her as a changeling with “fairy gold”: Look thee here; take up, boy. Open’t. So, let’s see. It was told me I should be rich by the fairies. This is some changeling. Open’t. What’s within, boy? . . . This is fairy gold, boy, and ’twill prove so. Up with ’t, keep it close. (3.3.112–15; 119–20) Declaring the money as “fairy gold,” neither earned nor stolen, enables the Old Shepherd to assert his rights to it without further explanation. His actual justification lies in the unspoken understanding implicit in these circumstances, that the money represents payment, presumably by the gentlewoman-mother, to whatever stranger would rear this infant. To take an example from King Lear, the blinded Earl of Gloucester invokes “fairies and gods” (4.6.29–30) to prosper the purse he offers to his disguised son Edgar, whom he believes to be a halfmad beggar, in payment for leading him to a cliff where he may commit suicide. Blessed by fairies, this treasure received from a suicidal earl and hunted outlaw requires no explanation to outsiders.

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These and other incidents depict members of higher status groups adopting fairy allusions as the appropriate language for specific forms of social trespass, often involving either sex or money, considered the proper provenance of the lower sort. In staging these cross-class collaborations, Shakespeare’s plays publicize this clandestine use of fairy allusions as an insider knowledge to his primarily urban audience. Through the use of fairy allusions, available to those of higher status through shady cross-class interactions, various disparate groups, from old shepherds to mad beggars, became misrecognized in a cultural imaginary as a homogeneous “popular” culture characterized by forms of trespass against conventional social values and laws. Chapter 3 explores a very different mode of interaction between the better sort and lower status groups through old wives, as the tellers of tales. This intimate relationship between women caregivers, often of a lower sort, and the children of middling or aristocratic status exerted an especially powerful and continuing influence on early modern culture and, I will argue, on its selfnarratives. Like the cross-class evasions encoded in fairy allusions, adults’ memories of old wives’ tales created a false sense of a homogeneous popular culture. Oral tales were composed and performed by men as well as women, and what has survived of their content suggests a primary audience of adults rather than of children (Warner 1994: 21–2). But to little children lying at their nurses’ feet or sitting in their laps, these tales became a part of their induction into what seemed a predominantly female culture. Later references by adults convey the association of these tales with the influence of women, for better or for worse, on the children they had once been. For the most part, the cultural meanings of these tales, and the female influence which their narration enacted, would not have come into place until children, and especially elite young boys, left this domestic sphere. The schoolroom environment in which boys learned Latin provided a powerfully distorting objective mirage through which to understand the feminized culture of childhood differently. In the process, women’s tales acquired powerful ideological meanings. As boys enacted their individual separations, their childhood experiences – their relationships with the women who raised them, their own perceived androgyny, their limitation to a simpler vernacular or “mother” tongue – took on new and sometimes unpredictable significances within the rigorous and often ascetic conditions of a grammar school or individual tutelege. As Richard Halpern has pointed out, the deliberate alienation of boys from “the more spontaneous forms of popular learning,” including tales by women, was implicit in the humanist pedagogy of the early modern schoolroom (1991: 25). Whether produced in accordance with or in defiance of schoolroom values, the ways in which boys interpreted or even remembered their childhood experiences inevitably bore a mark of the early modern institutional system. Contemporary references to the continuing power of these experiences even into adulthood resonate with Carolyn Cooper’s account of the persistent and visceral effects of the oral culture of her Jamaican childhood as “noises in the blood” (1995: 2–3, 8). The particular and ongoing power of these experiences induced

Producing popular cultures 15 some and perhaps many writers to associate or, more often, to disassociate their imaginative writings with women’s tales heard in childhood. Transmitted over time and across disparate groups, old wives’ tales disturbed the patriarchal gender relations underlying notions of individual authorship. In Chapter 4, I discuss productions of the popular through various forms of amateur performativity, designated for convenience through a prominent figure, the hobby-horse. Cross-group encounters through amateur performances contribute an understanding of an aesthetics of the early modern body as a factor in the vulgarizing, or conversely the idealizing, of the festivities of an older and merrier England. An understanding of the rapidly declining prestige of these performances historicizes an insight voiced by John Fiske: “The struggle for control over the meanings and pleasures of the body is where the social is most convincingly represented as the individual and where politics can best disguise itself as human nature” (1989: 70). The struggle over changing meanings of the body emerges from Elias’s account of how the civilizing process, operating through an advancing threshold of shame (1978: 129–38), rendered the control of “bodily carriage, gestures, dress, facial expressions” (55) as a mark of social class. In the process, robust or spontaneous forms of movement became increasingly perceived as vulgar or grotesque. Amateur performances characterized by their use came to signify both an aesthetic of the low and also a past time before this aesthetic was in place. This increasing gap between the aesthetics of high and low becomes most visible in the radical decline of the hobby-horse. A respected and well-loved performer at church ales in the reign of Henry VIII, the hobby-horse came to signify low taste or even illicit sexuality by the close of Elizabeth’s reign. This low aesthetic of the body categorized other amateur performers as well, such as St. George skirmishing with his dragon (a large form of hobby-horse), and a cross-dressed Maid Marian dancing the morris, where the hobby-horse also began to prance his steps. Revealing the startling extent to which once separate “genealogical fragments” (Foucault 1980b: 82–3) blurred by the early seventeenth century, the animalistic qualities attributed to the lower sort became expressed by another over-sexed human–animal hybrid, the classical satyr. These formerly distinct figures merged significances in a chaotic whirl of sensory activities often associated with a seasonal festivity such as May Day or the twelve days of Christmas. A sense of general confusion and festive disorder emerges from contemporary accounts by Henry Machyn and Philip Stubbes, as well as the records of court proceedings against the continuing festivities enacted at Wells in 1607. As their energetic modes of embodiment came to mark plebeian social status, these figures reveal how the aesthetics of the low took shape as a cultural category. In this way, the hobby-horse and fellow-travelers enter works by Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson as representations of a low aesthetic by which these writers measured their own evolving professionalism. Yet surreptitious or even overt identifications of their works with these amateur performances also reveal a persistent struggle of aesthetics that was not yet resolved.

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Fairies, old wives, and hobby-horses are not the only figures through which early moderns produced a popular culture. Others, such as ballad heroines and maypole dancers, also make their way into early modern versions of the popular. The qualities attributed to old wives sometimes became transmuted into the abundant bodiliness of garrulous alewives who provided adult forms of nourishment as they, too, told fantastic stories. At least as early as Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, fairies became associated with Robin Goodfellow. But it is these relatively disconnected figures – fairies, old wives, and hobbyhorses – that appear together, with striking regularity, in the same works. From modes of trespass, to childhood dependence on female caregivers, to amateur entertainments: the variety of these interactions delineates the breadth of category of the popular. With its outlines changing according to the interests of various groups, popular culture shifted its shape to look, like Polonius’s clouds, “like a camel indeed” and also simultaneously backed “very like a whale” (Hamlet 3.2.376, 381). Yet the simultaneous inclusion of fairies, old wives, and hobby-horses, sometimes in transmuted forms, in well-known works suggests that early moderns tended to identify these figures, and the interactions they signify, as common reference points through which to measure their own relationships against as well as through these lower status groups. This need of middling and elite groups to measure their distance from lower status groups was part of a shared impetus for distinction from the “low” becoming particularly evident by the late sixteenth century. To understand this impetus, it is necessary to review a much-discussed paradigm proposed by Peter Burke. In a seminal pronouncement, Burke proclaimed that in 1500 “popular culture was everyone’s culture; a second culture for the educated and the only culture for everyone else. By 1800 the clergy, the nobility, the merchants, the professional men – and their wives – had abandoned popular culture to the lower classes” (1978: 270). Burke identified two major forces behind a withdrawal from popular culture. With its first phase between 1500 and 1650, a culture of the godly led a movement directed against festivals, taverns, ballads, and plays, to reform the culture of ordinary people according to orderly and pious values (207–43). At the same time, the nobility and some bourgeoisie increasingly internalized an “ethos of self-control and order” (276) leading to more “ ‘polished’ manners, as well as the “new and more self-conscious style of behavior” modeled in courtesy books, according to which the more spontaneous outbursts of popular festivity were perceived as not so much ungodly as vulgar (244–86). Burke’s theories have elicited considerable support as well as important refinements. Two anthologies, in particular, elaborate and complicate Burke’s paradigm, even as they demonstrate its continued centrality to current critical conversations. Using Burke as its point of departure and featuring his contribution as its lead essay, Barry Reay’s Popular Culture in Seventeenth-century England notes common cultural capital in ballads and other activities shared among groups of differing status, yet also observes that the roles assumed by wealthier participants as patrons or organizers could “reinforce rather than deflate hierarchy” (1985a: 15). In this more complicated social model, Reay

Producing popular cultures 17 draws on Gramsci’s concept of hegemony to describe the process of reform as a continuing struggle, never reaching completion, that accommodates, in various negotiated forms, both class rule and popular resistance (18). Dedicated to Peter Burke, Tim Harris’s Popular Culture in England, c.1500–1850 similarly complicates Burke’s model by stressing continuities as well as tensions among groups, and by noting significant variations by region and by gender. Rejecting the view of popular culture as a “passive victim of historical process,” Harris locates some of the impetus for change within the lower orders themselves, adapting to meet the conditions of an evolving world (1995: 23–4). Perspectives expressed in these and other anthologies contribute to a general critical consensus that the lived experience of the Reformation was much more complex and resistant to generalizations than had been earlier theorized. No such critical consensus has emerged to resolve the debate, of particular relevance for the period discussed in my own project, over the beginning and end points of the social separation described by Burke. In his study of sexual conduct and marriage practices, Martin Ingram interprets the reform of popular culture as “an intensification . . . of processes at work for centuries” rather than a major change in cultural perspective (1985: 138, 160). From the other side of the time frame, Ronald Hutton confirms that in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the reformers’ hostility to popular festivity produced “a sharper separation . . . between the sophisticated and the vulgar” (1994: 111); yet he objects to Burke’s thesis as an anachronistic “error” since this movement was not completed until sometime between 1740 and 1850, when the “literate really did come to regard traditional popular pastimes as belonging to a different world to their own” (246). Along similar lines, Sullivan and Woodbridge have argued that, since popular culture belonged to “everyone” in 1500, it cannot function as a “historically specific descriptive category” (2000: 268–9): since, as Peter Burke has claimed, “by 1800 popular culture was for the lower classes,” then it came firmly into place, paradoxically enough, only when it was no longer “popular”; that is, when its customs and practices became identified as the property of a smaller and less prestigious group, sometimes to slip from historical record entirely. Yet in between these dates of the early sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, Sullivan and Woodbridge also observe that in “the elite creation of the Folk, the popular, as a category . . . the Renaissance laid the groundwork” (282). While these scholars criticize Burke for prematurely identifying a defined “popular culture” in the Renaissance, none deny that by the end of the sixteenth century the category of the popular was undoubtedly in formation. This inbetween quality of a concept coming to visibility but not yet wholly distinct usefully offers the opportunity to understand the process of this withdrawal while it was still underway within society and, more importantly, within the subjectivities of early moderns. In identifying two separate groups – the godly who attempted to reform contemporary values, and the nobility (with some bourgeoisie) who internalized an ethos of self-control – Burke wisely refused to attribute this social shift to any one group or to any one motive. Defining themselves according to differing if

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not absolutely opposing values, social fractions simultaneously distanced themselves from lower status groups characterized alternatively as socially vulgar or spiritually reprobate. The question remains: Why did these disparate groups share an impulse to differentiate themselves by the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries? To rephrase Sullivan and Woodbridge, why was the groundwork for the “creation of the Folk, the popular, as a category,” laid in the Renaissance? What was the ideological impetus underlying the production of popular cultures against which, and through which, early moderns could then perceive themselves? The answers are as diverse and as complex as those underlying the Reformation. From a broad viewpoint, it seems clear that various forces, operating at variant intensities, combined to sharpen the compulsion for early moderns to distinguish themselves in terms of other, and particularly of lower, groups. Sometimes distinct and often intermingling, economic as well as ideological, these forces include (1) the unprecedented availability of goods, combined with social stratification caused by inflation and population increase, (2) religious movements that created new meanings for previously neutral practices that came to signify a popular culture, and (3) a nationalist fervor that fostered competing modes of patriotic self-definition. To understand the agendas shaping various groups, it is necessary to address briefly each of these forces. Rather than a simple withdrawal, the widening gap established by the elite and middling sorts from those of lower status was part of a larger process of social stratification already in its early stages by the high Middle Ages, intensifying during the sixteenth century and still in process for at least another century after. By the sixteenth century, social fractions multiplied in response to an economic system poised between feudalism and capitalism. In addition to continuing expansion in trade and industry, a dramatic rise in population accompanied by significant price inflation accelerated a process of economic stratification. As Paul Slack has noted, the increased demand for goods attending this rapid population growth produced wealth for larger landholders and poverty for those whose real wages could not keep up with inflation as, by the third quarter of the sixteenth century, real wages fell 30 percent below their level in 1500 (1988: 47). Straining available resources of charity and punishment alike, the numbers of homeless poor increased, according to A.L. Beier, at “an alarming rate” between 1560 and 1640 (1985: 14). In the meantime, consumer demand exploded.5 The period from 1570 to 1650 was, according to Craig Muldrew, one of particularly intense social polarization with the rising levels of poverty juxtaposed to increasingly comfortable modes of living for those especially of the middling sort (1998: 49). Probate inventories confirm William Harrison’s amazed observation of the rapid changes in consumption, as even “inferiour artificers and manie farmers” have now furnished “their cupbords with plate, their joined beds with tapistrie and silke hangings, and their tables with carpets & fine naperie” (1877: 239; Orlin 1994: 255). In a restless search for increasingly higher levels of refinement, wealthy aristocrats and merchants embarked upon similarly spectacular improvements in their living arrangements, their clothing,

Producing popular cultures 19 and even their food (Stone 1979a: 547–88; Peck 2000; Albala 2002). Between these extremes of wealth and poverty, diverse social groups differentiated themselves from others through increasingly complicated modes of consumption. By the last third of the sixteenth century, the Elizabethan language of degree became supplemented by an even more flexible language of “sorts” – the better sort, the wealthier sort, the meaner sort, the vulgar sort – to describe not only a more complex social system, but also the sense of dissociation by which the “better sort” distinguished themselves from those beneath them (Wrightson 1991: 45–7). Social fractions became groups; groups became “sorts,” and “sorts” would, with the coming of the industrial age in the nineteenth century, eventually become classes.6 Defining oneself in terms of a relationship with God was no more an exclusively early modern phenomenon than defining oneself through goods. However, like the increasingly diversified consumption, religious affiliation offered opportunities for sharper and more varied forms of self-differentiation. The progressive splitting off from a centralized religious institution, first from the Catholic and then from the Anglican Church, fostered intensified affiliations with like-minded believers as well as increased estrangement from those with differing perspectives. By the early seventeenth century, these various godly discourses of the self actively established, or intensified, the social significations of “merrie England,” as a wide range of Protestants defined themselves through the practice of a sober and godly life militating against what were considered the excesses of a popular culture: the maypoles, the dancing, the wakes and church ales. From what had once represented ordinary festive mirth now wafted the odors of paganism or, perhaps worse, the Catholicism of a pre-Reformation England with which it was now associated. Noting objections by conservative Anglicans to seasonal mirth as fostering political disorder, scholars have refined Max Weber’s attribution of the asceticism that “descended like a frost on the life of ‘merrie old England’ ” to a solely Calvinist repression of the “spontaneous expression of undisciplined impulses” leading away both from “work in a calling and from religion” (1930: 112; Hutton 1994: 197; Collinson 1996a: 31; Durston and Eales 1996). Most recently, Peter Lake and Michael Questier (2002) have ably explored intersections between “hot” reformers or Puritans and the more popular forms of print. Yet, as Patrick Collinson has observed for the latter part of the sixteenth century, those areas with the most visible Puritan presence were especially prone to become polarized between those who “gadded to sermons and those who gadded to dances, sports, and to other pastimes” (1982: 230; Underdown 1985a: 52; Durston and Eales 1996: 26). By the time James I and then Charles I lifted earlier prohibitions on popular amusements on Sunday by issuing the Book of Sports, participation in maypoles, morris dances, and church ales had become irreparably offensive to the sensibilities of many citizens (Marcus 1986: 2–6; Hutton 1994: 187–97; Collinson 1996b: 36–8; Durston and Eales 1996: 16–23). Tensions with defenders of sports escalated. Indeed, on an election night in Shrewsbury in 1594, a maypole tree served as a motive for a fatal assault by an apprentice shearman on a servant to a prominent

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draper. Collinson’s account of this incident provides a textbook case of the inextricability of discourses – religious, economic and nationalist – in constructing especially urgent contemporary meanings for a maypole and, by extension, the festivities of “merrie England” (1998). To these movements may be added the emergence of nationalism or perhaps more accurately, nationalisms. To those who defined their nation, as well as themselves, according to religious discourse, England was God’s own Protestant nation. Prophetic preaching warned, however, that England’s special relationship with God was vulnerable to change and if England was not to lose God’s special favor then it must, like the Israel of the Old Testament, search out its corruptions and repent its sins (Collinson 1996a). In this project of England’s self-Reformation, the pleasures offered by traditional pastimes appeared to pose as great a threat as Catholicism for, as Collinson observes, “It was minstrels more than mass-priests who proved to be the enemy” (1996a: x). To those who defined England in more commercial and cultural terms, as an upcoming and cosmopolitan nation, it was necessary, as Richard Helgerson argues, to align itself “with standards of order and civility that transcended national boundaries but enforced boundaries of class” (1992: 11). To avoid identification, including self-identification, of England as a “land of bumpkins” (Woodbridge 2001: 159) then, it was necessary to distinguish what was most “English” from the rusticities of popular culture. Both these projects of nationalist self-imagining associated popular culture with self-alienation, a disturbing identification with what Helgerson has represented as “the barbarous or inferior other” (243) in a process that ran exactly counter to the discovery or invention of a national “folk” in the late eighteenth century. Rather than reducing alienation between groups, the early modern project of nation-making generally required a separation from the popular, whether perceived as unacceptably pagan or simply vulgar. In this complex process of separation, literature played a significant role. Sullivan and Woodbridge have described a literary effect of the rising standard of civility constituting a prominent mode of social differentiation: collections of jests once compiled by respectable humanists such as Petrarch and Erasmus and even the courtly Castiglione became, by the end of the sixteenth century, depropriated as the productions of a low culture. Yet far from being unread, the now rude jests of farts and excrement became doubly pleasurable, both for their own humor and also as the sign of “lower-class vulgarity” (2000: 278) inviting more privileged readers to rehearse their own superior refinement even as they laughed. Similarly, street ballads once written by a range of authors were by the end of the sixteenth century “deemed appropriate only to the world of alehouse poets and vagrant songsters” (271) even as, in fact, broadsides circulated “across all social classes” (272). Emphasizing the constructedness of the category of the popular as “the condition of any high/low split, always historically contingent, always being renegotiated” (2002: 19), Lori Newcomb has ably explained how elite readers preserved their own social distinctions in the face of a broadening readership by creating the debased category of popular literature, so that they could still enjoy a prose romance such as Greene’s Pandosto, but as imagined as

Producing popular cultures 21 a “low” text read by serving girls. Or, contrarily, an elite reader might enjoy relief from the demands of distinction by temporarily choosing to become, in imagination, a lowly serving girl. This aesthetic of double pleasure, not only in an enjoyment in the low for its own sake, but in simultaneously registering one’s distance from the low, affirms but also complicates Helgerson’s narrative of Shakespeare’s role in excluding and alienating “the popular, the socially marginal, the subversive, the folk” as “signs of barbarism” to be purged from the theater as well as from national history (1992: 244). Centralizing power in the monarchy and further dividing social groups, this national self-making performed in Shakespeare’s history plays was, for Helgerson, inseparable from Shakespeare’s own emergence as a playwright who was “both gentleman and poet” (244–5). Such separation was not, however, so easily accomplished. In the Henry IV plays, for example, Hal’s conflicted and fraught relationship with Falstaff suggests the painful personal cost attendant on this purging of the socially marginal. Moreover, while Falstaff disappeared from Shakespeare’s plays, he yet remained arguably the most mentioned of Shakespeare’s characters and a dependable favorite of the Elizabethan and Jacobean stage (Bevington 1997: lxiii–lxiv). Did this popularity signify approval of Falstaff’s excesses or a pleasure in Hal’s rejection of his disreputable friend? Or perhaps, in a double aesthetic, the audience could enjoy both at once? In the complex admixture of discourses running through Henry IV, the character of Falstaff seems ideally calculated to offer this double pleasure to groups differentiating themselves according to all three patterns of consumption, religious affiliation, and/or patriotic nationalism. Falstaff’s illicit activities as “Diana’s forester” (1.2.22) robbing monies from respectable consumers seems well designed to engage the anxious interest of solid householders whose own monies and goods rendered them vulnerable to theft. Together with his witty barb at the reformist work ethic to defend his activities as a thief (“ ’Tis no sin, Hal, to labor in one’s vocation” [1.2.92]), Falstaff’s indulgence in drinking and sensual pleasures explicitly engages the ethos of the sober sort as a dynamic within the play. Abrogating honor before the battle of Shrewsbury, Falstaff’s release of what Howard and Rackin call “the effeminating forces of a degenerate modernity” against the play’s evocation of “a heroic masculine English past” (1997: 51) comically inverts the fundamental premises of English patriotism. In a prolonged critique of Helgerson’s narrative of the exclusionary nature of Shakespeare’s theater, David Kastan maintains that it lies in an audience member’s personal choice to invest loyalty in the official plot affirming the ideology of monarchy or in the more popular values of Falstaff and the tavern group; and that this decision is far from predetermined by the play itself (1999: 129–48). I would complicate this choice further by positing an additional pleasure specific to those divided subjects, for whom Hal’s pleasure in Falstaff, and his rejection of that pleasure, rehearsed their own conflicts intensified by the social separations ongoing in this period, wherever their own loyalties finally centered. The heterodoxy available to the early modern stage creates of Shakespeare’s plays an ideal vehicle for exploring the process, the push and pull rather than the

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final accomplishment, of the evolving social disparity already in the process of distinguishing Blackfriars from the Globe (Montrose 1996: 198). It was abundantly possible for the same play to elicit diverse modes of pleasure, even from members of the audience sharing similar backgrounds.7 The comminglings of social affiliations to a greater degree in the sixteenth century than in earlier times further fostered this unpredictability of response. A tailor’s son attending the Merchant Taylors School could choose to identify with artisan characters or with characters with Latin names familiar to him from his newly attained classical knowledge. Wealthy merchants who bought landed estates and married their daughters to knights or even earls could choose to self-identify with aristocratic as well as commercial groups. As allegiances chosen in the coming Civil War demonstrate, the reformist values of some members of the aristocracy outweighed their sense of loyalty to the King. While the middling sort was especially prone to identify itself as the bedrock of English nationalism, a sense of patriotic pride similarly stirred social groups of lower as well as higher status. The heterodoxy inherent in Shakespeare’s plays becomes available, in different form, within poems such as Spenser’s epic Faerie Queene, accessible in print. A print culture replicated the capacity of the early modern stage to elicit various and conflicting forms of identification by offering readers a range of implied personae, from the lowly servant girl described by Newcomb for Greene’s romances, to the self-indulgent gentlewoman reader described in Lyly’s Euphues and His England, to the informed and presumably masculine reader of well-reasoned political tracts, to the sober and pious reader of devout bestsellers by William Perkins and Richard Greenham. As if they were clothing themselves in garments above or below their station, readers could assume, for the time of reading a book, a wide range of subjectivities. This relatively new sense of a fluid self moving, in actuality or in the imagination, among various social formations complicates the early modern productions of popular cultures. Creating variant forms of popular culture that correspond to the agendas of different social groups, all three writers – Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson – reveal the complexity of diverse cultural identifications that, I will argue, shaped the subjectivity of other early moderns as well. The immensely various productions of popular cultures by Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson enact an almost infinite calculus of difference in relationships with lower status groups. Rather than a specific position, these works offer an opportunity to choose a response. One can choose to feel contempt or envy for Bottom, to indulge in the sensual pleasures of Acrasia’s bower or to triumph in its destruction, to perceive or deny the material desires shared by Jonson’s courtier-fairies and low satyrs, or in a more complicated response, to choose to feel conflicting responses simultaneously. Yet as these choices are presented to early moderns, their terms are also limited by their literary representations. However sympathetic, clownish figures such as Shakespeare’s Bottom, the Red Cross Knight consigned to Gloriana’s floor “unfitte through his rusticity for a better place” (Spenser 1997: 738), and Jonson’s satyrs reveal diverse treatments of a single issue of cultural status, or what would later be called “class,” as pre-

Producing popular cultures 23 dictably central to early modern productions of popular culture. Less understood within popular culture scholarship, gender also plays a central and significant role in these productions. With a few important exceptions (Benson 2003; Amussen 1995), discussions of popular culture have omitted discussions of gender. In his introduction to his anthology on popular culture, Barry Reay laments that “sadly the women in the pages which follow appear infrequently and then often as victims” as he calls for more knowledge about “the contact points for female popular culture” (1985a: 10, 11). In Popular Culture, I argue that, far from invisible or even marginal, gender assumes a defining role in productions of popular culture by Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson. Titania and Acrasia demonstrate a dangerous femininity, whether seductive or repulsive, lurking at its heart. For Jonson’s work, I argue that the iconography of the moonlit world of Oberon, The Fairy Prince evokes the silent presence of old queens that contrasts and also overlaps with the malice of Mother Maudlin in The Sad Shepherd. Finally, the imbrication of popular culture in the performative – the hobby-horses that form a model, I will argue, for the ass’s head Puck places on Bottom for his amateur acting, in the popular renditions of St. George and his dragon in The Faerie Queene, in the disjointed skippings of Jonson’s satyrs in Oberon, The Fairy Prince – points to a quickening sense of vulgarity emanating from the evolving disciplines of the physical body. Through these figures, and through their shared presence in a series of the same literary spaces, these productions of popular culture discover common issues surfacing in the widespread withdrawal from the mores and values attributed to lower status groups. As early moderns find their personal and often unpredictable forms of pleasure, these productions expose this process as taking place not only between social formations, but also within individuals. In this book, I explore how political strategies of cultural domination, and strategies of resistance, become intertwined in modes of pleasure. In a pattern now familiar to Foucauldian formulations, that which appears to be marginal plays a defining role in that which is considered to be at the center (Mullaney 1987). The effort required to move away from the popular, or rather to move the popular away from the social and psychic center, reveals its defining role in forming not only early modern culture, but also early modern subjectivities. As each work generates its range of relationships with the popular culture it produces, personal pleasures merge, inevitably and inextricably, with social and ultimately political choices.8

Part I

Fairies, old wives’ tales, and hobby-horses Rising to (in)visibility Introduction In their representations of popular cultures through fairies, old wives’ tales, and hobby-horses, Shakespeare, Spenser and Jonson participated in a larger cultural phenomenon underway but not yet complete by the late sixteenth century. The forces of an emergent commercial economy, the Protestant Reformation, and a burgeoning nationalism provided both the motives and the cultural materials by which early moderns could generate forms of distinction for themselves as social groups and as individuals. As with any self-definition, these social identities required some degree of “othering” in the identification of differences from other groups. Lower status groups did not, by any means, provide the only form of Other; nor were early moderns the first to other them. Literary works by these and other authors reveal a wide range of available alternatives from other nations, such as the French and the Turks (McEachern 1996), from other races such as the African (Hall 1995), and from other religions, such as the Catholics or Jews (Shapiro 1996). But some othering of lower status groups was already in place, although in less specific and ideologically complex ways, from medieval days; and contemporary lower sorts provided particularly accessible Others for elite and middling sorts alike. Many early moderns encountered these more ordinary Others directly and often, as domestic servants in their homes, as poorer neighbors walking their streets, as raucous participants in festivities in the churchyard. For many, these groups represented aspects of their own past, whether a personal past in a childhood led among hired female caregivers, or a national past before church ales and maypoles had become objects of social dissention. For these early moderns, lower status groups served as a convenient measure for the distance they had advanced from who they once were or who they might, in theory, have remained. As part of the texture of everyday life, these lower status groups were capable of eliciting complex emotions not only of pride in superior accomplishments, but also nostalgia for a time perceived, no doubt erroneously, as simpler. These emotions were rendered all the more complex by a sense of covert or open identification capable of eroding this sense of defining difference. As Ronald Hutton has noted, the process of withdrawal from a popular culture described by Peter Burke was by no means complete

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Part I Rising to (in)visibility

(1994: 246). To use a term from Julia Kristeva, lower status groups formed an “abject,” an object from which one must separate but from which complete separation is not possible (1982: 4). The complex and often conflicting attitudes towards lower status groups shaped the representations of popular culture circulated in early modern England. Perceived through what Jameson has called an “objective mirage,” the characteristics of these, as of any Others, became distorted according to the interests of the defining group (1993: 33). From idyllic to demonic, the more extreme representations bore the marks of exaggeration present but less evident in all representations. Perhaps the most common distortion was a sense of their homogeneity. While drawn from various kinds of interactions with lower status groups, the popular culture represented in works by Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson was, finally, imaginary. It was a simulacrum of a culture that never existed in any homogeneous whole. Allusions to transgressive acts such as cross-class sexual relations through fairies, the circulation of old wives’ tales to children, performances of amateur theatrics with hobby-horses during holiday seasons: all that held these three activities together as a group was their common function as modes of interaction with members of other social fractions. Writers such as Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson included fairies, old wives, and hobby-horses together in the same works because they represented not what was most authentic, but what was most known about the practices and values of lower status groups. This almost obsessive association is itself significant. The persistent presence of these figures in the same works provides an answer to the question: why fairies, old wives, and hobby-horses? Why not explore representations of popular culture through maypoles, church ales, and morris dancers? As subsequent chapters will demonstrate, this grouping is not primarily mine, but theirs. Fairies, old wives, and hobby-horses provided for these writers, and, I believe, for the early modern culture as a whole, a particular cluster of figures representing their most direct and frequent access to these heterogeneous groups. Early modern appropriations reduced each of these figures to stereotypes signifying an imaginary popular culture re-created according to the interests of the dominant groups. This recurrent association of these figures with each other enabled their representation as the kind of homogeneous whole necessary for the function as a defining Other for the elite and middling sorts. Through them, popular culture came into being as something different from the culture of everyone, on the one hand, or of fragmented subgroups, on the other. In their association with fairies, old wives, and hobby-horses, these disparate lower status groups came into visibility, misrecognized as a homogeneous culture, through their increasing differentiation from higher status groups. This visibility served, paradoxically, as a form of invisibility, as this process of differentiation, performed in the interests of other groups, rendered them more and more like caricatures and increasingly less like themselves. To provide a context for the productions of popular culture explored in later chapters, this section describes some uses of these figures of fairies, old wives,

Part I Rising to (in)visibility 27 and hobby-horses within the early modern period. In no sense do these figures open up unmediated access to the world-view or the perceptions of lower status groups. In no sense do these figures suggest a shared common culture. Yet even as re-imagined within the self-defining narratives of dominant cultures, these figures suggest a great deal about the nature of interactions between members of lower status groups and those of the elite or middling sorts. Drawing on a wide network of fairy allusions to refer to a variety of acts evading the strictures of early modern society, Chapter 2 provides insights into why the fairies in literary works by Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson convey a sense of sexual trespass, especially as enacted in cross-class collaborations. These collaborations reveal cooperative rather than oppositional relationships with members of higher status groups although, paradoxically, this cooperation is often defined by mutual defiance of a wider cultural prohibition. In these interactions, the representation of the language of fairy as “native” to lower status groups suggests an early modern understanding of a wider network of fairy allusions to refer to a range of acts particular to them. For a member of the middling or upper sort, to speak this language of fairy was often, in itself, a socially transgressive act. In Chapter 3, I will explore how references to the “old wives” who tell “old wives’ tales” reveal the continuing impact of women storytellers known in childhood, and the capacity of their narratives to confirm but also disrupt the ideologies of gender and of class inculcated through the education of boys in Latin knowledges that formed a condition of their social privilege. A sense of this disruption emerges, I argue, within the mutually defining competitions between narratives characteristic of the nursery and the schoolroom staged in such plays as William Wager’s The Longer Thou Livest, The More Fool Thou Art (1568–9) and George Peele’s “The Old Wives Tale” (1595). Finally, Chapter 4 explores the role of various figures – in particular hobby-horses, St. George, and morris dancers – in play games composed of combat or combat-dance, that came to signify one form of the popular by the early seventeenth century. An understanding of the denigration of these figures as a sign of the popular by the late sixteenth century provides a necessary context, I will argue, for Bottom’s ass’s head and the obscene theatrics of the Pyramus and Thisbe play; for Spenser’s Red Cross Knight with his dragon as a version of St. George; for the satyr dances in Jonson’s masque Oberon, The Fairy Prince, and for Jonson’s refusal of these meanings in the Maid Marian of his Sad Shepherd. Unlike some earlier studies, this section does not represent lower status groups as emerging from a utopic and unchanging historical past. On the contrary, the politicizing of their practices by the early seventeenth century shaped the content and local significances of what they came to mean to a larger culture. Relying less on folklore than on cultural studies, Part I uses the perspectives of Michel de Certeau (1984) and Pierre Bourdieu (1984, 1993) to inform a focus on the practices of everyday life: ordinary forms of graft committed in the name of fairies, ballads sung to children by women performing menial household tasks, bids by unsponsored performers to elicit hospitality in a holiday season. My work on the uses of fairy allusions to cover transgressive acts restores a vital

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sense of agency to a folk denigrated or more often idealized by attributions of a naïve belief in superstitions. It is my hope that my claim for the significance of old wives’ tales to early modern narrativity may foreground the crucial role of women in future studies of popular culture since, with a few exceptions, scholars of popular culture seldom acknowledge the significant impact of the innumerable and now nameless women who transmitted a rich oral history to the children in their charge. Finally, through the study of hobby-horses and amateur performativity, I hope to encourage further studies that develop a line of inquiry into the changing significances of the body, as specific forms of embodiedness became increasingly differentiated according to social status.

2

Taken by the fairies

Associated with the worst of our own contemporary popular culture, and particularly with consumables – often pink ones – designed with maximum little-girl appeal, fairies did not constitute a respectable academic subject until relatively recently. Most scholarly references to fairies, often made in passing, deferred to the relatively undigested information amassed by Minor Latham (1930) and Katherine Briggs (1959 and 1967). More detailed analyses of early modern works tended to derive their methodology either from the psychoanalytic approach popularized by Bruno Bettelheim (1976) or from the index of folk-motifs compiled by Stith Thompson (1955–8). Neither of these approaches became mainstream in early modern studies. Bettelheim’s use of modern family structures to support his Freudian model did not transfer naturally to Shakespeare’s plays. Stith Thompson’s classifications of motifs led analyses into a dry and arid landscape. As Marina Warner has wittily commented, “This taxonomy provides a list of ingredients with no evocation of their taste . . . no sense of how or why it was eaten” (1994: xxii). In the meantime and in another discipline, scholars of cultural studies and folklore were moving away from these transhistorical approaches to analyze what tales revealed about the material circumstances in which they circulated: in the struggles of a pre-capitalist people to better their conditions (Zipes 1979), in real-life issues of a peasant culture in which parents sometimes did cast off starving children (Darnton 1984), in extended households in which dependent aged women strove to attain some form of authority by telling stories (Warner 1994: 17). This serious attention to the meanings of folk and fairylore within their material and historical context contributed to a sudden outburst of engaging representations of specifically early modern significance for fairies. Diane Purkiss analyzes fairy allusions in, for example, Scottish witch trials as a way of thinking and talking about the dead, and especially dead kin (2000a: 97–104). From an understanding of fairies as souls still in purgatory, Purkiss extends this use of the fairies to evoke a Catholic past that was itself rooted in the ancient world (see also Briggs 1967: 10; Buccola 2003). In a sophisticated argument connecting English nationalism to the domestic sphere, Wendy Wall links fairies to a personal as well as a national past. Fairies legitimized the values of an industrious middling sort in their capacity to “literalize the mundane work of

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housewives and serving women” (2002: 110). In the process, fairies evoked the material relationships of a personal past led among domestic servants in childhood or, alternatively, consolidated the patriotic values of an industrious middling sort through their affinity with a native tradition. For Marjorie Swann, writers of Stuart fairy poetry evoked a somewhat different past in the fairyland of medieval romance to validate the origins of a hereditary aristocracy, as opposed to an urban middling sort, in a “conservative vision of a time-honored social order” (2000: 452). This aristocratic identity was, she notes, also performed through the ostentatious forms of display central to such literary works as Ben Jonson’s masque Oberon, The Fairy Prince (1611), Michael Drayton’s delicate “Nymphidia” (1627), and Robert Herrick’s “Oberon’s Feast” (1648). As these critics have skillfully demonstrated, fairylore circulated in all levels of society, from poor women of Scotland, to a patriotic middling sort, to the Stuart aristocracy; and for each of these social fractions, fairies invoked a national or a personal past. In this section I argue, perhaps counter-intuitively, that this wide social circulation was largely predicated on an ongoing and heightened awareness of the lower status groups to which fairylore was understood most appropriately to pertain. Rather than signifying a democratic solidarity closing social ranks, fairylore became a means for various groups to generate forms of distinction precisely because of its identification with the low. The Scottish women most vulnerable to accusations of witchcraft already belonged to a low status group. While, as Purkiss observes, they used fairies to allude to mortality in sensitive and creative ways, their auditors misinterpreted their references as signifying demonic influence or idle superstition, or both. This reductive misinterpretation became widespread especially among the hotter Protestant factions, for whom fairies represented yet another ignorant belief to be dispelled by the truth of Protestant doctrine. For many godly Protestants, otherworldly creatures not sent by God were necessarily sent by the devil (Thomas 1971: 608; Sagar 1995). The association between fairies and a Catholic past only strengthened this conviction of a demonic origin. As Briggs has pointed out, the earlier representation of fairies in Catholic England as souls between heaven and hell – fallen angels who did not descend all the way to hell, or souls still in purgatory – did not please Reformation Puritans (1967: 10). The extensive parallels between the Catholic Church and the kingdom of faery meticulously traced in Hobbes’s Leviathan point irresistibly to a common ruler: The Fairies in what Nation soever they converse, have but one Universal King, which some Poets of ours call King Oberon; but the Scripture calls Beelzebub, Prince of Daemons. (1651: 481) For this godly sort, such indications of a backward belief in fairies vindicated their identity as righteous agents of the Reformation. The demonization of fairies valorized their own enlightened liberation from the morass of lies circulated among a populace sufficiently credulous to believe in purgatory and saints.

Taken by the fairies 31 For those less dogmatic members of the middling sort, I would shift the emphasis of Wendy Wall’s argument to stress the significance of the household as a primary site not only of domesticity but also of contact between social groups. As Wall observes, the fairylore of Elizabethan households emerges from interactions with domestic servants, including the female caregivers who sang fairy ballads to children as well as the serving girls allegedly rewarded or punished by fairies according to their efforts. My discussion of “old wives’ tales” in Chapter 3 further develops Wall’s insights concerning the cultural significance of the sharing of tales between domestic servants and children. But I would qualify Wall’s association of fairies with the industrious middling sort by exploring the transforming power of the contemporary accumulation of household goods on evolving ideals of bourgeois femininity. In Chapter 6, I explore how the forms of distinction embodied by Mrs. Ford and Mrs. Page in Merry Wives depend on the presence of the lower domestic Mrs. Quickly. The disdain expressed by Mrs. Page for those “superstitious idle-headed eld” who preserved the tale of Herne the hunter complicates the apparent celebration of a “merrie England” in the community’s staging of fairies near the end of that play. Due largely to inflation and demographic expansion, the economic distance between the increasing numbers of poor and the comfortably well-off created a more defined sense of social distance that became naturalized in the dynamics of the household. Whether Puritan or bourgeois, the middling sort generated a sense of their group identity through their association of fairies with lower status sorts. Paradoxically, it was the aristocracy that seemed unusually prone to identify themselves, and to be identified, with fairies. As noted in the introduction, the young Prince Henry played Oberon in Jonson’s masque Oberon, The Fairy Prince (1611), and the Oberon of Robert Herrick’s “Oberon’s Feast” (1648) is transparently a tiny and dazzlingly wealthy aristocrat. These associations of aristocrat-fairies with incomparable wealth often displayed in expensive gifts were complicated by a subtext implying a less mysterious source, described below for the lower sorts, of alluding to stolen goods as presents from the fairies. This subtext may inform Herrick’s use of fairy ostentation, first to mystify aristocratic consumption, and then to critique that consumption as parasitic greed (Swann 2000: 459). For wealthy aristocrats, the use of fairies to self-identify with the low appealed to a different association, evoking the supposedly congenial relations between simple villagers and their feudal lords from an “old” time before the emergence of a powerful urban and middling sort. Peter Stallybrass has described this process as “ruralization,” in which “social relations which were crucially structured by court and city and could be presented as part of a timeless country tradition . . . to produce a mythic unity of prince, gentry and people which could be used as a weapon in a struggle within the governing classes” (1986: 241, 244). Thus, the time-honored world that Marjorie Swann associates with the fairyland of medieval romance was not solely literary. In the aristocratic imaginary, fairies could invoke an idealization of a primarily agrarian lower status group that was simultaneously a contemporary social fraction potentially useful to the monarchy as a political alliance and also a reassuring

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remnant of a past time in which a feudal social structure formed a dependable basis for distinction according to lineage. For all three of these groups – godly reformers, bourgeois householders, and Stuart aristocrats alike – fairies served as shared cultural materials from which they constructed a national past in order to justify their individual visions not only of their contemporary England, but of their own social roles within it. This heightened process of social identity formation accounts for the paradox that literary references to fairies were reaching their peak at the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth centuries, at precisely the time when traditional customs within which fairylore evolved were losing ground. While Katherine Briggs has explained this outburst of references in terms of a natural growth of a yeoman literature with popular roots (1959: 6), I argue that the sudden increase in literary allusions to fairies reveals a coming into visibility of these lower status groups, and that this visibility was predicated upon the early stages of self-differentiation by the literate middling sort and the elite that was, in fact, creating new meanings for the low as a socially significant category. Whether projecting the very different responses of nostalgia or repulsion, this early modern fascination with fairies clearly had little to do with the simple transmission of oral traditions circulated among yeomen, and much more to do with the creation of a category of the popular to serve defined social agendas. Even in their new forms created by various social agendas, fairies often evoked a lurking sense of trangression. Later chapters will demonstrate that from Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream to Jonson’s Oberon, to go with the fairies was to tread on dangerous ground. A sense of personal or national past evoked through fairies was often inflected, I argue, by a contemporary understanding of fairy allusions to refer covertly to illicit or at least unspoken acts. This implicit sense of social transgression remained an integral part of the signification of the fairies, and derived from their continued association with lower status groups. This is not to claim that references to unauthorized acts represented the only use of fairy allusions. Drawn from “ancestral spirits, ghosts, sleeping heroes, fertility spirits and pagan gods” (Thomas 1971: 607), fairylore was markedly heterogeneous. Many of the meanings for fairies have no doubt been lost. The use of fairy allusions to refer to the illicit or the unlawful survived because it became visible to literate social fractions who collaborated with the lower sorts, often in sexual or criminal acts. For this reason, references in plays, prose tracts, and other printed works reveal and also circulate a knowledge of such practices, usually centered within a low social formation composed of loosely linked and heterogeneous members addressing local problems as individuals or in small groups: highwaymen, servants willing to take bribes, parents of unwanted children, young women who become pregnant by men they do not know or cannot name. These uses of fairy allusions became integral to what fairies signified to various social groups. While written sources provide a necessarily mediated view, they do reveal forms of agency practiced by the lower sorts in their attempts to discover remedies for difficulties not addressed by established institutions such as lawcourts or

Taken by the fairies 33 churches. From a model of class resistance developed by James C. Scott based on “implicit understandings and informal networks” rather than on direct confrontation, references to fairies often served as a “weapon of the weak” which, like “footdragging, dissimulation, desertion, false compliance, pilfering, feigned ignorance, slander, arson, sabotage,” enacted an “everyday form of peasant resistance” (1985: xvi). Complicating a straightforward social division, the permeability of any distinct social boundaries appears in such interactions as bribery and cross-class sexual encounters involving collaborations with members of the dominant culture in mutual evasions of social control. In the introduction, I discussed such an example from Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale. When the Old Shepherd takes up the infant Perdita, his comments to himself express his assumption that she is illegitimate, perhaps the progeny of a waiting-gentlewoman. His subsequent depiction of the baby as a “changeling” to his son protects her from the shame of her origin. In this context, he clearly does not believe that the coins left with the infant actually represent “fairy gold,” a gift given freely by beneficent fairies to the finder. The circumstances establish that these coins comprise a silent payment, probably by the mother, to any kind soul who might take pity on her child. To understand the ways in which fairy allusions may have functioned, let us explore this example further as a discursive act. What is the status of the Old Shepherd’s fictional explanation? Would the Shepherd’s neighbors have “believed” that Perdita was a fairy changeling and that the Shepherd had found “fairy gold”? Or, rather, would these fairy references form a discrete way of alluding to a shared understanding of her shameful origin and the real source of the Shepherd’s sudden wealth? The Old Shepherd’s fairy narrative would seem to represent a speech-act more complex than either a statement of literal belief or a simple lie. He has entered upon a sophisticated social transaction conforming in important respects to what Pierre Bourdieu has called a “white lie,” a distortion or fabrication that is “socially devised and encouraged” within a group to correct “the symbolic effects of strategies imposed by other necessities” (1977: 43). In Bourdieu’s example, a family saves its honor from the shame of an unprestigious marriage by masking constraint as a moral obligation; with the “benevolent complicity” of all concerned; the group creates a “circle of calculated lies” which deceive, and are probably intended to deceive, no one (1977: 51). As a “white lie,” the Old Shepherd’s explanation of Perdita’s fairy origins depends upon the assent, more than the literal belief, of members of his community. At that moment in the play, it is not clear whether the kindly but dim-witted son of the Old Shepherd assents to a white lie or actually believes that Perdita is a changeling child. Either response serves the Old Shepherd’s purposes. Years later, however, when the Shepherd’s son fears recriminations as Perdita’s brother from the angry Polixenes, the Clown pleads with his father to refute any kinship relationship: “There is no other way but to tell the King she’s a changeling and none of your flesh and blood” (4.4.691–2). In this statement, is the play raising a smile at the Clown’s expense for his literal belief in fairy changelings? Or in the absence of any reverence for the magical origin of his

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“changeling” sister, it would seem that his matter-of-fact description suggests an understanding, ascribed to Polixenes as well, of a “changeling” identity as a white lie alluding to an unknown and presumably illegitimate birth. If the Clown is, in fact, aware of Perdita’s presumed illegitimacy, his plea to inform Polixenes of her changeling status inscribes a community of interpreters ranging across widely diverse social groups. Or if the Clown himself is sufficiently out of the interpretive loop to believe in fairy changelings, then he becomes an outsider to this material discourse circulating through the coins passed from the baby’s mother to the Old Shepherd. This outsider status remains potential to various informants about fairies, particularly to elite adults who recount the fairy beliefs of childhood. As one of the first antiquarians of popular culture, John Aubrey serves as one such informant for the customs surrounding the fairies in the early modern period. His nostalgic memories from his pre-Civil War childhood draw together a number of the practices commonly associated with fairies: When I was a Boy, our Countrey-people would talke much of them: They were wont to please the Fairies, that they might doe them no shrewd turnes by sweeping clean the Hearth, and setting by it a dish whereon was sett a mess of milke sopt with white bread: and did sett their Shoes by the fire, and many times on the morrow they should find a threepence in one of them. But if they did speak of it they never had any again. . . . They would churne the cream &c. That the Fairies would steale away young children and putt others in their places: verily believed by old woemen in those dayes: and by some yet living. (Aubrey 1972: 203) Aubrey’s account has particular value because it conveys not only the customs, but also the discursive circumstances by which these customs were transmitted. Like many early modern men of learning, Aubrey was what Peter Burke has described as culturally “amphibious,” reared in a common community of “Countrey-people” and “old woemen” before he entered the “great” culture through education in the texts and values of a literate society (1978: 28). Thus, for Aubrey, the question of belief in fairies is complicated by his experience of fairy customs in boyhood. As Keith Thomas notes, “the fact that fairy-beliefs seem to have had childhood associations for most commentators” makes the vitality of this tradition difficult to determine; and scholars of various disciplines have abundantly demonstrated the problems raised by assessing belief in general.1 How is it possible to assess the accuracy of Aubrey’s observation that the fairies were “verily believed by old woemen in those dayes”? The circumstances surrounding the transmission of these customs to young children may themselves have fostered the illusion of belief in fairies. Marina Warner discusses the use of fairy-tales by old women, in particular, to diminish their powerlessness in a household controlled by younger, more active women (1994: 229–37); the same dynamic was no doubt also at work with fairy practices. What better way

Taken by the fairies 35 for a country servant, and especially an old woman, to gain psychological power over a boy than to impress him with the powers of magical forces within the household under her control, or at least known to her in a way not available to the more educated members of the household? Alternatively, professing belief in fairies may have been preferable to explaining the underlying customs enacted through fairy practices to a boy whose allegiances would soon belong to a more powerful social formation. Given these constraints on Aubrey’s childhood memory, there is still no doubt that some early modern adults “believed” in fairies. Gullible victims demonstrated belief by freely giving money to con artists in exchange for a meeting with the Queen of Fairies.2 The “belief” of Welsh conjurers that they walked with the fairies on Tuesday and Thursday evenings (Penry 1587: 46) becomes more plausible when compared to even stranger accounts by Italian “benandanti” of how, armed with fennel stalks, they did periodic battle with malevolent powers to save the season’s crop (Ginzburg 1983: 6). Numerous local indications of faith in various forms of magic, including fairies, appeared to linger especially in rural areas despite a general decline of belief in magic in the early modern period (Thomas 1971: 151–73). But while fairy belief existed, it was far from universal. Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft lists fairies along with “spirits, witches, urchens, elves, hags, satyrs, pans, faunes” and another common folk figure, “Robin good-fellowe,” as terrifying “bugs” commonly passed down in childhood by “our mothers maids” (1584: 7.15.139). For Scot, the bowl of milk left for fairies in Aubrey’s account was set out by “your grandams maids” instead for Robin Goodfellow “for his pains in grinding malt or mustard, and sweeping the house at midnight.” Scot supposes that this milk was actually consumed by “a cousening idle frier or some such roge” (4.10.88). To account for practices such as these detailed by Scot and Aubrey, some scholars have moved from determining levels of a given belief to analyzing how beliefs function within a society. Keith Thomas, for example, has noted such social consequences of fairy beliefs as clean houses and dairies, as well as increased vigilance over newborns (1971: 611–12). This functional approach obscures a pragmatic problem of agency raised, for example, by Scot’s suspicions: Who did eat the milk sopped in cream? Who dropped money in the shoes of maids who cleaned well, and who pinched them at night? Why did parents claim that a changeling was substituted for their newborn? And what had happened to their newborn? While it is precisely the role of the standard fairy practices to obscure agency, material for educated speculation is still provided by references in plays by Shakespeare and his contemporaries, in early modern references to rebels and thieves, and in the evasive allusions to sexual violations by modern descendants of early modern Irish and English fishermen. These bring into view an alternative use of fairy practices that involved neither naïve acceptance, an unconscious fulfillment of societal needs, nor simple deceit, although all three of these may also have been present at times. These references suggest the sophistication and range available to the “weapons of the weak” used by members of subordinated subgroups to

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forward their own interests. These interests were not always poised in direct opposition to those of more powerful groups. Without denying the ongoing presence of social struggle, various strategic interventions merge the interests of common and dominant cultures to reveal the inadequacies of any simple model of oppression and resistance. Early modern references strongly suggest the use of fairy allusions as white lies to refer to shared understandings about “found” money and sexual acts. A passage from the Wisdom of Doctor Dodypoll (1600) reveals another crossgroup collaboration, through which the practice of dropping money in a servant’s shoe could reward more than meticulous cleaning. In this play, a manservant named Hance uses fairy allusions to describe an informal system of bribery insuring his silence about the night visits of his mistress’s wealthy lover: I may lie all night triumphing from corner to corner, while he goes to see the Fayries: but I for my part, see nothing; but here a strange noyse sometimes. Well, I am glad we are haunted so with Fairies: For I cannot set cleane pump down, but I find a dollar in it in the morning. (A4) Hance’s sly reference to a “strange” and presumably sexual noise alludes to his ribald appreciation of the actual nature of the activities performed nightly in his mistress’s bedchamber. The play represents Hance as well aware that the young aristocrat who loves his mistress has nothing at all to do with fairies, and that it is he who leaves money in his shoe. The presence of this passage in a play raises the possibility that the euphemism of “going to see the fairies” to allude to illicit sexual activities may have been widespread enough to be shared with a contemporary audience. As in the example from The Winter’s Tale, the transaction between Hance and his mistress’s lover represents a cross-class collaboration in evading the prohibitions of the dominant culture, in this case against premarital sex. For Hance’s mistress, the sexual encounter was desired; but in the prose pamphlet Robin Good-Fellow, His Mad Prankes, and merry Jests (1628), the desire felt by a young woman of little means for a wealthy man was less easily determined. A tavern hostess tells of Robin’s mother, a “proper young Wench” whose room was repeatedly visited at night by a “hee Fayrie” who “forced” her to dance with him, leaving her silver and jewels upon his departure until she became pregnant, when his visits ceased. When asked the identity of the father, she replied, “A man that nightly came to visit her, but earely in the morning he would go his way, whither she knew not, he went so suddainly.” The identity of the father was determined by an old woman who told her that “a Fayrie had gotten her with childe” and comforted her by saying that “the childe must needes be Fortunate that had so noble a Father as a Fayry was; and should worke many strange Wonders” (A4–A4v). While in this story, as narrated by just such an “old woman,” the father was in fact a fairy, the girl’s experience evokes more ordinary and sordid encounters at a time when young serving girls, for example, were

Taken by the fairies 37 often perceived as fair sexual game by their masters (Kussmaul 1981: 44). This sense of “fairies” as alluding to very human sexual predators is suggested in Cymbeline by the circumstances informing the bedtime prayer of a king’s daughter, as Imogen’s entrusts herself to the gods: “To your protection I commend me, gods./From fairies and the tempters of the night/Guard me, beseech ye” (2.2.8–10). Even as she prays, the perfidious Iachimo is hidden in her trunk, planning if not actually to ravish her, at least to ruin her reputation for chastity in a highly charged scene of sexual voyeurism. The sexual deeds performed by the “hee Fayrie” and falsely bragged of by Iachimo bear the same signs of human agency as spirits described in the 1665 edition of Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft. In fact, earlier in the century these “jocund and facetious Spirits” might well have been called fairies, for like fairies they pinched maidens black and blue at night. Attribution of these deeds to “spirits” performed the same function of evading sexual prohibitions as they sported themselves anonymously “in the night by tumbling and fooling with Servants and Shepherds in country houses, pinching them black and blew, and leaving Bread, Butter and Cheese.” Sometimes nightly visits escalated into kidnapping and even mutilation, according to this account in Scot’s work: Many such have been taken away by the sayd Spirits, for a fortnight, or month together, being carryed with them in Chariots through the Air, over Hills, and Dales, Rocks and Precipices, till at last they have been found lying in some Meddow or Mountain bereaved of their sences, and commonly of one of their Members to boot. (2.4.51) It is not difficult to understand why a traumatized victim of sexual assault might not be able to identify the assailant. It is even less difficult to understand why victims might fear the repercussions of identifying an aggressor who might do them further harm if named. It is not clear from this account, however, who was responsible for attributing these acts to spirits. Did the victims claim that they were wronged by spirits as a sign of their refusal to name the assailant? Or did the persons who found them make this claim to signify that there was no evidence pointing to a specific person? Or was it the victims’ families, when pressured to explain what had happened to their loved ones? Stretching the boundaries of literal belief, the apparently wide attribution of real and physical harm to “many such” victims suggests the cooperation of the victims’ community in circulating this white lie to protect their members from further harm or perhaps to shield the reputations of their violated women as virgins. Some insight into a very similar white lie attributing assault specifically to fairies is provided by a similar usage in a modern community in Newfoundland, descended in part from Irish and English fishermen from the late sixteenth and seventeen centuries. While Burke cautions against the regressive method of studying an earlier cultural phenomenon through its modern version, he does acknowledge its usefulness as a base from which to consider more fragmentary

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evidence from an earlier period, as I am here proposing (1978: 80–4). A recent study by Peter Narvaez presents striking resemblances to early modern practices as he details how members of this community still attribute to “fairies” deviant behaviors, including “extreme tardiness, premarital sexual acts, infidelity, incest, child molestation, wife battering, and sexual assault” (1991: 357). Rather than appealing to a “belief,” a woman who claimed she was kidnapped by fairies when she missed a turn off a freeway avoided embarrassment by using a culturally sanctioned excuse to refer to an unsaid – that she was daydreaming as she drove. Interestingly, her pretext for “lost community time” (336) bears a resemblance to the lost “fortnight, or month together” of the victims of the spirits described in Scot’s work. It also evokes early tales of wanderers who returned to their families, or their descendants, years later, claiming they had been living with the fairies (Briggs 1978: 15–17). Attributions of fairy agency to sexual episodes in Newfoundland were particularly frequent in the 1930s before the use of freezers transformed the local blueberry-picking industry from low-paying women’s work. As told to Narvaez’s informants by their grandparents’ generation, the stories of young women who went with the fairies while picking blueberries bear striking similarities to early modern narratives of spirits or fairies. One Mary Charles, for example, strayed while picking berries to be found the next day “only in her bloomers,” her ribs broken, and terrified, claiming “the fairies had beckoned to her” (1991: 346). In a period when women were liable to be blamed for their own rapes while rapists were punished lightly if at all, Mary Charles’s allusion to fairies shielded her from further violence by her attacker and implicitly protected her reputation by denying that the act even occurred. A less fortunate young sister of an informant’s grandmother was taken by the “fairies,” never to return, leaving behind only one red sock and a dipper of blueberries (352). The extent to which fairy agency was used to deflect scandal appears in the case of an informant’s aunt who became pregnant as a teenager. When the doctor announced her pregnancy, her father responded, “No, she isn’t. She was taken by the fairies” (357). The reply of the father of a pregnant daughter makes explicit the role of community assent in the circulation of this white lie. To most readers outside of Newfoundland, this explanation remains unintelligible. The father, however, assumed rightly or wrongly that the doctor belonged to a discursive community sharing his understanding of this reference to fairies as a denial of his daughter’s sexual agency. She was prey to forces, presumably very physical forces, beyond her control. It wasn’t her fault. Yet, as the doctor also knew, she was still pregnant. Does the father’s response indicate a simple state of stunned denial? Or does his reply suggest that since his daughter was presumably a victim of rape, this pregnancy wasn’t “real” and should perhaps be terminated? Was termination of “fairy” pregnancies an understood medical procedure? While Narvaez does not report the doctor’s response, the father’s assumption raises interesting questions. Was this discursive community, as defined by an understanding of fairy allusions, centered in a socio-economic group? Did the doctor’s traditionally high status and education in the medical sciences remove him from such a

Taken by the fairies 39 community? Or would contact with this community in boyhood equip him to understand the father’s meaning? The concentration of this discursive community in Newfoundland suggests its determination by geographic location at least as much as by education and class status. The questions raised by this episode are equally applicable to the early modern period. Since explanations of fairy-induced pinches, pregnancies, or even maimings of necessity depended upon community assent, geographical area may have played an important role in the early modern period as well. Who exactly were members of the discursive community circulating fairy allusions? The boyhood perceptions of men such as Aubrey raised among servants may have reflected only a partial understanding of the function of white lies. Yet other members of the dominant culture seemed fully able to collaborate in the use of fairy allusions to resist the values and customs of their own group, especially in the case of consensual sexual acts or bribery. Sometimes allusions were not so much collaborative as protective of innocent victims – such as raped women or illegitimate babies – who would otherwise suffer shame according to conventions of the dominant culture. While fairy narratives originated in an oral tradition of an agrarian culture, they circulated beyond this group, especially in its complex interactions with members of other cultures. But how far did they circulate, and under what circumstances? Even partial answers to these questions provide a window into the complex relationships between the low status groups and a dominant culture. While in their very nature, sexual activities blurred the binary divisions between members of low and dominant groups, property theft tended to reinstate these divisions to compensate those persons disadvantaged by an economic system based upon personal ownership. In these uses, allusions to the fairies functioned more explicitly as a “weapon of the weak” to intervene in the unequal power relationships supported by the juridical systems and values of the dominant culture. Thus, in addition to sexual activities, early moderns also used fairies to allude to forms of social protest ranging from revolt to property crime. This latter use represents an extension of the Old Shepherd’s appropriation of the money found with Perdita as “fairy gold” belonging only to the one who found it. In The Wisdom of Doctor Dodypoll, Hance does not believe that fairies left money in his shoe; nor does he believe the alleged fairy origins of a valuable jeweled golden cup that a peasant attempts to sell to a jeweller (1600: E3v–r). While in this play the peasant did in fact steal the cup from the fairies, this incident suggests that the circulation of real-life narratives of “fairy gold” expressed a shared understanding concerning stolen goods. An interpretation of fairy origins of mysterious wealth as a white lie for acts such as bribery or theft subject to legal recourse restores intelligibility to this incident of fairy bestowal noted by John Aubrey (1972: 203): There was a labouring-man, that rose up early every day to goe to worke: who for many dayes together found a nine pence in the way that he went. His wife wondering how he came by so much money was afraid he gott it not honestly: at last he told her: and afterwards he never found any more.

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It is not difficult to imagine the wife’s increasing curiosity and then suspicion as over “many dayes” her husband returned with the fairly substantial sum of nine pence without sharing with her the source of his extra earnings. Given other uses of fairy allusions to refer to illicit activities, the wife’s fears would seem to be well founded. When her mounting anxiety led her to a direct confrontation, his “explanation” of fairy beneficence was probably not intended to inspire literal belief, but to signify instead his refusal to identify the actual source. But whether because his wife’s objections became unpleasant in themselves, or else endangered his activity by signaling her withdrawal of silent assent, he ceased the practice, or at least he ceased telling his wife about any future sums of ninepence he “found.” Incidents such as this may explain the folk wisdom that once a mortal discloses gifts of fairy wealth, he loses any future gifts. Less evident in this relation is John Aubrey’s own level of belief. As one of the first antiquarians of the habits and practices of lower status groups, Aubrey’s concern seems more to record than to interpret such events. Still, the absence of any allusion to an underlying code suggests an ignorance proceeding from the two stages of his relationship with this community. As a child, he was liable to believe stories of fairy gold; as an adult outsider to the group, he was liable to have attributed to his informant a naïve belief in fairy gold. According to this interpretation of fairy gold as a form of white lie, the actual source of a number of goods bestowed by fairies becomes suddenly vulnerable to suspicion: a golden ball stolen from the fairies as “proof” of his visits with them by a boy named Elidurus in the twelfth century, as related by Giraldus Cambrensis’ Itinerary through Wales; wine stolen by fairies from a lord’s cellar as explained by a boy they left drunk there the next morning; a diamond ring mysteriously bestowed by fairies on a wife at a christening (Briggs 1978: 48, 157; 1967: 113). A literal belief in their accounts would serve the purposes of Elidurus, or the drunken boy, or the wife. Equally efficacious was a form of community assent that implied a discreet acceptance of their refusal to divulge the presumably illegal source. Such discretion may have expressed a communal resistance to a current system of property ownership. In these cases, theft represented not so much a crime as just compensation for an unbalanced distribution of wealth within a society. Those outside this discursive community, whatever its actual social boundaries may have been, would have misunderstood these fairy narratives as false superstitions or wondrous truths. For this reason, it is not surprising that con artists such as the Wests found most of their gullible victims among the more educated bourgeois or middle-class citizens of urban centers rather than among illiterate farmers or countrywomen, most of whom may well have known better (Halliwell-Phillipps [1845] 1996: 181–94). In commissions of property theft, there is sometimes a thin line between personal greed and social protest. Richard Wilson has related two incidents of subversive fairy allusions of a political nature from the late medieval period. In 1450, Jack Cade’s rebels secured an area they called “fairyland” and, in a striking gender inversion, dubbed Cade himself as “Queen of the Fairies” (1996: 212). In its self-conscious and blatant absurdity, this assertion of a royal identity

Taken by the fairies 41 of sorts looks forward to the character Cade’s speech in Shakespeare’s Henry VI part 2 in which he pretends a claim to the throne by tracing his lineage to the Mortimers through an unknown son stolen by a beggar woman and raised as a bricklayer (4.2.132–40). The claim by Shakespeare’s Cade was not designed to inspire literal belief as much as to parody other supposedly more serious claims to the throne through lineage. In a similar way, the historical Cade’s superficially absurd assertion of his political rights to territory in the name of the Queen of Fairies made a serious political point. Cade’s pretense parodied the claims of an elite group to exclusive rights to own land. To some disenfranchised citizens, these rights undoubtedly seemed just as groundless as those of the fairy queen. As Cade not only alluded to fairies, but cast himself in the role of their Queen, he was literalizing a figure of speech legitimating property theft by the poor from the wealthy. His defiant use of a familiar figure posed the interests of his group in direct opposition to those profiting from the contemporary political system. A similar logic structures an episode described by Wilson as occurring a year later. In 1451 in Kent, a William Cheeseman and Tom Crudd “with others unknown . . . and covered with long beards and painted on their faces with black charcoal, calling themselves the servants of the Queen of Fairies,” broke into the Duke of Buckingham’s preserve and poached ten bucks and seventy-two does. The staging of themselves as servants to the queen of fairies provided disguises and at the same time signified their refusal to divulge their names. In the process, they enacted an underlying ideology, circulated through fairy narratives alluding to property theft, that denied the Duke’s exclusive rights to own deer. How large was this discursive community characterized by the implicit assent of its members in the property crimes represented as bestowal of fairy wealth? Depending on the time and place, it no doubt varied in size from a substantial portion of an economically disadvantaged group of an area, to a few members of a band of thieves. While Falstaff does not specifically refer to fairies, it seems probable that a practice such as this informed his naming of his band as “Diana’s foresters . . . minions of the moon” (Henry IV part 1, 1.2.25–6). Shakespeare’s play does not suggest that, in Falstaff’s case, the discursive community extended into the larger population of early modern England. In a more political example from France, however, Natalie Zemon Davis has found a larger community among rural peasants who protected the anonymity of rebels sheltered in their cottages by calling them “fairies” (1975: 191–2). According to Peter Linebaugh, this association of fairies with property theft lingered into the eighteenth century, when the bandits of Connaught were similarly referred to as “fairies” (1992: 196). As these examples suggest, the use of fairies as a “white lie” for property theft was practiced primarily although not wholly by males. The female domain, in the bearing and raising of infants and small children, provides a somewhat more complex use of fairy allusions. In this provenance, not all these references necessarily encoded a “white lie.” According to Minor Latham, the following narrative of fairy theft explaining various physical changes in infants or even their mysterious deaths was recorded for the first time in the sixteenth century:

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fairies stole mortal babies and substituted their own changelings in their place (1930: 150). This narrative was especially flexible, capable of covering a wide range of very different circumstances, from natural death, to culpable accident, to intentional murder. Especially in instances of some medical conditions, it is difficult to determine the level of parental or even communal belief. Eberly and Munro present striking correlations between the described appearance of “changelings” and actual disorders. As one of several examples, Eberly notes that the symptoms of the inherited disease PKU, most common in children of English or Irish descent, begin to appear in normal-looking babies at about six months, leading to slow growth and severe retardation (1991). Munro describes the wizened appearance of failure-to-thrive babies, who become “psychosocial dwarves” as a result of “parental hostility” or neglect (1991: 273). Eberly surmises thoughtfully that children who survived these disfiguring disorders into adulthood may have avoided ridicule and physical persecution by keeping to themselves; and that they may have performed household chores at night, like fairies or Robin Goodfellow, in exchange for a “ritual evening dish of fresh cream”(72). Many infants, however, did not survive the methods of determining if they were changelings. In theory, if parents treated their changelings cruelly, the fairies would take the changelings back and return the mortal infants. As Eberly notes, traditional methods – such as bathing them in foxglove (a herbal form of digitalis), starving them on a dunghill, or throwing them on to hot coals – were “little more than socially countenanced forms of infanticide” (62). Would the early modern parents of retarded or failure-to-thrive babies have “believed” that they were changelings left by the fairies? Or did fairy narratives enable a socially accepted form of infanticide as a means of managing a situation that seemed, or perhaps actually was, impossible? The use of the changeling narrative as a white lie to soften the cruel reality of accidental death emerges from an anecdote told by Robert Willis concerning his own near-death in infancy around 1564: Such an accident (by relation of others) befell me within a few daies after my birth, whilst my mother lay of me being her second child, when I was taken out of the bed from her side, and by my suddain and fierce crying recovered again, being found sticking between the beds-head and the wall; and if I had not cryed in that manner as I did, our gossips had a conceit that I had been carried away by the Fairies they know not whither, and some elfe or changeling (as they call it) laid in my room. (1639: 92–3) Born at about the same time and to the same approximate socio-economic group as Shakespeare, Willis reveals the circulation of the changeling narrative among the “middling” sort, perhaps through a midwife or “gossip” from a less prosperous group. In Willis’s case, the term “changeling” would have referred to an actual dead infant, not a living fairy substitute. His term “conceit” indicates his perception that the women or “gossips” attending his mother after childbirth

Taken by the fairies 43 were very aware that the reason for his near-death had nothing at all to do with fairies. If Willis had died, the fairy narrative would have deflected blame from the mother and her attendants for a terrible accident. This use of a changeling narrative to deflect blame also appears in Marlowe’s The Tragedie of Dido. When the nurse temporarily loses the little Ascanius, the play presents her fairy story as the flimsiest of excuses: O Dido, your little sonne Ascanius Is gone! He lay with me last night, and in the morning he was stolne from me, I thinke some Fairies have beguiled me! (5.1.212–15) Marlowe’s play renders the nurse’s hysterical outburst as comic. In fact, the loss of children by nurses, whether from such accidents as the one nearly occurring to Willis or from general neglect, reflects a grim actuality (Wrightson 1982b; Willis 1995: 18, 66). What was the level of acceptance by middle-class or elite mothers of this deflection of blame circulated by nurses from the less privileged classes? Narratives of changelings were sufficiently well known in court by 1589 for George Puttenham to refer to a figure of speech as a “changeling” because for “our Ladies and pretie mistresses in Court . . . it is a terme often in their mouthes”(1936: 173). Did they, like the Old Shepherd in The Winter’s Tale, allude to illegitimate children born to women of the court or to their attendants as “changelings”? An aristocratic mother may well have withheld her assent to a changeling narrative when it came to a nurse’s loss of her own infant. Marlowe stages such a confrontation between women of different social groups when his character Dido responds to the changeling narrative by calling the nurse a liar: O cursed hagge and false dissembling wretch! That slayest me with thy harsh and hellish tale, Thou for some prettie guift hast let him goe, And I am thus deluded of my boy. (5.1.216–19) Whether told as a means of evasion or explanation, these narratives of changeling children required the assent of the community to serve any social function. If Willis had in fact died as an infant, the “gossips” would have had to agree to present the changeling narrative as their explanation. The surrounding community would have had to assent to this narrative, either as the actual reason or, more likely, as the sign of their refusal to assign blame for the accidental death of an infant. An incident in which the community refused such assent appears in the late nineteenth century. O Giollain relates a case as late as 1895 in Ireland, when a young woman named Bridget Cleary was suspected as a changeling when she fell ill of catarrh and nervous excitement. Over a period of

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days, her husband and relatives burned her with a hot poker to elicit her confession of her identity as a fairy until she died. When they buried her, they claimed she had “gone with the fairies”(1991: 210). The modern Irish community did not legitimate this fairy narrative. On the testimony of two witnesses, the involved parties were arrested and convicted of murder; and a contemporary broadside described the incident in this way: “They said she was a fairy, a spirit or a witch,/and so they cruelly murdered her, and threw her in a ditch” (210). Murder, and especially infanticide, rebellion, theft, rape, bribery, and illicit sexual relations: this early modern language of fairies has, for the most part, disappeared. Perhaps the closest modern remnant of this tradition exists in the tooth fairy, the beneficent female spirit who places a coin under a child’s pillow in exchange for the child’s tooth. At what age do most children see through this fiction, to identify a parent as the actual source of the coin? To what extent do they continue to “play along” because to dispel this illusion might end the flow of cash? By indulging their parents’ kindly deception, children unknowingly reenact a prime tenet of early modern fairylore: to name a fairy’s gift brings an end to fairy bounty. But outside of this benign exception, the complex social understandings once negotiated through fairylore have now become generally reduced to ignorant superstitions or pretty fantasies appropriate to little girls. Reductive misunderstandings were also common in the early modern period, from the interrogators of Scottish women accused of witchcraft to John Aubrey himself, whose nostalgic memories of childhood included fairy practices “verily believed by old woemen in those dayes.” References in plays and prose tracts reveal that other early moderns were insiders to the use of fairy allusions as illicit acts; and these references further enlarged the circle of insiders to the readers of these works. Yet however large the circle might grow, fairies retained a lingering association with lower status groups in this period from the late sixteenth into the early seventeenth centuries.

3

Old wives’ tales

In addition to alluding to illicit acts, fairies evoked another form of cross-group interaction at once more socially sanctioned but potentially more socially subversive in its impact upon early modern subjectivities. As caregivers and other domestic workers told stories and sang ballads in the performance of their ordinary tasks, fairies – and other fantastic creatures – became part of the daily rhythms of those childhoods led in close familiarity with female members of lower status groups. The cultural meanings of these narratives, often denigrated as “old wives’ tales,” arose more from the conditions of their transmission than from the tales themselves, most of which are no longer extant.1 The telling of old wives’ tales, and the memory of the women who told them, left a lasting impression on the subjectivities of many early moderns. Adam Fox has eloquently observed that “children of all classes were bewitched by fireside stories and songs and insofar as the wealthier in society employed humble women as servants and nurses, they exposed their infants to the influence of popular lore” (2000: 192). I argue that in this process, children learned more from popular lore. As Marina Warner maintains, “Children, of whatever rank, who play around the women gossiping are learning the rules of the group; fairy tales train them in attitudes and aspirations”; they pass on the “values and beliefs of the community in which they are growing up” (1994: 49). Included in Terrors of the Night (1594) this reminiscence by Thomas Nashe reveals the extent of his childhood enculturation into beliefs shared by “old wives”: I have heard aged mumping beldams as they sat warming their knees over a coale scratch over the argument verie curiously, and they would bid yong folks beware on what day they par’d their nayles, tell what luck everie one should have by the day of the weeke he was borne on. . . . When I was a little childe, I was a great auditor of theirs, and had all their witchcrafts at my fingers endes, as perfit as good morrow and good even. (1966: 1.369) Adam Fox has noted for this and other passages that “at the juvenile level . . . the repertoire of unlearned village women coincided for a brief but significant

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period with that of the educated male elite” (2000: 192). Fox’s insight reinforces the earlier representation by Peter Burke of educated males as “amphibious, bicultural and also bilingual,” knowledgeable in popular traditions regarded as “play,” as well as in “great” or high-status traditions regarded as “serious” (1978: 28). Neither Fox nor Burke, however, acknowledges potential conflicts between the low and the elite cultures, or the extent to which early modern child-rearing practices gendered and also classed these conflicts, internalizing them within the subjectivities of early modern males. This conflict emerges from the two contrasting viewpoints implicit in Nashe’s account. In learning so perfectly the perils of ill-timed nail-paring, the boy Nashe had risen to take his place as a full communicant in a world of hostile forces placated, or outwitted, by the small homely means at the disposal of unlettered women and small children. These “witchcrafts” that Nashe valued enough as a boy to learn by rote not only lost their usefulness: they became objects of contempt. It is only from his perspective as an adult that these women, once so powerful in their knowledge of the occult, diminish in value to become “aged mumping beldams.” As with the mysteries of nail-parings, so with fantasies and oral tales. Various early moderns witnessed the lasting impact of old wives’ tales upon their own adult psyches. In 1584, the present tense of “are” in the clause “we are afraid of our own shadow” suggests that for Reginald Scot, the horrifying monsters described by “our mothers’ maids” continue to haunt his imagination in adulthood: Our mothers’ maids have so frayed us with Bull-beggars, Spirits, Witches, Urchins, Elves, Hags, Faeries, Satyrs, Pans, Faunes, Syl[v]ens, Kit-withthe-Canstick, Tritons, Centaurs, Gyants, Impes, Calcars, Conjurors, Nymphs, Changelings, Incubus, Robin Goodfellow, the Spoorn, the Mare, the Man-in-the-Oak, the Hell-wain, the Firedrake, the Puckle, Tom-thombe, Hobgoblin, tom-tumbler, Boneless, and other such Bugs, that we are afraid of our shadow. (1964: 7.15.139) While ostensibly denigrated as “Bugs,” the promiscuous eclecticism and hairraising specificity of Scot’s list of figures demonstrate the continuing hold of tales told by “our mothers maids” on his memory. Scot assumes, moreover, that these figures were widely known by the “we” of his readers, who had also heard them from their mothers’ maids. If productive exchanges between literate and native traditions mixed together tales of classical satyrs and Robin Goodfellow, these did not change Scot’s contempt for the lot of them. For Scot, it was not the origin of the tales that mattered but their mode of transmission. Whatever their content, tales told by his mother’s maids were finally women’s stories, designed to keep children such as his earlier self in subjection through fear.2 Scot’s experience was not unique. In his Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton similarly observes this lingering dread as he warns that the practice of frightening children with “beggars, bugbears, and hobgoblins” may have damaging effects

Old wives’ tales 47 lasting “all their lives” (1941: 284). Lady Macbeth’s castigation of her husband, terrified by the appearance of Banquo’s ghost, reveals that this fear was not only readily legible on the English stage; it was also capable of causing shame in adult men. Demanding “Are you a man?” she compares Macbeth’s fear of the ghost to the “flaws and starts” of those listening to “a woman’s story at a winter’s fire,/Authoriz’d by her grandam” (3.4.63–6). Not all early moderns remembered these tales with dread. John Aubrey recounts with pleasure the vernacular tales of his own early seventeenth-century childhood, when he had heard “old women and mayds” telling “fabulous stories nightimes, of Sprights and walking of Ghosts” (1950: xxix, xxxiii). Various literary works represent old wives’ tales as a source of comfort rather than of fear. As discussed below, George Peele’s “Old Wives Tale” portrays a request by frightened young pages, newly rescued from a night lost in the woods, for such a tale from the Smith’s wife Madge Clunch to reassure them as well as to pass away the time. A passage from Lyly’s Sappho and Phao (1580) assumes that children commonly responded to old wives’ tales with pleasure, as an old woman Sybilla invites Phao, a young ferryman, to “Come neere. Take a stool and sit down. Now, for that these winter nights are long, and that children delight in nothing more than to hear old wives tales, we will beguile the time with some story” (1991: 2.1.22–6). Not limited to an audience of children, women also performed their tales, sometimes in ballad form, to lighten menial tasks. In these work settings as well, they evoked pleasure and sometimes nostalgia in early moderns from more elite groups. In William Wager’s The Longer Thou Livest, The More Fool Thou Art (1568–9), the fool Moros sings lines from ballads he had learned as a child sitting on the lap of “a fond woman to my mother” and as he helped his “dame” to grind mustard seed (1967: 8, 40). Shakespeare’s Orsino requests that Cesario perform a song “old and plain” chanted by “the spinsters and the knitters in the sun,/And the free maids that weave their thread with bones” (2.4.43–5). This practice lasted into the early eighteenth century, when the poet John Clare remembered weeding wheat fields as a boy, as women shortened their time with their “songs and stories” (1951: 19). Even in the twentieth century, Walter Benjamin decries the loss of the art of storytelling with the decline of household weaving and spinning (1968: 91). Given these strong responses ranging from dread to nostalgia, why then does the phrase “old wives’ tales” convey such a strong sense of their foolishness and triviality? As Philautus exclaims in John Lyly’s “Euphues and His England,” “You see, gentlemen, into what blind and gross errors in old time we were led, thinking every old wives’ tale to be a truth” (1916: 332). Adam Fox has traced how writers of the Protestant Reformation dismissed the alleged superstitions of the Catholic Church as old wives’ tales; proponents of academic disciplines similarly denigrated ideas not sufficiently based on empirical inquiry (2000: 175–7). The terms of these dismissals reveal, as Fox notes, the views of “a prevailing, male-dominated culture which typically characterized women as creatures of the spoken word” (2000: 177); and Helen Hackett has also described the contempt for “fantastic stories” associated with women as exemplifying a “low” oral

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culture in the mapping of binaries configuring patriarchal culture (2000: 15–16). This early modern binary opposing a literate male culture to an oral female culture presents an obvious distortion: it excludes illiterate males as well as literate females. While female caregivers served as the primary transmitters of this oral tradition, scattered references reveal the existence of male storytellers as well. Philip Sidney’s Apology implies a male gender for the storyteller who, like the poet, also entices with delight, in his “tale which holdeth children from play, and old men from the chimney corner” (1969: 124); Richard Corbett’s “Fairies Farewell” identifies the memory of old William Chourne of Staffordshire as one of the last repositories of fairylore (1955: 52). This binary also ignores the dense interrelationships between printed texts and oral tales. Such distortions reveal that, like other binaries, it functioned instead to promote a social agenda. Deriving early modern “truth-value” from the similarly distorting binaries of prevailing gender ideologies, the phrase “old wives’ tales” helped to naturalize a concept of authorship appropriate for literate males. Rather than the communal circulation of a common body of old wives’ tales often in the performance of repetitive household tasks, authorship by male writers increasingly valorized the individual – his thoughts, his learning, his authority – as defining the nature and even the quality of a work. Whether used to denigrate Catholic doctrines or to express nostalgic yearning, the phrase “old wives’ tales” produced, and was produced by, the social practices instituting the cultural capital of a developed and empowering literacy as primarily a male prerogative. Representations of female narrators from lower status groups advanced this emerging concept of authorship. Much like the fairies, caricatures of old wives rose to assume a form of cultural visibility based on profound misrecognitions of who they were. As some anecdotes and tales came into print, the use of uneducated, garrulous, and often older women as storytellers served to excuse or justify the presentation of low material to a presumably more sophisticated audience. Textual cues indicating old wives’ lack of refinement enabled literate readers to enjoy these tales even as they fashioned their superiority to the groups that produced them. In this sense, the figure of the ignorant female storyteller served a parallel function to the chambermaid imagined as reading Greene’s Pandosto (Newcomb 2002: 89). As literacy became too widespread to confer distinction, a debased category of the lowly reader of popular romance emerged to confer prestige on more educated readers and their allegedly more sophisticated texts. Similarly, the caricature of the ignorant female narrator heightened an awareness of the sophistication of a highly literate authorship represented as predominantly male. Paradoxically, while print eventually promoted the circulation of tales across a range of groups, these representations of lower status women as storytellers make visible the social gap opening between a more elite reading audience and those lower sorts encountered in alehouses and in the nursery. The caricature of the low female narrator was further debased through an association with the body (Lamb 1998a). The low social position attributed to old wives became mapped on to a gendered mind–body binary apparent, for example, in associations of women’s narratives with their vulgar body parts

Old wives’ tales 49 rather than with their minds. A common pun on tale and tail formed one means of invoking this association. In Peele’s Old Wives Tale, Madge’s insulting ultimatum to the boy who interrupts her narrative evokes a physical intimacy, an association between her story and her abundant and sexual bodiliness, that was the source of the power as well as the anxiety later elicited by women’s stories: “Nay either heare my tale, or kisse my taile” (1970: l.117). The purported storyteller of the anecdotes collected in the pamphlet Robin Good-Fellow, His Mad Prankes and Merry Jests, a tavern hostess explains to a tired traveler that the people of that county were called “long tayles” because their “tales are so long that wee use to passe the time withall” (1628: A4r). The French compiler MarieCatherine d’Aulnoy would have been horrified to know that her elegant tales, refined of rustic impurities for her primarily urban and most sophisticated audience, were translated into English as Mother Bunches Closet Newly Opened (1685). Mother Bunch was a figure for a lower status woman, often an alewife, whose ribald narratives were exceeded only by the wonderful vulgarity of her own body capable, in Pasquils Jestes, with the Merriments of Mother Bunch (1629), of blowing a fart that leveled the steeple of St. Pauls (A2; Brown 2003: 77). While often grotesque representations of garrulous old wives in printed works enabled readers simultaneously to take pleasure in low narratives even as they rehearsed their own social superiority, the ideological meanings of old wives’ tales drew even more deeply from a wider cultural anxiety over the formative power of the interaction between lower class women and especially the young males in their charge. The authority of a mother, who possessed substantially more social status than a nurse over a male child, in itself posed sufficient cause for the deprecation of the feminine. Summarizing the object relations model of Nancy Chodorow, Coppelia Kahn notes the psychological pressures influencing a modern male to deny the impact of this first relationship with the mother: “Certain activities must be defined as masculine and superior to the maternal world of childhood, and women’s activities must, correspondingly, be denigrated” (1985: 77). Janet Adelman (1982: 7) historicizes this insight to accommodate the prolonged period which boys spent with mother-figures: How much more difficult and anxiety-ridden this process must have been if the period of infantile dependency – with all its pleasures and dangers – was prolonged, and if the body itself, in all its vulnerability, could later be understood as the inheritance from her contaminating female matter. These general sources of anxiety were exacerbated by a specifically early modern sense of gender as unfixed in childhood. Whether interpreted through the one-sex gender system described by Thomas Laqueur or the more recently emphasized humoral body, masculinity represented an achieved characteristic more than a biological given.3 Dominated by women and wearing skirts until at least the age of three, boys younger than seven years of age were still considered indeterminate in gender. As Adelman observes, “until the little boy came of age

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as a man, he was dangerously close to the maternal body, dangerously undistinguished from ‘the baby of a girl’ ” (1982: 7, 105). According to Stephen Greenblatt, “Virtually all males experienced a transition during childhood from a state close to that of females – indeed often called ‘effeminate’ – to one befitting an adult man” (1988: 78). The influence of women represented an ever-present threat to this achievement of masculinity As Anthony Fletcher has demonstrated, it was impossible for men “to think of themselves as wholly gendered male beings until they had struggled free of maternal making and maternal influence” (1995: 58). Once achieved, masculinity must be continuously performed; for the instability of this system – the constant danger of a return to the effeminacy of childhood – has been ably demonstrated (Levine 1994: 10–25; Fletcher 1995: 97, 189, 334). In these and other discussions, the use of the term “maternal” tends to obfuscate an important distinction between mother and nurse. Studies by Wendy Wall and Gail Kern Paster restore this distinction to suggest that the anxiety elicited by inherent gender instability was exacerbated by the typically low social status of women caregivers. Wendy Wall has ably demonstrated the widespread patriarchal concern over the “ambivalent psychic formation” of the maternal in an early modern England where the frequent practice of wetnursing among the elite subjected the male child not only to female authority, but to the authority of “a lower-class, often rural female servant” (2002: 70). If childhood subjection to women was, in theory, a source of shame to the adults that these children later became, how much more was this shame heightened by the retrospective knowledge of the low social status possessed by these women. Even more threatening, numerous authorities of the time warned that the nurse’s qualities, including her morals and affections, were thought to be transmitted through her milk (Fildes 1986: 189–90). Through her breast-milk, the wetnurse exerted a lasting influence not only over who the child was, but also over who the child would later become. As Wall eloquently states, “Wetnursing was seen as installing national and class hybridity into the very origin of the subject” (2002: 137). Tracing the wide-ranging effects of this practice of wetnursing upon early modern culture, Paster argues convincingly that the sending away of infants to nurses and their subsequent return months or even years later represented a formative event for the early modern psyche (1993: 276). Wetnursing represented the earliest and most intense interaction between women of lower status and the more elite children in their charge. Their influence continued until the children left their care. Like the madelaine that restored to Proust a sense of a time past, old wives’ narratives – the tales whispered by a winter’s fire, the ballads sung while grinding mustard seed, the nursery rhymes chanted while bouncing a toddler – preserved and potentially re-created in adults a memory of the most formative interactions of their early lives. The intensity of these memories no doubt varied among social groups. While families of the middling sort usually employed at least one servant, parents were more often personally present within the household and within the lives of their children. For Protestant reformers, in particular, parenting assumed tremendous import-

Old wives’ tales 51 ance as a religious as well as a domestic duty, for inadequate rearing of children could result not merely in their exclusion from worldly status, but in the damnation of their immortal souls (Gouge 1622: 502; Marcus 1978a: 54–5). In contrast, the larger and more extended social formations of elite households included a more socially diverse group. Aristocratic mothers tended to play a less active role in the menial daily tasks of bathing and feeding children, and the social organization of the open lineage family fostered a more prolonged association between children and women caregivers.4 Yet even for the middling sort, the formative power of nurses’ tales did not go unnoticed. Written for the Reformation of his own family (2v), William Lowth’s translation of Battus’s De Oeconomia Christiana as A Christian Mans Closet warns parents that the stories of wetnurses may ruin their children: And Plato seemeth verie diligently to admonish Nurses, that they sing not to their babes and yong infantes everie trifling tale, rusticke ryme, baudie Ballet, and olde wives fabled fansies, lest from their cradles it shall fortune, that they be nouseled in folly, and frought with corrupt conditions, and too bolde behaviour. (Lowth 1581: O2) From this perspective, let us return to the assertions by Reginald Scot and Robert Burton that maids’ narratives induced a fear in children that continued to disturb them as adults. Does it seem likely that fear represented the only response for most early modern children? Might this fear have included a frisson of pleasure? Or was the experience of this terror in safe circumstances – perhaps warmed by an evening fire and surrounded by the comfortable bodies of women – precisely the source of its pleasure? Was this attribution of a continuing power to make adults afraid of their own shadows an overstatement designed to defend against a more frightening possibility: that in their nostalgia for such stories, Scot and his readers may have become vulnerable to the continuing influence of the women who raised them as children? While some nurses used frightening stories as a method of control, the exaggerated representation of a dread lingering even into adulthood suggests a cover-up for the unacceptable experience of an intense narrative pleasure which was, as discussed below, rendered threatening to masculine identity by patriarchal ideologies forcefully encountered in adolescence. Let us consider another anomaly. Nashe’s grotesque representation of “mumping beldams” supports the widespread representation of aged women caregivers, the “old wives” who told tales to children. While old women undoubtedly told stories, might the repulsive exaggeration of the characteristics of age in women caregivers also act as a cover to disguise an unacceptable nostalgia for the younger women they had once been? The discussion by Stallybrass and White of the desires of upper-class males for the working-class maids of a later time would seem to be generally applicable to this social formation as well. In the late nineteenth century, childhood memories rendered the maid as not

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only “a figure of ‘lowness,’ she was also a figure of comfort and power” (1986: 156). Freud’s desire for his mother was more acceptable than his desire for the “hired help,” the “ugly, elderly nurse” who remained “a potent reminder of the child’s helplessness, a helplessness to which the adult doctor was still prone” (159–61). For Walter Benjamin, the noise of “carpet-beating . . . engraved itself more indelibly in the child’s memory than the voice of the beloved in that of the man, the carpet-beating that was the language of the nether world, of servant girls, the real grown ups” (1978: 44; Stallybrass and White 1986: 150). If the noise of carpet-beating had this effect upon Benjamin, then what may have been the effect of sung ballads upon early moderns? The deafening silence about the women who bathed them, who fed them, who entertained them until they were about 7 years of age is itself significant. It seems unlikely that all of these women were old. Women who served as wetnurses were, of necessity, of childbearing years; and in wealthy families, some of these remained in the household to continue as dry nurses. The preponderance of women migrating to London were young, entering domestic service between the ages of seventeen to nineteen in the hopes of earning a dowry for themselves by the age of twenty-four (Phillippy 1997–8: 445–6). The insistent repetition of the phrase “old wives,” together with the evocations of the deformities of age, suggests a defensive reaction, not to a chronic fear, but to a lingering desire. In the recollection of childhood, some of these “mumping beldams” were surely remembered as beautiful young women, who seemed at the time to be as powerful as the magical fays of the stories they once told. This cultural meaning of old wives’ tales as signifying a child’s bond with women of the lower sort was not necessarily apparent to small boys or to women caregivers. According to Frederic Jameson’s definition of culture as an “objective mirage . . . a nimbus perceived by one group when it comes into contact with and observes another one” (1993: 33), it would have been in their withdrawal from this space of childhood between the ages of about seven to thirteen to learn Latin from a schoolmaster that boys most directly encountered powerful binaries structuring early modern gender as inflected by social status: nurses vs. schoolmasters, androgynous childhood vs. masculine youth, vernacular vs. Latin, old wives’ tales vs. classical myths. The contempt for women’s lore expressed in the phrase “old wives’ tales” reflected a gender system inherent in the all-male grammar schools burgeoning in England between 1560 and 1660 (Fletcher 1995: 299). The education received within the early modern schoolroom was intended, in part, to distance boys from women, as well as to remediate any ill-effects remaining from this earlier period of female domination.5 Taught only by men and in the presence of other boys, youths learned Latin under highly ascetic and sometimes punitive circumstances. In what has by now become a famous representation of the early modern educational experience as “male puberty rites,” Walter Ong has argued that a central project of the schoolroom was in fact to instill an early modern form of masculinity through rigorous routines, ascetic living, and corporal punishment (1959). The acquisition of Latin became, as Anthony Fletcher has called it, “the making of the rational

Old wives’ tales 53 man,” as much through the process of achieving it as of the knowledge itself: “The fierce inculcation of the classical curriculum was the core of an overall process of hardening, or teaching self-control and endurance”; it was designed “to impose discipline on the emotions” (1995: 303, 305). This form of masculinity was based on a technique of the self revived through the classical curriculum, through which the governing of one’s own appetites, passions, and pleasures represented a precondition for the right to rule others (Foucault 1986: 61–7). In this sense, it was not only the cultural capital of a classical education that demonstrated the status of privileged early moderns. By hardening boys into this form of masculinity, the rigorous process of acquiring knowledge of Latin legitimated the rights of students to occupy positions of authority in the future. According to this model, effeminacy became defined as the opposite of this Roman masculinity: as “unmanly weakness, softness, delicacy and selfindulgence” (Fletcher 1995: 87). As Rebecca Bushnell has pointed out, the “tyrannical indulgence of pleasure was itself thought to be ‘effeminate’ ” (1992: 340). This effeminacy was the trait imagined for tyrants, unable to rule others because they were unable to rule their own passions, and for women, who were by nature, according to this philosophy, incapable of rule. “Unmanly weakness, softness, delicacy, and self-indulgence”: these were also the traits of the androgynous boy-child before he was disciplined into masculinity by schoolmasters. Under these circumstances, pleasures taken in tales heard as androgynous boys not yet rendered wholly male through the arduous process of learning Latin became, in retrospect, dangerous to the forms of masculinity and of status to be inculcated by the schoolroom. Unlike old wives’ tales, the narratives of the masculinizing schoolroom – the myths, epics, the histories of the classical world – were designed for higher purposes than mere pleasure. They were to further the eloquence and instill the morals to train the leaders of the next generation (Crane 1993: 163). The enjoyable flow of classical narratives was often disrupted by laborious construing of Latin verbs. Whatever gratification they may have taken in Latin texts, young men were to draw upon their familiarity with classical narratives to present themselves not only as learned, but as masculine. As becomes explicit in this statement by Erasmus, humanist hostility to “old wives’ fairy rubbish” was part of a larger conflict waged by the Latinate culture of the schoolroom for control over the minds of young boys: A boy [may] learn a pretty story from the ancient poets, or a memorable tale from history, just as readily as the stupid and vulgar ballad, or the old wives’ fairy rubbish such as most children are steeped in nowadays by nurses and serving women. (1964: 214) This is not to say that this humanist perspective always or even often succeeded in displacing the narratives of childhood, any more than it could entirely succeed in displacing the “soft” effeminate boy with a “hard” disciplined youth, but designed in part to counteract the influence of old wives and nurses, early

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modern grammar schools confronted boys with a predicament. According to the binary implicit in the early modern study of Latin itself, as a mark of gender and also of class distinction, old wives’ tales and classical myths came to signify not only two opposing cultures, but also two opposing forms of self. An analogy may be made to Carolyn Cooper’s eloquent description of her own experience moving from the Jamaican language and culture of her childhood to the refined and written English of the schoolroom: Upward social mobility in Jamaica requires the shedding of the old skin of early socialization: mother tongue, mother culture, mother wit – the feminised discourse of voice, identity, and native knowledge. . . . But if the oral, broadly defined, does achieve “status” once it appears in written form, it nevertheless contaminates the written as . . . an alternative curriculum. (1995: 3) For Cooper, this process is highly gendered, as she observes, “This conception of the vulgar seems to originate in a fear of the coarse texture of the (feminized) body and the baseness of the flesh that must be made subject to the refining influence of magisterial ‘good taste’ ” (8). This gendered binary informing humanist pedagogy and practice required boys to choose, or to refuse to choose, between two cultures now in active conflict. Within this contest between cultures, tales told by women took on ideological meanings not present in childhood. Contempt for old wives’ tales, disparaged as “rubbish,” signified loyalty to humanist agendas; alternatively, a continuing appreciation of these tales provided a space of resistance. These two extremes defined an emotional spectrum with many points in between. The strategies for managing dissonance between the cultures known in childhood and in the schoolroom were undoubtedly as local and various as the experiences of individual schoolboys. For those who interpreted the tensions between these cultures as destructive, competing allegiances represented threats to the integrity of selfhood; and a clear-cut choice between the two was necessary. For others, the tensions between cultures remained more conflicted and more productive. Since strong social pressures mediated against any boy’s admission – not to mention his written expression – of his continuing love for his nurse, few or no texts by schoolboys survive to express these cultural conflicts directly, but the variety of ways in which the clashes between these cultures could be resolved, or left unresolved, emerges from the wide range of attitudes towards this oral tradition later expressed by adults. An investment in the classical curriculum predictable for a Cambridge don underlies Gabriel Harvey’s utter incomprehension of Spenser’s intention to write an epic including a fairy queen: “If so be the Faerye Queene be fairer in your eie than the Nine Muses, and Hobgoblin runne away with the Garland from Apollo . . . fare you well, till God or some good Aungell putte you in a better minde” ([1912] 1991: 628). In this context, Harvey’s sense of the incompatibility of the creatures from two forms of narrative – a fairy queen and the nine muses, a hobgoblin and Apollo – becomes more than a merely aesthetic

Old wives’ tales 55 distaste. His contempt for fairy queens and hobgoblins participates in a general hostility of the learned culture for the childhood culture of women. Other strategies were also employed. The sheer creativity of highly individual negotiations between dissonant cultures may well have contributed to the unusual outpouring of literary masterpieces of this period. As Wendy Wall has brilliantly demonstrated, the play Gammer Gurton’s Needle erodes the differences between domestic and learned spheres to construct “a conception of masculinity in ways that threaten to expose its reliance on its opposite” (1998: 68). This strategy of discovering accommodations, rather than oppositions, between these cultures underlies Ben Jonson’s derivation of the word “faeries” from a Greek word “pheras” for satyr in the notes to his masque Oberon, The Fairy Prince, in which he mingles fairies and satyrs together as equivalent subjects for a display of his impressive learning (1941: 7.343). Arthur Golding makes a similar accommodation when he translates the “di” of Medea’s speech in Ovid’s Metamorphosis as “elves,” and his translation passes into Shakespeare’s Tempest (5.1.33; Kermode 1990: 145–50). In his Daemonologie, King James describes classical nymphs as “Phairie” (132; Latham 1930: 52). The significance of this negotiation between learned and childhood spheres becomes perhaps most visible in literary works. Two plays approaching this conflict from opposite directions provide particular insights into the possibilities, or the impossibilities, of resolution. William Wager’s The Longer Thou Livest, the More Fool Thou Art (1568–9) provides an understanding of the challenges confronting a schoolroom culture even within a straightforward example of humanist propaganda. Adapting a vice model familiar through “Everyman” to propagate a humanist agenda, the play stages a competition between pedagogues and dissolutes to form the character of Moros. Rather than supporting the heavy-handed moral of this play, however, the irrepressible humor of Moros suggests the irresolvable difficulties inherent in any simple imposition of a humanist agenda on young boys. George Peele’s Old Wives Tale, on the other hand, pays unusual respect to the narratives of an oral tradition, in which kindness – whether to ordinary beggars or to grotesque heads mysteriously rising from wells – emerges as the highest virtue, while the meaningless noise of Huanebango’s garbled Latin relegates the learned culture to a laughable form of play. Together, these two plays demonstrate the breadth of early modern responses to the conflict between the perspectives of childhood and the schoolroom. There is, regrettably but understandably, no direct evidence from the students themselves about their feelings as they move between these experiences, but William Wager and George Peele were themselves once students in a humanist schoolroom, and the conflicts they stage demonstrate the extent to which old wives’ tales and ballads formed a mutually constituting binary with a classical education. These plays suggest the continuing resilience of children’s interactions with women of lower status groups to complicate and to challenge the patriarchal values through which boys were offered forms of distinction due their gender and social status. The audience imagined for Wager’s play The Longer Thou Livest, the More Fool Thou Art is primarily schoolboys, according to the subtitle pronouncing it

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“verie necessarie for youth, and specially for such as are like to come to dignitie and promotion.” T.W. Craik speculates that Wager’s play was written to be acted as a “schoolboy performance” by boy actors (1967: 29, 34). Stressing the necessity of “good schoolmasters” to correct youth with “reason” for the benefit of the commonweal (5), the Prologue expresses the play’s sympathies with teachers such as Discipline and Exercitation in their futile struggles to win the loyalty of Moros, or “fool.” The play foregrounds the destructive effects of the female domain of childhood at Moros’s first appearance singing lines from at least eight ballads learned from “A fond woman to my mother,/As I war wont in her lap to sit” (8). Refusing to heed Discipline’s stern advice (“Forget your babish vanity” (9)), he later sings another ballad learned of his “dame,” as mentioned above, “when she taught me mustard seed to grind” (40), as Idleness and two other unworthy companions dance. The play represents Moros’s enjoyment of ballads, games, and sensual pleasures in general as a refusal to “grow up” to assume the sober responsibilities appropriate to adult males. As the small excesses of youth become large tyrannies in his more advanced age, Moros becomes a bad ruler of others. At the conclusion of the play, God’s Judgement enters “with a terrible visure” to strike Moros down with the stern declaration: “The longer thou livest, the more fool thou art” (70). Confusion carries him on his back to the devil. Moros’s terrible end is, no doubt, implicit from his entrance. The actual performance of the play, especially before an audience of schoolboys, undoubtedly unsettled its explicit moral. The sober speeches by Discipline, Piety, and Exercitation are undeniably tedious. The most enjoyable moments of this play occur precisely when Moros and his unseemly companions rebel against their authority. These moments set up a counter-text opposing the explicitly stated intentions of the Prologue. Moros’s jumbled repetition of Discipline’s dry lecture on the complexities of Arius heresy, for example, elevates play, name-calling, and pleasure in food. Moros’s transformation of Discipline’s sentence “Pray unto him to give you sapience,” to “Play now and then in thy master’s absence” (1967: 16) displays delightful wit. Less witty but perhaps even more amusing is Moros’s old comic gag of repeating phrases Discipline does not intend to be repeated, such as the instructions, “Say the same verses alone together/Like as you said them after me,” until Discipline beats him savagely. But even as Moros cries out his obedience – “For God’s sake leave, mine arse is sore./I will say as you will have me say now” – he still cannot resist the temptation to repeat “Say thus” to Discipline’s order “Say thus” (19). Perhaps most evocative is Moros’s renaming of these pedagogues. The emphasis on “arse” in the renaming of Exercitation, for example, as “Arse-out-of-fashion” (24) removes the teacher’s privilege, rendering him vulnerable to the pain he inflicts through discipline and perhaps through sexual penetration. And within the queer economy of Moros’s topsy-turvy grammar school, this old “Arse-outof-fashion” is “out of fashion” – sexually undesireable – at the bottom of the heap in a youth’s libidinal hierarchy. In all of these droll deviations from schoolroom authority, the irrepressible Moros draws on the oral, as opposed to written,

Old wives’ tales 57 skills honed in an earlier time. Despite the humanist moral of its Prologue, The Longer Thou Livest sets up a contest not only between characters, but also between systems of value, for the loyalty of schoolboys. For some, the play’s structure may have evoked horror, or perhaps grim satisfaction, as Moros received his just deserts in Hell (Bevington 1962: 163–4; Cartwright 1999: 55). Others may have indulged their own desires to resist authority by laughing along with Moros’s comic tricks. Some may have had it both ways, reliving their own narrative pleasures in Moros’s defiance while finally abjuring these “follies” to enjoy moral superiority in his punishment at the end of the play. George Peele’s Old Wives Tale (1595) challenges the pedagogical agenda of Wager’s Prologue in various ways. In its title, Old Wives Tale expresses a connection with women’s oral traditions. It pays serious attention to folktales – the Abducted Maiden, the Grateful Dead, the Heads in the Well – by arranging them in artful patterns.6 It parodies the learned culture through the eminently silly Huanebango and his Latin nonsense; but, as with Wager’s play, it is the contest, more than the outcome, of the conflict between oral and learned cultures that constitutes its primary engagement. In Old Wives Tale, the negotiations between the perspectives of a learned and an oral culture reveal the shaping presence of a hybrid consciousness. This consciousness is located most visibly in the boys of the play’s framing device as they sit on stage to watch the play. Earlier critics have explored the implications of the on-stage presence of Frolicke and Fantasticke as a cue for the reception of the play by its larger audience (Cox 1978: 344; Cope 1982: 326; Free 1984: 55). Countering views of Old Wives Tale as a satire, Frank Hook posits the “uncomplicated and sympathetic acceptance” of these tales by the “entranced” young Frolicke and Fantasticke as an invitation for us the audience similarly to “give ourselves up like children to the story to be unfolded by the actors” (1970: 362, 359). Patricia Binnie also claims that Peele “consciously recreates the basic aim of folklore – to recall to the hearer the instinct and images of his childhood,” yet she modifies this view with a doubleperspective: “If the audience, upon seeing it, re-enters the realm of childhood, it does so with adult understanding” (1980: 15, 20). In none of these discussions do critics consider the circumstances of a distinctively early modern childhood, and specifically the transitional period between early childhood and young adulthood attained by the young pages. This transitional period is precisely the locus, I argue, of the consciousness structuring this play. The boys are hybrids of two systems of value that sometimes cooperate but more often conflict in important ways. This hybridity or double perspective accounts for the sharply divided views within the scholarship as the attitude towards “folkloric elements” staged in this play (Hook 1970: 359; Donovan 1993: 213). As Old Wives Tale stages material from the Latin schoolroom as well as from folklore, the contest between learned and oral perspectives waged within the subjectivity of these boys becomes a primary subject of Peele’s play. From its first scene, Old Wives Tale humorously evokes an instability of perspectives proceeding from this transitional state between cultures. The wanderings of these boys, lost in the woods, may themselves evoke a sense of an

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anxious middle state between worlds, neither of which is yet, or any longer, truly their home. Their names – Anticke, Frolicke, and Fantasticke – suggest that they, like Moros, have not become fully inculturated within the sober humanist system. Frolicke comforts himself by citing Latin; but as he calls out the female name “Maria!” his misquotation from Terence’s Adelphoe 4.1.790 (“O maria! O Neptune!” for “O maria Neptuni”) shows his imperfect understanding of the line (Binnie 1980: 37). Anticke, on the other hand, turns to a homely proverb to relieve his anxiety about sleeping outdoors: “Three merrie men, and three merrie men,/And three merrie men be wee,/I in the wood, and thou on the ground,/And Jacke sleepes in the tree.” Their divergent frameworks produce competing perspectives. Fantasticke describes their young master as led by Cupid to serve a “faire Lady” as a saint; to Frolicke, however, she is only “his wench.” It is Frolicke, however, who hails their rescuer, the smith Clunch, as the Roman fire god Vulcan. In a spate of collision–allusions, Frolicke inserts English folk hobgoblins into this world of classical mythology: “We are like to wander with a sorrowfull hey ho, among the owlets, and Hobgoblins of the Forrest: good Vulcan, for Cupids sake that has cousned us all: befriend us as thou maiest.” When Clunch offers them hospitality in his cottage, all Latinate pretensions that Clunch is Vulcan disappear, and they cry out together: “O blessed Smith, O bountifull Clunch” (l.51). Welcomed to their home by Clunch’s wife Madge and offered cheese and pudding (which they politely decline), the boys first sing a round with Clunch, and then, after Anticke retires with Clunch with an inappropriately Latin “Bona nox Gammer” (100), they ask Madge for a story. This frame for Old Wives Tale provides a rich source of early modern understandings of the female oral tradition. Frolicke’s request for a story shows his assumption that as a woman of lower social station, she must know many such tales: “Me thinkes Gammer, a merry winters tale would drive away the time trimly, come I am sure you are not without a score.” Like a child at bedtime, Fantasticke equates a tale with sleep: “I faith Gammer a tale of an howre long were as good as an howres sleepe.” Frolicke explicitly relates a tale with his childhood: “Looke you Gammer, of the Gyant and the Kings Daughter, and I know not what, I have seene the day when I was a litle one, you might have drawne mee a mile after you with such a discourse.” Perceiving such “Gammers” as stand-ins for the nurses of childhood, the boys’ desire for a story conveys a sense of the solace associated with old wives’ tales. This sense of well-being, so at odds with their wanderings in the cold and frightening woods, is an integral component of this scene of narration, and a primary social meaning of her tale. Peele’s play does not sentimentalize Madge’s narrative skills. Her awkward introduction marks her lower social status. As critics have noted, the sixteen lines of Madge’s story of an abducted maiden fall far short of conventional standards of written texts (Hackett 2000: 15–17). Hers is an unpolished story filled with oral markers, beginning with her formulaic phrase: “Once uppon a time,” then repeated again in the same first sentence. She revises the rank of the maiden’s father – “a King or a Lord, or a Duke.” Twice she backtracks to relate

Old wives’ tales 59 a necessary and earlier point of plot with exclamations “O Lord I quite forgot” and “O I forget.” The structure of all three of her sentences is clumsily additive, piling up “and” clauses with minimal subordination: “Once uppon a time there was a King . . . and once uppon a time his daughter was stollen away, and hee sent all his men to seeke out his daughter, and hee sent so long that he sent all his men out of his Land” (ll.110–15). Her narration fades into the play as the two brothers of her tale come to life on stage to announce their search for their missing sister Delia. Critics have debated the dissonance between Madge’s awkward beginning and the graceful performances composing the rest of Peele’s play. A.R. Braunmuller explains this disjunction of frame and main plot as a “combination of high art and simplicity” in terms of “Elizabethan courtly values” (1983: 62); Susan Viguers breaks down the distinction between the frame and the play by claiming various plots as belonging to Madge, whose art is poised against the sinister sorceries of Sacrapant (1981: 209–11). For Stephen Young, the staged performances of Madge’s “unintelligible” tale represent a “rescue rather than a continuation”; by establishing the old woman as “an object of fun,” Peele points up “the superiority of the dramatic action he supplies over mere storytelling” (1974: 71–3). Frolicke himself is not uncritical. As he points out the illogic of her fantasy, he reveals his self-identification with the ruler figure: if the king (or lord or duke) sent all his men to seek for his daughter, “Who drest his dinner then?” (l.116). Denying his privileged status, Madge invites him to “kisse my taile” (l.117), and Frolicke’s critical attitude quickly subsides. In his next, more respectful reply, his gentle explanation of the sudden appearance of the two brothers – “Soft Gammer, here some come to tell your tale for you” – locates her story as the origin of these performances. Yet Madge’s astonished outburst – “Gods me bones, who comes here?” – reveals that she did not invoke these apparitions, and that these staged actions have passed beyond her narrative control. Exceeding the plausible influence of printed texts, the specialized knowledges of Latin culture confirm that Peele’s Old Wives Tale does not attempt an unmediated representation of Madge’s tale, or of a women’s oral culture. As Margaret Dean-Smith has noted, “This is not a fairy-tale for a child, but adult fantasy compounded of romantic allusions comprehensible to an Elizabethan audience familiar with Apuleius and Ariosto, constructed upon the recognizable materials of folklore, legend and classical myth” (1973: 54). The play not only displays but uses classical learning in sophisticated ways. Eumenides, the name of a benevolent knight who pays for the burial of an indigent corpse, for example, means “the kindly ones,” and Braunmuller points out that this name was “a propitiary or euphemistic name for the furies, or Erinyes” in ancient Greece (1983: 58). Peele’s play balances the kindness of Eumenides with the malice of the actual furies assisting the evil conjurer Sacrapant. who was, like the Sacrapant of Apuleius’s Golden Ass, born in Thessaly to a famous witch Meroe (ll.340–1). Yet Peele’s play also revels in the customs of an irreverently physical culture at a far remove from the schoolroom. Drawing on a reference to

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a dance described by John Aubrey, Hook explains why the shrewish Zantippa broke her pitcher against a mysterious head rising from a well to plead: “Stroke me smoothe, and combe my head,/And thou shalt have some cockell bread” (ll.642–3). Apparently “cockell bread” was molded in women’s private parts, possibly as a love charm. The play also celebrates the seasonal cycles of the agrarian year with the singing harvest men who inexplicably interrupt the action twice, once to sow and once, with “women in their hands” (l.532), to reap. Rather than setting up a counter-text as in Wager’s play, the folk elements of Old Wives Tale surround and absorb the classical referents. Even heroes with classical names like Eumenides conquer by goodness, a form of agency distinguishing folk heroes from romantic heroes, who usually succeed through strength or wit (Hook 1970: 360). The evil Sacrapant’s magic is more folk than classical: he turns Erestus into an old man by day and into “the white Beare of Englands wood” (l.165) by night. Malevolent as they are, the furies function as a simple moving device to carry off Delia’s two brothers and then Huanebango. The clown’s name change from Booby to the Latinate Corebus passes without remark or corresponding transformation in character. In none of these displays of classical knowledge does Old Wives Tale present learning as a positive value. The compulsively Latinate Huanebango is a figure of humor rather than of admiration. Huanebango’s quotation of an execrable hexameter by Gabriel Harvey (“O that I might but I may not, woe to my destinie therefore” (l.654)) identifies him with the learned pretensions of that Cambridge don (Hook 1970: 309–19).But this form of Harveybombast functions, I believe, not so much to devalue the learned experiment of naturalizing classical hexameters in English, as for the sheer fun of exaggerated caricature. Huanebango’s arrogance takes on the zaniness of a schoolboy parody, as he declines his possessive pronoun in his ecstasy of erotic optimism: If this Ladie be so faire as she is said to bee, she is mine, she is mine. Meus, mea, meum, in contemptum omnium Grammaticorum. (ll.282–3) Even as a parody of Stanyhurst’s hexameters, Huanebango’s vows to Zantippa are delightful, not for their aesthetic commentary, but for their innate absurdity: Phylyda phylerydos, Pamphylyda floryda flortos, Dub dub a dub, bounce quoth the guns, with a sulpherous huffe snuffe: Wakte with a wench, pretty peat, pretty love, and my sweet prettie pigsnie; Just by thy side shall sit surnamed great Huanebango, Safe in my armes will I keepe thee, threat Mars or thunder Olympus. (ll.645–50) While ultimately deriving from Plautus, to what more silly use could the names of Huanebango’s father Pergopolyneo and grandfather Polimackeroeplacydus be put? (ll.289–90). Paradoxically, these nonsense sounds bring Huanebango’s lan-

Old wives’ tales 61 guage perilously close to the nonsense sounds (“dub dub a dub”) of nursery rhymes. Yet unlike Moros, Huanebango is not carried down to hell. Instead, he marries the beautiful Zantippa, whose shrewish words he is too deaf to hear. Within Peele’s forgiving play, Huanebango leaves the stage happy. In all of its several plots, Old Wives Tale advocates kindness not only as the highest virtue, but even as the most effective action.7 Conferring almost magical power, generosity to those less fortunate is more important than learning, social position, or even sheer intelligence to the outcome of the plots. When Delia’s brothers give alms to Erestus, his riddling prophecy provides the key to their rescue of their sister. Erestus’s neighbor Lampriscus brings him honey, always welcome, as Erestus slyly notes, to the bear he becomes at night (l.208). When Eumenides spends his last money to bury a pauper, the corpse’s grateful ghost Jack fills his purse with money and enables his rescue of Delia and her brothers from the evil Sacrapant. When Zantippa’s good sister Celanta strokes the head in the well and combs his hair, the corn and gold poured into her lap provide for her marriage to her beloved Corebus. It is this high value placed on kindness that provides the most significant link between the play and its frame. The generosity of the characters in Old Wives Tale participates in the generosity that was a fundamental meaning of Madge’s narrative act itself. Peele’s play finally pays tribute to the oral tradition of old wives’ tales in this way: while her style was admittedly unrefined, Madge’s hospitality to needy boys was exceptional. As any ten-year-old boy will tell you, what is really important is not silly declensions of “meus, mea, meum,” but the breakfast Madge provides before the pages depart. The play ends on this happy dramatic climax: FANTASTICKE:

Then you have made an end of your tale, Gammer? Yes faith: When this was done I tooke a peece of bread and cheese, and came my way, and so shall you have too before you goe, to your breakfast. (ll.926–8)

OLD WOMAN:

Peele’s Old Wives Tale is unusual in the sympathy of its treatment of this oral tradition transmitted by women. More typical is the grotesque representation of Mopsa in Sir Philip Sidney’s The Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia. Before embarking on her narrative, Mopsa slobbers and must wipe her mouth “as there was good cause” (1977: 311). Yet while Sidney’s profound and elegant work lies at the opposite end of the aesthetic spectrum, his work, like Mopsa’s, is finally fictional; both narratives are even arguably a form of chivalric romance. Self-identifications with this tradition are, for the most part, fraught with ambivalence. Whether blissful or nightmarish, old wives’ tales memorialized the childhood interactions with women from low-status groups to complicate and disrupt the hard-won masculinity achieved in the schoolroom. The casual use of the phrase “old wives’ tale” suggests a widely shared experience, yet few writers acknowledged directly the influence of fictions spellbinding enough to have drawn them, like little Frolicke, after their nurses for a mile. Unlike Corbett’s

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William Chourne, these storytellers are seldom, if ever, mentioned by their own full names: they remain “aged mumping beldams,” Madges, or Mother Bunches. For authors, as well as for the learned culture as a whole, old wives’ tales became as unspeakable as they were familiar. They became material for abjection, that often despised but necessary “thing” described by Julia Kristeva as necessary to reject, but too much a part of the self for rejection to be possible (1982: 4). Old wives’ tales, and the women who told them, exerted a formative force on the subjectivities of many early moderns. Their significance to early modern culture becomes apparent as they surface repeatedly in productions of popular culture by Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson.

4

Hobby-horses and fellow travelers

Lying at the opposite end from the narratives murmured in the sheltered space shared between women and children were amateur entertainments that became increasingly denigrated, instead of admired, as “popular.” In this chapter, I will trace the conflation, by the late sixteenth century, of various practices perceived as separate in the late medieval and early Tudor period: the hobby-horse who danced at church-sponsored events; the presentation of simple “games” or plays including combat dances by St. George; and the martial dances of the early modern morris. As Bruce Smith eloquently observes (1999: 136), generic boundaries became generally irrelevant in the common relationship of festive figures to sound: When dancers dance, when fighters fight, when riders ride in procession to a victim’s house, bodies move in rhythm with sound. . . . As different as they may be in many respects, morris dancing, combats by Robin Hood, skimmington rides, and jigs share one thing in common: they dance the circumference of sound from [o:] to speech to music to ambient sound before they revert to [o:]. The generic boundaries became further weakened as these once distinct figures intermingled in new ways by the end of the sixteenth century. They paraded together in the civic pageants of early Tudor midsummers and jostled together more indiscriminately in the later and more informal processions described by Henry Machyn and Philip Stubbes. Several were present in a disastrous revival of the church ale and subsequent games in early seventeenth-century Wells. They appear together in various combinations on the early seventeenth-century stage. Economic exigencies, as outlined below, provide a tangible motive for the physical merger of once distinct practices. Their newly formed alliances may also be a cause, or more likely a result, of the increasing homogenization of practices represented as popular by the late sixteenth century. This chapter explores how, singly and together, three specific figures prominent in early modern guests – the hobby-horse, St. George, and the morris dancer – were coming to signify a version of merry England from which many early moderns were attempting, with mixed success, to distance themselves.

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They become particularly important in works by Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson as signs of a degraded aesthetic through and against which these authors were fashioning their own forms of professionalism. As the cultural prestige of amateur performances fell from the pre-Reformation through the late sixteenth century, all three of these figures became vulnerable to interpretation as the sign of the low. Their very popularity in earlier times imposed upon them, paradoxically, a social stigma; for a more self-consciously refined early modern aesthetic would deprecate these vigorous and largely improvised performances precisely for their appeal to undiscriminating tastes. Moreover, the strenuous exertions required of all three of these figures in pre-Reformation play games, composed either of actual contests of strength or their stylized equivalents, implicated their aesthetic in a robust form of embodiment perceived increasingly as vulgar by the late sixteenth century. This attribution of vulgarity derived from new bodily disciplines, demonstrated in posture as in dance, through which higher status groups distinguished themselves as part of an early modern civilizing process. These evolving perceptions of unconstrained bodily movements as distasteful or grotesque became especially visible in the bifurcation of common and courtly dancing to encode, according to Skiles Howard, “social distinctions between those who worked with their hands and those who did not” (1998: 8). Courtiers hired dance masters to learn the intricate dance steps required to exhibit a seemingly effortless sprezzatura that affirmed their apparently natural superiority. For reformers, unconstrained bodily movements enacted not vulgarity but illicit sexuality. From either perspective, amateur performances came to signify a low form of bodily expression, and also a past before this category of the low was widely accepted by higher status groups. This gap between the aesthetics of high and low marked early modern productions of popular culture. The social implications of this gap between the aesthetics of high and low have been ably theorized for our own time. John Fiske has identified a “critical and aesthetic distance” that discriminates among works of art according to the social origin of the artist or performer. This aesthetic distance, he claims, is finally “a marker of distinction between those able to separate their culture from the social and economic conditions of the everyday and those who cannot.” He adds ominously, “There is no ‘distancing’ however in the culture of everyday life” (1992: 156). Similarly, Pierre Bourdieu has brilliantly correlated taste to socio-economic position to identify a “detachment of the pure gaze” conditioned by economic circumstances that participates in a “general disposition toward the world” conditioned by “a life of ease” (1984: 5). This aesthetic registers and justifies a relation of power: The denial of lower, coarse, vulgar, venal, servile – in a word, natural – enjoyment, which constitutes the sacred sphere of culture, implies an affirmation of the superiority of those who can be satisfied with the sublimated, refined, disinterested, gratuitous, distinguished pleasures forever closed to the profane. That is why art and cultural consumption are predisposed, con-

Hobby-horses and fellow travelers 65 sciously and deliberately or not, to fulfil a social function of legitimating social differences. (Bourdieu 1984: 7) As this chapter will suggest, no part of this process accomplished by the twentieth century was predetermined or inevitable. These differences in aesthetics of the high and low are socially created, although they are often presented, now as in the early modern period, as inherent in human nature. The early modern period provides insights into the evolution of an aesthetics of the low, as a forceful drive for distinction fostered the vehement and habitual expression of divergent social identities in and through the body. The movements of the body became more politicized, as the mark simultaneously of contemporary lowstatus groups and of a less refined past not yet disciplined into these modes of distinction. The prominent role assumed by the hobby-horse, St. George, and morris dancers in signifying the popular, attests to their significance within the early modern imaginary. Since Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson all use such figures to distinguish, and also to associate, their writings with these eruptions of amateur performativity, an understanding of their contemporary meanings provides insights not only into these literary works, but into the social movements of which they form a part. The following demonstrates that by the end of the sixteenth century, allusions to these figures reveal a growing social stigma not present in the late medieval or pre-Reformation periods. The low aesthetic marked by hobby-horses, St. George, and morris dancers was only confirmed, for many early moderns, by their participation in such common festivities as church ales flourishing in the pre-Reformation period. To some groups, the revelry of such communal pastimes signified the corruptions of the Catholic Church, the devilish vestiges of a pagan past, and a dangerous potential for social disorder. To others, they represented a merrier and more innocent time undisturbed by early modern divisiveness and, with the Stuart issuance of The Book of Sports, patriotic allegiance to royal authority.1 Thus, for some early moderns, these figures came to evoke nostalgia for the past. As Naomi Liebler interprets Hamlet’s citation of the tag line, “For O, for O, the hobby-horse is forgot” (3.2.122), the hobby-horse continued to serve as “a sexual reminder of fertility,” but it also expressed a “longing for old days and old ways” before, in this case, the murder of Hamlet’s father (1995: 179). When nationalistic fervor led some writers and other intellectuals to search for figures from a specifically English past to inspire patriotism, they attempted to rehabilitate, in a procession at Chester, the dragon-slayer St. George as a patriotic military hero. William Kemp’s morris performed from London to Norwich professionalized the dance as an athletic feat, and a simulacrum of an earlier festive time. By the early seventeenth century, all three figures had become complex ideological signs whose meaning was, as Peter Stallybrass has noted for Robin Hood, “produced and reproduced within the hegemonic process” (1985: 131–2). Yet underlying all of these meanings – whether as coarsely vulgar, as nostalgically rustic, or as

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patriotically English – was the implicit awareness of a once-wide appeal that continued to render them ideal material for various contemporary productions of the popular. The following sections provide brief histories of the changing status of the hobby-horse, St. George, and the morris dance, respectively. This description of their once distinct functions and cultural meaning prepares the way for a discussion of their later amalgamation as signs of the popular. Next, this chapter traces the increasingly divisive social meanings embedded in three May Days, from the mid-sixteenth to the early seventeenth centuries. The next section explores possible links between this strand of amateur performance and an evolving practice of house visits referred to by contemporaries as “mumming,” although not here claimed as identical to nineteenth-century mummings, as a formative interaction between social groups. Finally, I will briefly anticipate the discussions, further elaborated in separate chapters, for the implications of these figures for the aesthetic shaping of the writings of Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson.

The hobby-horse By the late sixteenth century, the term “hobby-horse” had become a term of derisive abuse, often of a lewd sexual nature. In Much Ado about Nothing, for example, Benedick dismisses Claudio and Don Pedro as “hobby-horses” for exchanging crude jokes over his new beloved (Don Pedro: “She shall be buried with her face upwards” (3.2.68–72)). In Love’s Labour’s Lost, Moth alludes obliquely to Armado’s beloved as a hobby-horse, and then clarifies to the audience that she is a “hackney,” a horse to be ridden, or a prostitute (2.1.19–22). In Othello, Bianca assumes that a handkerchief was “some Minxes token,” and tells Cassio to “give it your Hobbey-horse” or prostitute (4.1.147–8). An outrageous lechery was attributed to the hobby-horse in the early modern phrase, to take “a hobby-horse turne or two,” as denoting illicit sexual activities (Cawte 1978: 218). A hobby-horse role from Holyday’s play Technogamia, performed at Christ Church in 1617, supports this reputation for lechery and also aggression. In Technogamia, a hobby-horse enters with morris dancers, knocks down other characters on stage, kisses the female character Musica, and absconds with Taborer (1942: 4.5, l.596). These connotations of illicit sexuality did not represent a primary association in the early sixteenth century. The hobby-horse was prominent in the festivities planned by Sir George Ferrars for the Christmas season of 1552/3, in which a day was set aside for “feates of armes,” including “a challeng performed with hobbie horsis” (Forrest 1999: 113). However comical the hobby-horse may have been, these feats of arms suggest either martial or a parody of a martial encounter. Hobby-horses were sufficiently respectable to dance before Edward VI and then the young Elizabeth during Christmas season (Hutton 1996: 83, 1994: 122). Hobby-horses performed a charming parody of a martial encounter in the midsummer watch, described by John Mountgomery in 1585 with a procession in which twelve boys on hobby-horses, after “praunsing, mountinge, and

Hobby-horses and fellow travelers 67 fetchinge upp their horses alofte on all fower,” engaged in a stylized battle with their little swords. Mountgomery refers to this stylized battle as a “matachina,” or sword dance, which, he explains, “if they be truly taught, one shall not hurte another, but allwaies strike uppon the sworde” (1812: 395). It would seem that these performances by hobby-horses merged martial contest, dance, and play in a fashion not designed to offend but to entertain. The choice of a hobby-horse to perform to raise funds for parishes in church ales and May games confirms that he was a much-loved figure in the early sixteenth century.2 Churchwarden accounts from this time reveal this use for hobby-horses especially in Staffordshire and Northamptonshire, and in Nottinghamshire it was “an important regional midwinter custom” by the 1520s (Hutton 1996: 91). Ronald Hutton notes that the hobby-horse was already a “wellestablished tradition” by 1532 in Abbots Bromley in Staffordshire (1996: 90). With the Reformation, parishes turned to charging rates rather than raising money through church ales and other festivities, and this function for the hobbyhorse radically declined. In Abbots Bromley, however, it was revived in the early seventeenth century. Robert Plot describes a performance from the 1630s of a hobby-horse and six dancers carrying reindeers’ heads on their shoulders that was so profitable that the pence contributed by local as well as “foreign” onlookers defrayed the cost of cakes and ale, “repaired their church,” and “kept their poor too” (1686: 434; Hutton 1996: 90; Cawte 1978: 10–23). Referring to this event as the “hobby-horse dance,” Robert Plot described how the hobbyhorse snapped his jaws in time with the music as he danced with other performers bearing reindeer heads, three white and three red. While Plot does not recount the steps of their dance, the aggression of horned deer towards each other at rutting time, together with their two-part division by the colors red and white, suggests an earlier form of choreographed combat on the general model of that performed at Abbots Bromley in recent days (434; Cawte 1978: 65–70). As Hutton notes, however, the antlers used in 1630 may not have been present in 1532; and their presence seems to have been unique to Abbots Bromley (1996: 9). Carbon-dated to the eleventh century, these antlers do, however, suggest a reverence for the past as a formative meaning for this event, even if they were first used in the seventeenth century. How then did the hobby-horse come to imply vulgar or sexual antics? The alteration no doubt reflected changing attitudes towards its animal–human hybridity. Keith Thomas has argued that by the late sixteenth century, early moderns were highly threatened by the fragile boundaries between man and beast (1983: 38–9). Perhaps this anxiety accounts in part for the prominence of the tourney style, worn around the waist to resemble a rider on a horse, rather than the “hooden style,” in which the skull of an animal is mounted on a pole, while the operator, hidden by a sheet, uses a mechanism to clack its jaws.3 The boundaries between animal and human, according to Bruce Boehrer, provided ways to define humanity according to certain distinguishing qualities, such as the use of reason stressed by classical and Christian texts (2002: 7–10). Those less reasonable humans, unable to control their passions, were, from this

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perspective, less human (Boehrer 2002: 67). In this way, the need to establish a distance from the civilized (elite or reformist) human subject also created new, and newly bestial, connotations for hobby-horses and those of the lower sorts who operated them. As a hybrid of human and animal, the hobby-horse was no doubt always associated with some degree of “licensed misconduct, as he “kicked, gambolled, and pretended to attack” (Hutton 1996: 94). Evidently, by the late sixteenth century, this misconduct took on greater proportions, so that the once delightfully martial hobby-horse turned sexual.4 No doubt what had once been acceptable was now considered vulgar, or, more likely, the striking licentiousness connoted by early modern hobby-horses reflected their changed venue, as cut loose from the sponsorship of the church and court, they were left to their own devices, as independent entrepreneurs, to entertain a crowd, however outrageously, for money. How did the hobby-horse come to be known, paradoxically, for being forgotten? If “For O, for O, the hobby-horse is forgot” (Hamlet 3.2.122) was a tag line from a ballad (Greenblatt 1997: 1711), then what was its referent? Did the hobby-horse become simply too outrageous, alienating prospective donors? Did repairs to his costume become too expensive over time, when sponsorship by the church had declined, or too cumbersome for portability on protracted tours? While John Forrest argues against other scholars that his appearance in morris troupes began relatively late, only in the 1590s (1999: 231), the expectation of his presence became established quickly enough to cause comment when he was missing. His absence is mentioned in an entertainment written by Ben Jonson but surely imitating improvised visits by such troupes, in which a “morris of clownes” appears at Althorpe to entertain Queen Anne and Prince Henry in 1603. The presenter, one “No-Body,” instructs the fool to take on the role of hobby-horse: “But see the Hobby-horse is forgot./Foole, it must be your lot,/To supply his want with faces,/And some other Buffon graces” (Jonson 1941: 7.130). These “faces” and “Buffon graces” describe a degraded aesthetic of the low that was yet too essential to the troupe to be given up entirely, so that the fool was assigned the role. In a later play, The Witch of Edmonton (1628), the fool or clown figure young Banks performs the role of hobby-horse in a morris troupe performing in a private residence. Here the expectation is that the hobbyhorse will be forgotten; for in response to the dancers’ urging, “But remember, Banks,” he replies with an unintentional reversal of phrase, “The hobby-horse shall be remembered” (3.1.58). Banks brings in a new and satanic element with his invitation of a witch’s familiar dog to join a morris performance at a private residence. While this play shows sympathy for witches, the role taken by this servant of the devil, however endearing, in this dance with the hobby-horse suggests an aesthetic that is not only degraded, but tinged with the demonic. This sinister potential reflects an exaggerated production of the popular by the more religious sorts that would soon, in the decades of the Protectorate, lead to a more complete forgetting not only of the hobby-horse, but also of the joyful and often aggressive vulgarity of the physical body that he enacted.

Hobby-horses and fellow travelers 69

St. George and his dragon While St. George retained in one aspect a dignified reputation as the patron saint of England publicly celebrated by the Knights of the Garter, the widespread popularity of his public performances as the knight who “swing’d the dragon” also made of him a homelier figure appropriate for tavern signs (Shakespeare, King John 2.1.288). Christopher Fetherston mocks St. George who, wearing his tourney-style horse, was himself a form of hobby-horse: “Sainte George on horsebacke, who doeth alwayes purre cutte, but hee doeth nat ride a mile in a moone” (1582: C5v). Exploding his combat with a dragon as mere myth, Peter Heylyn expresses his scorn for popular uses of St. George: “But now St. George must . . . poast away unto the Land of Faeries, and there remaine for ever, with other the chimeras of an idle head” (1633: D7v, FF3). Yet before the reformed Protestant England of Edward VI condemned his veneration as a Catholic saint, there is no indication that St. George was associated with the idle heads or tavern signs. On the contrary, St. George presented a primarily military and patriotic figure suited to reception by kings. St. George and his dragon figured prominently, in a ceremony at Bristol welcoming Edward IV after his defeat of Henry VI in 1461: There was Seynt George on horsbakke uppon a tent fyghtyng with a dragon, and the kyng and the quene on hygh in a castell, and his doughter benethe with a lambe. And atte the sleyng of the dragon ther was a greet melody of aungellys. (Gairdner 1968: 85–6) St. George’s victory resonates with Edward’s recent triumph, as the “greet melody of aungellys” suggests heavenly partisanship of the York cause. A similar St. George pageant was also included with other displays to welcome Edward VI on his coronation in London. A small stage erected on a conduit presented “Seint George on Horsebacke in Compleat Harnes, with his Page in Harnes also, holding his Speare and Shield, and a faire Maiden holding a Lamb in a string” (Leland 1770: 4.319). By the time of Edward VI, this martial and illustrious St. George, together with the maiden and her lamb, had entered contemporary iconography. The church of St. Gregory in Norwich still exhibits, according to an observer, “a fine mid-15th century wall painting which shows St. George killing the dragon, with the princess in the background holding a lamb” (Galloway 1984: xxvi). More festive are the royal Twelfth Night revels of 1486, when the court of Henry VII traveled to Westminster Hall to see a pageant of St. George and the dragon, along with a play and disguisings by courtiers (Hutton 1994: 16). Similarly, in the Twelfth Night of 1494, a St. George entertainment interrupted, surely by plan, a “goodly Interlude” staged before King Henry VII, as bursting into the hall were St. George and a “ffayer vyrgyn attyrid lyke unto a kyngys dowgthyr” who led a “Terryble & huge Rede dragun” who “as he passyd spytt

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ffyre at hys mowth.” After a short speech, St. George began an anthem answered by the King’s Chapel choir. As he “avoydid” with the dragon, the entire hall joined in song (Anglo 1959: 348–9). Breaking down the distinctions between performers and audience, the participation in song suggests a culturally cohesive group with a broad spectrum of taste, able to enjoy a fire-breathing dragon along with a program of devout music. Beyond the court, the figure of St. George was familiar in “ridings” on his feast day, April 23, in what Hutton has called “some of the most colorful rites of the early Tudor period” (1996: 214). As expressions of civic pride, these ridings could require considerable outlays of time and money. At Norwich, an active Guild of St. George created this procession as particularly elaborate, with money spent not only on St. George and his dragon, but also on the Lady Margaret, on horses, on footmen, on shoes and gloves, and on a linen cloth for the dragon (Galloway 1984: 4, 10–17). In Newcastle, account books from 1510–11 reveal considerable care and expense, lavished especially on the dragon (Anderson 1982: 13–16). Hutton notes that “the popularity of St. George continued to grow up to the very beginning of the Reformation” with additional ridings also occurring in such cities as Leicester, Stratford-upon-Avon, Chester, Bristol, and Coventry (1996: 214–15). David Cressy observes that before the Reformation on St. George’s Day, when the Knights of the Garter convened at Windsor, at least twenty-eight towns held fairs (1989: 20–1); and St. George also appeared in Chester to announce Whitsun plays with attention-getting “drume musicke and trumpetes” (Clopper 1979: 1, 324). A St. George play was performed at a church ale held in Bassingbourn in 1511, and the large contributions of malt reveal the expectation of a high attendance for this event drawing from a wide area (Forrest 1999: 142). These customs came to an abrupt halt, in any official sense, when the Reformation gathered force with Edward VI’s accession to the throne in 1547. It was for St. George’s significance as a Catholic saint that the Lord Protector Somerset banned his image and eliminated his feast from the 1552 prayerbook. Then, with the accession of Catholic Mary Tudor, the feast was restored, and her husband Philip himself led the customary procession of the Knights of the Garter on St. George’s Day in 1555 (Hutton 1996: 216). Ridings were also restored to the villages.5 The agreement of the city fathers in 1558, the year of Elizabeth’s accession, that “this yere St. George play shall be left & not playd,” suggests an expectation based on performances in previous years (Johnston and Rogerson 1979: 318–19, 327). While it is not clear if the term “play” refers to a scripted production or a pantomimed skirmish with his dragon, the generous payment to the St. George actor suggests the development of a larger role. During Elizabeth’s reign, the signification of St. George became complicated by his identification with civic festivity; and it was as a festive as well as a Catholic figure that enthusiasts of the reformed religion exerted pressure against his appearances, along with maypoles, morris dancing and church ales, all of which had declined dramatically by the late sixteenth century (Hutton 1994: 111–52). While Queen Elizabeth continued to observe St. George’s Day by going in pro-

Hobby-horses and fellow travelers 71 cession with her Knights of the Garter to her chapel in state, festive entertainments became curtailed or limited in large part, Hutton observes, through the forces of evangelical Protestantism (1994: 124, 143). As Cressy notes, the annual procession and play of St. George were suspended in York in 1558, while in Norwich, St. George and Lady Margaret were removed, although “for pastime” the mayor allowed the dragon Old Snap to continue his appearance (Cressy 1989: 20–1, 96). Recalling the snapping jaws of the Abbots Bromley hobby-horse, this name “Old Snap” suggests that the dragon may well have delighted the crowd by acting like a large hobby-horse. It was not until the accession of King James that St. George resumed his rightful place beside his dragon in processions at Norwich. A dramatic contrast in two performances of St. George in Wells in 1607 and Chester in 1610 reveals two very different productions of this figure as an ideological sign. Described in more detail below, the Wells St. George appeared with morris dancers, together with the lowly Mother Bunch and other figures, in a raucous festivity that, refusing to shut down, turned sufficiently offensive to respectable citizens to be prosecuted as a Star Chamber matter. The Chester St. George, on the other hand, marked the visit of Prince Henry by presenting refined and highly abstract personages such as Fame and Peace, all of whom rode on horseback accompanied by presenters displaying lavish prize bells to be awarded to the three winners of the day’s horse-race. After the procession reached the Mayor of Chester, set orations in pentameter couplets declaimed the prosperity and blessedness of the realm. The personage Rumor mentioned St. George briefly, stressing his military might in placing “whole Hoasts of Heathens foes to flight” more than his defeat of “a hideous Dragon.” The orations were followed by the horse-races, presentation of awards, and finally an invitation by a personified Chester to selected participants (“each noble worthy, and each worthy Knight”) to share in a “small repast.” This dignified civic event did not so much suppress popular taste as contain it, providing outlets in the excitement of the horse-race and also in the hilarity of two acts designed to warm up the crowd at the beginning of the procession. The first was an acrobatic feat performed by a man standing on his hands on an iron bar on the church steeple, throwing off fireworks. The second involved the only pageant of the procession. Revealingly, it included “an artificiall Dragon, very lively to behold,” beaten to death by “savages” with clubs. This dragon demonstrated a particularly theatrical bent, “to the great pleasure of the spectators, bleeding, fainting, and staggering, as though hee endured a feeling paine, even at the last gaspe, and farewell” (Amerie 1610: A4r–v, C1v, D1v). His conspicuous separation from a St. George now too dignified to mime combat with him reveals that, in his very appeal to the crowd, the beloved dragon had come to signify an aesthetics of the low. Other seventeenth-century notices of St. George and his dragon indicate a mutual fall in dignity. According to a reference in John Fletcher’s The Womans Prize (1611), a St. George well known for his battles with his dragon in Kingston had become a humorous figure, hen-pecked by a scolding female dragon: “Running foot-back from the furious Dragon,/That with her angry tayle

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belabours him/For being lazie” (1995: 1.3.16–21). William Sampson’s play, The Vow-Breaker, or The Faire Maide of Clifton (1636) depicts a St. George who also joins forces with morris dancers for an entertainment to be presented by amateur performers before a queen. In this context, it is important that the actors of this entertainment are from lower status groups. The miller of Ruddington insists on his right to play the hobby-horse by asserting his ability (“I practic’d my reines, my Carree’res, my Pranckers, my Ambles, my false Trotts, my Smooth Ambles, and Canterbury Paces” (5.2.17–19)). When the lowly Ball promises to take on the role of the “fiery Dragon” (l.41), the miller’s hobbyhorse, apparently a tourney-stile horse with rider, becomes a St. George: “And I a thund’ring St. George as ever rode on horsebacke” (ll.42–3). The actual entertainment is performed off-stage; for in the next scene, Queen Elizabeth gives to Major, the leader of the troupe, a cup of gold as thanks (5.3.2). As an expression of loyalty to a beneficent monarch in 1636, this amateur performance engages royalist sympathies. It also stages this merging of St. George and his dragon with morris dancers – a merging perhaps quite new in the seventeenth century – as an allegedly traditional entertainment from an earlier time for which royalist supporters imagined there was considerable nostalgia.

Morris dancers Originally a dance of the European court, the moresca was a “fighting dance” characterized by “high leaping” and “rhythmic stepping” with dancing bells (Forrest 1999: 74–5). In Italy in the early sixteenth century, however, the vigor of the dance had already begun to threaten courtly decorum, since Castiglione warned courtiers to preserve their dignity by dancing the moresca only in a disguise (1959: 102–3). By the early sixteenth century in England, morris dancers had moved out of the court to a wider population, more receptive to the vigorous steps and leaps by dancers, usually wearing bells on their legs that created an emphatic percussive sound. More of a “repertory of body movements” than a standardized routine, the morris incorporated two forms of popular dance, the round or carole in which dancers faced each other, and the processional in which dancers moved through a village or field (Howard 1998: 9–11; Smith 1999: 145). By 1515, morris dancers were intermingling with Robin Hood players, habitual fund-raisers at church ales (Forrest 1999: 162–71). A drunken, dancing friar who appeared in Robin Hood plays became, for a time, attached to the morris dance, as did the figure for Maid Marian, often hilariously performed by a man wearing women’s clothing (156–7). Ronald Hutton surmises that the popularity of the Maid Marian’s amusing transvestism accounts for his continued presence in the morris (1996: 274–5). In a “playe of Robyn Hoode, verye proper to be played on in Maye games” appended to a Mery Geste of Robyn Hood (1560), the Robin Hood games end with a morris dance as, taking the lady’s hand, the friar becomes the morris fool, with the words “Here is an huckle duckle,/An inch above the buckle,” and finally concluding the event by dismissing the audience: “Go home, ye knaves, and lay crabbes in the fyre,/For my lady

Hobby-horses and fellow travelers 73 and I wil daunce in the myre for veri pure joye” (Dobson and Taylor 1976: 214). The friar’s intent to continue to dance “in the mire for veri pure joy” conveys a physical source of delight located in the body, unrestrained by concerns for cleanliness. If the vigor of the morris signified its vulgarity to the elite, reformist sorts censured morris dancing for its lasciviousness (Fetherston 1582: D7–D8). Philip Stubbes called the morris the “devils daunce” (M2v). From a drunken friar to a transgressive transvestite, it is not difficult to imagine why these church ale entertainments elicited local resistance by evangelical reformers. By the mid-1560s, church ales generally went into a decline, and parishes turned to more fixed and more subdued means of self-finance (Hutton 1994: 111, 119, 143). Losing sponsorship of established institutions, morris dancers became fellowtravelers with dragons, hobby-horses, and festive figures linked with May games. They mingled together not only as common expressions of festivity, but also, alternatively and even simultaneously, as common expressions of insubordination to those who would shut them down. Forrest (1999: 214) describes the dancers’ response to Puritan opposition to morris dancing and May games in the 1590s: Morris dancers . . . became a vehicle for social protest against an ecclesiastical hierarchy that was insensitive to the needs of rural communities. So, although the dancers were at one point a force for social cohesion, having been branded as antisocial they became so – disturbing the peace and breaking the law. Representing an inherent challenge to the authority of language in what Bruce Smith has named “the o-factor,” morris dances became at once a sensory experience, a mode of communication, and a political act (1999: 136–9). Classed as appropriate to the low, the morris reflected disparate meanings attributed to the lower sorts, as ridiculous imbeciles or as dangerous dissidents. The former appears as Samuel Rowlands’ “Knave of Harts” bemoans his morris-like wardrobe: “With such base cloaths, tis e’en a shame to see’t:/My Sleeves are like some Morris-dancing fellow,/My stockings Ideot-like, red, greene and yealow” (1966: 2). The latter appears in Shakespeare’s famous portrait of Jack Cade’s martial valor in morris terms, able to “capre upright, like a wilde Morisco,/Shaking the bloody Darts, as he his Bells” (Henry 6 part 2 3.1.365–6). The subsequent invasion of London by Shakespeare’s Cade, and his declaration of literacy as a capital offense, confirm the threat potential to the morris-like valor of a lower sort of rebel. The production of morris dancers to embody elite perceptions of the lower sorts led to their odd exaggeration, by the early seventeenth century, into another figure known for dancing. Distanced by a Christian culture from the god Dionysus who legitimated his irrational impulses of drunkenness and sex, the satyr came to represent the base and animal side of man. The most obvious identification of satyrs and morris dancers occurs in Jonson’s masque Oberon (1611) in

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which satyrs long for bells to attach to their thighs to ring, morris-like, as they dance. The direction “Heere a Dance of twelve Satyres” also appears unexpectedly at the sheep-shearing feast in The Winter’s Tale (1968: 294). Since a servant reports that one of the performers had “danced before the King” (4.4.324), Greenblatt suggests that these satyrs’ dance may refer to the Oberon (1997: 2929). But the satyr reference may also derive from the morris jumps, for a servant announces that “they call themselves saultiers” (4.4.312). Rather than actual satyrs, these dancers were lower sorts (carters, shepherds, cowherds, and swineherds) dressed in “hair” or furred skins (4.4.312); and their performance seems familiar to the Old Shepherd, who initially rejects their offer to dance as “homely foolery” too low for their country feast (4.4.319). Did this satyr dance reflect a new production of popular culture, or an older country practice with a hybrid man-animal costume misrecognized by the elite as satyrs? This striking emergence of this hybrid classical figure expresses, I believe, an early modern rationale for classifying morris dancers as near-beasts, described by Forrest (1999: 189–90): Elizabethans saw all humans as occupying a position in a hierarchy that was a microcosm of the greater cosmic order, with kings and nobles closer to the angels and the peasantry closer to the beasts. The lower orders were already dangerously near the carnal by their very natures, so that morris dancing and other lecherous pleasures could readily cause their further descent. It was not only their allegedly near-bestial nature revealed by their unrestrained physicality and unashamed pleasure in sex that created morris dancers as satyrs. It was also their potential to challenge authority. As early as 1565, Thomas Cooper’s Latin dictionary translated the Latin word “Satyra” as “A poetic rebukinge of vices sharply, not regardinge the persons” (TTTtt2); and English satirists quickly developed the persona of the rough and rude satyr (Kernan 1959: 91–103). This meaning had filtered down to the lower sorts in Wells by 1607, when a man in “Satire Skynns” appeared among morris dancers, although not necessarily a dancer himself. In response to a slur by one Mrs. Yard against a maypole as a painted or “sparked calf,” a painted calf was “often shewed . . . in the open Markett place,” where sometimes a person “attired in Satire Skynns” would cry, “ba, like a Calf” at it (Stokes 1996: 1.351). By 1621 R. Brathwaite entitles his book of satires Natures Embassie: or, The Wilde-mans Measures: Danced naked by twelve Satyres, pictured on the title page as performing a country ring dance, most likely a morris. This connection between the satyr and the country dancer, especially the morris dancer, as common embodiments of a low aesthetic becomes important in later chapters. Considered vulgar by the elite and immoral by sober sorts, morris dancers signified a physical exuberance, a bold sexuality, and a potentially oppositional politics that rendered them, for these groups, as satyr-like hybrids of animal and human. This production of the low becomes especially visible in a fascinating conflation of non-elite dancers, a satyr, and the devil

Hobby-horses and fellow travelers 75 himself in an illustration of Robin Goodfellow, included in the pamphlet Robin Good-fellow, His Mad Prankes and Merry Jests (1628). With a piper to the right, a homely circle dance of men and women behind him, and his own right cloven hoof poised mid-step, there is no doubt that this Robin is a rustic dancer, and his naked and very erect penis strongly suggests the obscenity of his performance. The black dog, much like the witch’s familiar Dog who plays in the morris dance in The Witch of Edmonton written around the same time,

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suggests Robin’s devilish origins already attributed to morris dancers by Stubbes. Yet the figure’s unabashed pleasure in his dance, communicated by his direct gaze engaging the reader, makes it as difficult to condemn him as the trickster Robin Goodfellow of the pamphlet. As he dances, the broom he carries jauntily over his shoulder suggests an increasingly important motive for morris troupes who were going into business for themselves by the late sixteenth century. Robin’s broom suggests an early instance of later uses by amateur performers to clear space for a performance, and also to sweep up money thrown to them at its conclusion. This figure was described, significantly enough, as a devil.6 The morris, by itself and with other performers, had gone commercial. The commercial appeal of the morris competed with, or perhaps affirmed, connotations of bestial hybridity attributed to the lower sort, uniquely able, it was thought, to re-create remnants of the English past for paying spectators. One of the most famous instances of the commercial morris was William Kemp’s dance from London to Norwich, described in his account Kemps Nine Daies Wonder (1600). Creating a simulacrum of a medieval past, Kemp swerved from the communal morris of medieval tradition to present a performance for which onlookers were to pay (Thomas 1992: 513). He represented his dance as a competitive exhibition in which he outlasted any from the crowd who dared to partner him. Kemp’s performance of his morris dance as a commodity opened up an unbridgeable gap from a participatory medieval practice that included onlookers in the dance. In his prolonged morris dance, Kemp was offering up for sale a production of a popular culture. Kemp’s famous exploit acts out what was happening on a smaller scale in the late sixteenth century. Without the institutional support of the theater, Kemp spun out on his own as an individual entrepreneur. Without the institutional support of the church, amateur performers and their hobby-horses were similarly engaged in productions of the popular. These performances could not revive a medieval past. Similar to Kemp’s morris dance, the prancing of hobby-horses and the dramatic death of the thespian dragon of Chester were also becoming primarily commercial ventures exploiting an audience’s shared desire for a popular festivity that signified to them an England of the past. These performances were not, and could not be, genuine in any real sense. Even though Kemp could offer only a simulacrum, Richard Braithwait’s “Upon Kempe and His Morice, with His Epitaph” expresses a sense of loss on his death as convincing as if Kemp’s performance had been authentic: But out alasse how soone’s thy morice done. When Pipe and Taber all thy friends be gone? ... Th’ast danc’d thre out of breath, And now must make thy parting dance with death. (F8v, quoted in Thomas 1992: 514) Alternately degraded, feared, and desired, morris dancers, and other fellowtravelers, became sites of contested meaning expressing entangled relationships

Hobby-horses and fellow travelers 77 with the contemporary lower sorts, and an English past they were thought, for the most part erroneously, to re-create.

Three events Changes in meanings attributed to hobby-horses, St. George, and morris dancers emerge from accounts of three successive May games over a period of almost fifty years from 1559 to 1607. Few specific accounts of early modern May games survive, and even fewer include significant detail. These three, however, provide a general sense of the deteriorating social environment surrounding these events, and some sense of the performers’ counter-response. First, Henry Machyn’s diary describes an apparently carefree May game procession around London on June 24, 1559, the first year of Elizabeth’s reign: The xiiij day of June ther was a May-game, and sant John Sacerys [Zachery’s], with a giant, and drumes and gunes [and the] ix wordes [the Nine Worthies], with spechys, and a goodly pagant with a quen c . . . and dyvers odur, with spechys; and then sant Gorge and the dragon, the mores dansse, and after Robyn Hode and lytyll John, and M[aid Marian] and frer Tuke, and thay had spechys rond a-bowt London. (Machyn 1848: 201) Machyn’s account demonstrates the extent to which the once separate figures of morris dancers, St. George, and his hobby-horse-like dragon had become intermingled, both in physical presence and cultural meanings. This catalog of characters suggests their common classification in a joyful production of a merry England continuous with a non-threatening traditional past supportive of the newly established present regime. What was the content of this event? The drums suggest a march dance in rhythm as the group processed around London, halting at various points for individual members, such as the nine worthies, to make speeches. The martial atmosphere of drums and guns may well have fostered some play games along the way between St. George and his dragon. Machyn’s description of this event as a May game suggests that more than a procession occurred; and the possibilities for playing to a delighted crowd are abundant. It is clear that the May game was a success not only with the citizens, but also with their officials; for on the next day, June 25, “the sam May-gam whent unto [the palace?] at Grenwyche, playng a-for the Quen and the consell.” Presumably this May game would not have been allowed to play at Greenwich without the Queen’s implicit approval, and Ronald Hutton gathers this with other evidence to suggest Elizabeth’s favor for such festival performances (1994: 124). Such outbursts of festivity declined steadily in Elizabeth’s reign in large part, Hutton asserts, through the forces of evangelical Protestantism (1994: 124, 143). These evangelical forces are strongly expressed in Philip Stubbes’s disapproving account of a May game festivity in 1583, as one in a long list of abuses current

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in England, in a well-known passage yet worthy of extensive quotation here as one of the few detailed eyewitness accounts.7 Following his selection by “all the wildeheds of the Parish,” the lord of misrule chooses between twenty and a hundred “lustie Guttes” as his men, to be appareled in light “wanton” colors (M2). Once decked out with “scarfs, ribons & laces hanged all over with golde rings,” these youths identify themselves as morris dancers by tying “about either leg xx. or xl. Bels,” with “rich handkercheifs” held in their hands or slung across their shoulders (M2). These morris dancers join in a noisy procession that includes skirmishing hobby-horses and dragons in a morris, or Stubbes’s “devils daunce”: Then have they their Hobby-horses, dragons & other Antiques, togither with their baudie Pipers and thundering Drummers to strike up the devils daunce withall, then marche these heathen company towards the Church and Churchyard, their pipers pipeing, their drummer thundring, their stumps dauncing, their bels jyngling, their handkerchefs swinging about their heds like madmen, their hobbie horses and other monsters skirmishing amongst the route. (M2–M2v) Stubbes’s serial participles – the “pipeing, thundring, dauncing, jyngling, swinging, skirmishing” – express not only his offense at the sheer physical energy of the event, but also its seductive power over him. He assumes, in this indiscriminant mingling of bodies, that illicit sex accounts for the handkerchiefs, “borrowed for the most parte of their pretie Mopsies & looving Besses, for bussing them in the dark” (M2). In this passage, “hobby-horses” itself has become a term of contempt. Stubbes’s category of “Antiques” is especially revealing in its conflation of figures known from a past time and “antics” or fools. After this processional dance, the company then enter the church, interrupting the minister’s prayers or sermon with their loud noise, where they enact a “pageant,” perhaps a play game, designed to elicit laughter by playing to the receptive parishioners standing on pews and forms: “Then the foolish people, they looke, they stare, they laugh, they fleer, & mount upon fourmes and pewes to see these goodly pageants solem[i]zed in this sort” (M2v). After processing several times around the church, the group exits into the churchyard to their “bowers” and banqueting houses, “wherin they feast, banquet & daunce al that day, & (peradventure) all the night too” (M2v). For Stubbes, the sole motive for this May game consists of a sensual pleasure that is, finally, only a heathen form of devil worship. He conveniently omits the fact that the funds gained or extracted by this May game probably represented a contribution to finance the needs of the parish. Or perhaps, as some churches withdrew their sponsorship of May games and church ales, various village groups continued their customary performances for their own profit. Whichever the case, Stubbes and his fellowthinkers invested these celebrations with newly negative social and political meanings, imposed upon particular persons through the badges sold, along with food and ale, as a means of fund-raising:

Hobby-horses and fellow travelers 79 And who will not be buxom to them, and give them money for these their devilish cognizances, they are mocked, & flouted at, not a little. And so assoted are some, that they not only give them monie, to maintain their abhomination withall, but also weare their badges & cognizances in their hats or caps openly. (M2–M3) Stubbes’s depiction of how those who refused to contribute were “mocked, & flouted at, not a little” while others displayed their badges openly provides a local understanding of the social divisiveness beginning to characterize such events. Sides were taken. Enthusiasts and censors alike were producing their contrasting versions of festive culture as, in the face of naysayers, what was once a communal activity was assuming an edge of defiance. This edge of defiance sharpened into open hostility in Wells in 1607 among festivities in which morris dancers marched together with St. George and his dragon. The citizens of Wells, like those of other communities, had become increasingly polarized in their attitudes towards the entertainments of merry England; and during an eight-week period of merry-making that refused to shut down, prominent participants moved beyond mocking and flouting to stage ad hominem attacks, for which they were finally imprisoned and fined in what ended up as a Star Chamber suit.8 This festivity began quietly enough as a sponsored church ale approved by the Dean of Wells for repairs to the bell and steeple of St. Cuthberts Church. Surviving as a court deposition, a verse description by one William Gamage depicts the elaborate procession designed to attract onlookers to the church ale. Among this throng rode St. George in armor, played by one Davy Trymm, preceded by a martial cadre setting off “thundering peaces” and bravely attended by Irish footmen. St. George was joined by a melange of figures both popular and classical: a lord of the May, morris dancers, soldiers, “Robbyn Hoodd . . . with all this gallants rayed in greene,” a “sparked” or painted “calfe,” “drumes fyfes and trompetts,” two men in hair bearing between them an egg on crossed staves, “olde Grandam bunche that filthe and slutte” carrying puddings in a wheelbarrow, Acteon converted into a hart, a coach with Diana and six nymphs in white, Noah’s arch, a giant and giantess that “in loftly maner loked presice/on after the other by degree,” a naked feathered boy, an Egyptian king with his queen, and, finally, 300 dishes to be consumed at the church (Stokes 1996: 1.267–9). According to manuscript notes quoted by C.J. Sisson, there was also “the Counterfecte of a dragon with a man within him that carryed the same & they boath represented or Acted the fighte betweene the dragon & St. George” (1936: 171). This description may refer to skirmishing during the procession, or an unexpected and comic reprise by St. George and his dragon after the procession, at the end of first day of the church ale. When the citizens were about to “repayre homeward,” comfortably full of food and ale, the “fyrye Dragon” provoked a skirmish with St. George as, somewhat like a large cat, he “laye in

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wayte/for to devowre the princess streight” (Stokes 1996: 1.268). Gamage praises this event in the tetrameter couplets of low verse: But I St. George of Wells comend & all his knightes that did attend that wrought the dragons great decaye & saved the princes lyfe that day. (Stokes 1996: 1.268) Beneath this cheerful chaos, however, tensions lurked. Gamage’s poem consoles young women who contributed to the finances of this procession for the disapproval of hostile citizens: “You virgins all of every sort/who with your wealth maynteine the sport/greeve not thoughe some at it doe frowne/they live not loved in our Towne” (Stokes 1996: 1.267). Civic tensions became expressed through the procession’s “sparked” or painted calf. At one point a group of morris dancers, with one William Peters carrying a board on which was painted a calf, and men bearing guns, swords, and drums halted before the house of a Mrs. Yard, where the calf was shot in what could surely be construed as a physical threat. As a sexual insult, William Gamage invented an immensely popular “holing Game,” which involved banking balls in nine holes carved at the bottom of a picture of Mrs. Yard, rumored as the sexual partner of the constable John Hole, placed between images of Hole and another man (Stokes 1996: 1.269). Their highly suggestive names of Yard (a euphemism for penis) and Hole surely rendered this game irresistible. In response to further opposition, the merry-making turned towards additional targets that reveal a status-based division within the town. When the already unpopular constable John Hole attempted unsuccessfully to halt a procession of morris dancers, he became one of several tradesmen – together with a haberdasher, a pewterer, a grocer, a usurer, and a scrivner – represented by grotesques parodying their trades at a later procession on Whitsuntide (Stokes 1996: 1.277–9). Scurrilous rhymes circulated, and one of these described an opponent as too cowardly to engage in the play game of St. George: he was too spineless to look a “pigmey in the face, muche lesse a gya[nt] or a dragons arse” (Stokes 1996: 1.272). As it turned out, the church ale was illegal according to the letter of the law, because the appropriate JP had never officially approved the churchwardens’ request. But it was this use of enactments to offend citizens, especially those who protested the guns, the drums, the cross-dressing, the drinking, and generally “very prophane & unseemely showes & pastimes” (Stokes 1996: 1.262) that made the Wells event a Star Chamber matter. As the escalating tensions in these three events suggest, figures representing merry England came to assume an edge not often apparent in the pre-Reformation or even in Machyn’s London of 1559. Efforts by reformers to discourage or to suppress festivities associated increasingly with the younger and “ruder sort” invested them with an intensified power to offend. A spiral of prohibition and defiance lent them a renewed energy and potentially dangerous purpose. In this

Hobby-horses and fellow travelers 81 way, the social meaning of these figures, and the merry England they came to represent, became produced not only by those who participated in festivities, but perhaps even more effectively by those who did not. For those members of the gentry or middling sort distinguishing themselves from a less elite group, contempt for hobby-horses served as a means of social self-definition. For members of these same groups who found themselves caught up in the spirit of the event, however, social dissociation was not always so simple or free from conflict.

Without sponsors Peaking in 1570, church ales went into rapid decline by 1600 (Forrest 1999: 172). While they revived for a time under the protection of the Stuarts, they never attained wide cultural consensus, and during the Interregnum they shut down entirely. What then happened to the hobby-horses, morris dancers, and St. George after they, and the church ales in which they performed, became considered too disreputable to permit church sponsorship? In a painstaking history of morris dancing, John Forrest has traced the financial support for the morris to the following venues: from the court (1481–1510), to guilds (1511–40), to church (1541–70), to local towns and villages (1571–1600), to a transition to individuals and households (1631–1750) (1999: 33). Dating the morris tours in the countryside and to gentry estates as beginning in the 1560s, Hutton also describes performances by independent teams of young men as continuing “to burgeon in popularity” in the latter years of Elizabeth’s reign (1996: 268). While the church hierarchy held the power over parishes to discontinue their ales, its power to halt individual groups from performing in secular venues was less effective. Forrest observes that the loss of church sponsorship around 1570 seems, in fact, to have precipitated a dramatic climb in morris events, which continued to escalate until about 1620, when they, too, dropped off suddenly, no doubt from the cumulative effect of the sharp increase in prosecutions between 1600 and 1630 (1999: 172–4). Increasingly, dancers moved to villages, as opposed to cities, to avoid officials, and Forrest speculates that “it may have been the mounting risk of prosecution in the early sixteenth century that accounts for the paucity of records concerning rural morris, in that those who chose to continue dancing became increasingly discreet” (1999: 270). By the early eighteenth century, when morris dancers were touring private homes, they were not always welcome. Sometimes they were, in fact, paid not to perform, according to a practice described by Lady Fermanagh in a letter from 1716: We have whisen ayls all about us, which brings such A Bundance of rabble & the worst sort of Company round us . . . I can’t help giving the Morrises monney when they come, for they tell me everybody doing it is the best way to send them going – there is one at Steeple Claydon, one at hoggshaw, one at Buckinham, and one at Stratton Audley. (Forrest 1999: 267–8, quoting Verney papers)

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Since, as Forrest notes, from the sixteenth century there are “strong indications that the tour was a serious money-maker” (1999: 269), it is not surprising that the morris tour became modeled on another successful money-maker, the procession by the Maylord and his company through villages to raise funds for a church ale. As Wiles has noted for such a tour by Robin Hood, inherent in such money-making events was the potential to go independent (1981: 27). But these dancers were not the “preamble to an event, but the event itself,” and so the form changed over time, from a simple ring dance to a more complex figured dance in couples, adapting moves from new country dances in the early seventeenth century (Forrest 1999: 270, 279). They became professionalized, performing their dances as a skilled exhibition. This altered venue also demanded other changes. Arriving in a village unannounced, morris dancers were required to extend the nature of their performance to allow time not only to gather but to warm up a crowd who was not expecting them. What was now necessary, as Forrest notes, was a “total performance” that included several stages: a processional, a comic speech (none of which survive), the dance itself, and a collection, followed by the departure in a processional, sometimes with a stop in the nearest alehouse before moving to the next town (1999: 273, 275–6). What was the content of this introductory comic speech? To what extent might this speech begin to blur the lines between dance and play game? While the steps of the dances changed, this structure for the morris tour remained relatively constant “even down to the nineteenth century, presumably because it worked” (Forrest 1999: 277). These altered performance requirements accompanying this change in venue explain why various morris companies expanded their numbers to include a hobby-horse in the 1590s (Forrest 1999: 231). The morris dancers needed to expand their act to allow more time to gather paying onlookers, and who better to warm up a group than the hobby-horse, whose credentials as a crowd-pleaser were so impressively proven in many generations of church ales? In addition, like the morris dancers, the hobby-horse operator had recently lost church sponsorship as well. It is in this role that the “Thames at Richmond,” a painting dating from around 1620 in the Fitzwater Museum, portrays the hobby-horse in a morris troupe.9 While two couples of morris dancers, including one crosseddressed Maid Marian, face each other, the hobby-horse stands alone, facing the onlookers, as the fool collects money with his ladle. In this position, the hobbyhorse is freed from any fixed role, so he may engage with onlookers to cajole or extort money from them. It is in his role as public entertainer that the hobbyhorse is portrayed in a window from a section of Betley Hall built around 1621 (Forrest 1999: 153–4). At the center of a group of morris dancers, immediately below a maypole, the performer wearing the tourney-style hobby-horse looks straight out at the spectator. The presence of the collecting ladle suspended from the horse’s mouth indicates that in this troupe it is the hobby-horse, rather than the fool, who collects coins from the onlookers. His role as entertainer is suggested by the daggers thrust through his cheeks, so comically grotesque in contrast to his rich-looking cloak and hat. Or, as discussed below, does this

Hobby-horses and fellow travelers 83 feature suggest that the morris dancing included a skirmish with the hobbyhorse and rider, in which his defeat is signaled by the daggers thrust into his cheeks? In this discussion of the morris, the general shape of loosely structured amateur performances becomes visible. With the banning of church ales, the amateurs who once performed there did not vanish from the face of the Earth. The various components of church ales became, as Forrest observes, “free floating performances without a sponsor” (1999: 214). As Forrest notes, the demand for bells rose sharply, as morris dancers went into business for themselves, touring villages and then attempting, with limited success, to enter private homes. In the process, their performances would change to accommodate new requirements: a longer act to allow time for the crowd to gather, introductions by their foreman or fool, the addition of a verbal and perhaps even a dramatic element, the clowning of a hobby-horse with the crowd.

Amateur performances As unsponsored performances, these events began to merge with another tradition, referred to by contemporaries as “mumming,” which provided a pretext for intruding into private houses with the expectation of hospitality or financial reward during the Christmas season, especially on St. Stephen’s Day, when hospitality demanded “good housekeeping and largesse towards the poor” (Marcus 1991: 171). As early as the fifteenth century, often between Christmas and Twelfth Night, English mummers disguised themselves by wearing masks or painting their faces with flour or charcoal to enter private residences to play dice or some other competitive game. The association of dice with the Christmas season derived from a rule that rendered dice play illegal, in theory, for servants and apprentices, at all other times of the year (Twycross and Carpenter 2002: 91). Evidence for the continued practice of this custom appears in its continued prohibitions. Visits “to the houses of the good folks of the city” by disguised persons for the purposes of dicing were prohibited in London in 1334, but they were not yet called mummings (Twycross and Carpenter 2002: 83). The prohibition of 1418 refers to the practice of disguise as mumming, but does not specifically mention dice: “No manere persone . . . during this holy tyme of Cristemes, be so hardy in eny wyse to walk by night in eny manere mommyng . . . with eny feynyd berdes, peyntid visers, disfourmyd or colourid visages in eny wise”(cited in Twycross and Carpenter 2002: 83). The unwelcome entry into private dwellings, together with the threat of criminal acts, appears in an Act of Parliament from 1511: Mummers have commyn to the dwellyng place of divers men of honour and other substanciall persones; and so departed unknowen; Whereppon Murthres felonye Rape & oder greate hurtes & inconveniences have afore tyme growen and hereafter be lyke to come by the colour therof. (cited in Twycross and Carpenter 2002: 100)

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These dangers were not imaginary. Twice in the fifteenth century, mummings were used as a cover for planned assassinations of Henry IV and Henry V, respectively (Twycross and Carpenter 2002: 99; Hutton 1994: 8–10). While dice was not mentioned in the prohibitions of 1418 and 1511, the practice of offering dice play seems to have continued in some form. It was still recognizable by the time of Jonson’s Christmas his Masque (1611), in which the presenter Christmas introduces a lowly costermonger named Mumming, who is supposed to appear disguised beneath a visor (except that he has lost his visor), and holding a box for money and dice (Jonson 1941: 7.444). Far from a central activity, however, dice playing did not actually occur in Jonson’s Christmas his Masque. This proffered dice play by disguised mummers did not remain a defining feature, no doubt due to a temptation to cheat with loaded dice (Twycross and Carpenter 2002: 92). The meaning of mumming was generalized to describe the intrusion of disguised strangers into people’s homes for the purpose of collecting coins or hospitality, often in exchange for some kind of show (Pettit 1982: 8). In the fifteenth-century court, disguised visitors might give, rather than receive, gifts, or else present a dumbshow explained to the audience by a presenter or Prologue (Twycross and Carpenter 2002: 158–60, 166). Such a dumbshow may have provided a model for the performance of St. George and his dragon, staged as an abrupt interruption of an interlude playing before Henry VII on the Twelfth Night of 1494. It is this traditional act of bursting in uninvited on a private party in the Christmas season that informs Jonson’s Christmas his Masque (1616), in which a Father Christmas intrudes into the court (“Ha! Would you ha’ kept me out?” ll.6–7). The names of his ten children present a catalog of traditional Christmas activities and foods of “a right Christmas, as of old it was” (l.174), including mumming, wassall, offering (from a “great house” with his dish to give charity to the poor), and babie-cake. Christmas directs his actors to begin their dance with a call to silence (“Mum Mum!” l.170) that suggests a silence conventional for those called mummers. They dance to the drum and fife (l.180) as Father Christmas sings his introduction of each of his children, after which they dance again. Father Christmas’s advice to King James to extract further funds from London citizens adapts the traditional request for money at the end of the performance. Christmas his Masque performs a version of an early modern amateur performance as a sudden intrusion, followed by a presentation of introduced actors, who then perform dances, concluding the performance with an Epilogue. It is revealing of its low cultural status that this masque stages an entertainment that is a sorry affair, staged by actors who are incapable, as Leah Marcus tactfully expresses it, of “the highest reaches of art” (1978b: 213). Jonson stresses the humble vocations of the actors, who include a cobbler, a porter, a cook’s wife, a card-maker, a costermonger, and a seamstress. Cupid himself is an apprentice to a bugle-maker, while the tire-woman Venus is only a fishmonger’s daughter. Several of the actors have lost their props or parts of their costumes. The boy Cupid suffers from acute stage fright. Instead of the twelve actors necessary to represent the twelve days of Christmas, Father Christmas can only

Hobby-horses and fellow travelers 85 find ten. Perhaps due to their low status, they do not follow the traditional masquers’ custom of intermingling with the courtiers at the end. Leah Marcus plausibly asserts that these insufficiencies reveal “the failure in devotion of its hypothetical producers, the citizens of London” (213). Rather than a failure of devotion, I would argue that these shortcomings reflect the increasingly low prestige and the perceived incompetence of performers associated with such amateur performances by the early seventeenth century. It would appear that rather than full-fledged performances, some early modern low entertainments verged perilously close to begging. In a humanist morality play, “The Interlude of a Contract of Mariage between Wit and Wisdome” (1579), the potential for a denigrated form of individual entertainment was already present. In the disguise of Master Doctor, the character Idleness loses his purse to the crafty knaves Snatch and Catch, who devise a strategy to prevent pursuit. Placing a sheet around him, they order him to pretend to be a mummer, charging him to inform any passers-by that “you goe a-mumming.” After being beaten, Idleness settles into a sad refrain: “Now I goe amumming,/Like a poore pennilesse spirit,/Without pipe or druming! (31). This interlude suggests two versions of amateur performance, here called mumming, in the late sixteenth century. The “pipe and drumming” of a group mumming suggests a procession of marchers or dancers. The other, sadder version of mumming alone and without money suggests something closer to begging. This movement from a group event to something close to freelance begging contributed to the debasement of this performance tradition by the late sixteenth century. The assumed names expose the emptiness of pretexts for festivity. When the youth Wit pulls the sheet off of him, Idleness gives his name as “Due Disporte,” but Wit recognizes him as the knave who, under the name “Honist Recreation,” had already deceived him (34). While this form of amateur entertainment may pretend to be honest recreation or due disport, it represents, at least to the author of this play, only a destructive form of idleness.10 Beyond these literary treatments, it is difficult to determine what these amateur performances entailed, since recorded sources are notably succinct. Bernard Capp has found, in the Worcester County Records, a charge in an Essex church against four women, three of them sisters, for “ ‘going disguised amumming’ ” in 1596; the father of the sisters was also charged for permitting them (2003: 350). Were they dancing, as in the entertainment represented in Jonson’s masque? Were they begging, like poor Idleness in the interlude? Perhaps a little of both? Undoubtedly, more such amateur entertainments occurred than were recorded; for unless the performers ran afoul of the law, perhaps in this case because the performers were young women, there would be little reason to mention them. Perhaps these amateur events occurred, or at least were offered, without being so named or recognized. What was the functional definition of such an entertainment to a respectable householder who opened his door to be greeted, or perhaps implicitly threatened, by a bizarre assortment of strangers even more eccentrically dressed? What were the thoughts of a Lincolnshire gentleman who was visited, over a period of fifteen months in 1561–2,

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by “a hobbyhorse player, a lone morris dancer, and a hobbyhorse accompanied by four musicians” (Hutton 1994: 114)? Would he distinguish between hobbyhorses and morris dancers; or would he categorize the inconvenient appearance of both as mere begging? In another house visit, strangers were described as mummers. On Twelfth Night of 1618, one Nicholas Assheton enters in his journal the following reference: “At night some companie from Reead came a Mumming: was kindly taken: but they were but Mummers” (1848: 74–5). Assheton’s description of them as “but Mummers” suggests persons from a lower status group. They were “kindly taken” because he did not have high expectations of them. Perhaps he felt that he owed them, as a man of relative wealth, some form of charity on a holiday. From a less sympathetic perspective, these lowly performers calling on Assheton’s private house bear a family resemblance to the “Bundance of rabble & and the worst sort of Company” of morris dancers in 1716 to whom Lady Fermanagh was obliged, like her neighbors, to pay off just so that they would leave. Whatever their specific content, the meaning of these events took shape from their social context. In any century, these amateur entertainments expressed and also interpreted social difference. The social divisions between performers and audience became part of the meaning of these events, so that hospitality or proffered coins could be understood by the host as charity for the poor, as a response to intimidation, or something less clear than either that lay in between. From their side, these amateur performers might use their entertainments to communicate solidarity or deference to a respectable household, or alternatively antagonism to a higher status group. Twycross and Carpenter ably discuss the inherent tension existing between disguised entertainer, whom they call a mummer, and unmasked host, which created an atmosphere which was “either excitingly delightful or potentially threatening” for, “in whatever proportions, mumming clearly depended on a mixture of playfulness and a sense of danger” (2002: 99). The 1511 Act of Parliament, it should be remembered, associated mummings with a potential for rape and murder. Robert Weimann describes how early modern entertainers sometimes forced their way into private houses and, once within, they “treated the house as ‘public property,’ ” sometimes incurring punishments from Tudor authorities (1978: 26). The increase of tension of the kind evident for the May games from 1559 to 1583 to 1607 surely contributed a social edge to some interactions between entertainers and hosts. This may have been the point. At the core of this experience was an immediacy of personal encounter, whether a source for delight, repulsion, or terror (Brookes 1988: 52). As all three figures – the hobby-horse, St. George, and the morris dancer – declined in status by the late sixteenth century, they came to signify episodes of amateur performance designated as low. Even their names became, in reformist circles, terms of contempt. The bodily disciplines imposed, or self-imposed, on elite and middling groups fostered an increased sense of alienation from spontaneous and vigorous forms of physical expression in their play games once more widely accepted by a range of social groups. Yet even in a bedraggled and

Hobby-horses and fellow travelers 87 sometimes oppositional form, these figures still signified a more unified and festive past that some early moderns were not yet ready to give up. While appealing to tastes increasingly designated as “low,” the cavorting hobby-horse yet retained an allure that must have been, even to some elite early moderns, difficult to resist. Through and against these figures – the hobby-horse, St. George, and the morris dance – and the traditions they represented, early modern writers fashioned and also resisted their own professionalism. It is important not to idealize any of these forms of amateur performativity. They were, in the larger scheme of artistic performances, relatively crude. It would appear that the performance of pure art was never the primary intent. In their motive to gain recompense, their interactions with audiences veered between criminal extortion and outrageous clowning. In this motive to gain financial rewards from performance, these events did not differ from sophisticated stage plays. But they did differ in their means. In their focus on particular forms of embodiedness based on performances of strength and coordination, their play games and stylized combats moved these events closer to athletic competitions as a category. It is not necessary to idealize or to denigrate this aesthetics of the body to understand its role in an evolving early modern aesthetics of art defining itself with but also against a form of embodiedness that became increasingly, and I would add unfortunately, the mark of low status. From the perspective of hindsight, the personal and social struggles attending this transition in the meanings of the body are seldom visible. We will never know if the performers themselves embraced these social meanings. Did the performer of St. George at Wells perceive himself primarily as a collector of funds for the church parish, or as a partisan of a mode of Englishness represented as vulgar by the more sober citizens? Did morris dancers share with the elite an understanding that the rhythmic chiming of their bells signified their difference from the more graceful aesthetic of court dance? Or would they instead have construed elite dancing as a poor showing lacking in spontaneity and vigor? And what were the responses of audience members caught between enjoyment and contempt? As I have argued, these processes were not yet complete in the early modern period. It is perhaps due to the ambiguities inherent in any transition that perceptions of embodiedness were articulated with such destructive and devastating clarity in the categorization of morris dancers, for example, as near-beasts. Covert identifications were necessarily fraught with danger and ambivalence. As the following chapters will demonstrate, early modern writers registered their own modes of distinction against and through these figures as a means of defining, and perhaps of understanding, their own evolving aesthetics. The cultural meanings of these figures provides a context for understanding an often conflicted aesthetics that becomes, finally, a source of richness within writings by Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson. This wider tradition of debased amateur performance provides specifically social meanings for audience members’ responses shaped by their own attitudes towards festive events outside of the play. As Bottom in his ass’s head takes on some of the hybrid characteristics of the hobby-horse, does he arouse more contempt or delight? Similarly, the

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artisans’ presentation of the Pyramus and Thisbe entertainment, a fiasco by courtly standards, would seem to represent a triumph according to an aesthetic of the low. Similar ambivalence closes The Merry Wives of Windsor, as Falstaff’s disguise as the horned Herne the hunter sets up a visual parallel with the horned dancers of nearby Abbots Bromley. Appearing in the midst of a very amateur performance, Falstaff’s interchangeable name of Oldcastle provides a specific association with an earlier form of amateur event; for Oldcastle was the chosen regent of Lollard rebels who intended to disguise themselves and, “undyr coloure of the mommynge,” to intrude into the royal castle at Eltham at Twelfth Night in order to kidnap Henry V (Stowe 1598: 344). The associations of St. George with amateur performances provide enormous complexity to the interpretive choices offered by Book I of Spenser’s Faerie Queene, to suggest that the relationship between the Reformation and the traditional pastimes of a merry England was more conflicted than is usually described. Finally, Jonson’s skipping satyrs who wish for morris bells distinguish but also implicate the aristocratic dancers in Oberon, The Fairy Prince; even as the theatrical impersonations by his “old wife” Mother Maudlin in The Sad Shepherd simultaneously express social conformity and dangerous resistance.

Part II

William Shakespeare

Introduction The striking contrasts in the popular cultures produced by A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Merry Wives of Windsor proceed from two related differences in their social contexts: first, in the differing drives to distinction determining the self-definitions of the elite as opposed to the middling sort, and second, in the dissimilarity of their primary interactions with lower status groups. Through the disjunctive settings of classical Athens and a fairy-inhabited English forest, A Midsummer Night’s Dream stages the narrative forms – classical myth and fairy-tale – that not only classify but perpetuate two dissimilar social identities: an elite group distinguished by classical knowledge, and a less prestigious group circulating oral tales of fairies. The popular–elite binary constructed through these settings, I argue, historicizes the binaries traditionally attributed to this play: the day-lit world of Athenian law vs. the moonlit world of dream; the restrictive patriarchal rules of Athens vs. the unrestrained passions of lovers wandering “wood within this wood” (2.1.191); the sublimation of uncivilized impulses in Athens vs. their free expression within the sexual violence and scandalous animalistic perversity practiced within the surrounding wilderness. These complementary and mutually sustaining binaries add point and purpose to an elite mode of distinction invoked by the Athenian setting; for the study of classical philosophy and literature, and the discipline imposed by this educational process, were in theory to instill a degree of self-mastery that formed the pretext, in fact, for elite rule over the allegedly less disciplined lower status groups. According to classical philosophy, lapses from this ideal of self-control included uncontrollable sexual passion, jealous rage, or even poetic inspiration (Plato 1937: 209). This play stages the consequence of such a lapse as the entry into the domain, simultaneously social and psychological, of a version of the popular produced in this forest setting through a cluster of signifiers: May Day festivities, fairy allusions to sexual trespass, and magical narratives told by “wise aunts” in childhood. Athenians wandering in this forest world became cultural hybrids, and so, I will argue, did other elite early moderns attempting, and inevitably failing, to adhere to unrealistic standards of distinction. It is this social hybridity that constitutes a primary topic of A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

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Part II William Shakespeare

This social binary constructed through the settings of A Midsummer Night’s Dream was clearly artificial; for in this play, and in early modern society in general, the boundaries defining these groups remained fluid, and numerous individuals traveled between them. But by the late sixteenth century, the rapid increase of stratification in an already stratified society had generated a greater sense of their separateness that in turn produced newly urgent cultural meanings for cross-group encounters. According to premises familiar from colonialist discourse, the widespread perversity and violence of the forest world justifies the elite rule implicit in the structures of civilized Athens. This legitimating function appears in the relief expressed by the wandering lovers as they escape from their own passionate impulses. Yet, since this separation was growing but not yet complete, early modern members of the dominant group had also “gone native” in a sense, to become hybrids of these two competing cultures. Thus, through its cross-group collaborations, the play also critiques the dominating culture of Athens by producing a popular sphere as a necessary sanctuary from its allegedly oppressive restrictions. As this binary between the classical culture of the schoolroom and the low cultures experienced, for example, in childhood is deconstructed by Theseus’s simultaneous dismissal of “antic fables” and “fairy toys,” A Midsummer Night’s Dream opens up a space for rethinking the privileging of the great culture over the popular, of Athens over England, of literate over illiterate, of male writers over “wise aunts.” In the process, this play offers opportunities to engage or, like Theseus, to forget, this cultural hybridity present, in some form, within many early moderns. Finally, the artisans’ performance of an Ovidian myth according to the conventions of low amateur entertainments foregrounds the hybridity of Shakespeare’s own play, in its unusual admixture of classical and folk narratives. Distinguishing and also identifying itself with the artisans’ play, A Midsummer Night’s Dream reveals the urge to separate from this lower art-form and also the impossibility of absolute separation. In what seems to be a direct response to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Merry Wives of Windsor reduces both classical and folk narratives to very human form as Mistress Quickly camps it up as a fairy queen and as a Welsh parson’s pedestrian Latin lesson demystifies the supposedly transformative experience of a classical education. Rather than a mutually defining binary, Merry Wives eschews hybridity for a process of appropriation and exclusion that reflects the ideological agenda of a middling sort. The context for this pattern of appropriation and exclusion is primarily social. As rapid inflation and a demographic explosion intensified already existing social stratifications, new significations for practices associated with lower status groups offered opportunities for the middling sort to distinguish itself through highly ambivalent productions of a popular culture. A crucial mode of distinction was the evolving ideal of the bourgeois feminine to signify the social distance increasingly discernible from the lower sorts, including vagrants, less respectable neighbors, and the “idleheaded eld” (4.4.33) of the past, imagined together as idle, immoral, and redolent with impurities of character that required cleansing. From these groups,

Part II William Shakespeare 91 Merry Wives appropriates any persons and practices adaptable to some pragmatic use, while voiding unassimilated elements of any ideological legitimacy. For example, Windsor citizens make full use of the very busy Mrs. Quickly in several of their schemes, while the “old woman of Brentford” is beaten, in the person of Falstaff, without intervention from the watching community. As the citizens of Windsor enthusiastically appropriate the ghost tale of Herne the hunter from “idle-headed eld,” they also perform a charivari expelling the version of the popular produced in the person of Falstaff-in-horns, at once Herne the hunter, a cuckold, and a performer like the horned dancers of nearby Abbotts Bromley. Interestingly, it is his own cultural hybridity that makes Falstaff vulnerable to rejection. Simultaneously a penniless vagrant and a knight addressed as “Sir,” Falstaff conflates values described for low and disreputable cony-catchers with an impoverished aristocracy promoting the traditions of an older “merrie England.” Neither group had substantial financial credit; both groups were out to exploit the resources of the middling sort. It would take more than an invitation to share in a community posset to restore Falstaff’s values to ideological legitimacy in Windsor or, in the less localized quarto version, in any urban area. Shakespeare’s ability to produce these contrasting popular cultures suggests his self-consciousness about the separate ideological needs of both elite and bourgeois social fractions. Perhaps more importantly, his capacity to represent such diverse ideologies demonstrates a fluidity of identification possible for middling and elite groups alike. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the promotion of an elite form of distinction based on knowledge of classical literature is not as exclusive as it at first might seem. Increasingly, an education in classical knowledges became accessible not only to the elite, but also to members of the middling sort, including Shakespeare as well as Spenser and Jonson. Moreover, the contemporary outpouring of translations from classical literature rendered names such as “Theseus” and “Pyramus” familiar even to non-Latin readers, including literate women. As educated members of the middling sort and even non-Latin readers became consumers of classical texts, they could yet imagine themselves as ex-officio members of a cultural elite. The aristocratic status of the ducal court of Theseus offers audience members from various social backgrounds this privileged form of identification described as “elite” in this chapter. For women readers of translations and accomplished graduates of Cambridge alike, the juxtaposition of this elite culture with the primarily popular culture produced in the English forest evokes a sense of cultural hybridity that remains an intrinsic consequence of the superimposition of classical culture upon English subjects. Similarly, while The Merry Wives of Windsor elevates the values of a respectable middling sort, the play offers points of identification for members of the gentry as well. The play recognizes the aristocratic Fenton as a superior match for Anne Page, to the detriment of the small-town suitors Slender and Dr. Caius. As the fairy queen Mistress Quickly orders her fairies to polish the ceremonial furniture at Windsor Castle, her monarchal fervor celebrates the special usefulness of an industrious middle sort; but this nationalist enthusiasm reaches out to include

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members of any social group receptive to patriotic inspiration. While for both plays, the social status of audience members is limited only by their own imaginations, these contrasting productions of popular culture remain circumscribed by the distinctive modes of interaction with members of lower social status characterizing the elite and middling sort. But no doubt like the interactions on which they are based, these productions encode highly ambivalent relationships that are subject to diverse interpretations.

5

A Midsummer Night’s Dream Breeching the binary

Traditionally, discussions of Shakespeare’s joinings of dissonant elements from classical Athens and from early modern England have assumed a substantial place in the critical discourse circulating around A Midsummer Night’s Dream.1 As almost any editor is quick to point out, the sources for A Midsummer Night’s Dream represent an unusual mingle-mangle of classical myth and native folklore, of Apuleius’s Golden Ass and popular lore of “pucks” or “pookas,” of the child-rearing practices of Greek Amazons and the crude jests of Robin Goodfellow, of a fairy queen whose name derives from Ovid’s Metamorphoses and an artisan Bottom who is all English.2 With the advent of new historicism, scholarly interest moved from source criticism to explore relations of power – between queen and subject, court and playwright, aristocrat and artisan – as circulating inside and outside of this play.3 With the advent of cultural studies, critics have begun to pay more serious attention to challenges to institutional authority posed by women and by artisans, and to alternative modes of consumption imagined for early modern audiences.4 These critical preoccupations have prompted particularly thoughtful reconsiderations of the relationship of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to its popular roots. As Diane Purkiss decries the play’s sweet and simple fairies who “come in shape no bigger than an agate-stone” only to “multiply like malaria mosquitoes” in the saccharine fairies of later periods, she questions the ideological purpose served by this sanitized production of popular culture (2000a: 181). From Louis Montrose’s seminal essay “ ‘Shaping Fantasies’ ” (1986) to Bruce Boehrer’s Shakespeare Among the Animals (2002), gender struggle has also emerged as a force shaping the meanings of the fairy world. How are we to reconcile the play’s double stance towards Titania, as a powerful queen dominating the hapless Bottom or as herself subjected to degraded sexual appetites induced by her husband to gain absolute control? Recent discussion has raised new questions over the relationship of the artisan’s play-within-the-play to the class politics of Shakespeare’s theater. Theodore Leinwand’s association of these artisans with the craftsmen hanged in the food riots of the 1590s has lent new seriousness to the implications of this comic interlude.5 What forms of power are staged in the artisans’ performance before the mocking courtiers? To what extent is their play representative of local acting traditions sent into decline with

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the rise of a professional theater licensed by the monarchy? These and other questions continue to cluster around earlier positions presented by prominent scholars of the popular. Michael Bristol stressed an oppositional position expressing the “admonitory purposes of plebeian culture” in Bottom’s company, as “they ridicule the desires, as well as the behavior, of their upper-class audience” (1985: 172, 178). For Annabel Patterson, however, A Midsummer Night’s Dream generates a deeply “festive spirit” that could “cross class boundaries without obscuring them” and so “imagine the social body whole again” (1989: 69). Noting its “inherent capacity to produce heterodoxy” (1996: 167), Louis Montrose describes a theater that makes the contradictions of Elizabethan society as the “very subject of its plays” (209). Rather than resolving the controversies over the social allegiances of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, this chapter internalizes Montrose’s model of a heterodox theater within the subjectivities of members of the audience themselves, actively living out the contradictions staged before them. Within the interior site of the hybrid subject, the unusual range of interpretive possibilities presented in this play creates an uneasy balance of power between the dominant or learned culture and the popular culture produced in the play. Implicit in the disjunctive settings of classical Athens and an English forest, the rough binaries structuring A Midsummer Night’s Dream were immediately recognizable within the personal experience of early moderns attaining a form of classical education, whether in a university or through translations. In particular, the many boys who left their childhood caregivers for schoolmasters rapidly traversed the seemingly insuperable distance in space and time separating Theseus’s Athens from a fairy forest. For them, the act of listening to fairy-tales yielded, often quite suddenly, to the reading of classical narratives. Tales of the arguments between a fairy king and his queen, stories of changelings taken from a human world by fairies, lullabies to protect sleepers from snakes and hedgehogs: all of these were part of the “old wives’ fairy rubbish” deprecated by Erasmus, ostensibly to be left behind on entry to the humanist schoolroom. As described in Chapter 3, this pressure to leave behind the androgyny of childhood to become disciplined masculine subjects through the attainment of Latinate knowledge confronted early modern males, especially, with a predicament: to choose, or to refuse to choose, between two opposing ideological domains and the very different selves formed within them. While Athens does not represent a schoolroom, the names of its inhabitants evoke the classical narratives that were taught there as the privilege, and perhaps also the burden, of class distinction. As described in Chapter 3, the internalized self-discipline now familiar from Foucauldian theory and the advancing threshold of shame described by Norbert Elias both bear striking resemblances to the self-mastery that was, in theory, to be achieved through a rigorous schooling in classical cultures. Rather than the ideally disciplined subjects this pedagogical process aspired to produce, the setting in Athens conflates classical myth with the early modern consumers of classical myth: those wealthy middling and upper social groups who had attained, or who aspired to attain, the knowledge of

A Midsummer Night’s Dream 95 classics engaged by references to classical Athens. While populated by characters with classical names such as Demetrius, Helena, Lysander, Hermia, and Egeus, the family problems in Athens would have seemed quite familiar to a wealthy early modern family, where intergenerational strife revolving around marriage choices was not uncommon. This was a world possessed of sufficient revenues to induce impatience in the sons of aging dowagers (1.1.5). This was the world of lavish weddings with enough disposable income to hire players for entertainment. This was the world that had begun, but had not yet completed, a lengthy process of separation from its affiliations with lower status groups, including the nurses and other domestics remembered for the tales they told. The location of this world in a specifically classical setting, divided from the fairy forest in time and space, demonstrates an urge to register difference from a low popular culture through the acquisition of classical knowledge. But, as the traffic between the classical and the fairy domains reveals, inextricable entanglements prevented this separation from becoming absolute. The popular culture produced within the fairy forest of A Midsummer Night’s Dream was not designed as an accurate portrayal of the social experiences of lower status groups. Instead, this fairy kingdom constituted what Frederic Jameson has described as an “objective mirage,” distorted by the ideological agendas of upper status groups, which the play advances and also resists. From this creation of an objective mirage proceed the binaries that come into place whenever one group perceives itself in terms of another. Dominant and popular, high and low – the play’s strikingly disjunctive settings of classical Athens and the fairy forest form a relational binary, however provisional and permeable, through which to generate cultural meanings. These binaries are not rigid. By naming its fairy queen Titania after an Ovidian name used for Pyrrha, Diana, and Circe, the play also unsettles these binaries it creates, but the existing binaries function as a means of initiating a conceptual separation preparatory to the eventual repudiation completed by the eighteenth century. As an objective mirage, this production of popular culture reveals a great deal about the desires and also the conflicts of members of the dominant cultures. Playing its music simultaneously in learned and popular keys, A Midsummer Night’s Dream presents interpretive choices according to social divisions operating within individual audience members who marked where their aesthetic pleasure lay through often visceral responses of laughter or distaste that may sometimes have disturbed as often as confirmed their external signifiers of social allegiance. This chapter focuses on the play’s inclusion of disjunctive settings, each with its own form of narrative, as a complex ideological act functioning simultaneously on aesthetic, social, and psychological registers. To uncover the contemporary social struggles giving meaning to the dissonant narratives juxtaposed in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, this chapter includes three sections – “Taken by the fairies,” “Old wives’ tales,” and “The heads of asses, fools, and hobby-horses” – each exploring the terms of a social contest operating not only among but also within early modern subjects.

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Taken by the fairies This section contributes a new understanding of how A Midsummer Night’s Dream produces its version of the popular by staging an ongoing use of fairy practices to allude to understandings, especially sexual understandings, shared within a discursive community.6 Chapter 2 has uncovered a contemporary function of fairy allusions as white lies, or weapons of the weak, through which lower status groups referred to a range of actions, from murder and especially infanticide, rebellion, theft, bribery, rape, and illicit sexual relations. Contemporary audiences would have been struck by the way Shakespeare’s fairies made literal a figure of speech, much as the artisans attempt to make “moonshine” literally present on stage. If, as in Hance’s phrase from Wisdom of Doctor Dodypoll (1600), going to “see the Fayries” refers to illicit sexual encounters, then Bottom’s adventure with Titania stages precisely what fairy allusions functioned to recognize but not say: in this case, a socially unacceptable sexual union between an artisan and an upper-class woman. In this play, fairy allusions come to signify a popular culture in which illicit sexuality, and the violence that often attends it, lie within an (im)proper social sphere associated with lower status groups. Since this popular culture reflects the experiences of hybrid subjects, it also opens out to foreground interactions with elite lovers in mutual evasions of the social controls of the dominant culture. Each propelled into the forest by erotic desires, the young lovers – Hermia and Lysander, Helena and Demetrius – are also, according to the homely metaphor, going to “see the fairies.” That they do not, in fact, see the fairies may register their own upper-class ignorance of this metaphor. A festive custom of May Day further locates the sexual trespass implicit in allusions to fairies within the domain of the popular. As C.L. Barber has noted, the lovers’ flight into the woods evokes an early modern practice of going into forests to gather boughs to decorate houses with greenery, censured by Philip Stubbes as “gadding over night to the woods . . . where they spend all the night in pleasant pastimes” presumably sexual in nature (Barber [1959] 1972: 21–2). Theseus’s face-saving excuse for the four young lovers discovered together asleep in the forest is more permissive although surely as sexual in his ironic conjecture, “No doubt they rose up early to observe/The rite of May” (4.1.131–2). Barber has argued that such popular festivities, with their pattern of a release of inhibitions followed by a clarification of limits, create a socially unifying structure for A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Barber’s attribution of a unifying saturnalia has been recently challenged by Gail Kern Paster and Skiles Howard, who observe that “May Day, as an unchanging festival of national immortality, self-renewing like spring vegetation, was already a fantasy, and the May game a contested historical space” by Shakespeare’s time (1999: 90). The greening of houses with forest boughs in May, like the once innocuous dance around a maypole, had acquired a dangerously factional edge in this sexualized realm of the popular. Marking the summer solstice, the “midsummer” holiday of the play’s title was celebrated by pagan bonfires and disordered urban watches

A Midsummer Night’s Dream 97 that also elicited social divisiveness (Cressy 1989: 25–8; Holland 1994: 105). I would argue that the play’s conflation of carnivals of unlikely holidays, also including Valentine’s Day, reflects a homogenization of popular culture rather than the modern critical blindness perceived by David Wiles (1998). To those early moderns unsympathetic to festivities, the customs of May Day, Midsummer, Valentine’s Day, all mingled together in the same spiral of prohibition and defiance described in Chapter 4 as investing a range of once-shared practices with a newly forceful power to offend. From an elite perspective, they were worse than licentious; they were vulgar and ill-bred. While this association of the lovers’ sexual energies with festive holidays produces a popular culture that is the space of erotic license, on a deeper level it was the initially repressive domain of Athens that drove them to the domain of the fairies in the first place. The fulfillment of their erotic desires frustrated by Athenian law, the lovers devolved into acts of transgressive sexuality and violence imagined through the artificial binaries of early modern culture, as the (im)proper sphere of lower status groups. This is not to claim that the sexual behavior of the elite was thought, even by the elite, to be above reproach. Instead, this is to assert that when Demetrius threatens to do Helena “mischief in this wood” (2.1.237), he has taken a furlough from the civilized self-control, implicit in the classical setting of Athens, to which the elite aspired. If, as described in Chapter 3, the rigorous process of attaining classical knowledge was to equip students for future rule by instilling self-control over their own passions, then what may be said for Demetrius’ treatment of Helena? Conduct books reveal similarly constrained ideals for the behavior expected from women of upper status groups (Kelso 1957: 261–81). Published in English around 1529 but republished throughout the sixteenth century, the humanist Vives’s influential Instruction of a Christen Woman advocated that women exert absolute self-control especially over their sexual impulses; virtually all other conduct books agreed. From this ideal of modesty, what then may be said for Helena’s wild chase after Demetrius, “to make a heaven of hell,/To die upon the hand I love so well” (2.2.243–4)? Helena’s internalization of restrictions upon the speech of well-bred women appears in her complaint to Hermia, “Have you no modesty, no maiden shame,/No touch of bashfulness? What, will you tear/ Impatient answers from my gentle tongue?” (3.2.286–7). Helena’s insult to Hermia as “puppet” implies not only her lack of agency, but her vulgarity.7 Revealingly, Hermia’s jealous counter-insult to Helena as “a painted maypole” impugns not only her height, but also her adoption of the illicit sexuality associated with festive customs of the lower sort.8 Paradoxically, they are both right. Even as they hurl insults at each other, they are themselves “gadding over night to the woods” in the manner decried by Stubbes. As these lovers wander through this forest, they also wander from what Paster has referred to as “an emergent ideology of bodily refinement and exquisite self-mastery” that was raising the threshold of shame for the aristocratic elite (1993: 14). To judge the lovers from this classical discourse is, of course, to distort their representation by the play. The lovers’ comical predicaments induce laughter

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and, if the watching Oberon is to guide audience response, some sympathy, as he orders Puck to use the love juice to set things right. Condemnation of the lovers belongs only to the unsympathetic Egeus. The play levels criticism instead at the rigid social rules that drove the lovers to the forest in the first place. Rather than a saturnalia leading to a clarification of limits, A Midsummer Night’s Dream seems instead to stage a mirror version of the dynamics of carnival.9 Instead of a discharge valve to assuage the dissatisfactions of the lower sort, the carnival of this play provides a temporary escape for those of more elite groups from the increasingly severe expectations of an upwardly mobile culture basing its distinction not only on classical learning, but also on the bodily disciplines and aesthetic refinements that learning was imagined to infuse. Experienced more as a nightmare than as a pleasurable release, the lovers’ temporary respite from societal norms does not lead to increased self-understanding or to significant societal change. Instead, somewhat like laborers who obediently return to work after a carnival festivity, the lovers return to Athens to celebrate their marriages as compliant sexual subjects. Their ridicule of the perceived deficiencies of the artisans’ performance of the tale of Pyramus and Thisbe will demonstrate their resumed identification with elite social standards. The experience of Theseus and Hippolyta was equally erotic and equally transgressive. According to Titania, Hippolyta had been Oberon’s “buskined mistress” and his “warrior love,” while according to Oberon, Titania had led Theseus to break faith with four women, one of whom he ravished (2.1.71, 78–80). This earlier forest sojourn by these older lovers, on the verge of celebrating their marriage, suggests that, rather than a one-time holiday from Athenian standards, the lovers’ devolution represents a necessary stage in their achievement of marriage in Athens. As the space of sexual freedoms needed for the legitimate procreation of the next generation of elites, the popular culture produced in this play is imagined as complementary and even essential for the continued reproduction of higher status groups. Moved by their erotic urges to “go to see the fairies,” these lovers have, in their passions, unknowingly become cultural hybrids. In this complementary relationship set up between popular and elite cultures in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, cultural hybridity has become a precondition for the sexuality necessary for a fulfilled marriage. In the necessity for this safety-valve, the play expresses dissatisfaction with the aridity and even sterility attributed to the modes of distinction adopted by early modern elites. In the undoubtedly exaggerated terms set up by this play, the attempt by elites to separate themselves from low and vulgar practices logically resulted in an unrealistic standard of behavior. Those who fell helplessly into excesses of passion or of anger possessed, according to the rigid binaries set up in this play, a hybrid form of subjectivity. To the extent to which these binaries reflected an aspect of their lived experience, inward struggles by early modern elites with aristocratic modes of distinction became increasingly susceptible to inner conflicts and divided loyalties. Early modern elites, and others who attempted to follow classical ideals of comportment, could turn to the theater to find ways to confront and to accommodate those

A Midsummer Night’s Dream 99 aspects of their own subjectivities that could not quite fit into the recommended social mold. It is not only the young lovers who “go to see the fairies.” In Titania’s sexual desire for Bottom, the play speaks most eloquently to the power of sexual desire to level social distinctions. This “most flatulently absurd of the mechanicals” already represents a most unlikely choice of a beloved for the ethereal fairy queen, even in his wholly human form (Greenblatt 1997: 809). The incongruity of Titania’s loving admiration for Bottom, heightened by his ass’s head, reflects and perhaps diffuses a contemporary sexual anxiety: Bottom’s asinine qualities provide him, according to classical and Renaissance traditions, with “the longest and hardest phallus” of all the quadrupeds (Kott 1966: 227–9). Bruce Boehrer and Dympna Callaghan have convincingly explored the sexual perversity of Bottom’s tryst with Titania in terms of animality. Without detracting from these insights, and in fact by drawing material from their arguments, I reconsider this bestiality as a cover for the more mundane and consequently more socially threatening desires of elite females for sexual relations with lower status males. This idea is implicit in Callaghan’s characterization of Bottom’s enlarged penis as “comic monstrosity” that reflects on his identity not only as an ass but also as a plebeian male: The purported hyperphallicity of men who, whether by virtue of race (as in the case of Othello as barbary horse), class, or physical deformity, constitute unsuitable sexual partners and the equation of such liaisons with both anality and bestiality are culturally pervasive notions resonant in Puck’s gloating commentary, “My mistress with a monster is in love” (3.2.6). (Callaghan 2000: 148; emphasis added) While Boehrer focuses on the literal bestiality staged in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, his model for how relative anthrocentrism “recapitulates, on the social level, the discriminations” enacted by absolute anthropocentrism “on the biological level” (2002: 67) leads me to an alternative interpretation for Bottom’s ass’s head as signifying his less-than-human status as a member of a lower social group. This association of lower status males with animals renders a sexual encounter of an aristocratic woman with her day-laborer as monstrous as if he were her horse. Early modern modes of distinction may well in fact have promoted a particular thrill in this form of cross-status relationship. With increasing social stratification, increased prohibitions surely rendered such sexual relations more excitingly transgressive, at the beginning of a period when a crisis in forced marriages was augmenting the separation rate of aristocratic couples (Stone 1979a: 661–2). Lawrence Stone’s claim for eighteenth-century England is, I would argue, at least as applicable to the late sixteenth century: the one relationship “totally outside the bounds of the moral order . . . was adultery between an upper-class woman and a lower-class male, especially a mere domestic servant” (1993: 243). I have argued elsewhere that this fantasy of the coupling

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of a higher status woman and a lower status male lay deeply within the cultural fantasies of the time (Lamb 1998b). The increasing refinement of elite males, ideally disciplined by the study of classical knowledge, may well have enhanced, for some women, the sexual appeal of muscular gardeners, or in this case, plebeian weavers. From this interpretation, the role of Oberon’s spell in magically inciting Titania’s lust for Bottom functions as a textual ruse to assuage a sense of sexual, or at least phallic, inferiority on the part of elite males. Similar to the playwright’s inscription of Elizabeth, Oberon’s magical power to compel Titania to love what she sees on waking, whether it be a “cat, or bear, part or boar with bristled hair” (3.2.36–7), becomes part of this play’s overarching fantasy of the ability of males to manage women’s desires (Montrose 1986; Levine 1996). If elite males are not endowed like asses (or muscular weavers), at least they might console themselves in their status as more entirely human. According to elitist ideology, if classical learning is to reflect a superior form of humanity rather than merely greater opportunity, then those of the lower sorts are limited in their very nature, like dogs or horses, in what they are capable of learning because they are not entirely human. This perception is emphatically expressed by the curate Nathaniel in Love’s Labour’s Lost as he flatters Holofernes by denigrating the uneducated constable Dull: “Sir, he hath never fed of the dainties that are bred in a book;/He hath not eat paper, as it were; he hath not drunk ink; his intellect is not replenished; he is only an animal, only sensible in the duller parts.” Nathaniel asserts that Dull is too half-witted to profit by education (4.2.23–31). In this scene, the allegation that Dull is “only an animal” reflects less on Dull’s admittedly low intellect than on the vain pedantry and senseless self-praise circulated between Nathaniel and Holofernes. In the same way, the play poses the transformation of Bottom to an ass not as an assertion but as a question, to test the limits of its validity as a figure of speech in ways that reflect on the elitist ideology that it encodes. Similar to the fairies themselves, Bottom’s head functions as a literalization of a figure of speech, in this case from the humanist domain. Notably, the play reiterates this figure of speech at least five times as a term of denigration. Bottom himself uses the term in his retort to Snout’s amazement at his metamorphosis: “What do you see? You see an ass head of your own, do you?” (3.1.96). Musing on his itchy facial hair, he reflects, “I am such a tender ass, if my hair do but tickle me I must scratch” (4.1.21). Overcome by awe as he wakes, he considers that “man is but an ass if he go about to expound this dream” (4.1.199). Mocking the Prologue, Demetrius predicts that the lion might speak, “when many asses do” (5.1.153). Theseus predicts that Bottom’s Pyramus “might yet recover, and yet prove an ass” (5.1.291). While the humor of these metaphorical remarks foregrounds Bottom’s actual transformation into an ass, the fall (or partial fall) into animality assuages an anxiety induced by humanist discourse. Yet Bottom’s ass’s head also points to the dangerous potential in any human for a metaphorical fall into a hybrid partanimal state. While in Bottom’s case, it is his low social position rather than his overpowering passion that creates him as part-animal, the hybridity of his oddly

A Midsummer Night’s Dream 101 partial transformation also reflects on the hybrid subjectivities of the lovers. The elite fear of lapsing into a bestial self is fully present in the two early modern interpretations of classical metamorphoses most often linked to A Midsummer Night’s Dream: William Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and William Adlington’s translation of Lucius Apeleius’s Golden Ass (Holland 1994: 69–70). In his “Preface too the Reader,” Golding interprets metamorphoses as external manifestations of inner bestiality: Lycaon became a wolf for his cruelty, Jove a bull for his lust, Elpenor a swine for his lust and gluttony: “not that they lost theyr manly shape as too the outward showe: But for that in their brutish brestes most beastly lustes did growe” ([1567] 1861: 17.ll.98–9). As Golding exhorts in his “Epistle,” those who live “under awe/Of reasons rule . . . are for too be accounted men” but the rest “doo differ nought from beasts, but rather bee/Much woorse than beasts, bicause they do abace theyr owne degree” (2.ll.59–61). Similiarly, William Adlington interprets the protagonist’s transformation in the Golden Ass as an externalization of sensual lust ([1556] 1967): Verily under the map of this transformation is taxed the life of mortall men, when as we suffer our mindes so to bee drowned in the sensuall lusts of the flesh, and the beastly pleasure thereof . . . that wee lose wholly the use of reason and vertue, which properly should be in man, and play the parts of brute and savage beasts. (“To the Reader”) In relying on contemporary techniques of allegorization, Adlington is reading against the grain of the original text, for the priest of the goddess Isis who restores the protagonist Lucius to his mortal shape charges him not with sensual lust but with “a little folly of thy youthfullnes, whereby thou hast had a sinister reward for thy unprosperous curiositie” ([1556] 1967: 238). In their similar interpretation of Bottom’s metamorphosis as a degraded form of the flesh, modern critics respond to A Midsummer Night’s Dream through a model of subjectivity shared with early modern elites well read in classical texts. In modern criticism, it would be impossible to do justice to the full array of other relevant classical myths – of Circe, of Diana and Actaeon, of King Midas and his ass’s ears – proposed as sources for Bottom’s transformation, and perhaps equally as impossible to choose one source over another (Bullough 1957: 372; Barkan 1980: 352–3). Rather than a solid sense of any single source, what emerges from these texts is a readerly operation by which Bottom’s transformation accrues meaning in terms of written texts of classical metamorphoses. A meaning most commonly proposed for Bottom’s ass’s head appears in David Bevington’s influential introduction to the play in his Complete Works of Shakespeare: “Whereas the head should be the aspiring part of him and his body the bestial part, Bottom wears an ass’s head on his shoulders . . . his very name suggests the solid nature of his fleshly being” (1997: 149). From this hermeneutic, Bottom’s metamorphosis represents an externalization of an inner state. As

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Titania lavishes her attentions upon him, he has literally “lost his head” as the seat of rational thought, that aspect of the disciplined subject which renounces pleasure to achieve high aspirations. While critics usually soften this interpretation with generalizations about universal human folly and his mystical vision on waking, the understanding of Bottom’s metamorphosis as embodying his essential bestiality descends directly from early modern ideology. As Boehrer has explained this ideology, authentic humanity must be constantly policed by the exertion of rational control over a self vulnerable to the physical appetites shared by animals and others, such as the lower sorts, who are imagined as animal–human hybrids (2002: 20–37, 44). Intrinsic to these texts, and perhaps to the academic institutions through which they circulate, is the valorization of the intellect over the passions, the mind over the body, the ethereal over the flesh. This learned perspective on the play is not exactly wrong. As Bevington notes, Bottom does lack aspirations as he lies in Titania’s arms. Sending Cobweb after a honeybag as he employs both Peaseblossom and Mustardseed to scratch his hairy face (4.1.4–25), Bottom does reveal the “solid nature of his fleshly being.” However, this model is not quite sufficient, either. If his ass’s head signifies a loss of rationality for the pleasures of the flesh, then Bottom remains a markedly cool-headed recipient of Titania’s attentions, even expressing his desire to leave: “But if I had wit enough to get out of this wood, I have enough to serve mine own turn” (3.1.142–4). It is Bottom, more than any other character, who retains his common sense as he refuses Titania’s praise of his wisdom and beauty (“Not so, neither” (3.1.143)) and even comments wisely on the disjunction of reason and love (“To say the truth, reason and love keep little company nowadays” (3.1.137–8)). Bottom is no more overcome by passion than Lucius, whose transformation punishes his curiosity rather than his sensuality. In this sense, modern critics are performing readings remarkably similar to Adlington’s against-the-grain interpretation of the Golden Ass. There is another way to represent Bottom besides a self-indulgent lover of sensual pleasure. The elements that do not conform to a classical interpretation of metamorphosis follow easily from a competing hermeneutic responsive to the narrative desires of lower status groups, where folk narratives also included metamorphoses of humans to animals. Because many oral tales are no longer accessible to modern readers, and perhaps because they bear less cultural capital than classical myth, the social dynamics they express through animal transformations are seldom discussed in terms of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. When perceived as the fabulous stuff of fairy-tales, Bottom’s metamorphosis takes on a new and perhaps equally viable meaning shaped by a different set of cultural problems. In folk narratives, speaking animals almost always tell the truth. In particular, Marina Warner describes how an early tradition interpreted the biblical tale of the wise donkey who spoke to Balaam as defending the “right of the ignorant to knowledge” (1994: 142). Perceived through subsequent folklore endowing donkeys with wisdom, Bottom’s transformation legitimated an innate wisdom voiced by the non-elite rather than a loss of rationality (Warner 1994: 136, 142). It is this very grounded understanding that is, paradoxically, respons-

A Midsummer Night’s Dream 103 ible for his modest denial of wisdom as well as beauty, and for his discerning insights into the disjunction between reason and love. Rather than a fall from rationality, folk narratives often used metamorphoses to reflect an anxiety more central to the lived experience of peasants in the destructive abuses of power by evil forces beyond their control. In folk-tales, most victims of metamorphosis in no way deserved their misfortune (Thompson 1956–8: 2.13–26). Rather than wallowers in any passionate excess, they were the innocent pawns of a cruel conjurer or witch. This is the model of metamorphosis emerging from Peele’s Old Wives Tale, discussed in Chapter 3, in which the evil magician Sacrapant changes a man into a bear by night in order to steal his beautiful wife. In this folk-tale as in others, the powerless and the good triumph over the magician; and by the end of the play, the husband is freed from the spell by characters who put an end to Sacrapant’s power. From the perspective of folk narratives, Bottom’s metamorphosis is not deserved, nor does it reveal anything particular about his fleshly self. Instead, Bottom’s ass’s head, as well as Titania’s love for him despite or because of it, proceeds from the evil magic practiced by Oberon and his too-willing servant Puck. Oberon’s magic, like Sacrapant’s, is motivated by his desire to steal someone he desires, in this case Titania’s changeling child, and through this theft to regain power over Titania herself. For his harmonious reunion with Titania, Oberon must compel her to see differently, to despise the artisan Bottom and to prefer his aristocratic self. From this perspective, Oberon’s lifting of his spell does not represent a release but a continuation of a larger enchantment through which patriarchy legitimates its power (see Freedman 1991: 180). A folk interpretation does not altogether conform to the details of the play as staged any more than the learned perspective described above. Oberon is a more sympathetic character than the scheming, evil magician of fairy-tales. If Titania’s reunion with him represents an enchantment, its power derives less from Oberon than from the patriarchal imperatives impelling comedies towards happy, heterosexual unions. While neither classical nor folk understandings of Bottom’s metamorphosis correspond entirely to all the details of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, they both provide interpretations that are viable in their own terms. The difference between them lies not only in the audience members’s familiarity with oral or written sources, but also in their opinion of Bottom. Perceiving Bottom as a bumbling artisan of limited intellectual capacity fosters an interpretation of his metamorphosis as the sign of his innate animality and in the process to affirm, perhaps with some underlying nervousness, one’s own intellectual and/or moral superiority. To deny the implications of his animality, or to laughingly identify with them, is to modify or dispute the classical discourse of the self underlying a prominent elite mode of distinction. Perceiving Bottom as the innocent victim of an evil magician fosters a sympathetic identification elicited by fairy-tale protagonists in the clutches of larger powers. A primary subject of A Midsummer Night’s Dream lies in its own operations upon its audiences, and in its own constructions of spectatorship (Levine 1996; Callaghan 2000). For those members of the audience who neither entirely identify with

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Bottom nor entirely despise him, the play offers an opportunity to experience their own conflicted social allegiances or, in the terms set up by this play, to explore their own modes of hybridity. Interpretations of the fairies also offer competing modes of spectatorship that implicate and potentially confuse social identifications. As argued in Chapter 2, fairy allusions served as what James C. Scott has called a weapon of the weak. Through asserting the right to not-say the existence of illegitimacy, premarital sex, rape, and domestic bribery, fairy allusions contested the valuations of dominant social formations by creating a “climate of opinion” legitimating resistance (Scott 1989: 22–3). What is at stake in this struggle between rich and poor is more than land and money; this is a “struggle over the appropriation of symbols” in a “continuous effort to give partisan meaning to local history” (Scott 1985: xvii). Rendering the edges of this particular weapon of the weak very dull indeed, the fairies produced in A Midsummer Night’s Dream would at first seem to constitute a definitive defeat for the lower sort. Purkiss’s representation of Shakespeare’s fairies as “malaria mosquitoes” sums up a long tradition of scholarship noting serious discrepancies between the fairies of folklore and of Shakespeare (2000a: 181; see also Latham 1930: 136; Briggs 1959: 45–6; 1967: 3). In this sense, A Midsummer Night’s Dream conforms to the hybrid desires of the dominant groups comprising its primary audiences. On the one hand, the play’s fairies appeal to their longing for escape from the demands of social distinction by enabling their vicarious participation in the experience of the low. On the other hand, the fairies would seem to expurgate that low of any unpleasant or coarse social meanings as play constructs a popular culture that poses no significant threat to established social institutions. Graceful and well meaning even to mortals of elite social groups, these fairies are politically contained and aesthetically refined. Directing her fairies to “fan the moonbeams from his sleeping eyes” (3.1.47), Titania expresses her lust for Bottom in a polished aesthetic that legitimates rather than blurs social hierarchies. Until the final scene, when their decorous dances bless the bridebeds of aristocratic marriages, fairies are neatly confined to their own forest world, to work their power only over Athenians who choose to travel there. The initially illicit unions of the lovers who flee to their forest are eventually legitimated by marriages in Athens and, given contemporary uses of fairy allusions, the lack of either willing or forced sexual congress between the aristocratic couples conforms to a moral code more indigenous to Athens, and to the elite and bourgeois of London, than to a fairy forest. Even within the forest, patriarchy is restored as Oberon overcomes Titania’s brief rebellion against his wishes, and she complies with his request to “rock the ground” (5.1.85) with him in a dance (Howard 1998: 75). In this way the binaries set in motion in the disjunctive settings of this play perform a conservative function in the production of a popular culture, at once the by-product of and a contributing factor to the separation preparatory to withdrawal. Beneath this aesthetic surface, however, lurk hints of more sinister fairies that disrupt, however briefly, the cultural amnesia staged in the benevolent fairies of

A Midsummer Night’s Dream 105 Shakespeare’s play. Titania reminds Oberon of the catastrophic natural consequences of their debate (2.1.81–117). Puck’s eerie portrayal of the fairies’ night-time visit to the ducal palace unsettles Oberon’s claim to be “spirits of a different sort” (3.2.388). As Puck and the fairies move towards the palace, owls’s screeching reminds mortals of shrouds even as “the graves, all gaping wide,/Every one lets forth his sprite” (5.2.11–12). If these evoke the uses of fairies to allude to the dead (Purkiss 2000a: 97–104), a demonic aspect taints the fairies “that do run by the triple Hecate’s team” to shun the “presence of the sun” and to “frolic” in the darkness (5.1.379–81). Oberon’s own reference to Hades undercuts his claim to difference from Hecate’s fairies in his order to Puck, “the starry welkin cover thou anon/With drooping fog as black as Acheron” (3.3.356–7). Similarly, the dark experiences traditionally mystified by fairy allusions also surface in the play’s sexual violence and perversity. Demetrius’s threats to harm Helena bring to mind sinister acts of sexual assault performed in fairy-haunted forests, although no one is actually raped or forced to perform a sexual act. Titania exerts near-dominatrix authority over her artisan male, as she directs her fairies to “tie up my lovers’ tongue, bring him silently” (3.1.201). Stressing the perversity of Titania’s degraded appetites, arguments by Levine (1996), Callaghan (2000), and Boehrer (2002) portray a popular culture produced through sexual trespass in a form of rape that implicates the act of theater itself. Yet however valid these insights, the primary response of most audiences is delight rather than horror. Replicating the function of their low status versions to not-say, Shakespeare’s fairies bring to awareness their darker aspects which their unusual goodwill towards mortals goes to such lengths to deny. Most complicated by brief reminders of his coarse folk original is the courtly and Cupid-like Puck. In its few textual traces of the crude and hairy Robin Goodfellow, the play suppresses but refuses to obliterate entirely its subversive low source (Weimann 1978: 192–6; Harris 1998; Wall 2002: 103–9). Explicitly identified as Robin Goodfellow (2.1.33), Shakespeare’s elegant Puck civilizes contemporary versions of that rough creature who laughed a hearty “ho ho ho” at pranks that were not always so funny to his victims. Published after Shakespeare’s play and no doubt as a consequence of its popularity, the prose pamphlet Robin Good-Fellow, His Mad Prankes and Merry Jests (1628) recounts the traditional spinning of hemp that locates Goodfellow squarely in the domestic sphere (Wall 2002: 109). He also performs other pranks, however, in which he rights wrongs in society at large. Robin Goodfellow tricks an old lecher into permitting a young maid to marry her beloved; he saves a young maiden from rape by transforming himself into a horse to carry away a “leacherous gallant”; he becomes a night-raven and then a ghost to terrify a wicked usurer into liberality to his neighbors; he reforms a tapster who cheats his customers by using small drinking pots. With the gusto of a hungry laborer, he transforms himself into a bear to have a large posset all to himself. In these episodes, the actions of Robin Goodfellow reflect a strategy for changing what James C. Scott has called the “climate of opinion” (1989: 22–3) to provide some

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redress for less powerful groups, whose needs and complaints did not dependably find remedy through early modern institutions, such as the lawcourts.10 Robin Goodfellow’s portrayal in this prose pamphlet Robin Good-Fellow, His Mad Prankes and Merry Jests (1628) as a rough and hairy satyr-figure with cloven hoofs, erect penis, horns and animal ears dancing in the midst of a circle could not be more at odds with the Puck of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Rather than reforming tapsters and old lechers, Shakespeare’s Puck aligns himself with monarchal values in his feudal obedience to Oberon, in the courtly self-deprecation of his Epilogue, and especially in the snobbishness of his initial response to the artisans: “What hempen homespuns have we swaggering here/So near the cradle of the Fairy Queen?” (3.1.72–3). Yet the very phrasing of Puck’s scorn for the artisans’ clothing of hemp elicits the memory of his own homely origin. His description of these “hempen homespuns” echoes Robin Goodfellow’s refrain “hempen hampen” uttered, according to Reginald Scot, as he labored vigorously at night with hemp ([1584] 1964: 88; Robin 1628: C2v; Davidson 1957; 72; Duffy 1987: 149). Expressing Puck’s contemptuous alienation and also, in spite of himself, his underlying identification, this phrase replicates the conflicting impulses of those early moderns who experienced their own competing alliances to dual cultures as hybridity. The cultural binaries evoked by the settings in classical Athens and in an early modern forest elicit these conflicting alliances most directly. A significant cultural labor performed through the fairies in A Midsummer Night’s Dream lies in Shakespeare’s narrative act itself, in the social implications of the play’s staging of these figures produced in a non-elite oral domain. In a sense, the play legitimates this domain through staging its fairies and Robin Goodfellow as counterparts fully equal to figures drawn from the classical myths of Athens. The influence of the fairies over the lovers and Bottom is as great or greater than the influence of the classical figures. The fairies’ roles are as or more substantial in dramatic impact as in numbers of lines; moreover, the actors performing the roles of Theseus and Hippolyta may well have also performed the roles of Oberon and Titania. Shakespeare’s decision to draw the name of his fairy queen Titania from Ovid’s Metamorphoses blurs the line between low and learned spheres to suggest an equivalence in their social value rendered explicit in Theseus’s contemptuous dismissal of them both as “antique fables” and “fairy toys” (5.1.2–3). With their elegant language, their willing servants, their courtly manners even in domestic quarrels, Shakespeare’s fairies have become the social equals of any aristocrats. Even Robin Goodfellow, in his persona as Puck, would not be out of place as an Elizabethan courtier. The effect of this hybridization of fairy narratives is at least potentially profound. As Stallybrass and White point out, new combinations in a semiotic system generate the possibility “of shifting the very terms of the system itself, by erasing and interrogating the relationships which constitute it” (1986: 58). As naming a fairy queen Titania dignifies low tales with classical precedent; so it also interrogates the social distinction conferred by the cultural capital of Ovid’s narratives. If Theseus sees no significant difference dividing “antique fables” of the classical

A Midsummer Night’s Dream 107 world from the “fairy toys” of English oral culture, what then is the rationale by which a social system privileges early modern males for an education in classical literature? This radical implication implicit in the binary of the play’s settings does not, however, prevail. The play presents the forest as a complementary equivalent to Athens only on the condition that the chaotic experience there be (nearly) forgotten. As the lovers leave the forest, Demetrius asserts, “These things seem small and indistinguishable,/Like far-off mountains turned into clouds” (4.1.181–2). Hermia describes her vision as unfocused: “Methinks I see these things with parted eye,/When everything seems double” (4.1.183–4). This process of forgetting is a central operation of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which forgetting proceeds not from lapses of memory over time, but from transformed perceptions. When Puck rubs fairy ointment on his eyelids, Lysander forgets his love for Hermia because he now sees her differently. Oberon squeezes herbs on Titania’s eyes twice to induce her eyes to be first “enthralled” by Bottom’s shape (3.1.114) and then to “loathe his visage” (4.1.73). In their preparations for their marriage of state, both Theseus and Hippolyta seem to have forgotten their erotic wanderings in the forest, led by Titania and Oberon respectively. Only Bottom half-remembers his experience as a “rare vision” (4.1.205). The all-powerful role of perception, staged in this play by the sightaltering potency of the love juice, replicates the effects of this play upon the audience as well. As elegant fairies enact a dark sexuality, as Puck’s scorn for “hempen homespuns” brings to mind Robin Goodfellow’s refrain “hempen hampen,” the audience is (almost) reminded of other and more dangerous versions of these figures associated with lower status groups. These passages invite the audience to (almost) remember those older Robin Goodfellows and those more malicious fairies that the play seems to (almost) forget. More than a complete erasure, Shakespeare’s play evokes the low derivations of its fairies and its Robin Goodfellow, only, to reiterate the words of Oberon, to cover them “with drooping fog as black as Acheron” (3.3.356–7), familiar to classically educated audience members as a river in the domain of the dead. As Barbara Freedman has noted in another context, in A Midsummer Night’s Dream repression itself becomes a fantasy; nothing is truly forgotten (1991: 191). While the lovers (almost) forget their wanderings in the forest, the audience does not. Just as the popular culture produced through A Midsummer Night’s Dream requires the forgetting of its dangerous fairies and its coarse Robin Goodfellow, other cues bring them to awareness, even if only subliminally, as a persistent (half) memory that continues to trouble thought, like the insistent traces of a dream.

Old wives’ tales The dominating maternity of the fairy queen brings into Shakespeare’s play quite another form of engagement with lower status groups, in a childhood led among women of the lower sort. A Midsummer Night’s Dream evokes the memory of this much more formative, and therefore much more threatening,

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relief from society’s demands. Chapter 3 discussed the dilemma confronted by schoolboys as they resolved, or failed to resolve, the implicit competition between the pleasures of a childhood led among women and the grueling demands of an often ascetic educative experience. As they attempted to conform to the exacting rules of elite femininity, young women also experienced this cultural imperative to transcend or more precisely to forget their subjection to lowly female domestics in childhood.11 This (near) forgetting of what was once valued in childhood is described by the waking Demetrius: My love to Hermia, Melted as the snow, seems to me now As the remembrance of an idle gaud Which in my childhood I did dote upon. (4.1.160–2) Like the transformation of the lovers’ perceptions in the forest, such a (near) forgetting results not from a lapse of memory, but from a revaluation from the perspective of an elite ideology. A Midsummer Night’s Dream stages elite ambivalence about this childhood experience in the conflicted responses evoked by a bumbling player who is yet the only mortal to see the fairy queen. As critics have ably demonstrated, Bottom literally takes the place of the changeling child in Titania’s affections; and his sensual repose in the arms of the fairy queen evokes not only a lover’s tryst, but also a regression to a female domination known in childhood (Dunn 1988; Paster 1993: 128; 140–1; Skura 1993: 106–10; Montrose 1996: 170). The portrayal of Bottom, simultaneously celebrated and degraded within the play’s own large fairy-tale, both encodes and resists a cultural paranoia about the perils of this regression in ways that reflect upon a cultural hybridity inherent in the experience of many early moderns who were raised by caregivers. It also locates within this experience formative narrative acts, in ballads of fairy queens and in the tale told by the “wisest aunt,” that implicate class hybridity as a possible genesis for the playwright’s art. In this interpretation of the play’s production of popular culture in terms of the dominance and also the allure of the caregivers and their old wives’ tales, I support and extend the work of a number of critics who fully articulate the play’s production of a popular culture as the domain of women caregivers from childhood.12 In all of these interpretations of Bottom’s encounter with the fairy queen, critics make visible a social and developmental subtext that the play presents in distorted form. Rather than directly evoking an earlier experience, A Midsummer Night’s Dream produces a popular culture through the perceptions of one who lives there no longer. Through the substitution of Bottom for the changeling in Titania’s arms, the forest episodes stage the absurd yet compelling fantasy of a return to a female-dominated space of magic and beauty. Bottom’s return violates a principle that was simultaneously social and maturational, for it was in the nature of this experience that it was transitory, as children grew up to assume their adult responsibilities. The play presents an allusion to this childhood experience filtered

A Midsummer Night’s Dream 109 through a full panoply of interpretive apparatus that accounts for Bottom’s brutish hybridity as reflecting his regression to childhood. According to humanist discourse, children were not considered entirely human until they reached the age of reason at 7 years (Aristotle 1941: 635, 967; Marcus 1978a: 10). As the creatures of their appetites and passions, small children were whipped and “cockered” like pets. As Lawrence Stone describes it, “immature children were regarded as mere animals lacking the capacity to reason, and therefore to be broken in just as one would break in a puppy, a foal, or a hawk” (1979: 126). The presence of an internal threat posed by the self of childhood provides further insight into the shame Montrose has found surrounding the Bottom–Titania episodes, and the play’s “collective masculine fantasies of powerful and dangerous motherhood” underlying Titania’s fierce possessiveness of the changeling child (1996: 137; see also 1983). As discussed in Chapter 3, these fantasies become all the more debasing when the maternal figure is not a biological mother but a low surrogate. From this perspective, the scenes between Bottom and Titania embody if not a cultural nightmare, at least a humanist one. In a perverse pieta, the dominating and seductive Titania, queen of fairies, cradles in her lap a man whose ass’s head suggests his literal reversion to a bestial nature first known in childhood. Lacking self-discipline, delighting in sensual pleasures, Bottom has abandoned any pretense of self-mastery; utterly passive, he is controlled, even in his bodily functions, by a woman. According to Paster, the play’s representation of her dotage on this monster-manchild “turns into a culturally empowered misrecognition of and distantiation from the mother–child dyad . . . imposing a kind of memorial shame on it” (1993: 141). But as Paster notes, neither Bottom nor Titania themselves express any sense of shame in these scenes. The remarkable theatrical appeal of these episodes, however strange and even absurd, suggests that A Midsummer Night’s Dream does not stage this relationship solely from a humanist perspective. Instead, the play invests this world of women and their gossips with the enchantment of performed poetry.13 Titania lovingly remembers her pregnant votaress’s imitation of a merchant ship in full sail in a passage that is arguably the most poetic of Shakespeare’s remarkably poetic play: And in the spiced Indian air by night Full often hath she gossiped by my side And sat with me on Neptune’s yellow sands, Marking th’embarked traders on the flood, When we have laughed to see the sails conceive And grow big-bellied with the wanton wind; Which she, with pretty and with swimming gait, Following – her womb then rich with my young squire – Would imitate. (2.1.124–32) Even though the votaress dies, even though Titania yields her child to Oberon, even though Titania comes to “loathe” Bottom’s “visage” (4.1.78), even though

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Titania finally accedes to the will of her husband, the rich and magical scenes in which Titania reigns supreme in her forest, like the scenes of early childhood, retain a haunting power which no later “memorial shame” can entirely undo. The womanly fecundity of Titania’s scenes embeds within A Midsummer Night’s Dream the female orientation of the very mode of production that created Titania as a fairy queen. Passed among women and to children, stories of fairy queens and other magical figures served as a synecdoche for women’s authority over children in this society; and larger cultural narratives concerning female domination surround and shape the fairy episodes of this play. In her ability to simultaneously dominate and enchant, this fairy queen merges with the more homely narrator of her tales and ballads. Or, to a child, how homely was this narrator? To a young child not yet aware of the social distinctions that would later debase a young caregiver, she may well have seemed enchantingly beautiful, with the bearing and the power of a queen. It was perhaps only later, as children grew up to see their caregivers through different eyes, that they came to resemble Thomas Nashe’s “mumping beldams” discussed in Chapter 3. Mirroring the tendency of children to blur boundaries between real people and fictional characters, the magically powerful fairy queen of women’s stories merges with the magically powerful women who tell those stories. Under the spell of a narrative remembered from childhood, Bottom himself becomes a participant rather than only an audience for this fairy-tale. This blurring of lines may well replicate the capacity of children to become utterly absorbed in a story, to the extent of temporarily losing track of the distinction between fantasy and reality. If Ruth Bottigheimer’s assessment is as accurate for early moderns as for the children she describes, such blurring may have occurred especially for fairytales: “The fairy tale is the first poetic form with which people come into contact in their lives. For most of us, it is one of the deepest and most enduring childhood impressions” (1986: 1). Children, as well as very receptive adults, may be in this sense kidnapped, as was Bottom, by a narrative delight not entirely under their control. However pleasurable his sojourn in the woods, Bottom is kept without his consent by Titania, who even orders his desires: “Out of this wood do not desire to go” (3.1.l46). Captivities such as Bottom’s are the stuff of a number of stories circulating as ballads in the early modern period. All featuring mortals captivated by fairy queens, ballads such as “Tam Lin,” “Thomas Rhymer,” and “Thomas of Erceldoun” no doubt influenced the Titania–Bottom plot (Bullough 1957: 1.372). In “Thomas Rhymer,” the queen of Elfland kidnaps True Thomas to keep him as her lover for seven years. If he is ever to return to his “ain countrie” he must not speak in that time, and his enforced silence is perhaps reflected in Titania’s order to “tie up my lover’s tongue; bring him silently” (3.1.196; Child [1882] 1956: 1.324). The synthesis of Titania’s maternal and sexual desires parallel those of another ballad fairy queen, who kidnaps Tam Lin as a child of three, to rear him until he becomes old enough to satisfy her sexual desires (Child 1882: 1.350). More important than possible plot influence, however, is the potential for class hybridity

A Midsummer Night’s Dream 111 induced in members of the “great” culture within the adult experience of delight in the fairy ballads of childhood. It is this balance, this unstable mixture of anxiety and delight, which represents not only an effect but a primary subject of the Bottom–Titania episodes. Rather than growing from child to man, Bottom regresses from man to beast-child. This regression is an effect of his rapt listening, as well as an event at the center of this great fairytale; and this regression remained a dangerously pleasurable possibility for any early moderns who heard these ballads in childhood, no matter how well educated in classical literature they would later become. A Midsummer Night’s Dream blurs the line between itself and its own fairy-tales, as the compellingly poetic yet absurd beauty of the Bottom–Titania episodes offers these same regressive narrative pleasures to its audience. From a “great” culture perspective, when Bottom awakes from his regressive dream, he should feel mortified, as is the waking Titania as she exclaims to Oberon, “Methought I was enamored of an ass” (4.1.76). Instead, Bottom responds with a wonder so profound that he seeks scripture, however mangled, to express his sense of the sacredness of the experience. This wonder moves him to create art; he will invent a ballad titled “Bottom’s dream” because “it hath no bottom” (4.1.213). Does Bottom’s choice of ballad as art-form suggest a degrading continuation of a childhood bond with women? Or does the focus of the passage fix instead upon his sense of awe, as alluding to the feeling of mystery inherent within true art? As an act of creation and moreover as an oral form performed before others, Bottom’s art exists in some relationship, whether identificatory or parodic, to Shakespeare’s. Or, more likely, the distinction between identification and parody becomes hopelessly blurred in the confusing conflicts between the cultural meanings and the memories of childhood. From these cues, various critics have speculated concerning the implications of Bottom’s experience for the genesis of art, and particularly of Shakespeare’s art. It is important in this context to note that like Shakespeare, Bottom is also an actor; and it was as an actor that he entered the forest to become the only mortal to see the fairies (Skura 1993: 107). Influenced by the work of Lacan, Skura’s psychoanalytical insights drawn from the self-reportings of actors expose a profound connection between their art and the “gaping wound of need” inflicted in childhood, returning them to what early moderns would consider an appetitive self, “to want and want and want again” (15). As Skura notes, actors are “in touch with emotions, attitudes, and fluidity of childhood”; their “narcissistic fulfillment then is based on physical sensation, the oceanic bliss of maternal nurturance and holding – milk to drink, a cradling embrace, and a reassuring gaze” (18). Julia Kristeva provides a reason to generalize this experience to the artistic process as, in the arms of Titania, Bottom magically encounters the preoedipal mother, whose pulsations and body rhythms create the chora of the semiotic essential for the later creation of art (1984). Emetic material in Paster’s reading suggests Bottom as the artist’s abject, that defiled and bestialized aspect excluded from the clean and proper self as described in Kristeva’s Powers of Horror. Kristeva links the abject to writing:

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Part II William Shakespeare Writing causes the subject who ventures in it to confront an archaic authority, on the nether side of the proper Name. The maternal connotations of this authority never escaped great writers. (1982: 75)

The modern project of tracing connections between childhood experience and adult subjectivity would not, in itself, have seemed so unfamiliar to early moderns. Such connections were only too present within a “great” culture in which educated males were threatened (or perhaps tempted) by the fear (or perhaps the illicit pleasure) of lapsing into a childhood state of androgyny, bestiality, and a humiliating dependence on women. Yet, even in the staging of the potentially shameful degradations undergone by Bottom and Titania, these episodes assume a magical presence that dignifies this revisiting of childhood experience as profoundly formative for the creation of art as an adult. It is in the evident reverence for these experiences, extending even to the emetic, that A Midsummer Night’s Dream shares common ground with modern psychoanalytic theory, to resist a contemporary sense of shame attached to the continuing influence of childhood on adults, including adult authors influenced by the narratives of childhood. The relationship between Bottom’s ridiculous, mystical experience and its expression through Shakespeare’s art is further complicated by Bottom’s location in class. As an artisan, Bottom’s status is not far removed from that of amateur actors, or even professional actors such as Richard Burbage, who was also a skilled carpenter. Yet Bottom had not received the education in Latin offered, for example, to Shakespeare in Stratford; and Bottom expressed no pretensions to the form of subjectivity shared by literate adults through their common education in the classics. For Bottom, as a member of the lower sort, ballads did not represent a degraded art-form. The choice of a lower sort as the beloved of the fairy queen provides a deniability factor within A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the representation of the genesis of its own art in relationship to the women of childhood. Just as Puck’s very contempt for the mechanical’s “hempen” garments brings to mind the labor in hemp performed by his own original Robin Goodfellow, the extent to which Bottom’s intent to write a ballad of his dream simultaneously does and does not reflect upon Shakespeare’s own creative process demonstrates the problem of origins haunting Shakespeare’s play. Whether the relationship of Bottom’s art to Shakespeare’s is identificatory or parodic, this subject cannot be “unsaid.” The production of a popular culture of childhood that must be (nearly) forgotten yet remains persistently remembered appears in Dream’s own primal scene of narration, the “old wives’ tale” briefly described by Puck: The wisest aunt, telling the saddest tale, Sometime for three-foot stool mistaketh me; Then slip I from her bum, down topples she, And “tailor” cries, and falls into a cough;

A Midsummer Night’s Dream 113 And then the whole quire hold their hips and loff, And waxen in their mirth, and neeze, and swear A merrier hour was never wasted there. (2.1.51–7) This passage makes visible both the attraction and the threat of this scene of narration. The sense of full embodiedness within this fellowship, as in these few lines the members of this company hold their hips, laugh, and sneeze, contributes a key meaning to the wise aunt’s narrative act. Unlike the upper-class characters of Athens, the members of this company are represented in terms of their bodies, and particularly of their lower bodies. This aunt has a prominent “bum” on which she falls; and her audience have hips that they hold as they heartily laugh; they actually sneeze in the extremity of their laughter. The aunt’s cry of “tailor” may well cover a fart (Paster 1993: 126); her fit of coughing functions in the same way. Yet far from degrading the company, their bums, coughs, sneezes, and farts denote a cheerful acceptance of their bodily functions that plays an essential role in the communal spirit of this gathering: their readiness to laugh, their enormous capacity for pleasure. In the happy amusement thus provoked lies an intimacy, a sense of connectedness with each other and with their own bodies, increasingly rare in the polite societies of the self-consciously literate. The communal merriment of the company was not, however, the same form of merriment as Puck’s. As in his previous two pranks played on a “fat and bean-fed horse” and a gossip with a “withered dewlap,” the evident intent of his disguise as a stool, only to slip from the old woman’s bum, was to stage a scene of humiliation. Puck’s description of their laughter masks the meanness of his childish prank, which is similar to holding a chair for someone and then moving it back so she falls. As Puck narrates his jests to the fairy, his humor is not communal but egocentric. The function of his unmotivated malice lies in its effect: he interrupts her story. He turns her story to a fart. Even though Puck refers both to the narrator and to her narration with admiration and even respect as the “wisest aunt, telling the saddest tale,” he changes the subject to direct attention to his own (invisible) actions. He creates himself as agent rather than recipient in this scene. But Puck is not the agent. Puck himself and all the other fairies are in fact the creation of this wisest aunt’s saddest tale, or others like it. As he makes this old aunt fall down on her bum in the middle of her story, Puck’s malice may be read as a refusal of his dependence, as a denial of his own point of origin. The implications of this denial, as well as its ultimate futility, can be easily interpreted as self-referential to the narrative act underlying A Midsummer Night’s Dream itself. An even more prominent refusal of origin is spoken by Theseus in his often quoted pronouncement, “I never may believe,/These antic fables nor these fairy toys” (5.1.3). As a figure with no basis in history, his denial of fictions is an erasure of himself as the creature of fiction. His presence on stage, where he voices his skepticism, is in fact a testament to the power of classical “antic

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fables”; and the audience has just seen the “truth,” in terms of the play, of English “fairy toys.” Theseus’s rational disbelief rings hollow not only for Theseus as a fictional character; his rejection at least of “fairy toys” conforms to the expectation placed upon early modern males entering the dominant culture. The patriarchal censorship of the shaping power of the bond with maternal figures, expressed through fairy-tales, is also a self-erasure. It was not only Indian boys who left a feminine bower of sensual delights for a masculine world. Denials by adult males – by humanists, by Puritan ministers, by statesmen – are rendered as patently false as Theseus’s denial. Like Theseus, early modern males were equally the creatures of “fairy-tales.” Their denial of early female influence in their ongoing withdrawal from popular culture lies at the core of the ideological work accomplished or attempted in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The discursive production of the play’s mingle-mangle of texts from very different domains, in the nursery and in the schoolroom, affirms the unity of the psychic and the social process (Stallybrass and White 1986: 191, 196–7). What a psychoanalytic critic might represent in terms of an Oedipal anxiety of maternal influence becomes in Shakespeare’s play a social exclusion not only of mothers but also of women caregivers and the low social groups from which they came. Internalized under the sign of negation, this low domain became constitutive of the identity of the elite male, whose disgust for “old wives’ fairy rubbish” bears the mark of desire. While A Midsummer Night’s Dream opens a space for intervention in the ideology of the elite culture, it also functions as a complex work of theater that simultaneously stages various perspectives. As stated above, Bottom’s entry into the popular culture of this play provides a deniability factor for any associations of the genesis of art with a childhood experience. An audience member may freely decline to perceive a ballad written by a low artisan as implicating Shakespeare’s art. While some audiences may sympathize with the artisans, however inept their performance may seem, a space is opened up in the ducal palace, as well, to share the contempt expressed by the mocking courtiers. Like the aristocratic Puck or the cooly rational Theseus, audience members may refuse to acknowledge, or they may remain honestly unaware, of any personal connection with low-status cultures encountered in childhood. Rather than encoding a single meaning, A Midsummer Night’s Dream reaches out to perform a variety of operations on audience members according to their own ideologies and personal experiences. In particular, the play serves as a vehicle through which members of the elite could define, or redefine, their own positions in the inherent conflict, internalized within their own subjectivities, between the low and elite cultures. Similar to the use of fairy allusions, one primary strategy fostering this flexibility lay in the play’s presentation of contradictory interpretive options. The simultaneous presence of these options is most explicit, and most ideologically grounded, in the meanings circulated by Bottom’s ass’s head.

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The heads of asses, fools, and hobby-horses In 1631, John Williams, Bishop of Lincoln, was charged “of a greate misdemenor” of entertaining his guests with “a playe or tragidie” on a sabbath evening. While some guests and performers were also charged, a Mr. Wilson was singled out for special punishment, as “a speciall plotter and contriver of this business” and also because he “did in such a brutishe manner acte the same with an asses head.” He was put in the stocks, “attired with this ass head, and a bottle of hay set before him” with an attached sign: Good people I have played the beast And brought ill things to pass: I was a man, but thus have made Myself a silly Ass. (Chambers 1930: 349–51; Holland 1994: 79) While this Mr. Wilson, “a cunning Musition,” was credited with contriving “this curious Comodie” (Chambers 1930: 351), scenes from Shakespeare’s play may well have contributed a script or at least a model for this entertainment. In addition to a marginal notation in a later hand that this was “The playe, M. Nights Dr,” the “bottle of hay” set before Wilson in the stocks suggests a reference to Bottom’s most desired foodstuff (349–50). Since the records do not detail exactly how this actor performed “in such a brutish manner,” it is difficult to ascertain his exact offense. However, given the outrageous conduct attributed to hobby-horses, it seems likely that this unfortunate actor was following some early modern understanding of how ass-men were to behave. Shifting cultural conditions may well have rendered what had once been acceptable behavior for the actor with the ass’s head as suitable only for a “silly Ass.” What had been anticipated, according to a letter from one John Spencer to an unnamed female present at the event, was “excellent musicke, such rare conceits, . . . such curious actors.” What was found, however, was only “vanity and vexation of spiritt” (349). While not strictly speaking illegal, the possibility for offense to elite tastes was inherent in earlier performances of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or perhaps in any play featuring a man wearing an ass’s head; for the presence of this ass’s head introduces a contest of aesthetic tastes as a primary issue in the play. Since the metamorphoses in both myth and fairy-tale usually transform whole bodies, it is necessary to turn from these narratives to two related figures on the cultural landscape: the fool who sometimes wore ass’s ears, and a hobbyhorse sporting the head of an ass instead of a horse.14 As performers themselves, fools and hobby-horses make visible some of the cultural meanings circulating not only around Bottom, but also around William Kemp, the actor who played Bottom. Bottom, and Kemp as well, signified a form of aesthetic taste designated as “low” on the one hand, even as they challenged such hierarchical categories of taste on the other. As David Wiles has eloquently argued, Kemp

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himself became a sign of plebeianness, capable of manipulation to “generate new descriptions of society, new meanings” (1987: 178). A full understanding of the reception of Kemp-as-sign must take into account the already-present significances of the low as internalized within the subjectivities of the members of the audience, elite and non-elite alike. These internalized conditions for the reception of Kemp represented a formative context for Shakespeare’s theater, even beyond A Midsummer Night’s Dream. As various critics have noted, Kemp’s improvisational form of clowning inevitably created tension within an increasingly professional theater expecting actors to follow authors’ scripts (Wiles 1987: 35, 43; Helgerson 1992: 223); and Kemp’s departure around 1599 signaled an important change for the Lord Chamberlain’s Men.15 As Shakespeare’s company became increasingly professionalized, its apparent abjection of its own amateur roots paralleled in some sense the very personal experience of many elite males. For a theater depending for its survival upon a paying audience, this parallel was more than coincidental. With the evocation especially of hobby-horses through the ass’s head worn by Kemp, the conflicted valuations of its own homely roots, at once ridiculous and appealing, became a primary issue of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Whether or not they were actually worn by professional fools in Shakespeare’s day, a humanist tradition links ass’s ears to issues of aesthetic taste.16 A drawing by Hans Holbein in the margin of Erasmus’s Praise of Folly depicts Folly, as well as one of her auditors, as wearing a fool’s cap with two long peaks, designed to cover ass’s ears (Hudson 1941: xxii). Hudson’s insight draws from the text’s own interpretation of ass’s ears through classical myth: according to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Apollo inflicted ass’s ears on King Midas for preferring the rustic music of Pan’s reeds to the sublime music of Apollo’s lyre. While Erasmus later elevates folly to embrace the highest Christian values, in this early section of the Praise of Folly, the interpretation of ass’s ears through the myth of King Midas represents a significant humanist reception of low aesthetic taste, as in a preference for Pan-like songs, as a negative form of folly. In Erasmus’s text, aesthetic preference makes visible an inner, essential form of foolish, non-elite self posing a contradiction, as it did for King Midas, with an elite social position. As Folly asks for her audience’s attention or their “ears,” she specifies “not those ears, to be sure, which you carry to sermons, but those which you are accustomed to prick up for mountebanks in the marketplace, or clowns and jesters, the ears which, in the old days, our friend Midas inclined to the god Pan” (Hudson 1941: 7). In its use of the King Midas myth, Praise of Folly guides its readers to sort themselves as intellectually or socially superior to those whose absurd ass’s ears expose their low aesthetic taste. It is not necessary to identify Erasmus’s Praise of Folly as a specific source to see how this classificatory function denigrating King Midas’s taste for the music of Pan also works through the music played in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Classification is inherent to an aesthetics legitimating social hierarchies. As Pierre Bourdieu has argued at length, “Taste classifies, and it classifies the classifier” (1984: 6), often along lines of social status. Bottom’s decided prefer-

A Midsummer Night’s Dream 117 ence for low music encourages an interpretation of Bottom’s ass’s ears as a sign of inferior taste, the musical equivalent to his appetite for “Good hay, sweet hay” (4.1.33). Abandoned by his frightened troupe, Bottom comforts himself by singing a song of an “ouzel cock so black of hue” (3.1.120); and it is his presumably off-key singing which creates the humor of Titania’s waking words, “What angel wakes me from my flowery bed?” Titania’s own folly is indicated by her pleasure in his music (“Mine ear is much enamoured by thy note” (3.1.133) as well as her admiration for his asinine shape. Bottom’s later expression of pride in his own taste in music is explicitly classed as non-elite: “I have a reasonable good ear in music. Let’s have the tongs and bones” (4.1.28–9). The Folio includes at this point a stage direction for the playing of tongs, “instruments used in rustic music . . . played like a triangle” (Bevington 1997: 169). Sweet harmony played later in the same scene at Titania’s request would have further shaped the cultural meanings of Bottom’s rustic music. What music was played in response to Titania’s call, “Music, ho! Music, such as charmeth sleep!” (4.1.82)? A simple lullaby would extend the low connotations of Bottom’s tongs and bones to include women’s songs, just as the fairy episode included women’s stories. An elegant courtly madrigal, on the other hand, would set up a selfselection process through which audience members could choose or refuse to exercise their own distinction in taste and so, like Midas, to choose or refuse to grow their own ass’s ears. This hierarchizing exercise of taste applies not only to music, but also to styles of acting. As Puck exits to place the ass’s head on Bottom, he comments in an aside, “A stranger Pyramus than e’er played here” (3.1.83). It is finally Bottom’s style of acting, not his fleshly desires, which moves Puck to give him an ass’s head.17 The other artisans are not much better. Their fear that the noble ladies of the audience might mistake Snug for an actual lion reveals “a ‘naïve’ involvement” (Bourdieu 1984: 5) with art described by Pierre Bourdieu as still characterizing non-elite groups in the twentieth century. It is not simply that the artisans lack imagination. Their lack of imagination itself signifies their nonelite status; for as discussed in Chapter 4, insufficient economic resources prevent the “detachment of the pure gaze” described by Bourdieu (1984: 5). Thus, it is not only their garments that elicit Puck’s snobbish response to the artisans as “hempen homespuns” (3.1.72). The amateur actors reveal their low social status in their naïvely literal solutions to production problems such as how to bring moonlight into a chamber and how to present a wall. Like Bottom’s solution that Snug peek through the lion’s neck and tell the ladies “plainly he is Snug the joiner” (3.1.42), their decisions to cast Moonshine and Wall as characters breaks down dramatic illusion, to focus attention on the actor as he plays the role. Thus, Bottom’s literal-mindedness signifies his low status as surely as his confusion of “odious” and “odors” suggests his unfamiliarity with a vocabulary shared by literate readers. Yet from among these artisans so obviously out of their depth, Puck singles out Bottom. Within the evolving professionalism of Shakespeare’s company, the implications of Puck’s selection cannot be entirely separated from a style of

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acting practiced by Kemp himself. Bottom’s role was designed not only to showcase Kemp’s talents, but to contain them by fashioning lines and acts that replicated what Kemp would have improvised on his own (Friedman 1992: 317). Bottom’s function as clown paralleled Kemp’s acting style: he played himself (Wiles 1987: 79). Resisting the romantic lead offered to him by Titania’s passionate admiration, Bottom – or the actor Kemp playing Bottom – stubbornly maintains a consistent sense of his own persona, winking to the audience lines such as “And yet, to say the truth, reason and love keep little company together nowadays” (3.1.138–9). This insight stands on its own as a comment on the action of the play as a whole; and it is made possible by the clown’s freedom to stand outside of his role to play himself (Wiles 1987: 99). Similarly, Bottom’s refusal of Titania’s praise of his beauty and wisdom (“Not so, neither” 3.1.143) reflects upon Kemp’s homely personal appearance and his function to remain a sign of himself, as much as upon his role as a character. Does Bottom’s ass’s head, with its ass’s ears, represent Kemp’s form of clowning as exemplifying unrefined taste, as the music of Pan rather than Apollo? Is it Kemp, as much as Bottom, who is rendered ridiculous by his ass’s head? Emerging from a literate, and specifically a humanist, culture, this classificatory function of ass’s ears provides a rationale for disdaining both the role and the actor who played it. Puck models this hierarchizing operation for the audience in his snobbish contempt for Bottom and the other “hempen homespuns” of his troupe. Just as he interrupted the wisest aunt’s saddest tale, Puck terminates a narrative act, in this case the artisan’s rehearsal of a script of Pyramus and Thisbe, to initiate a fairy plot featuring himself as an invisible agent. As with the aunt’s tale, however, Puck’s hostile act also suggests his own engagement, and perhaps even his own genesis, within it. Desiring to be an “auditor” and perhaps an “actor” to their play (3.1.68–9), he takes up the plot from the Ovidian lovers’ meeting at “Ninny’s tomb,” and in a sense rewrites the ending to deliver Dream’s own four lovers, alive and happily in love, back to Athens after their frightening sojourn in the forest. Social classification according to aesthetic taste is not the only cultural meaning possible for ass’s ears; and disdain is not the only possible reaction to Bottom. Under Oberon’s spell, Titania’s response to Bottom’s ass’s head, and especially to the ears, is delight. She crowns his “sleek smooth head” with muskroses; and she kisses his “fair large ears” as she calls him her “gentle joy” (4.1.3–4). These opposing poles of responses modeled for the audience suggest that Bottom’s ass’s head complicates, rather than simplifies, the meanings of Kemp as the sign of low aesthetic taste. Part of this complexity lies in the early modern reception of fools themselves. On the one hand, especially natural fools or idiots could provide a comfortable sense of superiority for the more ableminded around them. On the other hand, even natural fools might sometimes, perhaps like Balaam’s ass, become the unexpected purveyors of truths to those wise enough to listen; and artificial or witty fools such as Shakespeare’s Feste often demonstrated more discernment than did their social betters. To heed a fool requires a momentary relaxation of social difference at odds with hierarchi-

A Midsummer Night’s Dream 119 cal social structure. Marcia McDonald argues for such a social leveling effect of Bottom’s humor within the audience: “Bottom’s theatrical power – his power to create a laughing community out of the various individuals composing the audience – offers a challenge to the primacy of . . . power derived from social rank and its consequent privileges of interpretation” (1994: 85–6). In the theatrical context of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, this power emanated not only from the scripted role of Bottom, but also from Kemp’s inspired improvisations. Kemp’s very physical form of clowning forged a direct and egalitarian relationship with his audience through using the comedy inherent in a human body whose falls and farts acknowledge no social pretensions. Kemp’s spontaneous hijinks gained him enormous stage success. By the time of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Kemp had become a commercial entity in his own right; he and Burbage were ranked as the most famous actors of their generation (Wiles 1987: 34). These very different responses to Kemp – a sense of superiority or of relatedness – became part of a specifically theatrical moment of significance for Shakespeare’s stage. For contemporaries, the meaning of this theatrical moment was informed by another long-standing cultural tradition. An animal’s head such as that worn by Bottom was also worn by early modern performers operating hobby-horses (Paster and Howard 1999: 93). The possibility of acquiring an ass’s head from such an amateur performer of a hobby-horse (or hobby-ass), or perhaps the presence of an actor in the company who had himself performed as a hobby-horse of the hooden type, provides a simple and material explanation for this very odd transformation of Bottom’s head, and only his head. The presence of a hobbyhorse head as a property owned by Lord Admiral’s Men in 1598 suggests that this ass’s head may have similarly present in the properties of Shakespeare’s company, or at least that it would not have been difficult to acquire (Cawte 1978: 51; see also Brooks 1979: lxxxii). The presence of an ass’s head as a stage property receives some support from the wording of Bottom’s entrance in the Folio: “Enter Piramus with the Asse head” (1623: 152; facsimile 1968: 170). Bevington’s note on this direction shows his agreement with this stage tradition: “This stage direction, taken from the Folio, presumably refers to a standard stage property” (1997: 161). Standard for whom? In what other context, besides this play, would an ass’s head be worn? If Shakespeare were primarily modeling Bottom’s transformation after a classical metamorphosis, why change only the head? If he were primarily modeling Bottom’s transformation after the costume of fools, why change more than the ears? The use of an animal head mask belonging to a hobby-horse seems, under the circumstances, quite probable. Wherever Shakespeare’s company acquired the ass’s head, associations with hobby-horses structured the cultural meanings of Bottom’s partial transformation. An awareness of the cultural meanings evoked by hobby-horses provides insights into the ideological work performed by Kemp-as-sign in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Bottom’s ass’s head was transgressive even by hobby-horse standards; for by the early seventeenth century, the early modern anxiety about

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crossing the boundaries between man and animal had significantly eroded the apparently ancient practice of masking as animals. According to Keith Thomas, “even to pretend to be an animal for purposes of ritual or entertainment was unacceptable” (1983: 39); and so the earlier forms of the hood or the skull-andpole hobby-horse had yielded to the more well-known tourney style worn around the waist. The decline in the status of hobby-horses provides further cultural meanings for Puck’s placement of an ass’s head on Bottom. The appearance of Bottom, or perhaps more pointedly of Kemp, in his ass’s head identifies Kemp’s own inspired mode of clowning with a debased mode of amateur performance. As Chapter 4 has described, the much-loved hobby-horse attracting crowds at pre-Reformation church ales had by the late sixteenth century come to signify licensed misconduct, especially of a sexual nature, that catered to what was judged, by reformist and elite standards, as the lowest of aesthetic tastes. Since there is no record of Kemp’s earlier performance as a hobby-horse, the implications of Puck’s placement of an ass’s head on his shoulders seems instead to derive from a shared form of embodiment shaping Kemp’s performance as Bottom, and also more generally his jigs, his pratfalls, his spontaneous and very physical improvisations. While Kemp was to fade from historical record after his famous morris dance from London to Norwich, he is still remembered as an inspired clown. The amusement elicited by Bottom’s refusal to be anything but himself, even in the arms of the fairy queen, implicates Kemp’s own genius in performing the clown role as a consistent version of his stage-self. Quite possibly the tribute bestowed on Bottom, as the only mortal to see the fairy queen, honors a quality, simultaneously crude and ineffable, acknowledged in Kemp’s clowning as well. Condescending laughter at this bumpkin or pleasurable identification with a bizarrely visionary experience: these opposing laughters posed particular dilemmas of social formation for early modern audiences (Bakhtin 1984: 474; Patterson 1989: 192; McDonald 1994: 101). These dilemmas also shaped the evolving aesthetics of Shakespeare’s company. Rather than coming to a resolution, the ass’s head that classifies Kemp with hobby-horses foregrounds a relationship between Shakespeare’s increasingly professional actors and the very physical improvisations of amateur performers as a dilemma explored within A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This contest of aesthetics so significant to the shape of Shakespeare’s own theater becomes most explicit in the artisans’ play of Pyramus and Thisbe in Act 5. Judged as a professional play based on a classical narrative, Pyramus and Thisbe may well be the “silliest stuff” that Hippolyta ever heard (5.1.209). Pyramus’s overdone apostrophes to Night (“O night, which ever art when day is not!”), the foolish personifications of Wall and Moonshine, the mispronounced classical names “Limander,” “Shafalus,” and “Procrus,” the invocations to Fate by Thisbe and Pyramus: all of these construct the play of Pyramus and Thisbe as an imitation of classical conventions gone terribly wrong. From this perspective the aristocrats’ mockery may be cruel, but it is not unwarranted. As Stephen Greenblatt has recently observed, “the audience is invited to join the charmed

A Midsummer Night’s Dream 121 circle of the upper-class mockers onstage” by sharing a laughter that also marks the young Shakespeare’s “definitive passage from naivete and homespun amateurism to sophisticated taste and professional skill” (2004: 52). Many decades of Shakespeare criticism represented the artisans’ work as simple and comic incompetence. Yet, as Greenblatt notes, the play also confers “an odd, unexpected dignity upon Bottom and his fellows” so that “even as he called attention to the distance between himself and the rustic performers, Shakespeare doubled back and signaled a current of sympathy and solidarity” (52). From this less dismissive perspective, critics have begun to complicate the social implications of the artisans’ performance (Bristol 1985: 178; Leinwand 1986; Wiles 1987: 198–9; Wilson 1996). This more receptive approach enables an interpretation of “A tedious brief scene of young Pyramus and his love Thisbe” as a hybrid form of amateur entertainment, capable of incorporating social discontent within a traditional, and traditionally offensive, form of performance. Thus, while it remains an “absurdly bad play” (Bevington 1997: 149) from any official perspective, it may in fact have represented a successful performance according to the conventions of an amateur tradition. In addition to Puck’s placement of the ass’s head on Bottom as he rehearsed the part of Pyramus, there are several other cues for interpreting the artisans’ performance of Pyramus and Thisbe as perhaps the strangest hybrid of classical and low culture played upon the Elizabethan stage. If “A tedious brief scene” is seen as a cultural hybrid rather than a purely classical work, different criteria for judgement emerge. For example, by serious classical standards, the technical terms “thread and thrum” of Pyramus’s invocation, “O Fates, come, come/Cut thread and thrum” (5.1.281–2) render the Fates vaguely ridiculous by pressing the metaphor of spinning too far into mundane reality. As an incorporation of these classical figures into the mental world of Bottom the weaver, however, this invocation impressively achieves a difficult objective. It is in this sense that various references to an amateur tradition in “A tedious brief scene” may be understood. Ridiculous by any serious, literate standards, “A tedious brief scene” achieves success as a hybrid creation juxtaposing the aesthetics of high and low. Most importantly, the hybridity of the artisans’ play foregrounds the striking hybridity of A Midsummer Night’s Dream itself, with its own dissonant juxtapositions of classical myth and native fairytales. Some of these resemblances between the artisans’ play and amateur practice have been noted by various critics (Barber [1959] 1972: 151; Bradbrook 1966: 238; Davidson 1987; Skura 1993: 112). Ignoring social proprieties and offending polite members of an audience seemed to comprise part of the act. The Prologue’s announcement that “All for your delight we are not here” in fact catches the sense of this amateur entertainment remarkably well, as does his further statement that “We come not to offend,/But with good will” (5.1.109–10). The rowdy improvisations cast doubt on the court party’s easy dismissal of these sentiments as merely disordered speech (McDonald 1994: 100; Montrose 1996: 195). Particularly and wonderfully obscene are various lines addressed to Wall,

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who becomes as developed as any of the other characters of this narrative. If Wall placed his fingers between his legs to make a cranny through which the lovers could speak (Kott 1987: 54), what comic interactions with the audience might Kemp have performed in response to lines such as Thisbe’s “My cherry lips have often kissed thy stones” (5.1.188) and her “I kiss the wall’s hole, not your lips at all!” (5.1.200)? And how might Thisbe have performed these lines on stage? If these lines provide a bare sketch for a largely improvised performance, the opportunities they offer for hilarious and outrageously offensive obscenity can be scarcely imagined. Revealingly, the aristocratic audience of Theseus’s court remains noticeably silent at these lines. Any members of the larger audience receptive to the traditional obscenities of these amateur plays would, however, have surely exploded into raucous laughter. Besides the opportunities offered for rowdy improvisation, other more formal features of the “A tedious brief scene” would also seem to allude to amateur conventions. Snout’s self-introduction “I, one Snout by name, present a wall” resembles the introductions by the amateur actors of the nine worthies in Love’s Labour’s Lost (“I Pompey am, Pompey surnamed the Big” (5.2.542)). Theseus’s response to Pyramus’s death (“With the help of a surgeon he might yet recover, and yet prove an ass” (5.1.307–8)) evokes the humorous stage roles of mountebanks or quack doctors who effect miraculous “cures.”18 While the character Pyramus does not revive within this Ovidian plot, the actor Bottom jumps up just as Thisbe dies (5.1.348); and in this sense he revives as Theseus had expected, although without the help of a surgeon. Theseus’s anticipation that Pyramus might be an “ass” may become specifically realized if Bottom dons an ass’s head during the concluding bergomask. A recovery by Bottom to become an “ass” with an ass’s head would create visual connections between the final act and the forest scenes, drawing these disparate aspects of the play together in their common connection with an amateur performance tradition. A concluding hobby-horse dance would have been especially appropriate for Kemp. Skiles Howard has noted that in the related morris dance, “the hobby-horse, close kindred of the ass, did most of this jumping,” an ability for which Kemp was “legendary” (1998: 78). Whether or not Kemp wore an ass’s head in the bergomask, the artisans’ dance rehearses the aesthetic conflicts between low and elite groups shaping A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This competition begins with the first interchange between the fairy king and queen, as Titania accuses Oberon of disrupting her fairies’ “ringlets” (2.1.86), a dance associated with social solidarity, in which each dancer faces in towards the others, hands clasped to form a circle (Howard 1998: 71). This communal dance contrasts strikingly with the courtly dance performed by Oberon and Titania near the end of the play (4.1.85). Rather than celebrating a community tradition, this courtly couple dance asserts the male’s privilege of gender and social class by exhibiting his virtuoso footwork learned from written treatises of dance (Howard 1998: 75). Integral to its subordination of low culture is the patriarchal disciplining of the physical body, as appears in the contrast between the dances of the elite and the popular cultures. As Skiles

A Midsummer Night’s Dream 123 Howard observes, “gregarious, intimate, improvisational, and often ungendered” (1998: 76), the country bergomask, like the dances performed by Kemp and the other mechanicals, rejects hierarchical structures of class, gender, and the body itself. From this perspective, Howard’s claim that the physical vigor of Kemp’s high capers “may have presented a formidable visual challenge to the myth of elite supremacy and popular inadequacy” (1998: 78) depends on an appreciation of the joyful excesses of an unrestrained body that may not have been shared by the value system of an elite culture. Or conversely, an elite appreciation of Kemp’s physical vigor would have blurred the divisions of class hierarchy by promoting a common sense of embodiedness shared by all humans. To members of the audience familiar with the tradition, the entrance of Puck at the end of the play carrying a broom would have cleared away any lingering doubts about whether the artisans’ bergomask was part of a traditional amateur performance. Puck’s broom creates a striking visual identification of the amateur performer, sometimes a little devil, who steps out before the audience at the end of an entertainment to sweep up money thrown by the crowd. There is a complex and informative parallel to Puck with his broom in the illustration of his folk original Robin Goodfellow, described in Chapter 4, appended to the later prose pamphlet Robin Good-Fellow, His Mad Prankes and Merry Jests (1628). Rather than sweeping, Robin Goodfellow appears to be dancing. This interpretive context provides an alternative answer to Wendy Wall’s question, “Why does Puck sweep?” (2002: 94). In defense of her well-explored connection between Puck and domesticity, Puck does pledge to sweep dust behind the door in Midsummer. But as Puck stands before the audience of A Midsummer Night’s Dream to ask for their applause in his Epilogue, the traditional use of a broom to sweep up coins implicates not only the artisans’ play but Shakespeare’s play as well, in these events performed by low-status groups. In this Epilogue, financial profit does not conflict with communal spirit. As Puck invites the audience to “give me your hands, if we be friends” (5.1.432), he opens out the fairy dance, in a metaphorical sense, to include the audience so that “hand in hand” with the fairies, they together may bless “this place” (5.1.394) at once the ducal palace and the theater itself. Literally, of course, Puck asks the audience to applaud rather than to dance; and this applause marks a specific economic as well as cultural transaction (Howard 1998: 80). But from the perspective of an amateur tradition, applause and the money that was thrown to show approval both represented traditional forms of blessing. While the actors of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, like the artisans of “A brief and tedious scene,” work for profit, the fairy dance that ends and in a sense completes both performances also absorbs them as living parts of a single social organism. Preserving a magic imagined for ancient figures, these fairies enact a “discourse of fertility” that Woodbridge describes remaining as an “invisible mental structure” after literal belief has disappeared (1994: 159–62, 200). As the fairies bless the beds of the newly married couples, the play produces a popular culture separate yet necessary for the survival of elite social groups. Even as Puck evokes these connections between A Midsummer Night’s

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Dream and traditional amateur performances, he also forcefully brings to mind their differences. As he apologizes for any offense in elegant tetrameter (“If we shadows have offended,/Think but this and all is mended” (5.1.418–19)), Puck continues to fashion himself as a courtly servant to an aristocratic master who is now the audience rather than Oberon. It is a revealing irony that this most elegant character who marked his contempt for Bottom by placing on him a hobby-horse head, here reveals himself in the self-degraded role of an amateur performer. As Puck calls himself “Robin” and carries a broom, he evokes his coarse folk origins, even as his elegant language and courteous interactions with the audience also stage his distance from these origins. An elegant Puck with his homely broom over his shoulder, the wonderful obscenities introduced into the Ovidian narrative of Pyramus and Thisbe, the disjunctive joining of Athenian myth and English fairy-tale that constitutes A Midsummer Night’s Dream itself: all of these were cultural hybrids revealing the entanglements, the superimpositions, the simultaneities, of social groups straining to separate before such separation was possible. This simultaneous remembering and forgetting, so familiar in this play, takes on a special significance in the Epilogue. As Shakespeare’s company became increasingly professionalized, its abjection of its own amateur roots reflected in some sense the personal dilemmas of its audience who were themselves hybrids of cultures whose lines were not yet fully drawn, who still found it difficult at times to remember to forget.

6

The Merry Wives of Windsor Domestic nationalism and the refuse of the realm

In its staging of citizen wives and householders, Merry Wives fills in the middle term absent from the high–low binary structuring A Midsummer Night’s Dream; and perhaps the conspicuous absence of this prominent social group from that binary was a factor in the production of popular culture in Merry Wives. The differences between the popular culture produced in these two plays reflect differences in primary interactions with the lower sort. For the more restricted households of the middling sort, with fewer servants and greater parental involvement in child-rearing, the hybridity instilled by the contrasting perspectives of caretaker and schoolmaster, for example, may well have posed less of an inner dilemma than in the complex cross-group organization of large aristocratic households. In what would seem a direct counter-statement to the elite discourse evoked through Midsummer’s Athenian setting, William Page’s much-discussed Latin lesson implicitly calls into question the distinction conferred by the classical knowledge rendering Theseus and Hippolyta such familiar figures to the more educated members of the audience (Pittenger 1991: 389–408; Parker 1991: 225–62, 1987: 27–31). While the knowledge of Latin contributed to social mobility, William’s stumbling attempts at his declensions provide little evidence for the transfiguring force attributed to a classical education. He remains a vulnerable and anxious schoolboy, whose faulty linguistic ability pleases only his indulgent mother (4.1.69). Even more hazardous to the rationale underlying this cultural capital is Hugh Evans’s abominable Welsh pronunciation, “hing, hang, hog” for “hinc hanc hoc,” and most obscenely, “focative” for “vocative.” As Coppelia Kahn points out, this scene “works to demystify the grand humanist project of making Latin the cachet to a universal disinterested virtue” (1997: 7). From the other side, William’s Latin lesson also dispels any lingering nostalgia for sensual women of the lower sort who sang lilting ballads of fairy queens. The casting of the earthy Mistress Quickly in the role of fairy queen in Act 5 may well mark a moment of purposeful intertextuality between the two plays. Mistress Quickly represents, quite simply, an actual rather than a fantasized woman from William’s childhood. Her bawdy misinterpretations of Latin words as sexual innuendo (genitive case to “Jinny’s case,” “horum” to “whore”), reveal a vulgarity and ignorance that suggest little grounds for sentimental yearning.

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The striking contrast between this ethereal and very earthy fairy queen calls attention to the divergence in the popular cultures produced in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Merry Wives. These differences in popular cultures between the two plays derive from two related factors: (1) Rather than domestic caretakers of children, Merry Wives focuses on the disreputable poor as representing the lower sort; (2) Its middling sort aspires to social distinction through the proper management of goods more than through knowledge of Latin. While concentrated in the final performance, these differences extend throughout the play in what seems a deliberate reworking of fairies, women storytellers, and amateur performers from Midsummer according to the interests of the various groups comprising the middling sort. A substantial discussion of the contemporary social circumstances to which Merry Wives responded is necessary before embarking on a detailed analysis of the play. As a social context for Merry Wives, the urgent problem of poverty in the late 1590s posed a more pressing concern than cultural hybridity.1 Few members of the middling sort, especially in London or in market towns such as Windsor or Stratford, could have remained unaware of the rapidly increasing population of the destitute outside their doors. By the time Shakespeare was writing Merry Wives, the failure of harvests, rampant inflation, and falling real wages caused the numbers of the poor to escalate into an acute national problem. The food riots that occurred across England as a result of the harvest failures of 1596–7 would have made the issue inescapably urgent. Numerous indigents who would have remained residents eligible for parish relief in earlier decades became landless vagrants, some dispossessed from their lands by enclosures and others denied relief in their own parishes. In 1597, a contemporary describes the “swarms of poor loose and wandering people bred by these decays, miserable to themselves, dangerous to the state” (Tawney and Power 1924: 1.89). Arthur Kinney has argued convincingly that this suffering, “more than in anyone’s living memory,” represented a formative context for Merry Wives, whether in the Windsor of its folio version, or in the less specific location, arguably London, of its quarto.2 As Kinney asserts, “Shakespeare relies on his audience’s knowledge of the authentic Windsor, their authentic world – a real place characterized by starvation, theft, and death” to understand this play as “about the haves and the have-nots” (1993: 226). In this chapter, I argue that the popular culture produced in Merry Wives reflected a contemporary reconceptualization of poverty as a form of moral dereliction or even fraud perpetrated by disreputable elements of the lower sorts whose values, as discussed below, bore striking resemblances to those of the prodigal gentry. This association of fraud with the low was already available in, for example, the use of fairies to allude to property theft. As the vestiges of an earlier Catholicism identified with ignorant superstition and fakery, the festive practices of merry England were, according to a reformist perspective, similarly a perpetration of fraud. These were both influenced by a social stratification that with some exceptions (Leinwand 1993: 292–3; Woodbridge 2004: 162) dis-

The Merry Wives of Windsor

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tanced the middling sort from their poorer neighbors, who then became vulnerable to stereotyping as immoral or even criminal. Susan Amussen describes how “the equating of wealth with moral worth” led to the categorizing of the poor within villages that were increasingly polarized by the late sixteenth century (1988: 137, 155). Increased poverty and inflation exacerbated a fear of social disturbance among local elites, who then regulated the conduct of citizens, especially of the poor citizens, with more rigor (Hutton 1994: 143). Various factions, often with otherwise contradictory interests, grouped together as a “middling sort” to define themselves, in part, through their hostility to what they perceived or invented as a popular culture (Kegl 1994: 268–9; Berry 2001: 141). As Paul Slack observes, there was “no discernible culture of poverty” (1988: 106). Instead, a false sense of social coherence was imposed from the outside, in part through the association of the festive with lower or poorer groups (Kendrick 2004: 216). This supposed culture of the poor was attacked where it seemed strongest and most disreputable: in the alehouses where members of the lowest sort congregated. As an area permitting communal gatherings, the alehouse developed into a spatialized Other to the reformed church (Clark 1983: 152). Under the hostile gaze of Puritan ministers and respectable citizens, traditional entertainments, such as the morris dancing and amateur plays once performed by a wide range of social groups in medieval churchyards, were skulking off to the alehouse, where they were imagined to conclude in “drunken debauchery” (Clark 1983: 145, 152–4). Lewd ballads and rowdy catches were sung. In Twelfth Night, it was the singing of loud catches that prompted Malvolio to ask, “Do ye make an alehouse of my lady’s house?” (2.3.80). Sir Toby justifies their activities through the precedent of the festive “cakes and ale” of church ales (“Dost thou think because thou art virtuous there shall be no more cakes and ale?” (2.3.104, n.5 p.677)). Stubbes’s Anatomie of Abuses describes how filthy songs and wild morris dances performed in “Tavernes, Ale-houses, Innes, and other publique assemblies” would lead even practicing musicians down the “pathway to all uncleanes” (1583: O5). It is clear that alehouses only exacerbated the bad reputation of the festive practices used to characterize the low. A woodcut prefacing the printed ballad “The Mad Merry Pranks of Robin Good-fellow” shows the production of a popular culture precisely in terms of fraud and the indigent criminal element of the alehouse where, in fact, such ballads were sung. At the top center of the page, the maypole foregrounds a prominent symbol of popular culture, as befits a ballad about Robin Goodfellow. As promised in the title, this ballad lists his “mad-merry prankes”: with his signature “ho ho ho” as the ballad’s refrain, this Robin counterfeits his voice to lead travelers astray into woods and bogs; he transforms his shape into a horse, ox, and hound; he eats the cakes and drinks the wine belonging to merry lads and lasses (he kisses the lasses); and he performs menial household chores such as carding wool and spinning thread.3 A gap opens up, however, between the traditional, primarily rural content of the ballad and the very urban, contemporary items on this illustration: dice and cards, two very well-dressed couples, one

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in earnest discussion and one in a suggestive half-embrace; three rabbits or cony-catchers: one apparently hooking garments from a window, one holding facecards (a three of spades and a five of clubs), and one poised on his hindlegs holding a shield and a raised sword. Ominously overlooking the scene, what appears to be a judge is sitting on a chair of state and opposite him, on the other side of the maypole, stands a gallows. The explanation connecting Robin Goodfellow to this urban scene appears on the 1592 title-page to a rogue pamphlet, The Groundworke of Cony-catching, a reworking of Thomas Harman’s Caveat or Warning, for Commen Cursetors Vulgarely Called Vagabones published in 1566–7 (Beier 2004: 98–119; Wood-


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bridge 2001: 39–79). The illustration to Groundworke is identical to that of “The Mad Merry Pranks.” A single mention of Robin Goodfellow in Harman’s work provides the connection. As Harman describes how vagabond “hokers” intrude a staff with a hook through windows to pluck garments and even blankets from their sleeping victims, he imagines, “When they were well waked with cold, they suerly thought that Robin Goodfellow (accordinge to the old saying) had bene with them that night” (1592: B4). In Harman’s work, the traditional pranks of Robin Goodfellow have become indistinguishable from the trickery of conmen (or con-conies). The figures illustrated on these two works assemble numerous separate illustrations also appearing in rogue pamphlets written by Robert Greene. The illustration to Greene’s A Disputation betweene a Hee Conny-catcher and a Shee Conny-catcher (1592a) explains the identity of the couple in close debate: he is a thief and she is a whore; and they are arguing about which is “most hurtfull in Coosonage, to the Commonwealth”(tp). Appearing on the title-page of Greene’s Notable Discovery of Coosenage (1591a), the cony holding out the facecards provides the logical location for a number of the activities pictured in these pamphlets: as in the text of Notable Discovery, card playing, dice play, and various con-games enhanced by drinking all take place in taverns or alehouses.4 Robin Goodfellow has become a trickster figure for forms of fraud allegedly perpetrated by the disreputable poor. In their primarily fictional content, cony-catcher pamphlets by such writers as Thomas Harman and Robert Greene were themselves successful frauds eagerly consumed by the public for a variety of purposes. In addition to entertainment, these pamphlets proposed to supply useful information to protect citizens from the criminal element in an increasingly urbanized setting. They also provided an underlying identification in the thrill of a sting operation. The attitude conveyed by these pamphlets is strikingly unstable, veering from an initially sanctimonious tone to an amoral delight in the escapades of clever conmen. The roles of cony-catcher and cony seem to be similarly volatile. In a term popularized by Robert Greene, the dupe who fell for deceitful ploys, whether the display of a fabricated wound or an invitation to play with loaded dice, was a “cony” or rabbit. But oddly in the illustrations, the cony appears to be the conman rather than the gullible mark. This interchangeability of conman and cony appears throughout this literature. In the opening exposé in Notable Discovery, a conycatcher lures the naïve passer-by into a tavern or alehouse where he then pretends, by way of friendship, to show him how to win wagers by cheating at cards. When an accomplice then pretends to lose at cards, the delighted mark raises his wager to all he has, which he then of course loses when the card trick unaccountably doesn’t succeed. This ploy follows a pattern called, in conycatching cant, Barton’s law, as explained by Craig Dionne: “the ‘cony’ is caught when he agrees to help swindle someone else” (2004: 51). The foolish cony thinks he is a cony-catcher; and in order to gain the cony’s trust, the conycatcher also appears other than he is, in this case “apparelled like an honest, civil Gentleman” (Greene 1591a: B1). While these pamphlets present themselves as “how-to” manuals enabling honest citizens to survive in a dangerously criminal

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world, this underworld also mimics the theatrical self-fashioning inherent in a proto-capitalist economy where even peddlars might use assumed names. As Dionne observes, “In the cony-catching pamphlets, the hidden mode of selfproduction is laid bare,” reminding rising men of power that “their own identity was also a sham” (2004: 55). A similar volatility between conman and cony marks out The Merry Wives of Windsor. In this chapter I explore Merry Wives as a cony-catching play, designed to expose the rogue Falstaff’s ploys to gain money by counterfeiting friendship to wives whom he mistakes for conies. With a plot twist that must have endeared this play to the middling sort, the supposed conies repeatedly outwit the rogue, finally opening out his come-uppance to the entire community, who bond together in a production of popular culture that casts Falstaff as the naïve mark who still believes in fairies. Like the Barton’s law ploy of the conycatching pamphlets, Merry Wives implicates the honest citizens in the ultimately unstable, theatrical identity shared with cony-catchers. In this way, Merry Wives became part of the experimentation in fluid forms of selfhood ongoing in early modern theater that modeled the new social relations circulating around a nascent market economy (Agnew 1986: 7–12). A more detailed discussion of cultural discourses circulating around the problem posed by the early modern poor provides an important context for Merry Wives. By the end of the sixteenth century, attitudes towards the poor were often characterized by a remarkable lack of sympathy. Representing individual thefts as clever stratagems linked to an organized criminal underworld, this rising rogue literature of cony-catching pamphlets assuaged guilt by rendering any charitable impulse towards the unfortunate poor as gullible naïvety (Dionne and Mentz 2004: 19). As Woodbridge asserts, “when vagrants are figured as wits rather than butts, as tricksters preying on a hapless public, witty self-sufficiency erases their helpless misery and heightens their menace” (2001: 51). Admiration of their supposed con-artist skills did not motivate charity. As the sheer numbers of the poor strained the customary practices established for their relief by the late sixteenth century, authorities began to discriminate, to a much greater extent than before, among the types and causes of poverty in order to direct assistance to those believed to need it most. On often arbitrary or inaccurate criteria, the poor became polarized into two groups: those who deserved help, such as the infirm, the widowed, and the orphaned, and those who did not, such as vagrants, vagabonds, and bastard-bearers. In what A.L. Beier has called the “de-sanctification of the poor”(1985: 4), it became financially advantageous to look askance at their needs and to suspect them of taking advantage of the more fortunate. Despite some remnants of noblesse oblige in the countryside, Paul Slack notes that by the late sixteenth century, “condemnation of the poor was becoming respectable; and the refusal of alms to a substantial portion of them was widely regarded as legitimate” (1988: 19). Workhouses or Bridewells were established for the supposedly able-bodied poor, or else, like poor Tom of King Lear, indigents might be turned out of the parish, to be whipped “from tithing to tithing” (3.4.123; Woodbridge 2001: 214). To be an unemployed or “masterless man”


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was itself a crime (Beier 1985: xxi–xxii). During this period, commissions and also prosecutions of property crime increased radically; and the alehouses that served vagrants as temporary shelters became centers for fencing stolen goods (Clark 1983: 146; Archer 1991: 241–2). The association of the poor with fraud was, of course, self-serving; for it relieved the more fortunate of an obligation to provide relief. But it also intensified the perceived threat posed by the poor to goods. This vulnerability of domestic spaces to burglary or other forms of fraud evoked a special fear of rogues and vagabonds since, rather than mistrusting poorer neighbors, early moderns tended to displace their anxieties about domestic loss on outsiders (Dubrow 1999: 36–7). The pressure of poverty, so visible in the towns of the 1590s, shaped the self-definitions of the middling sort. As Slack has noted, “It is as if social boundaries were being redrawn and proper, respectable society being newly and more tightly defined” (1988: 25). This drawing of boundaries defined the vagrant poor as outsiders; and as they entered ordered social spaces, they became perceived as out-of-place, like pollution or dirt (Woodbridge 2001: 184). Ridding the town and finally the nation of such “ ‘lawless beasts’ . . . the filth and vermin of the commonwealth” became a form of “social hygiene” for, as Slack observes, “It was not mere coincidence that municipal by-laws against beggars and vagabonds were often issued at the same time as orders for cleaning the streets” (1988: 25, 115). Fears of the plague fostered representations of the poor as diseased in, for example, William Lambarde’s approval of harsh Poor Laws in 1582: it is “once more thought . . . meet to kill and cut off those rotten members that otherwise would bring peril of infection to the whole body of the realm and commonwealth” (1962: 171). In 1593, Lambarde continues to describe “swarms of vagrant and flying beggars” who “infect and stain the earth” (1962: 181). One reaction to this crisis of poverty, with its metaphors of the vagrant poor as dirt and disease, was an early modern “rage for domesticity,” extending from individual houses to the nation itself (Woodbridge 2001: 160). The associative link between the dirty, diseased vagrant and the clean domestic space was more than metaphoric. The same economic process that led to the dispossession of the poor enabled the more fortunate to amass lands and material possessions (Muldrew 1998: 15). The problem of vagrancy created a special form of privilege for the house and domestic comforts within the household. While aristocrats were demonstrating their status by building extravagant country seats, the middling sort were also busily enlarging their houses, adding rooms with newly specified functions, making them more comfortable with furnishings and possessions not imagined by their grandparents. The relatively rapid accumulation of goods – pewter, window glazing, tapestries, pins, lace, knives, copper pans, cinnamon, wine – recently available to the rising middling sort conferred not only comfort, but also new forms of social authority.5 The display of goods formed an essential means of establishing worth and social prominence. But with the increase in goods also came increased household debt, at a time before banks and insurance provided a measure of security against bankruptcy (Muldrew 1998: 17). Even

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very careful consumers were not entirely safe from losing all they had; for bound together with others through exchanges of credit, one creditor’s financial failure could bring down the entire network. As Muldrew states, “In a society with so much poverty, material security was a constant concern for the simple reason that it could never be taken for granted” (1998: 149). The growing numbers of parish poor and wandering vagrants would have provided an ever-present reminder of the fragility of the social fabric. They also elicited an ever-growing anxiety over the vulnerability of goods to theft (Dubrow 1999: 44). Craig Muldrew’s exploration of an early modern culture of credit provides important insights into the mentality of the middling sort, and the way they generated a sense of social value distinctive to their position (1998: 123–95; see also Sullivan 2002: 53–61). When the ability, transformed by cultural forces into a necessity, to express oneself through goods expanded consumer needs beyond the available supply of gold and silver coins, citizens incurred reciprocal debts that they then “reckoned,” or canceled out, to pay only the amount left outstanding. In this system, “credit” referred to the degree of trust in individuals to fulfill the financial obligations they assumed. To prosper or even to maintain solvency in this expanding economy, a reputation for honesty was necessary to attract credit. Neighborly relations and a reputation for integrity became a financial as well as a social imperative. In this way, the identity of the middling sort became theatrical. Similar to modern corporations on the stock exchange, householders competed with each other to pull in more credit by promoting their own reputations for solid trustworthiness that then, in fact, enhanced their prosperity. Householders also watched over each other’s financial well-being, for, in domino fashion, defaults endangered the financial state of creditors, and of creditors’ creditors, linked in a long chain of obligations. Threats to solvency increased as widening circles of credit fostered increasing amounts of debt so that by the early seventeenth century most households found themselves in debt and a large percentage “actually had more debts than credits and moveable goods combined” (Muldrew 1998: 118). The pressure to maintain a reputation for financial honesty, sometimes at odds with available resources, provided a vantage point through which members of the middling sort could produce a sense of their own value by censuring those from any social group whose credit lay in doubt. As Muldrew observes, this process of judgement was informed by classical texts, conveniently translated for non-readers of Latin, ascribing appropriate modes of consumption to a reasonable discipline of the self (1998: 3, 158). According to Xenophon’s Oikonomia, translated as Xenophons treatise of householde, prosperity lies in the correct management of the household, in turn based on due diligence and forethought of the master (1532: A8v). Those who allow themselves to become enslaved by gluttony, lust, or drunkenness find themselves plagued by these tyrannical pleasures in their bodies, souls, and households. Translated as Marcus Tullius Ciceroes thre bokes of duties (1556), De Officiis emphasizes this connection between personal discipline and financial profit: “Seemelinesse, measurekeping, sobermode, stayednesse, and temperaunce. May then any thing be


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profitable, that is contrarie to such an assemble of vertues?” (Cicero 1990: 190). Cicero exclaims, “how fowle it is to overflowe in ryotte, and live deliciouslie, and wantonlie: and how honest it is, to leade our life savinglie, chastelie, sagelie, and soberlie” (1990: 91). Muldrew notes that Nicholas Grimalde’s consistent translation of “trust” as “credit” in this text was part of a larger appropriation of classical virtues to describe a social order based on mutual obligations in responsible lending and borrowing (1998: 134–9). According to this ideology, those of any social group, however blameless in fact, who fell into poverty were imagined as largely at fault for leading a disordered ethical life. The poverty of the able-bodied poor was attributed not to economic factors, but to “moral failing” (Woodbridge 2001: 22; 110–15), as “an act of will rather than a consequence of a general economic failure” (Carroll 1996: 5). There was no category for those involuntarily without work. This attribution of moral blame reinforced the perception of the poor, and especially vagrants, as a kind of social dirt, posing a threat to property through theft or fraud. This caricature of the poor as ethically unsound was self-fulfilling. As the institution of the Poor Laws promoted attempts to prevent the illegitimate children and idle drunkenness that led to increased parish rates, the morals of the destitute came under public scrutiny. As Slack notes, this supervision reinforced a sense of the moral superiority of the ratepayers, who tended to become alienated even from the impotent poor by the cost of their support (1988: 208). Drunkenness came in for special notice. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, sermons denounced this vice with an unprecedented vigor (Clark 1983: 108–9). It was, again, the poor who became a prominent target of these denouncements, along with the often squalid alehouses that catered to their needs (Slack 1988: 104). Peter Clark describes how a “storm of criticism erupted against alehouses in the late sixteenth century . . . fuelled by a fear, sometimes bordering on the hysterical, that alehouses were being transformed into the strongholds of a populist world which aimed to overthrow established, respectable society” (1983: 145). The rapid rise of numbers of alehouses in the late sixteenth century confirmed the worst suspicions of the middling sort about the moral failings of the poor. It was not only the poor, however, who were censured for leading a disordered life. This moral judgement pertained to both extremes of the social hierarchy. Cicero’s reproof of those who “overflowe in ryotte,” living “deliciouslie, and wantonlie” (1990: 191) was more applicable to extravagant members of the elite than to the destitute. According to the values of a culture of credit, the stereotype of the gallant who would sell ancestral lands for high living in London or even for a suit of clothes signified not aristocratic display, but culpable prodigality (Twyning 1998: 93). Even aside from humanist ideology, the material threat posed by improvident aristocrats or gentry was at least as dangerous to the welfare of the middling sort as the charges of the poor. As the flow of goods to less prestigious groups obliged the social elite, or those wishing to be perceived as the social elite, to demonstrate their status through conspicuous consumption, they became increasingly strapped for cash (Elias 1983: 66–77; Kamen 2000: 83). By the late sixteenth century, a number of aristocrats and

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gentry entered into credit relations beyond their ability to repay; and defaults on debts endangered the financial stability of shopkeepers and the small tradesmen who were their creditors. Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens ably conveys an aristocrat’s irritation when confronted with demands that he pay back his loans; and his misplaced faith that his friends would cover his debts reflects an early modern practice that Michael Chorost has called a “tinkerbell economics” – the gaining of credit by appearing to be vastly wealthy, until the illusion can no longer be maintained (1991: 354).6 The casual approach of some aristocrats and gentry to paying debts led tradesmen and merchants to doubt their credit; and in the second half of the sixteenth century, members of the middling sort initiated lawsuits for bad debts against their social betters (Muldrew 1998: 97). With the move from a lineage to a contract society, the value of a signature depended not upon rank, but upon the ability to fulfill the terms written on the page. The middling sort could never compete successfully with the very wealthy in the accumulation of goods. As the monitory example of extravagant aristocrats amply revealed, the display of luxury goods beyond their means was not, in itself, a prudent mode of self-distinction. While some members of the middling sort yet emulated the aristocratic mode, others generated value for their social group by a mode of consumption better adapted to attract credit from fellow householders. The cultural capital accrued through Cicero’s own advocacy for prudent values – “seemelinesse, measurekeping, sobermode, stayednesse, and temperaunce” (1990: 190) – dignified their restraint. More than the mere display of goods, it was fiscally necessary to communicate trustworthiness through the proper management of goods, by demonstrating staid judgement and wise stewardship reassuring to those, often one’s own neighbors, who would then be willing to extend credit. The opposition between modes of consumption appeared quite visibly in clothing. The city gallant’s reputation depended upon knowing the latest and the most flamboyant style: the ruff, the peascod doublet, the lovelock over the shoulder, the “deep gussets and folds . . . ornate puffs . . . ties, ribbons, feathers, and bows” all of which “combined to produce deliberate overstatement and sartorial effusion” (Twyning 1998: 99). Or a gallant might adopt the “jilted lover” look in a fashion for “ungartered hose, unbanded bonnet, untied shoe,” perhaps with one long lovelock flung over a shoulder, to flaunt contemporary models of masculinity for a more exotic or poetic identity (109, 122). This language of fashion did not elicit trust in good judgement. One did not have to be a Puritan to prefer plainer apparel, the “simple materials, smooth doublets, unadorned collars lying flat on shoulders, plain stockings,” that all came to characterize the “solid burgher fashion of the period” (113). This mode of clothing was more discreet and, according to a contemporary norm condemning excessive consumption as effeminate, also more masculine (Sekora 1977). The middling sort adopted the same fiscally prudent standards for the nation as for itself. As early as 1549, Thomas Smith warned against squandering the nation’s treasure on such trifling goods from foreign countries as “glass windows, dials, tables, cards, balls, puppets, penhorns, inkhorns, toothpicks, gloves, knives, daggers,


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ouches [clasps], brooches, aglets, buttons of silk and silver, earthen pots, pins, points, hawks’ bells, papers both white and brown, and a thousand like things that might either be clean spared or else made within the realm sufficient for us” (1969: 63–4). The proper management of goods was not only prudent; it was patriotic. Through this project of self-distinction in the prudent management of goods, the middling sort could elevate itself over rich and poor alike. In terms of the cultural stereotypes of both groups, their bad credit, slothful idleness, and generally poor moral values left little to choose between them. This form of distinction was not deterred by the general financial insecurity of the middling sort itself. If one of their householders bankrupted himself through overspending or simple bad luck, then this “blame the victim” attitude only affirmed his moral failings or his lack of good sense. While alehouses of the poor and the extravagant fashions of the wealthy together offended Puritan taste, the bad credit of both groups posed a serious fiscal threat to a wider range of members of the middling sort, whether they were Puritan or not. Illegitimate children born in poverty raised their parish poor tax. Defaulted loans from a careless young aristocrat caused small tradesmen to go under. Issues of morality became indistinguishable from issues of finance. This brings us to Falstaff. The citizens’ desire to humiliate Falstaff proceeds from financial as well as moral grounds. More dangerous to Windsor prosperity than the inept attempts by this fat, old knight to seduce Mistresses Ford and Page is his broader significance as a figure of the fraud inherent to this economic system so dependent upon credit. As Charles Ross has noted, the Falstaff of Merry Wives represents a figure of fraud at least as much as a figure of carnival or of folk ritual (2003: 2). These overriding anxieties over credit provide perhaps the strongest connection between Merry Wives and the Henriad; for the implicit purpose of Falstaff’s arrival in Windsor is to make up some of the debt he incurred in London in Henry 4 part 1. As Nina Levine has convincingly argued for the Henriad, Falstaff’s bad credit foregrounds the moral and political credit of the Lancastrians, so that as Hal steps forward to make good on his word to “pay the debt I never promised” (Henry 4 part 1, 1.2.187), he affirms the value of the monarchy in terms of everyday credit practices familiar to his audience (Levine 2000: 414–17). Similarly, for Merry Wives, Falstaff’s bad credit foregrounds the threats to the moral and political credit of the middling sort, whose values he parodies in his ill-conceived plan to profit from the wives: “I am now about no waste; I am about thrift” (1.3.40–1). The credit relations explored in Merry Wives also implicate the monarchy, in the play’s presentation of the proper domestic management of the household as a model appropriate for the nation (Wall 2002: 124). This problem of credit complicates the functions described for Falstaff in his role as aristocrat. Following a seminal essay by Peter Erickson (1987), prominent critics have represented Falstaff as a stand-in for the aristocracy in the play’s production of its relationship with the middling sort (Helgerson 2000: 74; Berry 2001: 144–6; Ross 2003: 20; Moulton 2003: 237). According to this

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approach, the community’s victory over Falstaff valorizes citizen values over the predatory impulses of an unscrupulous elite, while Fenton’s marriage to Anne Page affirms an idealized union between the middle class and the aristocracy. This interpretation is not altogether inaccurate. Falstaff’s consistent hailing by Windsor citizens as “Sir John” suggests that his social identity as a knight remains secure in this play. But as an economic system based on lineage began to yield ground to a proto-capitalist system based on goods, the authority afforded to members of the gentry, especially fiscally irresponsible ones, according to their birth rank alone became less predictable. In Merry Wives, Falstaff and initially Fenton as well confirm stereotypes of prodigal gentry with bad credit. Mr. Page prohibits Fenton’s courtship to his daughter precisely because “he kept company with the wild Prince and Poins” (3.2.61). His morals, and therefore his credit, raise doubt: “he is of too high a region; he knows too much,” according to Mr. Page, who refuses permission for him to “knit a knot in his fortunes with a finger of my substance” (3.2.69–73). “Almost out at heels” (1.3.29) and unable to support his retinue, Sir John Falstaff must turn away Bardolph to serve the Host as a lowly tapster. By definition, the gentry performed no manual labor; and as Falstaff’s follower, Pistol expresses disdain for Bardolph’s employment as “base” (“O base Hungarian wight, wilt thou the spigot yield” (1.3 20)), and similarly refuses to bear a letter for Falstaff as a “base humor” detracting from his “havior of reputation” (1.3.78–9). Consistent with this attitude is Pistol’s exclamation in Henry V, “Base is the slave that pays” (2.2.86), that affects an aristocratic privilege ruinous to tradesmen and small merchants. This anti-work ethic does not promote confidence in the bottom line to industrious citizens. For a middling sort whose economic survival depends upon social and financial credit, an indigent knight such as Falstaff constitutes an “other” in much the same way, and for much the same reasons, as poor neighbors and vagrants. Falstaff’s social identity is not entirely fixed by his rank as knight. Falstaff is consistently addressed as “Sir John” by the citizens of Windsor, but he names himself “ ‘Jack,’ the most versatile and familiar name for every nameless hero of plebeian culture” (Bristol 1985: 205). Falstaff’s wooden cudgel (2.2.247) distinguishes him from gentlemen who bear swords, as does, in the Henriad, his close-fitting cap worn by apprentices and others below the rank of gentleman (Wiles 1987: 121–2). Wiles asserts that these externals identify him as a clown (1987: 125). He is a peculiarly urban clown for, reflecting on his desperate circumstances, Falstaff explicitly identifies himself as a cony-catcher. With his financial resources exhausted, he avows, “There is no remedy. I must conycatch, I must shift” (1.3.29). Like other cony-catchers, he works in a team, in this case comprising of Bardolph, Pistol, and Nym. Their inducement of Slender to drink while an undetermined member of the crew, probably Bardolph, steals his money constitutes the most common of cony-catching tricks (Greene 1591a: B1). Falstaff’s complaint that Bardolph’s “thefts were too open” (1.3.24) reveals his complicity; and his contempt for this affront to the artistry of the trade echoes other arrogant cony-catchers (Greene 1592b: B2). Like the cony-catchers described by Harman, Bardolph uses underground cant, such as “fap” for drunk


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and “cashiered” for robbed (1.1.147). These are amusingly mistaken by Slender for Latin. A production of an underworld in terms of popular culture is foregrounded by Falstaff’s association of Bardolph, whose face is red from drinking, with Robin Hood’s follower Scarlet, and of Nym as little John (1.1.145). The festive connection of these figures with underworld crime is especially relevant to their attempted theft of venison, the preferred feast food of Robin Hood’s men. While not explicitly cony-catching, this theft reflects contemporary illegal practice, for much of the venison sold on the black market in London came in fact from land surrounding Windsor castle (Berry 2001: 143; Theis 2001: 53). While Arthur Kinney interprets Falstaff’s financial straits as reflecting a poverty that was “among the court’s great failings” (1990: 227), I would argue instead that the intrusion of Falstaff and his thieving crew into Windsor deflects blame from the court, or any social institution, towards the poor themselves, whether indigent vagrants or down-at-heel gentry. Like the rogue pamphlets, Merry Wives uses Falstaff, together with Bardolph, Pistol, and Nym, to confirm what early moderns wished to believe about the poor. Resorting to cony-catching to fulfill their needs, they were idle, immoral, and lawless. This version of popular culture was itself only a form of fraud. The important point is not, finally, whether Falstaff is more representative of a prodigal gentry or the vagrant poor. What is most significant is how little functional difference separates these two social identities as filtered through the economic concerns of the middling sorts in Merry Wives. Members of both groups were likely to be frauds, with theatrically improvised identities designed to deceive the honest citizens. Greene’s cony-catcher passed himself off as a gentleman (1592b: B1); and Falstaff was not, apparently, the only indigent gentleman to commit highway robbery (Beier 1985: 137). Falstaff fully inhabits both social identities in his own imagination. In only a few lines after his selfdescription as a cony-catcher, he reinvents his imagined exploit in terms of the adventurous risks taken by a wealthy merchant trading to exotic ports, designating the wives as his “East and West Indies” (1.3.61). He is able to flatter Mrs. Ford with a line of a song from Philip Sidney’s courtly Astrophel and Stella (“Have I caught thee, my heavenly jewel?” (3.3.35)), and he is knowledgable in court apparel such as Venetian ship-tire and the semicircled farthingale (3.3.48, 53). Yet the title of “Sir” does not pay the bills, as not only the host but also the wives are well aware; for Mistress Page’s revenge for his assault on their honesty is to lead him on with delays until he is forced to pawn his horses (2.1.85). Falstaff is, then, a walking social contradiction. He is not exactly a poor vagrant – although he has no money, and he seems to lack a home outside of a tavern. As a knight, he is socially inferior to real aristocrats; and he does not possess enough money or lands to be truly prodigal. From the perspective of the middling sorts, these flagrant contradictions are subsumed in his function as an Other through which they generated their own social identity. With no dependable credit to their names at all, vagrants and knights alike provided a convenient foil to the sensible management of goods through which the middling sort dignified its own practical virtues.

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As Muldrew has demonstrated, the financial stability of worthy householders was sometimes far less secure than they would admit; and for some of them, a demeanor of prudent good sense also represented a theatrical role necessary to attract needed credit. This fundamental insecurity provides a context through which to interpret Mr. Ford’s hysterical outbursts. If his wife had been untrustworthy, there would indeed have been a “hole in his best coat” (3.5.122) in at least two senses: as a form of burglary strongly associated with sexual violation (Dubrow 1999: 36), and as that equally uncontrollable sexual hole of his wife genitalia. There is a third sense as well: dishonest acts by any member of Ford’s family would cause money to fall from his pocket by detracting from his household’s credit. Ironically, his repeated loss of face to the members of his community, as they observe in disgust his futile attempts to discover his wife’s lover, endangers his household’s reputation. Ford’s apparent paranoia discourages their all-important trust in his good sense. Evans comments, “Why this is lunatics; this is as mad as a mad dog”; and Shallow agrees: “Indeed, Master Ford, this is not well, indeed” (4.2.107–8). In the course of communal bonding against Falstaff as a common target, Mr. Ford seems to have recovered his status with his neighbors by the end of the play. Yet the deep anxiety about one’s local credit continues to haunt the play, as an aspect of the inherent vulnerability of goods to loss. While Mr. Page models supreme confidence in his wife and, by implication, in her stewardship of his goods and his reputation, Mr. Ford’s distress also eloquently evokes the anxieties circulating among early modern householders: “This ’tis to be married! This ’tis to have linen and buck-baskets!” (3.5.124).

Old wives’ tales As the protectors of goods so necessary to the reputation of a household, Mistresses Ford and Page assume center stage as the “merry wives” of the play’s title. Their prominence reflects the nascent consumer economy of this play so filled with goods – buckbaskets, linens, aqua vitae, pepperboxes, farthingales, birding pieces, kiln holes, trunks, chests, and coffers. Especially impressive critical work has recently explored the implications of their enhanced status. Wendy Wall has discussed the “fantasy of a socially empowering housewifery” increasingly central to the concept of a national identity as conceived by the middling sort (2002: 6, 123). Falstaff’s anxieties about being “heated, stewed, and cooled” were only an extreme version of feelings shared by other early moderns, since wives took charge not only of the goods the household, but also of the humoral bodies within it (Wall 2002: 119). Similarly emphasizing the importance of the domestic sphere, Natasha Korda focuses on the wives’ discriminating gaze, the “judicious oeillades” mistaken by Falstaff for sexual forwardness (2002: 85). Drawing on Norbert Elias’s history of the civilizing process, Korda describes how the wives turn this gaze upon themselves to internalize a self-discipline obviating the need for external supervision. Pamela Allen Brown stresses the agency of these wives as they take over the regime of control marked by female laughter through a form


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of jesting played out on the stage of the early modern neighborhood (2003: 44–5). The wives’ formidable housewifery converts Falstaff into domestic goods, melted “in his own grease” (2.1.68) as he shoehorns his massive girth into a laundry basket to avoid exposure to Mr. Ford’s wrath. No match for the witty wives, Falstaff is not only shamed but terrified. As Wall observes, “In Falstaff’s imaginative universe, the buckbasket mutates into a limbeck, a dairy cask, a bathtub, and a cookpot, all offering brands of household torture” (2002: 119). This account of empowered housewifery is central to the play’s elevation of the domestic sphere as the privileged realm of the middling sort. This representation of Mistresses Ford and Page gives shape to citizen values, particularly the bourgeois7 ideal of the feminine, in terms of the goods they so efficiently manage. The relatively rapid accumulation of goods available to the middling sort – pewter, window glazing, tapestries – provides a historical context in which housekeeping assumes new and specifically social meanings. The supervision of property, such as linen that must be washed and bleached, becomes a preoccupation that confers distinction on a middling sort now prosperous enough to obtain quantities of linen but not yet wealthy enough to affect disregard for its care. It elevates the middling social fractions above those lower sorts who had no linen and who in fact were likely to launder the linen belonging to others. Wall claims that the buckbasket scene undoes an early modern stereotype of laundresses of Dachett Mead as prostitutes, their reputations metaphorically soiled by the dirt they washed out of clothing (2002: 121). I wonder if the allusion instead confirms them in their lowness as, driven to prostitution by a desperate economic need, they set off by contrast the virtuous and prosperous wives. Like them, Falstaff figuratively reduces himself to dirt through his attempt to prostitute himself. The laundering of Falstaff stages, in tangible and corporeal fashion, the widespread analogy, discussed above, describing the vagrant poor as dirt, as “filth and vermin,” as an “infection to the whole body of the realm” (Lambarde 1962: 171). The fact that he so richly deserves this treatment for his appalling indiscretion affirms this representation of Falstaff, and others like him, as the metaphorical dirt of the realm. The conycatcher has been caught, and by his own conies, too. As the wives cleanse Windsor of a dirty Falstaff, the play seems, at least initially, to sanction the wives’ domestic management, investing it with a wider social function beyond their own houses. While both wives share this common ability to manage goods, Mistress Quickly’s description of their differences to Falstaff suggests ideological differences within the middling sort. If indeed Mistress Quickly is embroidering on an existing contrast, Mistress Ford self-identifies with the aristocracy, the “knights and lords, and gentlemen, with their coaches . . . coach after coach, letter after letter, gift after gift,” while Mistress Page, who “will not miss you morning nor evening prayer,” self-identifies with the godly sort (2.2.61–2, 91). They internalize these differences to engage in contrasting forms of self-scrutiny. Mistress Ford is angered by Falstaff’s duplicity in wooing them both, while Mistress Page examines whether she has been, perhaps unthinkingly, complicit in

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attracting his attention (Hall 1998: 136). These differences usefully reveal diversities within the middling sort also observed elsewhere (Kegl 1994; Berry 2001). Little attention has been paid, however, to their differences from the maids and domestics of the lower sort, through whom their empowered housewifery takes on ideological significance. This section explores how Mistress Quickly and Mother Prat (actually Falstaff in disguise) offset this feminine ideal, to restore to visibility the low domain absent from recent critical representations. These social contrasts between the women of the low and the middling sorts also implicate Shakespeare’s own fictions. It is through the agency of “old wives” that oral tales retain their vitality: the exuberant tales circulated by Mistress Quickly; the bequeathing of farts by Gillian of Brainford (the quarto’s name for Falstaff’s assumed female persona); the knowledge of witchcraft passed among the Windsor witches less than two decades earlier. All of these narrative acts signify a degraded version of the feminine. Rather than Titania’s magical beauty, these women possess the debased and grotesquely physical body through which early modern ideologies denigrated the poor. Moreover, all of their narrative acts are fraudulent. Mistress Quickly’s inventive lies to Falstaff, Gillian of Brainford’s willing of an impossible number of farts, the witches’ claims to cause human pain by pricking a wax doll: through these hoaxes the play extends its production of a fraudulent popular culture into the domain of old wives’ tales. From this domain emerges the preposterous tale of Herne the hunter, transmitted by “superstitious, idle-headed eld . . . for a truth” (4.4.34, 36) through which the Windsor citizens perpetrate their own fraud on Falstaff. As the citizens collaborate in using this tale, at the instigation of Mistress Page, to humiliate Falstaff, they also expose the absurdity of belief in ghosts and fairies. Even as clear-eyed and forward-thinking Windsor citizens cannot resist immersing themselves in an old legend they profess to despise, so the play Merry Wives shows its similar entanglements in the old wives’ tales that have become an inextricable part of Shakespeare’s own narrative act. Mistress Quickly plays a crucial role in defining, by contrast, the bourgeois feminine ideal celebrated in Merry Wives. As a domestic worker employed by Dr. Caius, Mistress Quickly shows a similar care for property shared with the citizen wives; but with a difference: the property she cares for is not her own. As she informs Simple, “I wash, wring, brew, bake, scour, dress meat and drink, make the beds, and do all myself. . . . You shall find it great charge – and to be up early, and down late” (1.4.84–9). Her chastity, unlike that of the citizen wives, is not above suspicion. She appears, in fact, to be providing sexual favors. A sexual interpretation of her surprised response (“Are you advised o’ that?”) to Simple’s innocent “ ’Tis a great charge to come under one body’s hand” (1.4.87) is supported in the Quarto by her bawdy phrasing of her claim to keep Caius’ secrets (“For I tell you, friend, he puts all his privities in me” (B3)). In this same scene in the Folio, when Dr. Caius finds Simple suspiciously hiding in his closet, her assertion of innocence of any sexual involvement (“I’ll ne’er put my finger in the fire an need not” (1.4.75)) conveys a revealing reluctance to put her chastity to the flame test imposed upon Falstaff at the end of the play.


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Her evident sexual activities contribute amusing irony to her self-presentation as a guardian of citizen morals in her censure of Evans as a bad moral influence on William for teaching him Latin: “You do ill to teach the child such words. He teaches him to hick and to hack, which they’ll do fast enough of themselves, and to call ‘whorum.’ Fie upon you!” (4.1.56–7). Even as she expresses moral outrage, the rapidity with which she translates Latin into sexual terms reveals her own actively sexual perspective. In her linguistic and apparently erotic errancy (Parker 1987: 27–31), she serves as a baseline by which to measure the sophistication and self-control of Mistresses Page and Ford. Mistress Quickly’s dubious sexual values are, in this play, an aspect of a low social status that provides her with the mobility to travel between households. This mobility as a lively go-between renders her central to the operations of Windsor, including the plots contrived in Merry Wives. She repeatedly purveys important information between characters. She reverses the direction of cheerful graft to exploit the out-of-towners. She promises to speak well to Ann Page for all three suitors – for Slender, Dr. Caius, and Fenton – but repeatedly accepts money from Fenton. She accepts Falstaff’s purse for commending him to the wives, whose irresistible desires and distinctive excellencies she has conveyed so persuasively (2.2). While she is in no sense poor or stupid, she yet commands little respect from the wives themselves. In her description of Mistress Quickly as a “foolish carrion” or rotten flesh (3.3.164), Mistress Ford distinguishes the careful self-discipline of the wives’ bodies from the abundant fleshliness attributed to hers. If overlaps between plays work on an associative level, then Mistress Quickly’s occupation as tavern-keeper in the Henriad supports her narrative function in Merry Wives. Korda contrasts Mistress Quickly and the merry wives in her treatment by Falstaff in Henry 4 part 2, in which “she represents the epitome of the insufficiently vigilant and hence unwittingly lascivious wife” (2002: 109). Just as significant, Mistress Quickly’s role as a tavern-keeper places her squarely within a popular narrative tradition circulated in taverns and especially in the alehouses forming a refuge for the lower sort. Printed tales adapted from an oral tradition were almost invariably given to the homely female narrator, as discussed in Chapter 3. The smith’s wife in Peele’s Old Wives Tale, the garrulous ale wife Mother Bunch, the female tavernkeeper of Robin Good-Fellow, His Mad Prankes and Merry Jests: these homely female narrators enabled literate early moderns to enjoy oral tales even as they rehearsed their sense of superiority to the low social fractions represented as circulating them. Early moderns required the invention of a Mistress Quickly as a narrator of low tales. In addition to her inventive lies to Falstaff, her relish for engaging in oral accounts appears in her declaration of Anne’s admiration of the wart above his eye to Fenton: “Well, thereby hangs a tale” (1.4.130). Her malapropism in her praise of Mistress Page as “fartuous a civil modest wife” (2.2.90) links her narrative to the bodily farts of other female narrators of low social status, such as Mother Bunch whose fart blew down St. Paul’s steeple (Pasquils 1629: A2). This association of farts with women of the lower sort may also have been influenced by a non-literary practice of cursing. The Stratford church

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record of 1592 relates how one Elizabeth Wheeler, “otherwise Rundles,” when presented for “continually brawling and abusing and not attending church,” erupted in a fart-curse, as she “brawled with these words: ‘Goodes woondes, a plague a God on you all, a fart on ons ars for you’ ” (Brinkworth 1972: 128). Sketched in lightly with Mistress Quickly, this association of farts and old wives’ tales significance is more pronounced in the person of the aunt of Mistress Ford’s maid, under whose guise Falstaff makes his second escape from Ford and his search party. Ford calls her a witch, an “old, cozening quean,” and a polecat (4.2.149, 162), the same word Mistress Quickly uses to refer to prostitutes in the Latin lesson. Mistress Ford calls her “Mother Prat” after her prominent buttocks. In the Folio, Mistress Ford refers to her as “the fat woman of Brentford” (4.2.62); in the 1602 Quarto, she is more specifically named as “Gillian of Brainford” (1910: F1v, F2). This name evokes a low form of oral authorship. In Robert Copland’s poem “Jyl of Braintford’s Testament,” printed in two editions in the 1560s, this alewife bequeaths twenty-six and one-half farts to such annoying persons as those who drink without paying, who do not provide for their households in winter, and who lend potentially harmful weapons (1993: 164–86). The absence of any mention of material goods in her will suggests her poverty; and even her payment to the curate who writes her will is rendered in farts (he gets one and one-half farts). Gillian of Brainford (or alternatively Brentford) had become a popular figure by the late sixteenth century (Freedman 1994: 207; Helgerson 2000: 67–8). Henslowe’s Diary mentions a now-lost play of Friar Fox and Gillian of Branford (1961: 104); and Nashe refers specifically to her will as reflecting inferior literary taste in his prefatory material both to Menaphon (1589: 3.234) and Summers Last Will and Testament (1600: 3.314). In the later anonymous Westward for Smelts (1620), Gillian of Brentford takes on an alternative occupation as fishwife as she recounts an apparently autobiographical tale of raucous adultery set, in fact, in Windsor, where she deludes a jealous husband by taking his wife’s place in bed while his wife engages in sexual relations with another man. Does this setting in Windsor reflect in any way upon Merry Wives? Perhaps Windsor was chosen as the setting for Westward for Smelts primarily because of its convenient location near Brentford, a town whose looser regulations and out-of-the-way location rendered it a haven for adulterous liaisons (Morgan-Russell 1999: 73). A previous version of this tale circulated orally may have influenced the cuckoldry plot of Merry Wives; conversely, the cuckoldry plot of Merry Wives may have influenced this choice of location in Westward (Morgan-Russell 1999: 82). Whichever the chronology, Westward for Smelts relies on a persistent convention establishing Gillian as a narrator figure whose allegedly coarse aesthetic served as a pretext for the printing of low tales for the pleasure of more educated readers. Like Mother Bunch, “the fat woman of Brentford” and “Gillian of Brainford” represent an agenda-driven caricature of women of the lower sort imagined as narrating unrefined tales. Their farts implicate their tales within an over-abundant bodiliness that delineates, by contrast, the refined bourgeois


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feminine ideal. The degradation of this oral tradition through the prominence of their farts also delineates, by contrast, a primarily masculine practice, not only of the printed word but also of the professional theater. Ford’s physical abuse of the person he believes to be the fat woman of Brentford brings into the play a reference to another oral tradition of knowledges circulated primarily among women of the lower sort. In addition to a rag, a baggage, a polecat, and a runnion, he denounces her as a witch (4.2.162). In 1584, Reginald Scot repeatedly identified witchcraft, in fact, as a form of old wives’ tale: believers “go to their grandams maids to learne more old wives tales, whereof this art of witchcraft is contrived,” while “the common people have beene so assotted and bewitched” with tales “they have heard from old doting women, or from their mothers maids” (1964: 388–9). In Ford’s mind, these superstitions seem to oscillate between a con game and a mystery. While he condemns her as a “cozening quean” or a con artist, his curses also betray his lingering sense of actual power in her fortune-telling: “We are simple men; we do not know what’s brought to pass under the profession of fortune-telling. She works by charms, by spells, by th’ figure, and such daubery as this beyond our element. We know nothing” (4.2.154). Simple’s later surreptitious attempt to consult her, through Falstaff, to determine if it was Nym who in fact stole his chain reveals that such superstitions remained alive in Windsor, although those who believed them were represented, literally, as “simple.” These alleged superstitions remained capable of arousing sufficient hostility to allow Ford to roundly beat this person without restraint from the watching community, composed of the wives, Shallow, Evans, Page, and Caius. This social divide complicates Helgerson’s claim that Falstaff’s disguise as the old woman of Brentford implicates Mistresses Ford and Page in “the illicit and mysterious world of wise women and witches,” a world “of concerted and female power” that represents the authentic source of Ford’s fear (2000: 68, 71). Scot was quite explicit about the low status of these women; and Deborah Willis has demonstrated that witchcraft practices more often separated than united women from different social fractions. In a primal scene of witchcraft allegations, an old woman who muttered or cursed a well-to-do wife for refusing her food might later be accused of causing any harm that might occur to that household (Willis 1995: 31–2). Based on an actual witch trial, a town’s treatment of Mother Sawyer in the somewhat later Witch of Edmonton provides a literary example of this pattern (Kinney 1998: xx). While the Reformation influenced the contemporary witch craze by labeling any spirits, such as ghosts or fairies, not sent by God as Satanic (Willis 1995: 91), the social stratification occurring with such force by the late sixteenth century located previously widely shared superstitions and magical powers in the realm of women of low social status. Ford’s allegations of witchcraft had specific and contemporary resonances for Windsor, the scene of a series of well-publicized witch trials less than two decades earlier. In 1579, four women were executed as witches. They were primarily old, poor, and disliked by their neighbors. The unfortunately named

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Mother Devell was “a very poor woman,” and Mother Margaret dwelled in the Windsor almshouse (Rosen 1991: 86). According to an ostler in Windsor, Elizabeth Stile, aged 65, would often come to his master’s house for charity. One day when she was late, she became angry when there was little food provided for her. Soon after, the ostler developed an ache in his bones that was relieved when he scratched Mother Stile to lift this curse. The practice that caused special concern to contemporaries about these particular women of Windsor, however, was their use of sympathetic magic. Meeting secretly in the saw pits in the forest, they pricked images of red wax fashioned by a fourth woman, Mother Dutten, in the shape of those whom they wished to die. These women confessed to directing their magic against those primarily of the more prosperous sort or those who worked for them: a farmer, a maid of a household, a past mayor, and two butchers. Reginald Scot describes the “terror and astonishment of manie thousands” over the potential power attributed to these “three images of late yeeres found in a doonghill” (1964: 391). The privy council was particularly concerned with the possible use of such sympathetic magic against the queen’s own person (Helgerson 2000: 206). These Windsor witches, whose manipulation of representations held such potential to harm even the queen herself, suggests the maid’s aunt, whom Ford called “witch,” as a low other for the playwright. In a sense, playwrights also deal in sympathetic magic through creating representations that also exert compelling power. From Midsummer to Macbeth to the Tempest, Shakespeare’s development of the analogy between magic and his art both elevates, and potentially contaminates, his own form of authorship. These degraded social meanings attributed to old wives’ tales through the grotesque figure of a Mother Prat extend outward to implicate the production of popular culture in the fairy play of Act 5. As numerous critics have noted, Falstaff’s cross-dressing as an old woman effeminizes him in a form of degradation associated with the charivari enacted near the end of the play (Marcus 1991: 175; Korda 2002: 101; Moulton 2003: 239). Against the frequent claim that this concluding performance provides a point of unity for the different factions of Windsor (Marcus 1991: 17; Kegl 1994: 2696; Berry 2001: 140), I argue that, on the contrary, the casting and even the initial concept are predicated on social differences. As Mistress Page turns to the tale of Herne the hunter as a means of conning Falstaff into one last assignation, she first expertly enacts the role of storyteller, and then rejects that role as she carefully delineates her social and intellectual differences from its earlier tellers: There is an old tale goes that Herne the hunter, Sometime a keeper here in Windsor Forest, Doth all the winter time at still midnight Walk round about an oak with great ragg’d horns; And there he blasts the trees, and takes the cattle, And makes the milch-kine yield blood, and shakes a chain In a most hideous and dreadful manner.

MRS. PAGE:


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You have heard of such a spirit, and well you know The superstitious, idle-headed eld Received, and did deliver to our age, This tale of Herne the hunter for a truth. (4.4.26–36) The first seven lines of this passage weave a spell of pleasurable terror that is the essence of ghost stories. Especially thrilling is the detail that he “makes the milch-kine yield blood.” Then, as if catching herself, she addresses the group as would a commentator or an early sociologist rather than as a participant in this oral tradition. Her description affords little respect to those who transmitted this tale: they were “eld,” and the association with “eld” and “idle-headed” suggests senility. Rather than creators, they were merely transmitters, receiving and then delivering the narrative without any inventions of their own. Most damning, they were ignorant enough to believe this tale “for a truth.” This representation implies the superiority of Mistress Page and her audience, consisting of the Pages, the Fords, and Hugh Evans. Unlike the “eld,” they are youthful and modern. Rather than superstitious and idle-headed, they are rational pragmatists, their minds laboring with useful schemes, their feet firmly on the ground, and never so foolish as to believe the tale of Herne the hunter. Mistress Page’s confident knowledge that the “eld” truly believed this tale itself exposes her alienation from these traditional storytellers. Their level of credulity is impossible to determine, since conveying a sense of the veracity of ghost stories, no matter how fantastic, was a convention designed to elicit a frisson from listeners. This supposed belief in absurd superstition is not limited to the “idle-headed eld.” “Many” still act as if they accept these stories. As Mr. Page observes, “Why, yet there want not many that do fear/In deep of night to walk by this Herne’s Oak” (4.4.37–8). Who are these ignorant souls who still fear, or pretend to fear, a walk by Herne’s Oak at midnight? And who would have told this old tale to Mistress Page? Her most apparent contact with such a low narrator would have been through unnamed women of a lower sort, women such as Mistress Quickly, who could tell a tale even of the wart over Fenton’s eyebrow, and the fat woman of Brentford, who traded in superstitions and the fears they elicited. It was to these old wives to whom such superstitious tales, in their rough and unedited form, in some sense, most belonged. The source of Mistress Page’s alienation would seem then to be social as well as intellectual, directed towards a low aesthetic circulated by the allegedly ignorant poor. The unlike treatment of the Mistresses Quickly and Brentford suggests conflicting relationships among the middling sort to the oral tales traditionally performed by old wives in front of a winter’s fire. While neither woman earned respect, the old woman of Brentford, in the person of Falstaff, was beaten as an outsider, while Mistress Quickly was readily absorbed into the citizen enactment of this tale as the fairy queen herself. However much she rendered herself of practical use to the citizens of Windsor, Mistress Quickly yet retained an identification with the low – as did tales of Herne the hunter and fairies.

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Fairies The fairy dance performed at the conclusion of Merry Wives follows this pattern of appropriation and rejection characterizing Windsor’s relationships with Mistresses Quickly and Brentford. Windsor citizens appropriate fairies to enact what is most useful for their own needs and values. When it is profitable to them, the Pages exploit the low association of fairies with sexual trespass. While Ann Page’s elopement with Fenton enables a companionate marriage rather than an illicit affair, the schemes of all three Pages, differing only in their choice of suitor, show the persistent connection of fairies with evasions of societal rules. For all three, Ann’s slipping away to marry a suitor in the midst of the fairy dance reveals a shared understanding of the sexual meanings of “going with the fairies.” As a side-effect, the unintended elopements of Dr. Caius and Slender with “great lubberly” boys (5.5.170) suggest a potential for same-sex relations in this fairy forest (Wall 2003: 386). Yet in a striking rejection of sexual errancy, Windsor fairies also punish rather than enact lechery. Played primarily by children, fairies discipline Falstaff for his sexual desire, as they pinch him, burn his fingers with tapers, and turn him around as they dance to these lyrics: “Fie on sinful fantasy!/Fie on lust and luxury” (5.5.90–1). In the Folio version, the fairy queen’s orders similarly reject low values. Instead of invading domestic spaces to rape, steal, or even to bless sexual consummations, these fairies are directed to engage in patriotic industry: to clean the chimneys of Windsor Castle, to reward or punish domestic maids, and to give the castle itself a thorough tidying, as the queen, played by Mistress Quickly, urges them on: “The several chairs of order look you scour/With juice of balm and every precious flow’r” (5.5.61–2). Rather than producing a popular culture associated with fraudulence or crime, this Windsor entertainment uses fairies to preserve and protect property in the interests of their rightful owners. But why include fairies at all? Since there was no mention of fairies in Mistress Page’s narrative of Herne the hunter, their inclusion suggests the continuing homogenization of figures representing a popular culture: fairies belong with the ghosts denigrated by Mistress Page as foolish superstitions circulated by the “idleheaded eld.” Despite their expressed contempt for such ignorant beliefs, however, the citizens of Windsor enact their roles with unusual enthusiasm and creativity. From the simple tale of Herne the hunter, Mistress Page and her friends elaborate an entire script complete with music, dancing, and costumes, and, without any pretext from the tale itself, they add fairies. Excellent studies have ably described what Windsor’s production of popular culture, complete with fairies, ghosts, and hobgoblins, suggests about the evolving self-narratives of the middling sort of Windsor in terms of the aristocracy (Erickson 1987: 124–6; Kegl 1994: 262; Helgerson 2000: 71–6). Little attention, however, has yet been paid to the meanings of this strange little drama in terms of a complex and highly ambivalent relationshipin-process between the citizens of Windsor and traditions associated not only with the “idle-headed eld,” but also with the lower sorts whose exclusion formed such an important aspect of their own self-definition.


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Like the artisans’ performance concluding A Midsummer Night’s Dream, this entertainment is also a hybrid of two forms, in this case of the low charivari and the elite masque. Rather than foregrounding the hybridity of the larger play or of early modern subjects as in Midsummer, however, Windsor’s fairy play is designed to generate forms of distinction differentiating the middling sort from low and high alike. The means of self-differentiation performed by the middling sort is revealed through their adaptations of each dramatic form. As critics have ably discussed, the citizens perform a charivari or skimmington as a communal form of humiliation of Falstaff for offending social norms (Parten 1985: 199; Marcus 1991: 175; Korda 2002: 101). Since charivaris were usually directed against wives who had beaten or cuckolded their husbands, the play’s punishment of a male primarily by females reverses the usual gender roles. Berry lists its common features in this way: “processions of armed men, the wearing or display of animals’ horns or heads, and mock proclamations, songs, and verbal horseplay” (2001: 148). Characterized by raucous laughter, charivaris were loud and crude events customarily accompanied by “rough music” made by kettles and frying-pans.8 Implicating Falstaff’s first two ordeals, charivaris might also conclude in ducking an offending wife in the local pond or displaying a crossdressed man playing the “wife,” beating the “husband” with a ladle. As a culmination of such events, Falstaff’s placement of the horns conventionally displayed in a charivari on his own head only augments the humiliation he faces in front of the entire community. Despite these structural similarities, however, the charivari staged in Merry Wives is far removed from the boisterous event described in historical accounts. It is uniquely bourgeois. Windsor has tamed the traditionally coarse charivari into a children’s performance, staged before the gaze of proud and indulgent parents. There is no charivari on record that mentions any participants costumed as fairies. Children were never featured as participants. This strikingly unusual adaptation reveals not only the homogenization of popular culture, through which very different practices become mingled under one category of the “low,” but also an urge to create roles appropriate to children. The community takes their children’s achievements seriously. To sing and dance together and on cue, they must attend rehearsals conducted by their schoolmaster and parson Hugh Evans for, as Mr. Ford remarks, “The children must be/Practised well to this, or they’ll ne’er do’t” (4.5.63–4). Just before their performance, Evans’ direction conveys his tension that they might fall short of a polished performance: “Trib, trib fairies! Come! And remember your parts.” The reluctance of the children to project their voices motivates his anxious direction to “Be pold, I pray you.” They must watch him for cues: “Follow me into the pit, and when I give the watch-ords, do as I pid you. Come, come; trib, Trib!” (5.4.1–3). This degree of stage anxiety – or indeed any stage anxiety at all – is utterly foreign to accounts of charivaris, loud and rowdy affairs conducted by adults intending to shame, not to impress. Creating rough music by banging utensils on pans did not require watching for cues from a conductor. This citizen intervention in the concept of charivari foregrounds the importance of well-trained children in the

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self-narratives of the middling sort. As the children burn Falstaff’s fingers with tapers and turn him about, they dance and sing in what emerges as an uncannily graceful performance of torture. As their discipline of Falstaff’s “sinful fantasy” surely impresses in their memories the absolute necessity for sexual chastity, it also subordinates his very real pain to the demands of the aesthetic. The children’s role in this charivari not only validates the imposition of physical harm on anyone, whether vagrant or knight, who violates the moral norms of Windsor; it also teaches them that this pain does not matter. This emphasis on the children’s rehearsed performances as fairies who sing and dance is more appropriate to the elite genre of masque often described as shaping this event (Pittenger 1991: 402; Katz 1995: 89; Cohen 1997: 455). Especially indicative of this genre is the fairy queen herself, presented in pageants staged in front of Queen Elizabeth at Kenilworth, Woodstock, and Ditchley (Woodcock 2004: 43–50). Giorgio Melchiori has argued that Merry Wives in fact incorporated an earlier courtly entertainment performed, or intended for performance, in front of the Queen at Windsor Castle (1994: 93–5). From these masque elements, Richard Helgerson interprets this figure of a fairy queen who “hates sluts and sluttery” as a staging of Queen Elizabeth as an “instrument of its reforming action” (2000: 72–3); and Peter Erickson describes this courtly masque as uniting the bourgeois to courtly values “in a celebration of national identity that is aristocratic rather than egalitarian in orientation” (1987: 126). This once-entrenched perception has recently undergone revision. For Wendy Wall, this fairy performance, “campy, stylized, and clearly over the top” parodies rather than glorifies aristocratic values to enact an “ ‘Englishness of everyday life’ ” that is solidly middle class (2002: 114, 125). In a sense, this fairy masque accommodates both approaches. The citizens of Windsor adapt the masque’s usual function of reflecting an aristocracy’s own idealized image to itself, to serve the agenda of the middling sort, to reflect its own idealized image in a performance elevating the particular value of their industry to the monarchy and to the realm. As familiar figures shared in a national past, fairies conveniently designate their patriotic Englishness. In ordering her fairies to scour the chairs of the Order of the Garter, this fairy queen shows a care for property which forms an essential aspect of the management of goods that, in theory, distinguishes the middling sort from both the poor and the aristocracy alike. As domestic management expands outward to form a political imperative for cleansing the realm, the queen of England becomes a citizen housekeeper writ large, with the entire realm in her charge. Rather than writing themselves according to aristocratic values, the citizens of Windsor claim the queen, as well as the nation itself, as most properly their own (Dubrow 1999: 79). In the process, the citizens’ play “nominates the values of an emergent middle class as the foundational world for which everyone supposedly yearns” (Wall 2002: 125). This production of a popular culture also exposes, however, a basic ideological contradiction that splits apart this “foundational world for which everyone yearns” as already impossible to attain. Rather than the merry wives or their


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husbands, the primary actors who perform this masque are drawn from the very sorts that the middling sort excluded in its own self-definition. The casting of Pistol, Evans, and Mistress Quickly in the speaking parts establishes a distance – a safe space of deniability – between the performance and the more dignified citizens of Windsor. Each of these three represents a specific and deprecatory aspect of the play’s production of popular culture. Appearing unexpectedly among the citizens of Windsor in the 1623 Folio directions (Shakespeare 1968: 59), Pistol evokes the popular culture circulated in alehouses by the presumably criminal poor depicted by the illustrations prefacing the ballad of Robin Goodfellow; and in fact Pistol assumes the disguise of a hobgoblin, like Robin Goodfellow. While a more sympathetic figure given an important function in Windsor, as a Welshman, the parson-schoolmaster Hugh Evans was strongly associated with fairylore and superstitions potentially contaminated by Catholicism (Buccola 2003). Finally, and perhaps most problematically, the casting of Mistress Quickly instead of the original choice of Ann Page as the fairy queen foregrounds the low social groups most likely to circulate fairy-tales – not only the “idle-headed eld” but also old wives. As the continuing stratification of social groups redefined the social meanings of housekeeping, the domestic sphere itself became fissured between citizen wives and low wage-earners. As Dr. Caius’s paid housekeeper, Mistress Quickly has perhaps less in common with the merry wives than with the potentially neglectful maids of Windsor Castle. While the fairies’ imagined cleaning signifies the loyal industry and general usefulness to the monarchy of the middling sort, the labor of these maids who might leave the fires unraked and the hearths unswept must be motivated by fairy pinches that would leave them, according to the fairy queen’s instructions, “as blue as bilberry” (5.5.41–2). As an integral part of Windsor’s discursive modes of self-distinction, the valorization of property, of monarchy, and of nationalism was an ideological effect of the social stratification in full force by the late sixteenth century. As Wall has recently pointed out, Merry Wives also demonstrates resistance to this production of a nation according to citizen values, through the “uncivil emotions – mirth, aggression, pretense, shame – that stray outside the bounds of moderation,” as the citizens engage in a theatricality “that makes identities extremely hard to control” (2003: 378). Restating Wall’s insight in slightly different terms, I also perceive a resistance to the self-narrative through which the middling sort established its particular value. To exhibit common sense and good judgement, to display a careful balance between conspicuous thrift and conspicuous consumption, to promote a wife’s reputation for sound domestic management in a culture of credit: these imperatives themselves constituted a theatrical role sometimes at variance with the practices of individual households. Allowing for little variation, this role must at times have seemed constricting, sometimes stressful and at other times a little boring. The citizens’ joyful immersion of themselves in the punishment of Falstaff as Herne the hunter, complete with singing and dancing fairies, is utterly at odds with their roles as solid credit risks. While the speaking parts are left to those of lower status, the citizens of Windsor invest –

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or from a perspective of sound common sense, they waste – considerable time and thought in planning the moment of Falstaff’s discovery, in devising the fairies’ scripts, in providing the props of the horns and chains that Mistress Quickly delivers to Falstaff. While their short play elevates the industrious values of the middling sort, their decision to concoct such a play, to be acted out in the middle of the night in a forest outside of town, defies good judgement. Instead, it demonstrates a shared desire for a pleasurable release from their own self-invention. Perhaps this desire accounts for the casting of Mistress Quickly as the fairy queen. As critics have noted, the implied analogy of this ignorant woman of questionable sexual values to Queen Elizabeth would hardly be flattering (Freedman 1994: 197; Wall 2003: 389). Perhaps the implied analogy of Mistress Quickly to the exemplary citizen wife is similarly designed not only to present, but also to parody, this feminine ideal. Perhaps Mistresses Ford and Page, the probable inventors of Mistress Quickly’s script, used this play to express their own resistance to the unflagging attention required to monitor the continual acts of scouring and polishing necessary for keeping up appearances. This resistance to the bourgeois ideal moves into outright protest in the Quarto. Set in a less defined and more urban location possibly in or near London, the 1602 Quarto version is more representative of citizen comedy. Less friendly to the court, the Quarto appeals more to a middling sort of urban audience (Marcus 1991: 177). The Quarto places more stress on economic concerns. For example, setting the discovery of Simple in his counting house (Shakespeare 1910: B3) instead of his closet leads Caius to suspect him as a thief rather than as Mistress Quickly’s current sexual interest (1.4.32, 45). The most concentrated changes appear in the final scene, in which the Folio’s Herne becomes the Quarto’s Horne the hunter. The tale of Horne is explicitly a ghost story, told by “women to affright their litle children” (F3). There is no Herne’s oak in the Quarto. Instead, the wives arrange for Falstaff to meet them in a field. Pistol does not appear in the citizens’ play. Speaking parts are given only to Mistress Quickly as the fairy queen and to Hugh Evans, who is disguised as a satyr and addressed as Puck. Most important, instead of tidying up Windsor Castle, these fairies are directed to punish the undesirables of the city. Rather than the poor, these undesirables are those who disturb and potentially oppress vagrants and citizens alike. On the fairy queen’s orders, Puck first instructs the fairy Peane to pinch lazy maids in “countrie houses” instead of Windsor Castle, and then he instructs the fairy Pead to punish persons specifically associated with finance: Where is Pead? go you & see where Brokers sleep, And Foxe-eyed Seriants with their mase, Goe laie the Proctors in the street, And pinch the lowsie Seriants face: Spare none of these when they are a bed, But such whose nose lookes plew and red. (G2v)


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The term “broker” was used contemptuously to refer to peddlers of commodities or dealers in second-hand goods; and the use of the term “brokery” to mean “cozening” and “forfeiting” indicates a common opinion of their dishonesty (OED: “broker,” “brokery”). In these lines they are, at least metaphorically, asleep “in bed” with serjeants at mace, a term referring to an “inferior executive officer carrying a mace as a badge of office” (OED: “sergeant serjeant”). A heavy staff or club, the mace conveyed a threat of force to any who would resist the serjeant’s commands, most commonly offenders arrested or summoned before the court (OED: “mase,” “mace”). This passage represents these serjeants as contaminating (covered by lice) and crafty (“foxe-eyed”); and it is for their squalid persons and dishonest dealings that they deserve the fairy’s pinches on their faces. Also punished were proctors who, among other duties, also collected tithes for the churches (OED: “proctor”). Brokers, serjeants at mace, proctors: these were common figures to the commerce of cities and market towns. They represented the harmful and threatening side of an increasingly commercial economy: brokers could cheat honest citizens; serjeants at mace could arrest them; and the proctors could appear at a citizen’s door to collect just when available resources were low. All three embody the dangers of market economics. In Puck’s orders to Pead, the citizens’ play registers a protest against the dynamics of this commercial culture by producing a popular culture of fairies and satyrs who intervene on their behalf in this urban sphere. The casting of Mistress Quickly as fairy queen remains appropriate to the special oppression of poorer groups by this system; but this passage in the Quarto softens the fairy play’s ideological contradictions by uniting the interests of the poor and the middling sort against a common urban enemy. Anyone – a drunken vagrant or a trusting householder – can be cheated by a clever broker; and sympathy even for poor frequenters of alehouses is expressed by Pead’s exemption from punishment of only those urban dwellers “whose nose lookes plew and red,” much like Fluellen’s description of the nose of the heavy drinker Bardolph as “like a coal of fire, sometime plew and sometimes red” (Henry 5, 3.6.96). Even an honest citizen who falls on hard times may be summoned to court; and those with small and great resources alike were charged tithes. Especially in the Quarto, the citizens register antagonism to the very economic system by which they, as a middling sort, were achieving prominence. Instead of the patriotic industry of the Folio, the Quarto stages their anger at unjust agents of a commercial system. Wendy Wall’s insight that the final act of Merry Wives reveals the investment of these citizens “in the fantasy of an expansive identity” underscoring “the continuing delights of unreigned selves and immoderate passions” (2003: 384) applies even more productively to the Quarto. Scripting Mistress Quickly and Hugh Evans as their leaders, the citizens may relax into a national past imagined as vibrant and alive long before the arrival of the economic pressures represented by brokers, serjeants at mace, and proctors. While in their ordinary identities as modern householders, they assert their superiority to superstitious simpletons who believe in ghosts and fairies, on this night they may indulge themselves in

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freedoms of identity still, in their minds, enjoyed by the indigent Gillian of Brentford of the present and the “idle-headed eld” of the past. They may ease up on some of the pressures of distinction to share fellow-feeling with those “whose nose lookes plew and red.” They may act out their dissatisfactions with a mundane and insecure present through indulging in a nostalgia for a past perceived as simpler and more communal. Nostalgia, however, is a slippery sentiment. Phyllis Rackin’s analysis of nostalgia for a medieval past expressed in Richard 2 applies as well to the citizens’ nostalgia for a popular culture also fantasized as signifying their cultural past: “Nostalgia for an idealized medieval past, then, was not simply an expression of mourning for the passing of an older, better world. It was also a denial of guilt for complicity in the destruction of that world” (1990: 128). This is, in Renato Rosaldo’s terms, an “imperialist nostalgia” designed “to establish one’s innocence and at the same time talk about what one has destroyed” (1989: 108). It is a nostalgia enjoyed by the subjects of advancing civilizations. As Rosaldo notes, “When the so-civilized civilizing process destabilizes forms of life, the agents of change experience transformations of other cultures as if they were personal losses” (1989: 108). Imperialist nostalgia transforms “the responsible colonial agent into an innocent bystander”; it conceals “complicity with often brutal domination” (108). All of these concepts apply with uncanny accuracy to the citizens’ play, in both Quarto and Folio. As their children circle in a fairy dance, the residents of Windsor stage a sense of nostalgia not only for what has been lost but what they themselves have destroyed. As economic stratification widened the gaps between groups, their own forms of distinction required the creation of a social distance as well. As Mistress Ford describes Mistress Quickly as “foolish carrion” and Mr. Ford beats a woman believed to be “Mother Prat,” they exert a scornful dominion over this allegedly superstitious world represented through fairies and old wives. The gross physical body of Falstaff serves as an antidote to nostalgia; and the disclosure of his fraudulent intents justifies the rejection of the popular as Windsor has created or imagined it in this play. Yet even as the citizens of Windsor define themselves through their common contempt, their own desires to play the part of fairies invests this repudiation of popular culture with the sense of personal loss common to imperialist nostalgia. This emotional conflict, this push and pull, exposes the ambivalence at the core of the self-formation of the townspeople of Windsor that, in terms used by Jonathan Hall, reveals the “disturbed and disturbing underside of the modern subject in formation” (1998: 127, 145–7). Merry Wives undercuts the seriousness of this analysis, however, by concluding with more of a sense of compromise than of loss. As the characters look forward to a pleasurable relief compatible with the self-imposed demands on the citizen household, the conclusion of Merry Wives suggests that the theatrical and expansive identity they have enjoyed in their fairy play will possess a half-life continuing at least for a while after the close of the play. As Mistress Page invites the company to her house to “laugh this sport o’er by a country fire, Sir John and all” (5.5.218–19), she anticipates the gratifications of their collabora-


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tive account of their own bourgeois tales of how they fooled Falstaff into wearing horns. Destroying the frisson of traditional old wives’ tales, this exposure of the foolish superstitions of such ghost stories substitutes a new narrative of middling-sort cleverness. A tale sufficiently entertaining to be told by a fire for years, perhaps generations, to come, it will in time become its own oral tradition. After the tales, sex will ensue. In the play’s final line, Mr. Ford’s sly premonition that Master Brooke “tonight shall lie with Mistress Ford” (5.5.222) dispels the specter of cuckoldry with anticipated comfort in the performance of the sexual act with his own wife. This maritally sanctioned sexuality will, however, be enlivened by an acting out of the predatory morals of the criminal world so much a part of the popular culture invented in this play. As I read this line, Mr. Ford will indeed commit adultery with his own wife through a playfully perverse reprisal of his persona as “Master Brooke.”

Hobby-horses Falstaff is disciplined for more than lust and fraud, or even for cuckoldry and cony-catching. Falstaff is punished as an embodiment of the popular culture Windsor has produced. In his dual association with a criminal underworld and a profligate aristocracy, Falstaff represents to the citizens of Windsor a type of the disreputable sort frequenting the alehouses that served increasingly as the refuge of traditional practices perceived as low or unseemly. According to the satisfyingly circular pattern of this play in which supposed conies outwit the conycatcher and supposed cuckolds pass the horns to the would-be cuckold-maker, the citizens of Windsor use festivity to punish the festive performer. As he puts on the stag’s horns, Falstaff becomes a multi-faceted figure. As Herne the hunter, Falstaff enacts a superstition from an older time. As the wearer of horns, he becomes the butt of the ubiquitous cuckold jests so prevalent in early modern England. As a hybrid stag-man standing before them in animal’s horns, Falstaff also represents a relative of the hobby-horse, in this case symbolically killed to rise again in this exceedingly campy performance by the townspeople. Rather than celebrating a seasonal holiday or eliciting funds, however, this festive event is designed as a form of self-cancellation. Conflated with the charivari, similarly adapted to suit citizen decorum, the goal of this entertainment is the public exposure of folly: of graft, of cuckoldry, and of a festive type of amateur performance itself. Cowering before fairies, Falstaff in his stag’s horns is idiotic as well as grotesque. His absurdity reflects not only upon himself, but also upon the other amateur actors, especially Mistress Quickly, Pistol, and Evans in their respective costumes as fairy queen, hobgoblin, and satyr. However complicated the responses of the townspeople towards this production, its effect remains the wholesale discrediting of the tales and practices attributed to the lower sort, rendered ridiculous through this amateur performance. In this performance event, the citizens discipline not only Falstaff but themselves. Part of their enjoyment lies in their exposure of the absurdity of this tale of Herne the hunter through the spectacle of this fat man in horns. In playing the

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part of fairies, they point at the ignorant naïvety of any onlookers who, like Falstaff, would mistake them for real. And as their children “pinch him, and burn him, and turn him about” (5.5.198), they enact their rejection, however ambivalently, of their own desires for the popular culture that Falstaff represents to them. In Merry Wives, as in the Henriad, “the language of the carnival yields to the scornful mockery which labels it ‘grotesque’ and even ‘monstrous’ as part of a strategy of misrecognition leading to recoil and repression” (Hall 1998: 127). This rejection of their own very real and continuing desire for a popular culture is enacted not only by the citizens of Windsor, but also by the actors of Lord Chamberlain’s Men.9 If recent scholars are accurate in assigning his role to Kemp, then Falstaff represented perhaps a final tribute to Kemp’s skills at improvisation, bawdy humor, and direct communication with an audience.10 When Kemp departed from Shakespeare’s company soon after the first performances of Merry Wives, he took with him a form of theater. As in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the actor remained himself, refusing to dissolve into his role. As with Bottom in his ass’s head, it is not only Falstaff but Kemp who appears in his stag’s horns. Through this presentation of Kemp in stag’s horns, Merry Wives denigrates – even as it also celebrates – this form of festive theater represented as low, old-fashioned, and no longer suitable to the tastes of the middling sort. Falstaff’s horns invite this consideration of his representation as an allusion to a degraded form of amateur performance.11 Edmund Berry has recently compared Falstaff’s ritualistic metamorphosis to the actions of folk-play actors who also wore parts of animals; more obviously, Falstaff in his horns also presents a compelling visual parallel with the dancers at nearby Abbots Bromley who bore reindeer horns as they performed their choreographed combat (2001: 134). It is possible that this gulling of Falstaff represents a local rivalry disparaging this annual enactment of rutting stags as unacceptably primitive. In castigating this horned figure for lechery and disrespect for property, whether deer parks or wives (Theis 2001: 47), this Windsor fairy play castigates these same traits in low amateur performers, and in the degraded popular culture they had come to represent. Falstaff’s offensive disrespect for property belonging to others was also claimed for hobby-horses and for other roving amateur players who attempted to gain entrance to houses as a marginally sanctioned means of begging. With little or no property of their own, the poor and especially vagrants were also imagined as most likely to poach or steal property belonging to others (Dubrow 1999: 41–5). Falstaff’s horns ridicule the sexual outrageousness of his attempted tryst with two wives as an act best suited to lecherous hobby-horses. This transgressive carnal desire attributed to Falstaff as festive performer was part of a larger production of a disreputable popular culture. Falstaff’s desires reflect the illicit sexual freedoms imagined to be shared between vagrants and their doxies but prohibited, in theory, to the middling sort (Woodbridge 2001: 45). Rather than competing with classical significations, this allusion is only strengthened by the learned association of this horned man with Actaeon of Ovid’s Metamorphosis, moralized in Renaissance iconography as a punishment for voyeuristic lust (Steadman 1963).


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In this conflation of Falstaff with a hobby-horse or horned performer, it is not necessary that all the specific folklore aspects line up. The effect of the citizens’ play in Merry Wives is not accurate representation but denigration. The production of popular culture in Merry Wives is an amalgam, combining ghost story, charivari, and fairy legends with folk theater. To this middling sort, there was little to distinguish any of these, for they all represented a popular culture whose traditions became increasingly homogenized by those who wished to deprecate or, alternatively, to idealize them. This indiscriminate homogenization of popular genres created another competing meaning for the stag-figure in the citizens’ production. However ancient or contemporary this stag-figure may have actually been (Twycross and Carpenter 2002: 31), it yet drew upon a sense of tradition from the past as part of its signification. Evoking a past increasingly distanced by rapid social movements, this figure had in a sense become, like the tale of Herne the hunter, its own ghost story. Much has been written concerning the hunter’s horns as signifying cuckoldry (Roberts 1979: 114; Kegl 1994: 258; Berry 2001: 154; Moulton 2003: 239). Other meanings also, however, complicate this figure from the past. In Mistress Page’s description of his ghost as walking at midnight “about an oak with great ragg’d horns” (4.5.29), there is no implication of cuckoldry or lust. Instead, Herne’s horns would suggest an honor given to successful hunters. This is the sense of Jacques’s comment in As You Like It: “Which is he that killed the deer? . . . Let’s present him to the Duke like a Roman conqueror. And it would do well to set the deer’s horns upon his head for a branch of victory” (4.3.2, 4–6). Taking on the horns of the deer suggests an identification with the prey understood by skillful hunters: to stalk an animal requires a hunter to foresee what he might do and where he might go, as if he were himself that animal. From this perspective, the dancers carrying reindeer heads at their shoulders in Abbots Bromley were surely acting out an assumed identity as deer rather than as cuckolds or Actaeons. Crucial to the meaning of this dance was a sense of a past, when a hunter’s ability to imagine himself as a deer was necessary for survival. This sense of the horned Herne as a part of a formative past emerges from the repeated phrase “Herne’s Oak” (4.4.38; 4.6.19; 5.3.12). Whether or not a “Herne’s Oak” actually existed in Windsor Forest (Victoria 1907: 1.351), it represents a recognized landmark in Merry Wives, as Mistress Ford calls a group “To the Oak, to the Oak!” (5.3.21). Because of accelerating social change, trees provided a link with the past especially important to early moderns (Thomas 1983: 217). This continuity with the past provided an alternate meaning for horns as well, when they were nailed to trees to memorialize a past hunt (Aubrey 1972: 198–9). An entry in Lady Anne Clifford’s diary generalizes a sense of loss when horns nailed to an oak in Whinfield Park in 1333 to commemorate the killing of a stag hunted by Edward King of Scots were broken first by parliamentary soldiers in 1648 and then accidentally in 1658 when the tree itself was in a state of decay:

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Part II William Shakespeare Whereby wee may see that Tyme brings to forgettfullness any memorable thing in this world, bee they never soe carefully preserved, for the Tree with the Hartes horne upon it was a Thing of much note in these partes. (Clifford 1990: 139)

Horns nailed to trees also contribute a sense of a formative past to May Day celebrations described by Henry Machyn in May 1562: The sam day was sett up at the cukold haven a grett May-polle by bochers and fysher-men, fulle of hornes; and they mad grett chere for ther was ij fyrkens of fresse sturgens, and grett konger, and grett bruttes, and grett plente of wyne, that yt cam to viijl. (Machyn 1848: 283) While the choice of the location of “cukold haven” revives the early modern meaning of cuckold, it was these other older meanings of the maypole-withhorns that served as a pretext for festive “grett chere” in eating much fish and drinking a “grett plente of wyne” by butchers and fishermen. The relatively recent critical discussion of Falstaff’s earlier name as Sir John Oldcastle, a medieval Lollard martyr, contributes additional associations of dissidence with his presence in the play (Taylor 1987; see also Brooks 1998; Kastan 1998). One such association links carnival disguise to political involvement dangerous to the state. In 1414, according to Stowe’s Annals, Oldcastle’s followers had planned to exploit a Twelfth Night custom to make their way disguised “undyr coloure of the mommynge” into the residence of Henry V at Eltham, and there to kidnap the king (1598: 344). Their scheme was discovered, but in 1418 and 1511 state prohibitions against this Christmas custom, then called “mumming,” registered anxieties concerning the dangers of sedition or domestic harm inherent in home invasion by disguised persons (Twycross and Carpenter 2002: 83, 100). This association of dissidence with a revival of oldtime mirth also emerges in Kristen Poole’s representation of Falstaff as a type of grotesque Puritan described in the anti-Martin Marprelate tracts. One of these, for example, satirizes a populist Martin sharing his anti-episcopal views in an alehouse, where his tracts served a similarly entertaining purpose as a “fitte of mirth” fiddled forth by a “blinde Minstrell” (1995: 72; quoting Martin Months Minde (E3v)). While neither the dissident would-be mummers nor the anomalous alehouse Martin wore horns, both contributed to productions of a popular culture signifying anti-authoritarian festivity. An interpretation of Falstaff as a grotesque Puritan might parody or, conversely, implicate the devotional subjectivity of a Mistress Page, whose piety in no way interfered with her merry plotting. Thus, as Falstaff appears as Herne the hunter beside Herne’s Oak, he represents in some sense a shared past memorialized through the tales passed down by “idle-headed eld,” through an old tree in Windsor forest, through horns that create cuckoldry as a pretext for May Day hilarity, through a medieval Oldcastle


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followed by mumming dissidents and represented as the spiritual ancestor of alehouse Puritans. In all of these, he is associated with a catalog of festive customs ranging from sedition to drinking. While Falstaff’s initial comparison of his animal transformation to Jove’s locates him in a classical past, his bawdy address to Mistress Ford as “my doe with the black scut” (5.5.16) also casts him as a rutting stag more consonant with the dancers at Abbots Bromley. If this ancient magic of an old discourse of fertility, however discredited, may yet have retained some power to shape the thoughts of early moderns (Woodbridge 1994: 159, 162, 200), then Falstaff may be participating in yet another version of the past. As he invites Mistresses Ford and Page to divide him like a bribed or stolen buck, “each a haunch” (5.5.21), he takes pleasure in the illicit status of this assignation, bequeathing his horns to their husbands as cuckolds. In this urban world of Windsor, however, governed as it was by a culture of credit, illicit sexuality was no longer practical; and Falstaff’s efforts earlier in the play to seduce Windsor wives not for sex but for money further represent him as a fraud (Woodbridge 1994: 185). When the townspeople mock him for his gullibility in fearing these fairies (“He that speaks to them shall die” (5.5.44)), Falstaff identifies himself revealingly with symbols of traditional festivity. In the Quarto, he retorts, “Tis well I am your may-pole, you have the start of me” (G3v). In a sense, Mistress Quickly’s direction that “every one take hand in hand,/And compasse him within a ring” does position him as a maypole around which the citizens dance (G3). Unlike the maypole of cuckold’s haven, however, this Falstaff maypole is surrounded not by drinkers but by mockers. This Falstaff maypole is the subject not of festivity but of abuse. Similarly in the Folio, his admission that his wit has been made a “Jack-a-Lent” (5.5.122) by the citizens casts his communal shaming in terms of a traditional festive figure. As a reference to a puppet at which children threw stones, this Jack-a-Lent aptly evokes the children’s role in punishing Falstaff in their fairy dance (Jonassen 1991: 51). A Jack-a-Lent also had wider popular meanings. A Jack-a-Lent appeared in effigy in a London procession in 1553 (Machyn 1848: 33). Perhaps it was the dramatic potential to his role as puppet that expanded the meanings of the Jack-a-Lent to include “a stage clown or comic character which entertained Elizabethan audiences with dance and song” (Jonassen 1991: 51). To describe a clown as a Jack-a-Lent was to foreground his associations with the low and the festive. These meanings overlap. It was the clown’s ribald dancing, his bawdy songs, his vulgar interactions with the audience that produced him as a popular figure appropriate to an older time. For such acts he no doubt occasionally became a puppet-like target for public hostility as well. It was these associations that produced not only Falstaff, but also Kemp, as a low and popular figure. Some of these have already been discussed in terms of Kemp’s performance as Bottom: his talent for improvisation, his sexual innuendo, his direct and egalitarian interactions with the audience. While these behaviors were expected of the medieval clown, by the late sixteenth century they came to signify an aesthetics of the low that developed as a by-product of

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the more refined aesthetics of high culture through which middling and elite groups distinguished themselves. In this cultural divide, Kemp came to signify the low, the plebeian, the vulgar. Particularly famous for his bawdy jigs performed after the play, Kemp may have been not only the actor but the model for Falstaff. In a sense, Kemp was already performing or even inventing Falstaff’s part in his well-known jigs about adultery, as a source of humor rather than of anxiety (Thomas 1992: 515). While Kemp gained funds from box-office receipts rather than from married women themselves, the illicit and reputedly voracious sexuality he performed in his jigs was, like Falstaff’s pretenses of love, finally only a performance aimed to procure money. Perhaps as the audience included more members of the middling sort, such jigs were no longer funny. Or on the contrary, such jigs may have become much too funny, so that Kemp’s commercial draw came to define Lord Chamberlain’s Men in ways the company no longer tolerated. Kemp’s very ability to draw in a crowd no doubt constructed him, like the once popular hobby-horse, as an object of contempt to those defining themselves by a discerning aesthetic taste. So, perhaps, for Falstaff. Few critics today accept the fable that Queen Elizabeth specifically called for his reappearance, and that the writing of Merry Wives in fact constituted Shakespeare’s response to her imperial request that she see Falstaff in love. But the story itself is revealing of Falstaff’s popularity. His name became a “byword almost as soon as he made his appearance on stage” (Bevington 1997: lxiii). He appears on the cover of The Wits, collected drolls sometimes acted in taverns (London 1662). He became one of the most mentioned Shakespearean characters in the seventeenth century. Yet, after Merry Wives and the two parts of Henry 4, he never appeared in a Shakespeare play again. It would seem that for Kemp, as for Falstaff, his very popularity posed a challenge to his culture. Like the citizens of Windsor, the theater was embarking upon its own project of distinction to generate a sense of its value. To appeal to its audience or, more likely, despite its audience’s desires, the theater was also elevating itself above clowning perceived increasingly as appropriate to the low and to the past. As vulgar forms of embodiment no doubt continued to upstage more subtle and sophisticated acting, Kemp’s clowning within a theater of increasingly refined aesthetic taste may well have become a source of tension (Helgerson 1992: 223–7). While the circumstances surrounding his exit from Shakespeare’s company will never be fully determined, the entrance of Robert Armin as a wise fool figure marked the beginning of a more cultivated form of comedy. From this perspective, the rejection of Falstaff by the townspeople of Windsor was as metatheatrical as his rejection by Hal. Describing Merry Wives as “Shakespeare’s farewell to festive clowning,” James Biester alludes to the tradition that Kemp departed from Shakespeare’s company during or after this play’s subjection of him “to a more blatant kind of ritual exclusion than that achieved in 2 Henry 4” (2001: 237). If so, then the exclusion of Falstaff was also the exclusion of the forms of humor that had made Kemp so popular. The very different popular cultures produced in Midsummer and Merry Wives make visible social changes occurring at the end of the sixteenth century. In both


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plays, the meanings of Kemp-as-sign are expressed through an animal’s head. The visual parallels between Bottom with his ass’s head and Falstaff with his stag’s horns are apparent, but the context could not be more different. Embraced by the fairy queen herself, Bottom became an informant, as it were, into a fairy world invisible to other mortals. In this realm, magic still exists. This fairy enchantment expresses in part an intimate bond between children raised primarily by caretakers in the extended domestic arrangements more common to those of high status achieved through lineage or wealth. In Merry Wives, on the other hand, the fairies were an imposture that would fool no sensible person. Instead of caresses, Falstaff experiences the pain of fingers burnt, in fact, by children, who play a major role in his rejection. For the middling sort, popular culture was itself likely to be a fraud perpetrated by a disreputable lower sort with possibly criminal designs on their property. Yet, even for the townspeople of Windsor, the opportunity to play at popular culture remained a source of pleasure. In both productions, popular culture provided a sense of release from the constraints inherent in the very modes of social distinction, whether aristocratic or bourgeois, they helped to define. Like Windsor’s fairies, hobby-horses and men dancing with ancient reindeer antlers offered only a hoax, concocted out of scraps sometimes – perhaps often – misunderstood. What they authentically performed was a long-lasting desire for what was gone. Whether as fairy stories told in childhood or as the tales passed down by “idle-headed eld,” whether through an amateur play in which an actor obscenely kisses Wall’s hole or through a masque-charivari in which children-fairies burn an outsider’s fingers, popular culture came increasingly to be understood, and often longed for, as that which was forever past, to be made present again only in small and inauthentic ragtag remnants.

Part III

Edmund Spenser

7

The Faerie Queene Vanishing fairies and dissolving courtiers

It goes without saying that the reception of Spenser’s Faerie Queene is necessarily different from the reception of a Shakespeare play. The experience of reading a long epic poem opens up some opportunities and closes off others offered to audiences watching theatrical works. While I have argued that Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream and The Merry Wives of Windsor addressed the ideological needs of the male hybrid subject and the middling sort respectively, characters within both plays also appealed to other groups, including the lower sorts who might be found among the groundlings of a public theater. While portions of The Faerie Queene might be read aloud, Spenser’s text was addressed primarily to the highly literate, even the hyperliterate, knowledgable in specific reading techniques elicited, for example, by allegory. A written text enabled readers to reread selected passages, to ponder them at their own pace, even to copy down specific selections in a commonplace book. While Shakespeare’s numerous plays-within-plays foreground their status as theatrical events, Spenser’s densely intertextual epic meditates often on its own status as a written text. Spenser’s Faerie Queene is self-consciously textual in ways that even Shakespeare plays are not. The narrator calls attention to the act of reading with repeated addresses to various readers, most notably Queen Elizabeth, but also the hostile reader who might judge this work “th’ aboundance of an idle braine” (II, proem 1). In addition, or perhaps including these, is the reader that Spenser’s poem purports to fashion “in vertuous and gentle discipline” (“Letter to Raleigh,” Spenser [1912] 1989: 407). The narrator repeatedly places the reader’s activity at the center of The Faerie Queene. Unlike a play, this poem makes visible the strenuous labor required from the readers as well as the writer, described together as “jolly mariners” who may strike their sails for a temporary rest before continuing on their “long voyage” of this poem (I.xii.42) or as fellow-laborers in the field who “after your long turmoyle” may now “cease your worke,” for “to morrow is an holy day” (III.xii.47). To an extent not possible for a play, a primary subject of Spenser’s Faerie Queene is the process by which it is read.1 As an aspect of its status as a written text, Spenser’s Faerie Queene situates itself in terms of other written texts. It assumes a readership well read in biblical passages in Revelation, classical epics such as Virgil’s Aeneid, and Italian

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romances such as Ariosto’s Orlando furioso and Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata. Scholarship has demonstrated the extent to which many episodes of The Faerie Queene represent rereadings of these formative texts in ways that make them absolutely central to its meanings.2 Even Spenser’s fairyland draws substantially from the Huon of Bordeaux cycle and romances by Boiardo and Ariosto (Murrin 1990: 296–8; Woodcock 2004: 37–8). It is easy to forget that the visibility of their determinative presence within Spenser’s work is also enabled by their survival as written texts. Editions of Ariosto, Tasso, and Virgil are easily accessible to twentieth-century readers. By contrast, Spenser’s evident debt to an oral literature of fairy-tales, announced in his title The Faerie Queene, has received less attention because it is more difficult to trace.3 Less work has been done on how its fairy queen, as well as its elves, witches, giants, loyal lions, and birds that carry mysterious jewels demonstrate Spenser’s debt to oral narratives associated with lower status groups. To neglect the centrality of this vernacular tradition is to remain blind to the breathtakingly bold narrative maneuver which Spenser’s epic performed in making simultaneously visible two competing forms of texts. Bringing these oral tales into narrative awareness required a rethinking of the written texts as well, as they circulated as a form of symbolic capital affirming the status of the educated and literate. As discussed in Chapter 3, oral texts assumed significant cultural power of a different sort, as the first experience of fiction-making that many early modern subjects encountered as children from female caretakers. These “old wives’ tales” shaped early modern perceptions of fiction, finally to create it as dangerously (or pleasurably) effeminizing. In its self-presentation as simultaneously a nationalist epic and a fairy-tale, The Faerie Queene reveals the social conflicts – simultaneously gendered and classed – at the core of its own narrative act. It was this aspect of Spenser’s work that Gabriel Harvey simply could not fathom. For Harvey, to choose a fairy queen over the classical nine muses was to let “Hobgoblin runne away with the Garland from Apollo.” His often-quoted letter to Spenser records his shock at Spenser’s decision to write an epic featuring a fairy queen: If so be the Faerye Queene be fairer in your eie than the Nine Muses, and Hobgoblin runne away with the Garland from Apollo: Marke what I saye, and yet I will not say that I thought, but there an End for this once, and fare you well, till God or some good Aungell putte you in a better minde. (1991: 628) Beginning with “Marke what I say” to “fare you well,” Harvey’s incredulity verges on incoherence; and the intensity of his disapproval suggests that more is at stake than a conflict between a native and a classical tradition. Harvey’s confidence in the absolute superiority of the classical tradition is exceeded only by his unapologetic contempt for a tradition including a fairy queen and hobgoblins. Praying that no less a force than God or an angel might put Spenser “in a better minde,” Harvey washes his hands of the entire project.

The Faerie Queene

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In Chapter 3, I have discussed how the contempt expressed by this Cambridge don reflects a learned aversion to the community of women, often from lower status groups, who circulated such tales to children in their charge. Recognizing these deeper cultural forces enhances an understanding of the threat posed by the fairy witch Acrasia and her sensuous bower, as well as its gendered implications for Spenser’s own poetic project. A suspicion of a lingering Catholicism practiced by those superstitious enough to believe in fairies may also account for the Catholic iconography identified in her bower (Greenblatt 1980: 188–90; King 1990: 101–2); for Spenser’s E.K. characterizes even “friendly fairies” as a remnant of a Catholic past when “bald Friers” “soughte to nousell the comen people in ignorounce.” Such beliefs, he claims, still “sticketh in the myndes of some,” presumably the low or “comen people” (Spenser [1912] 1989: 443). More classed than gendered, Harvey’s image of the hobgoblin bolting away with a garland rightfully belonging to Apollo also evokes the early modern antipathy for the disreputable poor, with their alleged propensity for theft and fraud. As described in Chapter 4, this sense of the increasing social distance between the middling and the lower sorts provides insight into the sheer bravado of Spenser’s associations of his Red Cross Knight with contemporary performances of St. George. Finally, Harvey’s hope that “some good Aungell” put Spenser “in a better mind” contributes a third and more religious motive for Harvey’s distaste in an association of fairies with the satanic. This association was not Harvey’s alone. Under the pressure of the Reformation, that which did not come from God must perforce come from Satan; and the Daemonologie of James VI identifies fairies as illusions manufactured by the devil (L1v). The anonymous writer of this marginal notation to The Faerie Queene would have agreed: Fayeries are [div]ells, & therefore [fa]yrieland must bee [the] devills land. And [w]hat a glorie is this [to] any, to [ca]ll her queene [of] such a place? (Orgel 2000: 103) As I will argue in this chapter, this demonic association informs Spenser’s treatment of Philotime or “love of honor,” whose infernal underground world also links her to Proserpine, a classical figure widely identified as a fairy queen. Thus, while enriched by abundant uses of written sources, Spenser’s Faerie Queene also uses these associations with oral traditions to play itself against a multi-leveled social text. Harvey’s alarm was only partially justified, for Spenser’s stance towards the groups credited with transmitting oral narratives was not wholly recuperative. In presenting fairies, old wives or female storytellers, and amateur performers, he produced a popular culture that was as conflicted as it was chaotic. The Faerie Queene represents an almost limitless repository of homely material transmuted, distorted, faithfully reproduced, and deliberately set aside in ways that suggest the complexity of Spenser’s engagement, and his distance from any firm resolution of the contradictory outlooks contributed from strikingly dissimilar sources.

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Unlike A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which juxtaposes the two dissonant settings of classical Athens and an early modern fairy forest, or The Merry Wives of Windsor, which incorporates low figures adaptable to its own uses and excludes, or attempts to exclude, those that are not, The Faerie Queene repeatedly superimposes figures signifying their diverse origins. Acrasia, for example, is simultaneously Homer’s Circe, Tasso’s Armida, and the fairy queen of such ballads as “Tam Lin” and “Thomas Rhymer.” The dancers on Mount Acidale are simultaneously graces and fairies. The Red Cross Knight is simultaneously Saint George the patron saint of England, a low performer, and every human wandering in a world of sin. In these episodes of stunning intertextuality, Spenser develops a practice fleetingly present in Shakespeare’s plays. Titania’s name was used for Circe in Book 14 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. In The Merry Wives of Windsor, Falstaff’s comparison of his horns with those worn by Jove in his transformation to a bull renders him, for a moment, simultaneously a figure for Herne the hunter and a classical god. This practice was undoubtedly influenced by conflations of Latin and native figures in early modern translations: the “di” of Medea’s speech in Ovid’s Metamorphoses that Arthur Golding translated as “elves,” reappearing in Shakespeare’s quotation of Medea’s lines in the Tempest: “Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves” (5.1.33; Kermode 1990: 147–8). In addition to satanic illusions, King James’s Daemonologie identifies fairies as Diana’s followers: “That fourth kinde of spirites, which by the Gentiles was called Diana, and her wandring court, and amongst us was called the Phairie (as I tould you) or our good neighbours” (L1–L1v). While Diane Purkiss reads James’s synthesis as “plainly an attempt to interpret popular culture through the lenses of learning” (2000a: 144), the actual effects of such interpretations are more difficult to determine, and perhaps more unpredictable, than the strategies described above for Midsummer and Merry Wives. Does the parallel between Diana and “Phairie” or the even more homely “our good neighbors” represent the use of a classical precedent to dignify otherwise low figures to suit them for a nationalist representation? Does this synthesis reflect upon the cultural dilemma presented by the early modern schoolroom, as an attempt to integrate not only these competing narratives of Diana and “Pharie” but also the competing selves of boys, now become men, formed through the circumstances of their telling? Or does it represent an attempt to overpower an early female discourse by a more authoritative male discourse? Related questions may be raised repeatedly for Spenser’s numerous syntheses of competing forms of narrative in The Faerie Queene. Spenser would seem to be elevating self-consciously English materials in order to construct a nationalist epic, but in the process, associations with the low continue to haunt this celebration of nationhood. Similarly, his use of classical narratives in The Faerie Queene may displace or appropriate childhood fictions to redeem fiction itself for masculinity. The process may, however, have worked both ways. While boys were, in theory, to leave behind vernacular fairy-tales for classical myths, The Faerie Queene may also have reversed the process, by placing classical works within a large “fairytale.” In this chapter, I foreground the genius of The Faerie

The Faerie Queene

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Queene precisely in its capacity to create startling syntheses of disparate perspectives. To grasp the interpretive challenges offered by this epic, it is necessary to restore these more homely figures to visibility, and to recognize the significance of their presence to early modern readers. In particular, I focus on Spenser’s diverse uses of fairies in his representation of Gloriana, Philotime, and the dancing fairy/graces of Mount Acidale; on an underlying identification of Phaedria and Acrasia with the women storytellers of childhood; and on the associations of the performed St. George with the battles of the Red Cross Knight. These very different figures reflect his very different engagements with diverse figures of popular culture: fairies, old wives, and hobby-horses. The shared tendency of these figures, each with their distinct genealogies, to appear together in the very different productions of the popular by Spenser, Shakespeare, and Jonson, indicates a propensity within the early modern culture to blend them together as a common sign of the low.

Fairies Modern scholars have alternately echoed and dismissed the palpable shock expressed by Harvey and other contemporaries over Spenser’s decision to allude to Queen Elizabeth as a fairy queen, explicitly stated in his letter to Raleigh: “In that Faery Queene I meane glory in my generall intention, but in my particular I conceive the most excellent and glorious person of our soveraine the Queene and her kingdome in Faery land” (1997: 737). C.S. Lewis, for example, marvels that Spenser would allude to Elizabeth as a fairy queen at the very time when women were being burned in Scotland for consorting with fairies (1964: 124; see also Latham 1930: 143). Other scholars explain away these negative representations by looking to more sophisticated texts as more likely sources for Spenser’s fairies: to texts by Virgil and Ovid (Bennett 1942: 7–8), to Malory’s Morte D’Arthur (Rovang 1996: 112), and especially to Ariosto’s Orlando furioso and Tasso’s Gerusalemme liberata (Greene 1963: 311; Giamatti 1966: 251–8; Marinelli 1990: 57; Quint 1990: 678–9). While the formative effect of these classical, medieval, and early modern Italian writings on The Faerie Queene cannot be disputed, in practice persistent and mutual exchanges between written and oral texts caused their fairy figures to mingle promiscuously together. Tales in English courtly literature of a fairy mistress who enthralls a human lover, for example, ultimately derived from Celtic motifs translated by Breton storytellers into French (Larrington 1999: 36; see also Rathborne 1937: 158). By the late sixteenth century, Arthurian legend had become indistinguishable from fairylore (McCabe 1989: 92). Conversely, in Sidney’s Countess of Pembroke’s Arcadia, Mopsa’s rambling and vulgar tale of knights and lovers’ quests suggests that chivalric narratives found in written texts provided grist for even illiterate storytellers (1977: 311–12). Thus, even Spenser’s most intertextual narratives of fairies were haunted by the oral practice shaped by social necessities (described in Chapter 1) of alluding to what should not be said directly especially in matters of illicit sexual relations and unexplained treasure.

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This allusive use of fairies underlies their prominent appearances in giftgiving ceremonies in entertainments for Queen Elizabeth (Woodcock 2003: 109). In 1575 in Woodstock, a “Queen of the Fayry” “very costly apparrelled” presents a “simple token” of a beautifully embroidered gown “of greate price” to Queen Elizabeth (Cunliffe 1911: 99); in 1578 one Sir Thomas Kidson presented “a rich jewell” to Queen Elizabeth in “a shew representing the Phayries” (Nichols 1965: 2, 215); in 1591 at Elvetham Aureola “the Quene of Fairy land” humbly salutes Elizabeth to present her with a garland or “chaplet,/Given me by Auberon, the Fairy King . . . made in fourme of an imperiall crowne” (Wilson 1980: 115); in 1593 at Quarrendon, a “Damsell of the Queene of Fayries” greets Elizabeth with a “Cupido in gould and stone” (Swann 2000: 453). Woodcock derives these instances of fairy munificence from medieval romances, in which fairies freely bestow magnificent wealth on fortunate mortals; the gifts of the fairy Melusine, for example, are represented as founding the Lusignan dynasty in Poitou (2004: 35). Caroline Larrington decodes these fairy gifts, however, in terms of a social rather than a literary stimulus to allude to the unspeakable: that the Lusignan dynasty was founded with the riches of a “wealthy bourgeois heiress” whose partial transformation (of the lower parts) into a serpent on Saturdays expresses a “suspicion of social difference” (1999: 39). Similarly, a proposed fairy source for the gifts to Elizabeth represents a solution to a social dilemma rather than exclusively a literary borrowing. By politely deflecting attention from the host as the actual gifter, it is a “free” gift that obligates the queen, in theory, to no one (Latham 1930: 143). Among the low, fabulous fairy gifts were understood to explain, or rather not to explain, questionable acts such as theft and bribery. The presentation of gifts by fairy queens in entertainments was also understood to explain what was understood but could not be said: the extraordinary cost of entertaining Queen Elizabeth and her court severely stretched the resources of her hosts. Far from complaining, courtiers could only represent themselves as privileged in her service. This gracious use of fairylore represented a necessary mystification of courtly economics (Swann 2000: 453). In the loud silence conspicuously informing the social contexts of these events, a substantial reward was in fact often expected, or hoped for, as reciprocity for this expense. Left unstated, the exact nature of this reward is now difficult to determine. Leicester’s lavish entertainment for the queen in 1575 at Kenilworth is thought to represent his final and desperate bid for marriage to the queen (Wilson 1980: 119), or perhaps as an appeal for leadership in a Protestant intervention in the low countries (Frye 1993: 61, 79). The Earl of Hertford’s elaborate entertainment at Elvetham in 1591 represented his unspoken petition to Elizabeth to declare his two sons by Katherine Grey as legitimate, and therefore viable claimants to the throne after her death (Breight 1992). Through the entertainment described in the Ditchley manuscript for 1592, Sir Henry Lee was evidently attempting to reinstate himself in Elizabeth’s graces, lost through his affair with Anne Vavasour (Chambers 1936: 150; Woodcock 2003: 112). This use of fairy elements to allude to material dynamics unexpressed, because unexpressible, in Elizabethan courtiership becomes an important aspect

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of the Philotime episode in Book two of The Faerie Queene. The long-noted fairy elements in this episode begin with Mammon’s striking resemblance to the aged man who traditionally defends a fairy hill and, like a leprechaun or fairy king, attempts to hide his treasure when discovered by a mortal (Greenlaw 1918: 111). Like an observer taken in by the seemingly effortless grace of expensive Elizabethan entertainments, Guyon displays a blithe indifference to the materialist base of his beloved “faire shields, gay steedes, bright armes” that are his “delight” in his too easy refusal of Mammon’s treasures for the alternate values of chivalry (II.vi.10). Mammon immediately corrects this idealistic naïvety: “Shields, steeds, and armes, and all things for thee meet” money can provide “in a twinckling of an eye,” as well as crowns and kingdoms, for Mammon has the power to “heape” even the lowly “with glory and renowne” (11). Guyon’s initial suspicion of the unseemly or illegal source of Mammon’s treasure reflects Spenser’s expectation that his readers are aware of this use of fairylore to allude to the mysterious acquisitions of goods through theft or bribery: “Ne wote I, but thou didst these goods bereave/From rightfull owner by unrighteous lot,/Or that bloud guiltiness or guile them blot” (19). Defending the origin of his wealth, Mammon leads Guyon down through his cave to see for himself. The capacity of Mammon’s fairy gold for corrupting mortals to perform even more illicit acts than theft or bribery is amply revealed by the damned souls of Tantalus and Pilate. Immediately recognizable to the anonymous reader who wrote in the margins of his Faerie Queene, “[fa]yrieland must bee [the] devills land,” the conflation of this underground world with hell taints this fairy hoard with a pervasive sense of evil. A trip to such a place by the knight of temperance was surely an epic journey as adventurous, on a spiritual level, as Aeneas’s epic journey to the underworld or Christ’s to Hell (Cullen 1970; Kermode 1971: 60–83; Heinzelman 1980: 35–69; Prescott 1990: 451–2). Guyon’s journey reveals the unstated reality underlying the fantasy of freely available fairy wealth, whether a golden cup stolen by a peasant or a rich gown given to Elizabeth. Such gifts are never entirely free. On the path into the cave, Guyon passes by allegorical figures signifying the hazards of a materialist economy: Payne, Strife, Gealosie, Fear, Horrour, and especially Care, who kept “wary watch and ward,” losing sleep to protect goods from Force and Fraud (II.vii.22–5). Rather than some magical resource, gold itself requires labor to refine it, as “deformed creatures, horrible in sight” worked the hot furnaces: “every one did swincke, and every one did sweat” (36). As this episode demonstrates, this labor provides no lasting satisfaction to anyone; for the desire for riches engenders yet more desire for riches. The same may be said for a desire for honor, exposed in Philotime’s court as equally insatiable and self-destructive. It is his desire for honor that, according to allegory logic, brings on Guyon’s initial encounter with Mammon, as his self-satisfied reflection on his own “vertues, and prayse-worthy deedes” is followed by his apparent disappointment at the absence of any “adventure” in that desert wilderness (II.vii.2). Guyon’s scornful refusal of Mammon’s temptations as merely “idle offers” echoes his earlier vow to spend his days in “honours suit” (10). The inseparability of the realm of Philotime,

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whose name means “love of honor,” from Mammon’s underground cave suggests that in this materialist world, a desire for honor was not as separate from a desire for wealth as the idealistic Guyon might believe. Like Mammon, Philotime also evokes a figure from fairylore. She is a fairy queen. Seated on a throne and “richly clad in robes of royaltye” (II.vii.44), Philotime presides over this underground world as a successor to Proserpina, whose garden remains outside her court of state. At least since Chaucer’s time, the classical Proserpina, queen of the underworld, had been conflated with the fairy queen, also often described as ruling an underground domain (Chaucer 1957: 125). This episode takes full advantage of the conflation of the classical hades of the dead as a Christian hell of the damned to stress the frenetic and useless activity of this infernal world. Philotime holds a great gold chain, stretching from heaven to hell, composed of links, each a “step of dignity” (46). As a crowd swelling around her frantically attempts to catch the chain to climb upward on these links, the allegory eloquently conveys the capacity of ambition to corrupt the soul:4 Some thought to raise themselves to high degree, By riches and unrighteous reward, Some by close shouldring, some by flatteree: Others through friends, others for base regard; And all by wrong wayes for themselves prepard. Those that were up themselves, kept others low, Those that were low themselves, held others hard, Ne suffred them to rise or greater grow, But every one did strive his fellow downe to throw. (47) This grotesque vision of the ugly social dynamics attending a desire for honor – the reality of the gracious “unsaid” of courtly entertainments – is hardly tempting, even for a lover of honor; and Guyon’s refusal of Mammon’s offer of his daughter’s hand in marriage comes as no surprise. As scholars have noted, this disturbing representation of ambition would seem to implicate Elizabeth’s court. In particular, Philotime’s crowd bears a striking resemblance to Colin’s descriptions of Cynthia’s courtiers, a transparent reference to Spenser’s own experience of Elizabeth’s court, in “Colin Clouts Come Home Again”: “Where each one seeks with malice and with strife,/To thrust downe other into foule disgrace/Himselfe to raise” (1989: 543). Some association between Philotime, whose name means love of honor, with Spenser’s fairy queen Gloriana, who means “glory” in his “generall intention,” seems evident. As with other sinister fairy queens, such as Lucifera and Acrasia, what that relationship may be has been hotly debated (O’Connell 1977: 106–7; Cain 1978: 112; Wells 1983: 3–5, 57; Helgerson 1992: 312). Finally, a choice to identify or to distinguish Elizabeth from Philotime lies in an individual reader’s own construction of meaning. This ambiguity is particularly appropriate to the

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function of fairy allusions within oral practice to signify what should not be explicitly stated; this function is best determined by what they accomplish. Without reference to this oral practice, Matthew Woodcock’s instructive focus on “what the text is doing rather than what it means” directs attention to Spenser’s own authorial function of constructing Elizabeth in his poem (2004: 50, 73–4). Whether interpreted as identification or antithesis, the figure of Philotime expresses less about Elizabeth than about her potential effects on those around her, including authors, readers, and courtiers who collaborate and also compete with her in creating her as an object of discourse. Like Philotime, the figures of other fairy queens also reveal more about contemporary responses to Queen Elizabeth’s monarchy than anything substantive about the woman herself. It is in this spirit that the sexual propensities of fairy queens should be taken, as a means of representing Elizabeth’s power over her male subjects. It would be most dangerous and even treasonous for Spenser to implicate Elizabeth in the illicit and especially cross-class sexual relationships implicit in fairy allusions. This sense of sexual trespass was especially intense in widely circulated ballads of fairy queens, notorious for kidnapping mortals for their sexual pleasure. Seemingly helpless to resist, Thomas Rhymer, Tam Lin, and Thomas of Ercledoune all perform carnal services to their fairy queens, whose desires seem simultaneously insatiable, impersonal, and destructive (Child [1882] 1956: 1.317–19, 326–30; Lamb 2000a: 92; Purkiss 2000b: 107–8; and Chapter 4, above). Within any relationships obligating both partners to sexual fidelity, the practical function of this fiction seems transparent. To a wronged wife, for example, a fairy queen’s overwhelming sexual powers provide a pretext for blaming the “other woman” for a husband’s sexual infidelity. However much a wife might silently recognize its implausibility, this excuse yet enables her to accept her husband back into a relationship strengthened, at least temporarily, by a sense of the wrong done to both of them by this third party. There were extenuating circumstances. It was beyond his control. This is the sense of Amavia’s narrative of Acrasia’s enchantment of her husband, “thralled to her will,/In chains of lust and lewd desires ybound” until he was “purged from drugs of foule intemperance” (II.i.54). For a courtier’s wife, abandoned on the country estate for months at a time, this excuse might extend beyond a sexual relationship to rationalize a husband’s long absence as he attended Elizabeth at her court. As for a husband who works late too many nights at the office, even a sexually faithful husband’s service to Elizabeth may well have felt much like an infidelity. Within the sexualized politics of Elizabeth’s royal entourage, she would not have been far wrong. In many cases, at least some flirtation had become part of a courtier’s job description. It is impossible now, and no doubt was impossible then, to ascertain the extent, if any, of Elizabeth’s actual sexual relations. The representation of her power over her courtiers in sexual terms is, however, indisputable. In addition to delineations as an old Testament Judith, the Virgin Mary, and a classical Diana, the cult of Elizabeth portrayed the queen as a Petrarchan beloved, willingly

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served by adoring courtiers (Wells 1983; Cain 1990: 236–7). Essential to this encounter was the flattering fiction, increasingly crucial to maintain as she aged, that Elizabeth continued to fascinate her male courtiers with her beauty and sexual appeal. This model of attraction drew legitimacy from medieval courtly love, which was to inspire a knight to accomplish martial deeds for the approval of the lofty mistress he adored; and it appears to have fostered the medievalism so pronounced in the accession day tilts and in some entertainments (Cain 1990: 237). The Petrarchan poet’s sublimation of his sexual urges for his chaste beloved was to inspire spiritual transcendence rather than martial deeds. Widely critiqued and even mocked by poets from Wyatt to Sidney, this Petrarchan model yet remained in force as a fiction of the Elizabethan court. Whether imaged or actual, Elizabeth’s chastity was crucial to her power as a Petrarchan beloved. Her withholding of sexual favors was the source, again imagined or actual, of her erotic attraction. In this sense, chastity is not the opposite of, but the precondition for the sexual power that Elizabeth was represented as exerting over her courtiers.5 Spenser’s description of Belphoebe, his version of Elizabeth as a “Lady” or private person, ably conveys this spiral of “prohibition and provocation” described by Louis Montrose as insinuating “a current of sensuality and erotic arousal into its encomium of militant chastity” (1986: 326). For most courtiers, playing into this fiction of Elizabeth’s sexual power over them, incited paradoxically by her chastity, became an elaborate game with potentially high stakes (Cain 1990: 236). Whether through the imagined effect of her idealized chastity or through the possibility of sexual favors that might and did, under James, confer political power, Elizabeth’s eroticism was imagined, like a fairy queen’s, as a means to exert utter control over her male subjects, rendered impotent to resist its power. This construction encoded a silent understanding that courtiers, and poets as well, held significant power over Elizabeth through their choice to celebrate or to expose this fiction of an irresistible fairy queen. The fairy queens in the entertainments staged before Elizabeth provide important insights into the aesthetic and also political context for Spenser’s representation of Elizabeth as the fairy queen of his epic (Woodcock 2004: 43). While none of the these small plays represents Elizabeth herself as a fairy queen, her particular form of eroticism shapes the significations they invoke. In the entertainment arranged by Sir Henry Lee at Woodstock in 1575, an unusually public-minded fairy queen acts contrary to type by advising the young Gaudina to abandon her beloved Contarenus to fulfill her duties to her kingdom in accordance with her father’s wishes (Cunliffe 1911: 117–19). Yet it is seldom noted that her advice reverses her sympathy for lovers, more characteristic of fairies, in her earlier speeches to Gaudina’s father. Defending his daughter’s elopement with “a man of meane estate, of base degree,” the fairy queen asserts that “love wil have his will,” for “Love doth alwayes fight on equal ground . . . if mynds agree the ground of states is found” (109–10). Only when it is clear that her father will not yield does the fairy queen present the daughter’s role as heir to the kingdom as a special case requiring the unusual sacrifice of her private

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desires. In this entertainment, a fairy queen’s well-known sexuality only adds emphasis to her advice; that is, even a fairy queen would approve a decision to profit the commonweal. The turn-about of Lee’s fairy queen from arguing for lovers’ rights to upholding public interests represents his politic reaction to Leicester’s disastrous entertainment of the queen at Kenilworth during the same year (Woodcock 2004: 46). A planned masque advising “Zabeta” or Elizabeth of the dignity of marriage was abruptly canceled, apparently in accordance with Elizabeth’s wishes. Instead of the planned performance of Dudley’s rescue of the Lady of the Lake from a rapist, a new performance exploits the miraculous power of Elizabeth’s superiority as a “better maid” as the means for the Lady’s deliverance. This substitution forestalled, according to Frye, an implicit military polemic in support of rescuing the Netherlands from the “rapist” Spain (1993: 78–83); and it also proclaimed the power of Elizabeth’s own virginal autonomy from any would-be suitor/rescuer. Lee’s subsequent entertainment, then, was designed as a show of support for Elizabeth’s decision to place her public duty to England over any private love, including Leicester’s, or any competing foreign policies presented before her under cover of that love. The jilted Contarenus’s resolution concluding Lee’s entertainment also provides a model for Leicester. Resigning his lover’s rights to Gaudina in favor of the “countries weale,” Contarenus resolves to “abide hers to command,/where so adventures hard shal carry me,” even if he will never see her again (122, 126–7). The continued sexual fidelity required of a royal’s beloved, with no expectation of reward or even recognition, becomes the subject of an apparently self-referential episode in Lee’s later entertainment in 1592, in which Elizabeth frees an old knight sunken into an enchanted sleep by “just revengefull Fayrie Queene” angered at his service to another woman (Wilson 1980: 131). In a suave and adult version of a small child’s strategy of splitting of his mother into “good” and “bad,” Lee’s division of Elizabeth into two persons, the jealous Fayrie Queene Elizabeth enraged over Lee’s affair with Anne Vavasour (Chambers 1936: 150), and the emancipating queen, the actual Elizabeth who then restores him to her favor, registers a petition against her fairy queen-like possessiveness while denying that the “revengefull Fayrie Queene” is really “her.” The Timias episode in The Faerie Queene employs a similarly obvious and also safely deniable identification of Elizabeth as a possessive fairy queen. His alienation from a jealous Belphoebe transparently alludes to Elizabeth’s anger over Raleigh’s secret marriage to her maid of honor Elizabeth Throckmorton. Like Lee, Spenser offers her an alternative action in a restoration of Timias to Belphoebe’s grace (IV.viii.2–18). As suggested in this episode, the queen’s chastity did not free her courtiers from the obligatory performance, however disingenuous, of an exclusive enthrallment to her person traditional for fairy queens. On the contrary, her idealized chastity, not customary to fairy queens, became the means of exacting it. For the queen, this representation affirmed the mystical power of her person. For the courtiers, it expressed a complex ambivalence, composed of varying combinations of veneration and bitterness, contributing to what Louis Montrose has termed “the subjection effect” (1999: 146).

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Whether influenced by these entertainments or by the iconography they circulate, Spenser’s Faerie Queene plays with and against the attribution of destructive sexuality to fairy queens. The overarching narrative of Arthur’s unsatisfied desires for his fairy queen bears a striking parallel to ballads of fairy queens (Lamb 2000a: 89–90; Purkiss 2000b: 115). According to the narrative Arthur confides to the sympathetic Una, it seemed that a royal maid lay “her dainty limbes full softly down” beside him as he slept, and she did make “most goodly glee and lovely blandishment” to him, ravishing his heart with delight. At her departure, she identified herself as “Queene of Faeries.” Awaking to find only “pressed gras where she had lain,” Arthur vows never to rest until he finds her (I.ix.13–15). Arthur interprets this encounter as sent by divine providence; and it would seem that his anticipated marriage to Gloriana should represent the triumphant conclusion to Spenser’s unfinished epic. The initial “me seemed” to this recollection, however, renders her presence problematic, frustrating any “straightforward answers or easy readings” (Woodcock 2004: 96). Beneath the glorious conclusion anticipated for the epic, then, there runs a sinister undercurrent in an alternative outcome to Arthur’s desire for Gloriana. Reflecting the unsatisfactory results of illicit sexual engagements, erotic desires for fairies seldom end well in fairy-tales and ballads. Perpetually dissatisfied, mortal lovers pine and die. To those who know this tradition, Arthur’s paleness and his vow never to rest until he finds Gloriana (I.ix.15–16) identify him unmistakably as under the spell of a fairy lover. From this perspective, he is a doomed man. Neither ending is realized in the unfinished Faerie Queene for, like the other Britons the Red Crosse Knight and Artegall, Arthur remains “stranded in faeryland” (Erickson 1996: 96). There is no other viable narrative choice. Without a marriage of Arthur and Gloriana, there can be no legitimate descendants, including the Tudors, from their union. Any narrative completion in a marriage between Arthur and the fairy queen would, however, repeat Leicester’s mistake at Kenilworth in the aborted masque advising “Zabeta” to marry. In epic poems as in entertainments, representations of Elizabeth’s autonomy must remain uncompromised. Like Lee’s knight Contarenus, Arthur would be best advised to demonstrate his constant desire for his queen through achieving glorious adventures in the course of his endless and restless search for her, without entertaining expectations of marriage or even of contact with this queen who, like Gaudina and through her Elizabeth, must necessarily subordinate her private desires for the good of the state. While Arthur does not engage in cross-class or adulterous sexual relations, he does, in a sense, “go with the fairies.” By inciting a forbidden desire that cannot be satisfied, his fairy queen dominates him with a sexuality rendered no less perilous by her chastity. Rather than serene Petrarchan sublimation, Arthur’s pallor and his restless wandering suggest pent-up frustration with no possible release. Like any high-rolling courtiers gambling high stakes in the cult-game of Elizabeth, Arthur – and no doubt Leicester as well – is emotionally stranded, even in the midst of his frenetic activity, in a ghostly land where desires can never be realized. This sense of paralysis is just as debilitating when the yearnings of erotic love compelling a knight such as Arthur, whose

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inner self is mirrored as “prays-desire” (II.ix.39), cannot be entirely distinguished from personal and national aspirations (Mueller 1991: 761), when a courtier’s yearnings of erotic love constitute in fact a transparent façade, a white lie understood by the discursive community, for actual yearnings of ambition. The destructive effects of a mortal’s love for fairies are most chillingly depicted in Acrasia’s seduction of Verdant, his “warlike armes” hung on a tree, “slombering/in secret shade” his “sleepie head” laid in Acrasia’s lap (II.xii.72, 76). At once Homer’s Circe, Tasso’s Armida, and the fairy queen of ballads such as “Tam Lin,” Acrasia demonstrates the debilitating power a dominating woman can exert over an otherwise virile man. This episode has benefitted from a number of brilliant interpretations (Lewis 1938: 61; Greenblatt 1980: 169–92; Gross 1985: 183; Silberman 1987; Parker 1987: 54–66; J. King 1990: 101). The “old wives” section of this chapter presents an alternative reading of this episode in terms of the cultural impact of women’s narratives. In this “fairy” section, however, my reading has perhaps already become apparent. While I would never claim that Acrasia represents Elizabeth, or even Spenser’s anxious hostility, acknowledged or repressed, towards his sovereign, this episode does seem to me to expose the inner corrupted dynamics of a cult of Elizabeth that would elevate her as a fairy queen (Wells 1983: 69; Helgerson 1992: 312; Montrose 2002: 931–3; Woodcock 2004: 49). From this perspective, I revisit Stephen Greenblatt’s eloquent description of Guyon’s destruction of Acrasia’s bower as a necessary renunciation of instinct required for the constitution of the civilized man, for whom “male sexual aggression – the hunt, the loathing, the desire to master – is yoked to the service of ideal values embodied in a female ruler” (2000: 178). I would argue against Greenblatt that Guyon’s aggression is directed not only inward towards his own instincts, but also outward towards the ideologies of Elizabeth’s court. For this poet who has seen war at first hand, Guyon’s aggressive destruction of her bower may represent his truest service to the queen, as a proper expression, rather than a renunciation, of an aggressive instinct crucial for military preparedness. I argue further that Guyon’s aggression is directed not against unrestrained sexual instincts, but instead against a mutually predatory game in which an aging Elizabeth and her courtiers together affirm the fairy queen fiction of the absolute power of her sexuality. Verdant represents a poster child for the degrading effeminacy implicit in this power game. Guyon’s “male sexual aggression – the hunt, the loathing, the desire to master” is exactly what this fairy queen has destroyed in Verdant, as she “through his humid eyes did sucke his spright,/Quite molten into lust and pleasure lewd” (II.xii.73). In freeing Verdant from an enervating sensuality, Guyon is restoring to him, and through him to the Elizabethan court, a masculinity equally as instinctual in its aggression. It was not only sex that was Verdant’s undoing. As with ballad fairy queens, Acrasia’s sexuality was inextricable from her immense wealth; and for early moderns, desires for sex and for goods were alike catagorized under the vice of “luxuria” (Archer 2000: 186). Verdant abandoned his arms and razed the

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emblems from his shield to enjoy “lewd loves” and also “wastful luxuree,” as “his dayes, his goods, his bodie he did spend” (II.xii.80). Imprisoning Acrasia, Guyon also destroys her lavish bower which represents the “material manifestation of a ‘Princes court’ ” (Montrose 2002: 929). More tastefully appointed than Mammon’s cave, Acrasia’s bower is filled with rich treasures worthy of a fairy queen: the “mighty Mazer bowle of wine” (49), a Porch “with rare device” of embracing vines with burnished gold (54–5), a golden cup (56), a fountain with “curious imageree” of “naked boyes” (60). Comparing this bower to Burghley’s Italianate garden visited frequently by the queen, Montrose interprets Spenser’s legend of Temperance as a criticism of excessive display by Elizabeth’s courtiers. This canto expresses this critique in gendered terms: like Verdant, the warrior knights of a masculine feudal past had now figuratively hung up their arms on trees to devolve into effeminate courtiers striving to please their female queen. As early modern government became centralized in the monarchy, the power and arguably the masculinity of the aristocracy became compromised. The luxurious pleasures of court served as an easy mark for this effeminizing course described, in another context, by Richard Halpern: as the early modern aristocracy felt “emasculated by conversion from a militarized to a consuming class,” a “formidable masculinity” enacted a “class nostalgia, a last bulwark of heroic authenticity’ which resists . . . the consumption-sign” as the indicator of status (1991: 245). This sense of emasculation was only exacerbated for militant Protestant subjects, including Leicester, by Elizabeth’s long delay in committing troops to fight against Spanish forces in the Netherlands (Montrose 2002: 933). It seems characteristic of the complexity of Spenser’s art that this long poem celebrating Elizabeth as a fairy queen enfolds a resistance to this celebration. However much the courtiers of her militaristic Protestant faction – and also her poet – may have remained unwavering in their respect for their queen, the effects of this collaborative fiction of the cult of Elizabeth were potentially devastating not only to them but, from their perspective, to the country. A profound suspicion of luxury permeates the fairy episodes of Acrasia and also Philotime; and the sense of trespass – of something wrong – implicit in fairy allusions gives point to an emasculation effected not only by sexuality, but by the pleasures of magnificent wealth. Familiar classical discourses provided a framework through which to articulate this concern, for foreign goods flooding from the empire into ancient Rome had also evoked a horror of luxury as well as a futile desire to resume the simpler life of the Republican era. Cicero is one of a number of philosophers to advocate a return to the values of “thrift, self-denial, sobriety, and simplicity” that became a justificatory mode of self-definition of a “virtuous ‘we’ standing against a luxurious ‘they’ ” (Sekora 1977: 35, 50–1). Guyon’s scorn for Mammon’s extravagant promises of wealth conveyed this sense of principled self-definition; and like classical writers, he too expressed nostalgia for an earlier and simpler time, an “antique world” contented with the gifts provided by the “Creatours grace” (II.vii.16). While imperfect, rife with petty jealousies, vulnerable to attack by brigands, the simple world of the shepherds in Book six is, arguably, the closest to the

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“antique world” imagined in The Faerie Queene. Meliboee’s satisfaction with what nature provides resonates with Guyon’s longed-for world: If happie, then it is in this intent, That having small, yet doe I not complaine Of want, ne wish for more it to augment, But doe my self, with that I have, content; So taught of nature, which doth little need. (VI, ix, 20) Rather than a “sentimental primitivism” (Wells 1983: 143), a primitivism of a specifically classical sort is evoked by the naming of the shepherds Meliboee and Corydon after Virgil’s Eclogues. For Spenser as for Virgil, this primitivism is paradoxically cultivated by learned men, as an act of rejection of what was increasingly perceived as the decadence of lives led at the center of power. The sophisticated life that Meliboee has discarded is, specifically, the court, with the “store of cares” that “doth follow riches store,” the perils of pride and ambition, its “idle hopes” (VI.ix.21–5). Influenced by Meliboee’s speech as well as by the beauty of Pastorella, the courtly Calidore becomes a ready convert. Rather than hunting “still after shadowes vaine/Of courtly favor, fed with light report/Of every blast,” he “sets his rest amongst the rusticke sort” (VI.x.2). While scholarly debates over Calidore’s truancy from his quest run high,6 the narrator makes clear his own sympathy based on his preference for “the happy peace” of country pleasures as opposed to the “false blisse” of “painted show”: “Ne certes mote he greately blamed be,/From so high step to stoupe unto so low” (3). This preference for a simple life over the aristocratic luxuries of court provides a formative context for the final and perhaps most explicit appearance of fairies, conflated with graces yet easily recognizable as such.7 Dancing only to the pipe of the shepherd Colin Clout, these fairies signify “grace” – simultaneously purity, inspiration, and “all the complements of curtesie” (VI.x.23) – possible only with the renunciation of the vanities of court. Spying on the scene, Calidore sees “an hundred naked maidens lilly white” dancing in a ring, and in the middle of the ring are three “Graces . . . Handmaids of Venus,” who as Colin will explain, “on men all gracious gifts bestow,/Which decke the body or adorne the mynde” (23). As “the poem’s supreme moment of self-reflexivity,” this vision on Acidale provides a privileged glimpse into the sources of Spenser’s own poetic inspiration (Kinney 1992: 82; see also Tonkin 1972: 138). As classical graces, the fairies of Mount Acidale dignify the supposed simplicity of the lives of the lower sort with which they are associated; for this inspiration is, in this episode, inseparable from the simple life shared by Meliboee and Colin Clout. Calidore would never have seen this vision if he had not left his courtly identity, as well as his quest for the Blatant Beast, to become a shepherd. Even Venus herself partakes uncharacteristically of this pastoral mode in her preference for this simple Mount to her own royal court of Cytheron (9). The honor afforded to the lower or simpler sort is most clearly demonstrated by the

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position in the midst of the graces of Colin’s own love who is “but a countrey lasse,/Yet she all other countrey lasses farre did passe,” and so is graced “to be another Grace,” for her graces excel “much the meane of her degree” (25–7). The narrator’s apology to the queen for praising another maiden enacts the poet’s own turn from the court by calling attention to an omission that was a dangerous disclosure of “the historical Spenser behind the pastoral mask of Colin Clout” (Helgerson 1983: 96): Great Gloriana, greatest Majesty, Pardon thy shepheard, amongst so many layes, As he hath sung of thee in all his dayes, To make one minime of thy poore handmayd, And underneath thy feete to place her prayse, That when thy glory shall be farre displayd To future age of her this mention may be made. (28) In these lines, the voices of the narrator and Colin Clout merge. Not only is the narrator now Gloriana’s “shepheard,” but the stanza itself, preceded by Colin’s long explanation and followed by the line “When thus that shepherd ended had this speech” (29), seems to be uttered in Colin’s voice, as well as the narrator’s. At this point, the narrator is resuming Spenser’s previous identity of the Colin Clout of the “Shepheardes Calender” who, despite his earlier panegyric on Eliza queen of shepherds, evokes associations with John Skelton, who used this name for his anti-courtly poetic persona (Norbrook 1984: 145; Falco 1994: 106). The narrator also resumes the poetic persona of the Colin Clout of “Colin Clout’s Come Home Again,” purportedly an account of Spenser’s trip with Raleigh to Elizabeth’s court in London in 1589. While this later Colin praises the queen and other personages, he, like Meliboee, also rejects the court for the country life after observing its vanities, with its courtiers who, like Verdant, “drownded lie in pleasures wastefull well . . . unmyndfull of chiefe parts of manlinesse” ([1912] 1989: 544). In the persona of Colin, then, Spenser turns from the court to praise a simpler life. Since the name Colin is itself lower class, derived from the Latin “colonus” or “farmer,” while a “clout” is a “rag or a clod of earth” (Shore 1990: 173), Spenser’s use of this name for the poet conflates an imagined solidarity with the shepherds or farmers of the earth with the cultural prestige of Virgil, who was understood also to assume the pastoral name of Tityrus. It is here, with Colin on Acidale rather than in Elizabeth’s court, that true grace, courtesy, and even poetic inspiration resides. Spenser must import this homely character, who appears for the first time in Book six, to reveal that this more rarified fairy world cannot be understood or used by aristocrats, even by a knight of courtesy who himself becomes a corrupter of this world, unable to understand it fully or to become absorbed into its ways (Kinney 1992: 104). This failure is in part because Calidore’s pure motives to lead a shepherd’s simple life are mixed with

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his less pure desires for Pastorella in an anticipated cross-group relationship that it was precisely one role of fairy allusions to represent. Colin’s vision cannot sustain Calidore’s interruption. As in Chaucer’s Wife of Bath’s tale (1957: 86), it is in their vanishing that these graces act most like fairies. This exclusive and mystical connection between Colin and the fairies is absolutely crucial to the significance of the vision of Mount Acidale. In this vision, Spenser attempts to recover the fairies as they were somehow originally imagined, before they rose to invisibility through circulation and interpretation by other groups in illicit collaborations concerning sex or money. He envisions an originary world, antithetical to the court, created out of a fantasized solidarity with a lower sort, desired here as a source of authenticity, to whom the fairies most properly belong. There is, as Kenneth Gross points out, a “sense of danger” in Spenser’s choice to flirt “riskily with what some readers must have considered debunked old wives’ tales, if not popish superstitions” (1985: 212). Spenser was also drawing on nostalgia for what was, from the perspective of the late sixteenth century, a simpler time of imagined social unity and personal wholeness. Based on an illusory image of the past, this nostalgia showed little desire for a truly rustic life led among actual shepherds. Spenser’s portrayal of the egalitarian giant of Book five suggests a serious restriction on any true solidarity with the lower sort; his debate between Piers and Palinode in the May eclogue of the “Shepheardes Calender” casts doubts on his desire for the revival of communal May games. Such nostalgia for the past would itself represent a luxury for those of the truly lower sort who spent their lives in back-breaking efforts to obtain basic food and shelter. An emotional indulgence available only to those who could afford it, this nostalgia expressed a fantasy of an earlier time perhaps, to Spenser’s mind, still present among a very idealized and inaccessible rural lower sort, characterized by a virtuous purity of life. This simplicity pre-dated the onslaught of goods that transformed the lives not only of aristocrats, but also of the middling sorts who were, by the late sixteenth century, expanding their houses, buying pewter and curtains, and accruing worrisome debt at a rate unprecedented in England.8 From the hustle-bustle of this commercial sphere, a poet could well long for Meliboee’s “antique world” of self-sufficiency, a life stripped of all unnecessary possessions, a safe and non-political space where a poet could praise his country lass without apologizing to a queen. That world was gone. Most likely, it never existed. In this book, it is destroyed by raiding brigands. Whether the destruction of the simple world of Meliboee is designed to show the consequence of Calidore’s truancy (Berger 1961: 108) or merely as a way to bring the episode to “cursory conclusion” (Kinney 1992: 81), the brigands’ predominant trait – a greediness that reduces even people to objects for sale – represents the antithesis of Meliboee’s selfcontained serenity. As the brigands, similar to used car salesmen, praise the excellencies of Pastorella “more t’augment her price” to the merchants (VI.xi.11), their tactics replicate the strategies for selling more conventional wares in a commercial economy. It would be easy to read the rising power of this economy as the actual source of the destruction of Meliboee’s simple way

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of life, whether located in classical Rome, in an England of an earlier time, or yet lingering in a Brigadoon-like contemporary rural outskirts where strangers could not intrude. As fragile as the fairies’ dance, Meliboee’s world had vanished, seemingly into thin air. In another context, Kenneth Gross has argued that the fairies’ disappearance is not an actual loss but a fiction of a loss, and that this fiction “does as much to valorize the authentic and fragile magic of these presences as it does retrospectively to expose their status as artifice” (1985: 221). This function for a fiction of a loss pertains as well to an older solidarity imagined for the simpler world of the lower sorts and their dancing fairies. Through the rise of a commercial economy, social groups had become increasingly polarized according to wealth and social status (Muldrew 1998: 49). While various social factions could unite to support shared causes or according to certain civic or nationalist identities, they were yet alienated into “sorts”: the poorer sort, the humbler sort, the better sort, the richer sort, the learned sort (Wrightson 1991). The sense of a shared communal identity among social groups in an older, merrier England, if it ever truly existed at all, was not likely to return. The fiction of its loss authenticates the visionary status of The Faerie Queene, even as it exposes the vulnerability of that vision not only to the limitations of Calidore-like readers (Kinney 1992: 109), but also to the commercial market, where like any other consumable, Spenser’s rhymes must “seeke to please,” for “that now is counted wisemens threasure” (VI.xii.41).

Old wives In an association of fairies with the old wives’ tales heard in childhood, Spenser evokes another earlier and simpler life that has passed forever. At the same time, within a context of competing learned and oral cultures, Spenser uses the fairy queen as an ideal vehicle for representing and managing a subject’s ambivalence over domination by Queen Elizabeth. This fairy figure from childhood narratives accurately locates ambivalence about a woman’s rule at its source, in the gendered significances attached to women’s rule in childhood. In this respect, Spenser is doing what I believe he does best in The Faerie Queene: he embodies cultural issues – even cultural nightmares – in his text in ways that make them accessible but by no means simple. By naming Gloriana as the queen of his own large fairy-tale, Spenser has created issues of gender dominance as part of his own narrative act. The imagery that is most infantilizing and also most evocative of women’s narratives occurs in the episode dominated by the seductive fay Acrasia. The parallels between Acrasia and Shakespeare’s Titania reveal significant similarities between the two writers. Like Titania, Acrasia is both a lover and a nurse, a figure of sexual trespass as well as of a degrading regression to childhood. Derived from the same ballad sources – “Tam Lin,” “Thomas Rhymer,” “Thomas of Erceldoun” – Acrasia’s desires are also simultaneously maternal and sexual. As Bottom takes the place of, and in a sense becomes, the

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changeling child in Titania’s arms, his ass’s head literalizes his cultural hybridity. Verdant also regresses to a former self for abandoning quests to lie in women’s laps represented to early moderns not only sexual indulgence, but also a childish regression to an earlier effeminate self.9 Yet these episodes also present revealing differences. The imagery of Verdant’s regression suggests not Bottom’s hybridity, but a more radical dissolution of identity. This dissolution is, I argue, integrally related to the dangers potential to lyric poetry and to the early modern fiction-making persuasively associated with Acrasia’s Bower. As in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the connection between art and a regression to a childhood experience brings to the surface the often unspeakable influence of women’s tales and ballads to literatures, including The Faerie Queene itself, of the early modern period.10 Phaedria anticipates this association between Acrasia and women’s tales. While her name derives from the Greek for “glittering” or “cheerful” and her Italian “gondelay” recalls temptresses of romance (Kane 1990: 541), Phaedria would also be immediately recognizable as a fairy or a fay of medieval Celtic lore. One of a series of such tales, for example, is the medieval story of Connla, summoned by a beautiful maiden, visible only to him, to live with her, forever young, on the Plain of Delight. At first he resists, but as he eats her gift of the perfect apple, he continues to yearn for her. In a month, when she appears again, singing her seductive song in her magic boat of glass, he sails away with her and is never heard from again (Paton 1903: 3). Phaedria shares with Connla’s fay a penchant for abducting warriors to be her lovers, an enchanting song, and a magic boat (Greenlaw 1918: 110). Residing in its properties rather than its composition, the magic of Phaedria’s skiff is more typical of numerous other fays: it moves without a rudder, seemingly of its own volition (Paton 1903: 16n.1; see also Briggs 1967: 44). This property is stressed repeatedly in canto 6. Phaedria’s boat slid into the Idle lake swiftly “withouten oare or Pilot it to guide. . . . Ne cared she her course for to apply:/For it was taught the way” (vi.5). She informs Cymochles that she rows her wandring ship “that knowes her port, and thither sailes by ayme” (10). Separating Guyon from the palmer, her “barke, obaying to her mind,/Forth launched quickly” (20). Even if told by men, such fairy narratives were, by the sixteenth century, classed as old wives’ tales. Like Titania, Phaedria seems also to be simultaneously the figure of a fairytale and also of the seemingly magical women of childhood who told such tales. Rather than evoking the magic of Titania’s forest, however, Phaedria’s narrative suggests a degraded analog for Spenser’s own fairy-tale, The Faerie Queene. Merrily laughing in her skiff, she entertains Cymochles with stories: she “greatly joyed merry tales to faine,/Of which a store-house did with her remaine” (6). In her use of her “fantasticke wit” to devise “vaine toys,” Phaedria suggests an unflattering analog to Phantastes (McCabe 1989: 49). The chamber of Phantastes is filled with “idle thoughts and fantasies” buzzing around like “many swarmes of Bees” as “devices, dreames, opinions unsound . . . and all that is fained is, as leasings, tales, and lies” (II.ix.51). In his proem to Book two, the narrator uses similar terms to describe judgements of his writing by

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unsympathetic readers as “th’aboundance of an idle braine . . . and painted forgery” (1); and his delightfully disingenuous dismissal of doubts that fairyland might exist (since who could have imagined Peru before its discovery?) does little to diffuse the anticipated skepticism of practical readers. Similarly, Spenser represents his Faerie Queene as “ydle rimes . . . the labor of lost time, and wit unstayd,” unless the reader makes the effort to weigh their “deeper sence” hidden from view (1997: 741). Idle thoughts, an idle brain, idle fantasies, idle rimes: Phaedria’s thoughtless merry tales represent a shadow or perhaps a reductive reading of Spenser’s own epic. As in the implicit parody of Queen Elizabeth by Philotime, whether this connection identifies or distinguishes Spenser’s writing from women’s tales is determined by the activity of the reader. However this relationship is interpreted, Phaedria’s tales have created women’s tales as an issue in the book of temperance. Phaedria’s evocation not only of a temptress, but also of a female caretaker, appears most explicitly in her actions on her floating island. She places Cymochles’ head in her lap, and she sings him to sleep with what is, most significantly, the only extended lyric attributed to a woman character in The Faerie Queene. It is suggestive that this lyric has the effect on Cymochles of a lullabye. Echoing the rose song in the garden of Tasso’s Armida as well as the Sermon on the Mount, its content is, however, highly sophisticated. It would seem unlikely that these three highly crafted stanzas were commonly sung by nurses, from the initial authoritative, “Behold, O man, that toilesome paines doest take” (II.vi.15) to the description of the “lilly, Ladie of the flowring field” with “the Flowre-deleuce, her lovely Paramoure” (16). Rather than an accurate rendition, Phaedria’s lullaby eloquently evokes the continuing temptation to sleep, to relax, to cease all cares and worries remembered from the lullabies of childhood. For boys trained into manhood through early modern grammar schools, the perception and perhaps even the memory of this earlier time was set by the conditions through which it was recalled. From the objective mirage of the schoolroom (Jameson 1993: 33 and introduction), where boys were led to establish a sense of self through competition and arduous exercises in translation, Phaedria’s sophisticated verse expresses precisely the temptation posed by the memory of a less demanding existence led among women. This loose paraphrase suggests some of its somnolent and haunting effect: What is the point of man’s “toilesome paines” that make of him a “wretched thrall,” wasting “joyous houres in needlesse paine”? Be more like the flowers of the field, springing from nature’s “fruitfull lap.” Be more like the lily (or perhaps the small child), that “neither spinnes nor cardes, ne cares nor frets,” and so “refuse such fruitlesse toile, and present pleasures chuse” (vi.15–17). The temptation to relax and to desist from labors continues, of course, throughout life. Not limited to the schoolroom setting, a “plea for self-indulgence” (Oram 1997: 101) recurs whenever the disciplined self wishes to abandon a difficult task. It recurs repeatedly in Spenser’s own heroic endeavor of writing his epic (I.xii.42; III.xii.47). But for any early modern males who experienced some nostalgia, as schoolboys, for their childhood led among women, this temptation would be forever associated with a memory of the schoolroom.

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In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, this regression was figured as hybridity reflecting, as argued in Chapter 4, the two cultures of the nursery and the schoolroom into which elite children, including small boys, were interpellated. While Acrasia transforms some men to beasts, Book two of The Faerie Queene figures this regression more as a literal dissolution of a hard-achieved masculine identity in a relaxing of body boundaries, a dampening of the vital spirits inspiring heroic action, an utter and torpid passivity. The early modern self was individuated not through the discovery of some hidden identity, but through a continual self-discipline to control “a series of undifferentiated passions” that would overrun and obliterate the self (Schoenfeldt 1999: 49, 73). Verdant reveals the end-result of succumbing to a desire that is by nature effeminizing, as Acrasia’s love “liquefies” his “carefully constructed self” (70). Anticipated by Duessa’s sensual effect on Redcross “poured out in looseness on the grassie ground” (I.vii.7), dissolution in Book two is insistently and repeatedly figured in terms of water. As the meaning of his name as “water-perturbation” suggests, Cymochles was especially vulnerable to Phaedria’s wiles: “So easie was to quench his flamed mind/With one sweet drop of sensuall delight” (vi.8). Once Cymochles was asleep, she completed the process with fluids: “She with liquors strong his eyes did steepe” (vi.18). While she achieved less success with Guyon, her intent was the same: “So did she all, that might his [Guyon’s] constant hart/Withdraw from thought of warlike enterprize,/And drowne in dissolute delights apart” (vi.25). Phaedria could dissolve even the meanings of her own words: “for all her words she drownd with laughter vaine” (vi.6). A sense of the danger of fluids to a constructed identity is today retrievable in the term “engulfment” to refer to the drowning or overwhelming of a self. In the humoral theory of early moderns, this danger was more literal, especially for males. Mark Breitenberg describes the humoral body as “characteristically ‘feminine’ in its unruly fluidity,” so that the male subject is “by definition perilously close to becoming ‘feminine,’ always at risk of being overruled by its own lusts and passions, anxiously attentive to the balance of its own troublesome fluidity.”11 Under this humoral system, masculinity is a matter of the proper management of fluids, “a function of body chemistry” (Smith 2000: 15). With their greater proportion of blood and choler, men are, ideally, hot and dry. It is heat, in fact, that distinguishes men from women by causing men’s sexual organs to be placed outside of the body. With their greater proportion of bile and phlegm, women are cold and wet, and this colder temperature causes their sexual organs to remain within the body. Rather than a binary, this model posits gender as a continuum. Some men are colder and wetter than others; some women are hotter and drier. These qualities could change with circumstances. In rare cases, the organs of women who become too heated can, in fact, descend to create them as men (Greenblatt 1988: 81). While there are no recorded examples of physiological change to men’s organs, the possibility of less drastic forms of effeminacy are always present. With the decline of the masculinity of their youth, older men lose heat and gain moisture. Not yet hot and dry, small boys under the age of six are also, like women, predominately wet (Filipczak 1997:

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22). The threat of fluids to masculinity is quite literal. Baths, especially cold baths, are considered dangerous to men; and Francis Bacon recommends that men smooth oil on to their skin to decrease the penetration of the water (cited in Filipczak 1997: 24). In humoral theory, then, when Phaedria “quenches” the “flamed mind” of Cymochles, she literally makes him less masculine and, in the process, she moves him towards an effeminacy known in his childhood. This highly gendered theory of the humors links the two concluding episodes of Book two. Like the House of Alma, the Bower of Bliss concerns the body, in this case the male body, under attack. This threat is ever-present in the conspicuous associations of women and water also evident in late sixteenth-century paintings, often depicting women “floating on seas, bathing in ponds, dipping their hands into fountains” (Filipczak 1997: 20). The imagery is persistent in Book two, as Phaedria floats her skiff on the Idle lake. Importantly, the fountain in which the two “wanton Maidens” (xii.66) display their bodies to Guyon, includes wrought images of boys, who are, like women, associated here with water: . . . and shapes of naked boyes, Of which some seemd with lovely jollitee, To fly about, playing their wanton toyes, Whilest others did them selves embay in liquid joyes. (60) The dangerous route to Acrasia’s floating island itself eloquently conveys anxieties over the watery dissolution of the masculine self. The “Gulfe” with “the threatfull wave,/Which gaping wide, to swallow them alive,/In th’huge abysse of his engulfing grave” (5), with his “griesly mouth . . . Sucking the seas into his entralles deepe” (6) would seem a nightmare version of oral sex by an old man, for this almost-personified gulf suggests river gods usually depicted as aged, and thus returned to the wetness of childhood (Filipczak 1997: 22). The Palmer’s explication of the gulf as “lustfull luxurie” (9) reinforces the connection between conspicuous consumption and the dissolution of masculinity. This physical and literal threat posed by the humors helps to restore a sense of the horror with which Guyon views Verdant, supine in Acrasia’s lap, as “his lips bedewd,/. . . through his humid eyes did sucke his spright,/Quite molten into lust and pleasure lewd” (II.xii.73). The homoerotic suggestion in the presence of “lascivious boyes” increases the watery danger of this sensual scene, even as it also evokes the memory of boyhoods led among women. The sensual description of Acrasia’s bare breast, with the drops of sweat so resonant of drops of milk, suggests her as a figure not only of an enchantress or even of a mother, but of a nurse: Her snowy brest was bare to readie spoyle Of hungry eies, which n’ote therewith be fild, And yet through languour of her late sweet toyle,

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Few drops, more cleare then Nectar, forth distild, That like pure Orient perles adowne it trild. (77) It is in part the sensuous aesthetic beauty of this sight as our eyes, like Guyon’s, follow the path of the exquisite drops slowly traveling down her breast that calls forth Guyon’s violent response suggestive of an anxiety elicited by his own forbidden desire, shared by other early moderns, to relax the boundaries constitutive of the hard-won masculine self in the arms of a woman whose sensuous domination recapitulates, in the act of adult sexual consummation, the pleasures of a merged subjectivity familiar to the effeminate self of childhood. While Phaedria’s narrative hints at an inferred relationship, whether identification or opposition, between the fantasies of Spenser’s epic and the “merry tales” shared by women, Acrasia’s Bower implicates Spenser’s own poetry on a deeper and more explicit level. As Greenblatt notes, “Acrasia’s realm is lavishly represented in just those terms that the defenders of poetry in the Renaissance reserved for imagination’s noblest achievements”: the harmonious concord and its sprezzatura or concealed effort (1980: 189). Speaking directly to contemporary concerns with masculinity, Patricia Parker describes this “fatal Bower of Bliss” as a demonstration of “the potential impotence of poetry itself in a state in which it is scorned as a form of effeminacy, or idle ‘toyes,’ in contrast to more active, imperial pursuits” (1987: 56, 58). As she holds in her arms the helpless and unarmed Verdant, Acrasia literalizes a now-famous metaphor in Sidney’s Apology for Poetry of “poet’s pastimes” that lull asleep “in shady idleness,” virile men once “given to martial exercises” (Lamb 1994: 501). Other figures, such as Homer’s Circe and Tasso’s Armida, confirm and extend the dangers of her nightmarish sexual powers. But as Acrasia, like Titania, conflates the authority of fairy queens with the powerful effects of “old wives’” tales and ballads on children in their charge, she provides an uncomfortably familiar locus for these anxieties. Acrasia gives concrete expression to a shared humanist nightmare: that in its competition with the schoolroom, the childhood culture of women might sometimes win out, to impair the full achievement of an active and striving masculinity. As the knight of Temperance, Guyon embodies precisely the disciplined masculine subject that it was the grammar school project to produce. It was this classical system of values inculcated in the Renaissance schoolroom that invested Verdant’s regression with a particular horror or, alternatively, with a perverse pleasure, invoking “the tempest” of Guyon’s “wrathfulness” as he destroyed the Bower (II.xii.83). The emphatic intertextuality of this episode, drawing from Tasso as well as Homer, implies an even more dangerous possibility: that any fiction – whether written or oral, classical or native, composed by men or by women – eliciting purposeless pleasure can be as effeminizing as the fairy-tales of childhood. In the Bower of Bliss episode, Spenser pushes contemporary anxieties about the gendered effects possible to poetry to their most extreme form. One might think that these anxieties, expressed in this way, would bring The Faerie Queene

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to a halt. It is perhaps the very direness of this scenario that leads to its reformulation in Book three, literally from a different perspective. The horror of Verdant’s lapse depends upon Guyon’s gaze, constructed from assumptions about masculinity codified as the virtue of Temperance, or the mastery of passions through reason. With the Book of Chastity, a woman knight Britomart knocks Guyon off his horse (III.1.7), replacing him as a hero to demonstrate a virtue especially pertinent to women. With this entry into a female domain, the entire situation looks different. This change of perspective is signaled in the proem to Book three, which re-views the gender dynamics of the Bower of Bliss. Placed so closely after the destruction of the Bower of Bliss, the narrator’s claims to be “ravished” with the “melting sweetness” of Raleigh’s poem and, even worse, to feel his “senses lulled . . . in slomber of delight” evoke Verdant’s lassitude (III.proem.4). What was cause for blame in Book two, however, becomes grounds for praise in Book three. The relationship between narratives circulated in the schoolroom and nursery changes from competition to cooperation, as Book three moves to a looser construction of narrative and character more typical of a mode attributed to early modern females (Wofford 1988: 15). Spenser’s quotation of the often-quoted words written over the doors in Busirane’s castle – “Be Bold,” “Be Bold,” “Be Not Too Bold” – counterpoises the folktale of Mr. Fox, an English version of Bluebeard, against the patriarchal “spell” of the lyrics, masques, and Ovidian myths that holds Amoret captive (Lamb 2000a: 97–9). In the House of Busirane, the battle is finally one of interpretation, in which the female knight Britomart refuses to yield to Busirane’s tyrannical readings (Silberman 1995: 59–60). In this contest for interpretation, and the gendered terms in which it was posed, Spenser’s work replicates similar battles waged furiously and extensively within the subjectivities of early moderns.

Hobby-horses and dragons, or the performed St. George12 With the performed St. George, the waging of battles occurred outside as well as within the self. In this figure, Spenser inherited an involved and far-ranging tradition. Through histories, church iconography, and oral accounts, the cultural memories of his frequent appearances in civic ridings, watches, and court festivities in pre-Reformation England would not have yet faded by Spenser’s day. From this tradition, St. George became an appropriate symbol of an “old” England during a period when a nation was searching for legends and heroes through which to represent itself. Through the processions of Queen Elizabeth and the Knights of the Garter on St. George’s Day, this nationalist significance remained alive even in the absence of a physical bearer of the saint. For Spenser’s readers, the responses elicited by the popular associations of St. George and, in his absence, of his dragon in May games, church ales, and other popular festivities in Queen Elizabeth’s reign, would have varied widely, depending on their age, geographical location, and religious sensibilities. As a figure of unsponsored and increasingly discredited festivity described in Chapter

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4, the performed St. George, often merged with a tourney-style hobby-horse, who fights with his dragon, would become a degraded sign of a low aesthetic by the early seventeenth century. But since this process was still in transition, not only among but also within individuals, this aspect of St. George was capable of arousing various degrees of joy and hostility, nostalgia and disgust, sometimes at the same time. The St. Georges of the early seventeenth century suggest conceptual routes available to Spenser: to capitalize on his popular associations at the cost of alienating the soberer sort as at Wells, or to purify him of festivity in a deliberate forgetting as at Chester, discussed above in Chapter 4. Accomplishing both and neither of these alternatives, Spenser’s Book one produces not only a narrative but an aesthetic capable of engaging readers at several levels simultaneously. It may perhaps seem strange to modern readers that one of these levels invoked a degraded aesthetic. Exhorting an “honest fellow” to “leave writing these beastly ballads,” Kemp’s Epilogue to his Nine Daies Wonder refers contemptuously to Spenser’s protagonist, asserting that even the “bloody lines of the blew Lady, and the Prince of the burning crowne” are “a better subject, I can tell ye: than your Knight of the Red Crosse” (1984: 338). As Spenser’s uses of the performed St. George invest Book one with complex, and potentially profound, social meanings, it is a mark of his genius that the operations of this text provide opportunities for readers to mark, or to fashion, their identifications with an aesthetic of the low through their own creative and unpredictable acts of interpretation. An awareness of St. George as the sign of the low enters The Faerie Queene as early as Spenser’s letter to Raleigh, in which he describes the Red Cross Knight as “a tall clownishe younge man” who, after falling before Gloriana to request an adventure, “rested him on the floore, unfitte through his rusticity for a better place” (1997: 738). Spenser’s use of this association is, however, openended. As the Red Cross Knight, the figure of St. George provides at least three possible identifications from which readers may choose. His initial appearance in Book one stresses his inexperience. “Old dints” from previous encounters reveal that his armor was received second-hand, for “yet armes till that time did he never wield.” He is disdained even by his horse, “angry” as he “did chide his foming bitt” (I.i.1). From such cues, Richard Hardin describes the text as “inviting us to consider that the clownish knight was . . . a product of the pageant and festival Saint George” (2001: 252) And this inexperience is not confined to the first canto, for “until the last three cantos, in fact, the gullible rustic behaves more like a rude pageant actor than the authentic hero as imagined by chivalry” (252). In fostering an identification with the cruder St. George of unsponsored performances, the narrative of Book one also flows into a broader stream of folktale plots. As an inexperienced rustic who succeeds in defeating the dragon and winning the heart of the princess, this St. George becomes indistinguishable from the tailors, the third sons, the Jacks in the beanstalks who also emerge from anonymity to accomplish great deeds. The functions of such tales to provide

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wish-fulfillment to lives worn down by labor and poverty create the core narrative of Book one as a fantasy reflecting the conditions of the peasants (cf. Zipes 1979: 27). This identification is supported by his name, George, from geos, the earth, of the “heaped furrow” where a fairy had placed him, to be found and reared by a simple ploughman (I.x.66). This association with the soil is particularly evocative for a figure that participated in the tales, as well as the May games and other practices, marking the seasonal cycles of the agrarian countryside. From this tradition, the overcoming of Una’s initial resistance not only to accept but even to marry her rustic knight models a receptive response invited from readers. With Contemplation’s announcement of the Red Cross Knight’s aristocratic lineage, born “from ancient race/of Saxon kings” (I.x.65), a second and very different narrative mode comes into play in the tale of the remarkable personage whose extraordinary qualities derive from an aristocratic descent at odds with his or her apparently humble origins. From the legendary Arthur to Shakespeare’s lovely Perdita of his Winter’s Tale, variations of this narrative were particularly popular in early modern romances in prose and drama. The implied reification of the aristocratic class as innately superior to other groups appears in the implicit connection between the “bloudie battailes” fought by his royal ancestors and Contemplation’s statement that “prickt with courage and thy forces pryde,/To Faery court thou cam’st to seeke for fame” (I.x.65, 66). In Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, such “sparks of nature” as a passionate pleasure in “warlike feats” indicated the royal parentage of two youths raised in a forest cave (3.3.78, 90). From this perspective, rather than a hero of low status, the figure of the Red Cross Knight asserts the genetic superiority of the aristocratic group. These contrasting narrative traditions complicate the relation to a lower status group underlying the third and more metaphorical perspective on the Red Cross Knight as fallen man subject to flesh, as are all humans. This interpretation of St. George appeared prominently in Caxton’s translation of Voragine’s Golden Legend: “George is sayd of geos/whiche is as moche to saye as erthe and orge/that is tilyenge/so george is to saye as tilyenge the erthe/that is his flesshe” (quoted in MacLachlan 1990: 212). His discovery in a furrow of earth finally signifies his fallen nature inherited from Adam, or “adamah,” the Hebrew for “earth” (1990: 212). Yet he may, like other Christians, become freed from sin by defeating the dragon Satan. A necessary transcendence of the flesh is implicit in Una’s acceptance of him as her knight only after he puts on the armor she provides, identified by Spenser as the “armour of a Christian man specified by Saint Paul v. Ephes” (“Letter” 1997: 738). As Kenneth Borris observes, it is only through Christian scripture and God’s grace that the flesh may be subdued by the spirit, to attain a sanctification prefiguring the glorified resurrected body (2001: 19). From one perspective, this third version negates the other two. In his rusticity, the Red Cross Knight is no more or less unworthy than any other fallen human. Similarly, descent from Saxon kings or any other noble ancestry is of no

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value without the armor of God; but resonances remain, as do interpretive possibilities. Association with the low may, if the reader wishes, become particularly implicated in the “geos” or earthly flesh that must be left behind, so abundantly present in the May games, the drums and trumpets, the festivals, the spontaneous bodily delight of the “devils daunce withall” so offensive to Philip Stubbes, as discussed in Chapter 4. Similarly, the aristocratic birth of the Red Cross Knight may, if the reader wishes, signal an inner form of nobility residing within any Christians chosen as God’s elect. Both of these sets of choices provide opportunities for members of the middling sort to identify, or to distinguish, themselves from low and aristocratic groups alike. Associations of Red Cross Knight with the performed St. George come most powerfully into play in his encounters with Turks and the dragon. Richard Hardin claims that the combat of the Red Cross Knight with the Turkish knight Sansjoy in the house of Lucifera, the subsequent defeat of Sansjoy, Duessa’s transportation of his wounded body to the doctor, here named Aesculapius, “offers yet another tantalizing clue that, a century before the earliest known date the Mummers’ Play was well enough known to appear in a parody” (2001: 251). Perhaps the traditional appearances of devils influenced Duessa’s descent into hell, with its vivid descriptions of its inhabitants, including ancient Night herself, who rules over this realm. Unlike the cure expected for the traditional combatant, however, the success of Aesculapius’s efforts is never determined. His placement in Hell, where he vainly strove to restore his own health with salves to “slake the heavenly fire, that raged evermore” (I.v.40) reveals his error in attempting to cure a spiritual disease through physical remedies. Whether or not Aesculapius can heal the wounds of Sansjoy, he cannot relieve the spiritual ill which Sansjoy represents. Read as a parody of a low amateur performance, the combat between the Red Cross Knight and Sansjoy, with the defeated Sansjoy’s attempted cure, operates in various ways. Analogous to the contemporary use of ballad tunes for psalms, the vigor and free spirits of the physical performance of a degraded aesthetic revitalizes the religious discourse of Spenser’s allegory. The knight’s spiritual battle seems more familiar, and more appealing, against this background of amateur enactments. In this sense, this “Saint George of mery England” (I.x.61) accomplishes, or at least attempts, a drawing together of the Protestant Reformation with a low social fraction, exhibiting an open appeal of Protestant piety that includes, rather than excludes, common forms of pleasure. In this context, the figure of Sansjoy casts aspersions against the disapproving sobriety of ministers such as Philip Stubbes who fulminated so publicly against traditional pastimes. This reading represents Red Cross’s fight against joylessness as a significant spiritual task within Protestant piety. The location of this combat within the House of Pride suggests a critique of the potentially prideful and self-serving alienation of the pious sort from their free-spirited neighbors. The futility of the salves of Aesculapius to cure spiritual errors elicits, however, a counteridentification with the performance of the low as well. With its drumming and stylized combat, the festive mirth of such public amateur performances was, by

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the standards of the Reformation, a merely physical pleasure unredeemed by spiritual value. From this perspective, Sansjoy is the “old man” to be left behind (Hardin 2001: 252). In his battle with Sansjoy, this St. George attacks the joylessness of the fleshly desires so abundantly present in the pastimes of a traditional culture of merry England. An interpretation of Lucifera’s house as signifying corrupted flesh, rather than the sanctified body of the house of Holiness, supports this reading (Borris 2001: 19). From this angle, the figure of Sansjoy evokes not self-alienation from physical pleasures but the ultimate emptiness of such pleasures of the body without the presence of spiritual grace. So which is it? In either reading, the struggle of the Red Cross Knight with Sansjoy enacts a struggle within the self. Freely chosen, readers’ interpretive choices mark or challenge their own forms of self-division. The Red Cross Knight’s combat with Sansjoy evokes another interpretive choice as well. Throughout, the episode juxtaposes the associations with traditional amateur performances and classical allusions. The doctor attending Sansjoy is Aesculapius, a physician of ancient Greece. The place to which Duessa carries Sansjoy resembles not only a Christian Hell of “damned ghosts” (I.v.33), but an ancient Hades of the “trembling ghosts” (I.v.32) of classical figures as well. In the combat itself, the “darkesome clowd” (I.v.13) that hides Sansjoy from the deathstroke of Red Cross evokes a classical scene from the Iliad of Chapman’s Homer, in which Venus’s veil and then Phoebus’s “sable clowd” hide Aeneas from a deathstroke until, protected by the “Sunne,” he may recover from his wounds in a “goodly Temple” (1967: 5, 328–432). Spenser’s episode parodies this source through specific contrasts: the heroic Aeneas vs. the irascible Sansjoy, the loving Venus vs. duplicitous Duessa, and especially young manly Phoebus the Sun vs. the ancient female Night. By inviting a highly educated form of reading pleasure, this episode appeals to classically educated readers who may recognize these parallels that both compare and distinguish Spenser’s work from Homer’s. The episode itself undoes this foundation of this textual kinship, however, by casting doubts on the value of this knowledge. Rendered ineffective by his limitations as a pagan, Aesculapius cannot heal the soul. Confined to the domain of the body without the benefit of redeeming grace, the knowledges of Aesculapius and his fellow pagans fall as short as those of amateur performers. Reading Homer will not redeem the soul any more than will play games. As the text presents this dramatic juxtaposition of two very different forms of identification – with amateur play game combats and with Homer’s Iliad – it also offers the opportunity to devalue them both as nonChristian traditions. The allusions to amateur play games in the Sansjoy episode reach further development in the final combat between Red Cross and the dragon in the culmination of Book one. Similar to the combat with Sansjoy, this combat is genuinely hybrid, bringing together high and low in ways that are finally hard to evaluate. Spenser’s rendition of this struggle engages various interpretive modes simultaneously in a virtuoso display of his art. The multi-level significances of this narrative are by now well known within Spenser criticism. In defeating the

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dragon, the ordinary Christian finds salvation through God’s grace; Christ Himself redeems mankind from the fall of man; Christ harrows hell; Christ overcomes Satan at the apocalypse; England puts down a papist Antichrist to become united with the true Church (Humphrey 1990: 223–4). As an incarnation of evil, this truly terrifying dragon evokes few reminders of the much-loved dragon accompanying St. George. Yet the fall and the resuscitation of a combatant enacts a core event of a play game. In this battle, it is the St. George figure, not his opponent, who falls and rises again with outside assistance. Rather than a doctor to attend to his physical needs, the Red Cross Knight is revived in spirit by sacramental means: by the sacred fountain symbolizing baptism and the stream of balm from a tree symbolizing Christ’s blood of the eucharist. Like the battle with Sansjoy, the relationship of this godly contest to debased amateur performances may be read in two opposing ways, although to the same evangelistic purpose. One the one hand, the battle represents a purification of a vulgar tradition and, it is hoped, of those who participated in such traditions, to render them clean and sober citizens fit for a New Jerusalem. Alternatively, it represents a popularization of a eucharistic tradition designed to appeal to those enthusiasts of festive practices alienated by the censures of pious reformers. For these, Spenser may be softening the harder outlines of a reformist practice to render religion more receptive to the pleasures of the low. Or perhaps the overwhelming terror induced by the dragon, more frightening than Norwich’s beloved “Old Snap” could ever be, suggests its meaning as an embodiment of an older Catholic England that must be conquered by a paradoxically now Protestant St. George. Distanced by the epic high style describing this final conflict, evocations of traditional play games resonate more strongly within the very different aesthetic written for the triumphant procession celebrating the dragon’s defeat. As one of Spenser’s few representations of a recognizably contemporary populace, this procession elicits popular associations in the “fry of children young” with their “wanton sports,” the maidens singing with their timbrels, the crowning of the May queen with a garland, the “rude rablement” that gaze open-mouthed at Red Cross, and especially the overprotective mother who fears that the dead dragon’s talons might yet “scratch” her son, or “rend his tender hand” (I.xii.6–11). Reflecting doubts as to whether the dragon is truly dead or liable to make a sudden move, this simultaneous fear and delight undoubtedly parallels the crowd’s responses to processional dragons such as Norwich’s Old Snap, named for his large, clicking jaws, or the later Wells dragon, poised to pounce on the festival princess. But except for Old Snap, many dragons were retired along with their St. Georges, at the cessation of officially sponsored ridings in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. By inviting a wide range of readers’ identifications, from joyful participation in the crowd’s delight, to nostalgia for the official entertainments of times past, to amused condescension at naïve responses to the dead dragon, this description provides another opportunity for readers to forge their own relationship with the traditions of the past, still evoked in the now degraded aesthetic of the low.

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The very different aesthetics written for Red Cross’s soul-searing combat with the dragon and the popular celebration afterwards pose a dilemma of interpretation reaching into the social sphere. Unlike the procession, the final conflict itself is intensely serious and literally apocalyptic in tone. Does the sacramental nature of the resuscitations of Red Cross discourage or even negate associations with amateur play game performances? What is the effect of Spenser’s divine parody of a debased secular practice? In short, does Spenser’s use of the performed St. George place him on a conceptual path traveling towards a chaotic and oppositional Wells or towards an ordered and hierarchical Chester? Throughout The Faerie Queene, Spenser mixed low associations with hyperliterate allusions from classical texts to create a stunningly rich and hybrid aesthetic. In these bold maneuvers, Spenser’s process incorporates some of the productive mixture of Wells and, like the citizens of Wells, he risked the contempt of those who, like Gabriel Harvey, accused his “Hobgoblin” of running away “with the Garland from Apollo” ([1912] 1991: 628). It is not clear, however, whether The Faerie Queene fosters the acceptance or the reform of lower status groups. Hardin suggests eloquently, in another context, that “having seen folk plays with magical cures, Spenser transforms them from buffoonery to blessedness, while preserving their original meaning” (2001: 253). Blessedness was not, however, discernibly part of any early modern meaning, at least as conveyed by the circumstances of performance. To interpret a low play game performance in terms of salvation and resurrection is to swerve from a recognition of the irremediable physicality of an experience aptly described by Bruce Smith as dying in O to “rise again in ha ha” (1999: 163). Spenser’s appropriation of low play game performances, like most other appropriations, was almost inevitably double-edged. Inviting the joy and vigor of low practices into his text, he also disciplined their meanings as he presented his reader not with a conflation, but a necessary interpretive choice. In this respect, his Red Cross Knight is closer to the Chester St. George as, purged of vulgarity, he enacts a deliberate forgetting even as the dragon’s presence in his triumphal procession reminds his viewers of what must be forgotten. Performances of St. George and his dragon represented one of a myriad ways in which a traditional festivity of merry England rose to public visibility; but what rose to visibility was not exactly the same experience encountered by earlier generations. Through May games, horse-races, and works such as The Faerie Queene, the figures and practices of a lower status group came to generate new meanings that they had never possessed before. Garrett Sullivan and Linda Woodbridge have discussed the mediation of popular culture by the educated, whose appropriations operated according to their own interests and agendas (2000: 289). When The Faerie Queene was written, this category was in formation but not entirely in place. What is the relationship between appropriation and remembrance in this transitional time? While some points of identification within the Red Cross Knight episodes suggest social or religious agendas, others do not. The rich and even contradictory interpretive choices offered to readers of The Faerie Queene reflect a range of identifications prevailing

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simultaneously not only within a single work, but also within a single mind. In this range, Spenser may be representative of other early moderns, similarly entangled with conflicting allegiances, whose desires, whether to remember or to forget, were not always consistent with their individual projects of selfdistinction, in which those memories were to be put to some personal and practical use.

Part IV

Ben Jonson

8

Oberon, The Fairy Prince (1611) and the great fairy caper; The Sad Shepherd (c.1637) and the topography of the devil’s arse

From the gracious fairy queen who bestows a jewel on Queen Anne in “A Particular Entertainment of the Queene and Prince . . . at Althorpe” (1603), to Dol, who acts the part of the fairy queen to fool poor Dapper out of his valuables in the Alchemist (1610), to the honest spokesperson Robin Goodfellow who exposes the disguised Plutus as the god of money in Love Restored (1612), Ben Jonson’s productions of the popular foreground a diversity of choices enriched by the works of his predecessors. In his masque Oberon, The Fairy Prince (1611), the naming of Prince Henry as Oberon alludes implicitly to his namesake Henry VIII, the Oberon who was the royal father of Tanaquill or Queen Elizabeth, in the fairy lineage meticulously traced in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (II.x.76). The dissonant domains of the masque’s moonlit world of fairy and the sunlit realm of kingly responsibilities roughly parallel those structuring A Midsummer Night’s Dream; and Prince Henry’s movements between these realms similarly foreground the complexities of the hybrid subject. Left unfinished at Jonson’s death in 1637, the play The Sad Shepherd draws Earine’s plot from Spenser’s Florimell, who also spurns a rude suitor, falls victim to the witch that is his mother, and finally is falsely reported dead (Barton 1984: 348). Replicating social tensions circulating between the disreputable poor and the comfortable householders of The Merry Wives of Windsor, the shape-changing Mother Maudlin becomes, like the old woman of Brentford, a degraded or abjected version of the playwright himself. Even more significant resemblances appear in Jonson’s techniques for the productions of the popular, from binary oppositions that ultimately collapse; to simultaneous impositions of meaning; to loosely structured referents to contemporary and especially monarchal fictions of relation. Rather than proposing solutions, Jonson’s productions, like those of Shakespeare and Spenser, brilliantly set out the cultural and personal dilemmas of the early modern subject. Rapid social developments occurring in the early seventeenth century also fostered significant differences between Jonson’s productions and those of his illustrious predecessors. Jonson was enjoying the successes of his first comedies on stage in the 1590s, when Shakespeare and Spenser were producing the writings discussed in previous chapters. By the performance of Jonson’s masque Oberon (1611) and the Sad Shepherd (c.1637), however, the dilemmas

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confronting the early modern subject had already undergone if not rapid changes, then at least significant intensifications of existing oppositions, due to two major but related socio-historical movements of that time: the increasing conflict between the Jacobean and later the Caroline aristocracy with their subjects, and the continued evolution of a commercial economy in a period of proto-capitalism. For this study, the most important of these differences are the changes in what was meant by the “popular.” Under the influence of these movements, the accelerating polarization of social fractions created an even greater distance from members of the lower sort. As social meanings projected onto the popular became more extreme, they became more prone to representation as romanticized ideals or degraded others, sometimes simultaneously. While discussed briefly in the Introduction, it is useful to review these two cultural developments. Early seventeenth-century patterns of living – and modes of spending – were increasing the distance between the aristocracy not only with the middling sort, but also with its own servants and tenants. Drawn to the opportunities for wealth and rank flowing from the Stuart court, increasing numbers of the gentry and aristocracy were becoming absentee landlords. Even at their country homes, private spaces for wealthy owners and their families were replacing the medieval great hall, and the aristocracy mingled less even with its own servants (Girouard 1978; Ranum 1989: 210–30; Fumerton 1991: 111–28). Concerned over the political vacuum caused by the distance between court and countryside, James I and then Charles I repeatedly ordered the gentry and nobles to return to their ancestral houses to keep hospitality with their neighbors, further encouraging country pastimes by issuing the Book of Sports (1618). The monarchy and its aristocrats frantically attempted to discover, or to invent, a relationship with a rural agrarian culture. Idealizing peasants’ mirth in festive pastimes as signifying allegiance to the king, loyalists attempted to recreate a more congenial time when a feudal system was more securely in place as a means of ideological legitimation against the rising power of an urban middling sort increasingly hostile to traditional forms of monarchal authority. But this past was gone, and it could not be re-invoked. Opposition from pious or otherwise sober neighbors often lent such pastimes a distinctly defiant and unpleasant edge, if they were not, as in Chester’s welcoming of Prince Henry in 1610, co-opted entirely by civic authorities (Chapter 4). As argued in this chapter, Jonson’s own position in this problematic of power was deeply ambivalent. Appealing on the one hand to aristocratic patrons, some of whom aroused in him genuine respect, he yet held himself apart, and somewhat above, a court whose politics and values he could not entirely share. Yet Jonson was no radical man of the people. When not offering gifts to aristocratic patrons as in his poem “To Penshurst,” his rural lower sorts remained, for the most part, country clowns. The Stuart production of a popular culture was also shaped by the rise of a consumer society in which modes of consumption functioned then, as in modern times, “in making, marking, and maintaining of cultural difference” (Bourdieu 1984: 116). The inscription of social relations on the discriminating choice and

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display of worldly goods operated at all social levels. Non-elite groups became empowered by forms of conspicuous consumption once primarily the privilege of the aristocracy. With its feudal hierarchy dealt a body blow by the sudden decline in respect offered to rank and title, aristocrats risked their fortunes on increasingly extensive and inventive bids for distinction. Even the disreputable poor were imagined to scheme, like their social betters, to exploit other groups for money. Memorably portrayed in Jonson’s city comedies, this seamy underside of humanity represents a degraded version of the popular. The deep structural changes marking the onset of an emerging capitalist economy caused Jonson to move away from the ebullience of popular festivity embodied by fat Ursula towards the “polished manners and inward depth” of the gentleman-like sensibility of his poem “Inviting a Friend to Supper” (Haynes 1992: 134–5). However, as in Shakespeare’s Windsor, the irrepressible swindlers of Bartholomew Fair, as well as the con artists featured in such plays as Volpone and The Alchemist, also exude a continuing Falstaffian appeal of a criminalized popular culture gone underground. In both idealized and degraded forms, these popular cultures were produced through early seventeenth-century conflicts that were, for the most part, intensifications of those experienced in the 1590s. The social tensions dividing an aristocratic elite from the middling and lower sorts would soon break out into civil war. While providing an alternative to a rigid lineage system, the materialist definition of subjects through the consumption of goods brought its own risks and disappointments, perhaps most particularly in a volatile and ultimately reductive perception of the self. Ben Jonson confronted these dilemmas on both personal and professional levels. While his masques and some poems sallied forth boldly into a fiercely competitive patronage system affirming social hierarchy, his finest plays submitted themselves to the public tastes empowered by the marketplace of the commercial theater. Neither aristocratic nor public audiences were to prove wholly satisfactory. As Jonathan Haynes has observed, Jonson’s self-definition as an author required “a watchful, wakeful audience, with enough personal autonomy to make independent judgements and enough aesthetic experience and training to make the right ones” (1992: 135). This audience was not yet in place; perhaps it never would be. It was itself a fiction created from classical literary materials encountered first at the Westminster School, taught by the great William Camden, who intervened in the life course of this boy who would in earlier periods have been destined to lay bricks for his stepfather. Jonson’s classical education contributed a significant and lasting effect to Jonson’s sense of self. From this education, and perhaps from the social relationships in the schoolroom where it was taught, came a Roman model of friendship between like-minded persons that formed the basis for Jonson’s construction of his ideal audience. Katherine Eisaman Maus aptly describes a Jonson play as a transaction designed to test whether his audience was, in fact, compatible with this classical ideal (1984: 143). This model of authorship corresponded to Jonson’s classical and finally stoic frame of mind, by which an individual’s moral caliber, quite apart from external

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circumstances, constituted the measure of his well-being (13). This inner moral equilibrium served as the source of what has been called Jonson’s “gathered self,” a serene sphere or circle closed off to the raging chaos of the world (Greene 1970: 329). Like his model audience, however, this gathered or Stoic self also represented an unattainable ideal. Jonson’s expressed contempt for his public audience, his ambitious self-fashioning as the king’s poet, his rivalries with Inigo Jones: all of these bespeak an intense engagement with the external world incompatible with Stoic serenity. It is perhaps the difficulties and tensions generated by the attempt to hold a self together in the face of divisive external forces that inform Jonson’s writings with their passionate intensities. This understanding of Jonson’s classical models, both of an audience and of a self, provides significant insights into his often-noted differences from Shakespeare and, I would add, Spenser (Wheeler 1938; Donaldson 1997, 1983; Loxley 2002: 125–30). While these authors owe a substantial debt to ancient writers, Jonson’s classicism represents a more fundamental aspect of his authorial self. Jonson’s classicism inevitably pervades his productions of the popular. Rather than identifying the playwright within a binary of high or low, the Oberon uses Jonson’s classical sense of self to clear a middle ground, ideally accountable to neither social extreme. Its classicism implicit in a discourse of topography devised by his old schoolmaster and mentor William Camden, The Sad Shepherd presents the literal ground as a site of unresolved ideological struggle. As this chapter demonstrates, Jonson’s middle ground is fraught with conflicted allegiances and contradictions, a number of which were not entirely of his own making.

Oberon, The Fairy Prince Performed in the court of King James on New Year’s Day, 1611, Jonson’s masque Oberon, The Fairy Prince was the second of two masques commissioned by Prince Henry, who entered a new phase of public life when he was created Prince of Wales in June 1610 at the age of sixteen. After his presentation as a warlike medieval knight skilled in tilting in Jonson’s Barriers, Prince Henry engaged the services of Jonson and Inigo Jones for the creation of a masque featuring him as the fairy king Oberon. Beyond an evening’s entertainment, this masque functioned as a vehicle through which Prince Henry presented himself as heir apparent to the court. As Stephen Orgel’s seminal Illusion of Power affirms, courtly masquers did not, strictly speaking, play roles; they used roles to play idealized versions of themselves which were, in theory, to reveal some “deep truth about monarchy” (1975: 38). When Prince Henry entered the Whitehall Banqueting House as Oberon, he was performing himself as a means of professing, before the court, his conception of his role as prince as well as of the king it seemed that he would one day become. Prince Henry’s choice to present himself as Oberon, the fairy king, was particularly fitting to his newly assumed identity as Prince of Wales, a region known for its superstitions and special fondness for fairies. Prince Henry was not the only presence in this masque,


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however. It also included courtiers who played fairies, professional actors who played satyrs, and the king who represented the anticipated end-point of Oberon’s progress across the floor from the world of fairy. As a dramatic performance of their aristocratic distinction, the prince and the court presented a united front. As Joseph Loewenstein has eloquently observed for this “huge scale of communal aestheticization,” “the form itself was an accomplishment” (1991: 169). Yet within this shared exhibition of distinction, conflicting agendas also reflected deep social and ideological fissures, a number of which were played out in the masque’s exceedingly odd mixture of classical and fairy elements. While the concept of fairy king was Henry’s, the execution by Jonson and Jones was remarkable for its addition of classical motifs. A brief summary of the masque’s slight plot, with its antimasque of rude satyrs who clamor to serve the fairy king, demonstrates the masque’s startling eclecticism of fairy and classical motifs. Responding to the sound of a cornet, satyrs gather to cavort within a rocky scene lit by the moon (Jonson 1941: 351, l.30). Admonishing them to chaster language, their praefect Silenus praises the fairy prince as “the height of all our race” (l.65). Hoping that he might fulfill their material desires for morris bells and nicer caves, the satyrs eagerly anticipate Oberon’s arrival. The rocky scene then opens up to reveal a glorious palace (not) guarded by two sleeping sylvans, whom satyrs wake by singing a rude catch. After a hostile exchange with the sylvans, the satyrs impugn the chastity of the moon with a song and fall into an antique dance. Then the palace itself opens, to reveal fairies and further behind them the knights of Oberon’s fairy court, and finally, as the last and most magnificent discovery, Oberon himself. To the sound of triumphant music and harmonious song, two white bears draw the fairy king’s chariot forward to pay homage to King James, named as “James,” seated in “Arthurs chaire” (ll.305, 323). The skipping satyrs give place to the lesser fairies whose “nimble feet” dance in “subtle circles” pointing to the honored father of Oberon (ll.31–2). Then Oberon and the knight masquers take out members of the court party in their three masque dances, each followed by a song. After one final dance, the scene closes again, and the masque ends with a song announcing the arrival of morning. According to the notes of an observer, the satyrs join in with the fairy masquers in the concluding ballet of the sortie (Herford and Simpson 1950: 10.523). The plot’s eclecticism is replicated in the architecture of Oberon’s fairy palace, where Gothic turrets embellish classical Palladian proportions based on the circular temples of Vitruvius (Peacock 1995: 75–6). Prince Henry’s costume mixes elements from Trajan’s representations of the twelve Caesars with portions of exotic creatures: a bird’s head at the front of his helmet, the mask of a lion’s head on his left upper arm, and a satyr’s mask just below his neck.1 The onlooker identified the “white brodequins” and the jackets “with wide folds” worn by the fairy masquers as the attire of “Roman emperors” (10.522). Representing more than an aesthetic choice, the combination of unlikely elements of plot, set, and costume assert, resist and, in some instances, purposely

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obfuscate, any single overriding interpretation by spectators of what this deep truth enacted by the idealized selves of courtly masquers might be. At its most obvious level, the mixed iconography tactfully mystifies the identity of the primary personage of the masque. Is it Prince Henry in his role as fairy prince, or his father King James, who from his initial entrance into London staged himself in high Roman style (Goldberg 1983: 33)? This necessary tact accounts to some extent for the mixture of fairy and classical characters. Anticipated by satyrs and venerated by fairies, Oberon served as the focal point of spectators’ attention. Yet his procession towards his father deflected the praise offered to him towards King James, not only as his father but also as the king that Henry would one day become. Beyond mere tact, the classical references also offer an implicit lesson to the prince of the necessity of his continued filial identification with King James. In addition to his new title as Prince of Wales, Henry’s selfpresentation as fairy king also announced his foreign policy. By identifying himself with the fairy queen Elizabeth, his fairy iconography encoded a militant Protestant posture hostile to Catholic countries, in direct opposition to his father’s more pacific approach to international relations (Butler 1998: 29–32). As part of his service as humanist advisor to rulers (Maus 1984: 106; Lindley 2004: 388), Jonson used these mixed icongraphies to make a serious political point, implicitly advising Henry to temper his aggressive stance with his father’s pacifism, which Jonson also supports. Finally, as argued below, the mixed iconography also expresses Henry’s conflicted allegiances to both parents, engaged in a long and bitter struggle over the queen’s free access to her son. Alluding to the domain of women, in this case of both Queen Anne and Queen Elizabeth, the intimate space of the fairy world reveals their continued but not unmediated influence over a 16-year-old Prince Henry whose maturation into adult manhood was not yet complete. This necessarily partial account of the irresolvable complications inherent in Prince Henry’s self-presentation at court reveals the genius of Jonson’s achievement in writing the Oberon. These divisions within the court – between King James and Prince Henry and between King James and Queen Anne – raised seemingly impossible difficulties in Jonson’s task, already complicated by inherently conflicting requirements to instruct and to glorify the court. Which court? Since 1610, Prince Henry had managed his own household, as did Queen Anne; and their developing power bases had become a source of tension with factions sponsored by King James. All three of these royal persons advocated their own agendas, none of which could be ignored without serious consequences for Jonson’s career. Jonson was obligated to please Prince Henry, who had commissioned the Oberon, but without alienating King James, who remained the primary source of power at court. This task was rendered most difficult by the implicit demand that he advocate, or appear to advocate, both opposed foreign policies favored by king and prince. At the same time, it was also imperative that Jonson’s obligatory adulation of King James did not offend Queen Anne, who had sponsored Jonson’s first court masque The Masque of Blackness. This task was rendered most difficult by the continued competition between these


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parents for the son whose coming-of-age was the very occasion for the Oberon. For all of his masques, it was necessary for Jonson not only to accommodate incompatible perspectives, but also to present them all as worthy of praise (Butler 1993: 99). In the Oberon, as I will argue below, Jonson goes beyond this seemingly impossible task to clear a space, through the highly ambivalent figure of Silenus, for his own criticism of the expense and vanity of the court in its performance of this very masque. In these various ways, Jonson’s seemingly inconsistent and erratic commingling of classical and fairy elements served a necessary purpose. Through them, Jonson created the Oberon as a masterpiece of evasion.

Fairies/pheras and satyrs/hobby-horses Agendas outside as well as inside the court created Prince Henry’s selfpresentation as Oberon as immensely complex. For outsiders less invested with the political and personal intrigues of court, his decision to play a fairy prince conferred dignity upon the allegedly superstitious beliefs of his less sophisticated subjects. As king of fairies, this new Prince of Wales professed his personal connection not only with the Welsh, but also with an English peasantry depicted as the primary narrators of fairy-tales. A larger court strategy, soon to be articulated formally in the Book of Sports, confirms the validity of this function for Oberon. As fairy king, Henry allied himself with the old traditional pastimes promoted by the monarchy in support of the peasants and lower status groups, idealized as loyal to the king, against the rising power of the urban middling sorts. Perhaps more than actual political power, this affiliation with rural England provided ideological legitimation for a feudal system of rank as established through centuries of landownership. As lands were leased and titles bought, this form of legitimation was becoming increasingly tenuous. From this less authoritative position, Henry’s self-presentation as Oberon functioned as a more dignified and large-scale version of the established use of fairy allusions to enact collaborations between the elite (the court itself) and low (the peasants of the countryside), to evade the social norms of an increasingly dominant middling sort hostile to country mirth and monarchy alike. In addition to performing his connection to a popular culture of idealized peasants, Prince Henry’s self-presentation as a fairy king accomplished another agenda around which a court split by factions could unite. No longer immune to a commercial economic system, the titled nobility, like the middling sorts, felt the pressure to demonstrate its social prestige through competitive consumption. Fairies provided an ideal pretext for consumption. Once serving to account for stolen goods, the fabulous and inexplicable wealth of fairies naturalized the ostentatious display of the courtiers’ jewels and silks as unrelated to market forces (Swann 2000). For fairies, as opposed to mortals, such magnificence required no justification. A spectator’s detailed description of their sumptuous costumes conveys a sense of the splendor of this scene:

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Part IV Ben Jonson There came the gentlemen in short scarlet hose and white brodequins with wide folds, as the Roman emperors are represented and the sleeves the same, all in gold and silver cloth, white and scarlet feathers on their heads and very high white plumes, and black masks. Each one wore a very rich blue band across the body, except that of the prince, whose band was scarlet to distinguish him from the rest. (Herford and Simpson 1950: 10.522)

Inigo Jones’s set similarly elicited high praise. When the rock opened, it discovered “a great throne with countless lights and colours all shifting, a lovely thing to see” (10.522). Such sights did not come cheap. Costing 1087 l, Oberon was one of the three “ruinously expensive spectacles” of 1610 to 1611 that elicited Parliament’s mounting concern about fiscal accountability (Butler 1993: 100). What was from one perspective a waste of funds was from another an exhibition of princely munificence elevating the prestige of the monarch and his court not only to themselves, but also to visiting ambassadors from other countries (Lindley 2004: 383). Illustrating the freedom to “waste” as perhaps the ultimate sign of wealth, the event taking place in the banqueting hall immediately following the performance presents a model for the masque event itself. According to what the apparently astonished onlooker describes as “the strange custom of the country,” the company took “a turn round the table,” and then, instead of eating the food, they threw it down “with furious haste” (Herford and Simpson 1950: 10.523). The much-anticipated appearance of Prince Henry as the fairy king was, then, double-coded. On the one hand, Prince Henry’s self-presentation as fairy king identified him as the leader of his people, with a special connection to those lower sorts who circulated homely narratives of fairies. On the other, Prince Henry’s self-presentation reflected the superiority of an aristocracy privileged not only through lineage, but also through extravagant display. These divergent significations of fairies as simultaneously high and low, elite and homely, bifurcated the fairy figure into the idealized aristocrat of fairylore and a debased other, creating an entirely new form of the “course, and countrey fairy” of the “harth, or dairy” (ll.418–19), against which the courtly dancers could distinguish themselves. Perhaps because the concept of a coarse and rustic fairy was too much of an innovation (what would a coarse fairy wear? Would she assume a country accent?), this function of the debased Other necessary to affirm the courtiers’ superiority was assumed, paradoxically, by the classical figures of satyrs. In his notes to this text, Jonson’s highly dubious derivation of “fairies” from the Greek “pheras” for “satyr” (Jonson 1941: 343) suggests the intellectual strain necessary to defend this blatant anachronism. Sharing fairies’ propensities for illicit sexual relations and violence but lacking fairy grace, these clumsy satyrs, simultaneously lecherous and naïve, savage and deferential, enact an elite fantasy of the behavior to be expected of uneducated rustics uninhibited by the social controls of highly civilized life. The relatively crude representation of these satyrs “limited by nature” (Maus 1984:


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108) conforms to a standard strategy described by Pierre Bourdieu: dominant groups may ascribe to the dominated a “brute strength, passion and instinct, a blind, unpredictable force of nature, the unreasoning violence of desire,” as they ascribe to themselves “spiritual and intellectual strength, a self-control that predisposes them to control others” (1984: 479). In their abundant embodiment of these qualities traditionally ascribed to dominated groups, satyrs paradoxically make up the masque’s production of the popular. Unabashedly lecherous, Satyr four’s hopeful inquiry, “Are there any Nymphes to woo?” elicits Satyr five’s optimistic rejoinder, “If there bee, let mee have two” (ll.42–5). When Satyr four asks Silenus if Oberon would give them “pretty toyes,/To beguile the girles withall?” Satyr five clarifies their sexual purpose, “And to make ’hem quickly fall?” (ll.84–6). Significantly, satyrs are given urgent desires for material goods which they cannot attain on their own. Better wine, larger caves, ivory staves for hunting, sweet powders for their heads, hoops of shells with silver loops for their legs, bracelets of “Fairie twists,” “garlands, ribbands, and fine poesies” for their horns, Tethys’ pearl, and, most of all, morris bells (ll.94–124). With the exception of Tethys’s pearl (perhaps a sly in-joke attributing clownishness to Daniel’s recent Masque of Tethys), the relative simplicity of these goods they so eagerly crave makes comically apparent the economic difference between themselves and the aristocratic spectators. The pranks they propose to annoy the sylvans caught sleeping before Oberon’s palace – a breeze to blow off their leafy coats to “strip ’hem,” to “whip ’hem,” to put wasps or hair up their noses (ll.175–81) – reveal their childish sadism. Their escalation to actual violence – the desire to drive a nail through the sylvans’ temples or to put an eel in their guts – justifies the control of their unregulated desires by others of higher status. In their barely controlled natural impulses, the satyrs enact the debased Other required to demonstrate the superiority of sophisticated courtiers. These impulses define a debased aesthetic of the low performed in the satyrs’ catch “Buz, quoth the blue Flie,/Hum quoth the Bee” (ll.210–11). Celebrating communal mirth more than individual virtuosity, catches were represented as popular among low clothworkers and tinkers (Rimbault 1975: xvi–xxi). Imitating the natural noise of insects, the satyrs annoy the sylvans by themselves buzzing and humming “in his eare, in his nose” (l.213) to produce a sound far removed from the distanced aesthetic of the elite. In their natural enjoyment of the “lower, coarse, vulgar, venal, servile,” the satyrs demarcate a loftier sphere of cultural consumption affirming the superiority of those who are “satisfied with the sublimated, refined, disinterested, gratuitous, distinguished pleasures forever closed to the profane” (Bourdieu 1984: 7). This loftier sphere is well expressed by the superior aesthetic taste of the courtly fairies. Unlike catches, their songs require disciplined voices able to produce harmony. Their lyrics are more ethereal. The lyrics of the first song, in particular, diffuse and deny the element of earth, the primary substance from which the divine created the physical body: “Melt earth to sea, sea flow to ayre,/and ayre flie into fire” (ll.300–2). Similarly, the satyrs’ dances are also designed to mark their low standing in a hierarchy of taste. Near the beginning of the masque satyrs gather at the rock,

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“leaping and making antique action, and gesture, to the number of tenne” (ll.30–1). Just before the palace opens to reveal the fairies, they “fall sodainely into an antique dance, full of gesture, and swift motion” (ll.283–4). As the rock opens and the satyrs leap with joy at the sight of the fairies, a sylvan informs them of the inappropriateness of their “skipping”: “This is a night of greatnesse, and of state;/Not to be mixt with light, and skipping sport” (ll.320–1). While the specific steps of the satyrs’ dance have been lost, Tim Bishop’s analysis of the “many shifts of rhythm and metre in short strains and bursts” of the surviving music suggests movements that are “disorganized, piecemeal, and chaotic,” as opposed to the smoother and more harmonious music accompanying the fairy dance (1998: 98, 100). It seems that Jonson’s masque produces a bizarre popular culture in which classical satyrs wish to dance, and probably actually do dance, the morris, in which some professional players were already proficient (Howard 1998: 125). The bells that Satyr two desires to hang on their shaggy thighs suggests a morris, as does the action he describes: “as we do strike a time,/In our daunce, shall make a chime” (ll.122–5). This odd mixture of classical and rural English contributes an added ambiguity to the term “antique” repeated in the stage directions, as meaning “old” and also “antic” or clownish (OED). Do these “antique” satyr dances ennoble the countryside with a sense of continuing ancient traditions? Or are the satyrs simply rendered as cloddish clowns? In either sense of “antique,” a primary effect of the satyrs’ movements was to set off the exquisite control of the aristocratic dancers. For flushed courtiers executing long-rehearsed and even dangerous capers on the dance floor, the deep truth of this performance may well have pertained more to their image in court, and to the benefits which a virtuoso leap might elicit from the king, than to any abstract concept of ideal monarchy. Dances were particularly important to King James. During a lagging performance of another masque, Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue, Buckingham, then a marquis rather than a duke, gained royal favor when he capered brilliantly in response to the king’s annoyed appeal, “Why don’t they dance? What did you make me come here for? Devil take all of you, dance!” (Lindley 2004: 401). In addition to a pleasurably erotic display for the king, Buckingham’s caper was an ideological statement naturalizing aristocratic status in an aesthetics of the body. This aesthetics privileges, according to Skiles Howard, “the elongated and enclosed aristocratic form, and endows it with magical powers,” turning the physical force once displayed in martial sports inward towards “a new foe – the self, now urged to prove its status by subjecting itself to the bodily disciplines of dance” (1998: 4, 23). Within the Stuart court, this austere control of the body, achieved through long rehearsals with a dance master, represented perhaps the ultimate mark of civilization not only for the group, but also for especially talented individuals, such as Buckingham, whose brilliantly opportunistic display elevated him above his peers. Dancing provided a means for courtiers to advance or lose the all-important charisma through which social power was circulated at court (Bishop 1998: 96). As perhaps for any spectator sport, some of the pleasure lay in the possibility of failure. As Bishop has noted, “dancing


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a lead role in a masque was thus a deliberate gamble,” for if a courtier tripped, he could lose his “symbolic all” (96). The courtiers, then, did not so much act out the role of fairies; they used the role of fairies to make a claim for a superior and especially ethereal version of themselves. Known for elegant dancing, fairies were barely physical. The song following the first masquers’ dance describes fairies, and the idealized aristocratic selves of masquers as well, as made of “ayre” (l.406). As they enact or, in some sense become, fairies on the dance floor, the masquers are to transcend their gross mortal flesh, forgetting their “knottie legs, and plants of clay,” that “seeke for ease, or love delay” (ll.403–4). The consequence of “the smallest stay” is to lose their social distinction to become like “the course, and countrey Faery” (ll.412, 418–19). As they continue to dance, however, such forgetting becomes increasingly impossible; and this distinction is rendered more difficult to maintain. Their inevitable inability, at some point, to sustain this necessary stamina invests their bodies, in their natural or relaxed form, with a grossness that now signifies the base physicality of the lower sorts. Especially for the particularly difficult dances of Oberon (Bishop 1998: 97), the pressure to deny exhaustion must have been enormous. After the “lesser fays” let their “nimble feet/Tread subtle circles” (ll.361–2) pointing to King James, the courtly dancers took out the ladies of the court three times before the final ballet around the floor in strenuous performances of the galliard requiring the males to perform “lofty turns and caprioles in the air” and the fashionable coronto, “a running dance, performed in sets of couples who swiftly circled the hall several times” (Howard 1998: 73, 114). The use of fairylore to distinguish aristocratic superiority evoked its own return of the repressed in the fatigued and progressively earth-bound bodies of the courtiers. The onlooker’s observation that figures and leaps were “extremely well done by most” of the fairy masquers (Herford and Simpson 1950: 10.522; my italics) suggests that a few courtiers did not, after all, do as well as others. Courtiers were not, in fact, made of air. In performance, their flushed cheeks and heaving chests forcefully brought to awareness the abundant physicality it was the function of their dances to deny. The evident physicality of courtiers – any fumbled steps, any panting for breath, any lagging behind – destabilized distinctions between high and low aesthetics designed to legitimate aristocratic domination of a popular culture produced according to their own self-narrative. Conversely, the pleased response elicited by the satyrs’ dances further blurred any social distinctions based on physical performance. The satyrs’ dances were well received. The spectator describes “great laughter” elicited by the first dance of joyful fauns, while the next ballet, performed “with a thousand strange gestures,” afforded “great pleasure” (Herford and Simpson 1950: 10.522). Unlike the antimasque figures of other masques who disappear at the royal presence, the satyrs remain to marvel at the fairy dancers, whom they join in the final ballet (10.523). This weakening of a social binary based on an aesthetics of bodily control renders the Oberon as especially appropriate for recent reconsiderations of the serious function of antimasques as forms of dissent emerging from the contradictions within the

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masque, leaving a “whiff of dissonance . . . in the air like smoke” (Mickel 1999: 28; see also Coronato 2003: 217–19). Rather than difference, the antimasque of the Oberon has been interpreted as posing an implicit critique of the satyr-like sensuality of the court itself. If, as Jonathan Goldberg has stated, the pleasures of hunting, sex, and wine are “the very pleasures characterizing James’s court” (1983: 124), then this elite aesthetic legitimating social hierarchy is rendered only a fiction, and a hypocritical one at that.2 James’s court was far from abstemious. As an extremely expensive pleasure the king and his court could ill afford, the Oberon itself represented indisputable evidence of an appetite for luxury goods as a similarity, rather than a difference, between courtiers and the satyrs who would beg gifts from Oberon. This similarity is particularly plausible in this masque, as the satyrs remain on stage to admire not only the dancing, but the rich costumes of the fairy courtiers exceeding any costly display that the satyrs could ever imagine. Rather than reifying their status through conspicuous consumption, aristocratic masquers exhibited a love of material goods most fitting, according to this interpretation of the antimasque, to satyrs. Despite his own profit from this court industry, Jonson’s epistle applauding Sir Robert Wroth for not thronging to masques suggests his own disapproval of this level of ephemeral ostentation: “to have a sight/Of the short braverie of the night;/To view the jewells, stuffes, the paines, the wit,/There wasted, some not paid for yet!” (1975: 91–2). The court was far from immune to allegations of an illicit sexuality attributed in this masque to satyrs as well. Lady Frances Howard, married to the allegedly impotent Earl of Essex, was already causing her reputation significant damage by 1607; by or before 1611 she was acquiring love potions from Simon Forman presumably for an affair with Robert Carr underway by 1612 (Riggs 1989: 200–1; Barroll 2001: 135). James was subject to criticism not so much for his sexual relationships with men, as for a propensity to promote his favorites that had begun in Scotland and was to continue, most notably with Robert Carr, later created Earl of Somerset, but who already “hath all favours” according to Lord Thomas Howard in 1611, and eventually with George Villiers, created Earl of Buckingham (Goldberg 1983: 19, 133, 138). Goldberg movingly evokes the self-destructive cycle of “the giving and the grieving” as James emptied “the royal coffers faster than they could be filled for his favorites” (139). An awareness of the court’s own sensual disorders evokes another meaning of satyr as related to “satire,” implied in a silvan’s contemptuous charge to the satyrs to “raile upon the moone” (l.244). The satyrs do, in fact, literally rail upon the moon, impugning her paleness as a sign of pregnancy instead of chastity, and proposing themselves, though “rough, & rude,” as her next lovers after she has finished with Endymion (ll.261–80). Is there a possibly embarrassing topical referent to this allegation? An interpretation of the satyrs’ sensuality as directed at James’s court deforms the masque from a transcendent legitimation of sovereign power into a satire of a sensual court that would stage itself in these illusory terms. Is this masque arguably, to a few astute spectators, a satire? Or does the urge to satirize turn back upon the unacceptably rude proclivities of satyrs, who


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interpret the behavior of their social betters in terms of their own degraded desires? Indeterminacy of meaning was no doubt essential to the poet’s survival. The potential for disturbingly satirical readings of the court turns on an interpretation of the figure of Silenus, the satyrs’ praefect. His ambivalent representation in Virgil’s sixth eclogue supports an interpretation of Silenus as a figure for a poet. As a drunken follower of the wine god Bacchus, he is a low satyr, not unlike his charges. But he is also an inspired declaimer of a didactic poem beginning with the origin of the world and ranging through favorite myths about such figures as Pyrrha, Pasiphae, Scylla, and Philomel (Virgil 1984: 69–75). In this aspect, his poetry, perhaps like Jonson’s, is to be understood, and respected, as inspired with some version of truth. In his management of the actions of the masque, Silenus resembles an author-figure, especially in his vocalizing the allimportant praise of Oberon/Henry (“He doth fill with grace,/Every season, ev’ry place” (ll.59–60)) and of James (who teaches men “by the sweetness of his sway,/And not by force” (ll.346–7)) as Oberon approaches the throne (Maus 1984: 107; Butler 1998: 33). As a figure for playwright, he most appropriately belongs with the professional actors playing the parts of satyrs. Their informant about the anticipated appearance of Oberon, he remains connected with the satyrs and also with the fairy court, yet wholly identified with neither. As Silenus educates the satyrs, he also educates the spectators in the values that Oberon will represent (Orgel 1965: 84). In this way, as Silenus admonishes his charges to “chaster language” (l.50), advising them that they grow “too bold” (l.197), he potentially assumes the duties of praefect not only to satyrs, but also to an unruly satyr-like court, as well perhaps of the prince and king. His praise of the royals may be interpreted as flattery, or else, according to humanist practice, as an implied behavioral objective, urging James, for example, to rule by “sweetness,” rather than actually claiming that he already does. This view of Silenus as mirroring Jonson as an inspired poet-teacher would be available only to the like-minded and very learned of spectators. It would be more available to readers of his Workes of 1616 than to the spectators of Oberon. The experience of reading the masque, together with Jonson’s extensive notes, displays a classicism superior to what any audience member could be expected to know. In his Workes, Jonson’s persona as poet and learned annotator makes a claim for the highest scholarly distinction. He reveals a profound knowledge of classical literature and history: of Euripedes’s play Cyclops; of a small sculpture in jasper described in Casaubon’s volume on satyrs; of Horace’s opinion of satyrs; of the confounding of satyrs and centaurs among the ancients; of Mercury’s engendering of Pan on the mountain Taygetan (Jonson 1941: 341–4). This symbolic capital of a classical education casts reflected glory on these satyrs as the subject of considerable interest by revered ancient authors and, according to Jonson’s unlikely theory, the original of fairies as “pheras.” The elegant and refined fairies of the Oberon, by contrast, receive no learned commentary at all. While the allegedly crude aesthetics of satyrs may place them low in the social hierarchy of the Oberon as performed at court, their presence in the Workes sets into motion an alternative measure of social value

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distinguished by profound – one might even say pedantic – learning. No titled nobleman, not even the king himself, could measure up to the standard of the classical education exhibited in Jonson’s notes. From the perspective of Jonson’s Workes, the mode of distinction achieved by aristocratic maskers dancing the intricate steps choreographed for them as fairies seems trivial compared to the distinction conferred on the playwright by his immense learning.

Old wives/old queens In this ideologically complex masque, riven by contradictions reflecting divergent agendas, the iconography of the fairy palace accomplishes one more task. In evoking associations both with Queen Elizabeth and Queen Anne, Jonson draws on the traditional connection of the fairy world with the domain of the feminine to conflate or, more precisely, to confuse issues of military policies with familial politics, as the imagery of fairies blends the female influences of both queens. In various ways – through the imagery of moonlight, through the prince’s journey, through the satyrs’ jibes – Oberon renders the specific meanings of the affinities of these queens with each other and with this fairy world as brilliantly open to interpretation. The personal and political domains ruled by these regal queens may be perceived, in their separate ways, as continually formative or irremediably past. Whether this fairy world represents a defining point of origin or, alternatively, a space to be left behind, depends solely upon the spectator’s perspective. By representing Prince Henry as in transition, as no longer confined to a fairy palace nor yet occupying his father’s throne, the Oberon proposes not so much a definite position as a textual crux. It is not in its expression but in its evasion of fixed personal and political meanings – or rather in its evocation of meanings that may then be denied – that Oberon, The Fairy Prince achieves its supremacy not only as a work of art, but also as an act of diplomacy. The thoroughly argued effect of the masque’s iconography as associating Prince Henry, in the person of a fairy king, with the person and policies of the fairy queen Elizabeth receives further support from the ubiquitous and muchmentioned presence of the moon, recalling her frequent representation as the moon-goddess Diana (Barton 1984: 310; Butler 1998: 31–2; MacIntyre 1999: 81–100). This iconography contributed to Prince Henry’s strategy for promoting militaristic foreign policies (Butler 1998: 31). As Anne Barton has eloquently affirmed, Prince Henry’s appearance as the fairy prince, the “true descendent of the Faerie Queene,” represented him as “anti-Spanish, anti-Catholic, martial, chivalric, and unafraid” (1984: 310).3 The masque’s setting of the moonlit fairy world also provides support for its celebration of the special bond between Queen Anne and Prince Henry (Barroll 2001: 126). Similar to the dissonant settings of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the masque’s two focal points of fairy palace and James’s throne set up a maturational binary complicated by the mixture of classical and fairy iconography. Hidden behind a rocky and primitive landscape, the fairy palace is magically revealed as a private place accessible to


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the human gaze only once a year, when Oberon and his fairy knights pay “their annuall vowes” to the “British court” (ll.322, 328). Like Titania’s forest, this fairy world is eloquently expressive of the intimate space shared between women and children. It is the space constructed through and by the sharing of fairy-tales. In Oberon, it is this space that displays and also contains the formative influences of powerful queens. From this paradigm, the masque stages Prince Henry’s coming of age as he begins his progress from the moonlit and feminized domain of fairies towards the daylight and masculine domain defined by “Arthurs chaire” (l.322), the seat of “JAMES . . . the wonder of tongues, of eares, of eyes” (l.305), and the space of public responsibilities (Hayes 1992: 45). This interpretation of the masque as a general staging of Prince Henry’s maturation towards adult responsibilities is most appropriate to its timing, performed only a few months after he had set up his own household as Prince of Wales. But the strength of Prince Henry’s bond with his mother is also a subject of this masque. Caught between the conflicting agendas of his parents, Prince Henry was placed in the difficult position, in a sense, of Shakespeare’s changeling child as King James and Queen Anne reprised the roles of Shakespeare’s Oberon and Titania competing for possession of him. In representing Prince Henry as in transition between the two worlds and wholly belonging to neither, the Oberon, The Fairy Prince offers a way to maneuver between these competing alliances. The prince’s movement away from female influence explicit in Oberon’s advance appeals to King James. The masque appeals to Queen Anne by representing her son as still hers, a monarch of a fairy world lit by a female moon. Perhaps, in Prince Henry’s mind, Ben Jonson’s staging of homage to King James tipped the balance too far towards his father, and it was to counterbalance this tribute that Prince Henry flouted tradition by singling out his mother as his partner in the three dances of the masque (Barroll 2001: 129). Barroll claims that that prince’s unusual act prompted King James’s command for the masque to end (192). Since it is the function of diplomacy to cover up rather than expose conflict, James’s motive will never be determined. As an act of diplomacy, the Oberon drew on the associations of fairyland and “old wives,” or rather “old queens,” precisely to make its meanings indeterminate. What, then, of Queen Elizabeth? In its evocation of Queen Elizabeth as a former fairy queen, this fairy world elevates Queen Anne by associating her with this former monarch, whose memory remained such a powerful force in James’s court. From a familial perspective, the memory of Queen Elizabeth assumes maternal intensity to haunt the consciousness of adult children with personal energy. As the monarch of a feminized space, Queen Elizabeth takes her place as a maternal figure not only to Prince Henry, but also to King James, whose letters late in her reign referred to her as his mother (Goldberg 1983: 15–16). If Prince Henry’s movement from this space stages his simultaneous leave-taking as well as the continued influence of his mother, then perhaps Queen Elizabeth is staged as an equally ambivalent influence upon King James. Hers is the influence that he outgrew; hers is the influence that will never entirely be left behind. The continued if muted dominion of Old Queens: that is

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both the threat and the promise of this masque, in which the power of nostalgia wanes and grows like the moon itself. The radically inconsistent imagery of the moon complicates any single interpretation of the masque. Appropriate for a coming-of-age narrative, the changes in the “hum’rous Moone” (l.15) convey a sense of unremitting movement through time. The masque begins in darkness until the moon rises to make the setting – a dark rock with trees – visible to members of the audience. As morning approaches to end the time of the masque, the description of the moon as “pale and spent” (436) would seem to suggest that the rule of queens is over, that of necessity they must yield to the natural dominance of the king’s sun. Yet it is the light of the moon that has shone over the festivities themselves and, to follow the logic of the temporal cycle, day must in the future itself yield to night. More disturbing is the odd inconsistency regarding the moon’s chastity. As Silenus urges the satyrs to “chaster language,” for “these are nights/Solemne, to the shining rites/Of the Faerie Prince, and Knights:/While the Moone their Orgies lights” (50–4), he associates the chastity of the moon with the decorum appropriate to the aristocratic ceremonies of Oberon. Yet this image of the chaste moon is almost immediately undercut by a scandalous image of a lustful, hypocritical moon that is, for the first time in the masque, personified. In their song, the satyrs claim that only “fools” would think she was a maid, for her “paleness” signifies an illicit pregnancy. Since she is sexually active, the satyrs reason, then she should grant them her favors, too, even though their rough bodies are not as appealing as Endymion’s. This song challenges critical efforts to explain in terms of Elizabeth’s iconography or Anne’s reputation (Butler 1998: 32; MacIntyre 1999). Quite possibly the satyrs’ satire encodes a lewd discourse about scandalously sexual relationships conducted by Elizabeth (and perhaps by Anne) with her courtiers, only to turn this satire against the satyrs themselves, as projections of their own oversexed imaginations.4 In this respect, Jonson would later himself function as a satyr in his “Conversations with Drummond,” in which he asserts that Queen Elizabeth “had a Membrana on her which made her uncapable of man, though for her delight she tried many” (Herford and Simpson 1925: 1.142). The best defense against such rumors lies in a destabilization of the act of interpretation itself, that emerges as a topic in this song. While the satyrs claim that only fools misinterpret the paleness of pregnancy as a sign of chastity, their own reading of the relationship between the moon and Endymion runs directly counter to the chaste and honorable sentiments represented in myth and in Lyly’s Endymion. Rather than accurate reportage, they are engaging in satire, a pun on “satyr” contemptuously invoked by the offended sylvan who had demanded that they “raile upon the moone” (ll.242–4). Does the masque itself, as mentioned above, turn into a satire on the sensual Jacobean court? Or does this song instead defend the chastity of queens by placing these sentiments in the mouths of lowly and lewd satyrs, so that those who would perceive the moon – or these queens – in this way only expose their own ignorance and desires as


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similarly vulgar? The choice of interpretation is necessarily and diplomatically indeterminate. The next image of the moon sets up an underlying competition with the sun, explicitly associated by Silenus with King James: he “holds his course, as certayne as the sunne./He makes it ever day, and ever spring,/Where he doth shine, and quickens every thing” (ll.352–4). But this sun cannot always shine, and the day must sometime yield to night, and the spring to winter. This unrealistic praise is soon followed by a song rife with tensions in just how to praise the moon and sun simultaneously: The solemne rites are well begunne; And, though but lighted by the moone, They shew as rich, as if the sunne Had made this night his noone. But may none wonder, that they are so bright, The moone now borrowe from a greater light. (ll.385–91) Equality in power is implied by stating that the moon’s light is just as bright as the sun’s noon; but inequality is suggested by the observation that the moon’s very brightness only reflects the sun’s light. In the final song, the image of the declining power of the moon as “pale and spent” yields to a sense of breathless competition between sun and moon, for which there is no clear winner: O Yet, how early, and before her time, The envious Morning up doth clime, Though shee not love her bed! What haste the jealous Sunne doth make, His fiery horses up to take, And once more shew his head! Lest, taken with the brightnesse of this night, The world should wish it last, and never misse his light. (ll.448–55) What can be made of this competition with this moonlit night by the “envious Morning” and the “jealous Sunne?” Their competitive haste would seem to express the rivalries between King James and both of these queens. This song ends this masque with a threat, that unless morning and the sun undertake strenuous efforts, the nostalgia for night may overtake the “world,” who would then “never misse” the light of the sun. It is assumed that the sun will resume its power, but it is possible that the “world” will regret the change and wish that the moon’s light would “last.” This reading praises queens – both Queen Anne and Queen Elizabeth – at the expense of King James. Or, alternatively, this song may be dismissed as reflecting polite regret that the first signs of morning signal

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the end of glorious festivities that the “world” of the court would wish to be further prolonged. This fairy world of court masques was not to be prolonged for many more decades. Signs of strain within the Oberon already witness particular stresses within the Jacobean court, among its factions and within the aristocratic self. The continued allure offered by the worlds of both old queens – the protected maternal domain signified by Anne and the allegedly “merry” realm signified by Elizabeth – suggests a self-division between past and present experienced not only by a youthful Prince Henry, but also by those adult aristocrats who might yet wish to be gathered together under skirts offering a less fragmented identity. Their self-presentation as fairies, never blundering, never tiring, never aging, directs this self-fragmentation against the body itself, as a stubborn obstacle to the desired melting into air that represents the ultimate and impossible proof of aristocratic worth. As fanciful solutions to the cultural dilemmas of aristocrats, the continued appeal of these fairy fantasies appears in the tiny fairy palaces depicted in such poems as Michael Drayton’s “Nymphidia” (1627) and Robert Herrick’s “Oberon’s Feast” (1648). In these poems, aristocrats become their own exquisite miniatures, stripped of gross physicality and, perhaps like the Borrowers, safely hidden in small recesses. In the Oberon, as in these poems, they enact aspects of the trivial nature of an aristocratic selfhood: aestheticized, detached, and self-estranged, deriving a sense of identity from “bric-a-brac worlds” composed of entertainment, along with spices, gifts and other “particles of cultural wealth and show” (Fumerton 1991: 1). This proliferation of the ornamental self had everything to do with the ongoing crisis of confidence in the aristocracy, requiring the incessant display of distinction through material goods. Like the allusions used by the lower sorts, this fairy language also alludes to significant realities perhaps acknowledged but certainly not spoken: that neither the court nor its courtiers can afford these displays; that their very physical bodies remain vulnerable not only to gravity but also to injury; and that the sources of their wealth are better left not entirely explained. In her subversive reading of seventeenth-century fairy poetry, Marjorie Swann provides another version of this bric-a-brac world from the perspective of the low: it is, like the fairy creation of artifacts from eyelashes and insect wings, composed of detritus (2000: 470).

The Sad Shepherd For the competing factions of insiders to the court, any solidarity with rural groups signified by casting the new Prince of Wales as the fairy king Oberon was kidnapped by their own agendas. In a production of a popular culture written about twenty-five years later, Jonson moves from the court to the countryside to achieve a more limited although arguably more successful vehicle for creating social alliances. The Sad Shepherd exploits a nostalgia for country sports shared by the aristocracy with other social groups united against a common enemy of the middling sort who would shut them down. In the process,


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this play set in the county of Nottinghamshire legitimates an aristocracy through its long-standing ties to the land, rather than to the king. Writing the nobility, although not necessarily the monarchy, on the countryside, the play presents an idealized form of the aristocratic landowner.5 Instead of a fairy court indulging itself in glittering displays, a genial Robin Hood and his merry band offer hospitality to their neighbors. Like other writings by Jonson, however, The Sad Shepherd complicates its most apparent agenda. The relationship between a country aristocracy and the monarchy is open to various interpretations; and even more destructive to proffered alliances is the play’s contested representation of low characters.6 As the absence of any protracted reference to Robin’s outlaw status suggests, The Sad Shepherd is not a radical play, overtly protesting social injustices. Competing with the popular culture produced through Robin Hood is another, more sinister popular culture representing the very poor through Mother Maudlin and perhaps the vulgar self-made man through her swineherd son Lorel. The play’s unfinished state at Jonson’s death in 1637 forestalls definitive resolutions to these interpretive cruxes. In the dramatis personae, the name of a hermit Reuben the Reconciler suggests some rapprochement, perhaps between Robin Hood and Mother Maudlin, that would provide a model for the aristocracy likewise to narrow widening gaps with lower social groups. This chapter explores these ambiguities to suggest competing interpretations of the aristocracy that represent not so much the evasions of the Oberon, as inconsistent social identities surfacing as the monarchy was losing the trust of numerous social groups in the years preceding the outbreak of civil war. Jonson’s decision to set The Sad Shepherd in the country rather than in the court reflects his personal circumstances as well as a developing ideology. No longer able to support himself through royal patronage, Jonson turned not only to writing plays for the stage, but also masques for patrons performed on their own estates. Some of these honored royal visits. Towards the end of James’s reign, his masque The Gypsies Metamorphos’d marked the king’s visit to the Earl of Buckingham at Burley before its reprise for the Earl of Rutland at nearby Belvoir Castle. In his last years, Jonson marked two visits by Charles to the estates of William Cavendish, Earl of Newcastle with the masques The King’s Entertainment at Wellbeck in 1633 and Love’s Welcome at Bolsover in 1634. This practice of writing masques for performance at country seats informs the setting of The Sad Shepherd in Nottinghamshire, near these estates at Burley, Belvoir, and Wellbeck. It may have been this locale, more than an inherent interest in Robin Hood, that led Jonson to write a play including this character (Sanders 1999: 52). Jonson’s Prologue highlights the river of this region, “old Trent,” as well as the “Vale of Be’voir” as his very English setting. In his elegy for Jonson, Lucius Cary’s assertion that he was intending “to visit and descend from Thames to Trent” also stresses the importance of this area (Riggs 1989: 343). The play is strongly localized. Corresponding to Mother Maudlin’s description as “the Witch of Paple-wick” was an actual Papplewick in the southern part of Sherwood Forest. Her disgusted curse on her son, “I geif him to the Devills eirs” (2.3.26) refers to a nearby cave whose fanciful origin is described

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at length by a character in The Gypsies Metamorphos’d. The shepherdess Mellifleur praises the love between Robin Hood and Marion as the talk of “Be’voir Vale”(1.5.108). Reproaching the Trent for Earine’s purported drowning, Aeglamour specifies the tributary rivers by name: Dove, Deane, Eye, Erwash, Idell, Snite, and Soare (1.5.53). The emphasis placed on this specific setting in Nottinghamshire links Jonson’s production of a popular culture with the country seats of his aristocratic patrons, perhaps as a bid for further patronage and certainly to explore the legitimation of their rank through their connection with the land. In feudal terms, it was land – their history with the land, their care of the land, their ownership of the land – that formed a primary ideological basis for noble status. This legitimating function of land emerges from the prominent genealogical details in one of Jonson’s primary topographical sources, William Camden’s Britannia, translated into English in 1610, from which both he and Drayton copied the mistaken name for the river Snite instead of Smite (Camden 1610: 549–51; Drayton 1933: 522; Herford and Simpson 1950: 371). Locating ancient Roman remains to foreground the essential Roman-ness of “Britannia,” the Roman name for England, Camden also names the “Dukes, Marquesses, Earles, Vicounts, Barons, and some of the most signall, and ancient families therein” (“Author to the Reader”). For Nottinghamshire, these would include a knight of Arthur’s round table, a prominent Lord Chief Justice, and an earl who “rebelliously opposed himselfe against a lawfull king” and was justly slaughtered at Stoke (Camden 1610: 549–51). Camden praises the deer of Sherwood Forest as a local feature of the landscape: the forest is now filled with “an infinite number of fallow Deere, yea and Stagges with their stately branching heads feeding within it” (550). This legitimating role of topography also informs Jonson’s other topographical source, the Polyolbion, written by Michael Drayton, retained by Prince Henry until his recent death. In Drayton’s verse account of Nottinghamshire, elegant personifications of land features distinguish the aristocratic nature of his work and of the countryside itself, as in the court-like rivalry expressed by the vale of Belvoir with Evsham, “that proud Nymph,” who would “pretend/Her selfe the first of Vales” but whom she “shall outbrave, that in my state doe scorne” (1933: 551). These topographical histories legitimate not only the aristocracy, but also Jonson’s form of authorship in writing The Sad Shepherd. The topographical emphasis of The Sad Shepherd foregrounds Jonson’s own intellectual genealogy from his great mentor William Camden, his own teacher at Westminster, from whom he gained the classical education that became so much a part of his persona as a poet. A prominent antiquarian as well as a humanist scholar, Camden published his first version of his Latin Britannia in 1586 while Jonson was still at Westminster School. In a later epigram praising him as the source of “all that I am in arts, all that I know,” Jonson specifically praises his topographical skill, his “sight in searching the most antique springs!” (Jonson 1975: 13). Jonson sustained a lifelong friendship with Camden, including him, for example, among the friends he entertained in 1605 to celebrate his release from prison


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(Herford and Simpson 1925: 38). Jonson’s close friendship with the lawyer John Selden, who annotated Drayton’s Polyolbion, provided him with a personal connection with Drayton’s topographical work, an important influence on his choice and treatment of Robin Hood (Barton 1984: 350; Knight 1994: 350). Omitting Drayton’s reference to Robin Hood’s distribution of funds from “wealthy Abbots chests” among the poor, Jonson stresses Robin’s love of his constant Marian “chiefe Lady of the Game,” who slew even more harts than Diana (Drayton 1933: 531). Like Drayton, Jonson aestheticizes Robin Hood as an aristocratic “lord of the forest” rather than the appealing but rough outlaw of ballad tradition (Knight 1994: 140). Jonson’s most striking use of Drayton may lie, however, in his maps. The reported drowning of Earine that so grieves Aeglamour appears to be a misreading, or I would argue a humorously perverse reading, of the naked nymph, half immersed in the river Trent to personify the river on the map of Nottinghamshire (Knight 1994: 47). Possibly this sly joke encodes a put-down of Drayton, a former rival for patronage, and here a competitor for the place as Camden’s disciple (Van den Berg 2000: 4).

No hobby-horses The marketing of this “landedness” – this construction of an identity through a connection with land – as a means of authorizing the status of aristocrats and writers alike constitutes a primary project shaping The Sad Shepherd. The genre of The Sad Shepherd itself affirms the importance of a long-standing association with land, England more generally and Sherwood Forest and Belvoir Vale more locally. The Prologue’s praise of “mirth” and the “sport” arising from “Rurall Routs and Families” renders it distinctively and perhaps defensively agrarian (Jonson 1941: 9–10). This defense not only of sports, but also of an older way of life, becomes explicit in a much-quoted exchange in which Robin expresses optimism that this happier way of life may still return: I should thinke it still might be (As ’twas) a happy age, when on the Plaines, The Wood-men met the Damsells, and the Swaines The Neat’ards, Plow-men, and the Pipers loud, And each did dance . . . And all did either love, or were belov’d. (1.4.41–7) During this era, shepherds might “wrastle” with a “Lasse . . . without offence,/Or least hazard o’ their innocence” for they knew “how to love, and not to lust” (ll.50–6). Since then, however, “the sowrer sort” of shepherds accuse them of “vanities,” of infecting their “blood with ease” in these “Pagan pastimes,” and of polluting their “thoughts with lust” (ll.21, 36–8). The sharp dealing of this sour sort presents a greater hazard; for as Tuck and Lionell point out, they strew fox hair on the grass to prevent sheep from grazing, dig pits to hurt their

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neighbors’ cattle, and under the pretense of hunting a badger, disturb flocks with their dog. In this account, the binaries set up between the merry aristocratic/rural sorts and the sharp-dealing middling/urban factions who censured country sports are clearly self-justificatory: simplicity vs. hypocrisy, innocent love vs. miserly self-interest; expansive mirth vs. mean-spirited malice. These binaries produce a festive popular culture whose shared values of simplicity and innocent love unite them with an aristocracy against a hypocritical middling sort operating in their own economic self-interest. As the privileging of the shared Englishness of elite and low rural groups who yearn for the restitution of an older and merrier England suggests, this play seemingly set in an English past of Robin Hood is in actuality staging ongoing tensions of the seventeenth century. With its implied parallel between the spectators’ consumption of this play feast and the banquet to be provided by a hospitable Robin Hood, the Prologue’s description of the playwright as having “feasted” the public with his plays for forty years implicitly draws even an urban audience to the rural side in this contest of values. The Sad Shepherd uses various strategies to gloss over the contradictions inherent in the attempt to join the aristocracy and idealized peasants of the lower sort into a common social unit. Jonson cleverly conflates the elite hospitality of the play’s Robin Hood, who offers venison to invited guests, with the common hospitality offered by other “Robin Hoods,” the young lords of misrule presiding over the church ales gone but “not forgotten” and occasionally revived in the early seventeenth century (Johnston 1998: 39). The usually hilarious festivity of these ales holds little in common with elite entertainment affirming hospitality as signifying power (Marcus 1993: 148). The double-coding of Robin Hood’s identity, as simultaneously a lord of misrule and an aristocratic host, also double-codes the spectators’ identity, as simultaneously participants in a communal church ale and as elite dinner guests. This conflation of social groups double-codes the bower and the food to be served there. As appointed steward, Tuck charges Robin’s followers to “see the Bower drest” (1.3.3); he has ordered George a Greene to “carve the Guests large seats; and these laid in/with turfe (as soft and smooth as the Moles skin:)/And hang the bulled Nose-gaies ’bove their heads” (ll.11–13). A “faire Dyall” and a bank where the pipers may sit rounds out the décor. The homely materials of this bower suggest the old arbors of tree branches and flowers, communal spaces open to all, where food and drink were sold at church ales (Wiles 1981: 16–18). In the attention paid to the smoothness of the turf, Robin Hood’s bower also suggests the withdrawing spaces used by the elite precisely to separate themselves from less distinguished guests. Queen Elizabeth, for example, had constructed temporary banqueting houses of tree branches and flowers at Greenwich, and such arbors remained a space distinguishing the most elite of guests as they dined (Fumerton 1991: 131). The food to be served there extends this double-coding. Transforming herself to look like Maid Marian, Mother Maudlin lists the foods commonly provided at church ales as she contemptuously charges Robin Hood’s band to “Fall to your cheese-cakes, curdes, and clawted creame,/Your fooles, your flaunes; and of ale


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a stream/. . . straine ewes milke/Into your Cider sillabubs, and be drunke” (1.6.24–7). Is Robin’s band, and the audience itself, to share in this contempt, or are these appetizing but low-classed foods to be eagerly consumed in the banquet presumably presented in the final act? Or are the dinner guests to be rescued from this undistinguished food by the restoration of the venison stolen from them by Mother Maudlin? As meat from deer hunted in the special preserves of parks owned by lords or even royals, the consumption of venison signified high social status; but it also, obviously, provided a staple for the diet of lawless forest residents. Unlike many others, these particular indeterminacies do not function primarily to offer interpretive choice. Instead, their openness to high as well as low social identifications promotes a merging of disparate groups in a shared project to support the rural pastimes that signify continuity with a past rooted deeply in the land of England and Nottinghamshire. The characters of The Sad Shepherd would have their whitsun cakes and eat them too. This authorizing English “landedness” also legitimates the form of pastoral Jonson has chosen to write. Within the Prologue’s defense of The Sad Shepherd as a “rustick Play” (l.37) lies an implicit depreciation of competing versions of pastoral as over-refined and finally not sufficiently English. As the Prologue, like a good clothing salesman, displays this play/hood made up of English wool as at least as good as those of Sicily or Greece, Jonson criticizes the Italianinfluenced pastorals – Montague’s Shepherd’s Paradise and Fletcher’s Faithful Shepherdess – then fashionable at court in the 1630s (Riggs 1989: 343). In the Prologue’s defense of mirth in a pastoral, Jonson derogates the very stylized and humorless speeches, “stamp’d with Ah and O” (l.54), of these pastoral plays. His primary criticism of this pastoral, as critics have noted, lies in his shepherd Aeglamour’s highly wrought language and strained conceits, characteristic of these Italianate pastorals popular at the Caroline court (Barton 1984: 342–3; Marcus 1986: 137–8; Riggs 1989: 344–5; Sanders 1999: 63). Deranged over the apparent drowning of his beloved Earine, Aeglamour plots to freeze the nymphs of the river by dipping an old woman’s foot into the water, or to burn them by flinging in a person ill with fever (1.5.13, 24). Sensible even in the throes of sexual passion, the love between Robin and Marian provides a healthy alternative. Clarion asserts that the story of their love is “told/Here every day, with wonder on the world” (1.5.104). Their subsequent greeting seems to bear this attribution out. Rob: “My Marian, and my Mistris!” Mar. “My lov’d Robin!” (1.6.1). As they passionately kiss (Mar. “Oh Robin! Robin!” (l.13)), Robin must remind her to “Breathe, breathe a while” (l.14). Yet even breathless from Robin’s kisses, this practical huntress is able to complete a lively narrative of the deer hunt in fairly technical detail. To the equally sensible Robin, Aeglamour’s passion is a “deepe hurt Phant’sie” that he pretends to approve only to promote a cure (1.6.77; 5.27). This perception of Aeglamour’s love as illness reflects upon court pastoral. Is this criticism purely literary, a distaste for strained poetical conceits and long humorless speeches? Or does it extend as far as a comment on the artificiality and emotional self-indulgence of the court itself? If the latter, Aeglamour’s illness might critique royal self-fashioning. Like the Oberon, court

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pastorals were more than entertainment. When the queen acted in Montague’s Shepherd’s Paradise in 1633, she performed an idealized version of her own loving bond with Charles, as a way of dignifying the royalist faction (Potter 1989: 74, 107). Contrarily, rather than a personal critique, the love between Robin and Marian might simply suggest a less inflated mode of modeling the love between the royal couple. Whichever the case, the deep sympathy conveyed for Aeglamour suggests concern more than deeply rooted hostility to the court. While it is no doubt intentionally difficult to determine the extent of Jonson’s critique of court pastoral, the double-coding of aristocratic and lower rural customs creates for The Sad Shepherd an undeniable distance from the unequivocally “low” traditions of Robin Hood and Maid Marian. The figure of Robin Hood and members of his band lent themselves to appropriations by disparate social agendas (Stallybrass 1985: 131; Nunning 2003). By the late sixteenth century, Maid Marian had become a much anticipated feature of the same morris dance that in the Oberon signified the degraded physicality of the low satyrs. Often performed by a male in drag, she became a hilarious spectacle of transgressive sexuality, even as Friar Tuck burlesqued the movements of a fat lecher (Hutton 1994: 67; ch. 4). More seriously, Robin Hood’s outlaw status was invoked both to justify and to denigrate peasant revolt and other alleged acts of treason by lower sorts (Wiles 1981: 28; Wilson 1992: 8–12). This fear of social disorder shut down many Robin Hood games in late Tudor times (Wiles 1981: 27–30). Largely to negate this rebellious function, plays such as Munday’s The Downfall of Robert Earle of Huntington (1598) refined the rough outlaw, even creating him an earl (Wiles 1981: 54). While not explicitly titled as an earl, Jonson’s well-spoken and genteel Robin Hood strongly resembles Munday’s character of that name. Sanders claims that his gentrified lifestyle and household steward Tuck imply aristocratic status (1999: 54). Like Munday’s play, The Sad Shepherd omits any stagings of low traditions, including those referred to in his earlier masques. Performed at the rural estates of Buckingham and also of the Earl of Rutland in 1621, The Gypsies Metamorphos’d denigrates gypsy dancers by categorizing them with morris companies including Maid Marian, Friar Tuck, the hobby-horse, and the fool: CLOD:

They should be Morris dancers by their gingle, but they have no Napkins. no, nor a Hobby-horse. CLOD: O he is forgotten, that’s not rule; but there is no Maid-marrian nor ffrier amongst them, which is the surer marke. COCKRELL: Nor a foole that I see. CLOD: Unless they all be fooles. (Jonson 1941: 7.589) COCKRELL:

Similarly signifying an aesthetic of the low, The King’s Entertainment at Wellbeck performed in 1633 features six descendants of Robin Hood (“of the


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blood,/They tell, of ancient Robin Hood” (1941: 7.797)) competing in games at a bride ale. However much these country sports may actually have appealed to King Charles, an acknowledgment of the masque’s low aesthetic appears in the concluding speech by a “gentleman” who orders them to “give end unto your rudenesse,” that takes up the King’s time “With light, impertinent, unworthy objects . . . sav’ring your owne tast’s” (l.801). Despite the Prologue’s reference to The Sad Shepherd a “rustick play,” the absence of any morris dances or country games, not to mention any trickster remedies for social oppression, suggests the conservatism of Jonson’s personal and political agendas in The Sad Shepherd. It would have been unwise to present a sinister Sheriff of Nottingham when one of his most important patrons, the Earl of Newcastle, was currently serving as warden of Sherwood Forest (Sanders 1999: 53). Dissatisfied with this apparent conservatism, Stephen Knight notes the limitation of Robin Hood’s role to “organizing feasts, welcoming guests, and commenting on his men’s activities” (1994: 140). Perhaps this limitation constitutes Jonson’s self-critique of a Robin Hood bleached of the vitality so abundantly generated by an aesthetic of the low. This aesthetic appears, in all its intensity, with the family of Mother Maudlin. Unlike Maid Marian, Mother Maudlin dances. She “hoppes about the house/Transported with joy,” spinning around until she falls of dizziness (2.6.4–5, 13). She even transforms herself, cross-dressing in class rather than in gender, to appear as Maid Marian. The omission of Maid Marian’s traditional morris dance must have become especially and ironically apparent as, speaking as Maid Marian, Maudlin scornfully charges the company to “foot it lustily” (1.7.31). The play’s production of a popular culture surrounding Mother Maudlin is, I will argue, considerably more ambivalent, however, than it would at first appear. On the one hand, her greed and craftiness seem to define her by contrast to a generous Robin Hood and his merry band. This harmony of graceful human relations breaks down, however, as the company joins to hunt her down, much like the stag they had just killed, for sport. In this communal hostility, the Maudlin subplot exposes the devious ideological fiction governing this play: that a shared desire to recreate a merry England is sufficient to allow the seamless merger of elite and rural factions into a harmonious whole. She exposes an ideological fiction of authorship as well. As the source for old wives’ tales that in this play incorporate modes of specifically theatrical fraud, the figure of Mother Maudlin makes visible the abjected presence of the old woman narrator even within the persona of this classically educated playwright.

Old wives (and a few fairies) Critics’ dissimilar attributions of meaning to Mother Maudlin and her son suggest the complexity, or perhaps the duplicity, of The Sad Shepherd. Leah Marcus describes Maudlin’s use of the “disguise of poverty to mask her greed for private gain”; and her contempt, expressed in the person of Marian, for the “course rustick mouthes” of a company better served by “a starv’d Muttons

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carkasse” as mimicking “the Stuart court’s disdain for the popular” (1986: 137–8; 1.7.5). Tom Hayes extends this line of thought to her son the swineherd Lorel, whom he perceives as wealthy, as representing “the new vulgar man in the seventeenth century countryside, the agricultural entrepreneur” (1992: 122). The text provides some solid evidence for these interpretations. The venison that Maudlin claimed to have divided among her poor neighbors in fact she kept selfishly for herself (2.6.37). In addition to the riches in cheese and honey he offers to the kidnapped Earine, the Lorel brags of his rents, as well as his large herds and pastures (2.2.5–6). Asserting that he is “na’ Fay! Na’ Incubus! Na’ Changlin!” Lorel praises his economic self-sufficiency as “a good man, that lives o’ my awne geere” (2.2.10–11). These representations would seem to place Maudlin and her son within the ranks of the middling sort, like the hypocritical “sour shepherds” whose self-interested business practices reveal their malice to neighbors. Lorel’s need to assert that he is not a fay, incubus, or changeling might suggest his hostility to folk culture. There are also counter-indications within the text. Lorel’s assertion that he is “na’ Fay!” may instead be taken to indicate an entanglement with folk culture requiring him to allay Earine’s doubts that he might be. His clothing does not suggest wealth. Rather than silks or velvets, Lorel wears swine-skins (2.2.24). Rather than jewelry, he gives Earine gifts of a badger and a hedgehog (2.2.39–40). The name “Mother Maudlin,” as opposed to “Mistress Magdaline,” indicates Maudlin’s lower sort status; and her residence “downe in a pitt. . . . Close by the ruines of a shaken Abbey” (2.8.16–17) suggests poverty. She seems to be hungry, not only for venison but also for the deer’s Ravens-bone, that in the shape of a raven she “crok’d and cry’d for” and then in her own shape broiled for food (1.6.45, 64). Impersonating Marian, her contempt for the poor may imitate Marian’s snobbery rather than her own; Marian does in fact describe Robin’s followers as “rude ones o’the wood” in her contested account of her actions against theirs (2.5.30). These inconsistencies support an interpretation of Maudlin’s witchcraft as a symptom of her poverty, and her purported division of venison among her neighbors as a protest against the excessive selfindulgence of an elite who feasted as the poor starved (Sanders 1999: 56). Ironically, in taking from the rich to give to the poor, Maudlin assumes the function of the outlaw Robin Hood. These disparate views of their economic circumstances set into motion disparate interpretations of Maudlin’s attempted theft of the venison as proceeding either from malice or from actual hunger. These discrepancies also foster contrasting interpretations of Robin Hood’s company, and the merger of aristocratic and rural it represents, as victimized by theft or uncharitable to the poor. These opposing interpretations are not Jonson’s alone; they encode very different perceptions of the poor circulating since the late sixteenth century (Slack 1988: 17–18; Woodbridge 2001; ch. 6). If the poor are scheming cony-catchers, or only pretending to be destitute, then there is no necessity to provide for them or to feel guilt over their privations. No doubt in deference to his aristocratic patrons, Jonson represents Maudlin’s fraudulence. No doubt in criticism of his aristocratic patrons, he represents her need.


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This same double view of Mother Maudlin extends to the play’s perspective on her witchcraft. The play leaves no doubt that she is a witch. She is a shapeshifter, first as a raven and then as Maid Marian. She plans soon to appear “in mony shapes,” through the powers of an embroidered belt eerily constructed with the help of “a Gypsan Ladie” by moonlight on her mother’s grave (2.3.37–41). The sequence of events is familiar from numerous witchcraft trials (Kinney 2001: 242–58; Willis 1995: 30–3). She wishes for food; she is denied; she mutters curses or a “Devills pater noster” (2.6.59); a member of the household becomes ill; she is accused as a witch. While the logical fallacy in attributing causation to witchcraft seems blatant, the play’s staging of her powers, however, as genuine affirms rather than allays fears concerning the dangers posed by witches; for her blood-curdling charms invoking disease on the limbs of Tom the cook are strikingly effective (2.6.55–69; 2.7). In response to this display of her “malice and her power” (2.7.11), Robin’s men head out, under the guidance of the wise shepherd Alken, to enjoy the “rare sport” of witch-hunting (2.8.1–2). It is at this point, when like a stag she is outnumbered and hunted for sport, that the play may elicit some sympathy. This danger to her person elicits the protective instincts of her devil Puck-hairy who, in traditional devil fashion, pretends to be her servant when actually she serves him (3.1). While his soliloquy confirms the demonic nature of her witchcraft, Puck-hairy seems more like an appealing vice than a frightening devil; his portrayal may well derive from the dancing, broom-wielding Robin Goodfellow of the prose pamphlet Robin Good Fellow, His Mad Prankes and Merry Jests (1628). Audience members who take pleasure in this trickster form of popular culture, or who perceive Maudlin as unjustly treated, will wish him to rescue her. The Witch of Edmonton had earlier staged such a sympathetic treatment, shifting the blame from a poor woman who decides to become a witch to the miserliness of a community who drove her to it (Marcus 1993: 157–8; Kinney 1998: xxviii). Those who perceive Maudlin as an actual threat would no doubt have a different response. These would include at least one of Jonson’s prominent patrons, the Earl of Rutland, who in that very valley of Belvoir in 1619 attributed the tragic death of his son to the witchcraft of one Joan Flower, dismissed from his household for diverting food to her own family and friends (“Wonderful” 1985: 360–80; Sanders 1999: 58). This latter perception of a truly dangerous Maudlin gains some credibility from its trustworthy proponent, the “good Hag-finder” (2.8.75) Alken, praised by Clarion as “a good sage Shepherd” (1.4.80) and by George a Greene as “this gud learned Man” (2.8.40). Critics claim that this man of learning may well represent a version of Jonson’s authorial persona; for he informs Drummond that in his lost pastoral play the “May Lord,” he assumed the name “Alkin Ethra” as referring to himself (Herford and Simpson 1925: 1.143; Harp 2000: 101). Hayes’s assertion that “Jonson’s persona, Alken, is locked in battle with – and defines himself in relation to – a representation of female sexuality exemplified by the witch Mother Maudlin” (1992: 134) applies most specifically, I would argue, to issues of gender and authorship rather than to sexuality alone. In this

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play, Mother Maudlin functions as an authorial abject, that aspect of a degraded female authorship against which Alken, and through him arguably Jonson, struggles to distinguish himself, but which cannot be left entirely behind. Beginning “within a gloomy dimble,” and progressing to the “graves, and grotts, neare an old Charnell house” (2.8.15, 19), Alken’s detailed description of Mother Maudlin’s dwelling place sounds like nothing so much as an old wives’ tale. In fact, Little John refers to Alken’s account as a story: “I wonder such a storie could be told/Of her dire deeds” (ll.35–6). Encouraged, Alken lists “the venom’d Plants/Wherewith shee kills!” in adjectives worthy of a poet – or of an accomplished storyteller: “the sad Mandrake,” “the dead-numming Nightshade!/The stupifying Hemlock!” (ll.42–5). The inclusion of fairies in Alken’s list of loathsome creatures (adders, snakes, owls, Night-crows, snakes, fire-drakes, flittermice, beetles) recalls the contacts with fairies described in trials of Scottish witches (Briggs 1959: 239–43; Purkiss 2000a: 97–104). These accomplices of this low witch function as the abjects of the fairies of the Oberon. Like the masque fairies, they spend their time dancing. More important, they are such “airie spirits” that they can “play with falling starres”; and they so far surpass merely human flesh that they may “mount the Sphere of fire, to kisse the Moone!” (ll.53–6). Yet they remain the creatures of a low popular culture. While the fairies fly and play, Maudlin reads her book of evil charms and she wounds puppets, the early modern equivalent of wax figures, to cause pain or death by sympathetic magic. Alken’s list of her injuries to cattle and children justifies his role as “Hag-finder” (l.75). Let us consider the function of the production of a low popular culture around Mother Maudlin in terms of a primary project claimed for this play, the defense of allegedly pagan pastimes – the mirthful sport from “Rurall Routs and Families” against the “sowrer sort” (1.4.21). But The Sad Shepherd does not actually stage country pastimes against naysayers. In its attempt to merge aristocratic and rural interests, not even their shared “landedness” in Nottinghamshire and not even the occasional Northern dialect of Scathlocke (1.6.57) come close to conveying the sometimes dangerous holiday mirth of May day church ales. If Jonson desires his play to “go country,” it is the country of the rural estate. Instead of dancing around maypoles, Robin Hood’s band engages in the predominately aristocratic sport of hunting deer. In this way, the play puts at least as much effort into distinguishing this production of an elite-friendly popular culture from the rude vulgarities of a truly low or degraded culture as from the artificial refinements of court pastoral. The repulsive activities of Mother Maudlin and her children Lorel and Douce function to define what the popular culture of Robin Hood is not: it is never coarse or tasteless, malicious or smallminded. In this very sensible popular culture of Robin Hood, a chance encounter with fairies would be most unlikely. This elite-friendly popular culture of Robin Hood would seem very alien indeed from the vagrants dispossessed by enclosures or by agricultural laborers suffering poverty on lands owned by aristocratic lords. As the gentry and nobility enriched themselves by enclosures that dispossessed agricultural laborers


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from the farms their families had worked for centuries, the very “landedness” Jonson draws on as a common basis for political alliance had itself become a source of bitter and protracted social division capable of erupting into riot (Wilson 1992: 5). Shared pleasures in country sports did not compensate for grinding poverty or homelessness. In anger and despair, the very poor such as Mother Maudlin were surely tempted to malice, small-minded acts, and even coarse jests. The existence of these disreputable poor, whose loyalty to aristocratic or village leaders was subject to doubt, revealed the weak point of any ideology attempting to unite elite and low: the elite generally used their power to serve their own best interests. The disreputable poor, including muttering old women liable to be accused of witchcraft, composed the ostensible subjects of this more vulgar popular culture, alternatively sympathetic or demonized, produced through Mother Maudlin according to the degraded aesthetic of old wives’ tales. Like Alken the hag-finder, Jonson himself tells an old wives’ tale in this play even in the act of distinguishing his aesthetic from theirs. The old wives who tell tales, in this case Mother Maudlin, expose another weak point of an ideology that would merge the aristocratic and the low, and define such a merger as “English.” The production of Mother Maudlin’s low popular culture makes visible a competing Catholic narrative no doubt immediately legible to Jonson’s patron the Catholic Earl of Newcastle, and close to Jonson himself, whose return to Catholicism is widely assumed (Van den Berg 2000: 10). Less subject to re-education during the Reformation, the very poor and especially the rural poor were more likely to hold on to the old ways of Catholicism, often in distorted or syncretic ways. This perception shapes Clarion’s description of Maudlin’s charms as a “Devill’s Pater Noster” and “your Devills Mattens” (2.6.59, 65). This perception finds some justification in Alken’s account of her dwelling “Close by the ruines of a shaken Abbey/Torne, with an Earth-quake, down unto the ground,/’Mongst graves” (2.8.17–19). In the sense of changing England’s very old investment in Catholicism in less than a century, the Reformation was a cultural earthquake. As the stones were taken from deserted abbeys to build secular structures, the Reformation did in fact create such ruins. The graves, perhaps the ultimate history of the dead, remained there; and the particular “landedness” of these burial plots posed a constant and poignant reminder of a religion from the past. Here by the dead and by the abbey, surely a recognizable structure to locals, Mother Maudlin was as justified through her “landedness” in her “Witches Dell” (l.13) as aristocrats who owned land and workers who labored on it. As Maudlin’s association with the land – the graves, the abbey, the dell – of an older Catholic England disrupts the play’s narrative of Englishness, topographical features also disrupt the play’s narrative of authorship. In Drayton’s Polyolbion, the class distinctions imposed on his personified landscapes bring into visibility an old, poor woman-mountain whose witch-like activities bear striking resemblances to those of Mother Maudlin. A poverty-stricken area of Nottinghamshire, the Peake is “a withered Beldam long, with bleared watrish eyes” and a “meager wrinkled face . . . sullyed still with lead,” who knows the

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powers of medicines, how to tame the spirits that haunt the mines, and above all how to tell a tale of “yee darke and hollow Caves, the pourtratures of Hell,/Where Fogs, and misty Damps continually doe dwell (1933: 530–1; ll.379–83). She is, in short, something close to a witch; and her tales recall Maudlin’s travels “in the foggs,/And rotten Mistes, upon the fens, and boggs” (2.8.24–5). A reductive reference to the nether parts of old women storytellers represents a predictable mode of denigrating their low aesthetic, as the Peake instructs her daughters not to be ashamed “of thy blacke Entrance nam’d/The Divels Arse” (531; ll.405–6). The association of Maudlin with this topographical feature of Peake appears the curse to her son, “I geif him to the Devills eirs” (2.3.25). Whether Jonson was influenced by Drayton’s topography, or whether both authors were following a common stereotype of old women storytellers, the reference to the cave the Devils Arse also implicates Jonson’s own authorship. In his masque The Gypsies Metamorphos’d, performed at the aristocratic country estates of Burley and Belvoir, a supremely obscene song by Cock-Lorell describes how the devil’s fart, responsible for creating the Devil’s Arse, resulted from his indigestion at a dinner of “Puritan poach’t,” promoters, tailors, seamsters, feathermen, “a riche fatt usurer,” a lawyer, “two rosted Sheriffes,” a mayor, a cuckold, a lecher, a midwife, a Justice of the peace, a jailer, and a constable (1941: 7.601–3). In this antagonism towards the professionals of the middle sort, and the legal apparatus supporting them, Jonson may in fact have finally located an interest shared between elite and low. The poem was extremely popular. As Herford and Simpson note, “There are more transcripts of Cock-Lorell than of any other poem of Jonson” (1950: 10.633). In its angry ribaldry, this stanza would seem more appropriate in Mother Maudlin’s popular culture than in Marian’s: And there he made such a breach with the wind, The hole too standing open the while, That the scent of the vapour, before, & behinde, Hath fouly perfumed most part of the Isle. (Jonson 1941: 7.603) The impressive vitality of this coarseness, especially as a vehicle for social critique, reveals alehouse (or perhaps coffee-house) aspects of Jonson’s concept of authorship. It provides reason to take seriously various cues aligning his interests with Mother Maudlin. Moreover, it is Mother Maudlin, more than any other character, who enacts theater in this play. As the character takes on the shape of Maid Marian, the actor performs the roles of both women (Cave 1991: 145). Mother Maudlin’s success, or the success of the actor playing Mother Maudlin, in catching the gestures of Maid Marian displays her/his virtuosity and theatrical intelligence. Emphasized by the repeated “m’s” in both names, this interchangeability of characters suggests an essential similarity that breaks down the play’s binary between the elite-friendly popular culture of Robin/Marian and the


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hostile vulgarity of the popular culture produced through Mother Maudlin. Following such inherent parallels as those between Lady Macbeth and the witches, The Sad Shepherd represents women as a vulnerable space of breakdown in the distinctions between these popular cultures. In The Sad Shepherd, as in The Masque of Queens, aristocratic women and low witches may share a magical power, located in their bodies, beyond the capacity of patriarchal discourse to control (Normand 1997: 120). The breakdown of the binary between these two popular cultures is accomplished in another way as well. More like Jonson than traditional old wives, or witches for that matter, Mother Maudlin obtains knowledge of her witchcraft by poring over books, as in her dell “she sitts reading by the Glow-wormes light,/Or rotten wood. . . . The banefull schedule of her nocent charmes” (2.6.57–9). As Jonson’s elaborate notes on the Masque of Queens indicates, he has also learned about witchcraft from print culture. His notes reveal witchcraft as, in fact, a classical discourse circulated by such authors as Pliny, Lucan, and Virgil (Herford and Simpson 1950: 10.500–3). It is significant in this respect that one of the two long quotations from a classical source is given to Lorel, whose speech proffering homely gifts to Earine is modeled on Cyclops’s wooing of Galatea in Theocritus’s Idyl (Herford and Simpson 1950: 10.375). The distinctions between graceful Italian pastorals and popular culture break down in this plot as well. A satyr in Tasso’s influential pastoral Aminta woos his kidnapped beloved with flowers, apples, and honey, with an equal lack of success. Rather than confining her within a tree as Lorel confines Earine, the satyr ties her to a tree by her long golden hair (Tasso 1591: C2v). Jonson’s shepherds also seem unusually well read. Clarion’s list of the authors of late Greek romance whose lovers bear comparison with Aeglamour, whose plot is in fact taken from Spenser (“Heliodores, or Tatij!/Longi! Eustathij! Prodromi!” (1.5.96–7)) display his knowledge of Heliodorus’s Aethiopica, Achilles Tatius’s Adventures of Cleitophon and Leucippe, Longus’s Loves of Daphnis and Chloe, Eustathius’s The Story of Hysmine and Hysminias, and Prodromus or Theodorus’s The Loves of Rhodanthe and Dosicles (Herford and Simpson 1950: 10.371). While this dissolution of a binary between print and popular cultures does not elevate Mother Maudlin to the status of Silenus in the Oberon, a deprecation of her as ignorant and unlettered becomes impossible to defend. The creation and then the breakdown of a binary between the elite-friendly popular culture of Robin Hood and the low popular culture of Mother Maudlin raises as many questions as it resolves concerning the appropriate relationship between gentry and the poor as well as between educated male playwrights and old women who tell tales. While their interests and agendas are not reducible to a unifying pleasure in country sports, they yet remain entangled in unexpected ways. The Sad Shepherd describes, rather than resolves, these entanglements. How might this play have ended? Does the wise and learned hag-finder Alken, positioned against the low popular culture produced through Mother Maudlin, yield to the hermit Reuben the Reconciler, whose name’s inclusion of “Ben” arguably presents him as an alternate author figure (Riggs 1989: 345)? Does

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Reuben succeed in healing the social divisions between the aristocracy and the poor as well as the inner divisions between classical scholar and female storyteller? The final scenes of two attempts to conclude The Sad Shepherd outline contrasting possibilities. F.G. Waldron’s continuation from 1783 reforms Maudlin, who craves pardon on her knees, as Clarion and even Alken advise Robin that “those who are blest with wealth, should of their store/Be stewards, and dispensers to the poor” (1905: 69). In Alan Porter’s 1944 version, however, Maudlin rejects Robin’s invitation to the feast as, Malvolio-like, she curses “The de’ill may tak your feast!” (1944: 92). Neither does justice to Jonson’s divided society and his even more richly divided self no doubt still under construction at his death.

Conclusion

It is difficult to come to definitive conclusions in a project that avoids master narratives. What I hope to have accomplished is less a conclusion than an approach, and perhaps a set of assumptions. I have attempted to convey a sense of the very real complexity of the entanglements between diverse higher status groups and the lower sorts, as these are worked out in literary texts. While it is inappropriate in this pre-industrial age to claim the existence of classconsciousness, I have attributed to the lower sorts a full awareness of their individual social predicaments, in direct opposition to those who assume a false consciousness for oppressed groups. I have suggested, through their use of fairy allusions, considerable inventiveness through which they address these difficulties. While oral texts are inevitably distorted in written texts, I have argued that the effect of old wives’ tales, and the women who told them, on the subjectivities of early moderns, including canonical authors, is profound. I have described how the changing perceptions of hobby-horses make visible the intersection between productions of popular culture and the lived experience of the body for many and perhaps most early moderns. While the sheer intransigence of language has required me to use unsatisfactory terms such as “low” or “lower sorts,” I hope that my respect for lower status groups, evident in these assumptions, becomes explicit in my discussions of texts. Rather than conveying an elite–low binary or even an elite–middle–low trinary, I have chosen to use terms such as “lower sorts” or “middling sorts” to allude to their inclusion of various social factions. I welcome further studies that break down these terms yet further to show the differences, for example, between self-narratives among various of the middling groups. Finally, I have tried to walk a middle ground, neither attempting to restore a sense of a merry England in-and-of-itself outside of a relational discourse mutually constitutive of higher status groups nor denying the vital presence of practices conducted through fairy allusions, ballads, old wives’ tales, and hobby-horses and the very real joy taken in them by persons of all social groups. While the very different productions of popular culture by Shakespeare, Spenser, and Jonson attest to the complexity of early modern productions of popular culture, it is perhaps possible to make some tentative statements regarding the variations among productions by these writers. To some extent, these

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variations are due to the range of genres and the audience these genres engage. Shakespeare’s plays were designed to appeal to the disparate groups comprising the audience of the public theater, while Spenser’s sometimes demanding epic The Faerie Queene addressed the literate, even the hyper-literate. Of necessity, Jonson wrote his masque, if not entirely to flatter, then not obviously to offend court factions. More difficult to ascertain due to its unfinished state, his Sad Shepherd seems to speak to his patrons who owned country seats in Nottinghamshire, perhaps attempting to reconcile them to lower social groups. Even given these differences due to genre, however, another pattern seems to emerge, as a distance widens between these productions and the lower sorts they evoke. The lower sorts seem to become more abstract, less distinct. My observations concerning this tendency are, at this point, very tentative; and more writings by these and also additional authors would be necessary to maintain this claim with confidence. But it seems to me that the magic of Titania’s forest, and even the perverse pleasures of maverick theater games in Windsor Forest, have begun to dissipate over these few decades. The ridiculous hybridity displayed by Bottom, as he lies in Titania’s arms, becomes for Verdant, compromised by Acrasia’s embrace, a dangerous dissolution of identity. The world of Spenser’s fairies who dance to the pipe of Colin Clout is more vaguely realized than the world of Shakespeare’s Mustardseed, Peaseblossom, and Cobweb. Even further removed is the world of the courtier-fairies in Jonson’s Oberon, for whom a country-fairy must be invented. Even as performed by Jack Falstaff, the fat woman of Brentford seems less generic than Jonson’s Mother Maudlin, who conforms so closely to contemporary stereotypes of witches. The amateur theatrics of Shakespeare’s artisans are more fully realized, and more offensively funny, than the indirect transmutations of dragon hobby-horses in The Faerie Queene; and Jonson’s The Sad Shepherd barely evokes their crude physicality only as an absence in the dances not performed by Maid Marian. As argued above for Jonson, the productions of popular culture in the first decades of the seventeenth century became both more idealized and more degraded. It seems that this difference conforms to a general pattern by which productions of the popular become increasingly detached from lived interactions with members of the lower sorts. Productions of popular culture have never quite ceased. It seems clear that irresponsible idealizations of the popular from the nineteenth century and continuing up until our own day have invoked a widespread hermeneutics of suspicion for the entire subject in the academic world. Dismantled by Peter Burke (1978: 3–22), misconceptions attending the enthusiastic “discovery of the people” in the nineteenth century address the common yearning for a less fragmented society, in tune with ancient customs and imbued with a sense of oneness among its members and with nature itself. This wish may differ in content, but not in form, with the desires expressed through the majestic Titania, through the vanishing fairies dancing for Colin Clout, and even in a sense through the long-ago world, however contemporary, evoked by the names of Maid Marian and Robin Hood. In our present day, productions of the popular

Conclusion 231 remain a continuing process, visible in re-creations of old ballads, in Renaissance fairs, in a fashion among adolescents for jesters’ caps with bells. Stallybrass and White have ably identified the rediscovery of a particular form of the popular – the carnival – as constitutive of bourgeois subjectivity in the early twentieth century, as they trace enactments by Freud’s patients of “desperate ritual fragments salvaged from a festive tradition” (1986: 176). In my own admittedly bourgeois subjectivity, I admit to yearnings for a simpler and less fragmented society that I imagine as existing in the past. But I know that no societies are truly simple. As I have worked on this project, I have come to a greater awareness not only of the content, but of the agendas, of my own selfnarratives. It is my hope that this study of early modern narratives of selfdefinition, while significant in themselves, may also increase attentiveness to the implicit ideologies of our own complex productions of popular culture.

Notes

1 Producing popular cultures 1 These are described in Chapters 2 through 4. My unwillingness to assume a unified culture of shared beliefs or practices has led me to rely on sometimes cumbersome terms such as “lower status groups” “lower sort,” “the low,” as socially descriptive only, not derogatory or elitist. While I sometimes resort to using them, I rejected the widespread use of the terms “folk” and “plebeian” as presupposing unified groups. “Lower class” assumes a class system not yet in place. There is no ready-made term; and I ask for my readers’ understanding of inevitably partial solutions to the semantic obstacles of describing these unrelated groups. 2 See, for example, seminal works (Barber 1972; Weimann 1978; Cohen 1985; Marcus 1986; Laroque 1991) as well as numerous works cited in chapters on each of these authors. 3 The first example will be discussed with Nashe’s Terrors of the Night in Chapter 3; the second with the performed St. George underlying Spenser’s Red Cross Knight in Chapter 7. 4 While taking into account Bruster’s sense of the term’s insidious simplicity (2003: 211), I use “culture” to describe “a particular way of life, whether of a people, a period, a group or humanity in general” (Williams 1983: 90). 5 Thirsk 1978: 106–76; Jardine 1996; Newman 1991; Braudel 1992: 183–265 (food and drink) and 266–333 (houses, clothes, fashion) and 1979: 404; Mukerji 1983; McCracken 1988: 11–16. Braudel 1979: 231. The discussion by Braudel (324) of the needs of the upper classes to invent new “distinctive signs” in costumes in the early eighteenth century has earlier applications. 6 For discussions of class, see Underdown 1985a: 20; Poovey 1994; Kastan 1999: 150; Wood 1999. 7 For complexity of the laughter response see Teague (1994: 24) and essays in Teague (ed.) (1994). Observing its dependence on cultural discourses, Teague finally questions “the notion that our laughter is our own” (23). 8 For the connection between politics and pleasure, see, for example, Jameson 1983: 14; McLuskie 1985; Zizek 1992: 43. 2 Taken by the fairies 1 Thomas (1971: 708); see also Clifford Geertz (1983: 73–93), and Hilda Geertz’s observation that the beliefs in which “we are brought up from childhood” gain a “plausibility” through “the sheer force of culture” (1975: 79). Woodbridge (1994) argues that even with the passing of serious belief, magical thinking continued to structure unconscious mental processes during this period. For extensive information on early modern representations of fairies, see Latham (1930); Halliwell-Phillipps ([1845]

Notes 233 1996); or Briggs (1959, 1967, 1978). See also Paster and Howard (1999: 307–10); Lamb (2000b). 2 Bridling (1595) describes how one “rich churle” gave money to Judith Phillips to saddle, bridle, and ride him to meet the Queen of Fairies. See also Examination of John Walsh and “Severall notorious and lewd Cousonages of John West, and Alice West, falsely called the King and Queene of Fayries,” in Halliwell-Phillipps ([1845] 1996: 181–94). 3 Old wives’ tales 1 For the most part, English tales did not begin to become transcribed into written literature until the later seventeenth century; and even then the most popular early written collections came from France (Warner 1994: 166–7) in what Briggs has called “the foreign invasion” (1967: 174). As Adam Fox observes, “Sufficient allusions to such tales in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries make it clear that they were then well known to contemporaries, but apparently almost no one thought them worth writing down or printing” (2000: 201). Early modern references do reveal, however, the oral circulation of specific tales transcribed later, sometimes centuries later: the tale of the owl as a baker’s daughter, quoted by the mad Ophelia in Hamlet, first printed in Gentleman’s Magazine in 1804; the tale “Three Heads in a Well” forming a plot element in George Peele’s Old Wives Tale (1595) included in a chapbook of 1764; the narrative of the Bluebeard-like serial killer Mr. Fox described as already an old tale in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing and a reference in Spenser’s Faerie Queene but not apparently written down until 1821 (Fox 2000: 200; see also Fowler 1921: 56; PorgesWatson 1999). References from as long ago as the twelfth century to tales such as “The Fairy Midwife,” “The Missing Sow,” “The Green Children,” and “Wild Edric” reveal the extraordinary persistence of these oral narratives, although no doubt in adapted forms, as they surface in the early modern period and even later (Fox 2000: 198; Briggs 1959: 197–235; collected in Hartland (1890) and Jacobs (1985)). Ballads, described by Alan Bold as “the art of storytelling raised to a musical pitch” (1979: 21), also preserved long-lived stories both in oral and eventually also in printed form. Printed in Francis Child’s nineteenth-century collection The English and Scottish Popular Ballads (1882), ballads such as “Thomas Rhymer” and “Tam Lin” date from at least the sixteenth century. Nursery rhymes also have an apparently long but often mysterious past. Iona and Peter Opie present reasons to believe that “nearly one in four of all the rhymes” collected in their Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes were probably known “while Shakespeare was still a young man” (1973: 7–8), although they also note the difficulty in documenting the age of many rhymes with scientific accuracy, beyond quotations such as Edgar’s “Fie foe and fumme” in King Lear. 2 From an historical perspective, of course, Scot was correct. Centaurs and fauns were in fact the creatures of old wives’ tales of a much earlier age; and female caregivers of ancient Greece and Rome apparently used tales to terrify, as well as to comfort, the children in their care, as pointed out eloquently by Purkiss (2000a: 11–36). But this was hardly the point of Scot’s diatribe. See also Fox for additional examples to support his observation that “this rich vein of folklore” of stories told by women to children was “inspired by deterrence and motivated by the desire to keep youngsters in subjection” (2000: 197). 3 For the one-sex gender system, see Laqueur 1990; for the more recently emphasized humoral body, see Fletcher 1995: 33; Smith 2000: 15–16; Paster 2004. 4 While I do not agree with Stone’s much-criticized argument regarding the greater parental distance from their children in the early modern period, I find his descriptions of familial organization valid. The “open lineage family” (1450–1630) was characterized by a wide network of kinship relations and fluid boundaries with the surrounding society, while the “patriarchal nuclear family” (1550–1770) was delineated more

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sharply from the surrounding society by a focus on the conjugal couple and its children (1979b). 5 Halpern (1991: 25); Wall notes the function of humanist education to “suppress the faults inculcated in the realm of early childhood” (2002: 71), although her essay “Household Stuff” explores a dependency of the learned culture upon female domesticity (1998). Montrose ably discusses the passage of boys from the “world of mothers and nurses into the world of fathers and masters” (1996: 125). According to T.W. Baldwin, Elizabethan schools purposefully prevented boys from playing to transform them into men (1944: I: 561). Thomas discusses the routines and disciplines of early modern schooling as designed to induce in boys an “instinctual renunciation” of bodily appetites and passions; occasional “barrings out” of the schoolmaster formed a periodic release from the tensions of this regimen (1976: 8). Bushnell (1996: 62) discusses the political purposes of this discipline. Coppelia Kahn describes this goal of instilling self-discipline and self-control as composing an “ethically orientated sense of Romanitas . . . almost synonymous with masculinity” (1997: 14). As well demonstrated by Stewart (1997: 84–121) and Bruce Smith (1999: 79–115), effeminacy is here associated solely with “female” traits, not with the gender of an object of sexual desire; humanist education in fact promoted homosocial and homosexual desire. 6 These separate tales are described well by Hook (1970: 319–39), who notes that except for their appearance in Peele’s play, several tales are not extant before the eighteenth century. See also Binnie (1980: 20–4), and Cox (1978: 330–46), who ably sets out the formal relationships between the plots. Braunmuller (1983: 57–62) discusses folkloric elements. 7 The role of charity or generosity in this play is noted by Cox (1978: 336) and Braunmuller (1983: 57, 59). Bradbrook (1970: 23–41) represents this charity as a desired outcome of a possible performance by players from Queen’s Company down on their luck, acting this play before country folk. 4 Hobby-horses and fellow travelers 1 Scholars have ably discussed these and other pressures creating a factional edge to events once functioning primarily to raise funds for the parish (Marcus 1986; Stallybrass 1986; Cressy 1989; Laroque 1991; Hutton 1994). 2 The history of the hobby-horse is further discussed by Liebler (1995: 177–82); Hutton (1996: 81–94 and 1994: 34, 87–8); and passim in Alford (1978); Cawte (1978); Forrest (1999). 3 Hutton (1996: 93); Cawte (1978: 23). Sir David Lindsay notes this form of hobby-horse in a Scottish interlude from 1540 (Hutton 1996: 93); see also Alford (1978: xxiii, xxvii, 2, 25–32, 50–1). This version continues in a related but smaller form as a child’s toy composed of horse’s head mounted on a stick to be ridden between the legs. 4 Interestingly, an element of sexual shock has become a traditional part of a number of modern hobby-horse performances. Chris Brookes, a performer from Newfoundland, describes how the hobby-horse seemed to guide its operator into making “manic lunges” and “sexual advances” to spectators, one of whom chased him out the door and around the block for biting her on the breast (1998: 52). Similarly provocative acts, such as sitting on the laps of attractive young women in the audience, have been recorded for other modern performances (Cawte 1978: 162, 217–18). While some scholars have looked to pagan rituals for the meanings of this sexual license, Hutton (1996: 112) and Cawte (1978: 218) both relate a sense of taking on a role from the horse mask itself; and Brookes asserts his belief that none of these were qualities “imposed upon our hobby-horse” (1998: 52). Yet surely these hijinks proceeded not mystically from the horse mask, but from the performer’s interpretation of the mask, guided by the performance event itself.

Notes 235 5 Financial records in York describe some form of a repeated “play” of St. George as part of his riding; in 1554, the City Chamberlains’ Books detail a payment to the waites or singers for “rydyng & playing before St. George and the play,” to the “king & Quene that playd,” and to one John Stamper the not inconsiderable sum of 3 shillings 4 pence for “playng St. George” (Johnston and Rogerson 1979: 318–19). 6 Chambers records the following verse: “In come I, little Devil Dout;/If you don’t give me money, I’ll sweep you out./Money I want and money I crave;/If you don’t give me money, I’ll sweep you to the grave” (1933: 9). It is not necessary to accept the authenticity of nineteenth-century mummings to perceive the devil sweeping up money at the conclusion as an earlier figure. The much-criticized Croker manuscript, copied from a document dated 1685, describes a performance already as “an ancient pastime of the citizens,” that included “a little Devil with a broom to gather up the money that was thrown to the Mummers for their sport” (Brody 1970: 11; but see Hutton (1996: 75) for a skeptical reading). It would seem a convenient way to gather together the money or gifts, and a devil’s disguise required only a blackened face (1673 “The Black Man” in Elson 1931: 393). 7 Some of the many critics who have ably discussed the implications of this passage from Stubbes for May games include Wiles (1981: 10–11, 14–18); Liebler (1995: 181); Johnston (1998: 31); Forrest (1999: 145–6); Smith (1999: 139–40). 8 Too numerous to list, a few historians who have ably traced this polarization include Underdown (1985a); Marcus (1986); Stallybrass (1986); Cressy (1989); Hutton (1994); Collinson and Craig (1998). The Star Chamber depositions for this event at Wells are reprinted in Stokes (1996: 1.261–327). These are summarized and discussed by Bruce Smith (1999: 135–7); Underdown (1985a: 56–7); and Sisson (1936: 162–85). Sisson also refers to Minutes, now in the Bridgewater MS in the Huntington Library, written by Lord Ellesmere supplementing the Star Chamber depositions (163). 9 This painting is conveniently reproduced on the cover of Forrest, who dates it as around 1620 (1999: 262), with discussion on pp. 276, 284. 10 A similar stratagem involving mumming by an individual of low social status was still culturally legible by the late seventeenth century, since it appears in a short play or droll, “The Black Man,” described by John Elson as a jig or song drama, published in 1673 but no doubt composed earlier (1931: 393). 5 A Midsummer Night’s Dream: breeching the binary 1 Parker (1996) develops this metaphor of joining on material, matrimonial, and verbal levels. 2 See, for example, Brooks 1979; Foakes 1984; Holland 1994; Bevington 1997; Greenblatt 1997. 3 Seminal in this discourse is Montrose (1986, 1996). For relations of power, feminist readings such as Levine (1996) must also be taken into account. See also Helgerson (1992). Already well argued elsewhere (Montrose 1986), this chapter does not replicate the analyses of Titania as Queen Elizabeth with Bottom as her parodic favorite. Rather than rejecting this approach, however, a longer study would link incorporations of Elizabeth with the familial caregiver, or fairies with sexual transgressions, real or rumored, of the court. These associations are discussed in Chapter 7. 4 See Leinwand 1986; Patterson 1989; Friedman 1992; McDonald 1994; Wilson 1996; Callaghan 2000; Boehrer 2002. 5 Leinwand (1986); for later discussions of the play-within-a-play indebted to Leinwand’s discussion of artisans’ riots, see Wilson (1996) and McDonald (1994). 6 Impressive recent scholarship has identified additional functions for fairy allusions. Wendy Wall has firmly located fairy references in the domestic realm of women’s labor (2002: 110–12); Diane Purkiss has discovered uses of fairy allusions to the dead

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7 8 9

10

11

12

13

14 15

16

17

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(2000a: 108–9). The performance of these historically specific forms of cultural work complicates traditional psychoanalytic interpretations of Shakespeare’s fairies as embodiments of transhistorical forces: as “eros in men and women and trees and flowers” (Barber [1959] 1972: 124), as archetypes in the racial unconscious (Sagar 1995), and as the irrational workings of the imagination (Dent 1964). Shershow (1995) describes the vulgarity attributed to puppet entertainments. Paster and Howard claim that the “ ‘painted Maypole’ . . . becomes an epithet of illfavored femininity” (1999: 93). Stallybrass and White (1986: 13) summarize the arguments for the function of carnival as a discharge valve finally supporting rather than undermining authority, also insisting, however, on the necessity of considering the politics of carnival only within “a close historical examination of particular conjectures” (16) rather than through any a priori assumptions. It should be noted, however, that the prose pamphlet Robin Goodfellow is itself a hybrid of a traditional Robin Goodfellow and a newly devout figure appealing to a market of pious reader, as discussed in Lamb (2000b: 300). Purkiss argues that the pamphlet was derived from A Midsummer Night’s Dream rather than reflecting folk practice (2000a: 171). In this forgetting, I am arguing against a position advanced by Peter Burke’s argument that “perhaps one should see noblewomen as mediators between the group to which they belonged socially, the elite, and the group to which they belonged culturally, the non-elite” (1978: 28); while relationships between mistresses and servants were undoubtedly close at times, mistresses were yet required to move beyond their childhood subjection in order to exert dominance over their employees. Paster affirms the extent to which “Titania’s mastery and Bottom’s passivity” replicate “the structure of the early childhood experience of the body” (1993: 138). Montrose describes the movement of the changeling boy “from the relatively androgynous or feminized state of infancy into the more decisively gendered state of youth, from the world of mothers and nurses into the world of fathers and masters” resisted by Bottom as the object of a dangerous maternal power (1996: 125, 170). Foregrounding “the mundane work of housekeepers and serving women” literalized in the fairies, Wall describes a “pleasurable and anxious return to the familiarity of childhood” on the “flickering identifications” of the audience (2002: 110, 112). As Montrose asserts, the “experience of female fecundity” in this scene poses “a lyrical counterstatement to paternal and patriarchal claims” (1996: 138–9). Levine argues that “this vision of female plenitude and the largess it implies . . . must be destroyed and rendered impotent in the course of the play for the plot to advance” (1996: 213). Cawte (1978: 127) notes a modern version in the Antrobus head, “said to be a donkey’s.” Helgerson argues that Shakespeare’s company “exchanged their plebeian clown for a courtly fool” to move up “the social scale from the Theatre to the Globe to the Blackfriars” as part of a shift of the London stage to a more controlled author’s theater oriented towards the literate culture of the court (1992: 199, 241). David Wiles’s finding of “no evidence that the fool’s cap included representational . . . ass’s ears” (1987: 190) is countered by the cover of Stephen Greenblatt’s Norton Shakespeare, which displays a globe wearing a jester’s cap with floppy ears on which are written Latin words translated as, “Who does not have asses’ ears?” (1997: iv). Taken from the Douce Portfolio (1620) at the Bodleian Library, this cap testifies to a long-standing tradition still legible by the early seventeenth century. See also (Welsford 1935: 121–2); and an anonymous Dutch portrait from 1500 reproduced by Warner (1994: 140). For an alternative genesis for Puck’s practical joke on Bottom, Jan Kott looks to the medieval Feast of Fools or “festum asinorum,” in which “the low clerics parodied the

Notes 237 Holy Offices while disguising themselves with the masks of animals” (1987: 49–50); see also E.K. Chambers (1903: I.287, 332) who notes, however, that the few references to this custom in England “are all previous to the end of the 14th century” (I.318). 18 Hutton (1994: 8) notes the presence of the quack doctor and Beelzebub as echoes from an earlier period; and Hardin (2002) traces a long history for the doctor as a figure in folk drama. In an account of a 1553 London procession, Machyn’s diary describes how an apparently dying Jack-a-Lent was shrived on horseback while his wife offered impossibly large sums of money to save his life (1848: 33; Jonassen 1991: 51). Making impossible and comic claims for their medicines, mountebanks would attract a crowd with an amateur performance and then sell their cures. A jest in Pasquils Jests (1609) describes a mountebank who collects money from the public (two pence apiece) who expect to enjoy his “orations” on a stage (C3v). “Mountebancks zanies” are included among strolling players, fools, and fiddlers as prospective performers of the short plays in Wits (Elson 1931: 265). This tradition, rather than any resurrection motif (Chambers 1903: I.185–6), would seem to account for the later presence of a doctor reviving the slain contestant in a hero-combat plot in nineteenth-century mumming events. The possibility of “cures” of characters in amateur performances is suggested not only by Theseus’s remark, but also by Aesculapius’s attempted cure of Sans Joy, wounded by Red Cross Knight, in Book I of The Faerie Queene (Hardin 2001: 251–3). See also the presence of a quack doctor in the much-discredited Croker manuscript, copied from a document purportedly written around 1685 describing a performance event dating from the early seventeenth century or before, according to the author’s statement that at the time of his childhood, it was already “an ancient pastime of the citizens” (Brody 1970: 11; with doubts by Hutton (1996: 75)). 6 The Merry Wives of Windsor: domestic nationalism and the refuse of the realm 1 The information in this paragraph is drawn from Beier 1985: 14–48; Slack 1988: 37–60; Rappaport 1989: 162–75; Carroll 1996: 21–5; Dubrow 1999: 44; Fumerton 2000: 206–26; Woodbridge 2001: 267–84. For issues in the dating of this play, see Freedman (1994: 190–210). 2 A. Kinney (1993: 220); Kinney has speculated that these extreme conditions “scraping so painfully along the bone” (234) caused Shakespeare to relocate the play from Windsor to a less specific setting, apparently London. Marcus (1991: 168–78) gives a full discussion of the differences between Quarto and Folio. 3 Woodcut illustration from Vol. 2, part 1 of Roxburghe Ballads (1872: 81). This ballad was separately printed for H. Gosson in 1631 with a derived difference showing a later date from the Roxburghe: for the cony holding facecards, it substitutes a sadfaced furred creature, leaving the facecards suspended in space. 4 Greene (1591a: B1–B1v). A lock-picking cony illustrates the title-pages of Greene (1591b); the embracing couple is a reverse copy of the illustration to Greene 1592a. 5 Stone 1979a: 547–88; Thirsk 1978: 106–32; Mukerji 1983; Braudel 1992: 183–265 (food and drink) and 266–333 (houses, clothes, fashion); Orlin 1994: 255–60 and 1995: 3–5, 81–3; Jardine 1996; Sarti 2001. 6 This accrual and then the failure of credit reflected an aristocratic practice that would lead to financial depressions in the Jacobean period (Chorost 1991: 355). This is not to say that the aristocracy declined as a group. As Kamen notes, lesser nobles were “quickly replaced by rising newcomers” as the “gentry increased in numbers and wealth” (2000: 83, 87). 7 Kegl (1994) analyzes the various and conflicting uses of terms such as “bourgeois” and “middle class,” finally stressing the importance of seeing class designations as a “shifting process” (257).

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8 Information in this paragraph about charivaris is taken from Ingram 1984; Underdown 1985a: 100–5, 1985b; Berry 2001. 9 Wiles 1987: 116–32; MacCabe 1988: 10–11; Helgerson 1992: 222–8; Beister 2001: 235–7. Wiles interprets the shaming of Falstaff as the ceremony of degradation for a disgraced knight of the garter. 10 For the attribution of the role of Falstaff to Kemp, see especially Wiles 1987: 116–20; and also Holmes 1972: 47–50; Poole 1995: 62; Thomson 2004: 412. The Quarto of Henry 4 part 2 (2.2) includes a stage direction “enter Will” for Falstaff. Early on, T.W. Baldwin speculated that of the two comic actors Kemp and Pope, it was Pope who initially played Falstaff before the role passed to Lowin (1927: 231–4). 11 In another significant parallel, Falstaff’s appearance in stag’s horns literalizes Hal’s address over the body he believes to be dead at Shrewsbury: “Death hath not strook so fat a deer today,/Though many dearer, in this bloody fray” (Henry 4 part 1, 5.4.106). As he rises from his prone position beside the truly dead Hotspur, Falstaff’s resurrection in Henry 4 part 1 enacts, as Berry observes, a pattern “reminiscent of ritualistic English folk drama” (2001: 134). 7 The Faerie Queen: vanishing fairies and dissolving courtiers 1 A few of the excellent discussions of this reading process include Parker 1979: 81, 99; Norbrook 1984: 112; Quilligan 1983, 1990; Kinney 1992: 109, 118. 2 See e.g. Giamatti 1966: 232–91, 1975: 28–32; Kennedy 1990: 717–19; Marinelli 1990: 56–7; Quint 1990: 678–9. 3 Some critics who have written on fairies as oral tradition in The Fairie Queene include Greenlaw 1918; Latham 1930; Rathborne 1937; Lewis 1964: 122–38; Duffy 1972: 127–36; Tonkin 1972: 127–38; Woodbridge 1986; Murrin 1990; Larrington 1999; Purkiss 2000a: 179–81, 2000b; Swann 2000; Woodcock 2003, 2004. 4 According to the Spenser Variorum 1966: II, 436, “the golden chain of the Iliad is associated with Philotime in the cave of Mammon as a symbol of avarice and ambition; thus Comes interprets it.” A few excellent discussions of Philotime include Cullen 1970; Tonkin 1972; O’Connell 1977: 104–7; Cain 1978: 94–7; 112–13; McCabe 1989: 179–80; King 1990: 119–20; Prescott 1990: 451–2; Helgerson 1992: 55–7; Oram 1997: 102–4. 5 Useful in this context is the concept of “chaste thinking” described by Stephanie Jed, for whom chastity is not the opposite of sexuality, but a cultural construct inviting rape (1989: 7). 6 Supporting his truancy as necessary for the knowledge of courtesy are Lewis 1938: 350; Tonkin 1972: 122–3; Helgerson 1983: 90; Kinney 1992: 81, Oram 1997: 256. Less sympathetic are Maxwell (1952: 143–9), and Berger (1961: 94), who views it as a “digression from a digression.” 7 Some critics who have discussed these figures as fairies as well as graces include Rathborne 1937: 205; Lewis 1964: 122–38; Tonkin 1972: 127–38; Cain 1978: 157; Gross 1985: 211–12. The stream flowing down its hills is guarded by “nymphes and Faeries” (VI.x.7). The sound of the pipe and the “many feete fast thumping th’ hollow ground” anticipate Calidore’s sight of a fairy dance (9). Blessed with this vision, Calidore could not decide “whether it were the traine of beauties Queene,/Or Nymphes, or Faeries, or enchaunted show, With which his eyes mote have deluded been” (17). 8 In what Muldrew ably describes as the “culture of credit,” longer chains of credit caused “more defaults, and economic insecurity” (1998: 3). With the late sixteenthcentury expansion of the commercial market, there was an “explosion of debt litigation” (7). While a coherent consumer society was not fully established until the eighteenth century, the “most intensely concentrated period of economic growth” before that time was from 1550 to 1580 (20). These sources detailing increased consumer demand are also listed in Chapter 5, n. 10: Thirsk 1978: 106–32; Stone 1979a:

Notes 239

9

10

11

12

547–88; Mukerji 1983; Braudel 1992: 183–265 (food and drink) and 266–333 (houses, clothes, fashion); Orlin 1995: 3–5; 81–3, 1994: 255–60; Jardine 1996; Sarti 2001. Montrose 1986: 329–30, Parker 1979: 57. For discussions of early modern perceptions of poetry and/or narratives as effeminizing, see e.g. Fleming 1993; Levine 1994. Acrasia’s power is generalized in Gosson’s image of poetry as “Circe’s cup” (Levine 1994: 12). Critics who have noted Acrasia’s maternal identification include Montrose (2002: 926) and Shepherd (1989: 81); this identification is implicit although undeveloped in Greenblatt (1980: 189), where he describes the placement of Verdant in Acrasia’s arms as an “uncanny parody of the Pieta.” Breitenberg (1996: 43, 67); Schoenfeldt differs from Breitenberg in this respect, arguing against an emphasis on gender that has “skewed the interpretation of Galenism, making fluidity the exclusive province of female corporeality” (1999: 360). But humoral theory is, as Schoenfeldt notes, a “near-poetic vocabulary of felt experience” rather than an exact science (3), and the continued perception of desire as a fluid that “flows in a certain sense through women,” threatening the masculine subject is amply demonstrated for the modern era by Theweleit (1987: 272). Besides the dragon, another “fellow traveler” of the hobby-horse is the satyr. Satyrs appear in I.vi to adore Una, and in III.x.46–51 to engage in multiple sexual relations with Hellenore whom they honor as their “May-lady” (44). Besides suggesting that these later satyrs indicate a potent sexuality attributed to the lower sorts, I have little to add to Jordan (1990: 628).

8 Oberon, The Fairy Prince (1611) and the great fairy caper; The Sad Shepherd (c.1637) and the topography of the devil’s arse 1 Gilbert (1948: 175); illus. in Orgel (1975: 68). Peacock (1995: 292) notes however that this costume is from a performance of Oberon a year later; and that the exact costume for the first performance is not extant. 2 See also Norbrook (1984: 204), and Butler (1998: 32), who notes that the satyrs’ “anarchy and lechery project the downside of court life.” MacIntyre (2004: 95–104) locates the satyrs’ greed in clients seeking patronage from Prince Henry rather than from King James. 3 Since her overt resistance to waging war placed her foreign policies significantly closer to those of King James than of Prince Henry, this use of an identification with Queen Elizabeth to put forward Henry’s militarist Protestant values seems a paradox. Rather than imitating Elizabeth’s pacific policies, Prince Henry may well have been drawing from the militarist values of Spenser’s Faerie Queene in, for example, Arthur’s rescue of Belge (V.xi). MacIntyre (1999: 81) is in a minority for claiming its intent as supporting James’s pacificism. Nostalgia for Elizabeth was used polemically, to support vastly dissimilar positions (Watkins 2000: 95–116). 4 This discourse continued to flourish among the most disaffected from mainstream religion in the next decades, and one John Trevalyan, a recusant in the late 1620s, pronounced Queen Tibb [i.e. Elizabeth] as “as arrant a whore as ever breathed” (Watkins 2000: 100). Similar rumors circulated around Queen Anne, encoded, for example, in Mary Wroth’s episode of the jealous queen who banished Pamphilia from her court as a rival for the love of Amphilanthus, a figure for William Herbert, Earl of Pembroke, very much in the favor of James’s queen (Lamb 1990: 187–8). 5 I am here adapting Leah Marcus’s concept of “writing the court on the countryside” (1993: title). For a similar strategy presented in Shakespeare’s As You Like It, see Wiles (1981: 52) (“Shakespeare’s concept of the golden world invokes not the abolition of the aristocratic order but rather an idealized form of that order”), modified by Wilson (1992).

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6 The opposing views of critics demonstrate the openness of this aspect of the play to interpretation. Butler argued that the play associates the country interests of the aristocracy with the outlaw aspect of Robin Hood and the radical politics of forest communities, as pitted against a court that had lost the nation’s faith (1984: 261). Marcus also reads the play’s nostalgia as a critique of the present, yet she sees Jonson’s response as more positive in his attempt to “reinfuse court culture with the popular” (1986: 108, 136). Riggs projects the function of Reuben the reconciler as the play’s attempt to “repair the widening rift between court and country” (1989: 345). Butler reverses his earlier interpretation to argue the play’s support of a Caroline monarchy under siege (1992: 185). More recently, Julie Sanders presents this play as a warning to the Stuart court of its self-indulgence (1999: 55). While difficult to reduce to a single argument, Tom Hayes’s book-length study of The Sad Shepherd interprets the omission of Robin Hood’s newly conferred title as preserving “the traditional identification of the legendary outlaw with the lower class, especially the rural agrarian peasantry”(1992: 91). For an excellent summary and bibliography, see Loxley (2002: 184–5).

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Index

Adelman, Janet 49 Adlington, William 101–2 aesthetics (low vs. high) 15, 21, 61, 64–6, 68, 74, 87–8, 95; in Jonson 205, 220–1, 225–6; in A Midsummer Night’s Dream 104, 115–16, 118, 120, 122; in Spenser 187, 189, 191–2; in The Merry Wives of Windsor 142, 145, 148, 158, 172 Agnew, Jean-Christophe 130 Albala, Ken 19 alehouses 48, 127, 129, 131, 133, 135, 141, 149, 151, 153 Alford, Violet 234 amateur performers 3, 15, 64–6, 72, 76, 83–8, 119–24, 153–5, 189–90, 237 Amerie, Robert 71 Amussen, Susan Dwyer 23, 127 Anderson, J.J. 70 Anglo, Sydney 70 Anne, Queen 68, 202, 210–14 Apuleius, Lucius 59, 93 Archer, Ian 85, 131, 175 Ariosto 59, 164, 167 Aristotle 109 Assheton, Nicholas 86 Aubrey, John 34–5, 39, 40, 44, 47, 60, 155 Bacon, Francis 184 Bakhtin, Mikhail 1, 120 Baldwin, T.W. 234, 238 ballads 2–4, 6, 10, 16, 20, 27, 31, 45, 47, 50, 52–3, 55–6, 68, 108, 110–12, 114, 125, 127, 149, 166, 171, 174–5, 180–1, 185, 187, 189, 217, 229, 231, 233, 237; see also Tam Lin Barber, C.L. 96, 121, 232, 236 Barkan, Leonard 101 Barrell, John 6 Barroll, Leeds 208, 210–11

Barry, Jonathan 10, 16, 23 Barton, Anne 197, 210, 217, 219 Beelzebub 30, 237; see also devil Beier, A.L. 18, 128, 130–1, 137, 237 Benjamin, Walter 47, 52 Bennett, Josephine W. 167 Bennett, Tony 7 Berger, Harry 179, 238 Berry, Edmund 127, 135, 137, 140, 144, 147, 154–5, 238 Betley Hall 82 Bettelheim, Bruno 29 Bevington, David 21, 57, 101–2, 117, 119, 121, 158, 235 Biester, James 158 Binnie, Patricia 57–8, 234 Bishop, Tim 206–7 Boehrer, Bruce 67–8, 93, 99, 102, 105, 135 Bold, Alan 233 Book of Sports 19, 65, 198, 203 Borris, Kenneth 188, 190 Bottigheimer, Ruth 11, 110 Bourdieu, Pierre 6, 8, 27, 33, 64–5, 116–17, 198, 205 Bradbrook, Muriel 121, 234 Brathwaite, Richard 74, 76 Braudel, Fernand 232, 237, 239 Braunmuller, A.R. 59, 234 Breight, Curt 168 Breitenberg, Mark 183, 239 Briggs, Katherine 29, 30, 32, 38, 40, 104, 181, 224, 233 Brinkworth, E.R.C. 142 Bristol 1, 69, 70 Bristol, Michael 8, 94, 121, 136 Brody, Alan 235, 237 Brookes, Chris 86, 234 Brooks, Douglas 156

Index 265 Brooks, Harold 119, 235 Brown, Pamela Allen 49, 138 Bruster, Douglas 232 Buccola, Regina 29, 149 Bullough, Geoffrey 101, 110 Burke, Peter 1, 10, 16–17, 25, 34, 37, 46, 230, 236 Burton, Robert 46, 51 Bushnell, Rebecca 53, 234 Butler, Martin 202–4, 209–10, 212, 239, 240 Byford, Mark 1, 263 Cain, Thomas 170, 172, 238 Callaghan, Dympna 99, 103, 105, 235 Camden, William 199, 200, 216–17 Capp, Bernard 85 caregivers see nurses carnival 9, 97–8, 135, 154, 156, 231, 236 Carpenter, Sara 83–4, 86, 155–6 Carroll, William 133, 237 Cartwright, Kent 57 Castiglione, Baldassare 20, 72 Catholic 6, 19, 29, 30, 47–8, 65, 69, 70, 165, 191, 202, 210, 225 Cave, Richard Allen 226 Cavendish, William, Earl of Newcastle 215, 221, 225 Cawte, E.C. 66–7, 119, 234, 236 Caxton, William 188 Chambers, E.K. 115, 168, 173, 235, 237 changelings 13, 33–5, 42–3, 103, 108–9, 181, 211, 222, 236 charivari 91, 144, 147–8, 153, 155, 159, 238 Chartier, Roger 8, 10 Chaucer, Geoffrey 170, 179 Chester 65, 70–1, 76, 187, 192, 198 Child, Frances James 110, 171, 233 Chorost, Michael 134, 237 church ales 63, 70, 73, 78–80, 82, 127, 218, 221 Cicero 132–4, 176 civilizing process 6, 15, 64, 138, 152; see also Elias Clare, John 47 Clark, Peter 127, 131, 133 classical learning 10, 15, 22, 46, 52–5, 58–60, 67, 74, 79, 89–91, 93–5, 97–103, 106–7, 111, 113, 116, 119–21, 125, 132–3, 154, 157, 163–7, 170–1, 176–7, 180, 185, 190, 192, 199–204, 206, 209–10, 216, 227–8; see also Humanism; Latin learning

Cleary, Bridget 43–4 Clifford, Lady Anne 155–6 Clopper, Lawrence 70 Cohen, Walter 148, 232 Collinson, Patrick 1, 2, 19, 20, 235 cony-catchers 91, 128–30, 136–7, 139, 153, 222, 237 Cooper, Carolyn 14, 54 Cooper, Thomas 74 Cope, Jackson 57 Copland, Robert 142; see also Gillian of Brainford Corbett, Richard 48, 61 Coronato, Rocco 208 Cox, John D. 57, 234 Craig, John 2, 235 Craik, T.W. 56 Crane, Mary Thomas 53 Cressy, David 6, 70–1, 97, 234–5 Cullen, Patrick 169, 238 Cunliffe, J.W. 168, 172 dance 4, 6, 27, 36, 56, 60, 63–8, 72–8, 82, 84, 87, 96, 104, 120, 122–3, 146–8, 152, 155, 157, 180, 201, 206–7, 217, 220–1, 230, 238; see also morris dancing Daniel, Samuel 205 Darnton, Robert 29 Davidson, Clifford 106, 121 Davis, Natalie Zemon 41 de Certeau, Michel 27 Dean-Smith, Margaret 59 Dent, R.W. 236 devil 30, 56, 65, 68, 73–4, 76, 78–9, 123, 165, 169, 189, 206, 223, 225, 235, 237 devil’s arse 197, 215, 226 Dionne, Craig 129–30 distinction, urge to 4–6, 16, 20–1, 25, 30–2, 48, 54–5, 64–5, 87; in A Midsummer Night’s Dream 89, 91, 98–9, 103–4, 106, 110, 117; in Jonson 199, 201, 207, 209–10, 214, 225, 227; in Spenser 188–91; in The Merry Wives of Windsor 89–90, 125–6, 134–5, 139, 147, 149, 152, 158–9, 193 Dobson, R.B. 73 Donaldson, Ian 200 Donovan, Kevin 57 dragon 15, 23, 27, 65, 69–72, 76–9, 84, 186–92, 230, 239 Drayton, Michael 30, 214, 216–17, 225–6 Dubrow, Heather 131–2, 138, 148, 154, 237 Duffy, Eamon 6

266

Index

Duffy, Maureen 106, 238 Dunn, Alan 108 Durston, Christopher 19 Eales, Jacqueline 19 Eberly, Susan Schoon 42 Elias, Norbert 6, 15, 94, 133, 138 Elizabeth, Queen 15, 66, 70, 72, 77, 81; cult of 171–6, 180; at Elvetham 168; in Jonson 202, 210–14, 218; at Kenilworth 148, 168, 173–4; in Shakespeare 100, 148, 150, 158, 235; in Spenser 163, 168–9, 171–6, 178, 180, 182, 186, 191, 197; at Woodstock 148, 168, 172–3 Elson, John James 235, 237 Erasmus, Desiderius 20, 53, 94, 116 Erickson, Peter 135, 146, 148 Erickson, Wayne 174 Faerie Queene, The 5, 22, 163–93, 230; Book I 5, 23, 27, 88, 174, 182–3, 187–93; Book II 165, 166, 169–71, 175–6, 180–6, 197; Book III 172, 182, 186; Book IV 173; Book VI 166–7, 177–80 fairies 9, 11–14, 27–44, 48, 53–5, 59, 93–107, 146–53, 167–80, 203–10, 224, 229; in A Midsummer Night’s Dream 16, 89, 91–115, 117–18, 120–3; in Jonson 3–6, 23, 55, 88, 197, 201–11, 214, 224; in Spenser 164–82, 185, 188, 230; in The Merry Wives of Windsor 125–6, 130, 140, 143–55, 157, 159 Falco, Raphael 178 farts 20, 49, 113, 119, 140–3, 226 female storytellers 14, 23, 31, 45–8, 51–62, 108–14, 140–5, 165, 180–2, 185–6, 223–7; see old wives’ tales Fetherston, Christopher 69, 73 Fildes, Valerie 50 Filipczak, Zirka 183–4 Fiske, John 1, 15, 64 Fleming, Juliet 239 Fletcher, Anthony 50, 52–3, 233 Fletcher, John 71 Flower, Joan and Margaret 223 Foakes, F.A. 235 fools 47, 56, 68, 72, 82–3, 115–16, 118, 158–9, 220, 236 Forrest, John 66, 68, 70, 72–4, 81–3, 234–5 Foucault, Michel 12, 15, 53 Fowler, Earle Broadus 233 Fox, Adam 10, 45–7, 233

Free, Mary G. 57 Freedman, Barbara 103, 107, 142, 150 Friedman, Donald 118, 235 Frye, Susan 168, 173 Fumerton, Patricia 198, 214, 218, 237 Gairdner, James 69 Galloway, David 69, 70 Gamage, William 79–80 Gammer Gurton’s Needle 55 Geertz, Clifford 232 Geertz, Hilda 232 ghosts 6, 32, 47, 61, 91, 105, 140, 143, 145–6, 150–1, 153, 155, 174, 190 Giamatti, A. Bartlett 167, 238 giants 77, 79, 179 Gilbert, Allan 239 Gillian of Brainford 91,140, 142–3, 145–6, 152, 197, 230 Ginzburg, Carlo 35 Girouard, Mark 198 Goldberg, Jonathan 202, 208, 211 Golding, Arthur 55, 101, 166 Goodfellow, Robin 5–6, 16, 35, 42, 46, 75–6, 93, 105–7, 112, 123, 127–9, 149, 197, 223, 236; see also Robin Goodfellow, His Mad Prankes and Merry Jests Gouge, William 51 grammar schools 14, 22, 52–6, 185, 199, 216; see also classical learning Gramsci, Antonio 7, 17 Greenblatt, Stephen 50, 68, 74, 99, 120–1, 165, 175, 183, 185, 235–6, 239 Greene, Robert 20, 22, 48, 129, 136–7, 223, 237 Greene, Thomas 167, 200, 218 Greenlaw, Edwin 169, 181, 238 Gross, Kenneth 175, 179–80, 238 Hackel, Heidi Brayman 10 Hackett, Helen 47, 58 Hall, Jonathan 140, 152, 154 Hall, Kim 25 Hall, Stuart 1, 10 Halliwell-Phillipps, J.O. 40, 232–3 Halpern, Richard 14, 176, 234 Hardin, Richard 187, 189–90, 192, 237 Harman, Thomas 11, 128–9, 136 Harp, Richard 223 Harris, Gil 105 Harris, Tim 1, 10–12, 17 Harrison, William 18 Hartland, Sidney 233

Index 267 Harvey, Gabriel 54, 60, 164–5, 167, 192 Hayes, Tom 211, 222–3, 240 Haynes, Jonathan 199 Hebdige, Dick 7 Heinzelman, Kurt 169 Helgerson, Richard 20–1, 116, 135, 142–4, 146, 148, 158, 170, 175, 178, 235–6 Henry, Prince 3–4, 31, 68, 71, 197–8, 200–4, 209–11, 214, 216 Henslowe’s Diary 142 Herford, C.H. 201, 204, 207, 212, 216–17, 223, 226–7 Herrick, Robert 30–1, 214 Heylyn, Peter 69 hobby-horses 2, 12, 15–16, 25–8, 63–88, 229–30; in A Midsummer Night’s Dream 23, 55, 115–24, 230; in Jonson 23, 203–10, 217–21, 230; in Spenser 23, 167, 186–93, 230; in The Merry Wives of Windsor 153–59 Holland, Peter 97, 101, 115, 235 Holmes, Martin 238 Holyday, Barton 66 Homer 166, 175, 185, 190 Hook, Frank 57, 60, 234 Howard, Jean 21 Howard, Lady Frances 208 Howard, Skiles 64, 72, 96, 104, 119, 122–3, 206–7, 233, 238 Hudson, Hoyt 116 Humanism 3, 14, 20, 53–5, 57, 85, 94, 97, 100, 102, 109, 114, 116, 118, 125, 133, 185, 199, 209, 216, 232 humoral body 183–4 Humphrey, Belinda 191 Huon of Bordeaux 164 Hutton, Ronald 6, 17, 19, 25, 66–73, 77, 81, 84, 86, 127, 220, 234–5, 237 hybrid subjects 54–8, 94, 96, 98, 101, 163, 192, 197 hybridity 5, 57, 68, 74, 87, 94, 96, 98, 100–1, 104, 121, 147, 153, 163, 190, 192, 197 Ingram, Martin 17, 238 “Interlude of a Contract of Mariage between Wit and Wisdome” 85 Irish 35, 37, 42, 44, 79 Jack-a-Lent 157, 237 Jacobs, Joseph 233 James I of England and VI of Scotland 3–4, 19, 55, 71, 84, 165–6, 172, 198, 200–2, 206–11, 213, 215, 239

Jameson, Frederic 8–10, 26, 52, 95, 182, 232 Jardine, Lisa 232, 237, 239 Jed, Stephanie 238 Johnston, Alexandra 70, 235 Jonassen, Frederick 157, 237 Jonson, Ben 197–228; The Barriers 200; The Bartholomew Fair 199; The Christmas his Masque 84–5; The Conversations with Drummond 212; “Inviting a Friend to Supper” 199; Love Restored 197; Love’s Welcome at Bolsover 215; Oberon, The Fairy Prince 3–6, 9, 12, 23, 27, 30–1, 55, 88, 197, 200–14, 239; Particular Entertainment at Althorpe 68, 197; Pleasure Reconciled to Virtue 206; The Alchemist 197, 199; The Gypsies Metamorphos’d 215–16, 220, 226, 263; King’s Entertainment at Wellbeck 215, 220; The Masque of Blackness 202; The Masque of Queens 227; The Sad Shepherd 6, 12, 23, 27, 88, 197, 199, 200, 214–28, 230, 239; “To Penshurst” 198; “To Robert Wroth” 208; Volpone 199 Jordan, Richard 239 Kahn, Coppelia 49, 125, 234 Kamen, Henry 133, 237 Kane, Sean 181 Kastan, David 21, 156, 232 Katz, Leslie 148 Kegl, Rosemary 127, 140, 144, 146, 155, 237 Kelso, Ruth 97 Kemp, William 65, 76, 115–16, 118–20, 122–3, 154, 157–9, 187, 236 Kendrick, Christopher 127 Kennedy, William 238 Kermode, Frank 55, 166, 169 King, John 165, 175, 238 Kinney, Arthur 126, 137, 143, 223, 237 Kinney, Clare 177–80, 238 Knight, Stephen 217, 221 Korda, Natasha 138, 141, 144, 147 Kott, Jan 99, 122, 236 Kristeva, Julia 26, 62, 111 Kussmaul, Ann 37 Lake, Peter 19 Lamb, Mary Ellen 48, 100, 171, 174, 185–6, 233, 236, 239 Lambarde, William 131, 139

268

Index

Laqueur, Thomas 49, 233 Laroque, Francois 232, 234 Larrington, Caroline 167–8, 238 Latham, Minor 29, 41, 55, 104, 167–8, 232, 238 Latin learning 3, 14, 22, 27, 52–5, 57–9, 74, 90–1, 112, 125–6, 132, 137, 141–2, 166, 178, 216 Lee, Sir Henry 168, 172–4 Leicester, Earl of (Robert Dudley) 168, 173–4, 176 Leinwand, Theodore 11, 93, 121, 128, 235 Leland John 69 Levine, David 2 Levine, Laura 50, 100, 103, 105, 235–6, 239 Levine, Nina 135 Lewis, C.S. 167, 175, 238 Liebler, Naomi Conn 65, 234–5 Lindley, David 202, 204, 206 Linebaugh, Peter 41 Loewenstein, Joseph 201 Lord Chamberlain’s Men 116–17, 119, 120, 124, 154, 158 Lowth, William 51 Loxley, James 200, 240 Lyly, John 22, 47, 212 MacCabe, Colin 238 McCabe, Richard 167, 181, 238 McCracken, Graham 232 McDonald, Marcia 119–21, 235 McEachern, Claire 25 MacIntyre, Jean 210, 212, 239 MacLachlan, Hugh 188 McLuskie, Katherine 232 Machyn, Henry 15, 63, 77, 80, 156–7, 237 Maid Marian 15, 27, 72, 82, 218, 220–1, 223, 226, 230 Malory 167 Marcus, Leah 19, 51, 83–5, 109, 132, 144, 147, 150, 218–19, 221, 223, 232, 234–5, 237, 239–40 Marinelli, Peter 167 Marlowe, Christopher 43 Maus, Katherine Eisaman 199, 202, 204, 209 Maxwell, J.C. 238 May games 2, 67, 73, 77–8, 86, 179, 186, 189, 192, 235 maypole 2, 16, 19–20, 25–6, 70, 74, 82, 96–7, 127–8, 156–7, 224, 236 Mazzola, Elizabeth 6 Melchiori, Giorgio 148

Mentz, Stephen 130 Mery Geste of Robyn Hood 72–3 Mickel, Leslie 208 Montague, Walter 219–20 Montrose, Louis 22, 93–4, 100, 108–9, 121, 172–3, 175–6, 234, 236, 239 Morgan-Russell, Simon 142 morris dancing 2, 15, 19, 26–7, 63, 65–6, 68, 70–83, 86, 88, 120, 122, 127, 201, 205–6, 220–1 Mother Bunch 49, 62, 71, 141–2 Moulton, Ian 135, 144, 155 Mountgomery, John 66–7 Mueller, Robert 175 Mukerji, Chandra 232, 237, 239 Muldrew, Craig 18, 131–4, 138, 180, 238 Mullaney, Steven 23 mumming 66, 83–6, 156–7, 189 Munday, Anthony 220 Munro, Joyce 42 Murrin, Michael 164, 238 Narvaez, Peter 38 Nashe, Thomas 45–6, 51, 110, 142, 232 nationalism 3–5, 7, 18, 20–2, 25, 29, 32, 50, 65, 91, 96, 131, 134–5, 138, 148–9, 164, 166, 180, 186, 188 Newcomb, Lori Humphrey 20, 22, 48 Newfoundland 35, 38–9 Newman, Karen 232 Nichols, John 168 Norbrook, David 178, 238–9 Normand, Lawrence 227 Norwich 65, 69–71, 76, 120, 191 nostalgia 25, 32, 47, 51, 65, 72, 125, 152, 176, 179, 182, 187, 191, 212–14, 239–40 Nunning, Vera 220 nurses (caregivers) 3, 7, 14, 16, 25, 27, 31, 43, 45, 48–54, 58, 61–2, 94–5, 108, 110, 114, 180, 182, 184, 186, 233 O Giollain, Diarmuid 43 Old Wives Tale (Peele) 27, 47, 49, 55–62, 103, 141, 233 old wives’ tales 2, 11, 14–15, 25–9, 34, 38, 45–62, 107–14, 138–45, 180–6, 210–14, 221–29; in A Midsummer Night’s Dream 106–114, 89, 94–5, 102–3, 121, 124; in Jonson 210–14, 221–8; in Spenser 164–5, 167, 179–86, 187–8; in The Merry Wives of Windsor 5, 31, 91, 138–45, 149–50, 153, 156, 159 Oldcastle, Sir John 88, 156

Index 269 Ong, Walter 52 Opie, Iona and Peter 233 Oram, William A. 182, 238 Orgel, Stephen 165, 200, 209, 239 Orlin, Lena 18, 237, 239 Ovid 11, 55, 90, 93, 95, 101, 106, 116, 118, 122, 124, 154, 166–7, 186 Parker, Patricia 125, 141, 175, 185, 235, 238–9 Parten, Anne 147 Paster, Gail Kern 50, 96–7, 108–9, 111, 113, 119, 233, 236 Paton, Lucy Allen 181 Patterson, Annabel 1, 8, 94, 120, 235 Peacock, John 201, 239 Peck, Linda 19 Peele, George 27, 47, 49, 55–62, 103, 141, 233 Penry, John 35 Pettit, Thomas 84 Phillippy, Patricia 52 Pittenger, Elizabeth 125, 148 Plato 51, 89 Plot, Robert 67 Poole, Kristen 156, 238 Poovey, Mary 232 popular culture: ambivalence towards 5–7, 9–10, 12, 50, 61, 87–8, 90, 92, 108, 146, 152, 154, 180, 221; see also hybrid subjects; cross-class collaborations 12–14, 26–7, 33, 36, 171, 174; definitions of 1–3; homogenizations of 12, 14, 21, 26, 63, 97, 146–7, 155; internalizations of 5–8; see also hybrid subjects; mediated through written texts 11–12; productions of 2–5, 7–9, 11, 15, 20, 22–3, 26, 62, 64, 66, 71, 76, 90, 92, 156, 159, 167, 197, 200, 220, 230–1; see also amateur performers; ballads; carnival; charivari; church ales; devil; dragons; fairies; ghosts; hobbyhorses; May games; maypoles; morris dancers, old wives’ tales; witches Porges-Watson, Elizabeth 233 Porter, Alan 228 Potter, Lois 220 poverty 2, 18–19, 126–7, 130–3, 135, 137, 142, 188, 221–2, 224–5; see also vagrants Prescott, Anne Lake 169, 238 Proserpina 170 Purkiss, Diane 29, 30, 93, 104–5, 166, 171, 174, 224, 233, 235–6, 238

Puttenham, George 43 Questier, Michael 19 Quilligan, Maureen 238 Quint, David 167, 238 Rackin, Phyllis 21, 152 Raleigh, Sir Walter 163, 167, 173, 178, 186–7 Ranum, Oram 198 Rappaport, Steven 237 Rathborne, Isabel 167, 238 Reay, Barry 1, 11, 16, 23 Reformation 2, 17–20, 25, 30, 47, 51, 64–5, 67, 70, 80, 88, 120, 143, 165, 186, 189–90, 225 Riggs, David 208, 215, 219, 227, 240 Rimbault, Edward 205 Roberts, Jeanne Addison 155 Robin Good-fellow, His Mad Prankes and Merry Jests 36, 49, 75, 105–6, 123, 141, 223 Robin Hood 63, 65, 72, 79, 82, 137, 215–18, 220–2, 224, 227, 230, 240 Rogerson, Margaret 70, 235 rogues 128–131; see also cony-catchers Rosaldo, Renato 152 Rosen, Barbara 144 Ross, Charles 135 Rovang, Paul 167 Rowlands, Samuel 73 Sagar, Keith 30, 236 St. George 5, 15, 23, 27, 63, 65–6, 69–72, 77, 79, 80, 86–7, 165, 167, 186–93, 232, 235 Sampson, William 72 Sanders, Julie 215, 219–23, 240 Sarti, Raffaella 237, 239 satyr 15, 22–3, 27, 35, 46, 55, 73–4, 88, 106, 150–1, 153, 201–12, 220, 227 Schoenfeldt, Michael 183, 239 Scot, Reginald 35, 37–8, 46, 51, 106, 143–4, 233 Scott, James C. 8, 13, 33, 104–5 Sekora, John 134, 176 Shakespeare, William 89–124; A Midsummer Night’s Dream 5, 6, 12, 16, 32, 89–126, 144, 147, 154, 158, 163, 166, 181, 183, 197, 210, 235; As You Like It 155; Cymbeline 37, 188; Hamlet 16, 65, 68, 233; Henry IV 21, 41, 135, 141, 158, 238; Henry V 136, 151; Henry VI, pt. 2 40–1, 73; King John 69;

270

Index

Shakespeare, William – contd. King Lear 13, 130; Love’s Labour’s Lost 100, 122; Macbeth 47, 144, 227; Much Ado About Nothing 66, 233; Othello 3, 66, 99; Richard II 152; The Merry Wives of Windsor 5, 6, 12, 88–91, 125–59, 163, 166, 197, 237; The Tempest 55, 144, 166; The Winter’s Tale 13, 33, 36, 43, 74, 188; Timon of Athens 134; Twelfth Night 47, 118, 127; see also Twelfth Night Shapiro, James 25 Shepherd, Simon 239 Shershow, Scott Cutler 8, 236 Shore, David 178 Sidney, Philip 48, 61, 137, 167, 172, 185 Silberman, Lauren 175, 186 Sisson, C.J. 79, 235 Skura, Meredith 108, 111, 121 Slack, Paul 18, 127, 130–1, 133, 222, 237 Smith, Bruce 63, 72–3, 183, 192, 233–5 Smith, Sir Thomas 134 Spenser 161–96; Colin Clouts Come Home Again 170, 178; Faerie Queene see Faerie Queene, The; “Letter to Raleigh” 163, 170, 187; Shepherd’s Calendar 165, 178–9 Spufford, Margaret 10 Stallybrass, Peter 6, 9–11, 31, 51–2, 65, 106, 114, 220, 231, 234–6 Steadman, John 154 Stewart, Alan 234 Stokes, James 74, 79–80, 235 Stone, Lawrence 19, 99, 109, 233, 237–8 Stowe, John 88, 156 Stratford 70, 112, 126, 141 Stubbes, Philip 15, 63, 73, 76–9, 96–7, 127, 189, 235 Sullivan, Ceri 132 Sullivan, Garrett 11, 17–18, 20, 192 Swann, Marjorie 30–1, 166, 168, 203, 214, 238 “Tam Lin” 110, 166, 171, 175, 180, 233 Tasso, Torquato 164, 166–7, 175, 182, 185, 227 Tawney, R.H. 126 Taylor, Gary 156 Teague, Frances 232 Technogamia see Holyday, Barton “Thames at Richmond” 82 Theis, Jeffrey 137, 154 Theweleit, Klaus 239

Thirsk, Joan 232, 237–8 Thomas, Keith 30, 32, 34–5, 67, 120, 155, 232, 234 Thomas, Max 76, 158 Thompson, Stith 29, 103 Thomson, Patricia 238 Tonkin, Humphrey 177, 238 Twelfth Night 69, 83–4, 86, 156 Twycross, Meg 83–4, 86, 155–6 Twyning, John 133–4 Underdown, David 19, 232, 235, 238 vagrants 20, 90–1, 126, 130–3, 136–7, 139, 148, 150–1, 154, 224 Van den Berg, Sara 217, 225 Viguers, Susan 59 Villiers, George, Earl of Buckingham 206, 208, 215, 220 Virgil 163–4, 167, 177–8, 209, 227 Vives, Luis 97 Wager, William 27, 47, 55–7, 60 Waldron, F.G. 228 Wales 10, 35, 40, 125, 149, 200, 203 Wall, Wendy 13, 29, 31, 50, 55, 105, 123, 135, 138–9, 146, 148–51, 234–6 Warner, Marina 10, 11, 14, 29, 34, 45, 102, 233, 236 Watkins, John 239 Watt, Teresa 1, 2 Weber, Max 19 Weimann, Robert 86, 105, 232 Wells 7, 15, 63, 71, 74, 79–80, 87, 187, 191–2, 235 Wells, Robin Headlam 170, 172, 175, 177 Welsford, Enid 236 West, John and Alice 233 Westward for Smelts 142 Wheeler, Charles Francis 200 White, Allon 6, 9–10, 51–2, 106, 114, 231, 236 Wiles, David 82, 97, 115–16, 118–19, 121, 136, 218, 220, 235–6, 238–9 Williams, John, Bishop of Lincoln 115 Williams, Raymond 232 Willis, Deborah 43, 143, 223 Willis, Robert 42–3 Wilson, John 168, 173 Wilson, Richard 41, 121, 220, 225, 235, 239 Wisdom of Doctor Dodypoll 36, 39, 96 Witch of Edmonton, The 68, 75, 143, 223

Index 271 witches 11, 29, 30, 35, 37, 44–6, 59, 68, 75, 103, 140, 142–4, 164–5, 197, 215, 222–7, 230 Wits or, Sport Upon Sport 158, 237 Wood, Andy 232 Woodbridge, Linda 6, 11, 17–18, 20, 123, 126, 130–1, 133, 154, 157, 192, 222, 232, 237–8 Woodcock, Matthew 148, 164, 168, 171–5, 238

Wrightson, Keith 2, 11, 19, 43, 180 Xenophon 132 Young, Stephen 59 Zipes, Jack 29, 188 Zitner, S.P. 11 Zizek, Slavoj 232

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